Customer Reviews

Olympic Battleground : The Power Politics of Timber Preservation

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Mr. Lien's book is one of the most thoroughly researched works on the state of national parks in America. His experience working at Olympic National Park, and serving as a sort of intern with Mrs. Edge gives us a rare insight into many of the personalities that shaped - and continue to influence - the fate of OLYM. Mr. Lien's documentation is highly impressive. However, I'm concerned that his passion for the park - and his apparently wholesale mistrust of the National Park Service - has lead to some critical mistakes.
For example, Stephen Mather was chosen "on the personal whim" of Secretary Franklin Lane. Lane knew more about Mather than Lien claims. Mather should hardly be remembered as "Saint Stephen" as so many in the NPS are anxious to do, but to dismiss him as someone chosen so cavalierly as Lien suggests is a dangerous underestimation of the man.
Second, it is unfair of Lien to put former NPS Director Newton Drury in essentially the same category as Fred Overly. Drury's tenure was that of a caretaker, and though his legislative skills were nil and his administrative abilities only slightly better, his focus and his integrity are things for which we should all be grateful. Drury was an outsider and he fought the good ol' boys: Overly, Albright and Wirth, to bring some measure of scientific integrity and conservation ethic to a deeply troubled park service.
Lien's breadth of scholarship is impressive. Unfortunately, his passion - while inspiring and insightful at times - has clouded his interpretation of early NPS history, and of the role of Newton Drury, a devoted, if sometimes uninspiring, conservationist.

A rare and wonderful animal(not extinct after all), that holds secrets to cures, anti-venoms and facts behind unsolved mysteries has reappeared! Not long ago I encountered and purchased "Olympic Battleground" at a rare book store. It was out of print. No longer. It took but the first few pages to have me swallowing bile and bouncing hard objects off walls. So inflaming was the tale that it awakened an activism in me I had not felt since the Viet Nam War days. I sought out and interviewed the author who assured me that it had taken almost thirty years to write. Battleground is destined to become the definitive source in four areas: 1) It is a complete history of Olympic National Park(and indeed the founding of all National Parks),beginning in 1895 and now updated to today. Sound dull? Uh uh, not with the kind of intrigue, fraud, scheming and plotting that underlay the movements to keep the old growth timber OUT of the Park, ventures often aided and abetted by the very public servants whose jobs were to PROTECT it. It should be mentioned that the entire book is documented with painstaking primary sources. What happened and how it happened is inarguable; the barrels are smoking. WE BEEN ROBBED! Yo, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars of assets. 2) There is a treatise here of decades of activism. But for the lifelong battling of a core of three people;fighting against power and unrelenting greed, this book convinces us that there would not be one tree left standing. It is the definitive tale, the tangible proof of just how mighty is 'the power of the pen'. No advocate person or group should have a bookshelf without this book on it. 3) Were there any congressional investigative committees with the bajoongas to take on the timber companies,local politicians and even the Park Service itself, Mr. Lein's book would be the place to start. Inditements lie there in wait! 4) Fail not to hear the warning: ye who would protect and preserve our national Parks, wilderness areas, monuments and wildlife reserves. Pass over this book at peril to their future existence. Beware by learning how boundaries shift in the night and legal wording gets shuffled and forests vanish with the turn of a phrase and promise . The very words are in place in even the newest documents of our "roadless areas" and "forest reserves". For anyone with 'green' agendas, in fact, any kind of activist intentions, this book is an absolute must.

This book provides an incredible example of an agency failing to follow its own mandate as well as ignoring the will of the public. For several decades, the National Park Service (NPS) not only allowed, but encouraged, loggers to cut down old-growth forest inside Olympic National Park. It also fought to reduce the boundaries of that park to increase the amount of timber available to the local logging industry. Even when found out, important people in the NPS remained determined to cut down the old-growth timber in the park wherever it thought local sawmills would benefit, and on any land that the NPS didn't want in the first place.

When I had first heard this story, it was presented as a couple of loose cannons getting away with tree murder. However, Lien's book provides so many smoking guns - - or should I say, "smoking chainsaws" - - that there is an obvious policy problem here.

Lien's ultimate explanation of this history remains somewhat unsatisfactory to me. He argues that the NPS has a weak management culture and unclear mandate (both true) and that it is also eager to compromise with anyone who makes demands on it - - including loggers looking for old-growth timber. I'm not sure that wimpy acquiescence is the dominant NPS norm, since it does resist certain types of demands, such as those of horse outfitters, hunters, and in some parks, mountaineers. The case of hunters is particularly interesting, since elk hunting in Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain, bison hunting in Yellowstone, and deer hunting in many eastern battlefield parks would solve a number of other policy problems, and there *is* public demand for such hunting. So, the NPS doesn't simply acquiesce to everybody, and that part of Lien's argument can't be right.

Lien grounds this story in a brief history of the U.S. Forest Service and the NPS, and how Pinchot's "conservation" eventually alienated preservationists such as John Muir and public opinion more generally. These chapters provide, at best, an unconventional history of the USFS and NPS in the Progressive era. I think Lien overstates the preservationist element of public opinion, and is too eager to see preservationism even among the elites of the Theodore Roosevelt era.

Criticisms aside, this is one of the most remarkable national park histories out there.

I read this book shortly after spending several months on Washington's Olympic Peninsula and hiking in the Olympic Mountains of Olympic National Park in 1993. I own the first edition when it was published by Sierra Club Books. In my opinion Olympic Battleground is one of the most important works relative to the environemntal movement, on par with "Silent Spring" and "A Sand County Almanac," though it is relatively unknown.

Lien tells the story of the Olympic Peninsula and how it was systematically logged by people of European descent in the late 19th century, through the creation of ONP in 1937, and the management of ONP through the 1950s (when Lien was there as a seasonal ranger) and beyond. Tells the story of how one overzealous development minded ONP manager named Fred Overly enthusiastically allowed LOGGING in the park. And not just salvaging downed trees off trails and roads, but systematically cutting the largest old-growth Douglas-fir trees that could be found! Later talking to a ranger at ONP, I learned that Overly also coached the supervisor of Mount Rainier National Park on how to get the cut out of that park as well. There is correspondance on record of this happening.

Olympic Battleground demonstrates that we can never be complacent, that the only way we will be able to preserve our most significant natural areas is through eternal vigilance. Lien's book recounts that during WW II, "patriotic" timber barons attempted to log ONP to "aid the war effort." Thankfully that initiative was thwarted. Olympic Batleground should be read by everyone interested in preserving National Park land, National Forest land, federal Wilderness Areas, etc. We should know our history.