Water and land interrelate in surprising and ambiguous ways, and riparian zones, where land and water meet, have effects far outside their boundaries. Using the Malheur Basin in southeastern Oregon as a case study, this intriguing and nuanced book explores the ways people have envisioned boundaries between water and land, the ways they have altered these places, and the often unintended results. The Malheur Basin, once home to the largest cattle empires in the world, experienced unintended widespread environmental degradation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After establishment in 1908 of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge as a protected breeding ground for migratory birds, and its expansion in the 1930s and 1940s, the area experienced equally extreme intended modifications aimed at restoring riparian habitat.Refuge managers ditched wetlands, channelized rivers, applied Agent Orange and rotenone to waterways, killed beaver, and cut down willows. Where Land and Water Meet examines the reasoning behind and effects of these interventions, gleaning lessons from their successes and failures. Although remote and specific, the Malheur Basin has myriad ecological and political connections to much larger places. This detailed look at one tangled history of riparian restoration shows how - through appreciation of the complexity of environmental and social influences on land use, and through effective handling of conflict - people can learn to practice a style of pragmatic adaptive resource management that avoids rigid adherence to single agendas and fosters improved relationships with the land. Nancy Langston is associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of "Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West".
I am an environmental historian and professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology with a joint appointment in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I served as president of the American Society for Environmental History from 2007-2009. You can visit my website at www.nancylangston.com and the website for Toxic Bodies at www.toxicbodies.org
My initial training was as an ecologist rather than a historian. While on a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at the University of Washington, I researched the evolutionary ecology of Carmine bee-eaters nesting along the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe. My experiences in African conservation persuaded me that to understand (and reverse) environmental degradation, we needed to pay much closer attention to human communities. Understanding the historic roots of environmental change became my primary research focus.
My first book, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares (University of Washington Press, 1995) examines the causes of the forest health crisis on western national forests. My second book, Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed (University of Washington Press, 2003) focuses on dilemmas over riparian management in the West. My third book, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES, has just been released by Yale University Press.
My current project is Changing Lake Superior: Forest, Fisheries, Global Warming, and Environmental Health.
Four months of the year, I live in a tiny cabin on Lake Superior, near Cornucopia. While the university is in session, I live with my husband (Frank Goodman), two pit bulls (Tiva and Vanya), eighteen chickens, and 100,000 (more or less) honeybees on the Little Sugar River Farm, a small farm south of Madison. I am an avid sea kayaker and cross-country skier.
