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Facing the World
Defense Spending and International Trade in the Pacific Northwest Since World War II
Christopher P. Foss
Oregon State University Press, 2020
Before the Second World War, the states of Washington and Oregon were thinly populated economic backwaters of the United States. Even the major cities of Portland and Seattle were dependent on agricultural industries, especially timber, for their economic health. That all changed during World War II and the Cold War.

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Pacific Northwest boasted a more diversified economy. Beer, tourism, and high tech moved in alongside timber and wheat as the region’s mainstay industries. In Washington, especially, a Cold War–driven military and national security state set up shop as an economic behemoth even as debates over the costs and consequences of the new Atomic Age raged.

Facing the World highlights these changes, as well as the politicians, business leaders, and ordinary people who helped bring them about. At the center of the story, Senators Henry Jackson, Wayne Morse, Slade Gorton, and Mark Hatfield; Congressman Tom Foley; and Governor Vic Atiyeh worked diligently for a generation to transform the region from insular and backward to cosmopolitan and forward-looking. Aligning the region with national security and international trade policies, these politicians made the Pacific Northwest economy what it is today.

Through extensive research in congressional and federal archives, historian Christopher P. Foss vividly brings to life the discussions, conflicts, and controversies that shaped this political era. Though it wasn’t perfect, its fading legacy of leadership is a lesson for our own time. Facing the World will prove a valuable resource to historians, political scientists, and civic-minded residents of the Pacific Northwest.
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Field Guide to Oregon Rivers
Tim Palmer
Oregon State University Press, 2024
In this updated edition of his classic Field Guide to Oregon Rivers, Tim Palmer gives us an unprecedented reference, introducing the state’s waterways and offering outdoor enthusiasts and resource professionals an interpretive approach to an extraordinary network of streams. He begins with natural history—geology, climate, hydrology, plants, and wildlife—then profiles 111 Oregon rivers with notes about nature, fish, and conservation, followed by essential tips on where to see each river, hike along the shores, fish, and explore by canoe, kayak, and raft. Illustrations identify riparian plants and animals while more than 150 photographs showcase a magnificent rivers estate. This volume is an essential outdoor companion for Oregonians and visitors alike.
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Field Guide to the Sedges of the Pacific Northwest
Second Edition
Barbara J. Wilson, Richard Brainerd, Danny Lytjen, Bruce Newhouse, and Nick Otting of the Carex Working Group
Oregon State University Press, 2014
Field Guide to the Sedges of the Pacific Northwest is an illustrated guide to all 169 species, subspecies, and varieties in the genus Carex that grow in the wild in Oregon and Washington. Most of these species are found throughout the Pacific Northwest and California. This updated second edition includes eight additional species documented in the region since the guide was first published, along with an improved identification key, updated nomenclature and taxonomy, revised range maps, and improved illustrations.

Sedges can be difficult to identify, with differences between species based on small, technical characters. This comprehensive guide contains identification keys, descriptions, more than 650 color photographs, and distribution maps for each species, providing users with helpful tools and tips for identifying the plants in this challenging group. Information about sedge ecology, habitat, management and restoration, ethnobotanical uses, and propagation enhances the guide’s utility.

Field Guide to the Sedges of the Pacific Northwest provides an invaluable resource for botanists, land managers, restoration ecologists, and plant enthusiasts. And, as the genus Carex becomes increasingly important amongst landscapers, nurseries, and gardeners, the guide will serve as a handy tool for choosing Northwest natives for the garden.
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Finding the River
An Environmental History of the Elwha
Jeff Crane
Oregon State University Press, 2011

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First Meal
Julie Green
Oregon State University Press, 2023

Wrongful convictions haunt the American criminal justice system, as revealed in recent years by DNA and other investigative tools. And every wrongfully convicted person who walks free, exonerated after years or decades, carries part of that story. From those facts, artist Julie Green posed a seemingly simple question: When you have been denied all choice, what do you choose to eat on the first day of freedom?

In the small details of life at such pivotal moments, a vast new landscape of the world can emerge, and that is the core concept of First Meal. Partnering with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, Green and her coauthor, award-winning journalist Kirk Johnson, have created a unique melding of art and narration in the portraits and stories of twenty-five people on the day of their release.

Food and punishment have long been intertwined. The tradition of offering a condemned person a final meal before execution, for example, has been explored by psychologists, filmmakers, and others—including Green herself in an earlier series of criminal-justice themed paintings, The Last Supper. First Meal takes on that issue from the other side: food as a symbol of autonomy in a life restored. Set against the backdrop of a flawed American legal system, First Meal describes beauty, pain, hope and redemption, all anchored around the idea—explored by writers from Marcel Proust to Michael Pollan—that food touches us deeply in memory and emotion.

In Green’s art, state birds and surreal lobsters soar over places where wrongful convictions unfolded, mistaken witnesses shout their errors, glow-in-the-dark skylines evoke homecoming. Johnson’s essays take us inside those moments—from the courtrooms where things went wrong to the pathways of faith and resilience that kept people sane through their years of injustice. First Meal seeks to inform and spread awareness, but also celebrate the humanity that unites us, and the idea that gratitude and euphoria—even as it mixes with grief and the awareness of loss—can emerge in places we least expect.

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For the Love of Rivers
A Scientist's Journey
Kurt D. Fausch
Oregon State University Press, 2015
Rivers and streams supply our water and capture our imaginations. We seek the more pristine ones to fish or paddle, to hike along or simply sit and watch. But what is it we are seeing?  What is essential about streams and rivers for us as humans?

In For the Love of Rivers, stream ecologist Kurt Fausch draws readers across the reflective surface of streams to view and ponder what is beneath, and how they work. While celebrating their beauty and mystery, he uses his many years of experience as a field biologist to explain the underlying science connecting these aquatic ecosystems to their streamside forests and the organisms found there—including humans.

For the Love of Rivers introduces readers to the life and work of Shigeru Nakano, a pioneering river ecologist who inspired other scientists around the world with his innovative research on stream-forest connections. Fausch takes readers along as he journeys to Japan, where he awakens to an unfamiliar culture, to Nakano, and his research.

Nakano’s life was abruptly ended in a tragic field accident, and his death was deeply mourned. Fausch joins Japanese and American colleagues to continue Nakano’s research legacy, learn everything they can about the effects that humans have on rivers, fish, and their intricate links with riparian zones, and share this knowledge with others.

More than a book about stream ecology, For the Love of Rivers is a celebration of the interconnectedness of life. It is an authoritative and accessible look at the science of rivers and streams, but it also ponders the larger questions of why rivers are important to humans, why it is in our nature to want to be near them, and what we can do now to ensure the future of these essential ecosystems.
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A Force for Change
Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon, 1912-1936
Kimberley Mangun
Oregon State University Press, 2010

A Force for Change is the first full-length study of the life and work of one of Oregon’s most dynamic civil rights activists, African American journalist Beatrice Morrow Cannady. Between 1912 and 1936, Cannady tirelessly promoted interracial goodwill and fought segregation and discrimination.

She gave hundreds of lectures to high school and college students and shared her message with radio listeners across the Pacific Northwest. She was assistant editor, and later publisher, of The Advocate, Oregon’s largest African American newspaper. Cannady was the first black woman to graduate from law school in Oregon, and the first to run for state representative. She held interracial teas in her home in Northeast Portland and protested repeated showings of the racist film The Birth of a Nation. And when the Ku Klux Klan swept into Oregon, she urged the governor to act quickly to protect black Oregonians’ right to live and work without fear. Despite these accomplishments—and many more during her twenty-five-year career—Beatrice Cannady fell into obscurity when she left Oregon in about 1938.

A Force for Change illuminates Cannady’s important role in advocating for better race relations in Oregon in the early decades of the twentieth century. It describes her encounters with the period’s leading black artists, editors, politicians, and intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, A. Philip Randolph, Oscar De Priest, Roland Hayes, and James Weldon Johnson. It dispels the myth that African Americans played little part in Oregon’s history and enriches our understanding of the black experience in Oregon.

A Force for Change is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of women’s history, gender studies, African American history, journalism history, and Pacific Northwest history. It belongs on the shelf of any reader interested in a richer understanding of the civil rights movement in Oregon and across the country.

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A Force for Nature
Nancy Russell's Fight to Save the Columbia Gorge
Bowen Blair
Oregon State University Press, 2022
A Force for Nature is a biography of Nancy Russell and her successful campaign to establish and protect the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. Bowen Blair tells the story of the activist who fought one of the most fiercely contested conservation battles of the 1980s, interweaving it with the natural and political history of the legendary landscape that inspired her.
 
The 85-mile-long Columbia Gorge forms part of the border between Oregon and Washington and is one of the nation’s most historic and scenic landscapes. Many of the region’s cultural divisions boil over here—urban versus rural, west of the mountains versus east—as well as clashes over private property rights, management of public lands, and tribal treaty rights.
 
In the early 1980s, as a new interstate bridge linked the City of Portland to rural counties in Washington, the Gorge’s renowned vistas were on the brink of destruction. Nancy Russell, forty-eight years old and with no experience in advocacy, fundraising, or politics, built a grassroots movement that overcame 70 years of failed efforts and bitter opposition from both Oregon and Washington governors, five of the six Gorge counties, 41,000 Gorge residents, and the Reagan administration. While building her campaign, Russell stopped subdivisions, factories, and government neglect through litigation brought by her organization, Friends of the Columbia Gorge, and last-second land purchases by the Trust for Public Land (TPL). Initially ignored, then demonized, Russell’s tires were slashed and her life threatened.
 
The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act barely passed—on the last day of the congressional session in 1986—and was signed by a reluctant President Reagan hours before the bill would die. Russell positioned the Friends to be a watchdog and orchestrated the purchase of thousands of acres of land for the public. Bowen Blair, an attorney, former executive director of Friends of the Columbia Gorge, and TPL senior vice president, brings an insider’s perspective to the tumultuous and inspiring story of this conservation battle.
 
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Forest of Time
A Century of Science at Wind River Experimental Forest
Margaret Herring
Oregon State University Press, 2007

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Forest Park
Exploring Portland's Natural Sanctuary
Marcy Cottrell Houle
Oregon State University Press, 2023

Situated in the rugged hills west of downtown Portland, Forest Park is the nation’s premier urban natural sanctuary. It supports essential habitat for hundreds of native plants and animals, including species at risk, and is one of the largest city parks in the world. While extending critical ecosystem services to the region, it offers miles of outstanding hiking trails, all within minutes of the downtown core.

Forest Park: Exploring Portland’s Natural Sanctuary showcases this treasure in a new light, offering a compendium of the most up-to-date and comprehensive information available. Twenty-one hikes covering seventy-five miles bring a full awareness of the park’s outstanding attributes. Hikes are grouped by theme to encourage people to explore Forest Park’s watersheds, geology, lichens and mosses, vegetation, amphibians and reptiles, pollinators, native wildlife, and wildlife corridors. Beautiful photographs and full-color maps accompany each trail description.

Forest Park is a shining example of the Pacific Northwest western hemlock community—an ecosystem unique among all temperate forests of the world. It is also an exciting model for a future Urban Biodiversity Reserve, a concept that would recognize the park’s scientific, natural, and cultural qualities. Forest Park will help all visitors discover the beauty and wonders of this extraordinary natural resource.

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Frigid Embrace
Politics, Economics, and Environment in Alaska
Stephen Haycox
Oregon State University Press, 2002

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From Backwoods to Boardrooms
The Rise of Institutional Investment in Timberland
Daowei Zhang
Oregon State University Press, 2021
Since the early 1900s, forestland ownership has gone through two major structural changes in the United States and other parts of the world: the accumulation of industrial timberlands between the 1900s and 1980s and, since then, the shift from industrial to institutional ownership. From Backwoods to Boardrooms explores the history and economics of these two structural changes with emphasis on the latter. These ownership transformations have impacted tens of millions of acres of private landholdings and billions of investment dollars. Industrial structure, forest management and policy, research and development, community welfare, and forest sustainability have all been directly affected.   

Through a historical examination of key events and players, prevailing management philosophies, public policy, and institutional factors, Daowei Zhang searches for an economic explanation and assesses the impact of these ownership revolutions with a three-pronged approach. First, he explains why industrial firms were able to profit from owning forestlands, and how the shift to institutional ownership came about. Second, he compares private timberland investments and public equity investments with respect to risk-adjusted returns and other dimensions of interest to investors and forest managers, including alignment of interests, capacity to exploit market inefficiencies, and their forest management and conservation records. Finally, he provides thoughtful commentary on the future of institutional timberland investments and global forest sustainability.   
From Backwoods to Boardrooms is essential reading for forest managers, investors, and anyone interested in understanding the workings of the modern forest sector and the future of forest sustainability.

 
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From Thorns to Blossoms
A Japanese American Family in War and Peace
Mitzi Asai Loftus
Oregon State University Press, 2024

Mitsuko “Mitzi” Asai was not yet ten years old in the spring of 1942 when President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—about two-thirds of them US citizens—from their homes on the West Coast to inland prison camps. They included Mitzi and most of her family, who owned a fruit orchard in Hood River, Oregon. The Asais spent much of World War II in the camps while two of the older sons served in the Pacific in the US Army. Three years later, when the camps began to close, the family returned to Hood River to find an altered community. Shop owners refused to serve neighbors they had known for decades; racism and hostility were open and largely unchecked. Humiliation and shame drove teenaged Mitzi to reject her Japanese heritage, including her birth name. More than a decade later, her life took another turn when a Fulbright grant sent her to teach in Japan, where she reconnected with her roots.

In From Thorns to Blossoms, Mitzi recounts her rich and varied life, from a childhood surrounded by barbed wire and hatred to a successful career as a high school English teacher and college instructor in English as a Second Language. Today, Asai descendants continue to tend the Hood River farm while the town confronts its shameful history. Originally published in 1990 as Made in Japan and Settled in Oregon, this revised and expanded edition describes the positive influence Mitzi’s immigrant parents had on their children, provides additional context for her story, and illuminates the personal side of a dark chapter in US history. It’s the remarkable story of a transformation from thorns into blossoms, pain into healing.

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Frontier Doctor
Observations on Central Oregon and the Changing West
Urling C. Coe
Oregon State University Press, 1996


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