Another Way the River Has collects Robin Cody’s finest nonfiction writings, many appearing for the first time in print. Cody’s prose rings with a sense of place. He is a native speaker who probes the streams and woods and salmon that run to the heart of what it means to live and love, to work and play, in Oregon.

His characters—from loggers to fishers to cowboys to the kids on his school bus—are smart and curious, often off-beat, always vivid. Cody brings the ear of a novelist and the eye of a reporter to the people and places that make the Northwest, and Northwest literature, distinctive.

“A rock, you know, will sink like a stone in water. But a flat rock, slung spinningly near the water surface and at an angel parallel to it, will go skipping across the water in defiance of gravity and common sense. How cool is that?! The first time a boy pulls this off ranks just short of first-time sex on the scale of things he will want to do over and over whenever he can and as long as he lives.”

-from “The Clackamas River”

One of the Most Important Battlegrounds in the History of America

While it is in the eastern United States where most Americans identify our military history, the vast, resource-rich Pacific Northwest, stretching from Northern California through British Columbia, endured a series of battles and wars over the course of the nineteenth century that were of regional and national importance. It was here where Great Britain and the United States had their final confrontation in the Americas, where Chief Joseph attempted to secure independence for the Nez Perce, and where the Oregon Trail marked the first great migration to the West of settlers bent on carving out new lives in the wilderness. The Pacific Northwest also saw some of the only attacks on the mainland by Japan during World War II.

Beginning with the earliest known accounts of wars among the American Indians of the region, Fighting for Paradise: A Military History of the Pacific Northwest describes early European contact, including British trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Jedediah Smith, and John Jacob Astor's trading post. The competition over the lucrative fur trade led to the "Pig War," which almost resulted in another armed conflict between Great Britain and the United States, but it was the influx of settlers from the Oregon Trail that touched off the long bitter battles between whites and American Indians. Starting with the 1847 Whitman Massacre and the ensuing war it touched off, the book covers the next three decades of violence, ending with the Sheepeater's War in 1879. Kurt R. Nelson then relates the Pacific Northwest's contributions to the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, the Mexican Punitive Expedition, World War I, and finally World War II, where the region fought Japanese submarine attacks and was harassed by balloon bombs. Throughout, the author provides current information about the state of preservation of various battle sites and other points of historical interest. Accompanied by maps and photographs, Fighting for Paradise provides insight into an area of American military history, rich in drama, that is not generally known.

A key component in healthy ecosystems, lichens can be found in almost any natural habitat in the Pacific Northwest. This comprehensive guide to the region’s macrolichens is intended for use by beginners as well as specialists: weekend naturalists will be able to identify specimens and recognize the great diversity of lichens, while lichenologists and mycologists will gain greater knowledge of the distribution and abundance of various species.

This revised and expanded edition of Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest includes includes keys to over 600 species —all the macrolichens known or expected to occur in Oregon and Washington. The keys also provide coverage for lichens of Idaho and Montana, inland to the Continental Divide. Almost all macrolichens known from northern California and southern British Columbia, and from coastal southeast Alaska, are included as well.

Color photographs and detailed descriptions are provided for more than 250 species, emphasizing lichens prevalent in forested ecosystems. The illustrated glossary and introductory material cover the terminology needed to identify macrolichens and provide information on collection and handling. The biology, ecology, and air-quality sensitivity of lichens are discussed. Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest will prove invaluable to anyone seeking to identify lichens or to better understand these organisms and their vital role in the natural world.

Tree sitters. Logger protests. Dying timber towns. An iconic species on the brink. The Timber Wars consumed the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s and early1990s and led political leaders to ask scientists for a solution. The Northwest Forest Plan was the result.  

For most of the twentieth century, the central theme of federal forest management in the Pacific Northwest had been logging old-growth forests to provide a sustained yield of timber. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a series of studies by young scientists highlighted the destructive impact of that logging on northern spotted owls, salmon, and the old-growth ecosystem itself.  

Combining this new science with newly minted environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act, environmental activists obtained court injunctions to stop old-growth logging on federal land, setting off a titanic struggle in the Pacific Northwest to find a way to accommodate conservation imperatives as well as the logging that provided employment for tens of thousands of people. That effort involved years of controversy and debate, federal courts, five science assessments, Congress, and eventually the president of the United States. It led to creation of the Northwest Forest Plan, which sharply and abruptly shifted the primary goal of federal forestry toward conserving the species and ecosystems of old-growth forests.   Scientists went from spectators to planners and guides, employing their latest scientific findings and expertise to create a forest plan for 20 million acres that would satisfy the courts. The largest upheaval in federal forest management in history had occurred, along with a precipitous decline in timber harvest, and there was no going back.  

In this book, three of the scientists who helped craft that change tell the story as they know it: the causes, development, adoption, and implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan. The book also incorporates personal reflections from the authors, short commentaries and histories from key figures— including spotted owl expert Eric Forsman—and experiences from managers who implemented the Plan as best they could. Legal expert Susan Jane M. Brown helped interpret court cases and Debora Johnson turned spatial data into maps. The final chapters cover the Plan’s ongoing significance and recommendations for conserving forest and aquatic ecosystems in an era of megafires and climate change.

During the nineteenth century, British and American settlers acquired a vast amount of land from indigenous people throughout the Pacific, but in no two places did they acquire it the same way. Stuart Banner tells the story of colonial settlement in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Today, indigenous people own much more land in some of these places than in others. And certain indigenous peoples benefit from treaty rights, while others do not. These variations are traceable to choices made more than a century ago—choices about whether indigenous people were the owners of their land and how that land was to be transferred to whites.

Banner argues that these differences were not due to any deliberate land policy created in London or Washington. Rather, the decisions were made locally by settlers and colonial officials and were based on factors peculiar to each colony, such as whether the local indigenous people were agriculturalists and what level of political organization they had attained. These differences loom very large now, perhaps even larger than they did in the nineteenth century, because they continue to influence the course of litigation and political struggle between indigenous people and whites over claims to land and other resources.

Possessing the Pacific is an original and broadly conceived study of how colonial struggles over land still shape the relations between whites and indigenous people throughout much of the world.

Tina Ontiveros was born into timber on both sides of the family. Her mother spent summers driving logging trucks for her family’s operation, and her father was the son of an itinerant logger, raised in a variety of lumber towns, as Tina herself would be.

A story of growing up in turmoil, rough house recounts a childhood divided between a charming, mercurial, abusive father in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and a mother struggling with small-town poverty. It is also a story of generational trauma, especially for the women—a story of violent men and societal restrictions, of children not always chosen and frequently raised alone.

Ontiveros’s father, Loyd, looms large. Reflecting on his death and long absence from her life, she writes, “I had this ridiculous hope that I would get to enjoy a functional relationship with my father, on my own terms, now that I was an adult.” In searingly honest, straightforward prose, rough house is her attempt to carve out this relationship, to understand her father and her family from an adult perspective.

While some elements of Ontiveros’s story are universal, others are indelibly grounded in the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest at the end of the twentieth century, as the lumber industry shifted and contracted. Tracing her childhood through the working-class towns and forests of Washington and Oregon, Ontiveros explores themes of love and loss, parents and children, and her own journey to a different kind of adulthood.
 

A work of natural and environmental history.

That Which Roots Us is a work of natural and environmental history that explores the origins of and resolutions to some of the United States’ environmental problems. Marion Dresner discusses the roots of Euro-American environmental exploitative action, starting with the environmental consequences of having treated Pacific Northwest forests as commodities. She shares her experiences visiting sites where animal-centered ice age culture changed to human-centered culture thousands of years ago with the advent of farming. The book explores the origins of the romantic philosophical movement, which arose out of the debilitating conditions of the industrial era. Those romantic attitudes toward nature inspired the twentieth-century preservation movement and America’s progressively modern conservation attitudes. 

The book is centered around environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest, contrasting utilitarian views of nature with Native American practices of respect and reciprocity. The elements that make That Which Roots Us a truly unique and important contribution to environmental literature are the author’s personal recollections and interactions with the landscape. Ultimately, Dresner offers hope for a new stewardship of the land and a focus on science literacy and direct experience in the natural world as the most grounded way of knowing the planet.