Research Interests
Why do Americans see cities and nature as opposites, and have they always considered them at odds? These are important questions because the rise of the city and the ascendancy of what became environmentalism were parallel events in American history. My first book, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle, explores these questions by tracing the connections between environmental change, cultural ideas, social inequality, and urban development across two centuries, using Seattle as a case study.
At the foot of the snow-capped Cascade Mountains on the forested shores of Puget Sound, Seattle embodies the American city in harmony with nature. But like many other American cities, its attempts to live up to its geography to-accommodate both industry and leisure, both progress and equity-repeatedly led to environmental injustice that became an inherent part of the city's landscape. Like the imaginary metropolis of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, Seattle was a place of stunning beauty but its perfection was, to many of its inhabitants, illusory and cruel. Emerald City is the story of the quest for environmental and social justice in an American city long associated with the modern environmental movement.
First image: Postcard of Smith Tower and Mt. Rainier, c. 1915,
image courtesy of Museum of History and Industry, Seattle;
second image: First Denny Hill regrade. c. 1910,
image courtesy of Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries
In Emerald City, I argue that many Americans, at the close of the nineteenth century, considered urbanization a process to improve nature not to destroy it. Borrowing theoretical concepts from cultural geography, ecology, and urban studies, my research revealed how trained experts and political elites in the late-nineteenth century believed that finishing nature would release its regenerative energies to advance social reform and beautify urban space. These reformers saw urbanization as rescuing nature. With that mission, Seattle's builders moved mountains, filled wetlands, redirected rivers, and cultivated parks to synchronize culture with environment. In the process, they created a hybrid nature, urban nature, a mixture of human craft and the material world and thus began to see the city as an invention that could produce environments to satisfy human desires. These transformations of urban space through time reveal how nature permeated the heart of metropolis of Seattle, and shaped almost every facet its urban life, from pests to politics, for good or ill.
Cover of C.B. Bussell, "Tide Lands: Their Story" (Seattle, c. 1903),
image courtesy of Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries
By moving mountains, filling wetlands, redirecting rivers, and crafting parks, reformers believed they could synchronize city with nature and culture with environment. In Seattle, these projects included filling the fronting Elliott Bay, rearranging the entire Lake Washington-Duwamish/Green River basin and the Cedar River watershed, removing the hills in the city's core through regrades, and building an extensive urban park system. As a result, by the beginning of the twentieth century, many Seattle residents, especially the more affluent and reform-minded middle classes, thus began to see their city as a device that could be manipulated to produce nature for their consumption.
Auto camping at Mount Rainier National Park, 1925,
image courtesy of Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries
But while this new urban nature benefited some residents, it also spawned inequality and prompted resistance as each cycle of improvement unleashed unforeseen consequences that split Seattle residents by race and class. Environmental change and social disparity went hand in hand. By the postwar period, many pined for landscapes free of social discord and physical ruin, a desire that gave rise to an environmental politics critical of cities and their effects. Yet the tradition of a restorative urbanism persisted as the nation became both more green-minded and more urban. Seattle's elites continued to push a revised gospel of improvement well into the post-World War II era, even as such projects reinforced social inequality. This trend continued into the late twentieth century as Seattle, renowned for its beauty and commitment to environmental protection, earned a dubious distinction. Together with Portland, Oregon, it became the first urban area required to restore now-endangered Pacific salmon runs. The politics of saving salmon, which were touted as uniting the region under the banner of ecology, only further divided along the lines laid bare by more than a century of social and environmental upheaval.
In such conflicts, my research revealed the common but neglected ground that unites Americans’ attachment to city and countryside: the quest for community. It was here that I found the core of the story: the history of Seattle, like the history of America, was the evolution of an ethic of place. Successive generations of Seattle residents, both those at the center of power and those on the margins, have tried to find an ethic of place over time to balance nature with the city. This quest has yielded uneven results for the city’s human and non-human residents alike. Some efforts brought back imperiled places, like Lake Washington, once polluted by unchecked sewage, but others have only sown discord.
The quest to find such an ethic is longstanding in both urban and environmental history. Urban historians have explored how the rise of the American city has been a dynamic process of inclusion and exclusion. Yet few have rarely considered the role that nature has played in forging the places urban Americans call home. By not acknowledging the independent if contingent force of nature—including floods, disease, pests, or landslides—upon the past, historians have missed opportunities to explain how and why the environment became an instrument to define and enforce the idea of community through time.
In contrast, environmental historians have considered the role of the natural world in shaping our conceptions of place, but their tendency to juxtapose nature and culture as pure categories in their narratives has yielded another problem. Often, environmental history tells stereotypical stories of nature despoiled, people poisoned, and environmentalists as saviors. This is a problem given the growing evidence of the unsavory biases in the history of the conservation and environmental movements. Creating and protecting wilderness, saving wildlife and fisheries, and promoting outdoor recreation often entailed expelling Native peoples from ancestral homelands and forcing working people to abandon their livelihoods.
Ultimately, Emerald City concludes on a hopeful if chastened note. It calls for histories that see humans and nature as tangled together, but it also calls for something more: a new ethic of place, one that has room for salmon and skyscrapers, suburbs and wilderness, Mount Rainer and the Space Needle, and one grounded in the complexities of history. History is no panacea, but thinking historically can help us to live with the consequences of being flawed creatures in an turbulent world.
In addition to my book, I also have published several articles, including one that unearths the environmental and social effects of Seattle's famed regrades, and another conceptual piece that analyzes the connections between consumption, nature, and spatial relations in environmental history.
For my next project, I have started exploring the interconnected histories of consumerism and environmentalism in turn-of-the-century America. This project will also build upon my existing research interests in cultural history and environmental history by integrating the rise of America's modern consumer culture and its attendant technologies with the growing power of what became the modern environmental movement.