Abstract
This is an ambitious book that tackles some important and vexing questions. Erik Loomis has a strong personal connection to his subject: his father, a plywood mill worker, instilled in his children a deep love for the Pacific Northwest forests at the same time that his body was absorbing the brutal effects of a job turning those forests into corporate profits. Empire of Timber attempts to address the contradiction between workers’ need for job security and an industry which treats their labor, and the environment which sustains them, as something to be used up and discarded. It does so by “plac[ing] labor organizations squarely at the center of the environmental history of the Pacific Northwest” (7).
Loomis looks at nearly a century of organization on the part of people who work in the woods, from the Industrial Workers of the World to the counterculture-inspired reforestation cooperatives of the ’70s and ’80s (which Loomis treats as labor organizations, albeit unorthodox ones). He looks for ways in which workers struggling for decent conditions and dignity of the job served as an effective brake upon the timber industry’s pillaging of the Northwest woods.
Only one of the organizations he examines—the left-led, CIO-affiliated International Woodworkers of America (IWA)—actually made a conscious connection between these two objectives and incorporated it into its program and strategy. From the very outset, sustainable forestry was central to the IWA agenda. It opposed clearcutting, resisted monopolization of timberlands, called for responsible reforestation practices, and advocated for strong federal regulation of the industry. The stated objective was to assure that timber jobs would remain in the Pacific Northwest and not become casualties of overcutting. But it also reflected the union’s political investment in the New Deal political coalition, which pushed to aggressively expand federal oversight of private industry.
Loomis argues that, before the environmental movement took off in the 1970s, the IWA represented the most significant force opposing predatory forest practices. He suggests three reasons why its efforts fell short. First, they was largely top-down. Although IWA leaders tried to educate the rank and file through articles in the union paper (which Loomis quotes extensively), they apparently found the scientific and political aspects of the issue too technical and complex to actively engage members. Second, the political climate changed with the onset of the Cold War and the retreat (and eventual collapse) of the New Deal coalition. In response, the IWA made its advocacy of sustainable forest practices less of a priority.
Finally, the IWA’s environmental strategy was “predicated on believing in an ever-expanding economy” (199). By the 1980s, automation and the explosive growth in export of raw logs (formerly processed in domestic mills) led to massive job losses in the industry. A weakened union was hard-pressed to carry out its agenda. To make things worse, erstwhile Democratic Party allies enamored of the neo-liberal “free trade” agenda balked at union efforts to restrict log exports. Frustrated loggers, trying to protect the few jobs that were left, increasingly directed their fire at environmentalists who wanted to take still more timberland out of circulation.
If worker and union attitudes toward sustainable forestry were often problematic, worker engagement with job safety and health persisted throughout the period of this study, beginning with the IWW. Historians have noted both the Wobblies’ skill at leading mass struggles and their chronic inability to consolidate the gains they won. The Pacific Northwest woods were a rare arena where they built sustained organizations—by focusing on the squalid, unhealthy conditions in logging camps and the horrific rates of on-the-job injury and death in the woods. Ironically, demands they advanced were actually achieved during World War I, just as the union itself was being violently repressed. To assure an adequate supply of timber for the war effort, armed forces personnel were sent into the woods and lumber camps had to be brought into compliance with military standards.
Half a century later, federal policy again opened the door for timber workers fighting for a less toxic work environment. Passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act gave the IWA a compelling organizing issue that galvanized the membership in a way that demands for sustainable forestry had not. The union fought effectively for enforcement of the new law until OSHA was crippled by Reagan administration cutbacks.
Job safety likewise figures in Loomis’s account of the Hoedads, a cooperative movement of dropouts with environmentalist politics who did reforestation on U.S. Forest Service lands in the 1970s. Unlike most environmentalists, the Hoedads gained firsthand knowledge of the grueling, physically dangerous character of work in the woods. Many became seriously ill from exposure to chemical defoliants used on clearcuts—as it happens, the same chemicals the U.S. military had used in Vietnam a few years earlier. Their struggle to restrict the use of these defoliants had implications beyond the timber industry. Not only was it a victory for the environmental movement; it forced the Veterans Administration to take seriously the claims of Vietnam vets suffering long-term effects of exposure to the chemicals during the war.
The Hoedads might seem like natural allies of union woodworkers; in fact, some actually toyed with the idea of joining the IWA. But class differences won out in the end. Despite their anti-capitalist, countercultural ethos, the Hoedads were like other cooperative business enterprises competing in a capitalist market: bottom-line considerations ultimately trumped social conscience. They actively lobbied against a proposed expansion of Oregon’s workers compensation law that organized labor wanted and needed, because they felt they could not afford to buy coverage for their members. They competed for government reforestation contracts against labor contractors who kept expenses down by hiring undocumented Mexican workers. The Hoedads might have made common cause with these immigrants, but lacked the will or the wherewithal to overcome barriers of language and culture. Eventually, they joined the clamor for a crackdown on “illegals.” Loomis does not dwell on this ugly business, but it gets thorough treatment from Mario Sifuentez in Of Fields and Forests.
Class prejudice also figured in the growing rift between woods workers and environmentalists in the subsequent fight to save old growth forests. The radical environmental group Earth First! spearheaded the struggle, but it showed little sympathy for people who worked in the woods. It tried to sabotage lumber operations with tactics such as tree-spiking, despite the mortal danger such tactics posed to workers. (One mill worker was almost decapitated by a spiked log.) Subsequently Judi Bari, a onetime postal union activist, became a leader in Earth First! and tried to make it more sensitive to workers’ concerns, but her working class sympathies apparently did not extend to existing unions.
Empire of Timber can be read as a story of lost opportunities and an elaboration on the problems and prospects of what some call “big picture unionism.” Organized labor has always needed allies, perhaps now more than ever. Strategic alliances require embracing a larger social agenda consistent with the immediate needs of members.
Noting the ongoing struggle of timber workers against the ravages of a physically dangerous job, Loomis argues that the fight to protect workers’ bodies was an extension of the larger fight to protect the natural environment in which they worked. His account suggests that, in real life, the connection—however necessary—is not so easily made.