Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

xix + 207 pp.

The problem was immense. The wholesale destruction of the towering pine forests of the upper Great Lakes by loggers, who unabashedly spoke of their harvesting methods as "mining", had left behind it a landscape, that, especially after raging wildfires fueled by the left-over slash, eerily resembled, to those who had seen both, the deserted battlefields of northern France after World-War I. There was nothing left but an eroded wasteland littered with charred and burned-out stumps. The loggers had, for the most part, moved on to the Rockies and Pacific Northwest, with never a thought to regrowing or replacing what they had taken from the public for their own enrichment. In fact, most of them probably thought they were doing the nation a favor by clearing the land.

At first most of the politicians, and even some of the professors agreed. Russell, the head of the University of Wisconsin's School of Agriculture, in particular was an untiring advocate of agricultural homesteading of most all this cutover land. Even Ely, who had something of a contempt for the bungling efforts of unenlightened backwoods farmers, seemed to think that with proper education, technology and government help, much of this land could be made agriculturally productive. However, as an economist, he also began to realize that there was something to be said for other uses of some of this land, including the recreational value of pure wilderness, such as the Quentico-Superior area in northern Minnesota which he helped create.

However, it was Lovejoy, who had been teaching at the University of Michigan's nascent school of forestry, who most of all began a quiet campaign to regenerate the northern Great Lakes cutover lands. He came to this conclusion especially after his 1919 tour of a cutover-to-farm land-development project in the Michigan U.P. that was euphemistically called "Cloverland". He began to see that such homesteading efforts on what was land essentially worthless for agriculture was not only a waste of resources, but an almost criminal misleading of well-intentioned people who, however hard they might work at it, would be doomed to perpetual poverty and disappointment. Eventually, after making little headway in changing institutional thinking, Lovejoy quit academia and launched himself into a writing and professional conservationist career to get his message across. (It was in this latter capacity that he was particularly responsible for the creation of Michigan's Pigeon River Country Forest.) Lovejoy was also helped by several other developments on the national scene. One was a growing fear of a timber shortage. The other was the great depression, which although it tempted some to flee the cities with dreams of making it on their own in the northwoods, also coincided with the realization, due to plunging commodity prices, that America already had too much land under cultivation. Much of it that land, as became very evident in the dust bowl years that were to follow, should have never seen a plow in the first place.

The problem still remained, however, as how to bring this transformation in thinking to the general public. This is where journalism and even novel-writing proved crucial, and even such mavericks as Curwood, who had started his writing career as a cub-reporter in Detroit but who soon, in his quest for fame and fortune, turned to cranking out western-style adventure novels, proved invaluable. An avid outdoorsman, Curwood saw that the forest rangers and game wardens could be made into a new breed of adventure story heroes, battling not cattle-rustlers, horse-thieves or bank-robbers, but greedy lumber barons and game hogs. But it was Titus, whose popular 1921 novel "Timber" was made into a 1923 Hollywood thriller called "Hearts Aflame", who in turn reached millions with the message of progressive forestry, even if it was disguised in nostalgia for a vanished frontier.

The catch was, however, that these new storybook heroes, even while breathing the aura of rugged American pioneer individualism, nevertheless accomplished their exploits in the name and with the authority of either the federal or state government, bringing law and order and progressive conservationism into what would otherwise be a chaotic take-whatever-you-can-and-run state. For when it came down to it, what the restoration of the upper Great Lakes forest lands would require was a wedding of that old pioneer spirit of adventure to the necessity of central government planning by experts if society was not to repeat all the old mistakes. It is this theme that keeps resurfacing through Kates' book, from the Introduction to the short Epilogue.

And it is a theme that still presents a challenge today. As the growth of northern communities, country retirement housing and recreational retreats bring what amounts to at least a semi-urban sprawl to the countryside and near-by forest lands, we find that at least some of the measures like rural zoning, which was hotly discussed and occasionally implemented as far back as the 1930s, perhaps more than ever need to be discussed again. For if government-sponsored centralized planning, not matter how well-disguised, has played a crucial role in the regeneration of our northern Great Lakes forests, so too, the preservation of these regrown forests, even from those who would love them to death, must continue if we are to foster, in turn, an essential part of the American spirit.

R W Kropf 5/9/06