In Timber Country: Working People's Stories of Environmental Conflict and Urban Flight.

• Author: Denzer, Kiko

When I moved to Oregon from Boston in 1991, I thought the SAVE A LOGGER, EAT AN OWL stickers on the pick-up trucks were a simple expression of uneducated, redneck, gun-loving dupes of the multinational timber industry who wanted to cut every last tree.

I learned otherwise when I took a job as a community organizer in a rural county, and got involved in a conflict between a community that wanted to keep its local campground, and the U.S. Forest Service that wanted to shut it down. Each side spoke a different language, and I was in the middle--fluent in policy but dumb to the ways and meanings of rural life.

It took me months of often-embarrassed listening before I heard what people were, repeatedly and not always patiently, telling me. What the Forest Service tended to treat as childish resistance to change actually was multilayered concern for local social, economic, and political life.

After about a year of community meetings, local loggers, ranchers, rednecks, and former hippies, with some outside research help from me, made demands that undeniably met Forest Service policy goals. The community now has a twenty-year permit to operate a campground and owns all the buildings and equipment on the site, and it's moving on to other, more critical issues.

This is a small story of hope in a much larger conflict that threatens to become a shooting war between communities and the government. Six rural counties in Oregon have recently declared the right to control what has always been federal land and have empowered sheriffs to arrest federal employees on public land.

Most media coverage of this so-called sage-brush rebellion hypes the conflict as jobs versus environment. Beverly Brown's In Timber Country is a sophisticated attempt to get a handle on the crisis in rural America. The oral histories she has gathered are a primer for anyone interested in learning a more complicated and interesting truth about the Northwest timber wars.

As she explains, timber has always been a boom-and-bust industry, but people compensated by making the most of open lands and resources. Hunting, fishing, gathering, and small-scale commercial mining and logging filled in lean times, and gave rural life a breadth and flavor that urban readers can only read about or imagine.

Brown asked twelve men and thirteen women--married, single, straight, gay, all working, and mostly white--to talk about "growing up, the changes they have seen in the area, and what they think of the...