Columbia River Gorge Focus Of ‘New West’

“Planning a New West” by Carl Abbott, Sy Adler and Margery Post Abbott ($26.95, Oregon State University Press)

Whether you are a recent arrival, or you belong to a family tree that has grown mossy after so many years in the Pacific Northwest, a carefully researched new book from Oregon State University Press will provide you with plenty to think about in terms of the future of this region.

“Planning a New West” is the inaugural volume in a bold new OSU book series dedicated to exploring human interactions with nature in the vast terrain west of the Continental Divide.

For this first book, Portland State University professors Carl Abbott and Sy Adler, together with marine transportation specialist Margery Post Abbott, focus on the contentious debate surrounding development issues in the Columbia River Gorge.

A region of spectacular natural landscapes, the Gorge for the last century has come under various and increasing pressures. Resource extraction interests, agriculture, real estate developers, and public power facilitates all have found themselves at cross-purposes with one another. Add to that the recent discovery of the Gorge by recreationalists, especially sailboarders, and the ancient claims of Native Americans tribes to this place, and you begin to understand why dissension over the Gorge’s future eventually became so vitriolic that the federal government intervened.

In 1986, the 293,000-acre Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area was designated by Congress. The authors take pains to be evenhanded as they trace the circumstances which led up to this unusual move, and then examine the issues which have continued to dog the agencies overseeing this experiment in land-use planning.

Ironies abound in this situation. The federal government, which now wants to limit development and preserve the area’s splendor, is the same government which played an instrumental role in permanently transforming the Gorge in the first place, via dam construction, the building of Interstate 84, and electrification projects which have threaded unsightly power lines along the banks of Columbia.

Local resentment of outside intervention is selective: Few appreciate the federal bureaucracy which now seems to meddle in their lives, but many still draw their paychecks from federal land and water management agencies, which are major employers in the area.

A further complication revolves around two state governments with very different ideologies: Twenty-five years ago Oregon adopted a relatively strict growth-management plan, while Washington, until recently, did little to intervene when local governments exhibited freewheeling attitudes toward land use.

“Planning a New West” easily might have been a dry treatise on public policy maneuverings. Instead, it makes for surprisingly compelling - if serious - reading, helped along considerably by plenty of charts, maps, photos (too bad they’re not in color) and sidebars. One might plead for more careful copyediting, but there is too much substance here to become churlish over the occasional minor glitch.