“Eighty Men Shared One Sink”
A review of a book about trees and labor. Twilight gets mentioned somewhere in here too
To steal a quote from writer Timothy Egan’s book The Good Rain, “Here in the corner attic of America, two hours’ drive from a rain forest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to.” The Pacific Northwest has, until recently, been a semi-ignored but extremely variegated and fascinating part of the United States. A hinterland rich in natural resources, stolen from Native groups, bargained for from the British, home to a white ethno-state, the area of the United States taken up mostly by northern California, Oregon and Washington has for a while been at the periphery of the United States popular imagination. This remained true until the rise of tech giants like Microsoft in the 1990s and Amazon in the 2000s made Seattle an international business center, and home to two of the richest people in the world, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. At the same time that these and other tech giants were coming out of the Pacific Northwest, groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, two of the forefathers of grunge, claimed the Pacific Northwest as home, and Stephenie Meyer, the author of the critically-derided but immensely popular Twilight series, choose to set her most famous novels in the region as well. This combination of money and cultural influence have all given the Pacific Northwest a place in the national consciousness, a place that demands more scholarly examination.
Being home to the world-bestriding capitalists such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates has brought the Pacific Northwest a huge amount of wealth, and with that wealth, the requisite matching set of problems. Labor disputes at Amazon have recently been front-page news, with “Prime Day” strikes at regional and international shipping and warehouse centers taking up much space, as well as the recently publicized efforts by Amazon to get the Seattle City Council to overturn a newly passed tax to help the homeless. Microsoft, caught up in lawsuits about illegal business practices, has had a long campaign in the U.S. and abroad to fight the effects of those lawsuits, while dealing with a number of labor problems of their own. This, of course, all takes place against the backdrop of the fight against climate change and environmental destruction, something that the conservative wings of government and business have long denied the existence of but that has been proven time and time again by the international scientific community. It is no wonder then, that there has been an upwelling of writing and coverage on the environment, labor and the Pacific Northwest. It is in this milieu that University of Rhode Island Assistant Professor of History Erik Loomis offers his new work Empire of Timber. Erik Loomis opens up his engaging new work Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests with a personal story, painting a picture of his own youth in the Pacific Northwest with his lumberman father, who proudly showed him the sustainable forests, and eco-friendly business practices of the timber companies his father worked for. As Loomis tells it, he did not realize the massive negative environmental impact that logging had on the Pacific Northwest until after his father retired with a motley set of ailments brought on by his many hard years as a lumberman. To this realization, Loomis added questions about labor practice, and sensing a gap in academic knowledge about how actual loggers like his father felt about and organized around environmental issues, Loomis made that combination the central question of his book. This grouping of labor, a bottom-up perspective, and the environment drives Empire of Timber and makes it such an exciting work.
Loomis, unlike some other environmental historians, does not take a “long duree” look at the forests of the Pacific Northwest, going back millennia, tracing the rise and fall of Ice Age glaciers and the slow growth of hard and soft wood forests. Instead, he starts around 1910, tracing the rise of the Industrial Workers of the World – also known as “The Wobblies” – and their attempts to infiltrate, organize, and radicalize the lumber camps that had begun to spring up in the Pacific Northwest, after the forests of Michigan and the yellow-pine stands in the southern states had been used up in the 1800s.
Loomis argues that the camps allowed for connections between labor rights and environmental needs to occur. Relating the story of one camp, Loomis tells of how “eighty men shared one sink and one towel. Unfortunately for his bunkmates, this new man had untreated gonorrhea… Soon, an outbreak of gonorrhea set in the workers’ eyes.” Loomis maintains this vivid level of description throughout his entire piece, wanting to recapture “The sensory experiences of early twentieth-century timber workers [which] have also disappeared from our eyes, ears, and noses.”
Loomis’ narrative of the “blue-green” alliance as he calls it, liberal labor and green environmentalists, starts with labor’s call for better working conditions for the laborers. Forced to work in horrible conditions for little to no pay, praying they would not be sent out to un-jam the million-timber-plus logjams that could back up the rivers used to send the felled trees to mills, workers flocked to the IWW as a way to achieve these basic reforms. However, industry-wide changes did not take place until after World War One. The wartime creation of army-sponsored “company-union” that took away worker’s rights to organize and strike on their own, in exchange for humane working conditions, and slightly better pay led to this stifling of the IWW efforts.
This first interaction between labor, the environment and capital defines the next series of four groups that Loomis traces the history of, leading all the way up to near-past. In addition to the work of the Wobblies, he looks at the Loyal Legion of Loggers – a WW1-era company union – the International Woodworkers of America, The United Brothers of Carpenters, and the Hoedads who were a reforestation cooperative in the late 70s. Loomis also deals with a few significant events, namely World War One, the fight to expand the borders of Redwood National Park, and the fight to save hardwood forests for owl habitats in the 80s and 90s.
Through these events and groups Loomis works to challenge what we know about labor power, especially labor power involved in natural resource extraction. Loomis wants to undermine and complicate the popular narrative of labor power and environmentalism being completely antithetical to one another, like two ends of a magnet. Instead, in the history of Pacific Northwest, Loomis sees another story. He sees a story of lumbermen, and women, that care about nature, particularly when it comes to their own leisure and their own safety, and care enough about it to organize and fight for what they want.
Empire of Timber is full of stories of unions, particularly the International Woodworkers of America, or IWA, who fight for environmental protections. They fight for reduced use of harmful chemicals and spraying agents, not just because of the harm they do to the workers, but because of the harm they do to the forests themselves. By showing how lumberworkers’ concerns for their own safety, and the longevity of their jobs, often intersected with, and caused them to work with environmentalist groups, Loomis shows that popular notions of lumber interest do not have a historical basis. In one example, Loomis tells us about how the IWA, at the height of its power, hired a lobbyist to fight full time in Washington for environmental reform. Loomis uses the actual words of the workers to great effect, allowing the read to get a greater glimpse of the actual people in his book.
In the end, Loomis reckons that the gulf between natural resource extraction labor and environmental groups exists thanks to the efforts of capital to widen and leverage existing gaps for their own benefit. Additional to that Loomis blames a lack of effort by both labor and environmental groups to listen and work with each other in the creation of this gulf. Loomis ends his work by offering his book as a lesson to his readers. As he writes, “Environmentalists taking workplace environments seriously and allying with union to keep American workers healthy and safe provides one tool to more broad-based support for the environmental movement. Creating a holistic environmentalism that centers the contributions and experiences of working people is a necessary part of building a sustainable and equitable future for people and the planet.” A lesson to take to heart, especially in our current climate.
Loomis provides an invigorating work with much to offer in our current moment. He succeeds at turning somewhat arcane labor disputes over helmet usage into a tightly written, expertly research, and thoroughly argued history of the Pacific Northwest, bookended by calls to create a better future, and a guide on how to do so.
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