Knock on Wood: Nature as Commodity in Douglas-Fir Country

In Knock on Wood , Scott Prudham investigates a region that has, in recent years, seen more environmental conflict than perhaps anywhere else in the country-the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. In the past decade and a half, the logging industry and environmentalists have faced off in intense, and occasionally, violent disputes. Home to some of the highest quality timber in the world, states like Oregon are also hotbeds of environmental activism, some of it very radical. Prudham looks at the social and economic conflicts arising from the timber industry’s practices, tracing its motivations, practices, and labor relations. But he is equally interested in the troubled relationship between nature and society. As forestry becomes ever more industrialized, the relationship between nature and the social has become increasingly complicated. Partly as a consequence, the politics surrounding industrialized nature have become sharper, culminating in a host of social movements and conflicts in the past dozen or so years. Prudham aims to demonstrate that an analysis of the political economy of the region is an ideal window into the fraught politics of nature and the social in contemporary times.