Scott Prudham’s Knock on Wood: Nature as Commodity in Douglas-Fir Country

Knock on Wood presents a persuasive analysis of the contradictions between capitalism and nature, developed through the case of Douglasfir logging, milling and reforesting in the Pacific Northwest. It starts from the spotted owl controversy that dominated debates about public lands, logging and wildlife through the 1990s. Although that controversy has cooled, Prudham provides the kind of historical–geographical depth and understanding that scholars and the public routinely need—but rarely get—in contending with apparent conflicts between environment and economy, conservation and use, wildlife and people. It was already well known that the 1980s had been a time of accelerated and unsustainable cutting of old growth timber on national forests; that Reagan-era forest policy had more or less preordained a crash in the logging sector sooner or later; and that when it came, it manifest politically in pitched battles between environmentalists and the rural timber-working class. Knock on Wood reveals that the crash was inevitable not because of Reagan or James Watt but by the very nature of capitalist timber production in the Douglas-fir region. But if the crash was in this sense unavoidable, its political expression in the 1990s—“Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?”—was not. My criticisms of the book concern, first, how to extend Prudham’s analysis of “ecoregulation” from Douglas-fir forests to other nature– capital interactions; second, the role of the state; and third, how Prudham treats the spotted owl.