Knocking Seattle off its haughty green throne

"Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle"

by Matthew Klingle

Yale University Press, 368 pp., $30

It's easy for Seattleites to lapse into smugness about their environmental credentials.

After all, we live in a hotbed of environmental activism, right? We've cut our greenhouse gases enough to meet the international Kyoto Treaty. We rally for old-growth forests and orcas, and against big dams. We dash out into the woods or onto the Sound to commune with nature on the weekends. Heck, chinook salmon swim through the middle of the city.

Reading Matthew Klingle's new book, "Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle," is an antidote to that conceit.

It can be a discomforting read, particularly for those who fancy Seattle a green city. In fact, its history is every bit as dirty and destructive as any Wild West town carved from the wilderness and beaten and reshaped into civilized submission. That legacy lives on today.

Klingle does a fine job of revealing those inconsistencies in prose that is usually clear and evocative.

That walk along Seattle's downtown waterfront? You're strolling on the remains of the hillsides that were washed into the bay by giant water cannons, to slacken the slopes and turn tideflats into real estate.

The hulking chinook salmon we love to watch do their gymnastics up the Ballard Locks toward Lake Washington? Mostly raised in fish factories, because we've re-plumbed the river systems so severely.

"The history of salmon and the city is tangled, and, when Seattleites tried to pry the two apart, they found themselves confronting a history embedded in the city's very foundations," Klingle writes of the debate surrounding efforts to revive the fish. "The resulting questions spin heads: Are cities natural? Are salmon unnatural? Are salmon raised in captivity wild? Can a wild salmon live in a man-made river?"

But, he warns, "to ask these questions is to fall into the dualism that pervades so much environmental thinking. Nature must be pure, yet historically speaking that has turned out to be an elusive state."

Reading the book is like peeling away the layers of an urban onion, eventually revealing the tideflats, estuary, old-growth forests and Indian villages that lie beneath.

But Klingle writes about not just what's been done to the city but why, and the winners and losers as Seattle's geography was transformed.

It is a cautionary tale both about the dangers of creating a glossy, romantic version of the past, and the possibility that we will make similar missteps in the future.

Local history buffs will already know many of the basic events in the book: The construction of the Ballard Locks and subsequent lowering of Lake Washington; the "regrading" of downtown Seattle; the construction of the string of parks under the guidance of John C. Olmsted; the cleanup of Lake Washington in the 1950s and '60s.

Klingle shows how a clash of interests and different systems of belief and views of nature — what he terms an "ethic of place" — lay beneath the events.

Take R.H. Thomson, the famous city engineer who oversaw creation of a city water system fed from the Cascade foothills, and the regrading of much of central Seattle using that water in the early 1900s. He embodied the era's boundless confidence in the power of human ingenuity to make the nature and cities better, cleaner places.

In one revealing letter to a friend he wrote that "with the cleanliness of water, through God-given Cedar River, and with cleanliness of light, also through God-given Cedar River, that we have just begun the question of municipal cleanliness."

Klingle details who was on the losing end of the struggles. Indians lost the shellfish and fishing in Seattle — a foundation of their culture — as tidelands were filled and rivers rerouted. The poor lost their hunting grounds to public parks, and sometimes resorted to poaching. People saw their homes destroyed for Thomson's regrading crusade.

Conservationists don't escape unscathed.

The author notes the elitism of early outdoors clubs such as the Mountaineers, where people could only join with the backing of two club members, as well as the fight over who had the right to camp in places such as Mount Rainier National Park. And there are decisions such as the one to clean Lake Washington partly by rerouting sewage effluent into the already-polluted Duwamish River, home to poorer communities and the fishing grounds of the Muckleshoot Indians and sportfishermen.

But the book is marred by an unfortunate tension, stemming in part from an effort to make it at once an academic work and a popular history attractive to someone looking for a good read after the kids are in bed. Being of the latter camp, I found myself wishing for less theorizing and more storytelling.

Seattle history is full of fascinating characters who come on stage in this book. Klingle, a University of Washington graduate and now an assistant professor at Bowdoin College in Maine, fleshes out these people.

But I wanted him to delve even further into their personalities and doings as an illustration of the bigger forces at play, and dwell less on the theoretical analysis of an "ethic of place."

That more philosophical approach, concentrated in the prologue and epilogue, felt at times like an insider's discussion among environmentalists and historians familiar with the likes of philosopher John Rawls or political consultant Ted Nordhaus. Not exactly household names.

But Klingle's thesis is timely, as the region considers trying to restore Puget Sound, one of the most ambitious and costly environmental initiatives to date. He warns that tinkering with the landscape — even with well-meaning environmental projects — can place unfair burdens on some.

"Someone somewhere will eat tainted salmon," he writes. "Or suffer the consequences of cleaning or restoring one stream at the expense of another."

Warren Cornwall: 206-464-2311 or wcornwall@seattletimes.com