Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics

Darren Frederick Speece. Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2017), $34.95, 384 pp. ISBN: 978-0-295-99951-7 (hardcover).

Standing over three hundred and fifty feet tall, enormous redwood trees grow in the thick fog of California's North Coast. The groves of two-thousand-year-old redwoods are quiet, the soft, thick beds of redwood needles absorbing nearly all sound. In Defending Giants: The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics, Darren Frederick Speece explores how this landscape, so remote residents call it the "Lost Coast," became the locus of the forces of global capital, explosions of violence, and presidential intervention. Centered on the attempts of an informal coalition of activist groups to stop the Pacific Lumber Company and other multinational timber corporations from "liquidating" or clear-cutting thousands of acres of old-growth redwood groves in the 1980s and 1990s, Speece makes a valuable contribution to the historical study of environmental justice, community activism, and the dynamic and overlapping responsibilities of individuals, corporations, and governments. Combining interviews with meticulous archival research, Speece provides a nuanced, yet incisive analysis of how a local community's struggle for justice in the 'Redwood Wars' catalyzed changes in environmental governance at the state and federal levels that continue to this day.

Speece's work challenges the conventional historical accounts of the American environmental movement and its evolution. He rejects the standard narrative in which the activist-led environmental movement transformed into a professionalized cadre of Washington, DC-based lobbyists, lawyers, and administrators on Earth Day 1970. Instead, Speece argues that community organizers and activists have continued to remain the heart of the environmental movement, organizing creative campaigns that both induce and make use of political change at multiple levels of government. In doing so, he credits small, strategically-diverse citizen groups with playing a central role in transforming the form of American environmental governance from one of Congressional legislation to executive branch negotiation and regulation.

Defending Giants is structured chronologically although Speece frequently breaks from his narrative to better contextualize events. The first half of the book examines the broad historical trajectory of efforts to protect old-growth redwoods on the North Coast. The opening chapter begins with an overview of the ecology of the redwood forests,...