Trouble in the forest: Redwood timber wars, remnant communities, and the modern social imaginary (California)

Trouble in the Forest is an ethnographic, historical, and cultural analysis of the redwood timber wars in Humboldt County, California. Taking off from field research conducted on the eve of the preservation deal that established the Headwaters Forest Reserve, I trace the social and environmental conditions of the conflict back through the region's labor trouble and Indian wars to the performative utterances of the nation's constitutional framers, whose state-building and people-making texts drove the American market revolution and institutionalized private property in the new world. In participant observation, interviews, and archival study, I found that the Indian wars, the labor wars, and the timber wars each produced a particular moment of extra-ordinary violence around which social memory has crystallized over time. These are events whose representations now inhabit Humboldt's built landscape of memory as well as its media archive, and so shape its performative cultures of timber production and environmental resistance. I treat the media spectacle each event occasioned as an archive of valuations, investments, desires and discourses that carries a signature of social relations in that historical moment. They reveal how changing claims of property right have moved in succession to the center of a social world that is institutionally programmed for perpetual conflict. Violence, law, and media spectacle record and map out social history in Humboldt, illuminating the cultural constitution of power and place on this capitalist frontier.