Greg Gordon is a professor of environmental studies at Gonzaga University. He is the author of When Money Grew on Trees: A. B. Hammond and the Age of the Timber Baron and The Landscape of Desire: Identity and Nature in Utah’s Canyon Country. His new book, Rewilding the Urban Frontier: River Conservation in the Anthropocene (Nebraska, 2024), was published in August.

More so than other ecosystems, urban rivers typify our evolving relationship with nature. Once a necessity for the development of civilization, by the twentieth century America’s rivers became neglected and abused, channelized, dammed, and filled with sewage and toxic waste. While acknowledging the profound impact our species has had on the natural world, and on rivers in particular, Rewilding the Urban Frontier argues that the Anthropocene presents opportunities for rethinking our relationship to the natural world and potentially healing the age-old rift between humans and nature.

Although the Clean Water Act of 1972 spurred a cleanup of the nation’s waterways, explosive urban growth has since fragmented the wildlife corridors and ecosystems along our rivers. The contributors to this volume contend that if done right, rewilding urban rivers can help avoid further loss of biodiversity and simultaneously address environmental and social inequities.

Introduction

Origins

Greg Gordon

This is a story about a river, or rather, many rivers. It could be any river, really. It could even be your river. This river was once chock full of salmon— fish so abundant that Native peoples of many tribes once gathered by the hundreds to harvest fish, hold ceremonies, conduct marriages, exchange goods, and forge friendships and alliances.

Not only did the river contain fish, but it also housed beavers, especially in the tributaries. Beavers, in turn, attracted fur trappers, who, while transient, radically changed the ecosystem by removing said beavers. Other Euro-Americans recognized the power and opportunity of falling water and built sawmills while staking out townsites. In the broad valleys, settlers tapped the rivers for irrigation, building canals and diversions to water crops and orchards.

Railroads followed the river valleys and conveniently placed their switching yards and warehouses in the middle of towns near the river. Dependent upon rail transportation, other industries followed. With the advent of electrical power at the dawn of the twentieth century, investors built dams across the narrow gaps in the canyon for hydroelectric plants. These dams dramatically altered the river’s hydrology, ended the salmon runs, and trapped toxic waste from upstream mines.

By the mid-twentieth century, the river had become an open sewer. The city’s industrial core featured mills, factories, warehouses, stockyards, and rendering plants, all strung out along the river, flushing industrial waste and toxins from mining, agriculture, industry, and municipal systems.

The 1970s marked a dramatic environmental turn as people began to recognize the value of the river and initiated ambitious cleanup programs. The city remade the industrial downtown, ripped up rail yards, tore down warehouses, and created public parks and walkways. Before long the river was a source of civic pride. With the help of the 1972 Clean Water Act and other environmental laws, the public began to push for better water quality, habitat protection, and recreational access.

If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same story across much of the United States. Urban rivers reflect our changing relationship with the natural world, from abundance, to abuse and exploitation, to neglect, to beautification. While this river story has generally been a narrative focused on human values, a biocentric view is now emerging. Ushering in a new era of river restoration, in 1992 Congress passed legislation to remove two dams on the Elwha River in Olympic National Park, Washington. Twenty years later, these dams finally came down, and the Elwha has largely returned to its presettlement conditions with braided channels, active sediment transport, and, most importantly, the return of salmon runs.

While on the East Coast in 1997, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission—the agency in charge of relicensing dams—ordered the removal of the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River, the first time the agency had taken such action. Two years later, the dam came down, and the river’s aquatic life quickly rebounded with Atlantic sturgeon, alewives, and even seals, swimming up from the ocean. Water quality improved as well, and the residents of Augusta, Maine, rediscovered their river. The age of urban river restoration had begun.

In addition to the physical restoration of hydrological function through dam removal, the twenty-first century has witnessed significant citizen engagement with local watersheds and a recognition of the importance of aquatic biodiversity, urban revitalization, and the implementation of forward-thinking legislation (such as the Clean Water Act). All of these factors have coalesced to begin the recovery of America’s rivers.

At the same time, the challenges for recovery are daunting. America’s rivers have been dammed, diverted, channelized, dewatered, and polluted. In short, urban rivers are the most abused, neglected, and damaged ecosystems in the country. And yet, the wildest places in the city tend to be along these same rivers and creeks that offer crucial wildlife corridors and connectivity to core conservation areas, such as state parks and national forests. Ironically, our postindustrial urban landscapes offer significant potential for ecological recovery and could potentially forestall the impending ecological crisis.

At the breaching of the Edwards Dam in 1999, Bruce Babbitt, then secretary of the Interior and a river advocate who proudly presided over the dismantling of multiple dams, stated, “Rivers flow through our lives, they flow through the lives of generations . . . rivers flow from the past bringing memories and associations rich in meaning. And of course, rivers are also flowing into the future.”

The title of this book might seem incongruous, or even a contradiction wrapped in an oxymoron. Rewilding, urban, and frontier are not terms that enjoy a close association with each other. Rewilding is generally thought of as a massive effort to restore native species on a landscape scale. Restoration of wolves would be a prime example, but rewilding could even be as ambitious as bringing back mammoths or aurochs, the ancestors of wild cattle. Most humans on Earth now live in urban areas, from towns to megacities, but frontier? Besides being practically an anachronism, the term is so problematic that many historians refer to it as the f-word.

In his famous 1893 essay, “Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Fredrick Jackson Turner declared the frontier experience as instrumental to the development of the “American character.” While Jackson’s “frontier thesis” has become an outmoded concept among academics and is fraught with overtones of racial, sexual, and ethnic violence, most Americans simply associate the frontier with the Wild West or Star Trek. Basically, a frontier is a place where the social mores are in flux and where laws and civil society have yet to reach, often leading to violence. Yet, freed of social constraints, a frontier can also be a place of freedom and reinvention where people can forge a new way of life and a new identity, even reshaping their reality. For Jackson, the frontier was also a process, a transformation from wilderness to civilization. Likewise, for this book, frontier denotes a meeting ground between past, present, and future perceptions of the natural world.

In its original meaning, frontier simply means an edge or border, as in the Spanish, frontera. In this book, the “urban frontier” refers to the border zone between domesticated and wild landscapes, as well as the ecological edge, or ecotone, between different ecosystems. Foregrounding the term frontier reminds us of the social and ecological violence that accompanied settler colonialism. Thinking of the frontier as a process, we can trace how the conquistador mindset that quickly “tamed” the frontier became institutionalized in U.S. bureaucracies, such as the Army Corps of Engineers with its emphasis on dams, channelization, and irrigation. Urban rivers illustrate how once something becomes established, innovation is stymied. Thus, a frontier can also be cutting edge, signifying a new approach or beginning. This is particularly apt in the sciences; in fact, the official journal of the Ecological Society of America is called Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

For Jackson, the frontier was a moving target, primarily from east to west. While historically flawed (settlement of the American Southwest preceded much of the country), Americans encountered free-flowing rivers as they moved across and around the continent. Dependent upon reliable sources of water for everything from drinking to irrigation to electrical power, America’s cities and towns boomed along watercourses: Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Antonio, even Los Angeles and Phoenix owe their initial founding to a river. In addition, the frontier has long been a place where people reinvent themselves, experimenting with new forms of government, social mores, and personal, as well as collective, identities.

What then does rewilding the urban frontier in the Anthropocene mean? The chapters that follow explore that question from multiple perspectives. While the frontier suggests a place in transition, rewilding is the visionary process that moves us from a colonial and controlling mindset to adapting to multiple ideas and cultures and embracing an uncertain future. Rewilding is related to but distinct from restoration (see chapter 3). Restoration suggests a return to a past condition, whereas in rewilding, natural and human forces merge and create something new, and all of it happens in the most human of environments—the city.