Robbins demonstrates that ecological change is not only a creation of modern industrial society. Native Americans altered their environment in a number of ways, including the planned annual burning of grasslands and light-burning of understory forest debris. Early Euro-American settlers who thought they were taming a virgin wilderness were merely imposing a new set of alterations on an already modified landscape.

Beginning with the first 18th-century traders on the Pacific Coast, alterations to Oregon's landscape were closely linked to the interests of global market forces. Robbins uses period speechs and publications to document the increasing commodification of the landscape and its products. "Environment melts before the man who is in earnest", wrote one Oregon booster in 1905, reflecting prevailing ways of thinking.

In an impressive synthesis of primary sources and historical analysis, Robbins traces the transformation of the Oregon landscape and the evolution of our attitudes toward the natural world.

"This is the best guide to the 'Oregon Country' we have had in a long time, perhaps ever. Robbins knows the place extremely well, not only its politics but also its technology, people, soils, forests, and waters. His genuine affection for the state never clouds his critical insight into thedriving economic forces behind its history". -- Donald Worster, author of The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

"In this wonderful environmental history of Oregon William Robbins discards the tired conventions of humans versus nature and confronts the ironies and dilemmas of a people who transform a natural world, all the while imbedded in that world. No reader will look at the Oregon landscape -- and by extension other landscapes -- in the same way after reading this book". -- Richard White, author of "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West

"Truly original scholarship, this environmental history of an American state has no counterpart". -- Richard M. Brown, author of No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society