ABSTRACT
I opened this book with a look back at the spotted owl crisis, perhaps the most significant controversy in American environmental politics since Hetch-Hetchy. I argued that the crisis over the northern spotted owl and old-growth forests in the Douglas-fir region was a key moment not only in the construction of new meanings vis-à-vis environmental change, but also in the politics of ecological crisis tendencies arising from the production of commodities from nature. Having examined various elements of the problems surrounding capitalist nature in the preceding chapters, I would like to close by returning to and reexamining in greater depth the crisis over the northern spotted owl. Specifically, this chapter extends the previous one by exploring how the construction of new meanings associated with old-growth forests informed environmental politics in the region during the late 1980s and early 1990s and led to significant changes in the social regulation of industrial forestry and environmental change.
