Checkerboard Cascades: Forestry and design in the American Northwest

In the American Pacific Northwest, forests came to acquire a distinct status in the cultural imagination. Rather than acting as natural environments or as sites of pure industrial production they became, due to historical and political circumstances, a staging ground for the articulation of ethics, blending the supposed positions of developers and environmentalists into a continuum of material expressions. This practice, termed in the text denaturalisation, is the framework through which American forests can be understood as highly designed environments, and as such they provide us with a theoretical lens for understanding landscape, architectural and regional planning operations, in order to reconstruct a narrative of a New World mode of operation in the woods.