Historians, anthropologists, ecologists, a botanist, geographers, biologists, law professors, and a journalist present 23 essays on how humans have adapted to the Pacific Northwest of North America and modified it over time, and how the changing landscape in turn has affected human society, economy, laws, and values. The place itself, the first peoples, rivers, agriculture, forests, and mining are their main themes.

Setting the Pacific Northwest stage: the influence of the natural environment / Eric C. Ewert — Place: an argument for bioregional history / Dan Flores — A natural history of the Puget Sound basin / Arthur R. Kruckeberg — From where we are standing: the sense of place and environmental history / William L. Lang — Willamette Eden: the ambiguous legacy / William G. Robbins — Footprints and pathways: the urban imprint on the Pacific Northwest / Carl Abbott — Salmon, sedentism, and cultivation: toward an environmental prehistory of the Northwest Coast / Douglas Deur — Mobility as a factor limiting resource use on the Columbia Plateau / Eugene S. Hunn — Unusual gardens: the Nez Perce and wild horticulture on the Eastern Columbia plateau / Alan G. Marshall — Megafauna of the Columbia Basin, 1800-1840: Lewis and Clark in a game sink / Paul S. Martin and Christine R. Szuter — Land divided: Yakama tribal land use in the Federal Allotment era / Barbara Leibhardt Wester — Salmon in the Columbia basin: from abundance to extinction / Dale D. Goble — The Northwest's hydroelectric heritage / Michael C. Blumm — Fish first!: the changing ethics of ecosystem management / Carolyn Merchant — Ecological influences of the introduction of livestock on Pacific Northwest ecosystems / Kathleen A. Dwire, Bruce A. McIntosh, and J. Boone Kauffman — Environmental change in the northern Rockies: settlement and livestock grazing in southwestern Montana, 1860-1995 / William Wyckoff and Katherine Hansen — Creating a hybrid landscape: irrigated agriculture in Idaho / Mark Fiege — Cultural perceptions of the irrigated landscape in the Pacific Northwest / Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted — Human and ecological change in the inland Northwest forests / Nancy Langston — Getting out the cut: a history of National Forest management in the northern Rockies / Paul W. Hirt — Changing forests, changing needs: using the Pacific Northwest's westside forests, past and present / Thomas R. Cox — Mining, environment, and historical change in the inland Northwest / Katherine G. Morrissey — Western smelters and the problem of smelter smoke / Katherine Aiken — Epilogue: environmental history and human perception / William Dietrich