From Reclamation to Restoration: Remaking Nature on Portland's Peninsula

This environmental history of the North Portland Peninsula is a critical case study of a landscape in transition, where new "natures" have been constructed through shifting projects of reclamation and restoration. The Port of Portland, who controlled the Peninsula, transformed the marshy bottomlands near the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers to accommodate greater networks of industrial infrastructure and expand their capacity for global trade. Beginning in 1967, the Port began dredging operations to fill Ramsey Lake to make way for the construction of Rivergate Industrial District. Through this process, Smith & Bybee Lakes were set aside as a remnant of the former ecosystem and developed as a natural area. With a new regulatory regime came new goals and a new age of environmental management in which restoration became a required aspect of the Port's work by the 1990s. This shift hinged on compensatory mitigation, but irregularities in the permitting system that underpinned mitigation exposed the weaknesses of this regulatory regime. The tensions between development and restoration on the Peninsula reveal that the problem was not simply how we view nature; rather, it is driven by ongoing material and economic pressures that organize our regulatory frameworks and social arrangements. The dikes, dams, and levees constructed to hold back the Columbia's seasonal freshets have also shaped what we have come to understand and experience as urban nature. These wetlands, waterways, and embankments exist in a "not-quite-natural state"—simultaneously engineered and wild, industrial yet natural—a constructed and contested landscape, that defies simple categorization.