Description: A broad historical synthesis chronicling the Pacific Northwest's first century of electification. Reveals how the region's citizens struggled to build a power system that was technologically efficient, financially profitable, and socially and environmentally responsible.
Review Quotes:
"One of the more creative and talented environmental historians, Paul Hirt offers an original and perceptive approach to studying the revolutionary implications of the coming of electrical power to the Pacific Northwest."--William G. Robbins, author of Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West and Nature's Northwest: The North Pacific Slope in the Twentieth Century
"The history of electric power in the Pacific Northwest is not a new topic. It has attracted substantial attention because of the importance of spectacular hydroelectric development, the region's role in the atomic age, and the direct conflict between dams and fish that epitomizes some of the essential environmental choices faced by contemporary society. Hirt's book, however, is the first to provide a broad synthesis and comprehensive exploration of the region's power history."--Carl Abbott, author How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America
"Dare I use the word 'illuminating' to describe Paul Hirt's valuable new study of electrification in the United States and Canada? I could also call it magisterial in its coverage of various facets of electrification as they applied to residents of the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, and hence to their nations as a whole. To successfully synthesize so much information--gleaned from original documents as well as from previously published studies and ranging from early trolleys to Columbia River dams--is by any measure a notable achievement. Successfully narrating this complex story in so readable a fashion makes The Wired Northwest doubly impressive."--Carlos Schwantes, author of The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History