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Book Review
| Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia. By James Murton. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2007. 267 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth $85.00.
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| In Creating a Modern Countryside James Murton argues that the British Columbia government's adoption of classic liberal and, later, "new liberal" land use policies shaped the way in which people understood, approached and engaged nature. During the interwar years, the provincial government, armed with the new political ideology, attempted to bring together technology and nature in the hopes of producing the stable, orderly and coherent economic development of marginal lands within the province. Reclamation schemes directed by the Settlement Board and the Ministry of Lands, such as the land clearing for soldiers' resettlements at Merville and Lister, the draining of Sumas Lake, and the irrigation of arid regions in the Okanagan, represented the desire to create a countryside that would both benefit society and improve nature. Murton concludes, however, that agricultural resettlement plans ultimately failed in their goal of establishing self-sufficient farming communities because of the unique environmental conditions—the soils, rivers, trees, plants and fires—within the regions. |
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Murton's main contribution to environmental history is his analysis of state formation within a region, an order that depended upon establishing a new and more direct relationship with the land. Creating a Modern Countryside shows that discourses like the countryside ideal make history even while it attempts to introduce a more materialist understanding by balancing hopes and possibilities with the complexities and problems of political and environmental reform. Murton reminds us in the first line of the book that "nature haunts the great projects of the state" (p. 1). Of interest to students of Canadian environmental history is the argument that state-sponsored reconstruction efforts and, more specifically soldiers' settlements, were a significant part of the political and environmental/economic reform movement in postwar Canada. While scholars tend to focus on social aspects of reform influenced by religious ideology, Murton shows how those in the government of British Columbia attempted to change society by using political ideas and by applying technology and science to land use. Further, Murton's argument expands our knowledge of the regional uniqueness of reconstruction; postwar reform was not a transnational, unified Canadian movement but depended largely on provincial leadership and local circumstances. |
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