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Book Review
| Canada's Forests, a History. By Ken Drushka. Durham, NC: Forest History Society; and Montreal, Kingston, London, England, and Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen's University Press 2003. Forest History Society Issues series. viii + 97 pp. Illustrations, tables, maps, bibliography, index. Paper $8.95; Feds, Forests and Fire. A Century of Canadian Forestry Innovation. By Richard A. Rajala. Ottawa: Canada Science and Technology Museum, 2005. Transformation series xi + 116 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Paper $20.00 CDN; Up-Coast: Forests and Industry on British Columbia's North Coast, 1870–2005. By Richard A. Rajala. Victoria: Royal BC Museum Corporation, 2006. vii + 294 pp. Illustrations, notes, maps, bibliography, index. Cloth $49.95.
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| Canada's forests cover nearly half of the country's vast land mass, generate exports valued at over $40 billion each year, and provide direct employment for about 350,000 people. In decades past they were formidable obstacles to settlement, sources of great wealth, and signal elements of the landscape. Sociologists, political scientists, and geographers have written a good deal about contemporary political struggles, managerial regimes, declining communities and "resource wars" in the forest, and popular historians, public servants, former woods workers, community activists, journalists, archivists, and others have added memoirs, company histories, detailed accounts of single-industry towns and trenchant critiques of logging practices to the now numerous collection of studies pertaining to Canada's forests. This literature is far too vast to list, or even to summarize, here. But an idiosyncratic assortment of examples reveals its broad parameters. Thinking only of British Columbia, one might point to M. P. Marchak's Green Gold (UBC Press, 1983), Jeremy Wilson's Talk and Log (UBC Press, 1998 ), and Roger Hayter's Flexible Crossroads (UBC Press, 2002), Ken Drushka's Working in the Woods (Harbour Publishing, 1992), Richard Mackie's Island Timber (Sono Nis Press, 2000), Donald MacKay's Empire of Wood (Douglas and McIntyre, 1982), Myrtle Bergen's Tough Timber (Progress Books, 1966), and James Sirois's Afloat in Time (Skookum Press, 1998) to typify the range and kind of work done. |
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All of it evinces a certain fondness for woods and trees and for those who exploited (or sought to save) them, but one has to travel deep into this veritable forest of material to find more than a handful of works that combine high standards of historical scholarship with broad interpretive ambitions. Arthur Lower, a prominent member of the country's first generation of specialist historical scholars, opened an important trail into these thickets. Drawing upon his Harvard doctoral thesis, he wrote vigorously, and voluminously, about the place of the forest in Canadian life. Three books published over almost forty years—Settlement and the Forest Frontier (Macmillan, 1936), The North American Assault on the Canadian Forest (Greenwood, 1938) and Great Britain's Woodyard (McGill Queen's, 1973)—frame themes that are central to persistent, common conceptions of Canadian economic development. Elsewhere, Lower described the northern forest in terms equivalent to those that Frederick Jackson Turner applied to the hither edge of free land, when he argued that "North American democracy was forest-born." But relatively few professional historians followed Lower's lead. Bibliographies frequently cite The Politics of Development (Macmillan, 1974) by H. V. Nelles, Foret et societe en Mauricie (Boreal Express, 1984) by Rene Hardy and Normand Seguin, and my own Timber Colony (Toronto, 1981), which deal with Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick respectively, as well as Lost Initiatives (Greenwood, 1986), in which R. Peter Gillis and Thomas Roach paint a national canvas, and two works on British Columbia, Richard Rajala's Clearcutting The Pacific Rain Forest (UBC Press, 1998), and Gordon Hak's Turning Trees into Dollars (Toronto, 2ooo), among books published in the last thirty years or so, but there they tend to stop. |
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