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Book Review
| Marshlands: Four Centuries of Environmental Change on the Shores of the St. Lawrence. By Matthew G. Hatvany. Sainte-Foy, Québec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 2003. 184 pp. xxi + 184 pp. Illustrations, maps, and bibliography. $25.00.
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| Written where environmental history and historical geography intersect, this is a compact, useful study of the changing human use of the salt marshes along the lower St. Lawrence River. It describes the uses of the marshes by Aboriginal peoples, colonists, and agricultural improvers; situates major developments on the St. Lawrence marshes in relation to developments elsewhere; and provides an example in a single study of the successful combination of ecology, history, and geography. |
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The marshlands were a rich biological environment much used by Aboriginal people and by early French settlers (primarily for salt-marsh hay). Neither, Hatvany shows, greatly affected the physical character of the marsh. Environmental effects increased markedly when dyking became common, as it did in the early mid-nineteenth century as agricultural land became scarce and the marshes came to be seen as potentially arable. Some Acadian refugees had settled along the lower St. Lawrence in the late eighteenth century, and possibly dyking technology accompanied them. The word aboîteau, which in Acadia referred to the sluice through a dyke and along the Lower St. Lawrence, came to mean the whole dyke and appurtenances, almost certainly did. But one of Hatvany's principal contributions is to show that the technology of dyking and draining tidal marshlands was widespread in coastal Europe, and was introduced along the eastern North American seaboard virtually wherever appropriate. Dyking and draining salt marshlands were not particular ethnic achievements. Similarly, the agricultural improvers' enthusiasm for drainage, which in the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth century greatly diminished the St. Lawrence marshes, had long antecedents elsewhere: in Holland, Poitou, the fens north of Cambridge, and widely in North America. An agricultural college, the second in North America, was established along the lower St. Lawrence in 1859, and propagated the agenda of the improvers, including dyking and drainage. A hundred years later these ideas would be challenged by environmental arguments, again drawn from scientific and popular writing across North America, about the intrinsic biological value of marshlands, with the result that today the remaining St. Lawrence marshes are protected. |
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Hatvany emphasizes the larger context of developments on the St. Lawrence marshes partly to show that, contrary to the image of a subsistent, Roman Catholic and French-speaking peasantry, Quebec farmers were attentive to developments elsewhere and astute in the promotion of their own economic interests. If they sought to preserve language and culture, they also, like farmers elsewhere, sought to get ahead in the world. Somewhat ironically, in this one respect Marshlands is a local study situated in arguments about the rural mentality of French Canada. In other respects it faces outward, toward an interdisciplinary scholarship on environmental change. |
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My one reservation about this effective book concerns syntax and copyediting. Les Presses de l'Université Laval is to be commended for publishing some works in English, but in so doing needs to be as attentive to the quality of writing and to copyediting as it is in French. This fine little book required a final editorial scrubbing. |
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Cole Harris is professor emeritus in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His most recent book is Making Native Space (UBC Press, 2002). |
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