| Book Review | Environmental History, 12.4

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.
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.	1
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.	2
Why? The books under review here— radically different in scope, ambition, and accomplishment though they are—suggest some answers. Precisely because they are so extensive, Canada's forests are hard to come to grips with, conceptually. Arthur Lower skirted this problem with his own version of an old trick: a child of Ontario, writing about the Great Lakes-St Lawrence region and the provinces to the east of the great river, he took that area for the whole. By swift and effective stroke of his pen, the trees of the hemlock-white pine-northern hardwood ecotone became "the Canadian forest." Ken Drushka, a journalist and author who also worked as a logger, silvicultural contractor, and sawmill operator in British Columbia before his death in 2004, had no such easy option when commissioned to write Canada's Forests, a History. Given an almost all-encompassing mandate, to describe both the development and use of forests across the vast sweep of Canadian space through several millennia, and to emphasize changing human attitudes toward the forest, he had to reconcile local detail with sweeping generalization. His challenge was only amplified by the thirty-thousand word format of the Forest History Society's Issues Series in which this booklet appears.	3
Like most FHS products, this one is well designed, with clear type, a clean layout, a relatively large number of illustrations and some useful maps. It is intended for a general readership and is written in an accessible style that carries the story forward through a handful of chapters, titled to indicate the progress of the narrative. "The Canadian Forest" traces the development of ten forest types following retreat of the continental ice sheets and characterizes them briefly. "Early Forest Use" gives fifteen pages to aboriginal use of the forest and the colonial era of forest liquidation, ending in 1867. Barely two-thirds this space is afforded the "Industrialization of the Forest," which deals with patterns of exploitation before the First World War. Chapter four charts the "Rise of Forest Conservation" and it is followed by a discussion of "Sustainable Forest Management." A brief conclusion opens with the observation that "the guiding principles of forest use in Canada and the practices derived from them have gone through many changes over the past century,"(p. 84) and ends with the assertion that "today, after centuries of forest use, Canadians have accepted their role as stewards of the forests that define this country. They have committed themselves to maintaining them, enhancing them, and passing them on to succeeding generations" (p. 87).	4
This affirmation parallels claims made in recent advertisements circulated by corporate forest giants and it may reassure those tired of the "wars in the woods" or anxious about the environment (in the concerned but un-engaged way of many citizens). Like the rest of this little book however, it is unlikely to comfort or persuade the scholar or the activist. Drushka has produced a synthesis, but it is a curiously orthodox, anodyne, and even somewhat muddled affair. The narrative line is both Whiggish and closely tied to the main themes of an older Canadian history, of the sort once taught in schools. Pinchot and Muir, the traditional pivots of the American conservation/preservation debate structure discussion of conservation thought in Canada. The nitty-gritty flesh and blood of conflict, struggle, and the lives of ordinary people—those who worked in, managed, and fought to protect the forest—are almost entirely absent from this account. Specialists might well wonder at many of choices made in constructing this narrative, from discussion of the fur trade as "the first forest harvest" (without considering the impact of declining beaver populations on the forest environment) to the inclusion of a photograph of piles of buffalo bones awaiting rail shipment from the prairie grassland. Synthesis and summary are always difficult, and especially in the extreme forms required of Drushka here. General readers probably will find his broad brush strokes and straightforward progressive narrative heartening; more serious students are just as likely to blanch at his broad assertions and wonder at what lies beyond this purified and simple story.	5
Those with a serious interest in the history of Canada's forests should pay attention to the work of Richard Rajala. Since completing the PhD thesis that became Clearcutting the Pacific Rain Forest, he has published a number of useful articles and monographs, and the two works reviewed here exemplify many facets of his contributions to the field. Several of his contributions share, with Feds, Forests and Fire, a tight focus on what might be termed science and technology or material history and others, like Up-Coast offer detailed treatments of parts of British Columbia. In this work, thematic or geographical specialization allows Rajala to achieve intellectual control of his inquiries. His knowledge of archives and sources relevant to the environmental, labor, and technological histories of forests in British Columbia is probably unsurpassed and he has a firm grasp of broader developments in the industry, especially in the twentieth century. His work builds upon this detailed understanding and turns around organizing principles that help to ground his generalizations and interpretive claims in particular, pertinent contexts.	6
Feds, Forests and Fire was produced under contract to the Canada Science and Technology Museum, and is Rajala's third such monographic essay. Like its predecessors, it is rich in detail. Intended to serve several constituencies, including museologists, historians, and scientists, it throws light on the motivations that underpinned research into forest fires and forest management in Canada and helps to illustrate the public value of this work. Rajala's topic is complicated by the division of powers between federal and provincial authorities that bedevils all who contemplate pan-Canadian histories of resource use, but he essentially skirts the problem by focusing on the role of the federal government within a broader context defined by "technological change, scientific inquiry and policy formation" (p. 1). Thus, this history of the Canadian Forest Service's management of western lands, and its research into fire protection, forest inventory, and silviculture is related to provincial and industrial histories primarily because federal initiatives (in fire detection and suppression in particular) were quickly and widely adopted by forest managers at all levels during the twentieth century.	7
In part at least, Rajala's account parallels that offered by Gillis and Roach in Lost Initiatives. Both studies offer an institutional history of the CFS organized around such leading figures as successive directors and prominent researchers, and both conclude (in Rajala's words) that "the story of the federal government's role in Canadian forestry is one of shifting tides" shaped by political expediency and constitutional wrangling (p. 5). Rajala does more than Gillis and Roach in detailing efforts at fire protection, however. This is a fascinating story, well illustrated with photographs of fires, look-out towers, rangers, and fire-fighters, as well as of the rapidly evolving suite of technological aids that those engaged in fire prevention had at their disposal, from heliographs to bulky portable telephone sets and from horses to patrol boats, from Caterpillar tractors to flying boats and, after the Second World War, to air-tankers or "water bombers" supported by increasingly sophisticated technologies for wildfire detection. This is an important story succinctly told, with important Canadian contributions, such as the research into the relations between weather and the moisture content in fuels that led to the development of the first set of fire danger tables in the 1930s, duly noted.	8
Up-Country is a completely different piece of work, a history of the relations among forests, industry, people and communities along the thinly-settled and little-studied coast of British Columbia north of Vancouver Island (and including Haida Gwaii, or the Queen Charlotte Islands). It is, I think, Rajala's most mature and accomplished piece of scholarship to date and is an important contribution to the literature on British Columbia and Canadian forest history. The product of Rajala's association with a large, well-funded interdisciplinary research project known as "Coasts Under Stress," this book is a fine example of regional scholarship that speaks to local people and wider concerns. The introduction to the volume serves as a succinct, accessible and useful summary of the whole and should be read by all interested in the consequences associated with the penetration of industrial resource economies into the lives and territories of indigenous peoples. Rajala does a fine job of sketching the implications of this short but intricate history for natives, newcomers, and (to lesser degree) the environment.	9
The story is fleshed out in seven chapters organized chronologically and unified thematically. Thus the narrative runs from early forest industrialization (1870–1914) through the war-time interest in the region's Sitka spruce, to the extension of corporate control and the consolidation of forest interests in the 1920s. Radical changes in patterns of forest exploitation during the depression are described in chapter four and chapter five returns Rajala to his interest in labor history through its focus on the organizing efforts of the International Woodworkers of America. The postwar years of sustained yield and dynamic development are characterized as an "era of error," before the challenges posed by rising environmental sentiment after 1970, and the winding down of forestry on the north coast, are discussed in a final substantive chapter.	10
In some ways the history of this region follows a familiar script, one in which industrial capital and corporate consolidation exploit resources, drive an economic roller coaster and abandon people and places to their more-or-less impoverished fates. But Rajala is sensitive to the story of this particular setting and refuses to render the north coast simply as yet another place in which people were the unwitting victims of capitalism's muscle. Resistance as well as accommodation marked the history of forestry in this area. Indigenous people "suffered, but not silently"; woods workers protested the conditions in which they were expected to live and work; town-dwellers were anything but meek hostages to fortunes dictated by multinational corporations. The history of this region reveals that different paths might have been taken and "from these threads of discontent ... a new, brighter fabric of up-coast forestry" might be woven (p. 16).	11
What more general observations can be made about the writing of forest history in Canada? The diversity of Canadian forests, dramatic changes in the economic, social, and technological contexts of their exploitation over time, different approaches to resource administration in the colonial period and complicated patterns of colonial federal-provincial jurisdiction since 1867 make any attempt at large scale synthesis difficult. Writing a "political history with trees" reduces the awkward big picture to manageable proportions but leaves out too much, forces the story into an ill-fitting mould and adds little new to understanding the country or its forests. Thematic approaches hold more promise—in very general terms, different technological complexes have shaped basic modes of exploitation in Canada's separate forest realms. Still, these realms typically encompass several political jurisdictions. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the best work to date has been conducted at provincial or local scales. Remarkably, little of it has had a strong environmental dimension. There is excellent and exciting work to be done here, not least by incorporating detailed understanding of the biophysical system developed by foresters, ecologists and geographers into well-grounded historical accounts sensitive to scale, context, diversity, and nuance.	12
Graeme Wynn is professor and head of the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. He is the author most recently of Canada and Arctic North America: an Environmental History (ABC-Clio, 2007), and general editor of the Nature / History / Society series for UBC Press.

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