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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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In engaging Ian McKay's provocative essay "The Liberal Order Framework" (Canadian Historical Review, 81 (2000): 617–45), Murton takes seriously the challenge to see "Canada-as-project" through a reconnaissance strategy of the politico-economic logic of "liberalism." His focus on the state's commitment to impose a certain kind of landscape is illustrated well in discussions on land resettlement policies and in the political ideology of public figures like Duff Patullo. One wonders, however, whether greater attention to a uniquely Canadian liberal logic developed within the context of British Columbia would have created a different history. Superimposing theoretical frameworks taken from Donald Worster's critique of capital or Richard White's exploration of nature may not be sufficient to show the development of a particular set of ideas that informed the interaction between humans and nature. Further, the plastic nature of liberalism as a category of analysis, especially when used to explore society's relationship with nature and, more problematically, the role that nature would take in shaping/forming/reforming culture, does not encourage clarity. |
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Creating a Modern Countryside opens up the possibility for an exploration of the intersection between state organization, landscape ideology, and culture in British Columbia. Murton's dual focus on ideas and pragmatic realities begs for an analysis of the role of ethnicity, race, and gender in not only the ideological foundations of the various forms of liberalism, but also in the ways in which soldiers and other would-be farmers understood and engaged the environment. How did women use the logic of liberalism to their own advantage despite the fact that they were not officially recognized as "individuals"? How did First Nations adapt provincial and federal policy to suit their own needs even while governments marginalized their people and dispossessed them of their territory? Did Asian immigrants respond to the province's resettlement plans with their typical ingenuity? How did the laboring classes use their own ideologies to challenge the "new liberalism"? Because the logic of liberalism was informed by masculine, Western, class-conscious categories, the culture of the countryside (the selection of land, the use of soldiers, the application of science) was not just a matter of chance or circumstance. |
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Nevertheless, Creating a Modern Countryside is a part of an ever-growing body of literature that increases our understanding of the environment and makes us aware of the complexity of the interaction between nature and society. As a recent addition to the Nature / History / Society series published by UBC Press and edited by Graeme Wynn, it fits well the aim to publish high-quality, lively, innovative scholarship on the interaction of people and nature through time in North America. Wynn's vision for the series is certainly evident in his excellent foreword, in which he locates Murton's soldiers' settlements in British Columbia in their western context, citing examples from New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and Canada. As the series grows with the publication of more fine examples of wide-ranging, interdisciplinary scholarship, its importance as an outlet for environmental history, especially for Canadian environmental history, will certainly increase. |
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Murton wants his readers to see how changes in both the land and state are inextricably linked in space and through time. He wants us to take geographies created by ideology and imagination and pack them with practical meanings that can only come as we sift through the complicated and nuanced events that shape reality. Perhaps his interpretation also could have been soiled by the perspectives of federal and provincial bureaucrats, technicians, and scientists who adapted government policy, or those of soldiers and settlers, including the women and children, who survived on the land, or those of First Nations and ethnic minorities who were on the margins of the new economic order. Yet Creating a Modern Countryside makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how soldier's resettlements during the interwar period fit into broader notions of a new political and economic order in British Columbia. It challenges us to think about how our constructions of the past need to be informed by an understanding of the environment. It is a good example of how environmental historians might "get outside and into the dirt." |
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Bruce Shelvey is associate professor of History at Trinity Western University located in Langley, British Columbia. |
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