| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2006)

AT FIRST GLANCE, writing the history of Canada's nascent wildlife conservation movement in the twentieth century might seem a trivial task. After all, the care and supervision of wildlife in Canada has largely been limited, some have argued, to the efforts of a few civil servants, game officers, and some natural scientists working within the federal and provincial bureaucracies. One could further claim that these public administrators confined their activities to a relatively narrow policy agenda, conserving wildlife whenever possible through government regulation but failing to develop a sustained critique of broader forces such as industrialization and commercialization that had brought some wildlife species to the brink of extinction. To those outside the field of environmental history, any attempt to chronicle the history of early wildlife conservation initiatives in Canada might thus seem an overly narrow administrative history of a small and relatively insignificant corner within the federal and provincial bureaucracies.

The recent release of Tina Loo's States of Nature will do much to dispel the notion of a limited historical significance for Canada's wildlife conservation movement. Although there have been a plethora of recent monographs on the complex history of Canadian wildlife conservation, Loo's beautifully written, lavishly illustrated, and exhaustively researched volume goes further than any of the others with its examination of wildlife conservation as a broad social movement and as an outgrowth of popular culture. Loo's greatest achievement with this new volume rests with her ability to draw connections between these diverse influences, effectively weaving together policy history with various accounts of popular environmentalism and grassroots activism.

Loo begins her volume with an analysis of wildlife conservation as a medium for the expansion of state power at the dawn of the twentieth century. Prior to this period, Loo argues, conservation was pursued through informal local arrangements worked out by groups ranging from Aboriginal hunters to hunting clubs. In the early twentieth century, however, the federal and provincial governments began to usurp local authority over wildlife, creating sanctuaries, hiring game officers, and implementing regulations that, according to Loo, "had the effect of marginalizing local customary uses of wildlife, and in that sense was part of the colonization of rural Canada." (6) Conservationists often framed this colonial discourse in terms of race and class politics, singling out minority groups such as Asians, working-class pot-hunters, and especially Aboriginal people as particularly destructive towards wildlife. Moreover, the resulting crackdown on illegal hunting practices could have devastating consequences for these groups as trapping equipment was confiscated, fines were handed out, jail sentences were issued, and human communities were removed from parks and game sanctuaries.

The reader might find some solace in this litany of injustices if such hard-edged policies had the effect of saving wildlife on the brink of extinction. Yet Loo argues that federal and provincial authorities often restricted local access to game merely as a prelude to managing wildlife populations for commercial purposes. Several of Canada's national parks, for instance, featured zoos to attract tourists and commercial abattoirs to attract revenue for the cropping of surplus game until well past World War II. For Loo, bureaucratic initiatives designed to control wildlife and rural hunting were the logical outflow of state authorities bent on dominating both humans and nature in hinterland regions.

Loo is at her best, however, when she describes the many individuals and organizations outside of government who contributed to the growth and development of wildlife conservation in Canada. She traces the contribution of early non-governmental organizations such as Ducks Unlimited to habitat protection, and includes a fascinating account of the Hudson's Bay Company's attempts to mobilize local Indigenous knowledge and labour to the cause of fur conservation in the 1930s. Perhaps even more significant is her pathbreaking attempt to create a pantheon of Canadian environmental heroes – in effect, an account of our Muirs, Pinchots, and Leopolds – to match the voluminous literature on major conservation figures in the United States. Some of the historical personalities Loo introduces, particularly Farley Mowat and Bill Mason, will be familiar to many readers. Others such as the out-fitter Tommy Walker, who campaigned passionately for the protection of the northern British Columbia wilderness, or the filmmaker and wilderness guide Andy Russell, who advocated habitat protection in Alberta's grizzly country, are given a well deserved place alongside the more canonical figures in the conservation movement. Loo also rehabilitates figures who were famous in their day but are largely ignored today. Her chapter on Jack Miner – the man who invented bird banding – finally grants this working-class bird conservationist his due place as a key popular figure within North America's conservation movement. Loo's account of Miner's early family life, his Christian-inflected environmental ethics, his famous waterfowl sanctuary near Kingsville, Ontario (established in 1904), and his somewhat brutal approach to predatory birds is one of the most engaging biographical portraits of a major figure in the North American conservation movement that I have ever read. In broad terms, Loo reveals that conservationist sentiment in Canada was manifest in a variety of social and cultural groups (e.g. elite sport hunters, working class farmers, Aboriginal fur trappers) and was grounded in a diverse array of ethical traditions ranging from utilitarianism to Christian stewardship.

It is difficult to find fault with a book that was so engaging and difficult to put down. There were, however, some minor points where I questioned Loo's interpretation of the available evidence. In her discussion of the caribou crisis in the 1950s and 1960s, Loo argues that federal wildlife officials still framed their arguments for conservation at least partly in terms of the commercial value of the caribou. Although she provides some quotes to back her claim, my own experience with the voluminous documentation on the caribou crisis suggests that the federal government had largely abandoned commercial dreams that had been applied to the caribou in the 1910s and 1920s as the perception of an extreme conservation emergency gripped the federal bureaucracy. I am also not convinced that reindeer were introduced to the Mackenzie Delta region in the 1930s as part of a conservation initiative to divert hunting attention from the caribou. According to many government reports during this period, caribou were thought to have largely disappeared from the Mackenzie Delta; the reindeer were established as an industrial pilot project and to provide a supplemental food supply to a population of Inuvialuit that were already suffering from the effects of a collapse in their local food supply.

These are trivial criticisms of an otherwise fascinating and impressive volume. When I gave the book to one of my senior students – perhaps the most important litmus test of a volume's general appeal – he suggested that it was one of the best historical works he had read in his university career. I certainly concur in this sentiment. States of Nature is an intelligent, eloquent, and thoroughly entertaining account of the wildlife conservation movement in Canada. It stands as a major contribution to fields of environmental and conservation history in this country and internationally. It is an instant classic that will both educate and reward those who hope to learn more about the complex and multi-faceted ways in which Canadians have attempted to come to terms with the wild creatures who live in their midst.


JOHN SANDLOS Memorial University of Newfoundland

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