Turning Trees into Dollars: The British Columbia Coastal Lumber Industry, 1858–1913 by Gordon Hak (review)

266 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Nevertheless, the essayists in the end achieved at least a portion of their aim: if the Church of England still worried about the bounds (or even the legitimacy) of free critical inquiry, it had started to come to grips with diversity as a fact of its own B and the nation=s B institutional life. Essays and Reviews, therefore, would seem to be a seminal cultural document. So it is curious that the present edition is the first since 1874, and the first critical edition ever. Or perhaps not. One age=s modernity is the next age=s antique. The terms of critical discussion in the theological enterprise, as in other disciplines, have shifted and even developed significantly since 1860; and of the seven essays, only Pattison=s >Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688B1750= continues to be consulted and taken seriously to this day. Essays and Reviews, in other words, may now be simply a historical document. And yet intellectual life, if it is to retain its energy, must engage in constant re-engagement with its sources, not in order to pass judgment on those sources but because those sources may (as Karl Rahner once wrote) >say something to us which we in our time have not considered at all or not closely enough, about reality itself.= By enabling us once again to read Essays and Reviews, masterfully edited and superbly annotated, Victor Shea and William Whitla have performed something far more than intellectual archaeology. They have given us a chance to re-engage one of the groundbreaking works of critical thought in the English-speaking heritage, and thus allowed the modernity of the 1860s to speak to the modernity of 2001. (STEPHEN REYNOLDS) Gordon Hak. Turning Trees into Dollars: The British Columbia Coastal Lumber Industry, 1858B1913 University of Toronto Press. x, 240. $65.00, $22.95 The British Columbia forest industry has become very popular as a thesis topic, especially in history departments. In the past half-dozen years at least a half-dozen new titles have been published, most of them theses-turnedbooks . Gordon Hak=s book appears to be one of these, a historical account of the early years of logging and lumber manufacturing on the coast. It adds a little of the earlier years but stops a half-century before the end-period covered by Richard A. Rajala, and it concentrates entirely on the Canadian logging and lumber industry, whereas Rajala covered all of the northwest coast and rather more of the United States than of Canada (Clearcutting the Pacific Rain Forest [1998]). Those who are interested in minute detail, year by year, will find it in Hak. His coverage is competent of the technologies, labour and union history, economic conditions, and formal political history. He has been assiduous in seeking out information from early newspapers, trade journals, HUMANITIES 267 diaries, and archives. The book is neatly organized by topic: markets, companies, forest policies, workers, and so forth. Hak writes well enough, but a reader would soon be bored unless using this as a reference source. As such, it is good research material, sometimes exhaustive if not exhausting. Those who are interested in trends, causes, consequences, or theoretical understanding are less likely to find this compendium stimulating. Although the publisher claims that it has as its focal point the concept of market capitalism, the focus is hard to find in the midst of so much detail. True, indeed, the industry operates within market capitalism, but then, what industry doesn=t? The fact that forests and trees in themselves had no market value in the nineteenth century, but became commodities once logged, especially if further transformed into board feet of construction lumber, is not really breathtaking as revelation. In short, there is no theoretical thrust to this account, which would, for example, more fully explore and explain, rather than simply describe, the development of technology, access to United States lumber markets, and shifts in government policies and business strategies. The use of immigrant labour and the industry=s relationship with First Nations are well covered at the descriptive level, and these accounts, especially if put together with similar accounts of the...