Making a Modern Wilderness: Conserving Wildlife in Twentieth-Century Canada

In Canada the twentieth century was marked by the making of a modern wilderness. In the first half of the last century, provincial government bureaucrats engineered the environment in response to market demand from urban middle-class men for a particular kind of encounter with the natural world. The article explores the emergence of this construction of the environment, arguing that it was modern in five respects: in what people sought from nature (a cure for the stresses of modern life); in the central actors involved (the mass market and the state); in the techniques used (rational planning and scientific management); in the sensibility that inspired and surrounded it (nostalgia and optimism); and in the conflicts that arose from it, ones that pitted three different environmental knowledges against each other. Over the twentieth century the situated and local knowledges of the countryside coexisted with and were challenged by the scientific environmentalism of government wildlife managers as well as the ideas about the natural world circulated by commodities purchased on the mass market. The tensions among these three kinds of knowledges were never entirely resolved. They continue to animate environmental politics into the twenty-first century.