The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place

“To Become Beavers of Sorts”: Eric Collier’s Memoir of Creative Ecology at Meldrum Creek

72 In 1931, in the Chilcotin region of the British Columbia Interior, a watershed was dying. Meldrum Creek, a narrow, weedy waterway, led through “stagnant and smelly” meadows and past the “crumbling façade” of abandoned beaver dams (Collier 5). Around the “sick” watershed were “powder-dry grasses,” and the forests and fields were unusually quiet of the call of waterbirds (5). As described by Eric Collier, author of the memoir Three against theWilderness, the Meldrum Creek watershed was drying and dying, and the birds and animals that relied on it were disappearing from the creek and the surrounding forests. Collier’s memoir, first published in 1959, translated into seven languages, and considered a classic account of settler history in British Columbia, is the story of how the Collier family moved to and restored the Meldrum Creek watershed and its dependent ecology. Three against theWilderness narrates creative ecological practice grounded in bioregional particulars. The Colliers’ practice depends on intimate lived knowledge of a dynamic ecosystem, and Three against the Wilderness follows the family as they develop and implement site-specific knowledge for the benefit of multiple species. In the genre of colonial settler memoirs— mostly episodic and monologic, and often racist and anthropocentric— Three against the Wilderness is unique in that Eric Collier responds to intersecting social and animal interests. British Columbia settler memoirs have received little critical attention; Three against the Wilderness has been referred to three times in historic and sociological studies of the region, N o r a h B o w m a n - B r o z “To Become Beavers of Sorts” Eric Collier’s Memoir of Creative Ecology at Meldrum Creek “To Become Beavers of Sorts” 73 but has not been treated as a literary or ecological text. Settler memoirs, especially those set in British Columbia, are mostly read outside academia. Collier’s Three against the Wilderness, now in the public domain, has been republished by three different publishers and maintains popularity across British Columbia. Born in England in 1903 to a wealthy industrialist family, Eric Collier rejected urban living in favor of trapping, hunting, and homesteading in Canada. Neither the idea of “ecology” as a general study of the interactions between living organisms and their habitat or as a term describing a region within which organisms interact was known to Collier in the 1930s (Conley 117). Nor was “the environment,” the notion of a surrounding natural space distinguished from humans, a subject of public discourse (117). Perhaps, then, it is even more remarkable that, from the earliest chapters of Three against the Wilderness, Collier exhibits an understanding that a successful ecological practice must recognize the influence of human culture and social institutions (however arcane or hierarchical) as well as natural forces. The Colliers’ ecorestorative success hinged on their ability to think laterally across human/animal, nature/culture divides. In Three against the Wilderness , the physical labor of moving logs and breeding beavers flows from Meldrum Creek and the Fraser River Watershed Norah Bowman-Broz 74 minds open to interspecies epistemologies; the humans and animals are coproducers of an ecological artistry. The creative epistemology in Three against the Wilderness charts the ground for a bioregional restoration narrative that speaks to artists, ecologists , environmentalists, and ecocritical theorists beyond the British Columbia interior. Collier narrates his family’s creation of a site-specific ecosophy. Canadian philosopher Lorraine Code describes an ecosophy as a personalized environmental philosophy, one that maps “knowledge-enhancing and knowledge-impeding possibilities” (60), thus allowing for restorative ecological acts that might otherwise seem at best nonproductive and at worst downright odd. The Colliers’ “becoming beaver” in the Meldrum Creek watershed is one such creative ecosophical act. Félix Guattari’s environmental philosophy treatise The Three Ecologies proposes that global ecological restoration requires all humans to undertake a radical ecosophical shift in mental, social, and environmental registers. Philosopher Verena Conley writes that Guattari’s ecologies demand that humans invent new ways of exchange between organisms, create “mutations in value,” and learn to “think transversally” across “economic, scientific, [and] subjective” regimes (118). These transversal moves require creative courage, a mode of willed vulnerability to interspecies affect. As this essay demonstrates, Three against the Wilderness, despite a misleading title that is perhaps designed to position it in the settler-memoir market, is an exemplary case study of the kind of radical interspecies ecosophy that Guattari proposes. Three against the Wilderness, set in a lodgepole...