The Institute of Man and Resources: An Environmental Fable (review)

There is an episode of the popular 1990s sitcom Seinfeld in which the show's frenetic, aimless character, Kramer, is fired from an office job he had been performing, but never actually had in the first place. 'I don't even really work here,' the hapless Kramer informs his 'boss': 'That's what makes this so difficult,' his puzzled 'boss' feels obliged to reply. Alan MacEachern must have felt a little like this would-be employee's boss as he wrote about the rise and decline of PEI's Institute of Man and Resources (IMR) - a little institute, so big that it practically never existed at all. MacEachern has met this practical challenge quite nicely. Indeed, challenges aside, anyone familiar with MacEachern's other work, especially his Natural Selections, will know enough to expect one thing for sure: an engaging and cleverly written piece of history. The Institute of Man and Resources: An Environmental Fable is a slick little book, written in a literary style that most professional historians could, and should, envy and emulate.

Based primarily on the IMR's archival collection and personal interviews, each chapter of this book is organized around a distinct energy modality: 'Potential,' 1973-1976, opens on the tumultuous days of 1973's infamous energy crisis. An OPEC embargo, spiralling oil prices, and geopolitical instability coalesced with an adolescent environmental movement to prompt a perspective shift in the federal governmental in Canada, particularly within the newly created Department of Energy, Mines and Resources. It was, however, 'little Prince Edward Island' - specifically Liberal premier Alex Campbell and his 'right-hand man,' Andy Wells (who resigned his job with the premier and became the institute's executive director) - that first realized, and then actually realized, the need to put environmental and energy theory into practice. Thus was born, in the spring of 1975, the IMR, an institute dedicated to the 'analysis, invention, adaptation and application of appropriate energy, food and crop production and living and shelter systems' (21). Six core programs and a commitment to R & D & D (research, development, and demonstration) anchored the IMR's very broad social goals, which were soon winnowed down to a focus on energy.

Meanwhile, in spite of the newly incorporated institute's lack of ... well ... everything (staff, buildings, leadership) besides a name, much of its apparent potential derived from an affiliation with the New England-based New Alchemy Institute. The New Alchemists proposed construction of a bioshelter, an ark, which attracted perhaps the lion's share of national and even international curiosity to energy issues during the IMR's 'Kinetic' period, 1977-1978. Yet the Ark wasn't even under IMR control, at least not initially. When the IMR did assume responsibility for the Ark in 1978, it also took on the Ark's reputation as an aloof and 'monopolistic' organization, unwelcoming to visitors.

Conflict characterized the IMR's 'Enervation' period, 1978-1981. Internal conflict between Ark and IMR employees; battles with a new Conservative provincial government (not Premier Maclean himself, but prominent members of his cabinet); the rise of rival organizations created by the provincial government; unprecedented conflict with the federal government; and growing suspicions of the institute's applicability by Islanders themselves (heightened by the government's inaccurate implication that the IMR was a governmental body), all served to take the wind out of IMR sails. Through it all, conservation replaced renewable as the new watchword. Even then, after all the stir that the IMR had managed to create, it still 'existed as little more than letterhead' (113). With little energy (to say nothing of cash) available for use in the 'system,' the IMR 'slipped quietly under' at the end of its 'Entropy' phase (9).

The Institute of Man and Resources certainly amounts to a case study in 'Canadian responses to the energy crisis' (10), as MacEachern hoped...