Up-Coast: Forests and Industry on British Columbia’s North Coast, 1870–2005 (review)

Richard Rajala has written an excellent, useful, and singular history of the development of industrial forestry along BC’s North Coast, beginning roughly at the time of Canadian confederation and ending with the present day. The book’s excellence is largely measured by the author’s obvious care and an attention to details, featuring meticulous research and careful narration. Its usefulness originates in this being an integrated work that explores social and ecological aspects of “doing” industrial forestry. And, its singular character originates in the fact that there really has not been much written of an historical and scholarly nature concerning North Coast BC forestry.

This is a no-nonsense book. It does not propose grand political or theoretical contributions; it is free of jargon, and it is organized strictly chronologically. But, neither is the book simple. One gets a sense in reading it that Rajala is deeply committed to his subject, befitting a scholar steeped in the complex political, cultural, economic, and environmental history of this region.

The chapters are organized around important shifts in forestry and forest policy. The first spans the period of 1880–1914, during which largely small scale, speculative, and entirely extractive forays into the North Coast took place in the midst of provincial policies aimed at consolidating the enclosure of forests at the expense of existing aboriginal inhabitants. Significant developments include the 1884 potlatch ban, which Rajala links to state-led efforts to create a disciplined work force. Explanations based on overt racism are avoided in favor of those based more on economic reasoning, but the author’s critical disposition toward these racialized exclusions is clear enough. The second chapter continues by briefly chronicling the region’s first boom—propelled by wartime demands for Sitka Spruce for use in airplane construction—primarily targeting the spruce-rich Queen Charlotte Islands.

Chapter three takes the North Coast through the first—albeit halting—experiences with large-scale capital investment at Ocean Falls, along with the equally preliminary and halting efforts to organize workers in the region. This serves as a prelude to Chapter 4, which tracks the region’s forest industrialization from Depression era slumps to the first real boom. By 1945, serious capital investment was accompanied by more widespread support for industrial unions. At the same time, the province officially embraced sustained-yield forest regulation and long-term or “evergreen” leases of vast areas of Crown forest lands to increasingly multinational capital.

Chapter 6 covers the longest sustained boom of industrial forestry in the province (along the North Coast, and in BC more generally) from 1945 to 1970. Yet, Rajala calls this the “era of error,” a time when efforts to achieve truly sustainable forestry failed. Inflated cutting rates, careless and poorly regulated forestry, and an inconstant industrial geography became the norms rather than truly renewable forestry and stable economic and social development. This period did, however, feature resurgent First Nations territorial claims, highlighted by the election of Frank Calder in 1949 as the first aboriginal person elected to the provincial legislature.

Chapter 7 begins the narration of provincial Falldown, a period of declining employment, mill closures, escalating political contestation, and signs of ecological exhaustion. Led by the Haida Nation on the Queen Charlottes, and by the Nisga’a on the mainland, First Nations continued to assert their rights to provincial lands and forests and in so doing, worked in an unruly coalition with increasingly powerful and transnational environmental groups to contest business-asusual forestry. Rajala’s humble and tentative Afterword takes us to the present, with continued signs of exhaustion and decline in North Coast forestry, occasionally interrupted by at least the suggestion of new large-scale investment.

The key themes throughout include: (i) the evolving relationship between private capital and the largely developmental ambitions of the (BC) state; (ii) the effects of industrial forest development on...