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  • Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History
  • Ted Steinberg
Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History. Graeme Wynn. Santa Barbara, CA : ABC-CLIO, 2006. Pp. 503, $85.00

Some fifteen thousand years ago the vast territory north of the forty-ninth parallel was all one big sheet of ice. Today it is home to factory farms, power stations, gas pipelines, mining installations, not to mention people, plants, and animals that simply did not exist back in the deep freeze. In his new book, Graeme Wynn tells the story of this transformation from ice sheet to industrialism in twenty-eight chapters that range through topics as diverse as the peopling of the region, the biological and ecological consequences of European contact, the rise of settled agriculture through to the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, and ending with the mining and logging of the twentieth century and the brutal reshaping these activities have had on the land.

A historical geographer by training, Wynn is interested in understanding both environmental change and ‘how places came to be’ (xii). He explores, for example, the role of fire in the lives of indigenous peoples, examining how they used it to help kill deer and, inadvertently or not, improved the grazing prospects for bison and other animals. He examines the rise of whaling, beginning in the sixteenth century, and the process by which it drew Inuit people increasingly into the orbit of Europeans and their trade goods. The resulting whale fisheries changed life for the Inuit, interfering with the ability of Inuit families to engage in subsistence activities and making them dependent on whaling captains for food. Eventually, the depletion of whale stocks in the Eastern Arctic spurred whalers west to the Bering Sea, where they continued to hunt the animals to the verge of extinction by the twentieth century. Moving on, he looks at the transformation of the land that occurred when Europeans surveyed these areas and turned the earth into private property, the emergence [End Page 581] of commercial lumbering in the nineteenth century, and the later development of coal mining, urban development, and highway and dam building that occurred after the Second World War.

Wynn’s study is a synthetic work that is based on extensive reading in environmental history, historical geography, and ecological anthropology. It serves as a valuable guide to the literature in these various fields, a kind of intellectual road map for those interested in understanding the environmental history of the northern part of North America. It is an important and valuable book. But as an exercise in history, the book falls somewhat short. Although the book demonstrates the environmental changes that have occurred in this region, it never offers a convincing causal explanation for the larger scale patterns it depicts. For example, Wynn notes, taking a page from Lewis Mumford, that the Eotechnic age of wood, water, and wind eventually gave way to the Paleotechnic era, a period centred on the use of fossil fuels such as coal. But what accounts for the shift? The book, by never suggesting a causal explanation, implies that the change was somehow inevitable or perhaps a function simply of changing technology. Most historians will not be satisfied with this failure of analysis.

The lack of a compelling causal explanation becomes even more apparent as the book moves through the twentieth century. Wynn is at pains to say in the preface that nature is resilient, a statement that seems designed to distance him from the so-called declensionists in the field of environmental history, who see the past as one long environmental tale of woe. And yet, the more recent history of Canada and the Arctic indeed reads like an ecological horror story. Wynn’s chapter titles demonstrate the point. He titles one chapter on forests and mines ‘Rapacious Harvests’ and then follows it with yet another chapter titled ‘Rapacious Harvests II’ about factory farms and the industrialization of fisheries. Wynn certainly is aware of the role of corporate power in the vast ecological and social changes he describes. But the book never offers a clear discussion of the emergence of corporate capitalism, nor any real consideration of the...

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