An Environmental History of Canada by Laurel Sefton MacDowell (review)

It is past time for this survey of Canadian environmental history. Laurel Sefton MacDowell’s An Environmental History of Canada enters the market with few competitors; Graeme Wynn’s Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara: abc-clio, 2007) and Neil S. Forkey’s Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012) are the exceptions, but both of those texts fulfill distinct purposes and do not function as a full-fledged classroom text. So, MacDowell has, more or less, invented the structure of a national environmental history for a comprehensive, synthetic, and classroom-ready text. In this difficult task, MacDowell has made a valiant effort and achieved success.

If an argument undergirds the book, it is the basic thesis of environmental history: nature influences historical change and is necessary to grasp the fullness of the past. Further, MacDowell effectively claims that Canadian environmental history is characterized by economic growth, not sustainable development; hubris, not humility; quick fixes, not systemic solutions for environmental problems. (5) Meanwhile, Native peoples and working people have tended to bear the brunt of deleterious ecological changes caused in the pursuit of Canadian development. Such a perspective permeates the book and the nation’s history whether describing fishing cod, trading furs, farming wheat, logging trees, mining ore, or producing energy. MacDowell also demonstrates a central paradox through most of Canada’s history and especially profound in the last century. Namely, national and provincial governments have been deeply implicated in supporting and facilitating economic developments, many with negative ecological effects. The methods were multiple, from infrastructure construction (e.g., Trans-Canada Highway) to sponsored research (e.g., Experimental Farms Service) to game management (e.g., Northwest Game Act) and much more. On the other hand, those same government bodies, especially after the environmental movement in the 1970s, were responsible for regulating pollution and managing resources. Canadians could expect, with few exceptions, such regulatory regimes to be underfunded, weak in enforcement, and unwilling to thwart the economically powerful. In other words, even when provincial legislatures and Parliament implemented new laws, business as usual largely prevailed.

The best of examples of this sort of failure may be the collapse of the iconic cod and salmon fisheries in the Atlantic and Pacific respectively. Canadians, operating within global economies, harvested unimaginable tonnes of these fish for centuries. Government commissions appeared at the end of the 19th century to study and develop policy to promote and protect the fishery. Despite policy innovations – changing offshore fishery boundaries, developing aquaculture, or expanding regulatory authority of the Department of Oceans and Fisheries – both fisheries collapsed utterly, putting tens of thousands of Canadians out of work, rearranging aquatic ecologies, and sacrificing the fishing cultures of Aboriginals and Newfoundlanders among others. This tragic story, that MacDowell tells well, can stand in for several similar resource histories related in this book: exploitation was followed by recognition of problems only to be managed with inadequate understanding and weak will to alter the exploitative pattern leaving an environmental disaster and often an economic and social mess, as well.

An Environmental History of Canada is not all gloom and doom. MacDowell locates early critics of the exploitative penchant of industry and government. For instance, she describes Catharine Parr Traill who, in the mid-19th century, worried aloud about disappearing native flora and fauna. MacDowell also chronicles some progress in ameliorating environmental harm and promoting ecological sustainability. For example, she furnishes a useful history of organic agriculture and community food-security movements. Unfortunately, successes come less frequently in these pages than failures.

Writing a national environmental history is fraught with organizational challenges. The Canadian scale – geographical and temporal – is unwieldy. Besides the problems with scale, nature ignores international borders, and so national environmental histories always rub against the limitations of the nation-state. More so than conventional historical topics, environmental history does not track well onto familiar chronological schemes following politically significant dates.

To counter such...