The Once and Future Great Lakes Country: An Ecological History by John Riley (review)

Strangely, the Great Lakes region can be easy to ignore. It’s central but not very dramatic, hegemonic but pretty boring, large but not inspiring. Its economy is highly industrialized (though a bit rusty recently), the boring core against which alternative paths and analytically edgy peripheries can be defined. The Great Lakes region is bisected by the least sexy national border on the globe, a series of bridges experienced mostly as on ramps and long waits but rarely as deconstruction-worthy social disruptions. There is so much research in the region, but surprisingly little on it, a one-letter distinction that makes all the difference in the world.

From this and many other perspectives, John Riley’s comprehensive survey of the region’s environmental history is most welcome. Riley traces ecological change across the region from ice age to climate change, as it were. He does this in three big parts. The first third of the book provides a survey of the region’s history from early human occupation to the initial phases of European settlement. The basic signposts are familiar – retreating ice sheets, human occupation, adaptation to and alteration of the land, the arrival of Europeans, social and demographic change, declining Indigenous power, resettlement, accelerated environmental change – but the story is well told. Riley confidently synthesizes the region’s long history, with scholarly observations leavened by anecdotes from his own travels and experiences as a biologist, ecologist, and activist. In the second section, ecological questions take centre stage, as European settlement brings many new dynamics and accelerates the pace of change. Chapters on the land, vegetation, and animals give copious detail on how new arrivals wrestled with and transformed the region’s environment by commodifying, altering, and removing what was there and by introducing many new organisms. By any standard, the changes were enormous, if sometimes unpredictable. Here, oddly, just at the moment that Riley’s background as a biologist and ecologist ought to shine, the words of contemporary observers take over. These middle chapters lose momentum, reading like lists of primary source quotations that too often overwhelm the confident synthetic voice of the book’s first part. To be sure, there are lots of gems in these many quotations, but the middle chapters would probably have been twice as good if they were half as long. Thankfully, Riley’s confident voice returns in the third and final part, when recent dynamics like climate change, the rise of “city-states,” and impulses to conserve and restore nature produce a complex story of intensified exploitation and a paradoxical trend toward salvage.

Overall, this is a good book that is well worth reading and assigning. Three features are particularly impressive. First, the book is seamlessly transnational in approach. Riley sometimes covers Canada and the United States separately, but he does so with a refreshing lack of self-conscious geographic positioning. The transnational character of developments is usually just assumed, so the narrative simply proceeds, drawing evidence from across the region rather than setting up binational narratives, except where the border really does make a difference in timing or general dynamics (e.g., conservation). Second, the book is based on an impressive range and depth of sources. Some are familiar to historians (e.g., Catherine Parr Trail makes several inevitable appearances), but many others are unique, often marshalling Riley’s own background in biology and ecology. Riley is as confident in pollen studies and archaeology as he is in the Jesuit Relations, and these diverse sources are well integrated, so the text moves comfortably between words and artifacts, story and science. Third, Riley’s narrative is refreshingly dynamic. Following recent environmental historians of other regions, for example, he makes clear that Indigenous groups altered the land and that the demographic and social changes of European contact produced the new, wilder landscape that so many newcomers assumed to be primordial...