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

At least two surveys of the environmental history of Canada have appeared in recent years: Graeme Wynn’s Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History (2007) and Neil Forkey’s briefer Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century (2012). Both are valuable but incomplete, and so there is reason to welcome Laurel Sefton MacDowell’s new synthesis.

MacDowell provides an expansive vision, extending from the Mesozoic era to now and touching on numerous themes. She presents this history in four parts. Part 1 surveys pre-contact Aboriginal peoples and environments, encounters with European explorers, and settlement and land-clearing for agriculture. Part 2 turns to the formation of cities and early concerns about urban environmental conditions, conservation of resources (especially forests) in the early twentieth century, the emergence and impacts of the mining industry, and the rise of consumerism and car-dependent suburbs. In part 3 she surveys the histories of energy production, water development, and agriculture. Finally, part 4 examines environmentalism and environmental politics, the history of parks and wildlife management, the history of fisheries, and (in the only chapter devoted to a specific region) northern Canada and climate change.

This is an ambitious book. However, several shortcomings limit its value. Most obviously, there are many errors of fact and interpretation. The account of the formation of Algonquin Park neglects the role of the timber industry. Early climate scientists did not “warn” of global warming; they welcomed it. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans was created in 1979, not the nineteenth century. The Montreal Protocol was about the ozone layer, not climate change. The discussion of the Pacific salmon fishery confuses hatcheries and aquaculture. In addition, many statements are frustratingly vague. For example, she explains that settlers in New France “tended to be freer and more prosperous” than their European counterparts because “European institutions were adapted to suit the New World environment.” And Hurricane Hazel, an event that had long-term consequences for regional planning and parks in Ontario, receives only this: “As Ontario politicians learned during Hurricane Hazel in 1954, some areas were inappropriate for houses. People who lived on a floodplain in western Toronto died.”

The overall interpretative approach may also be questioned. MacDowell presents a deeply pessimistic view of Canadian history: as a relentless, and usually heedless, destruction of landscapes and resources. This discouraging view stems from how MacDowell has chosen to frame environmental history.

First, environmental history is presented as an exercise in evaluating past actors in terms of today’s environmental and social attitudes. Thus, Europeans, who saw themselves as superior, had “myopic” views of Indigenous people. Settlers “had no notion of ecology” and saw trees as the enemy. Prairie farmers were not stewards but manipulative engineers. Government agencies, politicians, capitalists, all Canadians – all were careless, ignorant, unconcerned about future generations, or wilfully destructive. A delusional “myth of superabundance” encouraged unrestricted exploitation. While occasionally containing a grain of truth, these Whiggish, almost cartoonish evaluations neglect the complexity of Canadians’ relationships with their environment.

This evaluative perspective also encourages interpretative errors. For example, early ideas about parks and wildlife are described as incomplete or inconsistent because they are different from today’s perspectives. Similarly, governments in the past are characterized as unconcerned about the “public interest” as it would be defined today – neglecting the possibility that the public interest is itself an historical phenomenon. Most chapters conclude with advice regarding environmental policies or attitudes today – reinforcing the message that the function of environmental history is to support contemporary environmental reform by pointing out past errors.

In this account, environmental history has been reduced to a history of human impacts, with the environment as only a victim. Such a view neglects what makes environmental history so intriguing: the reciprocity between humans and nature, each influencing the other. The history of Canada is about how people have struggled to make sense of their settings, and to conduct their lives within them, in the context of an...