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  • Imagining Canada:Reflections in the Flames
  • Stephen J. Pyne (bio)

Knowing how Canada and the world relate supposes we know what Canada is, and what the world is. For some years I’ve asked Canadians what Canada is, and the only consistent answer I get is that it’s not the us. As for the world, I don’t know where to start, and probably wouldn’t know what to do with the answers I would get.

Peoples treat nature, even the same nature, in different ways. Those acts reflect choices they make, which express their institutions and values, so we can analyze landscapes and the practices that make them, just as we can buildings and novels, for insights into how a people see themselves and the world around them. In principle we could take any part, and it should (with a few tweaks) stand for the whole. My candidate for this exercise in synecdoche is fire.

Fire is especially useful because Earth is a uniquely fire planet and people uniquely fire creatures – in fact, we are the keystone species for combustion. In its properties, too, fire is unique. It is a reaction: it integrates its surroundings, including all that people do (and don’t do). As an index of everything, fire is unique (and impressive) – that is its promise. But while it may integrate everything (more or less), it cannot speak to everything equally, and always latent in fire’s use is the possibility that it may break free and escape in the mind as it does on the land. That is the limitation of pyromancy.

Canada is a good place to contemplate fire: it has a larger patch of combustibles than anywhere else. Among its enormous stocks of hydrocarbons, it has a boreal forest that regularly erupts into flame; grasslands that historically burned almost annually; peatlands, muskeg, and tundra that smolder when dry; and other biotas that, with some slashing, can burn nicely. But it also holds substantial subsurface reservoirs of hydrocarbons, some of which Canada burns in situ and much of which it exports. Canada is an industrial country, which means it generates most of its power directly or indirectly through fire. Not simply by virtue of its landed biomass but by its overall combustion heft, Canada matters. It matters hugely. Canadian fire reaches [End Page 610] across continents and geologic eras. Its varied fires can serve as a collective portal into Canada as an environment, a history, and a theme.1

boreal canada

Its boreal setting has long defined Canadian experience, whether as the “land God gave Cain,” as Jacques Cartier declared; or the Great Bear Rainforest, a sanctuary from modernity; or Margaret Atwood’s assessment that Canada’s is a literature of survival in the face of forces outside people’s control. Almost all observers agree that the Canadian environment has shaped how Canada has become what it is and, thus, how it engages the world.2

The traditional analysis argues that Canada evolved under a “northern economy” dominated by commodities. Its settlement history tracks fish, fur, forests, and, later, water and minerals. Even its farming has trended toward volume as its prairies converted from wild to domesticated grasses. Its politics has organized around mergers of convenience or compulsion in order to access aid or shield against unwanted pressures. Its economy has trended toward corporatism as a way of consolidating and coping with commodity markets beyond its control. Much of its environmental historiography is economic history refracted, like its commerce, through a landscape that has favoured the big over the varied.3 [End Page 611]

What underwrites this trend are the peculiarities of Canada’s historical geology. Very little of Canada escaped Pleistocene ice, which scraped away the palimpsest that characterizes most landscapes and left a tabula rasa; geography would inform history. Equally, what defined the boreal was more than its bulk, although it is the largest biota on the planet. What is critical is that it defies averages. It is a landscape of outliers and extremes. The norm is nominal. The reality is the ripping flood, blizzard, drought, and earth-deforming ice. And, of course, conflagration.4

No institution – at least none based on...

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