Wet Prairie: People, Land, and Water in Agricultural Manitoba by Shannon Stunden Bower (review)

In Canadian Wetlands (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Rod Giblett, a postmodern wetlands philosopher, writes that Canada is the “wetlands settler country par excellence” (11). Twenty-five per cent of the world’s wetlands are found in Canada, and wetlands have figured strongly in Canadian literature. However, as he cautions, the same is not true for Canada’s rich wetlands history, which is not well recognized and is frequently dismissed in a pejorative manner. Aside from being the “world’s greatest wetlands country,” Giblett writes with some irony, “Canada also probably has the dubious distinction of having destroyed a greater area of wetlands than any other country” (12).

When it comes to studying the place of wetlands in the Canadian landscape, as Shannon Stunden Bower poignantly underlines in Wet Prairie, there seems to be no end to the ironies surrounding this enigmatic topic. As geographic entities, wetlands are not quite land, not quite water, but something in between. They defy both scientific classification and managerial expectations that they conform to established laws and political boundaries. The existential paradox that is wetlands, Stunden Bower explains, stems from the fact that the surface water that intermittently turns dry prairie grassland into wetland is both mobile in space and highly capricious in time. These perplexing attributes of wetlands – the way they resist the laws of private property and municipal, provincial, and international boundaries – form the central problem of Stunden Bower’s study of how Manitoba’s settlers and succeeding generations of farmers, scientists, land managers, international lawyers, politicians, and conservationists perceived and tried to come to working terms with the transient nature of wetlands.

Stunden Bower’s Wet Prairie is a timely history given the unprecedented flooding experienced in the Canadian prairies in 2014. Massive flooding of farmland and urban areas has resulted in vitriolic debate, among farmers, wetland conservation organizations such as Ducks Unlimited Canada (duc), and federal and provincial drainage authorities, over who is to blame for the flooding and for the failure to better predict and respond to such a calamitous event. Stunden Bower’s book illustrates that this environmental problem is anything but new and is ultimately historical in nature, rooted in more than a century of difficulties in trying to come to terms with the essential nature of wetlands. In Manitoba, she succinctly writes, “the prairie is wet. This simple observation is significant to those interested in the history of the province, the prairie region, or the North American environment. The Canadian prairie is often described as an area of water scarcity, but much of southern Manitoba just does not make sense in these terms” (169). People have forgotten, or perhaps never fully recognized, that much of the most productive land in the province, such as that in the Red River Valley, is fertile because of its enrichment during periods of flooding. In a very poignant passage, we read about the late nineteenth-century settler Alex Ingram, who complained to the Manitoba government about how the land on his farm was ruined by inundation, not making the connection between the richness of his land and its susceptibility to flooding.

The problem, Stunden Bower argues, begins with a dominant settler society paradigm – the efficient use of land, a mode of land management developed in the East and brought to the West during the late nineteenth-century peopling of the prairies. This modern way of knowing the environment led a host of hydrologists, agronomists, and municipal and provincial administrators to encourage agricultural colonization based on the belief that sufficient understanding and technology existed to drain, restrain, and essentially tame the movement of surface waters, assuring the capacity to turn miserable wetlands into desirable farmland. However, this simplistic understanding of a complex ecosystem almost immediately ran into problems. Rather than dividing agricultural holdings by using a system of division based on the natural attributes of watercourses and general topography, an artificial uniformity of “chequer board squares” was...