Tracking the Great Bear: How Environmentalists Recreated British Columbia’s Coastal Rainforest by Justin Page (review)

This slim volume continues UBC Press’s Nature (History) Society series on environmental history under the general editorship of Graeme Wynn. It focuses on the mid- and north coastal rainforest of British Columbia, which comprises 20% of the Earth’s remaining temperate rainforest. It details the reconceptualisation of this Timber Supply Area into the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR) over the past 20 years. BC’s forests underwent a massive, largely uncontested assault by timber companies during 1945–85 under provincial government regulation, as evidenced by the numerous highly visible ‘clear-cuts’ in the province. Campaigns by environmental NGOs (ENGOs) in the 1980s and 1990s to save the remaining pristine old-growth forests focused on the south of the province and Vancouver Island, especially Clayoquot Sound, and the Stein, Carmanah, and Walbran Valleys in the so-called ‘wars-of-the-woods’.

The GBR Agreement of 2006 (the Joint Solutions Project, JSP) represents a major achievement between all interested parties in resolving probable future conflicts in central and north BC. To say, somewhat baldly, that this book explores the chronology of events leading to that agreement is, however, to understate seriously the author’s analytical approach. It is a study in ‘environmental sociology’, rather than a study in conservation history. Prominent is the use of actor network theory (ANT) exploring, by interview techniques, how conflict resolution was achieved among the disparate parties: viz. logging companies, labour unions, ENGOs, forestry communities, First Nations communities, and not least the provincial government with its constitutional rights of the governance of Crown Lands. Page’s research focuses on cultures of nature, and interrogates the ways in which human relations with the natural world are imagined and practised in the conduct of conservation, use, governance, and everyday life. Instead of a simplistic ‘humans-versus-nature’ paradigm, he explores networks of the political, social, and economic fabrics, as well as different ecological epistemologies in the conflict.

Graeme Wynn provides a seminal Foreword, with 35 notes, more than the rest of the book altogether. The Introduction provides background and introduces us to a veritable blizzard of acronyms, which thankfully are also listed separately. Chapter 1 identifies the location of the GBR and Chapter 2 recounts the campaigns against international markets used so effectively by ENGOs. Chapter 3 discusses the initial suspension of the ‘wars-of-the-woods’ by forest companies and ENGOs. Chapter 4 gives details of the JSP, preserving 1.8 million hectares and 4.6 million hectares subject to the ‘lighter touch’ of ecosystem-based management (EBM). Chapter 5 discusses how $120 million from a new Coastal Opportunities Fund will be invested in sustainable businesses in forestry and First Nations communities. An excellent location map is provided, though a minor quibble is that the Index is somewhat difficult to use, as it is arranged under a few very major headings.

This is an extremely important book, not only for explaining how collaboration has been achieved at a regional scale in mid- and north BC, but also as a symbol and example of what is possible in seemingly intractable conservation ‘stand-offs’. It will repay study by students of environmental history and by all involved in that wide-reaching, all-encompassing field of environmental politics.