The Ottawa lumber barons and the conservation movement, 1880–1914

The Ottawa lumber barons and the conservation movement, 1880-1914 ROBERT PETER GILLIS At the Canadian Forestry Association convention in 1908, Elihu Stewart, a former Dominion Superintendent of Forestry then employed by a lumber company, declared of the lumbermen: We like the miner fail to realize that we have reached our last west; that nature so prolific to this country in this respect has no more virgin fields to offer, and that the only means by which a supply can be maintained to meet the enormous demands of future years is by husbanding the resources of the territory which we are now exploiting. 1 This was one more indication of a new attitude towards resource use which had been becoming prevalent throughout the whole North American continent since the late 1870's. For the first time a considerable number of people were looking at their environment with some concern and realizing that resources had been used with a reckless abandon which had rendered much of the countryside useless for future generations. In the United States this was dubbed the "Conservation Movement" and integrated into the American reform tradition as an important component of the American Progressives ' crusade "to fulfill American democracy ."2 Unfortunately Canadian historians have not paralleled their American counterparts' interest in the conservationists or in the particular problems vitally connected with the conservation movement. The only detailed analysis of any aspect of the conservation movement in Canada has been the work of A. P. Pross concerning the formation of forest policy in Ontario.3 Pross' thesis is based on a theoretical model of "withinput" applied to the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests. He concludes 14 that a small group of government officials, aware of new trends in resource policy, initiated and persevered with forestry measures until 1941 when a departmental reorganization brought professional foresters into positions of influence and power within the Department and consequently a more enlightened forest management policy was applied in Ontario. While Pross may be entirely correct in his analysis of the aims and ambitions of provincial civil servants and government foresters, his study of the "ferment of ideas" which generated the conservation movement in Canada during the years after 1880 remains both constricted and unconvincing.4 Conservation was and is a broad concept combining planned approaches to land, water, mineral and forest use, as well as to general public health. As an attitude or complex of ideas, conservation has at least two distinct parts. First, there is the idea that the resources available belong to the "people" and that these resources should never be given over to the control of "monopolists ." On this level the conservation movement becomes melded into the ideology of democratic reform as it manifested itself in the antimonopolist crusades at the turn of this century in Canada. The second part is the idea that conservation means the wise, efficient development of resources instead of rapid, wasteful exploitation of them. This view had its origins with scientists, engineers , corporation managers and plain, practica1 businessmen. The two ideas are not necessarily incompatible with each other but they do reveal a basic dichotomy within the conservation movement itself. By 1914 the term "conservation" had achieved the status of a wide-ranging, if somewhat nebulous policy, which boasted as its dual objectives both the ending of social abuses and the wise and orderly development of the country 's resources. It had become engrained in reformist rhetoric as a means by which economic power could be returned to the people, but at the same time it was even more Revue d'etudes canadiennes attractive to powerful businessmen who recognized it as a rationale which promised the planned, efficient development of a new industrial, progressive and corporate dominated society.5 This last aspect of the conservation movement, the role of businessmen in preserving resources in order to ensure the continuous, stable expansion of corporate power, has never been appreciated in the Canadian context. It is the object of this paper to investigate one group of businessmen , the Ottawa lumber barons, and analyse their developing attitudes toward the one natural resource vital to their survival, the forest. The prevailing attitude in Canadian historiography towards the...