David A. Rossiter

The nature of protest: constructing the spaces of British Columbia’s rainforests

This paper examines the representations of nature circulating in a Greenpeace anti-logging campaign in British Columbia, Canada. The effort to stop industrial logging in a region of the central coast named ‘the Great Bear Rainforest’ is presented as a case study through which nature’s social production can be glimpsed. Part of the larger ‘war in the woods’ that gripped British Columbia throughout the 1990s, the campaign considered here pitted Greenpeace and other environmental non-governmental organizations and their grassroots supporters against the forestry industry and many members of resource-producing communities. Through an analysis of campaign literature, newspaper coverage and ‘letters to the editor’, it is argued that the preservationist position advanced by Greenpeace visually and discursively constructs a concept of pristine nature which appeals to urban populations, employs a neocolonial representation of First Nations peoples and the nature within which they are situated, and finds authority and legitimacy in ecosystem discourse. Drawing both on work by Matthew Sparke concerning mapping and the narration of the nation and on Haripriya Rangan’s identification of regionality as a key concept in understanding nature’s production, it is suggested that the construction of nature considered in this case study needs to be understood as part of an articulation of a particular west coast metropolitan identity.

Leave the Lemons at Home: Towards a Political Ecology of Border Space

This paper presents a political ecology approach to the study of borders through consideration of a lemons travels in contemporary North American border space. Following discussion of recent work on the dynamic, multi-scalar, and process-based character of modern borders, I suggest that such critical approaches could be usefully augmented by drawing on ideas about socio-material networks advanced by Bruno Latour. By adopting a political ecology framework, border scholars would be able to consider more fully the materiality of borders and bordering processes. Through the example of the lemon, I demonstrate that in constructing the fruit as a particular socio-material artifact that embodies multiple threats to US national space, it and its carrier become implicated in the regulation of political-economic and geopolitical networks that are seemingly far removed from the object of concern.

Producing Provincial Space: Crown Forests, the State and Territorial Control in British Columbia

Abstract This paper presents three ways in which Crown forest administration in British Columbia at the turn of the 20th century helped to facilitate effective provincial control of territory. First, officials discursively constructed timbered spaces as a shared trust for British Columbias citizens. Secondly, they produced useful geographical knowledge and a spatial architecture that would facilitate on-going surveillance. Finally, officials constructed resource spaces of sustained production, monitored and controlled by trained experts. Thus, Crown forest administration solidified provincial claims to vast swaths of territory. The analysis highlights the importance of considering the on-going geographies of land and resource management as a fundamental part of processes of dispossession and reterritorialisation.

Negotiating Nature: Colonial Geographies and Environmental Politics in the Pacific Northwest

Noting tension between environmental and aboriginal politics in the Pacific Northwest of North America, this paper explores the historical–geographic constitution of both the Great Bear Rainforest conflict in British Columbia and the Makah whaling conflict in Washington State. By highlighting the uneven production of territoriality between each jurisdiction and tracing these differences though the historical–geographic imaginations of environmental activists and writers of letters to editors of metropolitan newspapers, the paper argues that situated geographies of colonialism inform interactions between environmental and aboriginal politics at their core, thereby demonstrating the centrality of the production of space to the constitution of politics.

Neoliberalism as Shape-Shifter: The Case of Aboriginal Title and the Northern Gateway Pipeline

ABSTRACT Neoliberalism is a political economic ideology whose proponents adopt diverse project strategies to achieve similar goals. The Northern Gateway Pipeline proposal to carry bitumen from the oil sands in Alberta to the coast of British Columbia (BC) is one such project. Developing the concept of the “shape-shifter” employed by Aboriginal legal scholars, we highlight neoliberalism’s disruptive effects as it negotiates the province’s history of Aboriginal land claims. Proposed in 2010, the Northern Gateway project has been controversial, seemingly pitting environmentalists against developers. At the same time, recent court decisions have placed resource development inextricably in the context of Aboriginal title; governments are obliged to consult and accommodate affected First Nations. Responses to these requirements reveal neoliberal strategies that consistently aim to fix the landscape for the investment of capital but collide with an equally determined claim of Aboriginal sovereignty. Neoliberalism is a “shape-shifter” obscuring the unresolved question of Aboriginal title.

The ‘Nature’ of Canadian Studies in the United States

The idea for this special section of the American Review of Canadian Studies was sparked by a conference held in the fall of 2012 at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus. The theme of the conference, hosted by UBC’s Canadian Studies program, was “Beyond the Culture of Nature.” The aim of the event was to interrogate and rethink the culture–environment nexus at the core of much Canadian Studies scholarship produced in Canada. Whether in the traditions of the Staples and Laurentian theses of Canadian historical–geographic development (see, respectively, Innis 1995; Creighton 1937), in the idea of a national imagination emerging through confrontation with harsh northern landscapes (see, for example, Simpson-Housely and Norcliffe 1992; Frye 1995), or in more recent emphases on power and the cultural production of nature in Canadian discourse and practice (see, for example, Braun 2002; Loo 2006), “[f]or decades the phrase ‘culture of nature’ has been deployed in Canadian and environmental studies to examine the cultural mediation of the rest of nature or tropes of nature and nation” (Evenden 2013, 5). And yet, “[j]ust what constitutes a culture or nature, or various proxy terms with their own complex histories like wilderness or environment, is neither agreed upon or fixed” (Evenden 2013, 5, emphasis in original). The conference conveners asked presenters to reflect on new directions and imperatives for consideration of ‘the environment’ in the interdisciplinary field of Canadian Studies. Given the prominence of environmental issues in recent popular, political, and academic discourse, the theme of the event was timely and welcomed by the participants. As such, it was a productive event replete with discussions of the potential for themes of biopolitics, post-humanism, postcolonialism, pluralism, and environmental justice to thrive at the intersection of Canadian and environmental studies. It was also mostly a set of discussions about Canadian Studies as produced from a Canadian perspective. As a Canadian who studied in Canada for all of his degrees, the literatures and themes being debated were quite familiar and engaging to me. However, as a faculty member in a Canadian Studies program in the United States, and having served as editor of this journal, I have developed a sense that Canadian Studies as produced from a US perspective has traced a somewhat different trajectory than the one that was being considered at the conference. Thus, upon receiving the call for papers for the conference I had wondered: if the broad theme of ‘culture of nature’ has been central to Canadian Studies in Canada, what has been the ‘nature’ of Canadian Studies in the US? The brief paper that I presented at the conference set out to suggest an answer to that question. And, in prompting thoughts about past emphases and future directions, the paper ultimately framed two special sessions titled “Unsettling the Nature of Canadian Studies in the United States” at the 2013 Association for Canadian Studies in the United States Biennial in Tampa. It is from those special sessions that the articles following this introduction were drawn. In order to get a picture of the place of nature, or the environment, in Canadian Studies in the US to present at the UBC conference, I examined the table of contents of each volume of this journal since its inception in 1971 and identified every article that addresses issues of nature or the environment, broadly defined. The quantity and American Review of Canadian Studies, 2015 Vol. 45, No. 3, 259–265, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02722011.2015.1084138

A Review of: “Wynn, Graeme. Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History.”

In Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History, Graeme Wynn has produced a readable, engaging volume that should be of immediate interest to readers, both lay and scholarly, concerned with understanding the historical development of human-environment interactions in North America. A part of ABC-CLIO’s Nature and Human Society series, the book is the first comprehensive treatment of the environmental history of the northern half of the continent. As such, it is a substantial scholarly achievement. Covering millions of square kilometers of ‘‘geography’’ (xv) and ranging in time from the peak of the Wisconsinan Glaciation some 20,000 years ago to the development of resource mega-projects in the last half of the twentieth century, Wynn has taken on an enormous task. In doing so, he has succeeded in his stated aim of ‘‘offer[ing] a new perspective on the past of northern North America’’ (xvii). While paying attention to the broad strokes of social, economic, and political history, he has placed environmental change in the foreground of a single-volume historical treatment of Canada and Alaska. In lucid prose, Wynn lays out what he considers to be the most significant processes and patterns that mark human induced environmental change in the territory now coving Canada and Alaska. The book is divided into six parts, each addressing significant periods of human interaction with the northern North American environment through thematic chapters. Part One traces the ‘‘Deep Time’’ of 20,000 to 1,000 years ago. Focusing on ice retreat, vegetation advance, and the migration and settlement of first peoples, the section describes the formation and initial human settlement of the biophysical terrain that forms the current foundation of the northern half of the continent. With the stage thus set, the remainder of the book deals with the last millennium. Part Two introduces readers to the complex history of the consequences of contact between aboriginal peoples and European newcomers, while Part Three focuses on the experiences of these settlers in making a living from an environment Wynn labels a ‘‘Wooden World.’’ Ranging across time from the eleventh to nineteenth centuries, the combined effect of these two sections is to situate a vast land and its resources as the stuff of increasingly intense contestation and negotiation. In particular, the activities and impacts of traders (Native and European), missionaries, lumbermen, and farmers are accorded detailed treatment in separate chapters. Parts Four and Five consider the nature and environmental Society and Natural Resources, 22:686–690 Copyright # 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-1920 print=1521-0723 online DOI: 10.1080/08941920902985070