States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century Thomas R. Dunlap States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century. Tina Loo. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. Pp. 280, illus., $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper This book recounts episodes in the history of Canadian wildlife conservation and management from 1900 to 1970, both to discover changes in the ideas of Canadians about the natural world and to gain a 'perspective on the history of environmentalism in Canada . . . specifically on the attitudes and roles of the state, urban sportsmen, and rural peoples, from resource workers to First Nations.'(4) It makes three arguments, none particularly startling but all useful: that, over the course of the century, state structures guided by science supplanted a variety of 'customary, informal, and private practices'; that agencies using science displaced but never completely replaced private individuals and organizations in making policy; and that the values people felt should govern their relationship to nature shaped conservation policies. (6–7) Two general chapters set the stage for five topical ones. The first describes the situation around 1900, the legal background of Canadian wildlife law, the Progressive Reform movement, and the anti-modern reaction to it, while the second recounts rural resistance to the new, centralized wildlife policies, which favored sport over subsistence hunting. The topical chapters, running from the 1920s to the present, deal with: Jack Minor and his son Manly; the Hudson's Bay Company's use of science for management; park management of bison and reindeer for meat; changing ideas about predators; and the shift in public priorities from saving wildlife to preserving wild places in the environmental age. Loo's strategy of highlighting major events and personalities means that she rounds up the usual suspects – Jack Miner and his son Manly, the Hudson's Bay Company, Grey Owl, subsistence hunting in the North, wolves and reindeer, Farley Mowat, and the Canadian Wildlife [End Page 645] Service – but she tells useful, often new, stories about them, and manages the difficult feat of acknowledging American influences while telling Canadian tales. The first two chapters necessarily deal with Canada in a wider framework, and discuss wildlife law, progressive conservation, and rural reactions to it that extended well south of the border. Here Loo draws on American scholarship and ideas to good effect, and American historians as well as Canadians will find these useful for their comparative perspective. The next three present more specifically Canadian stories, for no American had the status Jack Miner enjoyed, the Bay's use of science had no close parallel in the United States, and Canadian parks controlled and managed bison much more closely than their counterparts in the United States. The chapters on predators and the wilderness return to common continental themes, but take specifically Canadian perspectives. From my own archival work I found the sections on the Miners ('Managing the Miners'), on wolves, reindeer, and Farley Mowat, and on buffalo ranching in the national parks particularly interesting and deftly handled. The difficulties with this work lie not in the scholarship or the analysis but in trying to describe Canadian wildlife policy as a whole. While ideas and goals were national, variations in land and settlement meant these grand visions suffered various, and at times odd or contradictory, fates across the country. This situation forced Loo to choose instances as examples, inevitably neglecting some areas and creating a narrative that skips from one topic and person to another. It also raises the inevitable concern that some instances might not be representative, and the patterns found by the author merely a product of research design. There is no help for this, for the subject just does not lend itself to a unified treatment. Loo has advanced our understanding with some important stories, particularly about science, national power, and national identity, and has blazed a good section of the trail out toward the scholarly frontier. She and others should build on this work's considerable strengths. [End Page 646] Thomas R. Dunlap Texas A&M University Copyright © 2007 University of Toronto Press