Tall among the trees: Organizing against globalist forestry in rural British Columbia

Abstract

In January of 2001, the TimberWest Corporation permanently closed its Youbou sawmill facility near Duncan, British Columbia, Canada laying off 220 workers. On the surface, the Youbou mill closure reinforced a pervasive sense that workers and communities in the province are increasingly vulnerable to an ever more globally integrated and footloose forest industry. But a funny thing happened in Youbou; the workers fought back. While the mill was completely dismantled and scrapped, with no discernable response from the provincial government, workers from the Youbou sawmill banded together to form a new NGO called the Youbou TimberLess Society. Since its inception, the YTS has developed into one of the most unique and compelling voices for forest policy reform in BC. In so doing, the YTS also represents something of an anomaly in exhibiting many of the characteristics of so-called new social movements, and yet emerging from the industrial working class. This paper explores the ways in which the YTS has served as a powerful arena in which the subjectivities of sawmill workers and other community members have been transformed through organized resistance to global capital. At the same time, informed by the YTS, the paper draws on Polanyi's idea of the dual movement to examine scales and terms on which globalization and competing notions of autonomy are contested in moral economies of both work and nature.