TINA LOO. States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 2006. Pp. xi, 280. $29.95

Abstract

This book suggests that states of nature are cultural manifestations of the interplay of people's impact on the environment and their conceptualization of nature. Tina Loo makes three arguments by examining Canadian wildlife management from the turn of the twentieth century to 1970. First, wildlife management evolved from decentralized, local, and customary practices to a bureaucratized and scientifically professionalized regime centralized in federal government hands. Second, rural people nonetheless remained important, if subordinate, contributors to this regime. Third, wildlife management regimes shaped Canadians' values about their relationship with the environment. From the turn of the century to 1945, according to Loo, Canadian federal and provincial officials responded to industrial expansion by introducing American Progressive–influenced scientific management to wildlife regulations, developing national parks, and regulating northern territories. Day-to-day conservation relied on amateur observation and enforcement by wardens and the staff of local fish and game associations. New policies focused on limiting aboriginal and rural working people's rights to hunt animals for food and trade. Although some ignored regulations, poached, threatened enforcement officials, or protested, many aboriginal and rural people commodified their local ecological knowledge as guides and camp operators for bourgeois sport hunters and tourists. Bourgeois Canadians' new sense of nature embraced hunting and fishing in the wild as an antimodernist, masculine restorative in the face of an emasculating and enervating urban life. Some antimodernists rejected outright the impact of capitalism on the environment, and read avidly the wilderness requiems of the Englishman Archibald Belaney, the ersatz aboriginal Grey Owl. Rural people turned to the work of Jack Miner, who between 1910 and 1940 studied the migration of geese, established sanctuaries on his property, wrote and lectured on the subject, and provided information to government officials. Loo argues that Miner's popularity partially arose from his rejection of the Progressive faith in the conservation “expert.” Instead, Miner accepted rural people's right to hunt and modify the environment within the responsible boundaries of a Christian sense of dominion over nature.