The profligate province: Roderick Haig-Brown and the modernizing of British Columbia

After the Second World War, British Columbia experienced a period of rapid expansion and modernization, when politicians and the public alike brimmed with optimism about the prosperity and luxury to be harvested from the province's bountiful resource hinterland. Amidst the panegyrical promise of development,

few voices, either left or right, questioned the ideology of progress, and historians intrinsically link the period with capitalist growth and modernization. By contrast, the British-born popular writer, magistrate and conservationist Roderick Haig-Brown articulated a different vision of British Columbia, one that questioned the modernist project in its cultural and physical manifestations. Haig-Brown was not an antimodernist, but his critique, particularly through his conservation messages, promoted the values of civility, tolerance and respect for community and nature. The configuration of modern ideas in the thought of Haig-Brown tempers the notion of a hegemonic, universal modernity and supports the idea of "multiple modernities."

Apres la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la Colombie-Britannique a connu une periode de croissance rapide et de modernisation alors que les politiciens, tout comme le public, debordaient d'optimisme devant la prosperite et le luxe pouvant etre recoltes des abondantes ressources de l'arriere-pays de la province. Au milieu de la promesse panegyrique d'un tel developpement, quelques voix, de gauche comme de droite, ont mis en doute l'ideologie du progres, et les historiens Bent cette periode, de facon intrinseque, A la croissance capitaliste et A la modernisation. Au contraire, Roderick Haig-Brown, ecrivain populaire, magistrat et conservationniste britannique, a articule une vision differente de la Colombie-Britannique, vision qui remettait en question le projet moderniste et ses manifestations culturelles et physiques. Haig-- Brown n'etait pas un antimodemiste, mais sa critique, particulierement par l'entremise de ses messages conservationnistes, faisait la promotion des valeurs relatives A la civilite, A la tolerance et au respect concernant la communaute et de la nature. Dans la pensee de Haig-- Brown, la structure des idees modernes tempere la notion d'une modernite universelle hegemonique, et elle appuie l'idee de o plusieurs modernites

"I hate practically everything British Columbia stands for today," railed Vancouver Island author and naturalist Roderick Haig-Brown during an after-dinner speech to the national convention of the Canadian Authors Association at Victoria's Empress Hotel on 21 June 1965. "I hate ... the shoddy, uncaring development of our natural resources, the chamber of commerce mentality which favors short-term material gain over all other considerations, the utter contempt for human values of every kind." Public Works Minister W.N. Chant, the evening's official host and member of the development-oriented Social Credit government, sat in silence as Haig-Brown levelled his criticisms at British Columbia's shallow and greedy politicians and "the trivial provincial mentality" in BC that sought "petty advantage at cost to the common weal."1 In a later column, Vancouver Province editor Paddy Sherman, a sympathetic observer of British Columbia's rush for prosperity, labelled the speech an "acrid blast," and found it "puzzling."2

Haig-Brown's outburst stood in stark contrast to the remarkable historical consensus displayed by non-Native British Columbians in favour of economic growth and industrial development. Consider historian Margaret Ormsby's 1958 reflection that despite the "despoilation of nature" most British Columbians "counted as gain" the mines, plants, and mills that sprang up in nature's wake.3 The epilogue of her British Columbia: A History reflected the technological optimism of the age and celebrated the development of the province's resource hinterland. Martin Robin's Pillars of Profit documents the political stimulation and manipulation of this development drive, especially by the Social Credit government that held power for 20 years starting in 1952. "The masses, and the companies, were pleased with the new spending" on ambitious development schemes such as hydroelectric-dam building, the completion of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway and capital expenditures on highways and bridges.4 David Mitchell speaks of the Bennett years as BC's "Great Leap Forward" and suggests that long-time Premier W.A.C. Bennett's policies led to "the rise of British Columbia."5

For an understanding of the ideological climate of this pro-development period, look no further than the province's Official Centennial Record, subtitled "A Century of Progress."6 Published in 1957, this lavishly illustrated, 176-page celebration of British Columbia chronicled the conquest and submission of the remote province and its recent rise to industrial glory. Whether illustrating the development of forestry, agriculture, mining or energy, photographs in the Official Centennial Record depicted the rustic roots of Progress culminating in modern machinery or factories at work. As Premier Bennett's introduction asserted, this book was no run-of-the-mill, Chamber of Commerce boosterism: "[It] will tell the story of development, of the building of a ... homogeneous province; of a God-fearing pioneer people dedicated to progress, strengthened by their contest with a great land at first reluctant to yield its full resources."7

Amidst the panegyrical promises of modernization and development, few voices, either left or right, questioned the ideology of progress, though many fought bitterly over the division of the spoils. Indeed, political scientist Jeremy Wilson has dismissed discussion of forest conservation in the post-war years as a "barren debate."8 One voice questioning the modernizing project in both its cultural and physical manifestations was that of Roderick Haig-Brown. In speeches such as the one above, in public broadcasts and in his writing, Haig-Brown challenged the prevailing materialist philosophy and boom-town mentality that yielded "a gallantry about the job and a shoddiness about the end result."9 Yet Haig-Brown was no radical, nor was he a thoroughgoing anti-modernist, despite his criticisms of BC's development ethos. Indeed, it is the paradoxical nature of his attitudes about modernization that makes his perspective both intriguing and instructive to historians, for Haig-Brown's story illuminates both the particular experience of modernity in BC and the utility of "modernity" as a historical idea.10

We understand the conditions or circumstances of "modernity" to be ones in which a society has become seized or pervaded by the idea of "ceaseless development, progress, and dynamic change." Such a society has as its central dynamic "an orientation to rational purposive control of the environment (both natural and social)."11 David Harvey asserts that the concept of universal modernism has generally been perceived "as positivistic, technocratic, and rationalistic" and entails a "belief in linear progress, absolute truths, the rational planning of ideal social orders, and the standardization of knowledge and production."12 Thus, the cluster of concepts that we associate with the term "modernity" includes change, progress, rationalism, standardization and bureaucracy. This ideological formation, which emerged in Western societies in concert with the development of industrial capitalism, generated an increasingly instrumentalist and scientific understanding of both social organization and nature. While resisted in some quarters, modernization had gained ascendancy in Canada by the early years of the twentieth century.13

Our use of the term "modern" in the BC context reflects both the attitudes suggested by Bennett in the Official Centennial Record and the policies and practices that flowed from them. These policies and practices, which included the increased capitalization of resource development and development's spatial extension across the province, were accompanied 'by an optimistic faith in the ability of technology, rational planning and the bureaucratic organization of labour and government to undertake efficient resource extraction and wealth generation. As a consequence, the politics of nature became both a site of celebration of growth and progress and a theatre of emergent dissent.14 We focus on the postwar period - the era of high modernity - when Canadians put great trust in the ability of planners, economists, psychologists, businessmen, and many other types of professionally trained experts to organize prosperity and control deviance and dissent.15 In British Columbia, where industrial modernization had been slowed by the late timing of settlement and by the Great Depression and the Second World War, the postwar years witnessed dramatic population growth and unrestrained optimism. Yet, while modernist ideas appeared to be hegemonic in the province and the development ethos seemed to be endorsed by a broad strata of BC society, our examination of Haig-Brown reveals that faith in modernity was not universal, even among the non-Native majority. Haig-- Brown attempted to resist and engage the tenets of modernity in terms of their effects on civil society and the natural environment. In so doing, he mobilized a critique of postwar development in British Columbia that was both critical of, yet rooted in, the conditions of modernity. The resulting "counter-narrative" sought to forestall the creation of an ultra-modernist social and natural order in BC in order to protect the nonmaterial, non-capitalist values of nature and community.

In observing Haig-Brown's engagement with change in postwar British Columbia through the lens of "modernity," we are influenced by a growing body of literature in several disciplines that is exploring anew the concept of the "modern." For a period after the Second World War, scholarly enquiry of what it meant to be "modern" emphasized the process of "modernization," by which was meant the global, and preordained, spread of Western capitalism and values from EuroAmerican countries. Described in this manner, change was Eurocentric and prescriptive, and left little room for understanding how modern influences could develop in unique and diverse ways in non-European parts of the world, or indeed how such a universalizing process of change might have been resisted at the local level." While such an understanding of "modernization" has been discredited, the concept of the "modern" has regained scholarly favour, though with the emphasis now on the cluster of values associated with the concept of "modernity." In particular, modernization and the condition of modernity that it creates are viewed as complex phenomena that vary according to specific times and places and generate not a single modern condition but rather "multiple modernities."17 Thus, for example, geographers Alan Pred and Michael Watts note that the revolutionary nature of capitalist development "has resulted not only in a multiplicity of capitalisms, but precipitated a multiplicity of experienced modernities."18 Art historians are also exploring the impact of modernist thinking "on those people implicated in the construction of such social and cultural categories as Folk, Primitive, Authentic, and Traditional."19 Of particular relevance to our study of British Columbia is the suggestion emerging from this work that the concept and experience of modernity should be examined in its historical and geographical context, where broad-scale events and ideas interact with the local particularities that give them shape.20 The notion of "multiple modernities" helps situate and explain Haig-Brown's critical assessment of the triumphalist narrative of capitalist modernization in postwar British Columbia.

Haig-Brown was born in Sussex, England, in 1908 to a rural family of socially prominent standing. His father, a writer, schoolteacher and soldier who died in battle in 1918, was the youngest son of William Haig Brown, for 33 years headmaster of Charterhouse School - one of England's oldest and most prestigious "public" schools - and, as such, "a prime custodian of the values and myths of Victorian Society."21 In keeping with family tradition, Roderick Haig-Brown had also attended Charterhouse, but had been expelled for defying authority. His maternal grandfather was a prominent brewer and landowner in Dorset and a neighbour of novelist Thomas Hardy. Like many "gentleman emigrants" from England,22 Haig-Brown emerged from this privileged environment a rather rebellious young man who yearned for independence and adventure, a quest that led him in the late 1920s to the northwest coast of North America where he worked as a logger, trapper and beachcomber. This wilderness experience stimulated the young outdoorsman's desire to write and settle in the region, which he did in 1934 near Campbell River after marrying Ann Elmore, the daughter of a Seattle doctor. He lived there until his death in 1976. He served as a personnel officer in the Canadian Army during the Second World War, as a stipendiary magistrate for the town of Campbell River from 1941 to 1975 and as chancellor of the University of Victoria in the early 1970s.

Haig-Brown's importance in this period stems from his success as a writer, his main vocation. Through his productive career he wrote 28 books,23 several series of CBC radio broadcasts and historical dramatizations, contributions to national historical compilations and regular articles in publications as diverse as Mayfair, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and Sports Illustrated.24 His books for adults and children were extremely popular in Britain and the United States, and these countries provided much of his income and adulation. But Haig-Brown's popularity stemmed mostly from his fishing books, which made him arguably BC's best-known writer in the 1950s and 1960s. Described in October 1952 as British Columbia's "top nature writer and conservationist," he had already sold more than 300,000 copies in English, German, French, and Swedish editions. By the 1960s, his stature as a writer led many in Canada to regard Haig-Brown as the "voice of B.C."

IMAGE PHOTOGRAPH 12

Roderick Haig-Brown on the Campbell River near the western end of the Haig-Brown farm, June 1957.

Haig-Brown's status as a fishing authority was equalled by his reputation as an active and vocal conservationist. He served on various sportsmen's councils and conservation organizations in the United States and Canada. Conservation of resources was a major theme in his books on fishing and the subject of many other writings. Though he complained that they interfered with his writing, he accepted several speaking engagements annually, delivering speeches on conservation, as well as on legal and literary matters. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he led a bitter (and unsuccessful) fight against the province's approval of a river dam that would raise the level of Buttle Lake in Strathcona Park. Throughout the postwar period, would-be conservationists from around North America wrote Haig-Brown for counsel on how to oppose developments in their area or set up conservation organizations.

Haig-Brown did not arrive in North America with much understanding of the region's people or economy. Instead, as a young man escaping the constraints of Old World social ties and expectations, he was at first exhilarated by the "fine spirit of independence" that he found in the logging camps of Washington State and Vancouver Island, places where, "if you didn't like the colour of your foreman's shirts you could tell him to go to hell ... it was never hard to find another job with a foreman who had a better taste in shirts."26 Furthermore, for Haig-Brown the bountiful wealth that nature offered the settlers of northern Vancouver Island in the 1930s meant that pioneer dreams of independence in a small farm or logging operation, in a fish boat, or on a trap line were "never too far from probability."27

But while never giving up the dream of frontier independence, Haig-Brown became increasingly aware of the environmental cost in British Columbia of extracting wealth from the land. Returning from England after the Second World War, Haig-Brown observed that "the pace of extractive exploitation of the forests, the mines and the fisheries of his beloved Canada was moving inexorably into high gear."28 It did so in Campbell River's back yard when, in the late 1940s, the British Columbia Power Commission announced plans to dam the Campbell River to generate electric power for industrial use. A dam at the mouth of Lower Campbell Lake was proposed first, and then, in 1950, another that would raise the level of Buttle Lake in Strathcona Park. The coalition of nature lovers, fishing clubs and tourist interests that came together to limit the shoreline damage caused by the flooding of Lower Campbell Lake reassembled to fight the desecration of Buttle Lake. Haig-- Brown played a leading role in this fight, which culminated in ten days of hearings at Courtney in August 1951.(29) Eventually Buttle Lake was raised 15 feet, not 45 as originally proposed, but the battle to save what Haig-Brown had once described as the "gentlest, grandest, and most beautiful lake in all of British Columbia" was lost, and the lake unalterably changed." The experience embittered Haig-Brown and contributed to his increasingly harsh denunciation of provincial government resource policies.

Haig-Brown's critique of industrial modernization in British Columbia focused especially on its negative effects on provincial parks and wilderness. Parks, he argued in 1964, "may be taken as a rough gauge of a people's respect for the land." By this standard, British Columbia failed miserably. BC could boast the most imposing of provincial park systems, but the system was "really only a front, subject to change at any time and in any way merely by cabinet order."31 Between 1948 and 1961, BC cut 1.9 million hectares from its provincial parks out of a total of 4.4 million hectares. The largest chunk - some 400,000 hectares - was removed from Tweedsmuir Park to allow for construction of the Kenny Dam, which was to generate power for the aluminum smelter at Kitimat. Though policies fluctuated, provincial governments up to the 1980s were also quite willing to allow economic activity such as prospecting and logging in provincial parks.32

Haig-Brown's concern about the tendency of British Columbians to "test everything against a scale of dollars and cents" found expression in a biting critique of the government of W.A.C. Bennett, the ringmaster of the province's development circus. Hardly concealing his resignation and sense of betrayal over Buttle Lake, Haig-Brown asserted in a private letter in 1956 that the Bennett government "has not yet developed the slightest concept of the real meaning of preserving and developing recreational resources."33 Instead, provincial parks, like natural resources in BC as a whole, had succumbed to the "arrogant vandalism" of industrial interests. He wrote to Bennett several times in the 1950s and 1960s, bringing to the premier's attention "the increasing number of conservation issues that are beginning to count more and more against your government."34 These included starving the Department of Recreation and Conservation for funds, failing to plan for forest clearing in the new reservoirs behind the Peace and Columbia river dams, and violating Strathcona Park. By the mid-1960s, he was demanding pejoratively:

Why can't we secure parks and wilderness areas and wild rivers and other spectacular things of the continent hard and fast in ... the Constitution, so that they will be safe from violation even if the biggest goddammed diamond mine or oil well or underground facsimile of the whole General Motors complex is found in one of them? Why not? Has industry some inalienable right to invade public lands wherever found and destroy them?35

Haig-Brown's "I hate British Columbia" speech of 1965 was the culmination of a number of such outbursts during the previous decade against the "ridiculous competition for growth through industrial development" that Bennett's Social Credit government had encouraged.36 As the pace and effects of modernization accelerated, Haig-Brown found himself nearly alone in questioning the radical industrial transformation of BC society and nature.

Many characters in Haig-Brown's fiction wrestled with the dilemma of their love for wilderness and the need for social development and progress. In Pool and Rapid, a juvenile novel published in 1932, the major character accedes to the need for development, resulting in a dam on his beloved river, a conclusion that prompted Haig-Brown to keep the book out of print after 1936. Haig-Brown based the 1942 book Timber, the first of his two adult novels, on his experiences as a woodsman on the northwest coast. Through the story of friendship between two men Haig-Brown explored the technicalities of logging, the tenuous society of loggers, and the dangerous conditions of forest labour on Vancouver Island before workers unionized in the 1940s. Whereas Timber examined the working world of loggers from an optimistic social perspective, his second adult novel, On the Highest Hill (1949), gave full rein to his despair over the conflict between development and nature. The story's young, socially inept hero seeks refuge from the difficulties of society in the mountains but ultimately finds himself engaged in a fatal encounter with agents of modernized nature, a park officer and police. While Haig-Brown clearly did not share the sense of estrangement and social disengagement of his hero, the novel illustrates his sense of the dark subtext of modernization and the domination of nature. It is, as Anthony Robertson notes, an anomolous text for Haig-Brown, whose literary works are characterized thematically by the attempt to find balance between community and nature.37

How can we explain why Roderick Haig-Brown questioned the dominant rhetoric of economic growth and resource development in British Columbia? To begin with, Haig-Brown was a cultural and political outsider, both in his own back yard and in the centres of power, Vancouver and Victoria. He inhabited BC's rural fringe, the sparsely populated, resource-dependent Campbell River area, and shared with many rural residents a pioneering sense and daily interaction with the land, although he rarely earned his living from it.38 Haig-Brown participated in and viewed politics from an intensely local perspective, one reinforced by his duties as stipendiary magistrate for Campbell River. Like many rural British Columbians, Haig-Brown found his pristine if rugged isolation threatened by the bold developments of the provincial government.

But Haig-Brown's British background and his vocation as a writer also placed him somewhat outside the roughly egalitarian social world of the resource hinterland. His intense commitment to humanistic values flowed naturally from his family's history as writers and educators. In addition, Haig-Brown carried with him to the frontier the social ideals of the rural British society he had come from, simplified but still hierarchical, a world organized around the conservative values of respect and community. By taking on the role of magistrate in Campbell River at the outset of the war, Haig-Brown was responding to the call of duty, as would be expected of a country gentleman. Lacking formal training in law, he none the less saw himself as a well-rounded amateur who possessed the necessary "qualities of compassion, understanding, intelligence, and humanity" to be a good judge.39 Paradoxically, Haig-- Brown's country background and diffident urbanity served to alienate him from both rural society - which saw him as aloof - and urban life - which he found distasteful. The Haig-Browns' attitude of noblesse oblige towards the local community led one wit to label them Campbell River's "Holy Family."40 Furthermore, Haig-Brown's unorthodox views on the pace and cost of resource development placed him at odds, it seems, with just about everyone in the province, from financiers to fishermen and fallers. Yet these very influences that separated Haig-Brown from fellow British Columbians also account for his role as critic of unrestrained economic development.

Reaching back to his British past, Haig-Brown sought to articulate a vision of modern British Columbia rooted in the concept of "civility." He attacked the prevailing consensus about progress on the grounds that it failed to respect individuality, promote ethical behaviour or preserve non-material values. In fact, he argued that the modem worship of technology and materialism undermined these values. "The true measure of a civilization is not in its material might and power," he contended, "but in its understanding of and attention to abstract values."41 Haig-- Brown's conservatism led him to urge that the economic values of the frontier "the ruthless pursuit of material power and wealth that builds up huge populations while destroying resources" - be mediated by the values of art, education and community, all essential civilizing elements.42

This goal required an ethical stance towards the land he summed up as the heart of the idea of conservation.43 In The Living Land, which he wrote for the expert-driven British Columbia Natural Resources Conference, Haig-Brown argued that conservation "means accepting moral and practical restraints that limit immediate self-interest ... [W]ithout moral concepts and ... a sense of responsibility for the future of the human race, the idea of conservation could have little meaning."44 Ennobling appeals to moral and ethical behaviour alternated in Haig-Brown's writings and speeches with more inflammatory rhetoric, in which he called for "a major change of attitude and thinking ... a new sense of the meaning of the land and the purpose of society in all people."41 Indeed, in one posthumously published essay he proposed a "radical" overthrow of the values and mores of a society that seemed, through its ignorance and avarice, destined to destroy the natural environment.46 Though his public rhetoric rarely reached this extreme, Haig-Brown's insistence on an ethical foundation for conservation remained an important theme until his death.

Yet, despite Haig-Brown's attacks on the "bitch-goddess Progress," he did not oppose capitalism or economic growth. He was neither a socialist nor a preservationist but rather embraced the ideas of efficiency and planning that historians associate with the utilitarian environmental philosophy of conservationism. This is most evident in his relationship to the aforementioned British Columbia Natural Resources Conference (BCNRC), the province's leading source of scientific conservation information and activity in the postwar years. Meeting annually from 1948 to 1970, the conference brought together government officials, senior industry administrators, university faculty, conservation groups, and sportsmen's organizations, as well as educators, journalists, labour representatives and members of the public. Functioning mainly as a clearing-house for ideas and developments in conservation and management, its core goals - planning, research, co-ordination and efficiency - were characteristic expressions of modernity. Haig-Brown began attending conferences in 1951, sat on the BCNRC executive in 1952 and 1953 and consulted with wildlife and recreation or pollution panels for most of the conferences of the 1950s. He delivered two conference papers and in 1961 wrote The Living Land under contract to the BCNRC. In addition to developing scientific and bureaucratic contacts, he counted many delegates, including leading figures in business, among his friends and sometime fishing companions. Haig-Brown often used the language of utilitarianism to promote his aims, particularly in presentations to the BCNRC and other conservation bodies, and wrote in 1964 that the aim of the conferences - which, presumably, he embraced - was to contribute "to more intelligent management of resources" in British Columbia.47

In a parable repeated in several of his writings, Haig-Brown portrayed the history of resource development in BC as "necessary and even productive," though occasionally abusive and obstructive.48 His acceptance of responsible development is especially clear in an essay entitled "The Land's Wealth," published as part of a national history compilation in 1967. In it, he argues for the sound management of natural resource industries and emphasizes the value of planning as the foundation of good management.49 The language of "rational development," "efficiency" and "planning" is modernist and could easily have been used by one of the progressive-minded experts who attended BCNRC conferences. Yet this is the Haig-Brown who that same year penned a savagely critical essay describing British Columbia as the "profligate province" where the "rush of prosperity" left in its wake "drowned and derelict forests ... and ill-planned cracker-box towns." It is "rather easy to think of the development of British Columbia as a series of engineering triumphs," he sneered, where people pay "little attention to much beyond physical development."50

An understanding of these seemingly contradictory views can be found at the intersection of who he was - a gentleman emigrant from England - and where he was - British Columbia at the mid-point in its historical development between being a "pioneer" and a "modern" society. Haig-Brown associated both stages with positive and negative values. Viewing BC as an "adolescent" society, he hoped that as it developed it would retain some of the positive qualities of the pioneer era while outgrowing the negative aspects. As above, the core positive value that Haig-Brown recognized in pioneer society was independence, a value he felt was threatened by the homogenization and systematization of modernity. As he told CBC listeners in 1951, "Living is a matter of individual flowering and development."51 Yet pioneer BC was also "a halcyon time of tearing down, despoiling and exploiting with no thought beyond the immediate, easy dollar."52 This was the country of timber barons and railroad grants, where settlers and speculators alike took wealth from the land with little regard for the future. Their ruthless exploitation was guided by the myth of superabundance: the belief that water, soil, forests, wildlife and fisheries were inexhaustible. While this development was necessary for growth, it fostered an ethic of extractive land use practices that threatened to destroy the society it had built.53

Coming from the domesticated landscape of England, Haig-Brown initially perceived both pioneer Canada and British Columbia to be fundamentally immature societies. For instance, he wrote of his home country that "there is more to know, more to understand, more to use (as a writer) in the thousand square miles of Dorset than in the three hundred thousand square miles of my home province."54 Throughout his work, Haig-Brown associated maturity with community and human values. Speaking to CBC listeners about the land-based identity of Canadians, he contended that resource-rich Canada "is just passing out of the stage where it all 'comes naturally.'" The country, he asserted, needs to "grow up" and plan for a mature future.55 In a 1952 convocation speech he warned University of British Columbia students that the pace of modern development was a particular threat to Canada's growth into a mature nation.56 This danger was especially acute in British Columbia. "'Pollution for profit' is nineteenth-century thinking," he wrote in 1970, and "B.C. has plenty of nineteenthcentury minds."57 By contrast, the promise of being truly modern lay in the potential for provincial society to move beyond the adolescent exuberance of youth into a mature "third stage" characterized by artistic achievement, spiritual development and civil society.58

Interestingly, while he believed that British Columbia lacked the capacity to counter modernity's deleterious effects, by the 1960s he had come to see the Canadian state more hopefully. Haig-Brown had been introduced to national conservation strategies and ideas when he participated in resource conferences at the national level in 1954 and 1961. As the rest of the country began to see Haig-Brown as a representative of BC on the national stage (inviting him, for instance, to contribute to two national centennial publications), Haig-Brown embraced a national vision to counteract the devastating pace of development in his home province. He called for "strong federal leadership" in resource conservation and the regulation of progress and development, including, for instance, the control of industrial pollutants that the province had "so grossly neglected."59 In his famous "I hate BC" speech, he rhetorically apologized to Canada for BC's lack of maturity: "I hate and despise the trivial provincial mentality that denies Canada's national heritage [and] resists every vital Canadian concept and the whole range of modem knowledge and communication which can make the Canadian ideal a reality."60 Haig-Brown's sense of local identity, then, became tempered by an increasingly strong identification with Canada, a shift in affiliation dependent in no small part on his perception of the nation as an exemplar of civilized modernity.

In his rather unsympathetic biography of Haig-Brown, E. Bennett Metcalfe dismisses the author's criticisms of BC development and politics as the fulminations of a naive romantic who was comfortable in the company of university and business elites and was co-opted by them. In Metcalfe's view, Haig-Brown's social manner and failure to develop a radical critique of the impact of capitalism on the environment led to his being welcomed by the likes of David Rockefeller Jr., H.R. MacMillan and the Koerner brothers "as the perfect ikon for the troublesome new religion of ecology."61 Metcalfe, an early Greenpeace member, also notes Haig-Brown's apparent failure to engage with the environmental movement of the late 1960s.

It is our contention that Metcalfe offers a superficial reading of Haig-Brown's position, and that, rather than being an outdated romantic, Haig-Brown embodied many of the critical tensions scholars have identified as resident within modernity itself. John Jervis notes that from "early on many of the critics [of modernity] regarded the remorseless dynamic of the process as being in tension with its alleged [Enlightenment] ends, suggesting that the operations of the market and bureaucratic organization can have decidedly un-Enlightened consequences. In this sense, there may be a tension between Enlightenment ideals and the project of modernity."62 The suggestion by Jervis here is that an important strand of criticism about the effects of modernization came from people who themselves embraced modernist ideals.

An example of this tension within modernity can be found in the thought of Roderick Haig-Brown, a social conservative, conservationist and writer who articulated a "counter-narrative" to the story of development and modernization in postwar BC. For social conservatives intent on preserving social relations and tradition, David Harvey argues, the conservative critique of modernity characteristic of some environmentalists (like, we would argue, Haig-Brown), "has its romantic side" but can "also produce a hard-headed politics of place that is highly protective of a given environment."63 Rooted in his rural British conservatism, Haig-- Brown's response to capitalist modernization was also conditioned by the historical and geographical circumstances of the BC resource hinterland, a place he saw as being at an early stage in its social development. But he did not reject modernity outright and did not surrender to Romantic nostalgia. Instead, notes Allan Pritchard, he constantly insisted, with "the scientific authority of the naturalist as well as the understanding of the humanist, that there can be no life or growth without change."64 The configuration of modern ideas in the thought of Haig-Brown tempers the idea of a hegemonic, universal modernity and supports the view of "multiple modernities," experiences of modernization that reflect both historical and geographical contexts and individual formations of modern ideals.

In training his critique of modernization on its callous disregard for nature, Haig-Brown also demonstrated how the politics of nature intersected with the creation of a modernist social order. Increasingly, social and ecological processes are viewed as interactive and dynamic, and the production of certain social formations and ideologies is implicated in human attitudes and actions towards non-human nature. As Raymond Williams writes, "Out of the ways in which we have interacted with the physical world we have made not only physical nature and an altered natural order; we have also made societies."65 In this sense, the domination and control of nature through technology and bureaucracy that characterizes industrial modernity entails a similar re-engineering of social relations. The modernist visionaries of BC promoted a capitalist industrial utopia based upon the rapid extraction of wealth and power from nature. Haig-Brown, by contrast, resisted this vision, advancing an ideal of harmonious relations with nature and a civil society based on humanistic, rather than materialistic, values. Haig-Brown's critique stands as an important site of qualification of the government's triumphalist modernizing narrative and provides a point of departure for exploring the resistance of British Columbians, including conservationists, to the modernist project.

FOOTNOTE

Notes

FOOTNOTE

1. Victoria Daily Times, 22 June 1965: 2.

2. Vancouver Province, 26 June 1965: 5.

3. Margaret A. Ormsby, British Columbia: A History (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958) 485-86.

4. Martin Robin, Pillars of Profit The Company Province (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart) 193.

5. David J. Mitchell, WAC Bennett and the Rise of British Columbia (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1983).

FOOTNOTE

6. British Columbia Centennial Committee, British Columbia Official Centennial Record: 1858-1958: A Century of Progress (Vancouver: Evergreen Press, 1958).

7. Centennial Record 9. Bennett's success in personifying Western Canadian prosperity in the 1960s found expression soon after the 1966 provincial election when Time magazine put his portrait on the cover of its international edition and labelled the region's prosperity "Bennett's Boom." See Mitchell, 371.

FOOTNOTE

8. Jeremy Wilson, "Forest Conservation in British Columbia, 1935-85: Reflections on a Barren Debate," BC Studies 76 (Winter 1987-88): 3-32.

9. Time, 21 February 1967: 6.

FOOTNOTE

10. See Allan Pred, Rethinking European Modernities: A Montage to the Present (London: Routledge, 1995); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990); Donald Worster, "Two Faces West: The Development Myth in Canada and the United States" in Terra Pacifica: People and Place in the Northwestern States and Western Canada, ed. Paul W. Hirt (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1998); Matthew Gandy, "Crumbling Land: the postmodernity debate and the analysis of environmental problems" in Progress in Human Geography 20:1 (1996): 23-40.

11. Stuart Hall et al., eds., Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) 17 and John Jervis, Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998) 6. Marshall Berman distinguishes between modernity (the experience of rapid social, technological and cultural change accompanying the development and spread of industrial capitalism and its attendant social relations), modernization (the social processes that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in a constant state of becoming) and modernism (the cultural visions and values surrounding and reflecting this experience and these processes). Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988 [1982]).

12. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity 9.

FOOTNOTE

13. Ian McKay, "Introduction: All That is Solid Melts into Air," in McKay, ed., The Challenge of Modernity: A Reader of Post-Con federation Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1992) ix-xiv. Modernity in Canada emerged through the nineteenth century but grew noticeably in the mid-century period in the areas of public education and state administration; for example, see Allan Greer and Ian Radforth, eds., Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). For instances of "resistance" and anti-modernism, see Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994) and Donald A. Wright, "WD Lighthall and David Ross McCord: antimodernism and English-Canadian imperialism," Journal of Canadian Studies 32 (Summer 1997): 134-53.

14. Some useful recent explorations of this intersection of modernization and the politics of nature include Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Tina Loo, "Making a Modern Wilderness: Conserving Wildlife in Twentieth Century Canada," Canadian Historical Review 82.1 (March 2001): 92-121; and Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

FOOTNOTE

15. Three recent studies of aspects of modernity in postwar Canada are Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); and Miriam Wright, A Fishery for Modern Times: The State and Industrialization of the Newfoundland Fishery, 1934-1968 (Don Mills: Oxford, 2001), 7-8 and 15-16.

FOOTNOTE

16. Hall, Modernity, 11-12 and Wright, A Fishery for Modern Times, 7-8 and 15-16. On modernization theory as neo-colonial discourse, see the final chapter of Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Man: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

17. S.N. Eisenstadt, "Mulitiple Modernities,"Daedalus 129.1 (Winter 2000):12 and 23-24; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 10, 17; and Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity 30.

FOOTNOTE

18. Allan Pred and Michael John Watts, Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992) xiv.

19. Lynda Jessup, ed., Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) 4.

20. Pred and Watts, Reworking Modernity, 1 and 11,15 and Cole Harris, The Resettlement of British Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographical Change (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997) xi-xiv, 161-93.

FOOTNOTE

21. Anthony Robertson, Above Tide: Reflections on Roderick Haig-Brown (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing Co., 1984) S. For biographical accounts of Haig-Brown's life, see in addition to Anthony, E. Bennett Metcalfe, A Man of Some Importance: The Life of Roderick Langmere Haig-Brown (Seattle and Vancouver: James W. Wood Publishers, 1985) and Valerie Haig-- Brown, Deep Currents: Roderick and Ann Haig-Brown (Victoria: Orca Books, 1997).

22. Patrick A. Dunae, Gentleman Emigrants: From the British Public Schools to the Canadian Frontier (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1981) 1-5, 11.

23. Four of his 28 books were published posthumously.

FOOTNOTE

24. For an insightful commentary on Haig-Brown's writing, see Glen A. Love," Roderick Haig-- Brown: Angling and the Craft of Nature Writing in North America," ISLE 5.1 (Winter 1998): 1-11. Also see W.J. Keith's assessment, "Roderick Haig-Brown," Canadian Literature 71 (Winter 1976): 7-20 and George Woodcock, "Remembering Roderick Haig-Brown" in The World of Canadian Writing (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1980) 174-81.

25. Don Stainsby, "Gentleman Angler," in "BC Magazine" the Province, October 1952, 3. 26. See his essay "If Armageddon's On" in Valerie Haig-Brown, ed., Writings and Reflections (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982) 94-95.

27. Province 21 February 1967, 25. Also see Roderick Haig-Brown, "British Columbia," in Anthony Netboy, ed., The Pacific Northwest (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1963) 129.

28. Metcalfe, A Man of Some Importance 180.

FOOTNOTE

29. The Buttle Lake controversy is discussed in Yasmeen Qureshi, "Environmental Issues in British Columbia: An Historical-Geographical Perspective" (MA Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1991) 95-101. See also the University of British Columbia, Special Collections and University Archives Division, Roderick Haig-Brown Papers [hereafter cited as RHB Papers], especially box 76. Haig-Brown also presented his case about Buttle Lake in a series of front-page stories in the Victoria Daily Colonist from August 14-19, 1952.

30. Valerie Haig-Brown, ed., To Know a River: A Haig-Brown Reader (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1996) 57.

FOOTNOTE

31. Roderick Haig-Brown, "Man Tames the Wilderness," in The Atlantic Monthly, 214:5 (November 1964): 150.

32. Qureshi, "Environmental Issues in British Columbia" 44-47 and 118-122. See also Eric Michael Leonard, "Parks and Resource Policy: The Role of British Columbia's Provincial Parks, 1911-1945" (MA Thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1974).

33. Roderick Haig-Brown to A.T. Norman, letter, 8 May 1956. RHB Papers, box 23, file 16.

34. Roderick Haig-Brown to W.A.C. Bennett, letter, 27 January 1963, RHB Papers, box 25, file 11. See also Haig-Brown to Bennett, letter, 12 September 1952, RHB Papers, box 22, file 19; Haig-Brown to Bennett, letter, 1 March 1954, RHB Papers, box 23, file 4.

35. Haig-Brown, "Some Approaches to Conservation" 175.

FOOTNOTE

36. "Some Approaches" 173.

37. Robertson, Above Tide 80.

38. Haig-Brown's sense of place in Campbell River is best revealed in Roderick L. Haig-Brown, Measure of the Year and A River Never Sleeps (Toronto: Collins, 1974 [1943]).

39. He writes about his role as a magistrate in Campbell River in Measure of the Year, 51-80; quotation from 60. See also 231-38: the values associated with the status of being an amateur were ones that Haig-Brown greatly admired.

FOOTNOTE

40. See Metcalfe, A Man of Some Importance 142. Haig-Brown's assertion that British Columbians should "drink wine with meals," especially "good foreign wines," and his belief that drinking fine wine was "a highly civilized habit," would have marked him off from the great majority of British Columbians in the early 1950s, when he made these remarks. See Stainsby, "Gentleman Angler," Province, 4 October 1952: 3.

41. Roderick Haig-Brown, "Abstract Values," transcript of CBC Radio talk series "Variations on the Canadian Air," Series 1, Part 2 (1951), RHB Papers, box 59, file 1.

42. Roderick Haig-Brown, "A Problem Stated," transcript of CBC Radio talk series "Variations on the Canadian Air," Series 3, Part 1 (1953), RHB Papers, box 59, file 1.

43. Roderick Haig-Brown, "Land and Space Requirements for Recreation and Conservation," notes for speech to Pacific Northwest Tourist Association, 18 April 1967, RHB Papers, box 55, file 6; and Haig-Brown, "Abstract Values."

FOOTNOTE

44. Roderick Haig-Brown, The Living Land: An Account of the Natural Resources of British Columbia (Toronto: MacMillan, 1961) 21.

45. Roderick Haig-Brown, notes for address to Canadian Audubon Society, Toronto, 6 February 1965, S. RHB Papers, box 59, file 5.

46. Roderick Haig-Brown, "Some Thoughts on Conservation," draft article, 19 November 1966, 8. RHB Papers, box 55, file 5. This remarkable article, written for Sports Illustrated but not published, presciently described the impending clash of ecological values and corporate capitalism, and laid out a political program for the environmental movement. It was eventually published in Valerie Haig-Brown, Writings and Reflections.

47. Roderick Haig-Brown, "Man Tames the Wilderness," in The Atlantic Monthly, 214:5 (November 1964): 154.

48. Roderick Haig-Brown, "The Proper Use of Natural Resources," notes for speech, nd [1950s], RHB Papers, box 136, file 1 and Haig-Brown, "Let Them Eat Sawdust" in Measure of the Year, 214.

FOOTNOTE

49. Interestingly, when surveying Canada's west and east coast fishing industries he calls for a "reduction and relocation of manpower" and "larger and better-equipped boats" that will increase efficiency. See Roderick Haig-Brown, "The Land's Wealth," in J.M.S. Careless, ed., The Canadians 1867-1967 (Ottawa: Macmillan, 1967) 434-35.

50. Roderick Haig-Brown, "B.C.: The Profligate Province" in "Century 1867-1967: The Canadian Saga," supplement to the Province, 13 February 1967: 25. A similar attempt to balance a commitment to modem society with ethical conservation is found in the writings of celebrated American conservationist Aldo Leopold. A perceptive analysis of this balance is Curt W. Meine, "The Utility of Preservation and the Preservation of Utility: Leopold's Fine Line," in Max Oelschlaeger, ed., The Wilderness Condition: Essays on Environment and Civilization (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992) 131-72.

51. Roderick Haig-Brown, "First Things."

FOOTNOTE

52. Roderick Haig-Brown, "A Forestry Project," Colonist, 19 June 1938: 8.

53. Roderick Haig-Brown, "The Land's Wealth" 411 and Roderick Haig-Brown, Living Land 257-59. This passage also reads as a thinly veiled criticism of Social Credit mega-project policies.

54. Roderick Haig-Brown, "Hardy's Dorset," in Valerie Haig-Brown, Writings and Reflections 44.

55. Roderick Haig-Brown, "A Problem Stated."

56. "Noted Writer Tells Grads of Their Canadian Role," Province, 16 May 1952: 25.

FOOTNOTE

57. Roderick Haig-Brown, "Pollution for Profit," in Valerie Haig-Brown, Writings and Reflections 185. This article was originally published in 1970.

58. Haig-Brown, Living Land 260.

59. Haig-Brown, "Pollution for Profit" 185.

60. Province, 26 June 1965: 5.

61. Metcalfe, A Man of Some Importance 180-83.

62. Jervis, Exploring the Modem 8-9.

FOOTNOTE

63. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996) 178-79.

64. Allan Pritchard, "West of the Great Divide: Man and Nature in the Literature of British Columbia," Canadian Literature 102 (August 1984): 44.

65. Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature," in Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980). This complex relationship is powerfully explored in William Cronon's history of the rapid capitalist modernization of the hinterland around Chicago, and of the city itself, in Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). In another example, the geographer Eric Swyngedouw, in his case study of modernization in Spain, examines the "socionatural production of Spanish society" through the promotion of progressive, modernist visions - and their material realizations in river dams - of remade natural and social orders. See Erik Swyngedouw, "Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of Spanish Waterscape, 18901930," in Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89:3 (1999): 444.