Ice Blink: The State and Northern Environmental History

Over the last several weeks I've been introducing (see here, here, and here) the chapters in Ice Blink: Navigating Northern Environmental History, soon to be published by the University of Calgary Press. Two weeks ago, I began a series of posts (here are the first and second ones) that present some key themes that our authors considered as they discussed the environmental history of northern Canada. Today, we're examining a third theme: the role of the state in northern environmental history.

Our presentation below is organized into two parts. First, we present an excerpt from the Introduction, which outlines one perspective on the state and northern environmental history.  Then, we present an excerpt from the Conclusion, where we outline how selected chapters in Ice Blink have contributed new insights to this perspective.

The State
Throughout the twentieth century, the evolving state in northern Canada�its capabilities, roles, and objectives�has had consequences for people�s relations with the environment. This became evident even in one of the state�s primary roles: asserting territorial sovereignty. It has often had environmental dimensions: hunting regulations in the 1910s, military activities during and after the Second World War, mapping and aerial surveys, scientific activities (with scientists asserting a Canadian presence in the north), and the Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act of 1970. State efforts to reshape the northern economy have also had environmental consequences. In the 1920s, an emerging federal wildlife bureaucracy attempted to conserve and domesticate musk oxen and reindeer. In subsequent decades, support for resource development (through surveys, transportation facilities, and financial incentives) redefined the northern landscape as part of the national economy. Economic development became part of colonization, as educational, health, and social services transformed communities, ways of life, and relations with the landscape and wildlife.

These interventions, often justified in scientific terms, marginalized local customs and attitudes, advancing a view of species, especially caribou, as production units enabling efficient use of the northern landscape. In the 1970s, as environmental concerns became prominent, the state responded by extending the mechanisms of administrative rationalism into the north through regulations and environmental impact assessment.

The activities of the state in the north paralleled those elsewhere in Canada (albeit with, in the territories, the federal government acting in the place of a provincial government): partnerships with economic interests, formation of educational and social services, management of wildlife and other resources. All were aspects of the wider expansion of the state since the 1940s. In the north, as elsewhere, the state has also imposed boundaries on nature, and on particular ways of knowing, managing, and regulating.

But the northern state has also exhibited distinctive features�the product of local history and geography: poor agricultural prospects, concern with territorial authority, dispersed settlements requiring transportation networks, and the presence of other agencies, such as the Hudson�s Bay Company, the military, and the resource industries. Today, the state�s relations with Indigenous communities through land claims, co-management arrangements, and novel approaches to managing national parks have exemplified the status of the north as a terrain of experimentation in governance.

And from Ice Blink's conclusion...

Our authors considered several aspects of the relations between the state and the northern environment, through its own activities, as well as its influence on how others�scientists, Indigenous peoples, industries�have understood, used, or transformed the environment. The state�s role in encouraging resource development has been central to these relations, linking the northern environment to global markets. In this volume, this has been evident in resource surveys and support for aviation and the expansion of mining and hydroelectric development. Economic activities by the state have had, as we have seen, far-reaching impacts on the environment and on Indigenous ways of life. The state has also promoted or imposed a variety of other ways of relating to the environment. During the interwar era, the state attempted domestication of wildlife through the Canadian Reindeer Project; as Andrew Stuhl describes, this �experiment� in expanding the role of the state in the northern environment aimed to replace Inuit reliance on the fur trade and caribou with what was hoped to be a more stable and predictable pastoral economy.

But as northern priorities shifted in the postwar era, so did state activities�to encompass, for example, the �geographical engineering� of the DEW Line�one of many ways in which the state, as Matt Farish and Whitney Lackenbauer explain, fused science and security. These interventions also included relocation of settlements and expanded social programs (including sustainable development initiatives, which, as Tina Loo explains, demonstrated the limits of state action), and land and wildlife management regimes based on property rights and territorial jurisdiction. Another role of the state became evident in the Northern Contaminants Program: contaminants were redefined in terms of federal jurisdiction, reframing an environmental and health issue to be consistent with administrative boundaries. These and other initiatives exhibited the extension of the state�s authority and capacity to impose order, making the north administratively legible and amenable to regulation.

Several chapters also illustrated the significance of food in state roles and policies in northern environmental history. Changing views of subsistence have been part of this picture, with an early preference that Indigenous people continue to rely on hunting and fishing being eventually displaced by the assumption that an agriculture-based diet was superior. The result was �food colonialism��evident in the reindeer project, relocation to places lacking adequate local food supplies, and a variety of other educational, nutritional, and social interventions. Food thus became the basis for northern administration�a means of managing the relations between people and nature, bringing the region into the Canadian mainstream, and making Aboriginal peoples full citizens of Canada. Food itself was redefined, becoming a matter of nutrition, not culture. Ultimately, however, food also became a basis for resistance to the state, as became evident in reactions to wildlife management, nutritional policies, and contaminants research.