Landscapes of Cyclonic Development at Uranium City, Saskatchewan

1 ‘Born in an Atomic Test Tube’: Landscapes of cyclonic development at Uranium City, Saskatchewan ARN KEELING Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador A1B 3X9 ([email protected]) Abstract Drawing together insights from neo-Innisian geography and environmental history, this paper explores the landscape and environmental changes engendered by ‘cyclonic’ patterns of development associated with uranium production at Uranium City, Saskatchewan. Strong postwar demand for uranium led to the establishment and rapid expansion of Uranium City on the north shore of Lake Athabasca as a ‘yellowcake town,’ dedicated to producing uranium oxide concentrate to supply federal government contracts with the United States military. In spite of optimistic assessments for the region’s industrial future, the new settlement remained inherently unstable, tied to shifting institutional arrangements and external markets, and haunted by the spectre of resource depletion. The planning and development of the townsite at Uranium City reflected both neo-colonial desires to open the north to Euro-Canadian settlement and efforts by the state to buffer the stormy effects of resource dependency. Ultimately, however, quixotic government efforts to implant an outpost of industrial modernity in the Athabasca Region failed to forestall the inevitable winds of change, which left in their wake destructive legacies of social dislocation and environmental degradation, already evident with the near- collapse of the uranium export market by the early 1960s. Keywords: Uranium mining, environment, single-industry towns, Aboriginal Peoples, historical geography, staples economies 2 A cyclone hit the northern shore of Lake Athabasca in 1944—neither a climatological event nor force of nature, it was instead a whirlwind of industrial development lasting, in its first phase, some 15 years or so. Centred on the exploitation of extensive low-grade uranium deposits, this paroxysm of development radically remade the region’s physical and human landscapes, overturning traditional land uses and social arrangements, and erecting entirely new forms in their place. The boom began with a rush for uranium in northern Saskatchewan that attracted thousands of prospectors, mining capital, and state interests to this remote region. This led to the establishment and rapid expansion of Uranium City as a ‘yellowcake town’ dedicated to producing uranium oxide concentrate to supply government contracts with the United States military. This, in turn, stirred hopes that Uranium City would become a springboard to the industrialization of Saskatchewan’s northern hinterland. Yet the new landscapes created by the cyclonic forces of staple development were inherently unstable, buffeted by changes in technology, tied to shifting institutional arrangements and external markets, and—ultimately—haunted by the spectre of resource depletion. By the early 1960s, the region was already in decline, due to the near collapse of the international uranium market. After two more decades of boom and bust cycles, the town of Uranium City was virtually abandoned. While the proximate causes of this decline were ore depletion, low commodity prices and changing labour arrangements in the northern mining sector, this paper contends that a deeper account of the rise and fall of Uranium City lies in its connection to the historical geography of resource-extractive economies in modern Canada and the quixotic attempts to control the human and environmental effects of what Harold Innis aptly described as ‘cyclonic’ patterns of development. In examining the early history of Uranium City, this paper 3 ties together several strands of inquiry associated with Innisian political economy: natural resource extractive economies and the geographical relations they spawn; colonialism and national development; and the role of the state in shaping these patterns and processes. The case of Uranium City illustrates how the cyclonic nature of a particular staples development, and efforts to control or at least mitigate these stormy effects, were registered in the physical landscapes and environmental legacies of this resource extractive region. Cyclonic landscapes In his writing on global mineral rushes, the economic geographer and historian Harold Innis deployed the metaphor of a cyclone to describe the intensity of economic and cultural changes resulting from the incursion of metropolitan industrial capital and technologies into remote, resource-rich regions (Innis 1943; Drache 1995, xvii; Watson 2006, 160). Innis described the economies of staples-dependent frontier countries as ‘storm centres to the modern international economy,’ subject to violent disturbances in market and institutional conditions (Innis 1946, 33). As further developed by Trevor Barnes (2005, 112), ‘cyclonics’ indicates the ‘whirlwind ferocity of capitalist accumulation at resource sites, and the equally ferocious decline that follows.’ Such instability renders settlement and economy on the periphery of the capitalist system inherently precarious, subject to the disruptive shocks of geographically distant technological changes, market cycles, and government policies. Barnes extends these insights further, arguing that different staples exhibit particular ‘space-time biases’ rooted in the geographical and historical processes through which they are discovered, produced, and incorporated into cycles of capitalist accumulation (Barnes 2005; Barnes et. al. 2001). As Jody Berland (1999) suggests, the production of space under the cyclonic conditions of staples development results not simply in 4 disorder, but rather the creation of a new spatial order, however temporarily, at these marginal sites. The cyclone metaphor not only attempts to capture these economic fluctuations and their spatial consequences, but (from a mining perspective) also helps avoid the naturalization of economic booms and busts inherent in the notion of a ‘resource cycle’ (Clapp 1998) or Aschmann’s (1970) classic theory of a mine’s ‘natural history.’ Instead, it points to the importance of considering how ‘politics and institutions thoroughly constitute as well as condition the resource cycle’ (Reed and Prudham 2001, 13; Norcliffe 1999). In particular, cyclonics emphasizes the effects of the dynamic initial phase of commodity development, with its rapid influx of labour, technology, and communications (including transportation) into resource regions, and the equally disturbing periods of transformation and/or decline that accompany subsequent shifts in commodity production, demands or prices, institutional arrangements (such as government regulations) or, less frequently, outright resource exhaustion. As Innis (1946) argued, the disturbances characteristic of frontier regions have created challenges for governments, which struggled both to foster resource-based economies and to stabilize them in the face of their economic volatility. It is the contention of this paper that Innis’ metaphor—less a theory of development than what Barnes (1996, Chapter 8) refers to as a ‘local model’ of historical-geographical patterns—may be extended beyond political economy to help explain the dramatic transformations of landscape, environment, and social relations on Canada’s northern mining frontier. At the same time, it is important to recognize the limits of this metaphor and to emphasize—as rural sociologists increasingly suggest we must—the ‘historical specificity’ in ‘the ways in which the relationships between resource extraction and regional development have 5 changed over time’ (Frickel and Freudenburg 1996, 448; Freudenburg 1992; Wilson 2004). Indeed, Barnes et. al. argue that ‘Innis's model of the cyclone is devised to highlight the specificity of a particular kind of commodity production in a particular place’ (2001, 2131); their study of Port Alberni, B.C., demonstrates how the specific institutional and market conditions of the forest industry shaped the historical trajectory and economic fate of the town. Thus, the instability characteristic of settlements at the resource periphery reflects cyclonic processes related to individual staples: ‘Single industry towns ... are borderline communities connected to the spatial and temporal relations produced by the staples on which they depend’ (Barnes 2005, 110). Similarly, as students of the Innis-inspired ‘new political economy’ school have argued, mineral industries in Canada and elsewhere are marked by geographical patterns of uneven development under which resource peripheries remain in a state of social and economic underdevelopment while benefits flow to metropolitan regions (Drache 1995; Clement 1997; Watkins et. al. 2006). These patterns produce uncertainty and unpredictability in the ‘extractive spaces’ (Bridge 2001; Brechin 1999) of mining regions, which often remain dependent upon the exploitation of a single resource for export markets: ‘In addition, cyclical patterns (boom and bust cycles) in the economy… affect the stability of levels of production and levels of employment, not only in single enterprise towns but in the whole of the resource extractive sector’ (Bradbury 1979, 149; Bradbury 1984a). Notwithstanding recent calls to recognize the diversity amongst resource-dependent communities in Canada (Randall and Ironside 1996), it is clear that mining communities, in particular, struggle with the destabilizing effects of commodity market fluctuations and resource exhaustion. Yet political

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