Piper_full_text:NHS Template.qxd 3/30/2009 7:00 AM Page i The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada Piper_full_text:NHS Template.qxd 3/30/2009 7:00 AM Page ii The Nature | History | Society series is devoted to the publication of high-quality scholarship in environmental history and allied fields. Its broad compass is signalled by its title: nature because it takes the natural world seriously; history because it aims to foster work that has temporal depth; and society because its essential concern is with the interface between nature and society, broadly conceived. The series is avowedly interdisciplinary and is open to the work of anthropologists, ecologists, historians, geographers, literary scholars, political scientists, sociologists, and others whose interests resonate with its mandate. It o ffers a timely outlet for lively, innovative, and well-written work on the interaction of people and nature through time in North America. General Editor: Graeme Wynn, University of British Columbia Claire Elizabeth Campbell, Shaped by the West Wind: Nature and History in Georgian Bay Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century Jamie Benidickson, The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage William J. Turkel, The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau John Sandlos, Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories James Murton, Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia Piper_full_text:NHS Template.qxd 3/30/2009 7:00 AM Page iii The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada UBC Press • Vancouver • Toronto Piper_full_text:NHS Template.qxd 3/30/2009 7:00 AM Page iv © UBC Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), www.accesscopyright.ca. Printed in Canada with vegetable-based inks on ancient-forest-free, FSC-certi fied paper ( % post-consumer recycled) that is processed chlorine- and acid-free. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Piper, Liza, - The industrial transformation of subarctic Canada / Liza Piper. (Nature, history, society ; - ) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN -- - - . Industrialization – Canada, Northern – History. Canada, Northern – Environmental conditions. Environmental degradation – Canada, Northern – History. Canada, Northern – Economic conditions – th century. Natural resources – Canada, Northern. Industrial policy – Canada – History. Winnipeg, Lake (Man.). Athabasca, Lake (Sask. and Alta.). Great Slave Lake (N.W.T.). . Great Bear Lake (N.W.T.). I. Title. II. Series. HC .N P .′ C - - UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing pro gram of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Colum bia Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federa tion for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and with the help of the K.D. Srivastava Fund. UBC Press The University of British Columbia West Mall Vancouver, BC V T Z - - / Fax: - - www.ubcpress.ca Piper_full_text:NHS Template.qxd 3/30/2009 7:00 AM Page v To Georgia and David Piper_full_text:NHS Template.qxd 3/30/2009 7:00 AM Page vi Piper_full_text:NHS Template.qxd 3/30/2009 7:00 AM Page vii Contents List of Illustrations / ix Foreword: The Nature of Industrialization / xi Graeme Wynn Acknowledgments / xv List of Abbreviations / xvii Introduction: The Industrial Colonization of the Northwest / P On the Edge: The s / Railway’s End: Adaptation / Industrial Appetites / P An Ordered World / Sub / Terrain / Harnessing the Wet West / “Two Weights and Two Measures”: Conservation and Con flict in the Fisheries / Piper_full_text:NHS Template.qxd 3/30/2009 7:00 AM Page viii P Industrial Circuitry / The Hazards of Disassembly / Conclusion: The Frontiers of High-Energy Civilization / Appendices / Glossary / Notes / Bibliography / Index / Piper_full_text:NHS Template.qxd 3/30/2009 7:00 AM Page ix Illustrations F . In filling of the Athabasca Delta between and , as visible from air photos / , . The Northwest as “duck factory,” / . Map of the large lake region / . The Ducks Unlimited vision of the Northwest, / . Joe Bird, c. - / . Tonnes of freight moved by water in the Mackenzie basin, - / . SS Northland Trader and the barge Bell Rock caught in the ice, / . Map of transportation across the Northwest, s / . A common juxtaposition: An Avro Anson VI aircraft with a dog team in the foreground on the ice at Yellowknife in the late s / . Fishing station at Little George Island on Lake Winnipeg, / . A sign pointing out the final destination of uranium produced on Great Bear Lake / . A miner hauling an ore car metres below the surface, in the Eldorado mine on Great Bear Lake, c. / . Lydia Nakamura at Gros Cap, Northwest Territories, / . The principal food relationships among fish species on Great Slave Lake / ix Piper_full_text:NHS Template.qxd 3/30/2009 7:00 AM Page x x Illustrations . Commercial goldeye and sturgeon production on Lake Winnipeg, - / . Commercial white fish production on Lake Winnipeg, - / . Commercial catches by lake and in total, - / . Map of quota and restricted areas on Great Slave Lake, c. / . a, b Maps of transportation across the Northwest, and / . US engineer troops aboard a Mackenzie barge, c. / . A Bristol freighter discharging its cargo, a new fire truck for Yellowknife, s / . Map of the movement of fossil fuels in the Mackenzie basin, - / . Cat trains on Great Slave Lake, / . A man poses in front of a shipment of jute bags at Port Radium in / . A discarded truck from the Cayzor mine, Fort Chipewyan, / B. Total fish production on Lake Winnipeg, - / B. Fish species harvested on Lake Winnipeg displayed by proportion of catch, - / B. Commercial catches on Lake Winnipeg, - / B. Commercial catches on Lake Athabasca, - / B. Commercial catches on Great Slave Lake, - / T . Dimensions of the large lakes / . Water levels, - / . Chemical shipments to the Port Radium mine and mill on Great Bear Lake, / . Chemical shipments to the gold mines and mills on Great Slave Lake, / . Chemical shipments to the Beaverlodge mine and mill on Lake Athabasca, / A. Shipping seasons on the Mackenzie basin large lakes, - / B. Fish species on the large lakes / B. Fish catches on Lake Winnipeg, - / B. Fish catches on Lake Athabasca, - / B. Fish catches on Great Slave Lake, - / Piper_full_text:NHS Template.qxd 3/30/2009 7:00 AM Page xi The Nature of Industrialization by Graeme Wynn “Had we but world enough, and time” to pursue the central concern of this thought-provoking book through all its branches, the task would be fascinat - ing. 1 Books and poems, myths and legends, songs and stories, paintings, pho - tographs, essays, and articles galore have re flected upon the ways in which industrialization changed human relations with nature to produce new socio- ecological circumstances. No list could capture all of this variety, but a hypo - thetical version might begin with the photographs of Edward Burtynsky or a YouTube video, and move back through the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and the works of environmentalists, nature writers, and eco-critics to consider the American Transcendentalists (Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman) and the (sometimes so-called) eco-romantics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain (including, for example, J.M.W. Turner, William Wordsworth, and William Blake). Alongside them, George Perkins Marsh, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and many others would surely warrant attention, until perhaps the search for the beginnings of this complex, braided intellectual thread led back to the Titan Prometheus of Greek mythology, who stole fire from the gods, delivered that powerful technology to mortals, and provided a base both for the conviction that progress depends upon human domination of nature and for vigorous objections to that view. Recent years have seen a torrent of thoughtful re flection and analysis on this theme. The flood has run in many channels, and Liza Piper’s discussion of industrialization in Subarctic Canada inevitably speaks more cogently to some of these than others, but it warrants an important place in the increasingly 1 “World enough, and time” is from Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress” ( - , published ). xi Piper_full_text:NHS Template.qxd 3/30/2009 7:00 AM Page xii xii Foreword crucial debate about human–environment interactions. Put simply, this is because Piper knows what novelist Elizabeth Hay demonstrates in her Late Nights on Air (set in Yellowknife and the barrens beyond): that the fundamen - tal story of this territory is an ecological one, “about the fragile interdepend - ence of people, animals and their environment.” 2 This means that Piper understands the Canadian Northwest as a place where humans and nature have a long and continuing history of co-adaptation, with each changing in response to the actions