Description
In the early 1900s, British Columbia embarked on a brief but intense effort, with long consequences, to manufacture a modern countryside. For the first time, the state directly intervened in planning and implementing land settlement. “Creating a Modern Countryside” examines how this process unfolded and assesses its consequences. James Murton argues that the state’s relationship to the environment was determined in the early twentieth century by the idea of centralized, “scientific” management of social problems by experts – known as progressivism or new liberalism. The efforts of new liberal experts to reshape forests and deserts into farmland largely failed, due to their inability to properly comprehend environmental and social complexity. Ultimately, Murton argues, the environment itself played a role in ending liberal land resettlement in the 1920s and 1930s. One ironic outcome of the program, however, was the expanded state apparatus that emerged after World War II with an even greater capacity to manage environmental change. “Creating a Modern Countryside” offers a new way of understanding the human-environmental relationship in the 20th century, and shows how this relationship shaped the province we live in today.
