Creating Order: The Liberals, the Landowners, and the Draining of Sumas Lake, British Columbia
Item
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Title
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Creating Order: The Liberals, the Landowners, and the Draining of Sumas Lake, British Columbia
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Description
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Essay about the draining of Sumas Lake, British Columbia, Canada by the provincial government in the 1920s and the landowner and government ideologies of progress and improvement surrounding the decision. The author argues as to the source behind the financial and environmental problems of the project.
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Abstract
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This essay considers the draining of Sumas Lake, British Columbia, Canada, by the provincial government in the 1920s. I argue that both the B.C. state and local landowners believed in the virtue of the ordered landscape of agrarian ideology. Both supported a quest to order nature that clashed with a disordered and interconnected natural environment, leading to massive cost overruns on the building of drainage works and the creation of farmlands. The state battled local landowners over who would pay for the project. Landowners argued that the drainage had not made their farms more profitable. Yet both groups continued to agree that the drainage represented progress and improvement. The landowners' continued support of the project despite its cost and their meager gains suggests that the problems of the project lay less in the general logic of the state than in the discourse of liberal agrarianism that both supported. The financial and environmental problems of the project owed more to the limits of this shared vision than to inherent limitations in the state's relationship with nature or the local.
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volume
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13
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issue
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1
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pages
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92-125
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Date
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2008
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issn
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1084-5453
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Publisher
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Environmental History
