The Cultural Politics of Ecological Integrity: nature and Nation in Canada's National Parks, 1885-2000

Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona

doi:10.7202/040828ar

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Articulating with this role in nation making, parks in the interwar period were also promoted on the grounds they enabled national health. As J.B. Harkin, Canada’s first Commissioner of National Parks, explained in 1915, “The most important service which the parks render is in the matter of helping to make Canadian people physically fit, mentally efficient, and morally elevated” (quoted in Mortimer-Sandilands, 2009: 169), a benefit that would also facilitate the nation’s economic security “by adding to the efficiency and vitality of the nation” (Rettie, 2017: 8).…”

Section: Canadian Parks As Vehicles Of Biocultural Nation Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The emergence of Canada’s national parks can be traced back to the Progressive Era of the late 1800s, a period characterized by growing concern for the rational use and preservation of nature, often anti-modern and anti-urban sentiment, and appreciation of the healing properties of nature (Lieffers, 2013; Sandlos, 2013; Tyrrell, 2012). The earliest parks, like the iconic Banff, emerged from this context and were promoted by the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Canadian government to encourage tourism and generate profit where visitors could escape the urban-industrial cities of the East and find leisure and adventure in the mountains of the West (Campbell, 2011; Mortimer-Sandilands, 2009; Sandlos, 2011). Less well recognized, the early parks can also be traced back to a growing appreciation for the health benefits of nature.…”

Section: Canadian Parks As Vehicles Of Biocultural Nation Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Biocultural nation making: Biopolitics, cultural-territorial belonging, and national protected areas

Stinson

Lunstrum

2021

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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While the academic literature on biopolitics has investigated how the life of the population and its biological capacities have increasingly become the target of political concern and intervention largely at the scale of the nation, the literature on nations and nationalism has explored nations as cultural-territorial units including questions of their emergence, ongoing production, and impacts. What these share is a similar if not nearly identical object of analysis: the nation or national population. These, however, are realms of scholarly debate that have largely, and quite surprisingly, bypassed one another. This paper advances the concept of biocultural nation making to bridge these debates and illustrate that nation making is at once biological and cultural-territorial and that these are deeply intertwined. We ground this in the experience of Canadian national parks, highlighting how “natural” environments like national parks are key sites of biocultural, and increasingly neoliberal, national production. Here, state conservation organizations promote park visitation as a means of, first, enabling an active, healthy, and economically productive national population. Second, parks are promoted on the grounds that they enable the experience of distinctively Canadian landscapes and places of national inclusion especially as park visitorship is expanded to include nontraditional visitors including immigrants, urban communities, and the youth. Parks, in short, have become vehicles of biocultural, and increasingly neoliberal, nation making. While there are indeed affirmative aspects to this, we also highlight hidden exclusions tied to the embrace of neoliberal logic, the limits of multiculturalism, and the ongoing erasure of Indigenous communities.

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Section: Canadian Parks As Vehicles Of Biocultural Nation Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Canadian Parks As Vehicles Of Biocultural Nation Makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biocultural nation making: Biopolitics, cultural-territorial belonging, and national protected areas

Stinson

Lunstrum

2021

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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“…Kulchyski (2005) draws upon Poulantzas’ insights about how the state constructs modern forms of subjectivity to explain the Canadian state’s colonization of Indigenous peoples. Mortimer-Sandilands (2009) uses Poulantzas’ writings about nationalism to examine the role of ideas about nature and wilderness in Canadian identity.…”

Section: Nicos Poulantzas’ Theory Of the Capitalist Statementioning

confidence: 99%

“Regulatory capture” and “extractive hegemony”: the relevance of Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state to contemporary environmental politics in Canada

Bernauer

2020

Human Geography

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This paper considers the relevance of Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state to debates about hydrocarbon extraction and environmental assessment in Canada. I begin with a brief summary of Poulanztas’ work, followed by an overview of the politics of hydrocarbon extraction in Canada. Next, I examine recent public policy debates about the assessment and regulation of energy extraction in Canada. These debates, which focus on the concept of “regulatory capture,” fall victim to many of the problems Poulantzas identifies with instrumentalist approaches to the state. Critical accounts of regulatory capture have helped expose the fact that oil companies exercise an incredible degree of control over the Canadian state. However, it offers limited guidance for long-term strategies to confront extractive capital. In the section on “Environmental assessment and extractive hegemony,” I draw on Poulantzas to examine recent academic debates about the role of environmental assessment in the reproduction of extractive capitalism in Canada. Scholars have shown a more nuanced understanding of the power dynamics at play in the assessment and regulation of energy projects in Canada. Nevertheless, engagement with Poulantzas’ work can help deepen and expand these critiques, especially his emphasis on the role of state-organized material concessions in producing consent to capitalism.

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“…As I’ve already described, the PCA has a dual mandate to protect the environment and to facilitate human use. The articulation of the environment in park policy has most recently been facilitated through the advent of “ecological integrity,” as an organizing principle (see Mortimer-Sandilands, 2009 for a more detailed history and interrogation of the concept as used by the PCA). The Canada National Parks Act (2000) defines ecological integrity as: “(…) a condition that is determined to be characteristic of its natural region and likely to persist, including abiotic components and the composition and abundance of native species and biological communities, rates of change and supporting processes” (Section 2 (1) of the Canada National Park Act).…”

Section: Prescribed Burning: Encounters With Landscapes That Burnmentioning

confidence: 99%

Encountering the burn: Prescribed burns as contact zones

Sutherland

2019

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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Encounters with fire and landscapes that burn have the potential to be both disastrous and life-giving events. In Canadian national parks, where a century of fire suppression has ruled human encounters with fire adapted landscapes, fire managers and ecologists are eagerly returning fire to diverse ecosystems in the hopes of building healthier ecosystems and reducing the risk of larger wildfire events. Ongoing changes to park policy have made new relationships with fire possible on these federal lands. Prescribed burns, whereby fire is applied to the landscape by park managers, is one such emerging encounter made possible by these policy changes. By reconceptualizing the burn as a process constituted by encounters, in what Mary Louise Pratt would call a contact zone, we gain insight into how thinking and working with fire requires an attention to how humans and more-than-humans encounter one another and the institutional settings which narrate and often constrain these encounters. In the case of Parks Canada’s fire program, this tool of active management, and an alternative to full-suppression, illustrates how thinking and working with fire consists of a set of encounters which take place at both an institutional and embodied scale.

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The Cultural Politics of Ecological Integrity: nature and Nation in Canada's National Parks, 1885-2000

Cited by 9 publications

References 6 publications

Biocultural nation making: Biopolitics, cultural-territorial belonging, and national protected areas

Biocultural nation making: Biopolitics, cultural-territorial belonging, and national protected areas

“Regulatory capture” and “extractive hegemony”: the relevance of Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state to contemporary environmental politics in Canada

Encountering the burn: Prescribed burns as contact zones

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