The political ecology of hegemony in depression-era British Columbia, Canada: Masculinities, work and the production of the forestscape

Geoforum 40 (2009) 303–315

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The political ecology of hegemony in depression-era British Columbia, Canada: Masculinities, work and the production of the forestscape Michael Ekers * School of Geography, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QY, England, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 20 November 2007 Received in revised form 3 September 2008

Keywords: Antonio Gramsci Hegemony Forestry Masculinities Production of nature Relief policies

a b s t r a c t This article attempts to empirically demonstrate how the struggle for bourgeois hegemony in depressionera British Columbia, Canada, was fought for through the production of new natures. Bringing together Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualization of hegemony with marxist understandings of political ecology, I examine how the legitimacy of particular groups’ dominance over subordinate groups and the survival of specific social relations was built and contested through the (re)making of the material-symbolic landscape. However, I also take seriously Stuart Hall’s argument that we must take note of the multi-dimensional character of hegemony by paying attention to the entanglement of class, gender and ecological relations during the 1930s. In order to demonstrate these arguments I examine the economic, social, moral and ecological crisis that rippled across the socionatural fabric of B.C. during the depression years. I detail how the federal and provincial states responded to the interlaced crises of class, gender and ecological relations through launching a series of public works programs and training programs. These projects were intended to modernize the forestry industry and remake unemployed men in body and soul. In doing so, I demonstrate how ideologies regarding nature come to be both enrolled in the struggle for hegemony and materialized in the making of the forestscape. By weaving theoretical insights through the socionatural history of British Columbia, I demonstrate how a gramscian sensibility pushes us to take seriously the relationality of socionatural processes and the embededdness of concepts in material histories. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction The concept of hegemony is widely considered to be Antonio Gramsci’s preeminent contribution to social and political thought. For Gramsci, hegemony refers to the ability of a ruling bloc to exercise leadership and control over subordinated social groups through ‘‘bringing about not only a union of economic and political aims, but also intellectual moral unity, posing all the questions around which struggles rage not on a corporate but a ‘universal plane’” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 182). The concept of hegemony is so appealing because it eschews any traces of reductionism and pushes us to consider the varied social relations that are tangled together in any historical moment. Yet in almost all discussions of Gramsci and hegemony the domains of ‘nature’ and ‘ecology’ are generally not considered to be constitutive relations in political and social projects aimed at garnering consent and legitimacy (for exceptions see Moore, 1996; Cohen, 2004; Loftus and Lumsden, 2008; Wainwright, 2005). It seems necessary to ask, then, whether a group’s struggle for hegemony over subordinate groups leads to the production of new natures and new landscapes. In other words,

* Present address: 7 Shannon Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6J 2E6. E-mail address: [email protected] 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.09.011

are hegemonic projects also political ecological projects? For Antonio Gramsci, the answer would appear to be yes. In one of his brief reflections on nature, Gramsci rhetorically asked whether ‘‘human history should be conceived also as the history of nature” (1971, p. 448). Affirming that this indeed was the case, he suggested that social history comes to be internal to natures. Thus for Gramsci nothing escapes the dialectic of history, which means ‘nature’, normatively understood as something that is fixed and external to society, is a myth. In contrast, a gramscian sensibility, which sees the history of social processes as unfolding in concert with the production of natures, requires us to focus on how ideologies and practices concerning ‘nature’ and ‘ecology’ are constitutive relations in the orchestration of hegemony. In British Columbia (B.C.), Canada, the provincial and federal states’1 attempt to address the stresses heaved up by the prolonged

1 I use the word state in the plural to indicate the different tiers of formal government (municipal, provincial and federal). Following the general current of marxist state theory I see the state as the institutional congealing of a broader spectrum of social relations, which is rife with contradictions. The state is also relatively autonomous from wider social relations such as capital (see Aronowitz and Bratsis 2002; Gramsci, 1971; Jessop, 1990; Poulantzas 1978). However, the relation between capital and the state should not be privileged at the expense of failing to consider how relations such as gender come to bear on the constitution of the state.

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depression of the 1930s did not leave nature untouched. Rather, relief and work programs, — intended to iron out conflicts related to class, gender and a devastated forestry industry — in part, began to reshape elements of the forestscape while ushering in a new regulatory model of forestry focused on sustained-yield management and multiple uses.2 Thus by investigating changes under way in the B.C. forestscape it is possible to understand how various tiers of the state attempted to construct a broad-based socionatural hegemony. It is the expansive socionatural character of hegemony I want to highlight in this paper. In order to do so, I want to take seriously Hall’s (1996b, p. 424) argument that ‘‘we must take note of the multi-dimensional, multi-arena character of hegemony.” As indicated by Hall, it is an appreciation of the relationality of various social — and I would add ecological — processes (see Gramsci, 1985, p. 25–26) that is the most important feature that a gramscian sensibility can bring to political ecology. Thus taking my lead from Gramsci and Hall, and from historical materialist accounts of political ecology (Loftus, 2007; Mitchell, 1996, 2000; Smith, 1984; Swyngedouw, 2006), I investigate a relatively unexamined phase of B.C.’s socionatural history: specifically the period from 1935 to the commencement of World War II.3 The spring and summer of 1935 represented the high-mark of radical politics during the depression years; the highlight being the ‘‘On-to-Ottawa Trek in which of 5000 unemployed men struck the federal relief camps and eventually the men rode the rails east to Ottawa in an effort to present their demands directly to Conservative Prime Minister Robert Bennett. The ‘‘On-to-Ottawa Trek”, as it is popularly known, ended in a bloody riot in the prairie city of Regina and symbolized the failure of Bennett’s administration to pose a solution to the crises of the depression.4 It is the period after the Trek that I examine in this article and specifically the tactics deployed by the provincial and federal states to establish a comprehensive socionatural hegemony, which aimed – yet never fully succeeded in this endeavour – to secure normative class, gender and ecological relations. I detail how these three axes of the states’ hegemonic project — capitalism, gender, and ecology — came to be articulated together in The Young Men’s Forestry Training Plan and Forestry Development Projects. In doing so, I want to add a degree of relationality – and specifically a consideration of gender relations – to previous discussions of Gramsci and political ecology. For Gramsci, political and social theory does not exist in a realm separate from the ebbs and flows of real historical processes. Concepts for Gramsci gain their efficacity when they emerge out of — and reflect back upon — the practices and ideologies of particular historical conjunctures. Thus in this article concepts deployed from Gramsci’s writings, and likewise from the field of political ecology, are introduced in conjunction with the history of depression-era B.C. By presenting the material in this manner, the hope is that by moving between the concrete and theoretical domains, the article contributes to building a gramscian sensibility regarding polit2 Sustainable-yield forestry is based on the premise that the rate of harvest should not exceed the rate of new growth and this in theory leads to the sustainable perpetuation of timber supplies and the forestry industry. For a longer discussion please see Section 3.5 of this paper. 3 There are numerous general and critical introductions to Gramsci’s work that I feel warranted in avoiding a prolonged introduction to his work in this paper. However for general introductions see: Anderson (1976), Femia (1981), Gill (1993), Jessop (1980,1990), Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Kipfer (2002, 2008), Mouffe (1979) and Simon (1991). For a good discussion of Gramsci’s approach to ideology see: Eagleton (1991), Hall (1996a) and Hall et al. (1977). Similarly there are numerous introductions to the literature concerning the production of nature see: Braun (2002, 2006), Braun and Castree (1998), Castree (1995, 2000, 2002) and Castree and Braun (2001. For more feminist inspired examinations of the making of natures see Gururani (2002), Loftus (2007) and Nightingale (2006). 4 For a discussion of the Relief Camp Workers Union strike and the Trek see Liversedge (1973), Howard (1985), Brown (1987) and Rajala (2000, 2003).

ical ecology. With this caveat in mind, the remainder of the article is organized in following manner: in the subsequent section I detail what Gramsci would have described as the ‘organic’ character of the 1930s depression. I concentrate on the interrelated class, political and gender relations that led to the On-to-Ottawa Trek and the supposed pernicious effects of prolonged idleness on the lives of men. I then discuss the socionatural ‘moment’ of the organic crisis by detailing the growing calamities in the B.C. forestscape. In the following section, I turn my attention to the attempts made by the Provincial and Federal governments to redress the organic crisis. Accordingly, I shift our conceptual attention towards Gramsci’s discussion of ideology and hegemony. I examine the ideologies and practices of the Young Men’s Forestry Plan and Forestry Development Projects, which were two programs through which the states attempted to construct their hegemony in B.C. Drawing on marxist accounts of the ‘production of nature’ I detail how the YMFTP and the FDP contributed to the modernization of the forestscape and, in part, changed the trajectory of the forestry industry from a focus on resource extraction to timber production and multi-use forestry. Given that each relief program contributed to the remaking of the B.C. landscape and the construction of hegemony we are able to see how these two processes are internally related and expressed.5 2. The organic crisis of 1935 2.1. The historical context The Great Depression affected all capitalist economies, yet the repercussions of slackened demand, plummeting commodity prices and the collapse of stock markets were spatially uneven. Resulting from the predominance of resource industries in the B.C., the province was hit hard. While national unemployment rates rose to 26% by 1933, figures in B.C. were much higher owing to the collapse of the forestry, fishery and mining industries (Saunders, 1939; Struthers, 1983). Rajala (2006, pp. 90–92) notes that within the forestry industry by ‘‘1931 the value of production fell to less than half of the 1929 total.” High unemployment rates in resource industries dumped working class men back into urban centres. This, coupled with westward migration, led to unemployed men, women and children populating Western cities: in B.C., predominantly in Vancouver and Victoria. While the depression was undeniably an economic phenomenon it was also centrally about broader socio-cultural–political– ecological relations. In trying to combat a wave of economic reductionism amongst marxist-communist circles in the 1920s and the early 1930s, Gramsci attempted to elaborate a nonreductionist style of marxism. One aspect of this project involved understanding crises not merely as an economic phenomenon but rather as a totality of relations of force (1971, pp. 184– 185). Thus Gramsci fore-grounded the concept of an ‘organic crisis’ in order to capture how an economic crisis was accompanied, and effected, by a crisis of a ruling bloc’s authority, and other political, cultural and moral ruptures. As such, an organic crisis reverberates through the economic structures, the state, and the ‘‘so-called private initiatives” (1971, p. 258) such as

5 The original research for this article is based on primary material from various archives including the Special Collections Library of UBC, the City Archives of Vancouver, the B.C. Archives and the National Archives in Ottawa. Covering the period from 1929–1940, I conducted a systematic survey of a range of archival materials including: governmental reports from the Forest Branch, Department of Labour, City Clerks’ Papers, Premiers’ Papers, Correspondence Papers between the Forest Branch and other branches of government, newspapers and material related to union struggles.

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Fig. 1. Representations of the unemployment problem often involved portraying it as an urban problem as this image of the National Junior Chamber of Commerce (1939) indicates. Notice the drawing of a group of men in the bottom left hand corner that constructs men as idlers.

‘‘the Church, the trade unions, the school etc. (1971, fn56) that for Gramsci constitute ‘civil-society’. From the onset, the depression had the contours of an organic crisis as described by Gramsci. By 1931, the presence of unemployed men in the interior and periphery of cities and the emergence of hobo jungles developed into a national scandal (Cassidy, 1939; Cooper, 1932). Following a long history of pathologizing transient men in North America (Cresswell, 2001; Davis, 1984; Higbie, 2003; Katz, 1996; Monkkonen, 1984; McCallum, 2006), a moral panic (Hall, 1978) concerning the degeneracy of young unemployed men gripped the national-popular imagination. It was cities that unemployed people flocked to, which resulted in urban centres being constructed as havens of poverty and idleness (see Fig. 1). The migration of people to cities was decidedly gendered. Conservative elements throughout civil-society and the state, such as The Canadian Council on Child and Family Welfare (CCCFW), saw the flocking of men to cities as representing the de-masculinization of working class men who had lost sight of the value of the primary producer and rural life (CCCFW, 1934; Weir, 1939).6 This sentiment was reiterated in the popular press; one editorial in The Vancouver Sun (1933) complained of the ‘‘grotesque and sickly bodies one sees everywhere in Vancouver” and another suggested that this could be remedied through a ‘‘fair share of freedom and sunshine” (Lee, 1933, p. 6). Migration of men to cities and the representation of unemployed men as loathsome illustrates

6 For discussions of how cities were seen as antithetical to men’s masculinity, and reciprocally, how wilderness was viewed as a space in which men’s gendered identity could be reconstituted see Cronon (1996), Sandilands (2005) and Simon (2003).

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how ideologies concerning masculine identities, nature, and work were entangled in the unfolding of the organic crisis. The early depression years saw a rise in political mobilization by the working class, and in particular, the unemployed. Historian Stuart Jamieson (1968, p. 217) explains that ‘‘the early years of the Great Depression generated in governments and other circles fear bordering on hysteria regarding the dangers of Communist subversion and revolution.” In an effort to neutralize the potential (and imagined) threat of this political up-swelling, in 1932, under the watchful eye of Richard Bennett, the Department of National Defense (DND) established a series of relief camps across rural B.C. and the rest of Canada that aimed to remove unruly men and communist organizers and sympathizers from urban centres (Brown, 1987; Howard, 1985). Relief workers laboured on projects geared towards highway development, forestry infrastructure, and initial attempts at reforestation. The DND scheme paid men a meagre 20 cents a day on top of room and board, which the camp workers and the Relief Camp Workers Union (RCWU) considered insulting at best (Department of Labour, 1935; RCWU, 1935a). The DND administration prevented the relief workers from making appeals to public opinion and stipulated that workers level their grievances on an individual basis (Department of National Defense, 1932). The DND rules and regulations were met with disdain by the relief workers, who described the policies as authoritarian in nature and were challenged through the organizing efforts of the RCWU. The initial impetus of the relief scheme was to both clear young men out from cities and to refashion their masculine identities to be in tune with dominant social norms that emphasized being physically strong, individualistic, productive and heterosexual; however the DND failed on both fronts. The 1935 RCWU strike resulted in thousands of men filling Vancouver’s public and private spaces from April 4th to June 3rd. While the government wanted to construct men with respectable, deferent masculinities, the men of the RCWU clung to revolutionary masculine identities that emphasized strength, solidarity and militancy,7 as indicated in The Worker’s Unity League (1934) (which was the umbrella organization for the RCWU) slogan: ‘‘Fools starve. Men Fight.” The Union added, ‘‘Fighting Breeds the Fighting Spirit, Starving Breads Docility! What to you prefer – to fight and eat or pull out and starve” (capitalization and emphasis in original). Following the prolonged Vancouver strike, the men embarked on the On-to-Ottawa Trek, which was the culmination of the political organization of the RCWU and its deadlock with the Bennett administration. The Trek received a tremendous amount of public support (see RCWU, 1935b) and its tragic finale in Regina came to represent Bennett’s inability to pose a solution to the crisis (Brown, 1987; Howard, 1985; Liversedge,1973). This failure constituted a ‘‘crisis of authority” insofar as ‘‘the ruling class failed in some major political undertaking for which it [had] requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 210). In the aftermath of the Trek a special committee appointed to investigate the failings of Bennett’s relief scheme, concluded that: ‘‘Communist agitators...are expert in the art of inoculating the minds of relief camp workers, particularly the younger element, with the virus of discontent. . .The principal and direct object is to fan to flame the sense of injustice which is felt by these men and especially to incite the young fel-

7 Numerous scholars have argued against any singular essentialist notion of masculinity. In contrast it is argued that multiple masculinities exist and often one type of masculinity comes to be hegemonic through othering masculinities and femininities considered to be inferior. See Bhabha (1995) Collinson (1992), Connell (1995, 2000), Donaldson (1993), Frank (1987), Longhurst (2000), Jackson (1991, 1994), Maynard (1989) and Nye (2005). For a discussion of masculine identities in the radical labour movement see, Higbie (2003), Kessler-Harris (2007) and Shor (1992, 1999).

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Fig. 2. This figure from the National Junior Chamber of Commerce (1939) demonstrates the prolonged period of unemployment experience by high percentage of residents. The decaying house represents the impacts of prolonged unemployment and the decline of domestic standards and ideals.

lows to disobedience. These young men become trouble makers. They shirk work and break regulations indiscriminately” (Rigg et al., 1936). As indicated above, the special committee concluded that Bennett’s relief camps not only failed to quell the ‘Reds’, but in fact ripened the conditions for political organization. The Rigg Report also illustrates how the political crisis was tied to the clash of masculinities, as illustrated in its indictment of the virile and disruptive masculinities constructed in the radical union movement. To briefly summarize, we can see how the economic decline of the early 1930s was tied to the disruption of gender norms of masculinities and to political challenges from the unemployed and working classes. 2.2. Prolonged depression and prolonged idleness By 1935, the depression was into its sixth full year and its prolonged duration was constitutive of its organic character. For Hall, the protracted nature of organic crises means that the different axes of crises change with time (Hall, 1996b). After 6 years of continual upheaval, the new concern that caught the attention of the public and the government was the effects of prolonged idleness on the moral character and physique of unemployed men (see Fig. 2). Given the central importance of ‘‘work, albeit work that is ‘suitable’ for a man, that confers and confirms the central attributes of masculinity” (McDowell, 2003a, p. 833)8 there was a popular fear that prolonged unemployment was leading to an erosion of men’s embodied gendered identities. The Relief Officer of Vancouver, W.R. Bone remarked that ‘‘on the principle that an idle machine deteriorates more quickly than if worked until it falls apart, hundreds of men who have experienced years of idleness have deteriorated mentally and physically far beyond the stage they would have reached had they remained in employment, even if only casually” (as quoted by The News-Herald, 1936).

8 Numerous individuals have detailed the connection between waged work and masculine identities. See Collinson (1992), Collinson and Hearn (1996), Connell (1995, 2000), Fraser and Gordon (1994), Mac an Ghaill (1996), Mann (2005, 2007), and McDowell (1997, 2000, 2003b).

The erosion of waged work for many men compromised their status as the family breadwinner and precipitated a general crisis of masculinity (McDowell, 2000). In the fall of 1935 following the RCWU strike in Vancouver, Pattullo (1935), the Premier of B.C. proclaimed that: ‘‘As a result of the actions of these disturbing groups [the RCWU] your government has laid down a policy that all relief recipients, physically able to perform work but who refuse to do so or to give a reasonable day’s service, will be considered ineligible for further relief. Where it is necessary, dependents of these men will be allowed relief and the disqualified relief applicant will be removed from the position of head of the family so far as the unemployment administration is concerned. He will only be reinstated when he is prepared to give a reasonable amount of labour in return for his and his dependents’ relief.” In Pattullo’s comments we see how unemployment was tied to a deviation away from hegemonic forms of masculinity, even if, as Joy Parr (1990) correctly points out men were not always the breadwinners of families. Responding to this problem 2 years later, Griffith (1937a) the head to the B.C. Unemployment and Relief Branch, wrote to Relief Officer Bone, instructing him ‘‘that with improved conditions I believe the time has now arrived when we should refuse to be the means of making it easy for men to ignore their legal responsibility” – that is, supporting their ‘dependents’. The gendered paradox of dependence was that men on the relief rolls were considered overly dependent and the dependency of these men led to women and children being overly independent (see Fraser and Gordon, 1994). The crisis of masculinity meant that the depression was also squarely a crisis in gender relations. Importantly, this was linked to shifting (un)employment norms, the gender and class identity of the unemployed and their political persuasion. The manner in which economic processes, political struggles and gender relations intersected and affected one other closely resembles Gramsci’s (1971, p. 400) call for ‘‘a new concept of immanence”, which was central to the relational style of marxism he developed. The concept of immanence was meant to capture the way in which different

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political, economic, cultural, ‘moments’ become congealed together in a unitary whole. The recognition of how each individual ‘moment’ was preparatory of the others was central to his conceptualizations and social–political analysis. In the discussion above we see how class, gender and political relations were constitutive of one another, and in the words of Hall (1980) comprised a ‘‘differentiated unity.” Despite Gramsci’s methodological insistence on relationality he did not explicitly examine how particular crises had distinct socionatural make-ups. However foregrounding Gramsci’s concept of immanence facilitates a transition to the axis of ecology as one of the constitutive elements of the organic crisis of 1935.

2.3. The ecological ‘moment’ of the crisis The early history of industrial forestry in Canada was largely guided by a logic of rapidly harvesting the highest grade and most accessible timber possible (Hayter, 2000; Parminter, 2000; Prudham, 2003, 2005, 2007; Rajala, 1998, 2003) with little consideration being given to the long term socio-economic–ecological viability of the places in which logging took place (Rajala, 2006). In 1936, F.D Mulholland, head of the Forest Surveys Division and an influential employee of the B.C. Forest Branch, remarked that ‘‘Countries like B.C. with a large stock of virgin timber, naturally follow at first a policy of exploitation of visible supplies, without regard for the future – in forest parlance a policy of ‘‘devastation”. This permits the development of farms and towns, and provides money for roads and schools and social services. But a policy of devastation by its very nature cannot be permanent; it involves the dissipation of capital resources” (Mulholland, 1936). In the opinion of the Chief Forester E.C. Manning, the policy of devastation gave the industry an ominous historical geography. In his words: ‘‘as the centre of the lumber industry moved from region to region. . .at first there was a feast – then a famine; prosperous communities – then ghost towns unless agricultural and other industries followed in the wake of departing loggers and millmen” (Manning, 1937a). The issue that B.C. faced was that with only 2% of the land tillable, a small population and a manufacturing industry that was dependent on forest products, a timber famine would prove disastrous (Manning, 1937a). From 1885 to 1935 the annual volume of timber cut increased from 30 to 3020 million board feet (Manning, 1937a). This progressive expansion of the forestry industry drastically altered the landscape, and in effect, pushed the front of merchantable timber back from existing rail lines and roads. A Forest Branch report stated that ‘‘the industry is logging timber 10–15 miles further back then in 1924, it is poorer in quality and on rougher ground (British Columbia Forest Branch, 1938). In a letter to the Forestry Committee of the B.C. Legislature, H.R. McMillan (as quoted by Manning, 1937a) owner of the Province’s largest lumber company warned that the company was ‘‘working on all fronts – many operations [would] finish in 5 years; more in 10; and you [could] count on the fingers of one hand the number that [could] operate for 20 years.” The paralleling of McMillan’s sentiments with the provincial government’s concerns illustrates how the concerns of the state emerge in response to the issues facing private capital. Industrial logging had definitive impacts on the emerging tourist industry and not simply the future of the timber industry itself. It was principally wealthy men who travelled to B.C. for its fish and game and the socially produced majestic beauty. However, these spaces, and the revenues generated through their production and consumption, were being transformed through industrial logging practices. Savage (1935), an Independent Member of Provincial Legislative Assembly, stressed that ‘‘among other assets [Vancouver] Island is

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a tourist paradise. But, it is no use thinking that tourists will come to travel our interior roads and see from them our logged-off lands.” Against repeated warnings from the Forest Branch as early as 1910, forests were treated as a source of revenue rather than as capital. The issue that rose to the fore in the 1930s was whether to continue cutting the forests or whether to begin cropping them (Fulton et al., 1910; Gray, 1989; Mulholand, 1931; Whitford et al., 1918). Savage (1935) stressed that ‘‘in a few years, unless there is action now, [the people of B.C.] shall find no forests to employ [the] people,” adding that ‘‘it is one thing to have unemployment and large natural resources. It is another to have unemployment and no natural resources.” The concern amongst the government and industrialists extended to questions of the socio-environmental legitimacy of the forestry industry and the potential political fallout when the public realized that the natural resources of the Province had been squandered. In 1936, Macleans, a prominent national magazine, published a prominent article titled ‘‘We’re Murdering the Forest” (Dickie, 1936). Through displaying images of apocalyptic landscapes (see Fig. 3) the article brought to the public’s attention the environmental impacts of what Mulholland described as ‘‘the policy of devastation”. The heavy influence of the forestry industry on the social-economic development of the province meant that the form of any regional crisis would be affected by the logging industry, and in this respect, the forestry industry was a preparatory moment of the organic crisis. On the one hand, the ‘unemployment problem’ of the 1930s was prefigured by the seasonal employment in the forestry sector. The logging industry annually ground to a halt in the winter months, and as such, unemployed men returned to cities to spend their stake (Cassidy, 1939; Struthers, 1984). The collapse of the forestry industry thus only exaggerated an established historical trend, and as we saw in the previous section, this disrupted normative gender and class relations. On the other hand, liquidating the Province’s timber resources in the name of economic development meant that the ‘crisis of authority’ was not limited to the ‘social sphere’, but rather, was a socionatural question. The expansive socionatural character of the 1930s crisis meant that an adequate strategy for addressing the calamities of the depression needed to deal with the gender, class and political crises, and additionally, the future viability of forestry industry. In the context of the 1930s, Gramsci (1971, p. 60) argued that hegemony is in its most stable form when ‘‘it really causes the whole society to move forward, not merely satisfying its own existential requirements, but continuously augmenting its cadres for the conquest of ever new spheres of economic and productive activity.” In the post1935 era, governments might have shared Gramsci’s sentiments – but not his politics – in that the subsequent governments led by MacKenzie King at the federal level and Dufferin Pattullo at the provincial level pursed forestry work as a means of alleviating the unemployment problem. What changed from the previous Conservative attempts at relief provision was that they attempted to organize the projects more firmly on a work and wages basis. The impetus for this decision by the provincial and federal states was to bring the interests of a larger faction of the social body to be in line within the dictates of capital and the states. 3. (Re)constructing hegemony 3.1. Work and wages? Throughout the entirety of the depression, attempts to control virile bodies of men involved a high degree of both direct and subtle forms of coercion. The Canadian Welfare Council (1938) warned ‘‘that authority [was] tightening its rein and threaten[ed] to ride hard,” adding that ‘‘ruthlessness alone [would] not revive broken men”. As Gramsci detailed, achieving hegemony, which refers to

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Fig. 3. This is image appearing on the first page of an article titled ‘‘We’re Murdering the Forests” publish in Mcleans, a prominent Canadian magazine. The caption reads, ‘‘When the loggers are done with their work, the shorn earth reaches away even more tragically dreadful than a battlefield.” Images like thus obviously challenged the environmental record of logging industry and the forest service. Interestingly the article did not mention the thousands of loggers who became unemployed during the depression (Dickie, 1936).

the ability of a ruling bloc to maintain its superior position over subordinate social groups, is both a consensual and coercive process. In depression-era B.C. if a more consensual method was needed in B.C. to contain and rehabilitate young men, the dominant opinion held that the best means of achieving this was through a work and wages program. In 1935, in front of the McDonald Commission, a federal government initiative charged with examining the administration of the relief camps, a young man speaking on behalf of the RCWU proclaimed: ‘‘We don’t care whether they give us good hotcakes or not – what we want to know is when do we get work and wages” (The Daily Province, 1935). Similarly, in a speech to the provincial government, Savage (1935) stressed that a work and wages program that he describe as a ‘‘Hope Plan”, ‘‘calls a young man to a real man’s job. He goes to a continuation school in training for Life. He has a saving bank balance at the end of five years. His removal from the cities and towns means more opportunity, less competition for young women. His success means a real opportunity for him and for them to get married.” According to Savage, the success of women was premised and made possible by the initial success of men. In his comments we also see the (re)substantiation of the ideology and practice that men should be the breadwinners of a family. A work and wages policy was, thus, not merely concerned with addressing the unemployment problem, but was also centrally a gender project.

broke away from this trend. The Director of Unemployment and Relief Branch, Griffith (1936) suggested that the YMFTP would only accommodate men that were ‘‘British Subjects, residents in B.C. for at least 10 years, in good physical conditions for [forestry] training and of social character that they can be relied on in carrying out of instructions and will take on interests in work.” The tacit message in Griffith’s directive was that labour organizers and communist sympathizers needed to be kept out of the camps. The contrast between the YMFTP’s and FDP’s admission policies is evident in Chief Forester, Manning’s comment that ‘‘the strict qualifications which govern admission to the Youth Forestry Training camps for young people [were] necessarily waived. . .the need of the applicant and his willingness to submit to discipline being the chief guides to admission” (Manning as quoted by The News-Herald, 1937). In separating the different classes of unemployed men from one another, the stage was set for each program to be administered through a distinct set of regulatory policies geared to the character of relief workers in question. Gramsci (1971, p. 170) drew on Machiavelli’s centaur — half-animal and half-human — in order to illustrate how the a particular ruling bloc attempts to either struggle for, or maintain, power through relations ‘‘of force and of consent, authority and hegemony.” The YMFTP represented the consensual side of the governments’ attempt to construct their hegemony while the FDP represented the coercive side. 3.3. Young men’s Forestry Training Plan

3.2. The unruly and the respectable Historian Katz (1996, p. 218) notes that the Great Depression was unique in that it amassed the ‘tramps’ and ‘chronic dependents together’ with the ‘‘mass of respectable, hard-working family [sic] men unable to find work”. The Young Men’s Forestry Training Plan, which was a provincial initiative, and the federally administered, Forestry Development Projects, aimed to tease apart the radical element of the unemployed from the deferential contingent. Up until 1936 relief schemes had principally aimed to clear unemployed ‘reds’ out of urban centres and the rehabilitation of men was publicly touted yet remained a secondary concern. The YMFTP

At the provincial level, Savage (1935) proposed that relief camps be abolished and replaced by a work and wages program that he coined a ‘‘Hope Plan”. The Plan, according to Savage, ‘‘applied to forests mean[t] a continuous policy, increasing tourist assets in growing forests where there [was] waste and reclaiming young lives to useful service.” Savage’s proposal led to the establishment of the YMFTP, which at its heart was a political ecological project. From its inception the YMFTP was meant to be a flag-ship program of Pattullo’s provincial government that would have the effect of distancing his administration from the public’s disenchantment with Bennett’s conservatism. Chief Forester Manning (1935) explained

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that the YMFTP that was ‘‘a new departure developed to take care of a special type of young man, eliminating so far as possible the undesirable features of the usual relief scheme.” In 1935, the first YMFTP camps were opened in June and ran until the end of September, enlisting 500 young men for a four-month period. In contrast to the DND camps which paid men 20 cents a day the YMFTP paid men $1.75 a day minus 75 cents for room and board. The Plan was an ambitious effort to respond to the numerous features of the organic crisis of the 1930s. A booklet that aimed to publicize the Plan succinctly captures the effort to bundle urban, ecological, moral, gender and class aspects of the crisis into a unified package. In the words of the Forest Branch: ‘‘A large percentage of the youth of the Province must eventually find employment in its basic industries....Too many have been looking for work in the cities and neglecting the opportunities elsewhere. This forestry programme offers them useful work under conditions that must benefit them physically and mentally, leaving them more self-reliant and with a saner outlook towards the future. Here they can gain experience in various kinds of construction work, learn to clear land, build trails and handle an axe.” In this description of the Plan, the government argued that the relief program produced normative masculinities in its participants and emphasized their physical and mental rehabilitation and their new found independence. In the 1935 Report of the Forest Branch, the Department of Lands (1936) stated that the YMFTP involved ‘‘all outdoor work, well calculated to improve young men mentally and physically and to develop initiative and self-reliance.” It was not simply being in nature that engendered this construction of identity, but rather, it was getting men out of cities and having them work in nature that was deemed expedient. It was working in jobs that were traditionally — and continue to be masculinized — that conferred the central features of masculinity onto the subjects who laboured. By not providing an explanation as to why ‘‘outdoor work. . .was well calculated to improve young men” the administrators of the Plan produced, and mobilized, an essentialist ideology of nature (see Castree, 1995; Smith 1984). Under this ideology, ‘nature’ was assumed to have essential (rather than socially constructed) characteristics that would aid the men in finding their ‘true’ masculine selves. These ideologies were not necessarily false representations of reality or false veils of consciousness in the classical marxist sense. Rather, these ideologies were material forces in and of themselves. This performative dimension to ideologies in which different configurations of ideas contribute to the making of material histories was central to Gramsci’s marxist sensibility (see Eagleton, 1991; Hall 1996a,b, 1977; Mouffe, 1979). In the context of this argument, ideologies concerning nature and gender contributed to the unfolding of relief policies, and hence, the making of history.

3.4. Forestry Development Projects Mackenzie King’s Liberal government swept to power in October of 1935. Shortly thereafter he was unwillingly forced to reopen the relief camps in November of 1935 due to the large number of unemployed men in western cities. Shortly thereafter, an Interim Report on Relief Camps in Canada concluded that it was in the best interest of the state to close the camps as soon as possible, adding that ‘‘relief camp conditions cannot be regarded other than as exercising a baneful mental and moral influence” (Rigg et al., 1936). As a result, the camps were closed in the spring of 1936. In response, one editorial suggested that without providing a substitute for the camps, ‘‘in its human aspects this policy is brutal, and in its disregard for the financial position of the provinces and the municipal-

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ities it touches a new high spot in federal callousness” (The Daily Province, 1936). In the fall of 1937 the potential for social and political disruption in Western cities forced King’s government, in connection with the B.C. provincial government, to provide relief for unemployed men in the form of Forestry Development Projects. On several fronts the FDP mimicked the YMFTP. This is indicated in a letter written by Manning (1937b) stating that ‘‘the department is more convinced than ever of the economical and social advantages to be secured in tying up our two greatest problems – forestry and young men’s unemployment.” Instructions to project foremen stressed that ‘‘men should be expected to do a full day’s work. As one of the objects of the programme is to train and fit the men for future employment, every effort should be made to develop industry and conscientious effort in each man. . .Maintenance of discipline and esprit de corps is an important duty of the foreman both on the job and in camp” (McCannel, 1936). In an effort to exert a modicum of control over the behaviour of the camp men and in order to lengthen the period over which men received state support, the Projects operated on a pay deferral scheme. Under the scheme, a portion of weekly wages owed to a man were withheld pending completion of employment. Upon completion, individuals were paid four dollars a week. In addition, the men rotated in and out of camps. Once a man had accumulated eight weeks of deferred pay they were laid-off to make room for another applicant. The system was designed to reduce the men’s dependency on the government in order to foster an attitude of initiative and independence whereby men had to become acquainted with the habit of looking for work (Griffith, 1937b). From the start, the Forestry Development Projects had a different camp and work environment than the YMFTP. If an esprit de corps could properly be said to have existed among the men in the YMFTP camps, the FDP camps were better described as being run on a coercive basis. The government was well aware of the political persuasion of the relief workers and as such, took immediate measures to quell their activism. The means of achieving this was through trying to individuate (Driver, 1993; Foucault, 1979, 2003) the men rather than dealing with them as a class. In a letter to the Superintendent of the FDP, Griffith (1937c) explained that the Project workers ‘‘will not be permitted to form grievance committees as complaints can only be dealt with individually. It should be impressed on the men that if an individual makes any reasonable complaint to the foremen he will not be penalized for doing so.” In order to isolate the project workers, McCannel (1937) stressed: ‘‘I wish you [the foremen] would make it a point to see that no outsiders are allowed in camps. If you have any difficulty in this respect I feel confident you know the proper action to take.” The proper action to which he referred to was eviction ensured through police support. The YMFTP sought to establish conscious support for the Plan and the government amongst the men through a ‘‘new conformism from below” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 242). In contrast, the FDP was more concerned with the coercive control of what the government deemed to a dangerous body of men. In their administration of the camps, the Forest Branch and the Department of Labour walked a fine line regarding the status of the FDP as a public works program versus a relief project. In the aftermath of Bennett’s ill-fated relief camps, the King administration wanted to frame the FDP as a work and wages scheme in order to illustrate their capacity to pose a solution to the unemployment problem. However, when the Relief Project Workers’ Union initiated a series of strike actions, the Provincial Minister of Labour stressed that the government ‘‘will not deal with the union in any way. We do not recognize it. There is no employer–employee relationship involved here, as in a private industry, and no room for a union” (as quoted by Hutchinson, 1937). On a more individual basis, if a camp member refused to work or malingered during that

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day, this was cause for dismissal. In such cases the Unemployment and Relief Branch was unequivocal in its directive: ‘‘Any men who are distinctly causing you trouble in camp after fair warning, you may discharge them and be sure that this Department is backing you in this respect” (McCannel, 1937). As Driver’s (1993, p. 58) study of Britain’s poor laws makes clear, the principal ambition of workhouse strategies combined ‘‘the semiotics of deterrence and the discipline of institutional regimes.” The FDP camps contained these two elements – the low wages and disciplinary administration were intended to deter men from seeking relief. Other policies attempted to individuate the men as wage-labours fit for future employment. Insofar as these measures were geared to remaking men, producing disciplined workers and ensuring the dominant position of the capital and the state, these measures were representative of the coercive struggle for hegemony. 3.5. Producing nature and the normal forest Smith (1984, p. 32) suggests that ‘‘when the appearance of nature is placed in a historical context – the development of the material landscape presents itself as a process of the production of nature.” Emphasizing production aims to highlight the role of social labour, and its organization, in the making of material-symbolic natures (Castree, 2002; Harvey, 1996; Smith, 1984, 1996, 1998; Swyngedouw, 2006). This conceptual position facilitates a politicisation of landscapes by highlighting the relations through which they are produced (Mitchell, 1996, 2003; Smith, 1984, 1998). Both the relief programs had the effect of organizing a labour force through which the material landscape could be produced. In this respect, the consensual refashioning and coercive control of unemployed were linked together with the making of nature. As previously emphasized, addressing the crisis in the forestry industry was an integral part of the construction of hegemony. Resolving this axis of the conflict required changing the direction of the forestry industry away from the liquidation of timber resources – even if this was not abated – towards sustained-yield management and multi-use forestry. Scott Prudham has argued that in the post-war era, the forestry industry became increasingly concerned with sustained-yield management and community stability, and taken together, these two facets of forest management amounted to securing a Fordist social order. These shifts lead to the production of what has been coined the ‘normal forest’, which is a forested landscape with varying and predictable age structures geared towards permanent crop rotation. The normal forest, as Demeritt (2001) and Braun (2002), suggest is also an object of government knowledge and regulation and a (post)colonial construction that ‘buries’ other types of relations to the forest under the hegemony of scientific management. Prudham’s argument is more materialist in orientation arguing that the normalization of the forestscape, and the post-war industrial take-off in the sector, were premised on a class compromise between capital and labour. These changes in the forestry industry documented by Prudham represented a drastic change from the historic booms and busts in the industry and the attendant precarity of employment. However, it is in the work performed under the YMFTP and the FDP that the antecedents of these transformations can be found. Through the YMFTP and the FDP a range of forestry projects were pursued with the in tension of altering the industry and securing the future basis for the accumulation of capital. Between the two relief programs three principal objectives were pursued. Under the YMFTP work was aimed, first, at improving communication and transportation networks, and second, towards reforestation and intensive wood production. Under the FDP, a third objective was pursued, which was the initiation of a broad multiuse forestry policy targeted at the burgeoning tourist industry.

The majority of the YMFTP work occurred at three main camps located at the Cowichan Lake, Green Timbers and Aleza Lake Forestry Experimentation stations. Additionally, smaller trail crews were scattered across the Province away from urban centres (Orchard, 1935). At the Forest Experimentation Stations, men cleared land, planted trees, and provided the labour for regeneration surveys and seedling production. Much of the work was geared towards determining the rate of growth and harvest of forests and creating an adequate reforestation strategy such that the forest lands could be managed on a sustained-yield basis. The remainder of the men worked on trail and road crews throughout the Province. The men built 382 miles of pack-horse trails, fixed ageing bridges, maintained and installed telephone lines and built patrol huts. The rationale behind this type of work was two fold: first, forest fires were considered to be a significant menace to the longevity of timber supplies. However, one of the chief problems in fighting the fires was the lack of infrastructure, which impaired the ability of the Forest Branch to access the spaces in which the fires occurred (Manning, 1936). Second, as the front of desirable timber was pushed further back from existing rail lines and roads, the competitiveness of the lumber industry depended on securing access to future timber stands and reducing the cost of transporting the products to the mills. District Forester, St. Claire (1935), in a letter to Manning proposing a trail in his district argued that it would ‘‘form the beginning of a network of trails on Handwicke Island, and the trail in question [opened] the largest body of mature timber in that area.” In short, the labour-power of the men was used in the initial steps of modernizing the forestscape, which would prove crucial to the post-war boom. As Gramsci explained, ‘‘the conquest of ever new spheres of economic and productive activity” is central to the organization of hegemony. In the 1935 Report of the Forest Branch the Department of Lands (1936, p. 8) indicated that it was keen to build-up political support for its activities and suggested that ‘‘though the care of forests is placed in the hands of the Forest Branch by the people of British Columbia, the nature of the task and the limitation of funds at its disposal is such that real progress is not possible without the active co-operation of the people and their informed sympathetic interest.” The YMFTP was a show-piece in this respect, aimed at garnering public consent. In 1935 the B.C. Forest Branch (1935), in an effort to bolster the image of the YMFTP, reminded the public that ‘‘timber is a crop, renewable and requiring protection. . .Our forest lands must be kept productive, especially in the Lower Coast region, where our great industry is centralized.” If the ideology of cropping forests – which was a key component to the production of the normal forest – was going to contribute to the legitimacy of relief projects and forestry work, this ideology needed to be materially illustrated. As such, one crew of men was set to work on the University of British Columbia (UBC) demonstration forest located on the campus grounds. The acting head of the Department of Forestry at UBC, Knapp (1935), explained that ‘‘the object in the management of the 105-acre tract is to provide a productive forest area where scientific forestry principles can be worked out and demonstrated not only to students but to the general public as well.” It was the men of the YMFTP who cleared out the dead timber, planted trees, and thinned out existing stands. In other words, the men brought a degree of regularity to the growth and age structure of the forest and harvesting in order to demonstrate the possibility of scientifically managing a forest crop. The FDP followed a similar path aiming to bolster the legitimacy of the forestry industry. The men from the FDP tackled a different set of tasks and were directed to work on park development projects that aimed to improve the prospects of the rapidly increasing tourist industry. The 1936–37 report of the Forestry Development Projects concluded:

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‘‘Outdoor recreation in the forests of British Columbia is in greater demand today than ever. How better can we work towards making areas more attractive than by making them accessible, developing them and replanting areas which otherwise would remain barren for at least several decades? Facilities for transportation are as necessary for timber management and harvesting as for the convenience of the public seeking recreation and for other forest uses” (Department of Lands, 1938b). The emphasis on road construction and park development represented the development of a broader multi-purpose forestry policy, which expanded from the historical imperative of ‘getting the wood’ out. The Department of Lands (1938b) was keen to highlight projects that ‘‘served the dual purposes of opening up areas for forest-protection and assisting local Fish and Games Clubs, Boards of Trade, and Irrigation District Boards in making certain areas more readily accessible for them.” The assistant Chief Forester, C.D. Orchard, explained that ‘‘E.C. Manning was imbued with the importance of building public relations and public approval for the Forest Administration. He believed that above all things we should curry public favour – if we stood high enough in public esteem we could then branch out into all sorts of refined forest practice – and that the avenue to the public heart was parks, recreation and boy’s work.” Manning utilized the FDP as a means of building up public support while also transforming the B.C. landscape from a space of production into a space of bourgeois consumption. Park projects were pursued Capilano, Little Qualicum Falls, Englishman River, Skutz Falls, Harrison Lake, John Dean and Thetis Lake. All of these parks were located in the greater Vancouver, Nanaimo and Victoria areas, and all continue to be popular destinations. It was the labour of unruly men who established the B.C. landscape as a space to be consumed by the urban bourgeoisie – ‘‘the fisherman, the hunter, the man who neither fishers nor hunts but delights merely to camp and regain his health in God’s great outdoors” (Manning, 1937a). The two relief programs began to shift the direction of the forestry industry by undertaking work concerned with securing future timber supplies, taking initial steps towards establishing the ‘normal forest’, and trying to foster the public perception of the industry. Taken together, the relief programs secured a labour force through which new natures were produced.

3.6. Representations of legitimacy The struggle for hegemony waged by the provincial and federal states also necessitated that they demonstrate their ability to ameliorate the unemployment problem. To do so they had to demonstrate the rehabilitative effects of the programs on the men. The Superintendent of the Plan, K.C. McCannel, was quick to point out that the young men enlisted in the program were ‘splendid material’ and The News-Herald (1935) stressed that the Forest Branch would ‘‘develop any special attainments in [the] students. Some will become expert foresters, cruisers or rangers, and some will train for the logging or sawmilling industries, or the fisheries and mining departments. All will be taught the value of healthy outdoor life.” Despite the administrators’ careful screening of applicants, which ensured that only the most respectable of the unemployed entered the Plan, the popular press coverage nonetheless stressed the rehabilitative value of the Plan. One article in The Daily Province reported: ‘‘Many of them were lean of body and dull of eye, tired of living with no prospects for the future when they arrived. But

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Green Timber camp had no boys like that at break-up time. They were all alert, healthy, some of them adding 25 pounds of muscle and flesh since living in the open, and every one of them learned many things in their apprenticeship. . .they were give a chance to show what kind of stuff they were made of, and they proved good material and ready workers” (Sutherland, 1936). On top of demonstrating how the YMFTP fitted men for future employment a booklet published by the Forest Branch contained countless photographs of men at work in the woods (see Fig. 4). Shirtless men were figured in the photographs displaying their muscular bodies and logging prowess, all of which counter-posed the representation of unemployed men in cities as weak idlers. The FDP was framed publicly in a similar manner to the YMFTP. Manning, in a speech to the Forestry Committee of the Legislative Assembly, claimed ‘‘the young men [had] received great benefit and the public purse [had] received 100 cents on the dollar in return” (Manning, 1939). With his classic flare, Savage (1937) rhetorically asked, ‘‘what has, clean, healthy work in the country done for the men” and then pronounced that: ‘‘It has tremendously lessened the red difficulty. . .Every man who came into camp was treated as a man. Foremen disregarded union buttons. A man was expected to ‘play the game’. To the eternal credit of the men in charge, backed by ‘‘the iron hand in the velvet glove,” and to the magic of the scheme, 99% percent did so. ‘‘Hobos” were reconstituted as citizens...If a man would not play the game in camp, out he went — and he could then get no relief in Vancouver.” While Manning wanted to stress the success of the FDP so as to secure a future labour supply for the Forest Branch, Savage wanted to illustrate the government’s ability to pose a broad-based solution to the depression that cut across social, political, economic and ecological relations. In the public representations of the YMFTP and FDP, the ability of each relief plan to reinstate normative masculinities is also highlighted insofar as men illustrated ‘‘the stuff they were made of” and were ‘‘reconstituted as citizens”. At the end of 1937 the Department of Lands (1938a) concluded that the YMFTP had ‘‘proved itself [as] a valuable means of developing character, initiative, and self-reliance in young men enrolled and of accomplishing essential forest development and protection.” The government added that the work accomplished would have ‘‘otherwise been impossible to undertake.” In amazingly clear terms, the Forest Branch recognized how the production of nature was tied to the fitting of individual men into a normative collective life (Gramsci, 1971, p. 242). For its part, the YMFTP was received by the public with much fanfare, however the FDP was far from successful. 3.7. Failed hegemony? In April of 1938 the King administration closed the FDP camps. In doing so the King administration failed in its most basic goal of keeping unemployed men out of the cities. With the closing of the camps one month ahead of their scheduled break-up, and with their deferred pay running out, the Relief Project Workers Union initiated a series of prolonged sit-ins in an effort to have the camps reopened on a more expansive and permanent basis. The ‘‘sit-down strike”, as it was popularly known, involved the occupation of the Vancouver post-office, art gallery and the Hotel Georgia and lasted two months before the men were forcefully removed from the buildings. Much like the On-to-Ottawa Trek represented Bennett’s failure to adequately deal with the depression, the sit-down strikes were perceived similarly (see The News-Herald, 1938a; The Vancouver Sun, 1938). A delegate from the Mothers’ Council that con-

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Fig. 4. Men at work on a Young Men’s Forestry Training Plan project felling a dead tree and displaying their chiseled bodies. Images like this reinforced hegemonic ideals of masculinity and contributed to the construction of wilderness as a place in which men’s gendered identity could be reconstructed (British Columbia Forest Branch, 1935).

fronted the Mayor of Vancouver astutely summed up the plight of the sit-downers: ‘‘Why should these men come out of the Post Office and Art Gallery? What institutions are there for them to go to? Is there anything illegal about being in a public place?” (Gutteridge, as quoted by The News-Herald, 1938b). In the fall of 1938 in a letter to Mackenzie King, Premier Pattullo (1938) reflected that in the previous summer ‘‘the trouble makers received a considerable body of public support because it was felt that the Governments had not adopted a sufficiently broad programme and were too late in starting. With every country in the world now embarking upon huge public expenditures, it seems to me that Canada could well afford to amplify its programme to meet this unemployment situation, particularly as our internal economy and defensive requirements so dictate.” Pattullo privately acknowledged that the various levels of the government did not go

far enough in combating the social upheavals of the depression, and in this respect, their hegemony was still a work in progress. Ultimately WWII proved to be the tragic solution to the Depression, and the Canadian government without hesitation paid for the cost of transporting unemployed men to recruitment offices. In respect to forestry, in 1939 a prominent conservationist and associate of the Forest Branch wrote: ‘‘Is it too much to ask of those who have charge of the country during the next few years that they will not be stampeded by expediency or profit but will guard and administer the natural resources as we have learned they must be guarded and administered – with a proper regard to future crops?” (Manning, 1939) This sounding of caution fell on deaf ears only a year later. With Canada participating in the war, the Assistant Chief Forester, Orchard (1940), reported that ‘‘a year ago we were embarked on what appeared to be a comfortable wait-and-

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see game of war; today we are engaged in a life-and-death struggle in which all the resources of the Empire must be marshalled, if necessary down to the last log and foot of lumber.” In effect, the onset of war eliminated any forestry gains that might have been made through the labour of unemployed men during the Depression while at the same time eliminating the unemployment problem.

4. Conclusions Gramsci’s insistence on the relationality of different social processes – and in this article I have added ecological relations – and his methodological resolve that theory emerges out of concrete histories, are precisely the two reasons why his work can be productively turned to in political ecological studies. In this article, I have taken these two aspects of Gramsci’s work as my starting point for understanding how the struggle for hegemony waged by the states was a political ecological project. As suggested at the outset, Gramsci sees human history as coming to be internal to nature, which is simply another way of suggesting that nature is socially produced. What allows us to develop a gramscian sensibility towards political ecology is Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of immanence’, which points to how different relations are prepatory of one another. This insistence on relationality means that it is conceptually consistent with Gramsci’s work to turn to ecology and nature as important axes in a particular ruling or subordinate blocs’ struggle for legitimacy. In fact, states and capitalists alike increasingly have to illustrate their capacity to address environmental issues in order to universalize their particular interests. This article demonstrates that this relatively recent concern with environmental hegemony is pre-figured historically. The second dimension that a gramscian sensibility brings to political ecology is an emphasis on the embedded nature of concepts within the intricacies of material histories. In light of this, I have tried to narrate the political ecology of hegemonic projects through the history of unemployment, relief work and forestry projects in depression era B.C. As such, I discussed how the organic crisis of the 1930s was not merely a social crisis but rather had a distinct socionatural make-up. The profound importance of the forestry industry on the B.C. economy drastically altered the forested landscape and thus potentially threatened the economic fortunes of the province. As in many resource based economies, falling commodity prices pushed provincial unemployment rates to unprecedented levels. The men who flocked to the western cities were seen as turning their backs on rural life. In the process, they were thought to have lost sight of their authentic masculine selves and their work habits. These varying relations taken together are indicative of the organic character of the depression-era socionatural crises. The organic character of the 1930 crisis is precisely why Raymond Williams is correct to argue that hegemony must be ‘‘continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified” (1977, p. 112). This was the case in B.C. The ecological, gender, and class aspects of the organic crisis meant that any hegemonic project needed to wrestle with all of these issues. The Young Men’s Forestry Plan and the Forestry Development Projects represented a relational effort to tackle these varied, but related, issues. This was at once an ideological and materialist project. Normative ideologies concerning respectable political beliefs, gender identities and work-place behaviour, and legitimate forestry practices informed the rolling-out of relief policies. In turn, these regulative ideologies were (re)substantiated, and at times, contested through the actual practices of the relief camps. The two relief programs also represented a means through which a labour force was organized to modernize the forestscape and in this respect the struggle for hegemony occurred in concert with the production of nature.

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While parts of the landscape were remade through forestry infrastructure projects, the relief programs also represented the first tentative steps towards a new regulatory model of industrial forestry focused on sustained-yield and multi-use forestry. Lastly, the linkages between waged work and normative masculinities were yet again secured. At the outset, it was asked whether a group’s struggles for hegemony over subordinate groups leads to the production of new natures and new landscapes. In B.C. this was decidedly the case, which means that contained in the history of the landscape is the struggle waged for hegemony throughout the depression years. It is thus possible to query into the histories of other landscapes in order reveal how various groups attempt to construct their legitimacy while natures are remade. To conclude, projects that aim to build alternative hegemonies – socialist, feminist, anti-racist – need to consider how these emancipatory projects can and must occur in concert with the construction of survivable natures. Acknowledgements This article has greatly benefited from the generous comments and criticism of Zuzana Eperjesi, Andrew Gibson, Stefan Kipfer, Alex Loftus, Geoff Mann, Linda McDowell, Scott Prudham, Erik Swyngedouw and two anonymous reviewers. Of course, I am solely responsible for the content and presentation of the final article. I would also like to acknowledge the support of a Social Science and Humanities and Research Council Doctoral Fellowship in allowing me to undertake the research included in this article.

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