“The War in the Woods”: Post-Fordist Restructuring, Globalization, and the Contested Remapping of British Columbia's Forest Economy

Abstract

Resource peripheries that are geographically remote from “core economies” are also peripheral to contemporary theorizing in economic geography, and requires higher profile within economic geography's research agenda. The restructuring qua remapping of resource peripheries is collectively shaped by institutional forces unleashed by post-Fordism and globalization that are fundamentally different from the restructuring of cores. As industrial regions, resource peripheries must negotiate the imperatives of flexibility and neoliberalism from vulnerable, dependent positions on geographic margins. For many resource peripheries, neoliberalism has been perversely associated with trade protectionism. As resource regions, the restructuring of resource peripheries has been further complicated by resource-cycle dynamics and radically new social attitudes toward the exploitation of resources that have helped spawn the politics of environmentalism and aboriginalism. Trade, environmental, and aboriginal politics have clashed around the world to contest vested industrial interests and remap resource peripheries in terms of their value systems. British Columbia's forest economy illustrates this contested remapping. For two decades, the powerful forces of neoliberalism, environmentalism, and aboriginalism have institutionalized a “war in the woods” of British Columbia that is sustained by shared criticism of provincial policy and disagreement over how remapping should proceed. The authority of the provincial government, which controls British Columbia's forests, has been undermined, but it remains vital to socially acceptable remapping. Meanwhile, the enduring war in the woods testifies that geography matters on the periphery.

Key Words:

• British Columbia contested space
• forest economy
• globalization
• remapping
• resource peripheries

Notes

Source: Hayter (2000a, 73)

Source: Hayter (2000a, 90).

1. I hasten to add that Markusen's impressive studies of American regional development explicitly incorporate resource sectors and peripheries (e.g., Markusen 1987). I would also emphasize that I am not disputing the importance of cores, their highly varied geography, or the contributions of industrial geography toward understanding their anatomy.

2. Economic historians of the “Far West” in the United States have made related arguments that industrial history is preoccupied with the core regions of the east (Igler 2000), thus following the “Innisian” tradition of Canadian economic history (Barnes 1999).

3. Within the context of economic geography's contemporary debate over the meanings of its “institutional turn,” this article's institutionalism accords with the interpretations provided by Martin (2000) and Barnes (1999).

4. I use “Fordism” and “post-Fordism” as labels for long-term Kondratiev cycles, waves, or phases that are interpreted by Freeman (1987) as technoeconomic paradigms and by regulation theorists such as Lipietz (1992) as regimes of accumulation. Other labels are also used. Freeman normally refers to post-Fordism as “the information and communication technoeconomic paradigm,” but since post-Fordism is the more widely used term within economic geography, I adopt it here. Debating the pros and cons of alternative theories of long-run industrialization and their labels is not a concern of this article.

5. Greenpeace symbolizes the emergence of ENGOs as global actors. Founded in 1971 in a church basement in Vancouver by a few “peace” activists and some “greens,”“Green-Peace” held its first protest against U.S. nuclear testing in the Aleutian Islands. In 1979, several of the founders created Greenpeace International, and its head office was relocated from Vancouver to Amsterdam. By 1986, Greenpeace was the world's largest ENGO, with an annual budget of over U.S.$100 million. In 1995, Greenpeace had offices in 32 countries, a budget of $150 million, and 2.9 million members in 158 countries. Its head offices and decision-making hierarchy match those of the corporate world and are ideal for mounting publicity campaigns, interacting with the leaders of MNCs, banks, international agencies, and foundations, and organizing protest campaigns. Greenpeace has ships, such as the Rainbow Warrior, and its campaigns are fought widely on the high seas as well as over land. Constantly seeking publicity through connections with the “rich and famous” (such as actor Pierce Brosnan, rock group U2, and Robert Kennedy, Jr.), Greenpeace is the subject of a Hollywood movie, that ultimate of global accolades.

6. An exploding analytical literature on BC's forest economy testifies to the complexity and controversial nature of change in the region. For examples, see Hammond (1991), Kimmins (1992), Drushka (1993), M'Gonigle and Parfitt (1994), Barnes and Hayter (1997), Wilson (1998), Marchak, Aycock, and Herbert (1999), Hayter (2000b), and Cashore et al. (2001).

7. BC's forest policy of 1947 also has to be seen in context of a substantial debate on forest and community “stability and sustainability” in the United States in the 1930s (Lee, Field, and Burch 1990).

8. At present, there are two main forest industry unions, based in the sawmill and pulp and paper sectors, called the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) and the Communication, Paper, and Energy Workers Union. Toward the end of Fordism, they broke away from U.S. control to become Canadian-controlled institutions.

9. In BC, the most influential larger ENGOs are the various affiliates of Greenpeace (Canada, Germany, U.K., U.S., and International), the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network (RAN), and the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pacific Resource Defense Council, both based in the United States. The best known BC-based groups are the Sierra Legal Defence Fund, the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, and Friends of Clayoquot Sound (Stansbury 2000,; 34). See footnote 5.

10. “Discontinuous clear-cutting” refers to the practice of clear-cutting adjacent areas in successive years, creating huge logged-over areas. The Forest Code prevents clear-cuts bigger than 40 hectares on the coast (60 hectares in the interior), and an area adjacent to a clear-cut cannot be cut until “greening” has occurred in the clear-cut, usually after seven to eight years.

11. ENGOs have mounted massive publicity campaigns to gain public support and money for the Great Bear Rainforest. They have frequently allied themselves to support from the “rich and famous.” Most recently, U2 agreed to join the Greenpeace campaign (Joyce 2001). ENGO media campaigns in BC have also made skillful use of “local ecoheros”: they have featured a grandmother, a teenager, and a former ecology professor who is a TV personality and the director of an environmental foundation.

12. In the Nisga'a Treaty of 1999, the Nisga'a, with an on-reserve population of 5,000 in a remote area of northwestern BC, were granted self-government and exclusive voting rights in a communal territory of 1,930 square kilometers (and 15 square kilometers of fee-simple lands), various monetary and nonmonetary benefits, and control over resources. The Nisga'a will be able to use (or not use) the forest resources as they choose, and stumpage will go to them, not BC. If they do log, provincial regulations apply. One controversial feature of the treaty is that non-Nisga'a—a definition that includes Nisga'a women who have married non-Nisga'a men—are not allowed to vote in elections. In time, the Nisga'a will be required to forfeit their tax-free status and aboriginal rights outside the treaty area.

13. The need to resolve the remapping of BC's forest economy is hard to underestimate. Many rural communities, especially those linked with the forest economy, have begun to depopulate, fragmentation between metropolitan and rural BC is widening, and in 2001 BC became a “have-not” province for the first time (Ward 2002). The war in the woods underlies these trends.