Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada’s West Coast

An exciting new approach to environmental politics Save the rainforest—not a question but a statement of fact. What good environmentalist would ever dispute it? Bruce Braun does; he goes so far as to ask, what is the rainforest? Who defines it? He examines the various practices—social, discursive, and political—through which Canada’s West Coast forests have been given meaning and made the site of intense political and ideological struggle. Departing from other work on environmental politics that assumes the “forest” is a constant, The Intemperate Rainforest traces the way West Coast landscapes have been viewed and controlled by explorers, foresters, environmentalists, artists, scientists, adventure travelers, and Native peoples. In 1993, dramatic political protests over logging in Clayoquot Sound in British Columbia propelled Canada’s temperate rainforests onto the global stage. Celebrities and rock bands joined protests that, with over eight hundred arrests, were some of the largest acts of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Moving between these events and the histories and practices that produced these forest spaces, Braun reveals a complex postcolonial landscape in which a conventional politics of wilderness preservation is found lacking. Bringing environmental studies into conversation with poststructuralist theory and postcolonial studies leads to a dynamic understanding of the forest as a historically contingent, politically charged object. Braun demonstrates how constructions of the forest are inextricably entangled with culture, race, nation, class, and colonialism in ways that trouble conventional approaches to nature and politics. Often portrayed as pristine landscape, he shows the forest to be an intensely cultural space inseparable from the primitivist fantasies, scientific discourses, and indigenous knowledges that constitute it. Displacing the language of wilderness, Braun proposes understanding the forest as a hybrid object that cannot be assigned to either “nature” or “culture” and cannot be understood apart from the relations of power that infuse it.