This paper examines the hitherto neglected conservation movement in British Columbia after
the Second World War. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the British Columbia Natural Resources
Conference (BCNRC) and Roderick Haig-Brown were the province's most vocal and authoritative
proponents of natural resource conservation. The BCNRC (1948-1970) held roughly annual
conferences of leading bureaucrats, industry administrators and academics, who promoted scientific
research and proposed resource management policies. Haig-Brown (d. 1976) was a well-known
fishing writer and vocal conservationist who attended most of the conferences up to 1961 and wrote
a popular book on natural resources for the BCNRC. Their activities generated public awareness
of and concern for conservation during a period of rapidly expanding resource extraction. Although
the common goal of prudent and rational resource use united Haig-Brown and the conference's
managerial elite in the immediate postwar period, their conservation philosophies increasingly
diverged after 1961. The ideals they articulated were rooted in the changing discourse about nature,
which was deeply influenced in this period by the emerging science of ecology. However, ecological
concepts led Haig-Brown and the BCNRC to different conclusions about how to deal with increasing
resource use and environmental degradation. While the conference used ecology and economics to
justify a regime of scientific resource management, Haig-Brown developed a critique of resource
development based on humans' ethical responsibility for maintaining the integrity of ecosystems.
This rift in conservation thought, and the public debate these conservationists generated, presaged
the rise of environmentalism in the late 1960s. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/8967 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Keeling, Arn Michael |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 2518514 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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