This thesis concerns the cultural and scientific practices involved with turn-of-the-century
struggles to conserve the Maine Woods. Conservation was underwritten by the
powerful and productive fiction that an essential nature exists as something completely
apart from the elaborately organized exhibitions by which it has been staged for our benefit.
The absolute distinction between nature and culture is profoundly problematic but
tremendously productive as well. Drawing on a variety of historical and theoretical sources,
this thesis describes the various ways in which the essential nature of the Maine Woods
was set up and represented as something demanding protection and conservation.
The thesis is divided into three parts. Part I sets the stage for the historical
discussions that follow by assessing debates in geography and environmental history about
the social construction of knowledge and nature. Recent scholarship has been caught on the
horns of a theoretical dilemma: while understanding of the present environmental crisis and
its historical roots seems to demand recognition of the independent agency of nature, social
theory suggests the impossibility of stepping outside the bounds of culture to represent an
independent nature as it really is. Different responses to this dilemma are discussed. It is
argued that environmental critique demands a more humble approach to truth, one sensitive
to the meanings of its metaphors and the politics of its practices.
Part II assesses the forest conservation movement. The objects of scientific forestry
depended fundamentally upon the ways in which the forest was framed as an object of
knowledge. Very different programs of action flowed from competing metaphorical
definitions of the Maine Woods as a crop, a mine, or a kind of capital. The ascendency of
technical and quantitative knowledge of the forest and its displacement of local
understandings are described as are public policy disputes in Maine about the regulation of
private property, the institution of publicly owned forest reserves, and the role of the state
in forestry.
Part in deals with the conservation of wildlife for sport. Flocking to the forest to
hunt, wealthy sportsmen articulated a variety of sexual, class, and racial anxieties about the
debilitating embrace of modern life. The transfomation of the Maine Woods into a
vacationland for their manly recreation demanded the institution of game laws and the
criminalization of traditional lifeways to save the game for sport. In these struggles,
conservationists had to contend not only with local residents, who resisted this construction
of the Maine Woods, but also with a variety of non-human actors, such as deer, predators,
and pathogens, whose presence, though difficult to deny outright, was culturally framed
and mediated in materially significant ways.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/6622 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Demeritt, David |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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