“People, these authors conclude, ‘have very different and perhaps equally valid ideas about what constitutes a sustainable landscape’.”
Therein lies the central conflict that ebbs and flows throughout Ronald Rudin’s accessible yet detailed historical account of the creation, dissolution, and legacy of the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration (MMRA), from its inception in 1948 to its dissolution in the 70s – and beyond.
Despite growing up and living along the Bay of Fundy for 40+ years, it was the first time I had heard of this administrative body that has shaped the coastal waters and farmland along New Brunswick and Nova Scotia shores – ostensibly, for the protection and rehabilitation of original Acadian dykes and les aboiteaux to ensure arable farming land.
Supported through Rudin’s research into meeting minutes and other supporting documents that have found their way over time under BBQs in government sheds, and accompanied by archival photographs and maps), his work begins with an explanation of various types of “nature”. The unaltered, wildly fertile “first nature” that provided sustenance and quality of life to Indigenous peoples, to a “second nature” that represents wresting salt marsh into desalinated yet still fertile fields through Acadian innovation, through to a “third nature” that completely surrenders the earth to industrial and economic interests – and back again.
To move through these types of nature is to negotiate not only the strength of the earth. And while the book will no doubt be of interest to both environmental historians and political scientists, it was also interesting to this layperson. Underneath the historical accounting of meetings between and within government and community lay a tale old as time – that, with enough “power” – financial, political (but rarely, sadly, scientific) – different ideas and expertise can be minimized or excluded. Farmers’ immense local knowledge of the flow of the tides, and how to best benefit from them, could be suppressed with enough lobbying or convenient polling.
(As an aside, I did note that the “first nature” before the Acadians – that of the Mi’kmaki who used the land for many years before the first aboiteaux was built – was rarely mentioned. While it was not admittedly the focus of the book, I did find it ironic as the Indigenous peoples’ own local knowledge would have been minimized in conversations about the land. The use of the term mētis – not the author’s original term – to talk about blended knowledge seems another appropriation, in this light.)
Throughout, the author clearly accounts for how expert knowledge accommodates local expertise, with varying degrees of intention and success. (Indeed, the phrasing of it indicates a primacy that belies an uneven partnership of voices.) This battle between locals and experts is then turned on its’ head in the final chapter, when factions of different local knowledge collide with each other; is a man-made lake that has been in existence for half a century still “third nature” or a new “first”?
This is why accounts such as Rudin’s are important. They highlight how easy it is to lose sight of long-term goals, and how challenging it can be to still make different choices despite knowing past history. And it calls forth the real underlying question: whose knowledge matters?
About the author
Ronald Rudin is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Concordia University. He is the author of numerous books, among them Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie: A Historian’s Journey through Public Memory and Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance, and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park. The latter received the Canadian Historical Association Clio Prize for best book on Atlantic Canada, the Canadian Oral History Association Prize, and the Prix de l’Assemblée nationale from the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française. Rudin has produced eight documentary films, most recently Unnatural Landscapes, which accompanies this book.
- Publisher: UBC Press
- Publication Date: August 15, 2022
- Language: English (316 pages)
- ISBN: 978-0-77486-676-7 (Paperback)
