Two perspectives on the material and discursive construction of British Columbian forests

This paper considers how forests as hybrid natural-cultural “things” enter public debates in the province of British Columbia through the juxtaposition of two examples: first, the Canada-U.S. softwood lumber dispute, and second, the felling of a single tree in Haida Gwaii as depicted in John Vaillant’s 2005 nonfiction bestseller, The Golden Spruce. The processes through which people come to know, value and represent nature in each of these examples are placed in the foreground. I argue that the framing of “the forest” as an external object for trade or conservation limits public debate by prematurely accepting the modern precept of natural and cultural separation. This argument calls for a move away from the lamentations/self-congratulatory awe of “modern” subjects faced with an external, debilitated, instrumentalized “nature,” and toward political engagement with multiple “natures,” human and non, that are not only inseparable but coconstitutive.