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People in the Way: Modernity, Environment, and Society on the Arrow Lakes

“Focusing on the 1964 Columbia River Treaty, this article examines the agents, techniques, and logic associated with the creation of a modern British Columbia through hydroelectric development, arguing that they were manifestations of an encompassing historically specific ideology of “high modernity.” It then looks at the reaction to the treaty’s provisions and the impact of the High Arrow Dam, making the point that, in their opposition, the “people in rhe way” of the dam articulated an alternative to the high modernism of Bennett and BC Hydro.’ The politics of nature on the Arrow Lakes reveals hat there were “multiple modernities” at play in British Columbia during the 1960s, each of which was characterized by a particular organization of space and time that gave rise to different notions of the good life.’ Before turning to these specifics and complexities, however, I begin with an overview of the relationship between modernity and the control of nature in postwar British Columbia, the context for the provincial government’s high modernist project on the Arrow Lakes.” Abstract taken from introduction.

Author: Loo, Tina
Publisher: BC Studies
Date: 2004

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