The nature of protest: constructing the spaces of British Columbia’s rainforests

• Published in: cultural geographies
• Main Author: Rossiter, David
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2004
• Subjects: Environmental Science (miscellaneous); Cultural Studies; Geography, Planning and Development; British Columbia; Canada; First Nations
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/14744744004eu298oa; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1191/14744744004eu298oa

This paper examines the representations of nature circulating in a Greenpeace anti-logging campaign in British Columbia, Canada. The effort to stop industrial logging in a region of the central coast named ‘the Great Bear Rainforest’ is presented as a case study through which nature’s social production can be glimpsed. Part of the larger ‘war in the woods’ that gripped British Columbia throughout the 1990s, the campaign considered here pitted Greenpeace and other environmental non-governmental organizations and their grassroots supporters against the forestry industry and many members of resource-producing communities. Through an analysis of campaign literature, newspaper coverage and ‘letters to the editor’, it is argued that the preservationist position advanced by Greenpeace visually and discursively constructs a concept of pristine nature which appeals to urban populations, employs a neocolonial representation of First Nations peoples and the nature within which they are situated, and finds authority and legitimacy in ecosystem discourse. Drawing both on work by Matthew Sparke concerning mapping and the narration of the nation and on Haripriya Rangan’s identification of regionality as a key concept in understanding nature’s production, it is suggested that the construction of nature considered in this case study needs to be understood as part of an articulation of a particular west coast metropolitan identity.