Restoring nature: Ecology, memory, and the storm history of Vancouver's Stanley Park

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 88, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 577-612

  Kheraj, Sean ^a  

^a TRENT UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949871270     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/chr.88.4.577     Document Type: Review

References (97)

1. The origins of the second name are unknown. Possibly, it is a commemoration of the seven Sutherland sisters, who used to pose in drugstore windows in Vancouver as part of a marketing campaign in the early twentieth century
2. Richard M. Steele, The Stanley Park Explorer (North Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1985), 139
3. E. Pauline Johnson, Legends of Vancouver (1911; repr., Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1997), 113-14
4. Catherine Mae MacLennan, Rambling Round Stanley Park (Vancouver: Roy Wrigley, 1935), 13
5. Alan Roy Evans, 'The Majestic Old Family that Rules Stanley Park' The Province, 12 Jan. 1957, magazine section, 8
6. City of Vancouver Archives (hereafter CVA), Board of Parks and Public Recreation, Board Minutes, MCR-47-6, 9 Jun. 1943; Vancouver Sun, 18 Mar. 1947, 9. Today, a plaque marks the place where the Seven Sisters once stood
7. Most park historians use this periodization for urban park history. Galen Cranz's The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982) sharply draws the line between what she calls the romantic park and the reform park at 1900
8. Terrence Young builds upon Cranz's model, but argues that the transition happens at different times in different cities in the United States, and can first be observed in the late nineteenth century. An important distinction between Cranz's and Young's arguments is that Young stresses that his examination of the two periods in San Francisco focuses on the cultural and environmental differences, while Cranz's study is sociological in its treatment of ideas of the romantic and reform park. Also, Young uses the term 'rationalistic,' rather than 'reform,' for the second phase, inspired by Samuel P. Hays's book Conservation and Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959)
9. Young sees the second phase as one similar to the progressive conservation movement, in which planners sought a more efficient use and development of natural resources. David Schuyler also draws a similar comparison in The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)
10. Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar's The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) provides one of the most comprehensive social and political histories of the first major landscape urban park in the US. Cranz's model of urban park history influenced early scholarly writing about Stanley Park, including W.C. McKee, 'The Vancouver Park System, 1886-1929
11. A Product of Local Businessmen,' in Recreational Land Use: Perspectives on Its Evolution in Canada, ed. Geoffrey Wall and John Marsh (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1982) 299-310
12. Robert A.J. McDonald, "'Holy Retreat' or 'Practical Breathing Spot'"?: Class Perceptions of Vancouver's Stanley Park, 1910-1913,' Canadian Historical Review 45, no. 2 (1984): 127-53
13. Mark Leirer, 'The Deadman's Island Dispute of 1899: A Monument to Stupidity and Vandalism,' British Columbia Historical News 26, no. 3 (1993): 22-4
14. More recent work includes the history of Stanley Park by Jean Barman in Stanley Park's Secret: The Forgotten Families of Whoi Whoi, Kanaka Ranch and Brockton Point (Vancouver: Harbour, 2006), which focuses on the removal of the settler families and aboriginal people who once lived in the park, but does not provide a detailed treatment of the role of nature itself in park policy or changing ideas of wilderness
15. Work by Renisa Mawani in 'Imperial Legacies (Post) Colonial Identities: Law, Space and the Making of Stanley Park, 1859-2001' (Law Text Culture 7 [2003]: 98-141)
16. and 'Genealogies of the Land: Aboriginality, Law, and Territory in Vancouver's Stanley Park' (Social and Legal Studies 14, no.3 [2005]: 315-39) broadens the discussion of park creation to examine sociological aspects of making park space and the relationship between aboriginal peoples and the law
17. Carolyn Merchant, 'The Theoretical Structure of Ecological Revolutions,' Environmental Review 11, no. 4 (1987): 267
18. Donald Worster, 'Appendix: Doing Environmental History,' in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, ed. Donald Worster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 290
19. for an excellent discussion of nature as an autonomous agent see Keekok Lee, 'Is Nature Autonomous?' in Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature: Theory and Practice, ed. Thomas Heyd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 54-74
20. Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935-1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001)
21. Claire Elizabeth Campbell, Shaped by the West Wind: Nature and History in Georgian Bay (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005)
22. John Sandlos, 'Federal Spaces, Local Conflicts: National Parks and the Exclusionary Politics of the Conservation Movement in Ontario, 1900-1935,' Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 16 (2005): 293-318
23. Lorenz developed the butterfly effect analogy in the 1960s to explain the complexities of weather prediction. He posited that there were an infinite number of minute factors that could produce an infinite number of meteorological outcomes; therefore, the flap of a butterfly's wings in Asia could theoretically cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. In essence, he argued that there were no ultimate predictable patterns in weather. This theory formed a foundation for the development of later chaos and complexity theories
24. The JTWC is a joint task force of the United States Navy and Air Force that provides tropical cyclone warnings for American protectorates and military bases in the Asia-Pacific region
25. Fleet Weather Central/Joint Typhoon Warning Center, Annual Typhoon Report, 1962, 29
26. Although the storm was commonly referred to as a 'typhoon,' the characteristics of this storm system were quite different from a typhoon. The storm was an extra-tropical cyclone, that is to say, a weather system that usually occurs in the mid to high latitudes in regions of large horizontal temperature variations known as frontal zones. They vary in intensity from ordinary cloud cover to extreme winds and thunderstorms. The term 'typhoon' refers to tropical cyclones that occur in the western Pacific
27. Jerome Namias, 'Large-Scale Air-Sea Interactions Over the North Pacific from Summer 1962 through the Subsequent Winter,' Journal of Geophysical Research 68, no. 22 (1963): 6171-86
28. Fred W. Decker, Owen P. Cramer, and Byron R. Harper, 'The Columbus Day 'Big Blow' in Oregon,' Weather wise, December 1962: 238-45
29. Robert E. Lynott and Owen P. Cramer, 'Detailed Analysis of the 1962 Columbus Day Windstorm in Oregon and Washington,' Monthly Weather Review 94, no. 2 (1966): 105-17
30. Lynott and Cramer, 'Detailed Analysis of the 1962 Columbus Day Windstorm in Oregon and Washington,' 105
31. Arthur Daley, 'Storm Damage,' New York Times, 16 Oct. 1962, 68
32. Decker, Cramer, and Harper, 'The Columbus Day 'Big Blow' in Oregon,' 241
33. Vancouver Sun, 11 Oct. 1962, 3; 12 Oct. 1962, 1-3. The failure to provide adequate weather forecasting was merely a by-product of the state of weather prediction in Canada in the 1960s. The Meteorological Service of Canada had been in operation in some form since the 1840s and kept apace with developments in the field of weather prediction in Western Europe and the United States. British Columbia established its first forecast office in 1890. While the Meteorological Service had grown into a more sophisticated network for weather prediction and started to use new radar technologies developed during the war, weather forecasting in 1962 had only recently started to apply computer technology for more accurate numerical predictions. Even though the Meteorological Service failed to provide adequate warning of the first storm, officials in Vancouver should have been more prepared for the second. For a comprehensive administrative history of the Meteorological Service of Canada and a succinct history of developments in meteorological sciences, see Morley Thomas, The Beginnings of Canadian Meteorology (Toronto: ECW Press, 1991)
34. Forecasts for Flying: Meteorology in Canada, 1918-1939 (Toronto: ECW Press, 1996)
35. Metmen in Wartime: Meteorology in Canada, 1939-1945 (Toronto: ECW Press, 2001)
36. John D. Cox, Storm Watchers: The Turbulent History of Weather Prediction from Franklin's Kite to El Nino (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2002)
37. Environment Canada, Daily Data Report for October 1962, http:// www.climate.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/climateData/dailydata_e.html
38. Vancouver Sun, 13 Oct. 1962, 1-3; 15 Oct. 1962, 1; 16 Oct. 1962, 1. Despite the facts that a similar incident had occurred the night before, and that forecasters warned that a second storm was approaching, city officials irresponsibly permitted traffic to travel through Stanley Park to the Lions Gate Bridge. Forty vehicles were trapped in the park while emergency service workers struggled to make their way through the debris
39. Vancouver Sun, 16 Oct. 1962, 10
40. The Province, 15 Dec. 1962, 4
41. Globe and Mail, 15 Oct. 1962, 2
42. Raymond A. Green, 'The Weather and Circulation of October 1962: A Warm Month with a Mid-Month Circulation Reversal,' Monthly Weather Review, January 1963: 46
43. The Province, 7 Jan. 1963, 5
44. Daily Province, 22 Oct. 1934, 1
45. CVA. Board of Parks and Recreation Fonds, Annual Reports 1934, PDS 12
46. ENSO commonly refers to 'the active ocean component of a vast, Pacific basin-wide oscillation in air mass and ocean temperature.' Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), 17
47. The Province, 30 Dec. 1901, 4
48. CVA, Board of Parks and Public Recreation, Board Minutes, MCR-47-1, 8 Jan. 1913
49. Minutes, MCR 47-2, 22 Dec. 1915
50. For more discussion and debate on nature as autonomous, see Thomas Heyd, ed., Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005)
51. Frederick Turner, 'The Invented Landscape,' in Beyond Preservation: Restoring and Inventing Landscapes, ed. A. Dwight Baldwin Jr., Judith de Luce, and Carl Pletsch (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 51
52. William R. Jordan III, '"Sunflower Forest": Ecological Restoration as the Basis for a New Environmental Paradigm,' in Beyond Preservation, 17-34
53. Eric Katz, 'The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature,' in Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community, ed. Eric Katz (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997) 93-108
54. Robert Elliot, Faking Nature: The Ethics of Environmental Restoration (London: Routledge, 1997), 76
55. Marcus Hall, Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 218, 6
56. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3
57. CVA, Board of Parks and Recreation Fonds, Correspondence, Stanley Park, 1920-1921, Forestry in Stanley Park: Extracts from Superintendent's Annual Reports, 49-B-5, files 2-6
58. CVA. Board of Parks and Public Recreation. Board Minutes. MCR 47-4, 10 Nov. 1920
59. Daily Province, 6 Feb. 1935, 1; 8 Feb. 1935, 1-2; 20 Feb. 1935, 4; 22 Feb. 1935, 3
60. CVA, Board of Parks and Public Recreation, Board Minutes, MCR 47-5, 21 Feb. 1935; Library and Archives of Canada (hereafter LAC), Dominion Unemployment Relief Commissioner, Department of Labour, Correspondence with British Columbia re Dominion-British Columbia Agreement, 1935 respecting improvements to Stanley Park, Vancouver, Letter from P.Z. Caverhill, Chief Forester of British Columbia, Department of Lands, Forest Branch, to Chairman of the Board of Park Commissioners, RG27-H-1. File Y1-8-11, Feb. 13, 1935
61. LAC, Dominion Unemployment Relief Commissioner, Department of Labour, Correspondence with British Columbia re Dominion-British Columbia Agreement, 1935 respecting improvements to Stanley Park, Vancouver, Letter from T.G. Murphy, Minister of the Interior to W.A. Gordon, Minister of Labour, RG27-H-1. File Y1-8-11, 2 May 1935; Memorandum of Agreement entered into this sixth day of November, 1935 between the Dominion of Canada and the Vancouver Board of Park Commissioners
62. CVA. Board of Parks and Public Recreation. Board Minutes, MCR-47-1, 9 Dec. 1901
63. Seth R. Reice, The Silver Lining: The Benefits of Natural Disasters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 15
64. Hall, Earth Repair, 214
65. Vancouver Sun, 4 Jun. 1936, 4
66. CVA, Board of Parks and Public Recreation, Board Minutes, MCR 47-5, 19 Nov. 1931
67. For an excellent examination of the perceptual disconnect between nature and human labour, see Richard White's essay '"Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?": Work and Nature' and William Cronon's essay, 'The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,' in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 171-85; 69-90
68. Vancouver Sun, 14 Mar. 1950, 7
69. News-Herald, 9 Apr. 1951, 13
70. CVA, Board of Parks and Public Recreation, Board Minutes, MCR 47-7, 15 Oct. 1962
71. Vancouver Sun, 15 Oct. 1962, 2; 16 Oct. 1962, 1; 17 Oct. 1962, 29
72. M.J. Bowden, 'The Invention of American Tradition,' Journal of Historical Geography 18 (1992): 3-26
73. George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1791-1795, vol. 2, ed. W. Kaye Lamb (London: Hakluyt Society, 1984), 561
74. Daily News Advertiser, 13 Jun. 1888, 2
75. The Province, 7 Feb. 1903, 14; 28 Jul. 1906, 13; 20 Dec. 1907, 1; 13 Feb. 1915, 6; 1 Dec. 1906, 12; 17 Oct. 1926, 8 (magazine section)
76. Robert Allison Hood, By Shore and Trail in Stanley Park (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1929), 16
77. CVA, C. Roscoe Brown, Stanley Park and Its Environs (1937), PAM 1937-46
78. Vancouver Sun, 28 Sept. 1955, 25; 17 Jul. 1951, 4
79. Theodore Binnema and Melanie Niemi, "'Let the Line Be Drawn Now": Wilderness, Conservation, and the Exclusion of Aboriginal People from Banff National Park in Canada,' Environmental History 11, no. 4 (2006): 724-50
80. Kathy S. Mason, Natural Museums: US National Parks, 1872-1916 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2004)
81. Hood, By Shore and Trail in Stanley Park, 112
82. The Province, 12 January 1957, 8 (magazine section)
83. Campbell, Shaped by the West Wind, 96
84. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 188
85. Maria Tippett, Emily Carr: A Biography (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1979), 72-3
86. Emily Carr, Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1966), 207-8
87. Vancouver Sun, 30 Mar. 1965, 8
88. Sun, 1 Jun. 1943, 4
89. B.A. McKelvie, Legends of Stanley Park: Vancouver's Magnificent Playground, (n.p., 1941)
90. George H. Raley, Our Totem Poles: A Souvenir of Vancouver (Vancouver: n.p., 1937)
91. Rev. John C. Goodfellow, The Totem Poles in Stanley Park (Vancouver: The Art, Historical and Scientific Association of Vancouver, 1923)
92. See Barman's Secrets of Stanley Park for more information on the aboriginal inhabitants of the Stanley Park peninsula
93. News-Herald, 30 Oct. 1939, 4
94. Vancouver Sun, 8 May 1968, 15
95. Vancouver Sun, 4 May 1989, B5; 13 Feb. 1990, B1
96. The Province, 11 Sept. 1989, 5
97. Vancouver Sun, 16 Dec. 2006, A1, A8