From Dismal Swamp to Smiling Farms

Front matter

From Dismal Swamp to Smiling Farms

Food, Agriculture, and Change in the Holland Marsh

Michael Classens

CHAPTER 3 Crops, Markets, and the Production of Stability, 1935-54 77

CHAPTER 4 Agricultural Modernization, Ecological Contradiction, and the Production of Instability, 1954-80 98

CHAPTER 5 A Legacy of Contradictions: Crisis and the (Re)production of the Holland Marsh, 1980—Present 127

CONCLUSION W(h)ither the Marsh? 155

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAP o.1 Map of the Holland Marsh xix

FIGURES o. Orderly fields of the Holland Marsh xx 1.1 Manicured landscape 8 1.2 Crop base in the Holland Marsh 10 1.1 Ryan’s survey 42 2.1 Drainage plan, 1924 59 2.2 People on the dredger 60 2.3 Dredging machine, tile machine, ditch digger, and broken land 62 3.1 Monthly farm labourer wage in Ontario, 1920-50 78 3.2 Total net farm income (x1,000) in Ontario, 1926-50 79 4.1 Water returns to the Holland Marsh 104 4.2 Composition of crop cover 110 4.3 Bushel baskets and pallet boxes 119

5.1 Sprawling city meets the fields 142 xi

Preface

I started writing this book in the “before times,” as we say now. The global disruption caused by COVID-19 has since been swift and staggering, and very likely it will be enduring. The global pandemic has exacerbated fundamental inequities of the industrialized food system while underscoring its profound unsustainability. More than this, the global capitalist food system is a key culprit in the emergence of COVID-19 in the first place. As agricultural capital seeks out ways to bring previously uncommodified natures into circulation, the frontiers of agriculture are expanding into ever more previously remote areas of the world. This self-expanding logic is “both the propulsion for and nexus through which pathogens of diverse origins migrate from the most remote reservoirs to the most international of population centers.”’ The rate at which these zoonotic diseases — those that originate in nonhuman animals and jump species into humans — are emerging seems to be accelerating. Indeed, in the past twenty years, there have been three significant pandemics - COVID-19 in 2020, HiN1 in 2009, and SARS in 2003.”

Though the evidence was already robust, this most recent pandemic has strengthened the argument that planetary survival may depend on more socially just, ecologically sound, and localized/regionalized food systems. And yet, amid the upswing of a second wave of COVID-19 infections in Ontario, the provincial government set to “hacking and slashing” legislation that protects landscapes in the province. Nested within Bill 229, a pandemic recovery measure, were provisions that dramatically reduced the power of conservation authorities and increased the use of ministerial zoning orders, enabling increased development of the countryside.’ The government also fast-tracked approval of a development proposed within a fifty-four-acre wetland, all of which led seven members of the Greenbelt Council to resign in protest.* Not long after these resignations, the province announced plans to revive the Bradford Bypass, colloquially known as the Holland Marsh Highway, an east-west thoroughfare linking Highway 400 and Highway 404 that runs straight through the northern part of the Holland Marsh.

The socioecological politics of landscape change, the pathologies of the industrialized food system, and the challenges and promise of localized food systems xiii xiv Preface are central themes within the following pages. The story of these themes is one ultimately refracted through my own limitations and capabilities as a researcher and writer. As the preeminent environmental historian William Cronon reminds us:

When we describe human activities within an ecosystem, we seem always to tell stories about them. Like all historians, we configure the events of the past into causal sequences — stories — that order and simplify those events to give them new meanings. We do so because narrative is the chief literary form that tries to find meaning in an overwhelmingly crowded and disordered chronological reality. When we choose a plot to order our environmental histories, we give them a unity that neither nature nor the past possess so clearly.’

The data I draw on come from a variety of sources. I extensively scoured a number of archives for information relevant to the Holland Marsh, including the Archives of Ontario, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Bradford West Gwillimbury Public Library, Ontario Workplace Tribunals Library, Simcoe County Archives, and a variety of online repositories. Additionally, the Pro- Quest Historical Database helped me find several hundred useful news accounts of the Holland Marsh published by some seventeen news outlets.

I also spent a good deal of time in and around the Holland Marsh over the course of nearly eighteen months. I made many trips to the area for interviews, which took place on farms, in barns or storage facilities, or on the front yard of a Marsh home (with a glass of lemonade in hand) - and on one occasion in the cab of a John Deere tractor during the onion harvest. Often I travelled there to attend specific events. Some of these were large annual community gatherings common to other rural areas themed around harvest time and featured crops, here including the Bradford West Gwillimbury Carrot Fest and the Holland Marsh Soupfest. I also attended meetings of the Holland Marsh Growers’ Association and a screening of a film it had produced, The Marsh Mucker’s Tale (2013). I also spent two days at the 63rd Annual Muck Vegetable Growers Conference, talking to farmers and researchers, listening to presentations, and walking the floor (an erstwhile hockey rink) of the farm-equipment and chemical trade show. On a handful of occasions, I simply wound up in the Marsh and wandered around, driving around the perimeter on the severely narrow Canal Road or cutting through the area on the idiosyncratic and potholed interior roads. With my dog, I hiked through Scanlon Creek Conservation Area, which is grazed by the Holland River as it heads toward Cook’s Bay and Lake Simcoe. And out of sheer curiosity, I tracked down the point where the river — a marshy, slow-moving

Preface Xv version of it at any rate — empties into Cook’s Bay — roughly fifteen kilometres north of the fields. I also draw on existing works about the Marsh by local historians, including George Jackson, Dorothy Cilipka, Albert VanderMey, and the Bradford West Gwillimbury Local History Association. I am grateful for the stories these authors tell about the Marsh — they have no doubt shaped my own.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to begin by thanking Dr. Gerda R. Wekerle, professor emerita, for her guidance throughout the original research for this book. At the centre of Gerda’s mentorship style is an uncommon amalgam of support and discipline, idealism, and pragmatism. She was generous with her guidance and patience while consistently challenging me to look beyond where I was at any given moment. We had many inspiring and energizing discussions about this book, of both the brasstacks and the blue-sky variety. She gave me the space to explore and the structure to succeed. I am very grateful for Gerda’s ongoing mentorship and friendship.

Thanks also to Scott Prudham. Scott’s capitalist-nature seminar at the University of Toronto was the first “geography” course I had taken since grade 11 in high school — it was a revelation and it changed the way I understand the world. Similarly, Stefan Kipfer exposed me to a rich diversity of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches that are woven into the fabric of this book. I must also acknowledge Anders Sandberg, Sarah Wakefield, and Peter Vandergeest, each of whom read an early draft of the manuscript. That they would spend so much time and intellectual labour on my behalf is humbling.

My time in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, where a good deal of the original research for this book was conducted, was generously supported by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, and York University’s Susan Mann Dissertation Scholarship. Funding from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship allowed me the time to conduct additional research and to begin writing. Iam grateful to have been so lucky in matters of finance. Thanks also to the friends and colleagues in FES and beyond with whom I have shared many conversations, ideas, struggles, and drinks. I undertook substantive revisions of this book while working as assistant professor in the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Program in the Trent School of the Environment. I am grateful to Trent University as well as colleagues and collaborators in Peterborough for their support and friendship.

For their generous, probing, and insightful feedback on an earlier draft of the manuscript, I thank the two anonymous reviewers for UBC Press and Graeme xvii xviii Acknowledgments

Wynn. Thanks also to James MacNevin, senior editor at UBC Press. Publishing a book during a global pandemic is a weird, challenging experience — James made it as pleasurable as I can imagine it being.

My deep gratitude extends also to the people in and around the Holland Marsh who were so generous with their time, insight, knowledge, and stories. I learned so incredibly much from you.

Finally, my deepest gratitude to the humans and the nonhuman with whom I most often share space — Serena, Emry, Maude, Clement, and Sue.

Sue — You have been the best kind of distraction a dog can be.

Emry, Maude, and Clement - When each of you arrived in our lives, you instantly made everything far more hectic, busy, and chaotic. But you also made it far more meaningful and, somehow, more manageable.

Serena — Finally, I can stop talking about “the book.” Until the next one, I guess.

lake L Simcoe Lake Simcoe

Holland River

watershed boundary

East

Richmond Hill | Vaughan \ Caledon Brampton a Toronto. Lake Ontario £ Mississauga AAA — Extent of Holland yj Marsh $ AT A A s E, H \ J — es) Kettlebv

MAP 0.1. Parts of the greater Toronto area, central Ontario, and the extent of the Holland Marsh.

FIGURE 0.1. Orderly fields of the Holland Marsh. Courtesy of Holland Marsh Drainage System Joint Municipal Service Board.

FROM DISMAL SWAMP TO SMILING FARMS

Introduction

Culture’s Marsh

IKE MANY KIDS WHO grew up in southern Ontario, I sometimes went

north in the summer for family vacations. As the family drove along High-

way 400, leaving Toronto behind us, I always looked forward to passing Canada’s Wonderland. The theme park — a sprawling spectacle of games, bright lights, and roller coasters in Vaughan, Ontario — seemed like an urban capstone. It was a carnivalesque punctuation to the urban agglomeration of Toronto and its ancillary suburbs. Beyond Canada’s Wonderland was Canada’s hinterland — a bucolic landscape of rolling hills, mighty forests, and pristine lakes.

From Canada’s Wonderland to the south canal of the Holland Marsh — a three-thousand-hectare protected agricultural area — is about twenty kilometres, or roughly a ten-minute drive north on the highway. Despite the short distance, the two places could not be more different, or so I used to think. The low-lying, verdant fields of the Holland Marsh are a stunning aesthetic counterpoint to the towering infrastructure of the roller coasters, after all. The twenty kilometres between the two seemed like a transition zone — a liminal space between the city and or the city, between nature and society. The Holland Marsh was where society ended and nature started.

I have driven across the short stretch of Highway 400 that bisects the Holland Marsh dozens of times over the years, somehow always missing the obvious: The Marsh is not the natural place I imagined it to be. Crisscrossed with roads, teeming with tractors, and dotted with houses and barns, it is patently more unnatural than it initially seemed. While the fields in their bucolic splendour might belie the fact, even the land within the Marsh is far from natural, having been — quite literally — made in the mid-1920s, exhumed from the wetlands of the Holland River through an amalgam of human ingenuity, labour, and hubris. To borrow and adapt a phrase, in many ways this is culture’s marsh.'

This, though, is only the most recent instantiation of the Marsh. Over the last 14,000 years or so, the material landscape has changed, how it has been interpreted has varied, and the ways it has been used have shifted profoundly.

As the Ice Age was drawing to a close, Paleoindian populations saw the area as temporary trapping grounds for arctic fox and arctic hare.” By about 6000 BC, Huron, and Algonquin peoples afterward, established more permanent camps near the Marsh, using it both for its nutritional bounty and for its convenient proximity to the Carrying Place Trail.’ For some of the earliest European settlers to the area, the Marsh was understood as “a mere ditch” and a dangerous place to be avoided.‘ Soon after, colonial “foot soldiers in the manufacture of land,” with a zeal for the “paramilitary regularization of the land into rectilinear parcels,” largely understood the New World landscape as unruly, a commodity to be surveyed, inventoried, and brought under control.’ By the early twentieth century, enterprising agriculturalists looked out over the Marsh and saw farmland, a “promised land with its broad acres of unbroken greatness.” Not long after this, a canal was dug around the wetland, the water was drained off, and a three-thousand-hectare polder assembled for the production of market garden vegetables, primarily carrots, onions, and celery.

By recounting the creation, use, and protection of the Holland Marsh, this book explores the complex, often overlooked, entanglements of nature and society, which are far less separate, or separable, than we assume. At the heart of this narrative is the notion that ideas about nature shape our concepts of agriculture, and that agriculture in turn shapes our ideas about nature. Nature is not the fixed thing we imagine it to be, but rather it is polysemous. Nature is social and nature is political. I explore these outwardly knotty ideas through an examination of the transformation of the Holland River lowlands and the agriculture this transformation enabled.

In the twenty-first century, we mostly think of wetlands as places to protect, not dredge, drain, and farm, yet in the 1920s, support for the conversion of the Holland Marsh was all but unanimous. Indeed, in 1920, not converting it to farmland would have been unthinkable. The irony, of course, is that since 2004, the Holland Marsh has been protected — not as wetland, but as farmland. Despite lingering around discursively in the moniker of the area, the antecedent landscape has been mostly expunged, though signs remain for the careful observer. As plans developed to drain the Holland River lowlands, the explicit intent was to reconstitute the wetland to produce orderly, productive, and profitable fields. Local media celebrated the fact that the “dismal swamp” in Bradford, Ontario, was finally being drained to make way for a much more agreeable contingent of “smiling farms.”’

Fast-forward roughly a century, and in many ways, the resulting farmland is being similarly threatened, despite — perhaps because of — the farmland-protection measures pertaining to the area. While the idea of farmland protection is currently de rigueur among many scholars, activists, and government officials, the story of the Holland Marsh demonstrates that its dominant paradigm is insufficient to effectively preserve such areas. Widespread simplistic and ahistorical understandings of the very character of farmland and landscape change have resulted in the development of preservation policies and practices that may fall short of their intended outcome. Put simply, conventional farmland-preservation measures are typically designed to protect a particular kind of capital-intensive farming, not the land itself: Farming preservation must be seen as distinct from farmland preservation, yet this distinction is rarely, if ever, made in scholarship, public discourse, or policy debates. The case of the Holland Marsh demonstrates that farmland preservation is a product of normative ideas about landscapes and land use, ideas that are ever changing and based on historically contingent notions about “nature.” The Marsh, protected as a Specialty Crop Area under Ontario’s Greenbelt Plan, has become a poster landscape for farming protection under the guise of farmland protection. And yet, these protective policies may be hastening the demise of this iconic, multimillion-dollar agricultural juggernaut known widely as Ontario’s salad bowl.

The stakes for how we think about “nature” and how we use our peri-urban landscapes could not be higher. It is becoming increasingly difficult to overstate the multiple, intersecting, and coproduced socioecological crisis of the contemporary period. From mass malnutrition and the arrival of a planetary fire age to global pandemics and an imminent climate reckoning, the socioecological limits of the earth are seemingly within sight.’ Agriculture is at once a key culprit in these crises and essential to their resolution.

From as early as the mid-nineteenth century — when a thriving trade arose to replenish Europe’s soil with guano from South America — agriculture has been enabled through a global metabolic rift.’ The so-called externalities of global agricultural production were vastly intensified during the green revolution as a raft of chemical and technological innovations were hastily embraced, rationalized within complementary neo-Malthusian and productivist discourses. The consequences have been catastrophic.

Mote recently, examples abound of the ways in which agriculture can contribute to repairing the widening socioecological rift. Lessons from this work are worth underscoring. Agro-ecologists and allied academics and practitioners have demonstrated the promise in reexamining the socionatural relations inherent in agriculture. Rather than taming nature — the operative logic of contemporary industrial agriculture — agro-ecologists insist on a more humble approach that rejects the premise that “nature” is controllable in the ways proponents of industrial agriculture assume." At the same time, a broad consensus is emerging suggesting that key crises related to the contemporary food system can be mitigated — and reversed — in place-based efforts focused on strengthening existing and forging new links between eaters and growers within discrete geographies." This work reveals the social and ecological benefits of relocalized food systems and compels us to reexamine our reliance on long-haul industrial agriculture.

I focus specifically on the Holland Marsh for a variety of reasons — its productivity, its iconic status, and its proximity to Canada’s most populace region and North America’s third-largest city. On a clear day, the fields of the Holland Marsh are visible from the top of the CN Tower, the quintessential icon of downtown urban Toronto. That some of the most profitable and productive farmland in Canada is in such close proximity to, and increasingly threatened by, the nation’s largest urban agglomeration itself makes this a noteworthy case within the catastrophe of the contemporary moment.

In this sense, the Holland Marsh is a proverbial canary in the coal mine — an example that can help us understand the history and complexity of the land at the centre of any putative efforts to relocalize food systems. The prized muck soil, as it is colloquially known, is a central character in the history of agriculture in the Marsh and receives herein an extensive explanation of its social and material significance.'” Suffice it to say for now, muck soil is relatively rare and extremely fragile, much more so than mineral soil. Asa result, from the moment the Marsh was drained nearly a century ago, this soil began to degrade. More than this, even if it were never farmed, the muck would inevitably disappear — agriculture is certainly hastening its demise. The Marsh, then, serves as a fascinating case study that reveals insight into human-environment relations, accentuates the contradictions and deficiencies of contemporary farmland-preservation paradigms, and highlights the challenges of forging more socioecological rational food systems.

Holland Marsh

Travelling northward from Toronto, the northern slopes of the Oak Ridges Moraine highlands give way to a gentle descent to the fields of the Holland Marsh. Within the span of the southern canal — roughly fifteen metres across — a variable landscape of cultivated fields of corn, pastureland, exposed glacial debris, and wooded hillsides cedes to uniform fields of lush, green vegetables. The farmed area of the Marsh — which vaguely resembles a banana if seen from a sufficient height — is separated into two sections. The main polder is known colloquially as the “Big Scheme,” from which the much smaller “Little Scheme” is pinched off at its north end at Yonge Street. The Holland River runs through the middle of the Marsh, serving as both a natural and political-administrative boundary. The fields on the west side of the river are in Simcoe County, those on the east side lay in King Township. As the river continues its northerly flow toward Cook’s Bay on Lake Simcoe, the orderly fields give way to a landscape that resembles more closely the scenery conjured by the image of a “marsh.” Marsh grasses, reeds, and small conifer shrubs populate both land and water, blurring the boundary between the two as if in a Group of Seven painting. Just before the Holland River empties into Cook’s Bay, destined for Lake Simcoe immediately beyond, it is once again dammed, canalized, pumped, and diverted around a final small agricultural area known as Keswick Marsh.

In all, the Holland Marsh is a mixed-use wetland of some 7,400 hectares (roughly 18,200 acres), 60 percent of which is drained agricultural land and 40 percent is preserved marshland." The cultivated land (roughly 3,000 hectares [7,400 acres]) supports 125 farms, together producing many millions of dollars in annual revenue by growing a range of market garden vegetables.“ According to the Holland Marsh Growers’ Association (HMGA), the total annual economic impact of the Marsh — the farm-gate value of the vegetables in addition to packaging, processing, and transportation — is $1 billion. This includes $130 million in annual carrot production and $160 million in annual onion production.” A 2009 study found that gross farm receipts were $7,130 per hectare in the Marsh, 3.7 times higher than the provincial average.'® This makes the farmland there some of the most profitable in all of North America.

While the soil can support a wide diversity of crops, the pressure to be pragmatic within an age of capitalist agriculture has resulted in a highly homogenous crop base. Combined, onion and carrot production account for 70.9 percent of the annual output in the Holland Marsh. Other crops, including celery (7.3 percent), mixed greens (7.3 percent), “Chinese vegetables” (2.7 percent), and potatoes (0.7 percent), are less commonly grown.”

Conceptual Framing and Scholarly Landmarks Agriculture and the Dynamics of Change in the Holland Marsh Food for human consumption has existed in the Holland Marsh since time immemorial, and by a sufficiently lenient definition, probably always will. But agricultural production per se arrived in the Marsh within a very specific social, w ARAO hs 7 => E

Marsh. B: The stark difference between the orderly agricultural fields of the Marsh and the land beyond the canal. C: Highway 400 bisects the Marsh. Courtesy of Holland Marsh Drainage System Joint Municipal Service Board.

cultural, political, and historical configuration. Emphasizing that food and agriculture in the Holland Marsh are distinctly capitalist in character puts a fine point on one of the main themes of this book. The Marsh serves as an exemplar of, but importantly at times a foil to, much of the recent literature concerned with the state of the contemporary agro-food complex. For over a century, scholars have questioned the extent to which agriculture is capitalist.'* While no clear consensus has emerged, they have convincingly demonstrated that agriculture is significantly shaped by the constraints and opportunities to capital in the ongoing process of attempting to fully rationalize food production.”

Food regime theory, developed by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael, is helpful in tracing the implications of this insight within the case of the Holland Marsh.” Friedmann and McMichael argue that historically contingent configurations of modes of agricultural production, capitalism, and state power have resulted in discernable periods of stability and crisis in the global economy over the past 150 years or so.”' As they put it, the food regime analytic brings together “international relations of food production and consumption to forms of accumulation broadly distinguishing periods of capitalist transformation since 1870.”**

The first period of relative global stability demarcated by Friedmann and McMichael was from 1870 to 1914. This first food regime was characterized

FIGURE I.2. Percentage of area by crop type grown in the Holland Marsh, 2006.

= Carrots = Onions = Celery = Mixed greens = Mixed flowers = Garlic = Parsnips = Turnips = Beets = Celery root = Chinese vegetables = Potatoes

= Greenhouse

SOURCE: Planscape, “Holland Marsh Agricultural Impact Study,” August 2009, p. ii, hetps://www.greenbelt.ca/holland_marsh_agricultural_study.

by monopoly trade relations between colonial (mainly the United Kingdom) and colonized states. Settler states in particular (such as Canada) were, during this era, important to maintaining British hegemony by providing the colonial market with a relatively cheap and abundant source of grain. The sociopolitical instability wrought by the two world wars also created economic uncertainty during which, according to Friedmann and McMichael, there was very little structured coherence to the global economy. As a result, there was no decisive food regime during the years 1914—47. But with the conclusion of the Second World War and the emergence of the United States as a postwar power, a second food regime emerged, lasting from roughly 1947 until 1973. This regime was characterized by the rise of the United States through the pretense of international development, primarily through the distribution of US grain surpluses. This was also an era characterized by the secular trends of intensive industrialization and commercialization of the agricultural sector. As national regulations — often through international agreements such as the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which lasted from 1948 through 1994 — were altered to accommodate the influx of capital demanded by a rapidly industrializing global agriculture, state power began to erode vis-a-vis a burgeoning corporate globalization.

Owing in part to the intellectual force of the paragons behind the staples thesis, much of the social-scientific scholarship related to agriculture in Canada has tended to focus on macroeconomic trends, countrywide aggregate data, and commodity- or sector-specific analysis.” This rich body of work is invaluable, yet its shadow is long, and it has sculpted the trajectory of Canadian food and agriculture studies for decades.” Recently, however, the study of Canadian agriculture has benefited from a more particularistic, place-based approach.” Within this body of work, rather than forming the centre of analysis, macrotrends and global food regimes constitute the backdrop on which equally compelling and important histories of agriculture, food, and culture play out.” This study of the Holland Marsh is similarly positioned: It recognizes and attends to structural, global, and national trends in farming, biotechnology, and the like, but always in terms of how these trends affect and/or are affected by the goings-on within the Marsh. While the dynamics of capitalist nature play out there, they do so mediated through the specificity of place and time. As Shannon Stunden Bower observes in her seminal work on agriculture in the wet Manitoba prairie, this is “capitalism at a different scale.”” My aspiration is not to gaze into the muck-soil fields of the Holland Marsh from the outside, but rather to stand in them, looking out at the world beyond.

Within this context, historians of agriculture have identified liberalism as a central modality through which agriculture and environmental change are mediated and modified in Canada. As James Murton puts it, understanding the environmental history of Canada requires moving beyond ideas about nature to recognizing “more general logics — such as liberalism — that implicitly encourage a particular form of engagement with nature.””*

This perspective builds on Ian McKay’s influential work asserting that Canada, as an ontological category, can be productively studied as a contradictory and complex project of liberal rule.”? Countering the notion that it is simply a “vacant lot” and a “relatively minor” bounded geography where the dynamics of social and natural history play out, McKay insists that the country should denote within scholarship “a historically specific project of rule.”*° Initial waves of the violent colonial resettlement of what would become Canada were driven by political, economic, and social rationalities premised on aristocracy and deference to crown and clergy.*' Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, this system would be replaced by one girded more firmly on the core elements of liberalism — liberty, equity, private property, and the primacy of the individual. As McKay argues, this emerging social ideology was “set down on the land,” shaping both the landscape and its people.”

While there is a sociological distinction to be made between the Victorian liberalism that fuelled agricultural expansion across Canada from the mid-eighteenth century through the beginning of nineteenth century and the New Liberalism that emerged in the early 1800s, the functional role of nature (and, by extension, agriculture) was largely consistent.’ And this remains true of the contemporary neoliberal era. A common thread stitching together the chameleonic and persistent liberal philosophy is an instrumentalist view of nature “in which the natural world is judged solely on its usefulness to human ends.”** This manifests as a “a culture and society built on, and absolutely dependent on, a sharply alienating, intensely managerial relationship with nature.””

This managerialism requires rationalization. Unable to contend with the enormous complexity of the (socio)natural world, states have historically sought to make nature “legible” in ways conducive to facilitating control, regulation, and the extraction of profit. As Bruce Braun puts it, “far from constituting a field of readily intelligible objects, nature enters into history in part through its cultural legibility.” Nature emerges as legible to the state through the processes of inventorying, abstraction, and standardization of both landscapes and the discrete bits of biophysical nature that compose them. Land surveys, cartography, soil classification schemes — these are among the technologies that made the Holland River lowlands legible to the aspiring agriculturalists who transformed it. Braun extends James C. Scott’s influential work by illustrating the “complex field of social practices” implicated in nature’s rationalization.” While Scott conceptualizes the state as distinct from civil society, Braun demonstrates the ways in which knowledge about nature generated outside the state ultimately influences how it sees and acts on nature. In other words, the state is not a totalizing force, but rather more fluidly defines and acts on nature in strategic ways, informed by a wide array of social, political, and economic forces.