Andrea Olive, Protecting the Prairies: Lorne Scott and the Politics of Conservation, Regina, Saskatchewan: University of Regina Press, 2023. 280 pgs. ISBN 9780889779631.
Reviewed by Emily Eaton.
In Protecting the Prairies: Lorne Scott and the Politics of Conservation, political scientist Andrea Olive undertakes a unique project of combining the history of conservation in Saskatchewan with the political biography of Lorne Scott, a farmer, conservationist, and former NDP provincial Cabinet Minister. The book succeeds at humanizing the trajectory of conservation in Saskatchewan, a province of just over 1 million people, and teases out the complex and contradictory views and responses taken by a man who left a huge mark on conservation policy in that province. The book also exposes how conservation policy in the province is contingent – the result of a few people’s capacities to fight on the issues they hold dear, rather than a systematic agenda determined by the needs of ecosystems and human life. Protecting the Prairies gives the reader an inside look at how conservation policy has been shaped by humans willing to make compromises to achieve their goals.
Protecting the Prairies is divided into eight chapters, with the bulk of the narrative spanning from the 1960s-70s to the 2010s. Most chapters begin with a setting of the scene in terms of the wider environmental politics playing out nationally and even internationally at the time. Next, Olive details the projects and causes to which Scott devoted himself during that time period in the context of provincial and regional policies, struggles and politics. The book tells the story of Scott’s journey from conservation organizations focused on local issues, into provincial government, and then back again to his rural community.
Scott’s love for birds and nature drew him first into organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and the Canadian Wildlife Federation, where he worked on preserving local habitat for birds and other creatures. In the first chapters of Protecting the Prairies, Olive also shows how Scott’s love of nature led him to affect environmental policy from the outside – for example, by challenging the Conservative Saskatchewan Government’s Rafferty-Alemeda Dam projects, which would flood native riparian wildlife habitat in the province’s southeast. The ultimately unsuccessful court case against the dam projects, spearheaded by Scott, drew in the federal government and led to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, which went on to review, and stipulate environmental protection on, thousands of subsequent projects across Canada. In fact, Olive cites this episode and its influence on establishing the federal environmental assessment act as one of three things she believes will be Scott’s long lasting legacies.
Next, Protecting the Prairies details Scott’s years working from within the halls of power during the Romanow NDP government. First elected in 1991, Scott served as Minister of Environment and Resource Management from 1995-99. In office he helped add 600,000 hectares of Crown land to the the Wildlife Habitat Protection Act, an Act the previous Conservative government had passed under political pressure from civil society groups led by Scott. As a minister, he also helped conserve land through the Representative Areas Ecological Reserves and the Conservation Easement Act. But Scott was also focused on conservation within a government that Olive characterizes as “pro-uranium and anti-climate change policy” (61). According to Olive, this did not really bother Scott. He was a prairie person from the south of the province and not tuned into the northern concerns about mine development. Moreover, he believed technology would be able to solve some of the impacts associated with uranium mining. And on climate change, he, alongside his government, opposed the federal approach of taxing emissions. This section of the book is really revealing – a rural politics of conservation, largely dominated by white settlers and their organizations and governments, did not seem capable of taking on wider issues of environmental justice and extractivism, especially as they related to Indigenous Peoples and future generations. This remains true today with both the governing Saskatchewan Party and the opposition NDP standing united to defend the oil and gas industry, open up new mining and extraction sites and oppose federal attempts to regulate emissions. To a large extent conservation remains one of the only forms of legitimate environmentalism in the province.
Olive traces how after Scott left government, he returned to more local politics and civil society-led initiatives aimed at pressuring governments. As the federal government retreated from its programs that maintained community pasture lands and promoted, researched and disseminated trees for shelter belts, Scott co-founded the Public Pastures, Public Interest group to pressure the provincial government to refrain from selling off these important refuges of biodiversity and habitat. He also donated four hectares of his own farm to establish a seed bank for about 100 species of trees and shrubs in order to preserve some of the successes of the federal tree farm programs. Olive finishes her narration of Scott’s legacy by outlining his mentorship of a new generation of conservationists in the province.
In my reading of Protecting the Prairies, I was looking for insight into how Indigenous Peoples did or did not factor into the settler-colonial history of conservation in the province. Given that the treaties that cover Saskatchewan guaranteed that First Nations signatories would be able to live “as before” and continue their livelihood practices of hunting, fishing, trapping and picking medicines, it seems obvious that preserving native prairie and wildlife habitat is a core treaty responsibility of settler colonial governments. I was involved in discussions that Scott helped lead in the early days of the federal government’s decision to return the federal community pastures back to Saskatchewan, and there was a shared concern amongst farmers and ranchers, Indigenous Peoples and environmentalists about the loss of the pastures and the selling of these Crown lands. But this type of alliance is absent in the history covered in Protecting the Prairies. In fact, Scott found himself at the centre of a legal battle over Métis hunting rights, being pressured by many (white) members of the public to restrict Métis hunting. According to Olive, in 1998, after the Court of Queen’s Bench had ruled that Métis people had to follow the same provincial hunting and fishing rights as non-Indigenous peoples, Scott’s office implemented a policy for Métis subsistence harvesters in Northern Saskatchewan, giving them the equivalent of an Aboriginal right to hunt. This is one of the only substantive areas of the book that deals with Indigenous people’s articulation to conservation policy.
In sum, Protecting the Prairies is written for a public audience and for readers concerned about prairie ecosystems and the mechanisms of policy change. I imagine it as very suitable for an undergraduate audience. While much has been written about the political history and the history of natural resource development in the province, this book fills in a gap about Saskatchewan’s history of conservation politics. And the details of Lorne Scott’s lifelong contributions bring those politics to life.
Emily Eaton
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- Review of Olive, Protecting the Prairies - November 6, 2024