P. WHITNEY LACKENBAUER AND MATTHEW FARISH
the cold war on
CANADIAN SOIL:
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
ABSTRACT
Given the low standard of contact between environmental and military historians, it is
unsurprising, if regrettable, that the relationship between military activity and natural
landscapes in Canada has received minimal scholarly attention. This paper seeks to open
space for such an environmental history of militarism and militarization. Focusing on the
Cold War and its aftermath, the essay documents the history of military activity on Canadian
soil, with an emphasis on the North, specifically examining a set of crucial projects and
operations that redefined not only physical terrain but associated imaginative
understandings of nature. The history of Cold War Canada is littered with suitable examples,
from early military exercises and the construction of the Distant Early Warning (DEW)
radar line to more recent missile tests and low-level training flights. While it is crucial that
these are understood in environmental terms, a genealogy of military activity in the Canadian
North reveals changing and at times contrasting approaches to the military-environment
relationship. Equally, however, as northern nature was viewed through a series of shifting
strategic perspectives, it remained a target of state-driven modernization linked consistently
to military objectives.
It had not been any failure of weapons in the cold that had prevented winter
warfare. It had been the inability to move, to supply and to live away from
main roads and railways. These have always been the problems of civilian
frontiers. Wartime progress in winter techniques in Canada has thus, by good
fortune, had to be directed not to weapons but to logistics, so that the answers
obtained can now, after the war, be directly applied to opening up the North.
Winter training would, therefore, seem to be a natural and useful role for
Canadian services in peacetime.
J. Tuzo Wilson
Canadian Geographical Journal, 19461
P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Matthew Farish, “The Cold War on Canadian Soil: Militarizing a Northern
Environment,” Environmental History 12 (October 2007): 920-50.
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
ON FEBRUARY 15, 1946, the “Moving Force” of Exercise Musk-Ox left Fort
Churchill, Manitoba, and over almost three months traced a 5,000 kilometer-long
northern arc via Victoria Island and Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories
to Edmonton, Alberta. Fort Churchill, later home to Canada’s Defence Research
Northern Laboratory, was by the end of the Second World War a site of significant
research on military bodies, units, and technologies under adverse environmental
conditions.2 Musk-Ox was an extraordinary extension of these research interests.
It was less a routine test of endurance than a public spectacle held within a
territory of new strategic interest, a demonstration of the Canadian military’s
ability to travel across, and thus command, a challenging landscape. Staged at
the outset of the Cold War, Musk-Ox offered no significant human enemies for
its participants, or for the audiences digesting reportage of the event. Rather,
the chief opponent was nature itself.3
The Cold War’s first decade featured numerous northern exercises similar to
Musk-Ox, part of a broader militarization of the North American Arctic capped
by the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line radar project.4 With the end of the
dominant historical narrative of the twentieth century’s second half, scholars
have begun to examine the geographic legacy of the Cold War—the ways in which
it defined and transformed specific sites, from proxy conflicts in client states to
the suburban streets of a superpower.5 This legacy is not just one of impact upon
landscapes; it also reflects the broader Cold War interest—on the part of the United
States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, their allies—in military
environments on a global scale. The result of such interest, as signalled by the
early example of Musk-Ox, was the systematic consolidation of nature as a
military entity, but also an extension of the scope and terms of militarization to
reflect the cautious longevity of the Cold War.
In North America and beyond, the continued prominence of military actors,
technologies, institutions, and, more crucially, perspectives (many with definite
Cold War roots) has inspired a small but growing literature on what Rachel
Woodward has called “militarism’s geographies.” If militarism is understood as
pervasive, “its effects on spaces, places, environments, and landscapes” require
attention from historical geographers and environmental historians. War, the
central subject for traditional “terrain and tactics” approaches to military
geography, constitutes only “the endpoint of a range of processes, practices, ideas
and arguments which make it possible.” A more critical vantage, Woodward
concludes, would reveal a wider set of relationships between militarism and
geography, whether in cultural, economic, or environmental terms.6
The global history of the American armed forces indicates increased attention
during and after the Second World War to the world’s hostile environments,
terrain types which might, it was believed, be scenes of conflict under the umbrella
of planetary struggles with fascism and then communism. This essay addresses
one such environment: the Canadian North. Frequently combined with Alaska
and Greenland to form a vaguely defined region, the Canadian North was a site of
keen military concern throughout the Cold War. While northern landscapes have
of late been wrapped into altered strategic representations flush with the
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Adapted by Eric Leinberger from Morris Zaslow, The Northward Expansion of Canada, 1914-1967 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988), 204; and K. C. Eyre, “Custos
Borealis: The Military in the Canadian North” (PhD thesis, King’s College, University of London, 1981), 81, 152.
Map 1. The Military North, 1940-1967
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MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
terminology of human and environmental security, these discourses are, as we
will show, not entirely products of the post-Cold War era. More importantly,
contemporary claims to geopolitical novelty are overshadowed by the persistent
treatment of the Canadian North as a military object, along with the startling
fact that at least some of the recent revisions of northern nature are direct,
reflexive responses to the risk-laden legacy of Cold War militarization.7 This essay
is thus first and foremost concerned with shifting military understandings of
the Canadian North as a natural space, since an accounting of exercises,
installations, and impacts is incomplete without a parallel sensitivity to the
currents of representation.
An environmental history of Cold War Canada is additionally important
because historians have been slow to move beyond diplomatic or social analyses
of the period, which often remain unnecessarily national, in step with political
rhetoric.8 As a bastion between an apparently aggressive Soviet Union and the
North American industrial heartland, northern Canada was a key component of
Cold War strategic maps. During the 1950s, in particular, recognition of these
cartographic conditions led to intense military and associated activity in the
Arctic, a region that had, until the Second World War, been largely ignored by
defense officials. The first decade of the Cold War witnessed a variety of attempts,
some relatively minor, others extraordinarily ambitious, to overcome what was
perceived to be an antagonistic environment. Military exercises, conducted in
scores of Canadian locations from the Yukon to Labrador, were not only tests of
individual and unit readiness for northern warfare against an invading force,
but state-driven campaigns to document and respond to natural challenges.
Meanwhile, the construction of radar lines and associated settlements
undermined the perception of Canadian wilderness as inhospitable.
During this early wave of interest, “neither the United States nor Canada
looked on the North as a place to be protected because of some intrinsic value,”
Kenneth Eyre observes. “Rather it was seen as a direction, as an exposed flank.”9
Until the late 1960s few proponents of northern militarization were concerned with
what this process entailed beyond the outlines of perceived Cold War pressures.
This limited vision was challenged, for a number of reasons, and from a number of
perspectives, as the Cold War entered its third and fourth decades. But the seemingly
unremarkable and yet singular perception of the North as a natural space readily
subject to military forms of geographical vision did not diminish.
Several bodies of scholarship inform this essay, which seeks to link Canadian
environmental history with military and diplomatic history, while furthering more
familiar affiliations with historical geography and opening avenues for future
research on similar themes and cases. First, the modest literature on the military
in the Canadian North, which effectively begins with the Second World War,
provides important context. “The Americans changed the landscape wherever they
went, with new roads, airfields, pipelines, military bases, and new communication
and other services,” observed Kenneth Coates and William Morrison in a
landmark study of the Alaska Highway. “Regions once largely isolated, like
Greenland, Northern Queensland in Australia, and the Canadian Northwest were
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showered with new facilities.”10 But while they touch on environmental issues,
historians have not tracked the environmental consequences of militarization
in a sustained manner.11
Second, we draw from a broader literature on militarization and the
environment, particularly that which analyzes the deleterious (and occasionally
protective) effects of military activity on domestic territory. Much of this
literature has focused on the American West, and is, in its more nuanced varieties,
not limited to a nonhuman nature, but rather views militarization through the
trope of sacrifice areas in which human lifeworlds as well as those of innumerable
other species are damaged or displaced. 12 It is possible, and tempting, to
historicize the Canadian North as an equivalent sacrifice area, essentially given
over to military activity with little consideration granted the region’s diversity.
But whereas portions of the American West such as the Nevada Test Site were
effectively treated as empty space suited to dramatic experiments on formidable
Cold War weaponry, the Canadian North was at once more strategic—a more likely
site for actual war than the Nevada desert—and subject to a more holistic form of
governmental intervention, driven by military demands and dollars but
incorporating scientific and economic curiosity as well. That said, these
additional interests were also characteristic of an earlier American West, and it
is equally important to acknowledge the lingering force of a frontier ideal in the
twentieth-century North, and the influence this has had on representations of
both nature and culture.13
The environmental history of the Cold War Canadian North is best understood
through the lens of military modernization, a particular version of a familiar
narrative: that of a state (or, in this case, often two) working to make a landscape
legible so as to enroll it more effectively into such classic political responsibilities,
according to James C. Scott, as “taxation, conscription, and prevention of
rebellion.”14 These did not drive the militarization of the Cold War North;
geopolitics did. But put into practice, militarism in the North was similar to the
nonmilitary projects Scott documents in his compelling study Seeing Like a State
(Yale, 1998), projects backed by the authority of reason and the latest technologies,
designed at a distance and implemented without sufficient attention to local
conditions. As the Cold War proceeded, this dynamic changed. Nevertheless, the
fact that environmental assessment and remediation directly related to military
activity initiated in the early Cold War period is still ongoing suggests that this
activity was not only significant, but also that the power of the military’s
instrumental, oppositional approach to northern nature has not entirely
diminished.
EARLY FORAYS
IF THE FIRST WORLD WAR heralded the dawn of the air age, air power still posed
no serious threat to North American security. With this awareness, the Canadian
government focused on domestic unity. The fledgling Royal Canadian Air Force
spent much of its time mapping and charting in the North, but did not build
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
permanent infrastructure in the region and never ventured into the high Arctic.
The Royal Canadian Corps of Signals opened the first stations of the Northwest
Territories and Yukon Radio System in 1923, installations that soon dotted the
landscape and revealed how the military could be used as a tool to support national
development programs in the North. Apart from this wireless communication
infrastructure, the military’s presence was insubstantial, and even if the region’s
environmental challenges were well known, it was not considered holistically in
the language of strategy.15
The Second World War was a watershed in the militarization of the Canadian
North. At the behest of American military planners interested in securing reliable
access to Alaska, Canadian officials agreed to support the construction of
northern airfields. The Northwest Airway, built from 1939-1941 to link Edmonton
to Fairbanks, established airfields and radio sites at one hundred mile intervals.
The subsequent Northwest Staging Route produced a larger series of airfields in
the Yukon and provincial norths, as did highway and oil projects. In the eastern
Arctic, the Crimson Route consisted of airbases built to ferry aircraft and supplies
to Europe. These were constructed in Goose Bay, Fort Chimo, and Frobisher Bay
in 1941, and at The Pas, Churchill, and Southampton Island the following year.
Even when these facilities were not used as planned, they opened up new
transportation routes to—and through—the North.16 None were large or paved, with
the exception of Goose Bay, Labrador, which boasted the world’s largest airport
by 1943. Besieged by a “friendly invasion” of Canadian and American soldiers,
airmen and seamen, Newfoundland and Labrador was particularly affected by
the reach of World War II; the social and environmental traces of this are still
discernable today, from Argentia to Gander and beyond.17 In Goose Bay, the
presence of an airport was a boon, at least for non-Aboriginal residents. Its
creation displaced a settlement of about thirty Native families, however, and
provided few jobs for Native peoples once construction finished.18
Disruptions were more profound in the western sub-Arctic, home to the
Northwest Defence Projects. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and civilian
contractors carried out most of the construction, with a view to short-term
military goals. “This was a peaceful army of occupation,” Coates and Morrison
observed. “The main weapons were the shovel, not the rifle, and the bulldozer,
not the tank. But such a force—more than 40,000 soldiers and construction
workers—could not help but recast the sparsely populated and undeveloped
Northwest.”19 The Alaska Highway soon linked an isolated American possession
to the southern road network through the Yukon, northern British Columbia, and
Alberta, while the Canol Pipeline extended from the oil fields at Norman Wells to
a refinery in Whitehorse. These military mega-projects radically transformed the
human and physical geography of the North. Bulldozers tore permafrost off the
ground, disrupting ecosystems and creating impassable quagmires. Forest fires,
logging, over-hunting, and over-fishing depleted resources in the region. Arriving
workers brought diseases, from measles to VD, which devastated indigenous
populations. Scientific and geographic surveys, telephone systems linking
Edmonton to Fairbanks and Norman Wells, shortwave communication systems,
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small generating plants, and wage employment all furthered connections to
distant centers of calculation.20 But as with Cold War endeavors further north,
engineering marvels did not master a distinct natural environment: unanticipated
conditions and minimal understanding of the local terrain meant that the
infrastructure was not up to proper standards. “Pioneer” roads had treacherous
grades and disintegrated during spring thaws.21
Philip Godsell’s The Romance of the Alaska Highway (Ryerson Press, 1944)
rests heavily on the imagery of the military sweeping north to conquer an
unforgiving and exotic land barely touched by humans. The highway was a
“modern miracle which has bridged 1,600 miles of bottomless muskegs, roaring
mountain streams and untamed wilderness,” Godsell boasted. “Faced with the
threat of Asiatic invasion Uncle Sam’s parka-clad engineers and doughboys swung
into action, to engrave on the scroll of Time a saga of ingenuity and engineering
skill which has few counterparts in history.” The achievement was a vindication
of the “frontier tradition,” and trumpeted the masculine prowess of the
construction crews who toiled in “a harsh, stern land where none but the strong
could survive.” They may not have battled Japanese soldiers, but they fought a
formidable foe: “Bridging unpredictable glacial streams, scaling white-capped
peaks, wrestling with quaking bog and muskeg; fighting mosquitoes and bullflies
in summer, and stinging, searing winter cold that froze the very marrow in their
bones—through tropic heat and Arctic cold they ploughed ahead.” Indeed, nature
was cast as a military enemy: “As they hacked through black-massed battalions
of spruce and serrated rows of colonnaded pines still others rose in a seemingly
impenetrable sage-green barrier ahead, parading in mass formation like an
inanimate army determined by the very weight of numbers to resist and wear
down the threatening forces of invasion. … Night and day, with relentless activity,
the primeval battle went on unceasingly.”22
Godsell also constructed the northern environment through the lens of race.
His book positioned Native peoples, described as “the first invaders from the
continent of Asia,” as a part of nature, overcome with wonder and awe at the
modern machinery and with “Negroes who became helplessly lost if they strayed
far from road or camp [and] soon became a major occupation for Indian guides
and scouts.” White men, it seemed, never lost their bearings. The kuskitayweasuk,
or “black meats,” as the Natives referred to African-American soldiers, joined
with “red-men, half-breeds and trappers in tripping the light fantastic” to the
sounds of fiddles in the camps, all carefully observed by the “scarlet-coated
Mountie.” Despite the wildness of the landscape, readers could rest assured that
the “constituted authority” maintained order and control. Indeed, the entire
project, for Godsell, entailed mobilizing a “virgin forest” in the service of war.
Time would tell, Godsell wrote, whether “the majestic highway, rushed to
completion with such a tremendous expenditure of money and labour, [would] be
left to languish and return to nature when the excitement of this war is over and
peace again throws her mantle over the world?”23
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
A HOSTILE NATURE
THE ANSWER was no. The military presence in the North did not cease with
declarations of Allied victory in 1945. In part this was because of the Cold War’s
sudden emergence, but the justifications for northern militarization, and related
scientific inquiry, were dependent not only on particular geopolitical
circumstances. Although the subjects of sovereignty and, more vaguely,
continental defense were discussed in wartime Ottawa and Washington, the North
was additionally becoming part of a more generic geography, a view which treated
the region as both important and unknown. Institutions such as the American
Air Force’s Arctic, Desert, and Tropic Information Center (ADTIC), briefly
discontinued at the end of the war, sprang into action once again to continue
research on problems of survival and combat in nontemperate climates.
The Canadian North was a crucial component of this inquiry; it was proximate,
strategically significant, but also mysterious. As the Director of the Arctic
Institute of North America, Lincoln Washburn, argued in 1948, “in general the
fundamental aims of Arctic exploration are purely scientific—to learn more about
the North, to solve the many problems that confront us there and which must be
solved before we are in a position to describe the North accurately and completely.
From this point of view the North differs from no other region; where it does
differ is in the fact that we know so little about it compared with most other parts
of the world.”24
Washburn did not mention that postwar scientific expeditions in the North
were being funded overwhelmingly by military sources. It therefore made sense
that journalistic articles about the Arctic during the early Cold War were filled
with terms such as “assault” and “invasion.”25 But the “polar regions,” a U.S. Air
Force researcher wrote in the preface to a 1953 ADTIC study of survival experiences
in the north, “are not to be entered casually or in an unprepared state. The
environment presents unique problems not met elsewhere in the world. Constant
study and experimentation are needed to adapt machines, materiel, and men to
its demands.” The examples documented in the text did not result from contact
with a human enemy; the “adversary in these episodes was the environment.”26
Military activity in the Cold War North was thus not just a physical
engagement with soil, muskeg, permafrost, water, and ice; it was critical to the
formation of a new imaginative geography of the Arctic. Clear evidence of the
transition is found in the numerous military exercises of the 1940s and 1950s,
varying in duration, scale, and premise, which traced a series of scars across the
region. The natural nordicity of these operations was apparent in their names:
Musk-Ox, Lemming, Eskimo, Polar Bear, Sun Dog, and Sweetbriar. Although their
cumulative imprint was still nowhere near as significant as that of concurrent
radar construction, their sheer volume is testament to the direct interest of the
Canadian and American armed forces in winter warfare. Indeed, the importance
of these forays into the North is collective.
For Major Patrick Baird, a participant or observer on several winter warfare
exercises in the 1940s, such repeated tests of equipment and endurance
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demonstrated that with appropriate technology and provisions military
“operations in the barren grounds which represent one third of Canada’s area
can be as unhindered as operations on the Libyan desert.”27 This was the premise
which lay behind agencies such as ADTIC: to show that while the Arctic required
specific study, it was, ultimately, only part of a set of hostile Cold War
environments which spanned the globe, environments where the American armed
forces might find themselves stationed. While Baird’s adventures might have been
motivated by the desires of Canadian officials to secure military experience on
their own terrain, national defense was constantly overshadowed in the first
decade of the Cold War by significant American pressure to share results and
space. The United States had Alaska, of course, which effectively became a Cold
War laboratory. But military exercises such as 1950’s Sweetbriar, which crossed
the Alaska-Yukon border and was deliberately designed as a binational event,
demonstrated that political borders were far less important than a common
natural environment.28 This shared landscape would automatically unite Canada
and the United States in the event of northern warfare, and thus in the planning
for this potential combat.
While military exercises were planned and executed, more ambitious plans
for Arctic defense were also developed. Although it would take a decade to be
implemented, the vision of a radar line stretching across the northern edge of
the continent was discussed as early as 1946, when U.S. Army Air Force planners
proposed a string of northern radar sites that could track waves of incoming Soviet
planes.29 When finally constructed in the late 1950s, this system, dubbed the
Distant Early Warning Line, was an extraordinary intervention that likely did
more to alter the lives of northern inhabitants than any other Cold War initiative.30
The DEW Line was made possible by a comprehensive exercise in military
geography: exhaustive terrain, climatic, and coastal surveys undertaken with the
aid of the Canadian Joint Intelligence Bureau and arms of both national militaries.
This was, in effect, a vast catalog of environmental data designed to aid “all those
who may be involved in the work of planning and installing the Distant Early
Warning Line.”31 But like the sponsors and designers of ambitious high modernist
projects considered by James C. Scott, the Line’s creators were forced to grapple
with the nuances of the northern environment.32
Articles in engineering journals tracing the progress of “Project 572”—as the
DEW Line construction effort was initially known—are prefaced with the language
of adventure, “the heights to which determination can aspire, in the face of
frustrating odds ... despite an uncooperative Nature.” But these reports also testify
to the limitations of “data” on northern landscapes, despite significant attempts
at collection and consultation, in the early stages of the project. These gaps, it
was believed, could be filled by field reconnaissance. Even then, when construction
began, “no member of the 572 Project had set foot on any of the proposed locations,
except the experimental sites in Alaska and a few native settlements in Canada.”33
“Hazardous aircraft flights over trackless wastes,” landings on “unprepared and
unmarked snowfields,” encounters with “the Eskimo and his primitive life” in an
“unmapped country,” and surveying successes in “sub-zero temperatures” were
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
all common components of the “fantastic” tale of the DEW Line, an “unparalleled”
“full-scale attack on the Arctic” narrated within and beyond scientific
communities.34 Such colorful descriptions certainly tested the dispassionate
terms of high modernism. More importantly, while these engineering stories
began with drama and concluded with success, it was difficult to maintain a
consistent tone: “many mistakes were made in the early stages of planning. Early
issues of drawings incomplete or containing architectural-engineer conflicts
resulted in erroneous material and tool procurement and shortages.
Unavailability of information on site topography, layout and soils led to
inadequate heavy equipment being furnished. … The errors resulting from the
inability to complete plans caused delays in some components of the schedules
which were costly and serious in relation to completion.”35
Overcoming an arduous environment also became a typical narrative for media
stories on the DEW Line, stories that similarly highlighted the successful
application of modern solutions to treacherous terrain. The Western Electric
Corporation, contracted to build and operate the radar line, noted in its short
history of this construction that
As you follow the DEW Line across Canada, the farther east you go the more
forbidding the country becomes. It starts out being rugged and treacherous and
ends up on the east coast of Baffin Island, a nightmare of precipitous mountains
and rocky gorges. … But it isn’t only the cold and never-ending darkness that make
winter on the DEW Line such a cruel, uncompromising foe. Combine these with
howling 100-mile-an-hour winds and snow constantly on the move in the teeth of
the king-sized blizzards that are commonplace, and you have a force to be reckoned
with. Men on the DEW Line learned quickly that you can’t fight the Arctic. You’ve
got to learn to respect it, to live with it, to rock with its punches. That’s the way the
DEW Line was built.36
Journalists who visited DEW sites under construction faced censorship, but
their directives suggested that “difficulties due to terrain, weather, distance, [and]
wild animals may be mentioned together with human interest stories on
construction personnel.” News writers were provided with stock anecdotes of
nasty weather conditions, polar bear encounters, and the benefits of “Eskimo”
clothing, which limited perspiration but kept workers warm—when it could be
found in sufficiently large sizes.37 Similarly, readers of their newspapers and
magazines learned that the actual radar installations comfortably housed
southern workers who enjoyed all the amenities of modern living while serving
on the remote front lines of Cold War surveillance and detection.38
To prepare for a potential Soviet invasion, it was not enough to detect aircraft.
Northern landscapes, low in population and sufficiently far from Soviet eyes, were
seen as particularly suitable for Air Force training.39 The development of jets,
rockets, and missiles, as well as high-level bombing and fighter interceptor
training, required a new Canadian air weapons center, and in April 1951 Defence
Minister Brooke Claxton informed Parliament that a bombing and gunnery range
centered on Primrose Lake would encompass 4,490 square miles.40 This expanse
of “unoccupied” Crown lands straddled the Alberta-Saskatchewan border along
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the fifty-fifth parallel, and the dense boreal forest and muskeg suitably resembled
a potential battlespace over Europe and Siberia. Negotiations over the range
focused on human geographies and little else. It would affect resource
exploitation, commercial fishing, and trap lines, but would not encroach on any
settlements. Hunters, fishermen, and trappers were compensated for their
interests in the land, and some Aboriginal communities received additional money
to offset partially the disruption of their traditional subsistence economies.41
For the first time, the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) expressed a direct
interest in the “preservation of national wildlife values in connection with projects
for defence training schemes.” Dr. Harrison Lewis was concerned that the bombing
range plans had not been referred to the CWS so that “national interests in wildlife
may receive consideration before action is taken.” He pointed to the U.S. military’s
consultations with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prior to recent atomic tests
and explosions in the Nevada desert as a model practice. Given provincial
jurisdiction over natural resources, the issue was more complicated in Canada,
but the federal Minister of Resources and Development reminded his Defence
counterpart that military development and control of “large tracts of land for
use as bombing ranges, training areas, or other defence purposes … may have
important effects on the widely distributed wildlife resources of Canada.” The
CWS duly appointed a wildlife officer “of extensive military experience and
appropriate military rank” to deal with National Defence on these matters. As
negotiations for the air weapons range neared completion, Saskatchewan officials
raised the possibility that an epidemic could break out amongst wild animals,
should overcrowding occur when trapping and harvesting ceased on the property.
“A large population, particularly natives, in this region of the north, depend almost
entirely on trapping for their livelihood,” one document noted, “and we are
naturally anxious to avoid damage to the industry.” The Department of Defence
was unwilling to change its development plans to accommodate trapping because
this would interfere with its training program. “The airport is nearing completion,
buildings, including hangars, are under construction and public utilities are
under way,” the deputy minister reported. If the range were unavailable, the base
would be of little use. Environmental concerns were quantified as financial
compensation to trappers and the provinces for opportunity costs in resource
development.42
Beginning in 1952, Alberta’s Cold Lake air station became a major Cold War
facility for pilot training and weapons testing. Two runways, each over a mile in
length, “stretched across the muskeg, while massive hangars and buildings,
showpieces of modern technology, rose [over what had once been] the haunts of
coyotes. A large and modern community had thrust out the wild forests of jackpine
and spruce.” The station housed more than five thousand people, and featured
many of the amenities of modern life: a hospital, tennis courts, a school, even a
shopping center.43 Bombing practice, noisy overflights, and air-to-ground training
on the 106 target complexes eventually established on the range produced
intermittent “startle effects” in wildlife, and practice bombs, rockets, strafe,
explosive ordnance, flares, marker marines, chaff, aerial targets, and tow wire
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
resulted in terrain damage and vegetation impacts. “Academic range training”
at Jimmy Lake posed the greatest disturbances: more than two hundred lowaltitude sorties were flown over this location during a busy month, each typically
involving six bombing passes, four rocket passes, four strafing passes, and two
“dry passes.” In addition to aircraft noise, firing rockets and cannons produced
sonic shock waves that exceeded decibel levels associated with “startle effects.”
At the same time, the military’s occupation served to limit outside resource
exploitation and development. In subsequent decades, when oil and gas
infrastructure and agricultural expansion engulfed neighboring lands, the
weapons range remained a heavily controlled yet protected boreal mixedwood
habitat for species like moose, caribou, bison, and river otter. Indeed, the
abundance of woodland caribou on the range suggested that they successfully
habituated to training exercises.44 The example of Cold Lake suggests that the
study of military-environment relations requires a contextual interpretation that
does not begin with assumptions of automatic degradation.
It does little good to confer present-day expectations on fifty-year-old policies
and their designers, as though they should have systematically contemplated the
environment in current scientific and cultural terms. Equally, however, it is a
mistake to conclude that rudimentary ecological principles—often unintentional
byproducts of the nuclear arms race—were absent from political and military
circles during the early Cold War.45 The Canadian Department of National Defence
(DND) relinquished its control over a high explosive weapons testing area near
Watson Lake, Yukon, in 1954, and while it did not find any unexploded ordnance
during its surface clean-up, it acknowledged the missiles or bomb fragments could
still be present. The military ensured that the Department of Resources and
Development did not anticipate major impacts on wildlife prior to establishing a
danger area for surface-to-air guided missile testing in Hudson Bay, or a practice
gunnery and bombing range at Grey Goose Island in James Bay. Given that the
latter was a major migration route for Canada geese and snow geese, and “an
important part of the food supply of the Indians who reside near the southern
end of James Bay,” the National Parks Branch requested that the air force curtail
its activities during the summer and autumn migration periods.46
At the 1958 meeting of the Royal Society of Canada, Robert Legget (Director
of the Division of Building Research at the National Research Council) proudly
explained that the technological developments of the previous decade had
changed the face of the North, and that engineers had “direct[ed] the great sources
of power in Nature for the use and convenience of man.”47 This was the language
of environmental modernization, which enrolled an increasingly definite region
in national and continental maps even as its geopolitical limitations were
becoming clear. Within the global purview of the Cold War, the colonial curiosity
of military science in the North was shifting to other landscapes. New
technologies, particularly intercontinental ballistic missiles, also redirected
attention away from the region in the late 1950s. Canadian military activities in
the region declined sharply. The DEW Line continued its vigil along the coast,
but half of the radar stations were decommissioned in 1964 and DND transferred
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the infrastructure (and liability) to the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs.
Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s election rhetoric about a new northern
national policy proved fleeting, and his tenure (1957-1963) was plagued by
indecision and inaction. The Canadian Forces vacated Churchill, the Department
of Transport took over many northern airfields, and the Northwest Highway
System was transferred to civilian control. Apart from the annual maritime
resupply of the DEW Line, this “new Mediterranean”—as the geographer Trevor
Lloyd dubbed the Arctic Ocean in an era of jets and nuclear submarines—was a
relatively quiet military space.48
Nevertheless, military actors remained prominent in new settlements
established around bases and radar stations, with a host of cultural and
environmental implications. Off-road vehicles damaged vegetation and organic
matter, resulting in the melting of permafrost, in turn affecting hydrological
systems. So too did the discharge of sewage onto the tundra, never mind the
presence of new physical barriers (such as roads, airstrips, and landfills) on the
landscape. Disruption of the local social order, whereby Aboriginal hunters did
not procure food in a seasonal cycle as they had previously, and denser clusters
of people around military sites meant more competition for resources. The DEW
Line personnel were not allowed to hunt: their rifles were sealed unless polar
bears, attracted to the site’s garbage or food caches, needed to be shot for safety.
There is no doubt, however, that the transient workers also violated hunting and
fishing regulations, depleting local animal and fish stocks, not to mention visitors
who “appear[ed] to believe game laws only apply to residents.” Federal officials
expressed serious concern with rumors that commercial pilots supplying the DEW
Line buzzed caribou herds for amusement, given the “alarming” decline in caribou
numbers. “It is difficult to say exactly what damage is done to a caribou herd that
is harried by an aircraft,” the deputy minister of Northern Affairs and Natural
Resources noted,” but most wildlife experts are convinced that there are a number
of undesirable results.”49 The full magnitude of these impacts cannot be
determined, but anecdotes suggest that these activities—coupled with the
concentration of Aboriginal groups around military installations—had
devastating local impacts and disrupted the traditional native subsistence
economy.
SOVEREIGNTY AND SYMBOLISM
PIERRE TRUDEAU’S ELECTION as Prime Minister in 1968 signalled a new era in
Canadian political life. He was uncomfortable with Canada’s “helpful fixer” role
abroad, scaled back its commitments to NATO, and reshuffled military priorities
to highlight sovereignty protection and continental defense.50 His liberalism was
the product of a decade which had witnessed, among other dramatic
developments, the emergence of a widespread ecological consciousness in North
America. At the same time, Trudeau was interested in northern development, and
rediscovered a role for the Canadian Forces in protecting Arctic sovereignty. The
most pressing threat was not Soviet invasion, but the challenge to Canadian
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
claims from its closest ally. The media generated significant public alarm over
the voyages of the American ice-breaking supertanker Manhattan in 1969 and
1970, which revealed the feasibility of carrying oil from Alaska to the eastern
seaboard through the Northwest Passage. Canadian leaders viewed the passage
as internal waters, while American spokespeople insisted that it was an
international strait. This sovereignty challenge provided an important connection
to the larger theme of Canada’s custodial responsibilities in the North. “If the
Manhattan succeeds,” a (Toronto) Globe and Mail editorial anticipated on
September 9, 1969, “other oil laden vessels will follow in her wake. Before that
happens Canada must be ready to receive and control them; for it is Canada’s
northland that would be devastated if the ice won and the tanker lost.” What if a
supertanker ran aground along the Northwest Passage? The Liberian tanker Arrow
had run aground off Chedabucto Bay, Nova Scotia, in early 1970, discharging nine
million liters of oil and polluting hundreds of kilometers of shoreline. Canadian
scientists suggested that a similar accident in the Arctic Ocean would have
catastrophic effects, and the media reported such forecasts to an emotionally
charged Canadian public.51
A delicate Arctic thus became a convenient pretext to extend Canadian
jurisdiction northward, and the government took direct action to securitize the
region. In his October 1969 Throne Speech to Parliament, Trudeau explained that
“Canada regards herself as responsible to all mankind for the peculiar ecological
balance that now exists so precariously in the water, ice and land areas of the
Arctic Archipelago. We do not doubt for a moment that the rest of the world would
find us at fault, and hold us liable, should we fail to ensure adequate protection of
that environment from pollution or artificial deterioration. Canada will not permit
this to happen.”52 Sovereignty had never been far from the lips of Canadian
politicians and other “northern nationalists,” although it was certainly secondary
to military exigency during the 1940s and 1950s. 53 But this pressure was
diminishing, and Trudeau’s environmentalist spin on lingering nationalist
concerns was novel.
The decision to frame foreign, particularly American activities as a threat to
Canada, violating the country’s territorial integrity and jeopardizing the broader
human right to live in a “wholesome natural environment,” allowed the state to
adopt extraordinary means to protect its environmental interests with
unprecedented haste.54 The Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act created a
regulatory zone extending one hundred miles out from Canadian shores in waters
north of the sixtieth parallel. The Territorial Sea and Fishing Zone Act extended
Canada’s territorial sea from three to twelve miles, which meant that any foreign
vessels entering the Northwest Passage would have to cross waters subject to
Canadian control. Both bills passed parliament unanimously.55 This renewed
interest in Arctic waters also had implications for terrestrial spaces: the first
regulations governing Arctic land use were introduced in 1972. By this time, of
course, debris and waste from military activity had already been scattered across
the North, often in unmarked drums susceptible to corrosion and posing
“considerable environmental liability.” Soils at former military installations were
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Adapted by Eric Leinberger from William D. Smith, Northwest Passage (New York: American Heritage Press, 1970); and E. J. Dosman, ed., The Arctic in Question (Toronto:
Oxford University Press, 1976), 1.
Map 2. The Manhattan Voyage and Canadian Jurisdiction
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MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other inorganic
compounds abandoned when the military departed in the 1960s. Asbestos, leadbased paints, building debris, and leaky drums of fuel, oils, and solvents were
stored in buildings or scattered around the sites. While these concentrations
represented a tiny fraction of the overall contamination levels in the North, their
local ecological impacts were significant.56 Because the fresh regulations did not
apply retroactively, however, these were matters to be left for another generation.
The armed forces had an obvious role in safeguarding sovereignty and
independence, and provided a functional capability to show the flag in remote
areas. The 1971 White Paper on Defence asserted that Canadian sovereignty could
face nonmilitary challenges in the 1970s, and that the military had to reconfigure
its surveillance and reconnaissance role to incorporate nonevasive, nonhostile,
and often cooperative “targets.” Defense policy would now reflect broader national
policy goals, including ensuring “a harmonious natural environment.”57 For
example, the Air Force would have to be prepared to conduct surveillance of
Canadian waters to detect pollution from foreign vessels, and the armed forces
would be expected to help arrest ships that breached Canadian environmental
regulations.58
Despite government rhetoric of expansion and the assertion of sovereignty,
however, the military’s presence in the North did not change significantly in the
1970s. Troop reductions abroad translated into a smaller Canadian Forces, not
redeployments to the Canadian North. The Army conducted frequent winter
indoctrination patrols, parachute assault exercises prepared the Canadian
Airborne Regiment for Arctic combat, Arctus aircraft logged thousands of flying
hours over the Arctic archipelago, and naval vessels ventured into northeastern
waters to fly the Maple Leaf. Taken together, however, these activities were
transient and limited. Long-range air surveillance patrols were constrained by
weather and the lack of northern airfields, naval ships were confined to select
waters only in ice-free months, and ground surveillance was impractical given
the distances involved.59 The Canadian Rangers, an unpaid volunteer force
comprising mainly indigenous northern residents who acted as the military’s eyes
and ears in remote communities, expanded in number and coverage. They were a
way to show the flag without incurring the high expense of committing regular
force units to the North. Their environmental impact was slight, except for the
caribou and seals brought down by their military-issue rifles and ammunition.60
Apart from the creation of a new Northern Region headquarters in Yellowknife,
the military’s physical presence in the North was still much less than the mid1950s.
Nevertheless, relatively modest military activities continued to leave their
mark on northern landscapes. The federal government embraced a national
development role for the Canadian armed forces, and military engineers seized
the opportunity to work in what they considered “very remote and hostile
climates,” viewing the challenge of northern construction as a complement to their
combat training. Major projects included the building of bridges along the Dempster
Highway in the Yukon and the construction or upgrading of remote airfields, which
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the Department of Indian and Northern Development (DIAND) supported as a
measure to improve communications in the North. Remote airfield construction
could have been completed by civilian contractors, but gave military engineers a
chance to operate in environments likened to “combat conditions,” which demanded
“a considerable amount of inspired adaptation.”61 By this time, the Canadian North
per se was not likely to be a battlefield in which soldiers would be forced to fight,
but it still served usefully as an inherently hostile environment.
The immediate crisis atmosphere over Arctic sovereignty ended when the
American tanker initiative was abandoned in favor of a trans-Alaskan pipeline,
which posed no immediate challenge to Canadian territorial claims. Declining
political and military interest in the region reflected this perception of a
diminished threat. But the saliency of environmentalism in northern political
discourse did not wane, and became explicitly tied to broader concepts of security.
The most threatening mega-projects in the 1970s originated with the hydrocarbon
and hydroelectric industries, not the military. When the Quebec government
announced its intention to exploit the hydro-electric power of James Bay in 1971,
and refused to negotiate with Cree and Inuit communities, Aboriginal groups
initiated legal action and launched debate about the extent and meaning of
Aboriginal rights. A few years later, a Mackenzie Valley pipeline threatened to
disrupt Aboriginal livelihoods and an intensive public inquiry exposed potential
impacts. In Thomas Berger’s landmark 1977 Mackenzie Valley Pipeline report,
based upon extensive consultation with residents, northern native peoples came
to symbolize the epitome of environmentalism: harmony with nature, an intrinsic
spiritual connection to the land and fauna, and deep-seated ecological
knowledge.62 The government had employed the idea of the Arctic as “homeland”
to assert its sovereignty, and Aboriginal peoples adopted the same logic to bolster
their own claims. The official supposition could hardly be retracted, particularly
as Aboriginal Canadians began to organize politically.63
The idea that northern residents might need protection from Canadian
military activities came to the fore in the debate over cruise missile testing in
the early 1980s, a time of contradiction in Canadian defense policy. In 1983, Pierre
Trudeau (back in office once more) embarked on a peace initiative to convince
world leaders “to civilize the dialogue … [and] get out of the Cold War era.” This
message met with little positive reception in Washington, but Canada’s enduring
security alliances stood intact.64 Concurrently, Trudeau’s government had signed
an umbrella agreement with the U.S. that permitted cruise missile testing in
Canadian aerospace: the state-of-the-art nuclear delivery system would travel
down the Mackenzie Valley to the Primrose Lake Air Weapons Range. This
northern landscape, selected because it resembled Soviet terrain, was well suited
to trials of a surreptitious weapon designed to skim the earth, underneath enemy
radar cover, to deliver its payload. Activists and journalists followed the issue,
however, and the ensuing debate emphasized the threats to local ecology and the
plight of local residents directly affected by military activities.65
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
THE LAND OF TOMORROW
THE VOYAGE of the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea through the Northwest
Passage in 1985 precipitated another flurry of Canadian interest in the North.
External Affairs minister Joe Clark’s statement to the House of Commons
encapsulated his government’s approach to the latest sovereignty crisis: “Canada
is an Arctic nation. ... Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic is indivisible. It embraces
land, sea and ice. … From time immemorial Canada’s Inuit people have used and
occupied the ice as they have used and occupied the land. … Full sovereignty is
vital to Canada’s security. It is vital to the Inuit people. And it is vital to Canada’s
national identity.”66
While the idea of the Arctic as a seamless, holistic national space was not
new, Clark’s words suggested a shift from Trudeau’s ecological sensibilities to
the practical considerations of Aboriginal rights. Both approaches, however,
continued to treat the “resources” of the North, whether environmental or human,
as justification for a political and, if need be, military vision of Canada as a
geographic entity defined by nordicity.
For Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government (1984-1993), the first step
toward perpetuating a statist vision of the North was to formalize Canada’s
cartographic control over the region, applying straight baselines and effectively
enclosing the Canadian archipelago within “historic internal waters” on the
grounds that it had never been part of an international strait. To assert functional
control, it also declared that the armed forces would build a Polar-8 icebreaker,
conduct naval exercises in Arctic waters, and increase the number of surveillance
overflights. The 1987 statement of defense policy (which included no less than
three polar projection maps) reiterated that the government would allocate
substantial resources to address northern security. Acquiring ten or twelve
nuclear-powered attack submarines would afford Canada a true “three ocean
navy” which could monitor Arctic waters and identify foreign incursions in
support of continental defence. Fixed underwater sonar surveillance systems, a
fleet of long-range patrol aircraft, and a new “northern training center” would
significantly augment the military’s presence.67 All of these activities reflected
the government’s emphasis on conventional military tools to assert sovereignty
in the North.
However, low-level flying controversies, environmental concerns, and public
appeals by Aboriginal leaders to demilitarize the North invariably expanded the
debate beyond a realist understanding of state-centered security. Writing in 1986,
George Erasmus, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, saw “no
military threat in the Canadian North,” only a threat to the cultural survival of
indigenous peoples posed by a military build-up. The president of the Inuit
Circumpolar Conference, Mary Simon, drew similar parallels between military
activities, “justified by the government on the basis of defence and military
considerations…[that] often serve to promote our insecurity.” Inuit ties to the
environment and a collective social order meant that, for them, “Arctic security
includes environmental, economic and cultural, as well as defence, aspects.”68
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Here was an alternate, unofficial security discourse, one bypassing the integrity
of the nation state to focus on the protection of essential group and individual
rights.
These contrasting visions of northern nature clashed most prominently in a
debate, beginning in 1980, over the potential expansion of Goose Bay’s air training
facilities. Compared to population-dense Western Europe, where low-level flying
was disruptive and dangerous, Canada seemed blessed with a preponderance of
space. Two expansive training areas in Labrador and eastern Quebec, representing
roughly 100,000 square kilometers, allowed aircraft to train at altitudes as low
as thirty meters. For the Sheshatshit Innu, however, these operations were
intrusive and threatening. As aircraft began to swoop low over or near their bush
camps, the Naskapi-Montagnais Innu association protested, alleging that the
training was environmentally hazardous. The military responded that it had
instituted measures to avoid negative impacts on human health and wildlife, but
Native residents were unconvinced. In the fall of 1983, amid media fanfare, an
Innu delegation travelled to West Germany to contest NATO’s activities, securing
the support of the German Green Party and the peace group Survival
International.69
The flights continued, however, and Labrador remained a source of military
and political interest after NATO proposed a new tactical fighter center in Turkey.
The Canadian government lobbied to upgrade the Goose Bay base instead: one
hundred allied aircraft could fly forty thousand sorties annually over land and
sea ranges. A key advantage was the low population density: central Labrador
was practically uninhabited, the logic went, and was much more secure than
Turkey. The provincial government and local non-Aboriginal communities
believed it would bring a windfall of jobs and money into an economically
depressed region.70
Once more, the Innu rose to the challenge, and quickly allied with the
environmental movement, which Aboriginal groups had previously fought over
the ethics of the seal hunt and had accused of promoting “cultural genocide.”
Now they became strange bedfellows to protect a certain image of Labrador. Public
intellectuals such as David Suzuki, the award-winning host of the popular
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television program “The Nature of Things,”
gave the Innu cause mainstream legitimacy. Well-attended news conferences,
occupations, and demonstrations elicited significant non-Aboriginal support and
media interest. In June 1986, for example, a Sheshatshit Innu leader and a
Greenpeace activist locked themselves in a van on Parliament Hill and blasted
parliamentarians with recorded “jet noise”71—an act designed to show that military
activities also polluted the local “soundscape,” with the sonic booms of jets
startling caribou and people and supplanting the “keynote” sounds of Nitassinan
with the roar of technology.72
In their public presentations, the Innu frequently played upon the notion of
the “ecological Indian.”73 They argued that air training obstructed their traditional
practices, and stymied indigenous attempts to nurture their rural communities
back to health.74 So long as rampant militarization threatened land and animals,
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
it posed an existential danger to their way of life. They asserted that low-level
flying had negative effects that only they could see on the ground. Because they
claimed a more intimate connection to nature than non-Aboriginal people, the
Innu challenged the scientific data cited by government officials with their own
observations. When these themes were wrapped together, the Innu argument
suggested that the military—and by extension the Canadian government—was
threatening their individual identities, the health of their communities, and their
traditional territory. As Peter Armitage and John Kennedy observed, the Innu
engaged in “ethnic dichotomization” using Aboriginal symbols and stereotypes
to polarize their differences from non-Aboriginal interests, creating an
“ethnodrama” to mobilize public support.75
The Goose Bay controversy was also an ecodrama. The Innu depicted their
contest with the government and non-Native locals as resistance to cultural and
ecological genocide. In this debate, the military was no longer able to maneuver
under the radar of media scrutiny, nor would “national security” and alliance
rationales be so easily digested by the public. Military supporters predictably
stressed that Canada was committed, as a NATO member, to uphold democratic
values through collective defense. This burden had to be shared, and providing
“land and facilities for training is just as much a contribution to the Alliance as
modernization, budget allocations, weapons testing, or commitment of military
forces.”76 They also highlighted the economic benefits of NATO training, and
challenged the Innu claims. For example, John Crosbie, the federal Minister of
Transportation, used scientific reports to contest the idea that low-level flights
were a “great environmental menace.” Other proponents of the flights questioned
Aboriginal claims to the land based on traditional pursuits, identity, and cultural
survival. How could the Innu claim an intimate ecological awareness, given the
shabby state of their homes and the garbage strewn about their villages? To what
extent was the Innu opposition their own, rather than the agenda of extremist
peace groups, environmentalists, and other “outside agitators”?77 The military
was adamant that low-level flying, Aboriginal land use, and environmental
sustainability were not mutually exclusive.
But on a larger scale, the growing prominence of environmental causes was
forcing the Mulroney government to work within new frameworks. In 1986, the
Department of National Defence asked the Minister of the Environment to form
an independent environmental assessment review panel to appraise publicly the
existing and potential military activities at Goose Bay. In December 1989, a
preliminary Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) concluded that expanded lowlevel flying activities would not have significant adverse effects if they were
carefully monitored and managed. To do so, Defence implemented a satellite
monitoring system to track caribou, began to plot human and animal patterns of
land and air use, promised to stop low-level overflights at designated thresholds,
and set up toll free lines so that hunters and fishermen could notify the military
when they planned to use the land. Of course, all of this required the acceptance
of Aboriginal land users.78
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For the military’s critics, the EIS was far from persuasive. Principal Innu
organizations refused to participate in the process, “fearing that their cooperation would merely legitimate the continuation of the low flying.” They had
little positive to say about the study’s findings. When the report was released,
New Democratic Party Member of Parliament Dan Heap still accused the Canadian
Forces of conducting “war against the Innu,” as did peace activists. The Innu
signed a “mutual defense agreement” with “some of Canada’s most militant Indian
bands” to protect their interests, suggesting little room for compromise. Drawing
upon scientific evidence and “traditional ecological knowledge” to bolster their
case, the Innu claimed the moral high ground. Innu court actions to stall the
proposed NATO facility carried into 1990.79 That troublesome year, the collapse
of the Eastern Bloc, Aboriginal-government friction over the Meech Lake
constitutional accord, and an armed confrontation between soldiers and Mohawks
at Oka, Quebec, displaced Goose Bay from the national headlines. In the end, the
collapse of the Berlin Wall sounded the death knell for expansion plans at Goose
Bay. With no Soviet adversary, NATO and Canadian priorities shifted away from
the eastern sub-Arctic.
ENVIRONMENTAL LEGACIES OF THE COLD WAR
THAWING RELATIONS between the superpowers led the Canadian government
to abandon most of its 1987 White Paper commitments to northern defense
projects. The federal government’s “Green Plan,” first introduced in 1990, and its
extensive Arctic Environmental Strategy (1991-1996) obligated departments to
adopt more environmentally conscious practices. As one military officer told
scholar Richard Langlais, these new strategies had direct implications for military
operations in the north. Southern unit commanders had to fill out hefty paperwork
laden with environmental procedures and policies prior to visiting the region.
When asked if the military’s role included protecting the environment as a
component of “national security,” the officer responded that the military should
not be asked to “walk the beach and clean up the oil and pick up the birds and all
that.” Armed forces existed to fight wars, and environmental commitments were
a distraction. But they could no longer be ignored.80
In the last decade of the twentieth century, a broader definition of Arctic
security was matched by an expanding range of environmental concerns.
Increased levels of persistent organic pollutants corresponded with the increased
toxicity of traditional foods consumed by Inuit peoples, and climate changes
threatened to wreak havoc on the Arctic ecosystem and traditional human
activities in the region. In short, environmental and human security became
inseparable, in a manner more sophisticated than earlier naturalizations of
aboriginality. A discourse of military necessity had been supplemented by a new
Arctic Environmental Strategy, announced in 1991 “to preserve and enhance the
integrity, health, biodiversity and productivity of our Arctic ecosystems for the
benefit of present and future generations.”81 If the image of the North as an
unspoiled, pristine wilderness was still powerful for southern Canadians, then
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
the valuation of this wilderness had shifted, largely but not completely, from
military expediency to a combination of supranational and local sustainability.82
Long-range pollution from the south in the form of industrial chemical
compounds and heavy metals could not be curtailed without fundamental changes
to the international industrial order, but the toxic legacy of Canadian military
activities on local terrestrial and marine ecosystems in the north could be
addressed more directly. “Canadian Military Under the Gun Over Pollution,” the
Ottawa Citizen proclaimed in September 1991, explaining that taxpayers faced a
“staggering bill” when it came to identifying and remediating waste fuels,
chemicals, and lead pollution at bases and former installations across the country.
Tony Downs from DND’s environmental division told reporters that Goose Bay
housed the “remains of a massive fuel tank farm, one of the largest in North
America,” with more than 4 million liters of spilled fuel in the ground.
Furthermore, National Defence had already spent nearly $15 million to incinerate
PCBs stored in bunkers at this airbase. This was the tip of the iceberg. The
daunting task of tearing down and cleaning up DEW Line sites was anticipated
to cost up to $300 million. Given that this mess was a product of bilateral
continental defense schemes, the Canadian government hoped that the United
States would pay for most of it.83 The two countries reached an agreement in 1996
to share clean-up costs related to some former military installations in Canada,
but the process was delayed by U.S. congressional concerns that this pact could
be construed as a precedent for critics of American military activities around
the world.84
When the last remaining DEW Line sites were closed in the early 1990s,
obvious hazardous materials were removed and the buildings locked. Agreements
between National Defence and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada prescribed
the removal of all unwanted structures to their foundations, the clean up of all
visible physical debris (such as barrels and equipment), and reestablishment of
natural drainage. Chemical contaminants, from batteries to asbestos, also posed
significant local dangers. An academic Environmental Sciences Group (ESG)
affiliated with Canadian military colleges conducted extensive studies into
contamination at remote military sites and its impact on the food chain.85 Similar
projects throughout the North meant that much of the military’s activity in the
region was devoted to coping with its own environmental history.86 The irony was
that a new battle—that of remediation—was being waged in a language of natural
hostility that had changed only slightly from the early years of the Cold War.
CONCLUSION
HISTORIANS OF MODERNIZATION theory have demonstrated how its claims to
objectivity were compromised by its Cold War origins and applications. The
immediacy of geopolitical conflict meant that grandiose theories of
democratization and economic liberalization often ran counter to seemingly
necessary military incursions and tempting authoritarian stability.87 The case
of the Cold War Canadian North is similar insofar as militarization was frequently
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disguised behind loftier goals, whether of scientific enlightenment, economic
and social development, or national pride. The most significant military project
in the North, the Distant Early Warning Line, was a modern marvel designed to
render a complex landscape legible, and in the process comfortable for southern
visitors and workers. This meant overcoming and disguising the effects of
northern nature on bodies and minds, with little consideration for the ways in
which the Line was radically altering the human and physical geographies of the
North, confirming once more an unfortunate correlation between toxins and race
in North American environmental history.88
In writing this history, engineering endeavors such as the DEW Line, just one
of a long list of military projects in the Cold War North, must be considered next
to the more general issue of nature as a subject of military scrutiny. The
contributions of the American and Canadian armed forces to the history of the
Cold War North comprise more than a list of individual activities and subsequent
effects. A map of “footprints”—some lingering, others fading—fails to illuminate
two wider considerations. First, these footprints represent a fraction of the global
military activity conducted in the name of the Cold War. Second, the identification
of military sites or routes across the Canadian North points only to the material
manifestations of a particularly powerful form of imaginative geography which
treats an environment as both an opponent and a resource to be used, possibly to
advantage, with the correct knowledge and training.
“As Canadian nationalism became more and more concerned about the need
to maintain a separate society with a distinctive identity,” the political scientist
Thomas Tynan has written, “the Arctic became a useful symbol of Canada’s
national heritage. Any American threat to this region, for example, the threat of
commercial pollution, would be seen as an assault upon Canada’s very own
heritage and identity.”89 We have noted that the Canadian approach to northern
nature began to change in the late 1960s, reflecting a direct connection between
landscape and identity politics. The North ceased to be only a hostile environment
to be assaulted and engineered for strategic purposes. By the early 1970s, it had
also become a place demanding protection from environmental and jurisdictional
threats. Northern peoples concurrently articulated their parallel, if distinct, sense
of the region as a homeland, and environmental and indigenous groups
appropriated and altered a governmental discourse which demanded that the
delicate environment be protected.90
And yet the militarization of northern nature has been flexible enough to
accommodate varying discourses of defense, protection, and security. Tracing
the genealogy of the Cold War has been aided by the recognition that the famed
military-industrial complex established in the middle of the twentieth century
has not vanished. In addition to a lingering, terrifying global presence in soils,
water, air, and species, it returned with a vengeance as Americans prepared for
an indefinite war on terror. Cold War military activities in the Canadian North
ultimately constitute part of a global “treadmill of destruction” tying militarism
to environmental and political injustice.91 Surveying the sixty years since the
beginnings of the Cold War, it appears as if this has been brought about more by
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
unfortunate neglect than deliberate disdain. “While the military has had a
considerable impact on the North,” Kenneth Eyre argued in 1987, “the North in
fact has had surprisingly little impact upon the Canadian military.”92 Eyre may
have been correct, although when writing he was not able to account for the costs
of Cold War toxicity that drained declining defense budgets in the 1990s.
As yet another wave of sovereignty and security concerns washes over the
Canadian public, prompted by a global climate change crisis that some
commentators anticipate will make commercial transnavigation of the Northwest
Passage feasible within the next two decades, it will be crucial to consider how
northern military activity will be justified—in the familiar language of national
defense, or in the more complex terms of human and environmental security.93
Beefing up defense spending and resisting compliance with international
environmental agreements suggest that the Cold War is, paradoxically, being both
perpetuated and forgotten. But as we have done in this essay with reference to
the Cold War period, it will also be crucial to continue to consider the persistent
militarization of northern landscapes in more philosophical terms—to ask how
this militarization bears on the idea of nature more generally, especially when
the Canadian North is still represented as geographically distinct.
Whiitne
tneyy L
Lack
acken
enba
bau
er,, assistant professor of history at St. Jerome’s University
P. Wh
ack
en
ba
uer
at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, is the author of Battle Grounds:
The Canadian Military and Aboriginal Lands (UBC Press, 2007). Matthe
hew
Farish
arish,
wF
arish
assistant professor of geography at the University of Toronto, is the author of
Strategic Spaces: The Contours of America’s Cold War , forthcoming from
University of Minnesota Press. They are currently collaborating on a history of
the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line.
NOTES
The authors thank Ken Coates, Matthew Evenden, Alan MacEachern, Bill
Morrison, and two anonymous reviewers for their criticisms and suggestions.
An early version of the essay was presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the
Canadian Historical Association (at York University), where we received a number
of insightful comments. We are also very grateful to the archivists and librarians,
especially at the Department of National Defence’s Directorate of History and
Heritage in Ottawa, who assisted our inquiries.
J. Tuzo Wilson, “Winter Manoeuvres in Canada,” Canadian Geographical Journal 32
(1946): 88-100; quote on 89-92.
2. See Defence Research Northern Laboratory, 1947-1965 (Ottawa: Defence Research
Board, Department of National Defence, 1966).
3. On Musk-Ox, see Hugh A. Halliday, “Exercise ‘Musk Ox’: Asserting Sovereignty ‘North
of 60’,” Canadian Military History 7 (1998): 37-44; and Kevin M. Thrasher, “Exercise
Musk Ox: Lost Opportunities” (MA Thesis, Department of History, Carleton University,
1998).
4. In this essay we will deliberately follow the loose strategic parlance of the period and
occasionally use the terms “North” and “Arctic” interchangeably, with exceptions where
1.
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
geographic specificity is required. We are aware of the hazards accompanying this
decision, but our intention here is emphatically not to delimit a distinct “northern” or
“Arctic” region, as much as such differentiation can be avoided.
For a unique example, see Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins
of Atomic America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002).
Rachel Woodward, “From Military Geography to Militarism’s Geographies: Disciplinary
Engagements with the Geographies of Militarism and Military Activities,” Progress
in Human Geography 29 (2005): 718-40. For a historical perspective, see John Childs,
“A Short History of the Military Use of Land in Peacetime,” War in History 4 (1997): 81103.
The reference here is to the literature spawned by Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards
a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992).
Indeed, there are few adequate histories of Cold War Canada; the standard reference
is Reg Whitaker and Gary Marcuse, Canada and the Cold War: The Making of a National
Insecurity State, 1945-1957 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). See, also, Reg
Whitaker and Steve Hewitt, Canada and the Cold War (Toronto: Lorimer, 2003); Robert
Bothwell, The Big Chill: Canada and the Cold War (Toronto: Canadian Institute of
International Affairs, 1998); and Greg Donaghy, ed., Canada and the Early Cold War,
1943-1957 (Ottawa: Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 1998).
Kenneth C. Eyre, “Forty Years of Military Activity in the Canadian North, 1947-87,”
Arctic 40 (1987): 292-99; quote on 294.
Kenneth S. Coates and William R. Morrison, The Alaska Highway in World War II: The
U.S. Army of Occupation in Canada’s Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1992), 8-9.
Historians have begun to uncover the effects of war on former combat zones. See, for
example, Donovan Webster, Aftermath: The Remnants of War (New York: Pantheon,
1998).
See, for instance, Valerie L. Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin
in the American West (New York: Routledge, 1998); Gregory Hooks and Chad L. Smith,
“The Treadmill of Destruction: National Sacrifice Areas and Native Americans,”
American Sociological Review 69 (2004): 558-75.
See Patricia N. Limerick, “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century,”
in The Frontier in American Culture, ed. James R. Grossman (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1994), 67-102.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 2.
Kenneth C. Eyre, “Custos Borealis: The Military in the Canadian North” (PhD thesis,
Department of War Studies, Kings College, University of London, 1981), 45-79. Most
planes were equipped with skis or floats, and construction was limited to grass or
gravel airstrips and makeshift buildings. See “The History of Military Construction
in the Canadian North from 1945 to 1980,” Department of National Defence, Directorate
of History and Heritage (hereafter DHH), Ottawa, file 80/127, Volume 1.
On these projects, see Stanley W. Dziuban, Military Relations between the United States
and Canada, 1939-1945 (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History,
Department of the Army, 1959); C. P. Stacey, Arms, Men and Governments (Ottawa:
Queen’s Printer, 1970), 379-88; and Shelagh Grant, Sovereignty or Security?
Government Policy in the Canadian North, 1936-1950 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1988).
Newfoundland and Labrador did not become a Canadian province until 1949, and was
initially just named Newfoundland.
“The History of Military Construction,” DHH, 2; John N. Cardoulis, A Friendly Invasion:
The American Military in Newfoundland, 1940-1990 (St. John’s: Breakwater, 1990),
114-29; Library and Archives Canada (hereafter LAC), RG 25, G-1, v. 1993, file 1056-AZ;
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
“World’s Largest Airport Operating in Labrador,” St John’s Evening Telegram, May 18,
1943; David Bercuson, “SAC vs. Sovereignty: The Origins of the Goose Bay Lease, 194652,” Canadian Historical Review 70 (1989): 206-22; John Clearwater, U.S. Nuclear
Weapons in Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1999), 123-54; Deputy Minister,
Department of National Defence (hereafter DND), to Deputy Minister, Department of
Resources & Development, January 27, 1955, LAC, RG 22, Series A-1-a, v.836, f.84-11-11
pt.1.
Coates and Morrison, The Alaska Highway in World War II, 85. On the air staging
route, see Edwin R. Carr, “Great Falls to Nome: the Inland Air Route to Alaska, 194045” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1946). On Canol, see Richard Diubaldo, “The
Canol Project in Canadian-American Relations,” Canadian Historical Association
Historical Papers 1977, 179-95.
The phrase is Bruno Latour’s; for a spatial consideration, see Michael Heffernan “Mars
and Minerva: Centres of Geographical Calculation in an Age of Total War,” Erkunde
54 (2000): 320-33.
Coates and Morrison, The Alaska Highway in World War Two, 67, 86-100, 158.
Philip Godsell, The Romance of the Alaska Highway (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1944),
1-3, 45, 159-64.
Godsell, Romance, 45, 159-64, 195. It is revealing that Coates and Morrison also entitle
their third chapter in The Alaska Highway in World War II “The Native People and the
Environment,” treating the two subjects as intrinsically connected.
A. L. Washburn, “Geography and Arctic Lands,” in Geography in the Twentieth Century:
A Study of Growth, Fields, Techniques, Aims and Trends, ed. G. Taylor, 3rd ed. (New
York: The Philosophical Society, 1957), 267-87; quote on 267. Washburn’s chapter was
originally published in 1948. The “unknown Arctic” found expression in far more
popular texts, such as Pierre Berton’s The Mysterious North (New York: Knopf, 1956).
For an example, see Leslie Roberts, “The Great Assault on the Arctic,” Harper’s (August
1955), 37-42.
R. A. Howard, Down in the North: An Analysis of Survival Experiences in Arctic Areas
(Maxwell AFB, AL: Arctic, Desert, Tropic Information Center, 1953), iii, 1. For more on
these topics, see Matthew Farish, “Frontier Engineering: From the Globe to the Body
in the Cold War Arctic,” The Canadian Geographer 50 (2006): 177-96.
Quoted in Hugh A. Halliday, “Recapturing the North: Exercises ‘Eskimo’, ‘Polar Bear’
and ‘Lemming’, 1945,” Canadian Military History 6 (1997): 29-38; quote on 38.
On Sweetbriar, see “Joint Canadian-United States Exercise Sweetbriar’, 1950,” Polar
Record 6 (1951): 258; Omond M. Solandt, “Exercise Sweetbriar,” Speech to the Empire
Club of Canada, March 30, 1950 (http://www.empireclubfoundation.com/
details.asp?SpeechID=2633&FT=yes). Solandt was at the time Chairman of Canada’s
Defence Research Board.
See T. Ray, A History of the DEW Line (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air Force Historical Research
Agency, Air Defense Command Historical Study 31, n.d.). The political history of North
American air defense is covered in Joseph T. Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs: Canada,
the United States, and the Origins of North American Air Defence, 1945-1958
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987).
This paper can only gesture to the relationship between the DEW Line and native
northerners, the subject of a larger project underway by the authors. The best starting
points on the social and cultural history of the DEW Line are M. S. Bégin, “Des radars
et des hommes: mémoires inuit de la station Fox Main de la DEW Line (Hall Beach,
Nunavut)” (MA thesis, Université Laval, 2004); R. Quinn Duffy, The Road to Nunavut:
The Progress of Eastern Arctic Inuit since the Second World War (Montreal and
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988); J. D. Ferguson, A Study of the Effects
of the D.E.W. Line Upon the Eskimo of the Western Arctic of Canada (Ottawa: Northern
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31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
Research Coordination Centre, Department of Northern Affairs and National
Resources, 1957); J. N. Harris, “National Defence and Northern Development: The
Establishment of the Dewline in the Canadian North” (MA thesis, Simon Fraser
University, 1980); and Kevin McMahon, Arctic Twilight (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1988).
Distant Early Warning Line Military Geography Support Programme (Ottawa, Joint
Intelligence Bureau, January 1955), DHH File 79/82.
Scott, Seeing Like a State, 7.
James D. Brannian, Frank J. Donohue, and Attilio Baltera, “W. E. Engineering for the
DEW Line—I. Siting Design and Construction,” Western Electric Engineer 1 (1957): 211; quote on 3.
J. D. Brannian, “Siting the DEW Line Radar Stations,” Engineering and Contract Record
70 (1957): 53-55, 171-78, 195-202, 207-11; quotes on 53.
M. S. Cheever, “Construction on the DEW Line,” Engineering and Contract Record 70
(1957): 53-57, 193-199; the quote is from p. 53.
Excerpt from Western Electric Corporation, “The DEW Line Story in Brief” (Paramus,
NJ: Bell Telephone Laboratories, Booklet Rack Service, c1960), reprinted in P. Whitney
Lackenbauer, Matthew Farish, and Jennifer Arthur-Lackenbauer, The Distant Early
Warning (DEW) Line: A Bibliography and Document Resource List (Calgary: Arctic
Institute of North America, 2005), 11. For similar themes, see, also, Richard Morenus,
DEW Line: Distant Early Warning, the Miracle of America’s First Line of Defense (New
York: Rand McNally and Company, 1957).
Joint Press Tour, DEW Line, March 26–April 3, 1956, DHH 181.009 (D6587).
See, for example, “Temperature, Vapors Kept under Control in DEW Line Buildings,”
The Globe and Mail, April 24, 1956; Rick Ranson, Working North: DEW Line to Drill
Shop (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2003), 7-18.
See Jockel, No Boundaries Upstairs, and Andrew Richter, Avoiding Armageddon:
Canadian Military Strategy and Nuclear Weapons, 1950-1963 (Vancouver: UBC Press,
2002), 37-47.
House of Commons Debates, April 19 1951, 2173-74. For background, see RG 10, v.6341,
f.736-1 pt.1, LAC; “Canadian Forces Base, Cold Lake, Alberta,” (c1960s), DHH 112.3H1.009
(D279); Dan Black, “Combat at Cold Lake,” Legion Magazine September/October 2002
(http://www.legionmagazine.com/features/militarymatters/02-09.asp).
See Indian Claims Commission, Indian Claims Commission Proceedings vol. 1 (1994),
3-157; and P. W. Lackenbauer, Battle Grounds: The Canadian Military and Aboriginal
Lands (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007).
LAC, RG 22, vol. 836, file 84-11-11, part 1.
“Canadian Forces Base, Cold Lake, Alberta,” DHH; T. Thompson, “Tales of the Bay and
Chilly Pond,” Airforce 25 (Summer 2001): 34-35.
See D. A. Westworth & Associates Ltd., National Defence Environmental Assessment
Cold Lake Air Weapons Range vol. 1: Natural Resource Inventory (Edmonton, December
1994); Bel MK Engineering, Department of National Defence Environmental
Assessment of NATO Flying Training in Canada–4 Wing Cold Lake, Final Report
(Calgary, April 1997), 44-47.
See, among other sources, Laura A. Bruno, “The Bequest of the Nuclear Battlefield:
Science, Nature, and the Atom during the First Decade of the Cold War,” Historical
Studies in the Physical Sciences 33 (2003): 237-60.
Assistant Chief, National Parks Branch, to G. W. Rowley, Secy, Advisory Committee on
Northern Research, February 10, 1956, and April 10, 1957, LAC, RG 22, vol. 836, file 8411-11, part 1.
Robert F. Legget, “An Engineering Assessment,” in The Canadian Northwest: Its
Potentialities, ed. Frank Underhill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959), 9.
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
48. Trevor Lloyd, “Canada’s Northland,” Queen’s Quarterly 66 (Winter 1960): 529-37.
49. J. D. Ferguson, “A Study of the Effects of the Distant Early Warning Line Upon the
Eskimo of the Western Arctic of Canada” Northern Research Coordination Centre
research project (April 1957), 48; Extract from Mr. D.W. Bissett’s Report for August
and September, 1961, LAC, RG 85, vol. 1360, file 207-6 pt 2; Distant Early Warning CoOrdinating Committee, Progress Report No. 6, LAC, RG 12, vol. 2407, file 14-13-9-1 pt 4;
R.G. Robertson to Vincent W. Farley, Western Electric Company, 4 April 1956, LAC, RG
25, box 5928, file 50210-C-40 pt. 7; Ken Reimer, The Environmental Impact of the DEW
Line on the Canadian Arctic: Summary (Victoria: Royal Roads Military College,
Environmental Sciences Group), 29-30; William R. Morrison, True North: The Yukon
and Northwest Territories (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998), 137. On illicit
hunting, see, for example, Lynden T. (Bucky) Harris, “A Failed Polar Bear Hunt,” and
Larry Wilson, “DEW Line War Stories vol. 1,” both at www.lswilson.ca/warstories.htm.
50. For context, see J. L. Granatstein and Robert Bothwell, Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and
Canadian Foreign Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 12-35, 79-81.
51. See the chapters in The Arctic in Question ed. Edgar Dosman (Toronto: 1976). On the
American response, see Theodore T. Eliot, Jr., “Information Memorandum for Mr.
Kissinger, the White House—Subject: Imminent Canadian Legislation on the Arctic,”
March 12, 1970, Department of State E.O. 12958, declassified and amended July 12,
2005.
52. House of Commons Debates, October 24, 1969, 39.
53. The important work of Shelagh Grant is essential reading on this subject. See her
Sovereignty or Security? and “Northern Nationalists: Visions of ‘A New North’, 19401950,” in For Purposes of Dominion: Essays in Honour of Morris Zaslow, ed. Kenneth
S. Coates and William R. Morrison (North York, ON: Captus Press, 1989), 47-70.
54. On environmental security, see Simon Dalby, Environmental Security (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Jon Barnett, The Meaning of Environmental
Security: Ecological Politics and Policy in the New Security Era (London: Zed Books,
2001).
55. See Thomas M. Tynan, “Canadian-American Relations in the Arctic: The Effect of
Environmental Influences upon Territorial Claims,” Review of Politics 41 (July 1979):
416-17. Christopher Kirkey, “The Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Initiatives:
Canada’s Response to an American Challenge,” International Journal of Canadian
Studies 13 (Spring 1996): 41-60, provides a balanced assessment of Canadian-American
concerns on the AWPPA.
56. A. Holtz and M.A. Sharpe, “Central Arctic DEW Line Site Inspection, July 18-25, 1984”
(Environmental Protection Service, Western and Northern Region, 1984), available at
Environment Canada Library; “PCBs cleaned up on DEW Line,” Winnipeg Free Press,
August 21, 1985; Reimer, Summary, 34-35; Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Environment
Department, “Sources and Pathways,” http://www.itk.ca/environment/contaminantssources-pathways.php.
57. “Defence in the 70s,” reprinted in Canada’s National Defence, vol. 1: Defence Policy,
ed. Douglas L. Bland (Kingston: School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University, 1997),
132; BGen R. M. Withers, “Northern Region Concept for Force Development,” 15 June
1971, DND file NR 3185-1 (Comd). See also the Report of the Steering Committee on the
Canadian North, “Canadian Forces Policies Objectives and Activities in the Canadian
North,” December 5, 1969, DHH 73/1223/987, box 52. The military’s “major efforts” to
avoid polluting the Frobisher Bay area during exercise Patrouille Nocturne, a mock
invasion in early 1972, indicated this growing awareness of ecological impacts. See
Rick Michon, “Patrouille Nocturne,” Canadian Forces Sentinel 8 (1972): 1-11.
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58. “Role of the Canadian Armed Forces in Relation to Sovereignty—Report on Consultations
with Other Government Departments and Agencies,” January 26, 1971, 9.
59. Eyre, “Forty Years,” 297-98.
60. See P. W. Lackenbauer, “Aboriginal Peoples in the Canadian Rangers: Canada’s ‘Eyes
and Ears’ in Northern and Isolated Communities,” in Hidden in Plain Sight:
Contributions of Aboriginal Peoples to Canadian Identity and Culture, ed. David
Newhouse, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, in press).
61. “The History of Military Construction,” DHH, 33; Indian and Northern Affairs 1971/72
Annual Report, 78.
62. On the James Bay hydroelectric and Mackenzie Valley pipeline projects, see Boyce
Richardson, Strangers Devour the Land: A Chronicle of the Assault upon the Last
Coherent Hunting Culture in North America, the Cree Indians of Northern Quebec,
and their Vast Primeval Homelands (Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green, 1991); Richard F.
Salisbury, A Homeland for the Cree: Regional Development in James Bay, 1971-1981
(Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986); Thomas R. Berger, Northern
Frontier, Northern Homeland: The Report of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry,
rev. ed. (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1988); M. O’Malley, The Past and Future
Land: An Account of the Berger Inquiry into the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline (Toronto:
P. Martin Associates, 1976); and Hans Carlson, “A Watershed of Words: Litigating and
Negotiating Nature in Eastern James Bay, 1971-75,” Canadian Historical Review 85
(2004): 63-84.
63. For example, the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories formed in 1969, the
Committee for Original People’s Entitlement (COPE) in 1970, and Inuit Tapirisat of
Canada in 1977. On political developments, see Mark O. Dickerson, Whose North?
Political Change, Political Development, and Self-Government in the Northwest
Territories (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992), 105-09.
64. Bothwell and Granatstein, Pirouette, 365, 371-72.
65. See, for example, Carol Giangrande, The Nuclear North: The People, The Regions, and
the Arms Race (Toronto: Anansi, 1983), 7, 44-62; C. A. Cannizzo, “Cruise Controversy,”
Calgary Herald, April 22, 1982; and “Northerners Deserve a Say on Test Flights,” Globe
and Mail, November 6, 1985.
66. House of Commons, Debates, September 10, 1985, 6462-64.
67. Ron Purver, “The Arctic in Canadian Security Policy, 1945 to the Present,” in Canada’s
International Security Policy, ed. David B. DeWitt and David Leyton-Brown
(Scarborough: Prentice Hall, 1995), 94; Elizabeth B. Elliot-Meisel, “Still Unresolved
after Fifty Years: The Northwest Passage in Canadian-American Relations, 1946-1998,”
American Review of Canadian Studies (Autumn 1999): 407-30, esp. 416-17.
68. Georges Erasmus, “Militarization of the North: Cultural Survival Threatened,”
Information North (Fall 1986): 1; Mary Simon, “Security, Peace and the Native Peoples
of the Arctic,” in The Arctic: Choices for Peace and Security, ed. Thomas R. Berger
(West Vancouver: Gordon Soules, 1989), 36, 67 (emphasis in original). On this
connection, see, also, Franklyn Griffiths, “Environment and Security in Arctic Waters,”
in National Security and International Environmental Cooperation in the Arctic: The
Case of the Northern Sea Route, ed. Willy Ostreng (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1999),
179-204.
69. Department of National Defence, Summary: Goose Bay EIS (Ottawa: DND, July 1989),
S-3; Peter Armitage and John C. Kennedy, “Redbaiting and Racism on Our Frontier:
Military Expansion in Labrador and Quebec,” Canadian Review of Sociology and
Anthropology 26 (1989): 798-817, esp. 802-03. Goose Bay had been a major facility
throughout the Cold War. The U.S. Strategic Air Command stationed nuclear strike
forces at the base in the early 1950s, and RCAF and USAF units began intensive training
MILITARIZING A NORTHERN ENVIRONMENT
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
at an air-to-air firing range by mid-decade. British RAF Vulcan bombers began lowlevel flying training in 1967. This activity meant economic stability for non-Native
residents in this part of Labrador.
David Murrell, A Balanced Overall View? Media Reporting of the Labrador Low-Flying
Controversy (Toronto: Mackenzie Institute Paper no. 19, 1990), 11-12; H. A. Pickering,
“Foreign Policy as an Extra-Territorial Extension of Public Policy: The Development
of the ‘Military Training Industry’ at Goose Bay, Labrador” (PhD diss, Queen’s
University, 1992); DND, Summary: Goose Bay EIS, S-5-10.
Peter Armitage, “Indigenous Homelands and the Security Requirements of Western
Nation-States: Innu Opposition to Military Flight Training in Eastern Quebec and
Labrador,” in The Pentagon and the Cities, ed. Andrew Kirby (Newbury Park, CA: Sage,
1992), 138-42; “Indians Pitch Tents at NATO Base as Battle Over Hunting Rights
Escalates,” Montreal Gazette, April 22, 1987. For the Innu perspective, see “Chronology
of Events Related to Military Flight Training Over Nitassinan (Quebec-Labrador) and
Innu Opposition to It,” at www.innu.ca.
On this theme, see Peter A. Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past: Toward an
Environmental History of Sound and Noise,” Environmental History 10 (October 2005),
636-65; and R. Murray Schafer, Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning
of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994).
For a critical look at this image, see Shepherd Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth
and History (New York: Norton, 2000). For a contrasting perspective, see Winona
LaDuke, All My Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Minneapolis, MN: Honor
the Earth Press, 1999).
M. J. Niemans, “‘For the Future For Every One of Us’: Innu Women on Community,
Country and Military Low-level Flying in Labrador” (MA thesis, University of
Amsterdam, 1995); M. Wadden, “Screaming Jets are Destroying our Culture, Say the
Innu of Labrador and Quebec,” Montreal Gazette, June 25, 1988; K. Cox, “Pediatrician
Sees Trauma among Labrador Children,” Globe and Mail, October 9, 1989.
Armitage and Kennedy, “Redbaiting and Racism,” 807; Murrell, A Balanced Overall
View?, 17-18; Mary Barker, “Low-level Military Flight Training in Quebec-Labrador:
The Anatomy of a Northern Development Conflict,” in Aboriginal Autonomy and
Development in Northern Quebec and Labrador, ed. Colin A. Scott (Vancouver: UBC
Press, 2001), 233-54, esp. 248-49.
Department of External Affairs and International Trade, “Our NATO Commitment:
Sharing the Burden” (pamphlet, c. 1989).
This synopsis is based upon Armitage and Kennedy, “Redbaiting and Racism,” 80811. This perceptive article seems to overstate the pervasiveness of “communist
conspiracy” arguments against the Innu.
DND, Summary: Goose Bay EIS: An Environmental Impact Statement on Military
Flying Activities in Labrador and Quebec (July 1989); Barker, “Low-Level Military Flight
Training,” in Autonomy and Development, 241; Paul Koring and Kevin Cox, “Study Sees
Little Harm in Labrador NATO Base,” Globe and Mail, November 1, 1989. Aboriginal
land claims and defense policy were explicitly excluded from EIS criteria.
DND, Goose Bay EIS; Wadden, “Screaming jets”; Spaven, “Environmental State,” 15860; FEARO, “Environmental Assessment Panel Reviewing Military Flying Activities
in Labrador and Quebec: Compilation of Comments Received from Technical Experts
Concerning the EIS” (December 1989); Geoffrey York and Laureen Pindera, People of
the Pines: The Warriors and the Legacy of Oka (Toronto: Little, Brown, 1991), 280; K.
Cox, “Innu Fighting Back on Challenges to Traditional Lifestyle,” Globe and Mail,
February 12, 1990.
Government of Canada, Canada’s Green Plan: Canada’s Green Plan for a Healthy
Environment (Hull, Quebec: Environment Canada, 1990); Richard Langlais,
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Reformulating Security: A Case Study from Arctic Canada (Goteborg, Sweden: Goteborg
University Humanekologiska skrifter 13, 1995), 150-55.
81. See Christopher S. Wren, “Eskimos View Radar Stations as Blots, Not Blips,” New York
Times, August 17, 1985.
82. On this theme, see Shelagh D. Grant, “Arctic Wilderness—And Other Mythologies,”
Journal of Canadian Studies 32 (1998): 27-42; Sherrill E. Grace, Canada and the Idea of
North (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); and Renée Hulan, Northern
Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2002).
83. “Canadian Military under the Gun Over Pollution,” Ottawa Citizen, September 15, 1991.
See also “Arctic Cleanup Cost May Hit $300 Million,” Toronto Star, November 24, 1991;
Edison Stewart, “Ottawa Targets Arctic Polluters,” Toronto Star, April 30, 1991.
84. On this agreement, see Heather Myers and Don Munton, “Cold War, Frozen Wastes:
Cleaning up the Dew Line,” Environment and Security 4 (2000): 119-38. Actual
American payments, which would take the form of a credit to Canada’s Foreign Military
Sales Trust Account (to purchase American-produced weapons) over a ten-year period,
were delayed by congressional opponents.
85. Reimer, Summary; Memorandum of Understanding between DIAND and DND for the
Remediation of Distant Early Warning System and North Warning System Sites, 5
July 1989. Reimer et al., 12, distinguish between contaminants (“substances whose
presence causes a deviation from the normal composition of the environment”) and
pollutants (“a substance that is present in greater than normal concentration as a
result of human activity and which has a net detrimental effect.” PCB clean-up at
abandoned DEW Line sites actually began in the mid-1980s. See Indian and Northern
Affairs Canada 1985-86 Annual Report, 28.
86. See, for example, Peter Moon, “Abandoned Bases Ooze Pollutants” (Toronto) Globe and
Mail, March 14, 1997; John S. Poland, Scott Mitchell, and Allison Rutter, “Remediation
of Former Military Bases in the Canadian Arctic,” Cold Regions Science and Technology
32 (2001): 93-105; Leonard J.S. Tsuji et al., “Remediation of Site 050 of the Mid-Canada
Radar Line: Identifying Potential Sites of Concern Utilizing Traditional Environmental
Knowledge,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 21 (2001): 149-60. On northern
militarization as heritage, see David Neufeld, “Commemorating the Cold War in
Canada: Considering the DEW Line,” The Public Historian 20 (1998): 9-19.
87. See, for instance, Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold
War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
88. Carolyn Merchant, “Shades of Darkness: Race and Environmental History,”
Environmental History 8 (2003): 380–94.
89. Tynan, “Canadian-American Relations in the Arctic,” 426.
90. Our historical approach clarifies assumptions in recent literature suggesting that the
main discursive shift from traditional military security to environmental and human
security took place in the late 1980s and 1990s. See, for example, Rob Huebert,
“Canadian Arctic Security Issues: Transformation in the Post-Cold War Era,”
International Journal (1999): 203-29; and Andrew Wylie, “Environmental Security and
the Canadian Arctic” (MA thesis, University of Calgary, 2002).
91. Hooks and Smith, “The Treadmill of Destruction.”
92. Eyre, “Forty Years,” 292.
93. See, for example, Rob Huebert, “Climate Change and Canadian Sovereignty in the
Northwest Passage,” Isuma (Winter 2001): 86-94. For a dissenting opinion, see
Franklyn Griffiths, “The Shipping News: Canada’s Arctic Sovereignty Not on Thinning
Ice,” International Journal 58 (Spring 2003): 257-82. On climate change and the Arctic,
see Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), Impacts of a Warming Arctic
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).