A fix in the forests: relief labor and the production of reforestation infrastructure in Depression-Era Canada

Abstract

In the 1930s, the Canadian state sunk large sums of capital into forested landscapes in order to address a mounting and widespread unemployment crisis and the environmental legacy of industrial forestry practices. Unemployed men were enrolled into relief camps established at emerging Forest Experimentation Stations. These Stations reflected, and contributed to, a growing emphasis on reforestation and sustained-yield production. I argue that the use of relief labor in the development of forest research stations represented a socio-ecological fix to the broad crisis of the 1930s that sought to: (1) secure the conditions for renewed capital accumulation, (2) tackle the problem of unemployment, and (3) address the frayed legitimacy of the state and forestry sector. I build on debates on the formal and real subsumption of nature to consider the socio-ecological dimensions of David Harvey’s theorization of the “spatial fix.”