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Coasts under Stress Restructuring and Social Ecological
Health 1st Edition Rosemary E. Ommer Digital Instant
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Author(s): Rosemary E. Ommer
ISBN(s): 9780773576018, 0773576010
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 5.53 MB
Year: 2007
Language: english
coasts under stress
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Coasts Under Stress
Restructuring and
Social-Ecological Health
rosemary e. ommer
and the coasts under stress
research project team
McGill-Queen’s University Press

Montreal & Kingston London Ithaca
G G
© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007
isbn 978-0-7735-3203-8 (cloth)
isbn 978-0-7735-3225-0 (paper)
Legal deposit fourth quarter 2007
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest

free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the
Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences,
through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds
provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada.
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the

Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also
acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada
through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program
(bpidp) for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Ommer, Rosemary E.
Coasts under stress : restructuring and social-ecological health /
Rosemary E. Ommer and the Coasts Under Stress Research Project
team
Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-7735-3203-8 (bnd)
isbn 978-0-7735-3225-0 (pbk)
1. Social ecology – Atlantic Coast (Canada). 2. Social ecology –

British Columbia – Pacific Coast. 3. Human ecology – Atlantic Coast
(Canada). 4. Human ecology – British Columbia – Pacific Coast.
5. Atlantic Coast (Canada). 6. Pacific Coast (B.C.). 7. Coasts –
Canada. I. Coasts Under Stress (Project) II. Title.
hc113.o45 2007 304.20971’09146 c2007-901510-7
Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in 10/12 Baskerville

Contents
Tables and Figures vii

Foreword xi
Abbreviations xv
part one how we got here: historical

restructuring and its social-ecological legacy
1 Introduction – What Stress? What Coasts? 3
2 A Social-Ecological History of Canada’s Fisheries 33
3 Not Managing for Scarcity: Social-Ecological Issues in Contemporary
Fisheries Management and Capture Practices 68
4 Social-Ecological Health and the History of the Forest Products
Industry on Both Coasts 94
5 Social-Ecological Health and the History of Nonrenewable Resources
on Both Coasts 123
6 Cross-Scale, Cross-Sector, and Cross-Purpose Issues: Overlap in the
Coastal Zone 154
part two the human impact of restructuring and

social-ecological health
7 The Restructuring of Health Care on Both Coasts since the
1980s 183
8 The Statistical Face of Restructuring and Human Health 210
9 The Human Voice of Social-Ecological Restructuring: Jobs, Incomes,
Livelihoods, Ways of Life, and Human Health 241
vi Contents
10 Restructuring, Nutrition, and Diet on Both Coasts 273

11 The Human Voice of Social-Ecological Restructuring II: Youth,
Education, and Health 296
part three towards social-ecological health:

coastal problems and potentials
12 Future Options I: Aquaculture, Hatcheries, Tourism, Transportation,
and Local Initiatives 323
13 Future Options II: The Oil and Gas Potential of the Queen Charlotte
and Tofino Basins 351
14 New Options for Governance I: Marine and Coastal Waters 379
15 New Options for Governance II: The Land and Sea/Land
Interface 405
16 Building a More Resilient Future 431
appendices
1 Interdisciplinary Team Research – the Coasts Under Stress
Experience 451
2 The Coasts Under Stress Team 465
3 Glossary of Technical Terms 478
4 Glossary of Species Mentioned in the Text, by Scientific Name 480
Notes 485
Bibliography 503
Index 557
Tables and Figures
tables
6.1 Mean Carbon to Nitrogen Ratios (c/n) and Percentage of Terrestrial

Organic Carbon of Sediments from Clio and Eagle Bays, British
Columbia 160
8.1 Population Change in Selected Locations, Coastal British Columbia
and Newfoundland and Labrador, 1991–2001 213
8.2 Selected Indicators of Income and Socio-economic Status, 2001 216
8.3 Potential Years of Lost Life (pyll) Rates per 100,000 Population,
1997 to 2001 219
8.4 Hospital Discharge Rates per 1,000 Population by Selected
Conditions, 1994–1999 220
8.5 Survey Completion by Area and Gender 221
8.6 Percentage of Respondents in British Columbia Satisfied or Very
Satisfied with Various Public Services 224
8.7 Percentage of Respondents in Newfoundland and Labrador Satisfied
or Very Satisfied with Various Public Services 225
8.8 Percentage of Respondents in British Columbia Reporting
Agreement or Strong Agreement about the Existence of Social
Problems in Their Area 226
8.9 Percentage of Respondents in Newfoundland and Labrador
Reporting Agreement or Strong Agreement about the Existence of
Social Problems in Their Communities 226
viii Tables and Figures
8.10 Odds Ratios for Reporting Health Status by Logistic Regression

Analyses 236–7
figures
1.1 The Coasts Under Stress study area 6–7

1.2 The Coasts Under Stress model 19
2.1 Trophic flow pyramids for Northern British Columbia 38
2.2 Percentage change in biomasses of selected functional groups 39
2.3 Reported catches of Pacific salmon in the Hecate Strait region from
1877 to 1977 39
2.4 Dr Quentin Mackie with brown bear jaw, Haida Gwaii (Fedje) 41
2.5 First Nations reserve allotments, ca 1891–1916 45
2.6 Drag and purse seine licence areas in relation to reserve allotments,
1915–16 47
2.7 Trophic flow pyramids for Newfoundland shelf marine
ecosystem 53
2.8 Percentage change in biomasses of selected ecosystem
groups 53
2.9 2j and 4r landings, 1953–2002 60
2.10 Mobile and fixed-gear landings, 2j 61
3.1 The number of species in each of the COSEWIC status categories for all
of the western North Atlantic region and for the northern Gulf of St
Lawrence alone 79
4.1 Swanson’s Bay Mill, 1909 96
4.2 Ocean Falls Pulp Mill, ca 1920 97
4.3 Visit of Sir Wilfred Laurier to Prince Rupert, 20 August 1910 97
4.4 Volume of wood cut in insular Newfoundland, 1950–2000 108
4.5 Central Newfoundland cumulative wood cutting patterns 109
4.6 Recent landscape age-class distribution of western and central
Newfoundland forests 110
4.7 Total production of paper and board products, 1961–2001 110
5.1 Nationalities of miners at Anyox, Hidden Creek, 1917 131
Tables and Figures ix
5.2 Deaths registered at Anyox 136

6.1 Location map of Clio and Eagle Bays on the British Columbia north
coast 157
6.2 Sidescan sonograph from Clio Bay showing dense concentrations of
whole logs on the seafloor 158
6.3. Photograph of partly decomposed whole log on the seafloor in Clio
Bay 158
6.4 Map of wood debris concentrations from towed seabed video imagery
in Clio Bay 159
6.5 Map of wood debris concentrations from towed seabed video imagery
in Eagle Bay 160
6.6 Percentage of towed video frames from Clio and Eagle Bays (British
Columbia) where Dungeness crab and sunflower seastars were
observed 161
6.7 Percentage of towed video frames within each terrestrial organic
debris surface area coverage category in Clio Bay where squat lobsters
were observed 162
6.8 Three bodies of water that make up the Hamilton Inlet 168
8.1 Percentage change in population, selected regions, 1996–2001 212
8.2 Prince Rupert and British Columbia hospital discharges for mental
health, diseases of the circulatory and digestive systems, and injury
and poisonings, 1986–1999 218
12.1 Food chains for both marine (a) and terrestrial (b) food sources,
showing the approximate conversion efficiencies at each trophic level
(Colinvaux 1986) 336
13.1 The location of the Shell Canada Limited offshore wells and other
wells and cores 352
13.2 Combined depth plots of vitrinite reflectance (vr) of eight offshore
Queen Charlotte Basin wells showing maturation zones (data from
Bustin 1997) 357
13.3 Areas where kerogen in the investigated source rocks is predicted to
be more than 50 percent transformed into hydrocarbon 358
13.4 Geohazard survey in Hecate Strait 361
13.5 Tofino Basin categories of potential offshore hydrocarbons,
sub-basins, and regions 365
x Tables and Figures
13.6 Overview of the prototype computable general equilibrium (cge)

model 371
14.1 Position of super hotspots across the entire ecnasap region from
Cape Hatteras to Greenland 390
14.2 Areas that appear to have static clusters of highly abundant species at
risk 392
14.3 High-priority areas for mpas in the Northwest Atlantic 393
14.4 Top twenty fishing areas, 1995–2000 394
14.5 High-priority areas and top twenty areas of trawl effort,
1995–2000 395
14.6 Gilbert Bay, Labrador, and surrounding area 397
14.7 Conceptual diagram showing the development of the optimal
restorable biomass (orb) restoration target and a possible restoration
trajectory 400
14.8 Equilibrium trade-offs resulting after twenty-five years of restoration
in northern British Columbia 401
a.1 Seastar structures of Coasts Under Stress 452
a.2 A simplified portrayal of the cus concept 453
a.3 Challenges in research integration 456
a.4 Examples of the integration of cus research 457
Foreword
The results of the work of Coasts Under Stress (cus) are to be found in
numerous journal articles, two films, one booklet, one book, and four
edited collections showing how the various parts of life in coastal com-
munities fit together and how interactive restructuring has generated
the risks, threats, and opportunities coastal communities (human and
biophysical) confront. Three of the team books are theme-based. One
deals with social-ecological knowledge systems and the vital impor-
tance and challenges of moving knowledge across disciplinary bound-
aries, within and between knowledge systems, and from people to
researchers to policymakers to students and back to communities, in
order to grapple with interactive restructuring and its effects (Lutz
and Neis forthcoming). One deals with the relationship between
interactive restructuring and power, whether as energy (oil and gas,
hydro), as “power over nature constructs,” or as power and agency in
nature and human communities (Sinclair and Ommer 2006). One
deals with the history of health, diet, and nutrition – with a particular
focus on the issue of decreasing food security in places where
once-stable food webs have suffered radical shock, as have the cul-
tures of human communities that have always been interdependent
with now-endangered food sources (Parrish, Turner, and Solberg
2007). There are two publications for special audiences: one for
policymakers (Ommer 2006) and one for coastal communities
(Ommer et al. 2006). This principal volume was team-written and is,
in itself, an experiment in interdisciplinary scholarship. The team
planned the volume, contributed their findings to all the sections,
commented on the manuscript as it evolved, and approved its final
shape.
In all our work, by environmental restructuring we mean changes in the
environment, usually at large scales, which are thought to be caused, at
xii Foreword
least in part, by such things as climate change. We take social restructur-

ing to mean changes in society at a range of scales that result in, for
example, changes in community cohesion, social support, health care
delivery, or the availability of educational resources. Such changes
include industrial restructuring, which deals with changes in patterns
of ownership and control and in work environments, and political
restructuring, which deals with shifts in policy regimes. We take health
to be the capacity to cope with stressors and recognize that people are
a part of (not outside) nature. Social-ecological health is the capacity of
the human-natural world nexus to deal resiliently with change and the
stress that it brings (Dolan et al. 2005).
We wish to take this opportunity to thank the Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc), the Natural Sciences
and Engineering Research Council of Canada (nserc), Memorial Uni-
versity of Newfoundland, and the University of Victoria for major fund-
ing of this work, and for ongoing support throughout the lifetime of
the project. We owe a debt of gratitude to Yves Mougeot and Katharine
Benzekri of sshrc, along with the various sshrc officers who assisted
us, particularly Jacques Critchley, who got us started, Pierre-François
LeFol, who was with us in our “middle period,” and Michèle Dupuis,
who has seen us through to the end. We also wish to express our grati-
tude to André Isabelle and Anne Alper of nserc, whose assistance has
likewise been invaluable throughout all the years of our work.
This project could not have been carried out without a dedicated
staff, and we here thank Janet Oliver, Carrie Holcapek, Cathy King,
Kari Marks, Graeme Bock, Gary Tunnell, Angela Drake, and Moira
Wainwright for their hard work, constancy, and continued support
through thick and thin. We wish also to thank the other universities
whose faculty contributed to our work: the University of British Colum-
bia (and, in particular, the Fisheries Centre and the Department of
Geography), Dalhousie University, Saint Mary’s University, and the
University of New Brunswick. Our heartfelt thanks go to our partners
and our advisory boards, named in the appendices to this volume, and
to the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society and the Centre for
Earth and Ocean Research, both at the University of Victoria, for pro-
viding the West Coast part of the team with a home. On the East Coast,
Memorial University provided a small building for the use of staff, fac-
ulty, and students, while on the West Coast the University of Victoria
gave the project director an academic home. We are grateful to both
these institutions for their generosity and for their faith in us.
For this, the main publication from the project, the project director
owes a particular debt of gratitude to the editorial committee (Dave
Foreword xiii
Schneider, Steve Bornstein, John Lutz, Barb Neis, Peter Sinclair, and
Carrie Holcapek), which helped finalize the text of this volume and
she especially wishes to thank Barb Neis and Peter Sinclair, who read
the whole volume through several times and made comments and sug-
gestions. The book could not have been completed without them. We
also wish to thank two anonymous readers for their insightful com-
ments, Ron Curtis for his careful and thoughtful copyediting, Bob and
Gillian McIvor and Bob Cecill for proofreading assistance, and Joan
McGilvray and McGill-Queen’s University Press for providing a positive
publishing experience.
Rosemary E. Ommer, University of Victoria

Abbreviations
acoa Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency

and Anglo-Newfoundland Development Corporation
aoi area of interest
btf Back to the Future
cba cost-benefit analysis
ccpfa Canadian Council of Professional Fish Harvesters
chc Community Health Council
chrhc Community Human Resources and Health Centres
cma Coastal Management Area
cnopb Canada–Newfoundland Offshore Petroleum Board
cnsopb Canada–Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board
cosewic Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in
Canada
cus Coasts Under Stress Research Project
cvihsda Central Vancouver Island Health Service Delivery Areas
cw carapace width
czm Coastal Zone Management
dfo Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada
ea Enterprise Allocation
ecbc Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation
ecnasap East Coast of North America Strategic Assessment Project
eem Environmental Effect Monitoring
eez exclusive economic zone
ei Employment Insurance
eia Environmental Impact Assessment
eis Environmental Impact Statement
epp Environmental Protection Plan
fao Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
fek fishers’ ecological knowledge
xvi Abbreviations
fpu Fishermen’s Protective Union

frcc Fisheries Resource Conservation Council
gbsc Gilbert Bay Steering Committee
gnp Great Northern Peninsula
gpa Global Programme of Action for the Protection of the
Marine Environment from Land-based Activities
gsc Geological Survey of Canada
hbc Hudson’s Bay Company
hccsj Health Care Corporation of St John’s
hsda Health Service Delivery Area
ia Income Assistance
ibm Individual-Based Model
ices International Council for the Exploration of the Sea
icnaf International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic
Fisheries
im integrated management
imf International Monetary Fund
imma International Marine Minerals Society
iq individual quota
itq individual transferable quota
iucn World Conservation Union
lek local ecological knowledge
lmn Labrador Métis Nation
loma Large Ocean Management Area
mha Member of the House of Assembly (provincial legislature)
moh Ministry of Health
mpa Marine Protected Area
msc Marine Stewardship Council
nafo Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization
narl North Atlantic Refining Ltd
nawmp North American Waterfowl Management Plan
ngo non-governmental organization
nha Northern Health Authority
nhnha Newfoundland Hospital and Nursing Home Association
nita Northern and Isolation Travel Assistance Program
npa National Programme of Action for Protection of the
Marine Environment from Land-Based Activities
npv net present value
nta Newfoundland Teachers’ Association
ntl Newfoundland Transhipment Terminal
nvihsda North Vancouver Island Health Service Delivery Area
nwhsda North West Health Service Delivery Area
orb optimal restorable biomass
Abbreviations xvii
pccrrhs Provincial Coordinating Committee for Remote and Rural

Health Services
pop Physicians Outreach Program
prfd Prince Rupert Forest District
psyus provincial sustainable yield units
pyll potential years of lost life
qcb Queen Charlotte Basin
rda Rural Development Association
rha regional health authority
rhb Regional Health Board
rhdb Regional Health District Board
rv research vessel
sam social accounting matrix
sara Species at Risk Act
sci Sustainable Communities Initiative
sep Salmonid Enhancement Program
ssp Strategic Social Plan
tac total allowable catch
tags The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy
tb Tofino Basin
tek traditional ecological knowledge
tfl Tree Farm Licence
toc total organic carbon
ui Unemployment Insurance
unclos United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
vec valued ecosystem components
viha Vancouver Island Health Authority
wcoeea West Coast Offshore Exploration Environmental
Assessment
wcvi west coast of Vancouver Island
wd Western diversification
wto World Trade Organization
wwf World Wildlife Fund
part one
How We Got Here:
Historical Restructuring and
Its Social-Ecological Legacy
1
Introduction – What Stress?
What Coasts?
the problem
Rural communities in Canada, and also in many other parts of the

developed world, are in crisis. Nowhere is this more true than in the
coastal resource-based communities on the East and West Coasts of
Canada, where there are now fewer people living than there were one
hundred years ago and where the resources and environment that
once supported communities are now all but gone. The communities
are so diminished that there are now more ghost towns than inhabited
ones on the East and West coasts. Changes in natural environments
have interacted with political, industrial, and social change to adversely
affect the health of the people who live there, their communities, and
the natural environments in which they are embedded. Such commu-
nities are bellwethers for national and global changes: the flight from
rural communities to huge urban agglomerations is not just a Cana-
dian phenomenon, nor is the environmental destruction that is partly
driving that migration. Increasingly, scholars, scientists, and social sci-
entists are telling us that we are headed down a pathway to environ-
mental collapse and social chaos unless important changes are made
soon. We do not have enough resources left, even if we stop degrading
ecosystems now, because already almost two-thirds of our resources are
used up (Guardian Weekly 2005; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
2005; Diamond 2005; Right 2004). We need to understand what has
happened, what is going on and why ... and then focus on recovery. In
short, Canada and the wider world need to make urgent choices. Our
accustomed patterns drove us into this mess, and we need new ideas,
new ways of thinking, to get us out.
The authors of this book think that the fundamental problem is an
inadequate understanding of the highly complex links between social
4 How We Got Here
and environmental restructuring and how they interact with the health
of people and places. This volume is an attempt to offer new ideas and
new ways of thinking based on research projects that have examined
these problems as they have developed in all their complexity. We
call the approach we have developed “social-ecological health,” a new
comprehensive analytical framework for understanding social and eco-
logical restructuring and its impact on health in Canada and interna-
tionally. This volume and the insights it contains, as well as the other
volumes linked to it, result from a bold experiment in bringing an
unprecedented diversity of expertise to bear on social and environ-
mental restructuring. Over five years of testing and experimentation,
we have crafted a scholarly technique that breaks through disciplinary
borders to allow scholars to work effectively together across traditional
divides. Not only do our research findings contain new knowledge, a
new perspective on coastal issues, and new ways of doing research, but
we have generated a new way to make and move knowledge within
scholarly teams and, through and from them, to policymakers and
communities.
We start with the understanding that today’s coastal communities
are the product of centuries of interactive restructuring between people
and natural environments. Interactive restructuring occurs through
the interplay of social factors (economics, policy, institutional history)
with the biophysical environment. The historical pathways of interac-
tion can be short (as in the case of some nonrenewable resources) or
long (as in the case of many renewable resources), but in all cases the
human and community health consequences of restructuring can lead
to biophysical degradation when risks, costs, and benefits are mis-
aligned and scale asymmetry occurs. Scale asymmetry happens in vari-
ous ways, depending on which scale is involved.
For our analysis, three kinds of mismatches are crucial: spatial scale
asymmetries occur when activities appropriate to one geographical
level are applied without due consideration at another or when the
process is wrong and decisions made at one level pertain to another
and people at that other level (usually, but not always, lower down) are
not consulted. Fisheries management, for example, occurs at the
national scale, which can result in decisions that are taken without ade-
quate local (or international) consultation and that turn out to be
inappropriate regionally and locally or ineffective globally. Again, gov-
ernment policy thinking may be directed at “the individual,” when “the
community” is a more appropriate level of management. We will see
examples throughout this book. Temporal scale asymmetries occur
when (for example) the need to introduce major change slowly is
ignored and problems arise from overly rapid change. By the same
What Stress? What Coasts? 5
token, change can come too slowly, as occurred in the case of the East
Coast groundfish moratoria, where policy-making did not respond
quickly enough to science. Organizational scale asymmetries occur
when, for example, activities appropriate at the level of the firm are
applied to government or community organizations. Working at the
appropriate level is of fundamental importance, particularly if the
scale of different firms is also considered: they may range from large
firms with a global reach to local firms. Firms differ in scale in at least
two ways: in the size and in the scope of their activity. Some small firms
can have a national or global reach and vice versa, although the typical
combination is more symmetrical, some of them being larger than
municipalities in numerical terms, and provinces in economic terms.
Thus, both practice and policy have to take type and scale of organiza-
tion into account and consider how they may benefit or be inappropri-
ate for producers whose livelihoods depend on resources. We also
consider that the different types of asymmetry tend to go together,
decisions made by the wrong organization tending to be for the wrong
geographical scale and also for the wrong temporal scale.1
Among the sources of misalignment we have uncovered are misdi-
rected flows of benefits that, if they fail to reach resource-dependent
regions and generate diversification in them, can lead to overdepend-
ence on one resource (a “staple”) and a consequent inability to trans-
form the economy when markets falter or the resource is depleted –
what is called a “staple trap.” The emerging solution to the problem of
depleted resources and stressed communities, which we see as a chal-
lenge for the recovery of both (albeit in a new form) is multiscale gov-
ernance, which is distinguished by cross-scale flows of knowledge and
cross-scale readjustments of regulatory power.
The team that came together to do the research on which this vol-
ume reports has been thinking about the problem of restructuring
and social-ecological health for some time. That there was trouble in
Canada’s coastal communities and marine ecosystems was obvious to
us, and we could not ignore the warning signals. In 1992, for exam-
ple, the East Coast groundfish fishery collapsed, and the subsequent
moratoria on fishing threw thirty thousand people out of work. At
that time, some of us from a range of disciplines in the natural and
social sciences explored how the disaster played out for communities
of fish and fishers in a small part of Newfoundland, to try to under-
stand what went wrong and what might be done in the future
(Ommer 2002). Subsequently, the salmon fishery on the West Coast
of Canada started to experience problems, and we saw therein worry-
ing resemblances to the East Coast situation. We therefore put
together a second interdisciplinary research team to look at issues of
6 How We Got Here
Figure 1.1 The Coasts Under Stress study area
ethics and equity in fisheries management on both the East and West
Coasts (Coward et al. 2000).
Those two research projects produced some interesting results, not
least by bringing home to us the fact that the problems on Canada’s
coasts extended beyond the fisheries to most resource sectors, renew-
Figure 1.1 (continued)
able and nonrenewable. It was made clear to us that coastal communi-

ties had inherited a legacy of increasingly depleted and/or degraded
resources (closed mines, ghost towns). Moreover, the extraction indus-
tries that remained were concentrated for the most part in the hands
of large companies who were themselves challenged competitively.
8 How We Got Here
The result has been distressed communities whose resource-based

raisons-d’être have been disappearing as both local environments and
community economies change. New options are, of course, emerging
(see part 3), but many of them (aquaculture, “underutilized species,”
offshore oil and gas) could aggravate existing problems if not man-
aged effectively.
That is why the Coasts Under Stress (cus) team came together to
work out a new interdisciplinary and multiscale approach that could
analyse what was going on. We chose areas on both coasts that between
them would cover the range of problems we needed to assess (see fig-
ure 1.1). We selected St Anthony on the East Coast and Prince Rupert
on the West as regional centres. Single-resource centres included
Tofino and Ucluelet on the West Coast, Port au Choix, Williams Har-
bour, and Port Hope Simpson on the East. Forestry was studied on the
Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland as a whole, with a particu-
lar concentration on White Bay South, while on the West Coast we con-
sidered the whole of the north coast of British Columbia from Haida
Gwaii to Ocean Falls. We chose Port Hardy and Port McNeill on the
West Coast as examples of mixed economies; we looked at now-defunct
mining towns – Anyox on the West Coast, Tilt and Bett’s Coves on the
East – and we looked at fisheries from Cartwright to Port aux Basques
on the East Coast and in the Hecate Strait areas on the West. We
looked at oil and gas at Hibernia on the East Coast and its potential in
the Hecate Strait and the Tofino Basin on the West Coast. We also
selected Haida Gwaii (for archaeological work) and Hartley Bay and
Alert Bay (all on the West Coast) to allow us to pay attention to the
impact on First Nations communities on that coast, where land claims
are of significant import today. There was no equivalent First Nations
presence in Newfoundland in the areas where we were working.
In these places, we could look at how our social and natural environ-
ments had been changing in an interconnected and complex manner
and at an accelerating rate and apply our understanding of how the
scale of decision-making matters. Despite extensive investments in
resource management and environmental impact assessments, we in
Canada have overharvested our groundfish, our salmon, and our for-
ests; our known mineral and energy resources are under pressure, and
we continue to degrade our marine, terrestrial, and atmospheric habi-
tats. In coastal areas, as in agricultural areas, our small, rural communi-
ties are increasingly in trouble, partly because environmental
degradation poses significant problems for people, while our attempts
at social responses often exacerbate degradation. These complex inter-
active processes affect environmental, population, and community
health and are in turn affected by them. We suspected that the prob-
lem was systemic in cause – a result of policy thrusts and economic

imperatives over the long term – rather than simply a result of specific
local geographies and resource bases. That is why we chose to work on
two apparently very different coasts, unalike in geography and
resource base, in timing of settlement (the “old” East Coast and the
“young” West Coast, always excepting First Nations), and in culture.
We hypothesized that if both coasts were suffering similar impacts,
then the problem could reasonably be said to be the result of patterns
of human decision-making (hence systemic), which means that it may
be fixable. That said, the fundamental problem Canada faces here,
both intellectually and practically, is that we have an inadequate under-
standing of the highly complex links between social and environmen-
tal restructuring and how together they interact with the health of
people and places. In other words, our work had to pay attention to the
interactive processes that have been restructuring Canada’s biophysical
environment, social structure, and the health of its coastal peoples.
restructuring
Following a substantial body of literature, we conceptualize what is

occurring on our coasts as a process of restructuring. In the past, restruc-
turing has been generally recognized to have created rapid and pro-
found social, economic, and political change both in and beyond
industrial countries, and the growing literatures on globalization, the
dismantling of the welfare state, industrial change, and neoliberalism
all speak of the advent of a “new industrial divide.” The literature on
social restructuring has concentrated on regulatory and industrial
restructuring through an examination of globalization, technological
change, and new industrial divisions and practices, and points out that
social restructuring has both global and local dimensions. Globally,
“freeing” the operation of economic activity has predominated (Beneria
and Lind 1995, 2). The effects can be seen, for example, in shifts in
the location of production, as well as in changes in the nature of work
and employment (Mackenzie and Norcliffe 1997). Nationally and
locally, restructuring has also been associated with the erosion of social
safety nets and changes in health and education systems. There has
been disagreement, however, on how such restructuring affected peo-
ple, their communities, and the environment.
The optimistic view has been that we have been shifting to a post-
industrial society characterized by greater flexibility, more skilled
workers, better work coordination, and new approaches to manage-
ment (Osborne and Gaebler 1992; Piore and Sabel 1984). This shift
was to be demonstrated over the longer term by (for example) less
10 How We Got Here
state debt, greater economic growth, reduced gaps between rich and
poor, increased leisure opportunities, more sophisticated niche mar-
ket structures, and better food production and distribution as a result
of biotechnological innovation (Hart 1996). From a social determinants
of health perspective, such outcomes from restructuring might have
unfortunate short-term negative consequences for some people (lost
jobs, reduced incomes, and state support programs), but in the long
run it was expected to help solve the problem of poverty and reduce
social inequities. With regard to the environment, poor outcomes (it
was argued) would improve as a shift away from mass production
reduced threats to environmental health as well as environmental
threats to human health, while actually creating new kinds of commu-
nities, including “virtual communities.”
The pessimistic view has been that, to the contrary, neoliberal restruc-
turing has deepened the divide between rich and poor people,
regions, and countries (Sforza-Roderick, Nova, and Weisbrot 1998),
strengthening transnational corporations relative to workers and gov-
ernments (Bonnano et al. 1994; Friedland 1991; Winson 1992), and
destroying communities (Laxer 1995) and, with them, the roots of
social integration and social action, while also threatening the health
of workers and their families (in Canada as elsewhere: Yalnizyan
1998). Some critics have added that the poverty gap is producing a
health gap – Canadians at the bottom of the economic ladder are more
likely to die from many different diseases than are the more well-off
(Raphael 1999). Such things as work reorganization, capital flight,
deregulation, and cuts to public services and social programs, in this
view, have affected the health of workers as a consequence of changes
in regulations that had been designed to prevent and/or detect work-
related health risks and workers’ access to public services providing
health care, training, and compensation for loss of work, accident,
injury, or occupational disease. Restructuring, seen negatively, has
become associated with such problems as higher unemployment rates,
lower wages and benefits, and poorer working conditions (Amott 1993).
“Job flexibility” has become a euphemism for low-income employment
without benefits, unions, or much job security (Armstrong 1995;
Leach and Winson 1995). The health risks associated with restructur-
ing are claimed to be profound, since strategies such as downsizing
and capital flight increase employment uncertainty and unemploy-
ment and create psychosocial stress (Mayhew and Quinlan 1999; Picot
and Wannell 1993; Witherill and Kolak 1996). The benefits are largely
reaped by employers, generally at the expense of workers, primary pro-
ducers, and the environment, and the health of all of these, while the
transfer of power from democratic institutions to private institutions
erodes effective democracy. Ecological degradation increases as regu-

latory constraints weaken (Albo and Roberts 1998; Martin and
Schumann 1998). In this book, we investigate the effects of restructur-
ing. In the process, we test the validity of both the positive and the neg-
ative view of it, from the perspective of coastal communities.
Such has been the social science literature. “Restructuring” has been
used in this literature to refer to periods of relatively rapid, substantive
change, what in the biophysical sciences is referred to as “regime shift.”
Research on such environmental restructuring has usually focused
either narrowly on regime shifts within ecosystems (Steele 1998) or
more broadly on ecosystem stressors and their potentially devastating
consequences for environmental and human health. “Healthy ecosys-
tems” are usually defined as ecosystems that are stable and sustainable,
resilient to stressors, and capable of maintaining organization and
autonomy over time. Natural disturbances, it is argued, often provide
the basis for the revitalization of local ecosystems, while anthropogenic
stressors are seen as often resulting in degradation that reduces the
capacity of ecosystems to recover, thus permanently affecting their
health (Rapport, Costanza, and McMichael 1998). Degradation can
worsen under conditions of scientific uncertainty, and/or when polit-
ico-economic pressure for continued resource exploitation results in a
cycle of resource overexploitation characterized by the so-called
“ratchet effect” (Clapp 1998; Ludwig, Hilborn, and Walters 1993).
All these literatures have reflected what we have come to see as an
incomplete understanding of the dynamics of environments or the
links between ecology, economy, and health. We see restructuring as
much more interactive and dynamic and as much less linear or discrete
than any of these views understand it, and we think, furthermore, that
it has deeper historical roots than any of these literatures recognize.
The importance of the temporal dimension is borne out by the work of
the eminent Canadian economic historian Harold Innis (e.g., 1954,
1956), who saw post-contact economic development in Canada as
grounded in natural-resource (“staple”) exploitation. He (and later
historians) went so far as to explain Canadian history in terms of the
development of regional economies that restructured the economies
of “new” and “empty” territories so that they became producers of fish,
fur, timber, wheat, and so forth (“staples”) for export.
In later work, Mel Watkins (1963, and with Grant 1993) suggested
that some regions could continue to shift economic focus (restruc-
ture) successfully either by switching resources when the original one
failed or by diversifying around the staple base and achieving indus-
trial development. It is argued that such successful restructuring has
occurred in various places in Canada in the last two centuries
12 How We Got Here
(Ontario, British Columbia), while other regions have failed to shift

staples or engender sufficient diversification around the resource base,
becoming stuck in a “staple trap” that has left them economically
“backward” (Newfoundland, for example). Some, on the other hand,
have been cursed with staples that were considered to be inadequate as
instruments of regional growth (Paquet on cod, for example, 1968).
More recent staples work, recognizing the narrowness of such an
explanation, broadened the approach to deal with issues of agency for
local people, the influence of power on the location of economic and
social development (Ommer 1991), the importance of the balance
between human populations and their environment (Thornton 1979),
or more modern developments such as branch plants and transna-
tional corporations (Hayter 2000). In addition, the staples approach,
in all of its variants, had one key lacuna: it never dealt with that first,
colonial, restructuring, which took the pre-contact world of First
Nations and restructured it in the image and likeness of European
merchant, and later industrial, capitalism, with consequences that are
still being played out across the continent. Nor did it come to grips
with environmental restructuring or with issues related to population
and community health.
complex adaptive systems and

social-ecological health
As we began our work, a new literature was emerging that sought to

develop new interdisciplinary insights and drew on “vernacular knowl-
edge” in order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics and con-
sequences of social and environmental restructuring (Berkes 1999).
This literature saw social and ecological systems as complex, adaptive,
and interdependent, as well as highly vulnerable in today’s increasingly
global postindustrial world. It also argued that these complex adaptive
systems, while vulnerable, also contained the germs of how to remain
sustainable and resilient, in that their modus operandi protected peo-
ple and ecosystems even under stressful conditions. There is now a sig-
nificant and growing literature on ecology, resilience, and complex
adaptive systems, as well as an important literature combining analyses
of human and ecological systems.
The most notable is the work of Fikret Berkes and his colleagues,
whose path-breaking research we can only partially examine here.2 The
seminal paper for all this thinking dates back to 1973, when biologist
C.S. (“Buzz”) Holling opened a discussion of the importance of what
he called “constancy” in ecological systems. He suggested that the per-
sistence of internal relationships was what really mattered when a system
was “profoundly affected by changes external to it, and continually

confronted by the unexpected” (1973, 1). If considered in this way,
ecological systems, he argued, benefited from “instability, in the sense
of large fluctuations” because they appeared to produce “resilience
and a capacity to persist” (15). In introducing the “qualitative” analy-
sis of relationship, rather than the traditional quantitative analysis of
presence/absence of component parts, he required that attention be
turned from equilibrium as the main feature of healthy ecosystems to
resilience.
This is the founding premise of what we now refer to as the “new
ecology.” Since then, Holling (1986) and others (Gunderson and
Holling 2002; Berkes, Colding, and Folke 2003; Turner et al. 2003)
have all been seeking a new understanding of human and biological
cycles and the relationship between them. They speak of “social-eco-
logical systems” (from which we derive our term “social-ecological
health”) having their own cycles of organization, collapse, and
renewal, but point out that such systems may also exhibit other fea-
tures, such as sudden transitions from one state to another, incremen-
tal and slowly emergent change, or change that occurs because of
exogenous and rapid disturbance. For social systems that are orga-
nized around a particular biophysical system, unanticipated shifts in
the biological base are likely to result in periods of social instability and
crisis. The reverse is also true – changes in social systems (as in the use
of more sophisticated harvesting technology or increased technologi-
cal intensity), particularly if managed poorly, can induce biophysical
change. Because of this interdependence, understanding system-wide
feedbacks – how human actions influence ecological systems and how
ecological systems in turn alter human behaviour – is crucial (Tengo
and Hammer 2003, 133). Scale-dependent interactions also need to
be understood. These interactions can be interpreted in the light of
several concepts of system complexity, especially that of complex adap-
tive systems with defined components, such as a community of people,
or a population of organisms (Levin 1999), which demonstrate resil-
ience.
Most importantly, however, while work in the new ecology is not
“wedded to an equilibrial perspective,” as Scoones observes, a great
deal of the social science thinking that has built on Holling’s original
insight has failed to catch up with this adjustment and “has tended to
ignore questions of dynamics and variability across time and space,
often excluding from the analysis the key themes of uncertainty,
dynamics and history” (1999, 480). Such a position is no longer tena-
ble, nor is (Scoones argues) the “nature-culture divide,” although it
must not be replaced by either determinism or relativism. He calls for
14 How We Got Here
work that is concerned with “spatial and temporal dynamics developed

in detail and situated analyses of ‘people in places,’ using in particular
historical analysis as a way of explaining environmental change across
time and space” (487–90).
We concur. This is exactly the kind of work we have done, except
that we go further and also look at social-ecological health and change.
Scoones recommends building on an understanding of “environment
as both the product of and the setting for human interactions, which
link dynamic structural analysis of environmental processes with an
appreciation of human agency in environmental transformation”
(1999, 490). With this, too, we agree, and indeed our work goes fur-
ther because we also consider the reciprocities (interdependencies)
that exist between human agency and environmental processes.
Scoones, however, insists that “the appreciation of complexity and
uncertainty in social-ecological systems” may result in “the recognition
... that prediction, management, and control are unlikely, if not impos-
sible” (490). Here, we disagree. We consider this too draconian a con-
clusion to reach before much more work is done, although we agree
with the importance of recognizing uncertainty and complexity.
Fortunately, however, Scoones also claims that in cases where rigid-
ity has given way to flexibility, there might be “major practical conse-
quences for planning, intervention design, and management” (479) as
a result. We think this is a wiser interim conclusion than a claim that,
given complexity, management may be “impossible.”3 Encouragingly,
in the last five years a network of scholars concerned with management
and resilience in social-ecological systems has developed. Key players
here include, in particular, Fikret Berkes and his colleagues and the
authors (most of them part of the Resilience Alliance) whose work is
presented in the theoretical book edited by Lance Gunderson and
Buzz Holling entitled Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in
Human and Natural Systems (2002). Berkes, Gunderson, Holling, Folke,
and others have explored social-ecological systems in case studies
drawn from around the world, and Berkes himself also has a rich col-
lection of work on the Canadian Arctic. Two major books, the first
edited by Berkes and Folke (1998) and the second by Berkes, Colding,
and Folke (2003) speak to the complex issues of how to link social and
ecological systems (1998) and how to “navigate” them (2003). They
present cross-scale and cross-disciplinary studies that inform us about
the conditions under which resilience is built, and they discuss ways of
managing social-ecological systems.
It is this new approach that is detailed and expanded upon in the
Gunderson and Holling volume in which Berkes and others in the
Resilience Alliance are contributors and which is a major theoretical
and structural analysis of complexity, drawing on both natural and

social science, although much of the social science is drawn from man-
agement and business studies. The book seeks to come to theoretical
grips with the thorny issues of complex adaptive systems, change, resil-
ience, cross-scale issues, and the urgent necessity of cross-disciplinary
and cross-scale research. Most significantly, it recognizes the impor-
tance of responding to uncertainty at a multiplicity of scales, and also
across them. The authors say that they “prefer to invent a[nother] term
that captures the adaptive and evolutionary nature of adaptive cycles
that are nested one within the other and across time scales,” because
they wish to get away from “rigid top-down” connotations. That is why
they call their theoretical system panarchy. Panarchy (they describe it
more clearly than they actually define it) embraces “biological, ecolog-
ical and human systems” that “contain a nested set of [the] four-phase
adaptive cycles, in which opportunities for periodic reshuffling within
levels maintain adaptive opportunity, and the simple interactions
across levels maintain integrity.” The four phases are characterized by
exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization (Gunderson
and Holling 2002, 73–4, and chap. 2).
There is much to ponder here, but it is in its understanding of cross-
scale interactions that the book’s most useful theoretical insight is to
be found. Using the lessons learned in earlier case studies (such as
those by Berkes and Holling, among others), Panarchy points to the
problems of rigidity in management systems at all scales and shows
how, in some cases, such rigidities can contribute to meta-system col-
lapse. Rigidity, in this use of the word, is a continued commitment to
existing practices in the face of difficulties, rather than seeking a cre-
ative new response to changed circumstances. That, in and of itself, is
not new. But what is new here is the idea that different levels of a meta-
system have different functions that need to be coordinated. Being a
theoretical discussion, illustrated only partially by rather limited case
studies, the book does not (and cannot) tell us how such coordination
should occur. However, it suggests that the top levels of a meta-system
should, under uncertainty, provide the slower-moving stabilizing role
of assessing and deliberating, and only then acting upon innovative
responses to crises in the system. Such highly creative innovative
responses, which can generate transformation throughout the meta-
system, are most likely to occur at the base of the system, where the
scale is small enough for dynamic response to be possible, because
experimentation is at a manageable scale.
This is an interesting hypothesis and one that is pertinent to the
kinds of social-ecological change that restructuring has created,
although it fails to come to grips with important issues of power (see
16 How We Got Here
Sinclair and Ommer 2006). What it does do is speculate on the dynam-

ics of multiscale response differentials, the problem that is at the heart
of their conceptual framework for dealing with uncertainty. They
hypothesize that creative innovative responses, if successfully filtered
across scales and positively assessed at the highest levels, will result in
positively creative and (relatively) stable cross-system adjustments.
Should, however, rigidities occur in the system, particularly at the
higher levels, the results can be catastrophic – and they cite the col-
lapse of northern cod (Gadus morhua) as an ecological example,
explaining (in broad terms) how institutional rigidities in the human
management system failed to cope with uncertainties and change,
resulting in both social and ecological disaster (Hutchings, Walters,
and Haedrich 1997; Hutchings and Myers 1995). They go further.
They suggest that inflexibilities in the system will have cascading effects
that can trap lower levels in unproductive stasis, stasis that can, in the
long term, lead to systemic failure. The authors speak of the patchiness
of resources (well recognized in biology), the importance of cross-scale
interactions, and the different kinds of social and ecological transfor-
mations that can occur, as well as the different rates of change at differ-
ent scales. This latter point is crucial, for in “a healthy society, each
level is allowed to operate at its own pace, protected from above by
slower, larger levels, but invigorated from below by faster, smaller
ones” (Gunderson and Holling 2002, 76). In human systems, they
assert, failure to allow each level to operate at its own pace will express
itself as a “poverty trap” arising from rigidities (such as inequitable
power and economic structures, and poor health) in other parts of the
system.
Gunderson and Holling’s book on panarchy, which encapsulates so
much new theoretical thinking, refers to case study examples through-
out in a sustained theoretical argument. The examples are drawn in
large part, however, either from biology or from the world of business,
where concerns over flexibility and rigidity have been uppermost in
the entrepreneurial mind for some time now (Cohen and Winn 2007)
and have succeeded in altering some business and management prac-
tices. The authors speak of the problem of poverty when local systems
fail (or are not given the chance) to adapt. They insist that when the
various levels do not aid one another, systemic change cannot be
responded to appropriately and that the end results are rigidity traps
and poverty traps in some levels of the system. These, they conclude,
are the hallmarks of maladaptive systems and can eventually bring
down the whole structure (see Gunderson and Holling 2002, espe-
cially 95–8).
the coasts under stress approach
This new literature is exceedingly important, and we build on it in our

own work, seeking to bring together many strands in the various litera-
tures in the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. But we go
further, because we add the population health literatures, which are
necessary if we are to link the functioning of social-ecological systems
to their health and well-being. Our work seeks, therefore, to combine
all this new work, along with population health thinking, in such a way
as to produce a more holistic view of interactive restructuring and its
relationship to the health of people, communities, and the environ-
ment. For its part, the population health literature has not paid much
attention to the relationship between human/population and commu-
nity health and environmental degradation, having as its main focus
the “social determinants” of health (education, income, employment,
gender, work environments, and so on). It has paid even less attention
to the relationship between biophysical environments and health, but
that relationship is critical to our understanding of the dynamics of
coastal communities and health in that context.
While we have drawn on the population health literature to some
considerable extent, then, we build into the picture the missing link of
environmental health, thereby creating social-ecological health as a
“process variable” – that is, a variable that is identified through the way
in which restructuring processes (shapes) the interaction between soci-
ety and environment. There are, we think, connected cascades (causal
sequences) of events (pathways) between society, the environment, and
population and community health that arguably become more visible
during periods of restructuring. Restructuring can also enhance the
potential for unanticipated health risks, because it can create misalign-
ment between institutional structures and social and environmental
realities. This is why it is so important to focus, as we have done, on
restructuring. Canada’s coasts have been subject to periods of social
restructuring (which is experienced in coastal communities) punctu-
ated by periods of rapid regime shift (biological restructuring) within
marine ecosystems, with the interaction between these two kinds of
restructuring being co-dependent. In some cases, triggers for ecologi-
cal shifts are relatively remote from the effects, a classic example being
the way in which the development of distant water fleets in Europe and
elsewhere eventually resulted in the “killer spike” (Hutchings and
Myers 1995) for northern cod and other groundfish species in the late
1960s, which was itself the harbinger of the collapse of groundfish in
the northwest Atlantic. Triggers can also be close, as when overfishing
18 How We Got Here
of the northern Gulf cod stocks by a local fleet of draggers (Palmer and
Sinclair 1997) led to their collapse.
More broadly, we should ask if “real” development (which includes
maturation and diversification, as opposed to simple growth) was and
is being generated around the various staple bases that have come into
existence on the East and West Coasts of Canada. To answer that ques-
tion we must think beyond short-term gdp (gross domestic product)
increments to include whatever cultural, social, health, and environ-
mental costs have been involved. Good governance, it seems to us,
means knowing as much as possible about the dynamics and potential
impacts of social-ecological interactive restructuring, using history and
comparative research to help anticipate change and uncertainty, in
order to minimize social-ecological costs and maintain social-ecologi-
cal health.
We define health in three categories. First, in the World Health
Organization (who) definition, human health is “a state of complete
physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of
disease or infirmity” (who 1948).4 Second, health of communities we
take to be the condition of a socio-economic-environmental system
where the economic, social, and political components are organized
and maintained in such a way as to promote both human and natural
environmental well-being so that the community experiences relatively
high levels of social support, a culturally acceptable standard of living,
less rather than more inequality, and similar benefits that augment
individual well-being and provide for low levels of social dysfunction.
Third, health of the environment we take to be the result of relatively
low levels of human-induced morbidity or mortality of humans or
other species, along with relatively low levels of contaminants that
induce mortality or morbidity in human or other species.
However, the health of communities and the environment is not
merely the absence of morbidity/mortality and social dysfunction. It
extends to those interactions of communities with their environment
in ways that sustain quality of life and promote resilience in response to
stressors. This is “social-ecological health,” which includes the cultural,
social, and environmental dimensions of health and reflects the link to
restructuring by integrating these components into one framework
that recognizes that processes operating within social, environmental,
and cultural contexts have interdependent, reciprocal, and nonlinear
relationships and feedback effects, and also complex causality. More
particularly, as our definition implies, resilience is a key idea, and so we
seek to explore the idea of resilience, elaborating it to see how it can
be achieved across complex adaptive systems that operate across sev-
eral scales. This multiscale perspective needs to become part of resil-
Figure 1.2 The Coasts Under Stress Model (Dolan et al. 2005)
ience thinking and will in the process generate new understanding of

what is involved. This should ensure that resilience cannot be under-
stood as any kind of “return to equilibrium” – an understanding that
was inherent in Holling’s original work (see above – 1973) and that
has been part of most biological resilience models but that is increas-
ingly untenable when applied to human (and even biological) systems.
There is no assumption in our work that resilient systems will tend to
maintain or restore equilibrium without changing essential relation-
ships among the parts. Instead, we seek to identify, through historical,
comparative, interdisciplinary research, the systemic changes that
resulted from colonial and postcolonial development in resource-
based economies, changes that have flowed through pathways connect-
ing socio-economic, environmental, and political restructuring to
social-ecological health. Our conceptual framework (figure 1.2) illus-
trates these pathways along which various forms of restructuring inter-
act with each other to influence population and community health
over time (Dolan et al. 2005). How and why these relationships unfold
as they do is significantly affected by the power of various groups of
people and organizations to structure courses of action and by the
power of other groups to resist. Differences of power among partici-
pants in the relationships we examine constitute an important part of
our work. Social power (the capacity to control social relationships)
can involve a wide range of strategies and the mobilization of relevant
resources. This is not to argue that people necessarily achieve the
20 How We Got Here
results they intend (as our work clearly shows); nor do we claim that all
actions are necessarily consciously goal-directed.5 Instead, we recog-
nize the wide range of choices that people make and find acceptable,
as well as the constraints under which those choices are made (mate-
rial constraints, knowledge constraints, etc.).
Within the framework of the model, human health (individual/fam-
ily) is a condition of physical and psychosocial well-being determined
by individual predisposition, circumstances, and experiences within
particular localities. Aggregate human outcomes, of course, are
socially produced, and socio-economic and cultural environments play
a significant role in influencing access to health care, environmental
exposures (home, work, community), and health behaviour (lifestyle
choices, use of health services, options for health promotion) (Adler
and Newman 2002). It is generally agreed, for example, that mortality
(death) and morbidity (disease) as a measure of health status follow a
gradient across socio-economic classes (Evans, Barer, and Marmor
1994). Human health, then, cannot be considered without reference
to socially produced attributes such as socio-economic status, gender,
education, and culture, and – given that human health is embedded
within social, economic, and cultural environments – the restructuring
of such attributes has direct implications for health status. Moreover,
human, community, and natural environmental health are interde-
pendent, since behavioural and genetic endowments are products of
individual biological, environmental, cultural, and social history,
which filter community and environmental influences.
We see community health (as we said earlier) as the condition of a
socio-economic-environmental system where the economic, social, and
political components are organized and maintained in such a way as to
promote well-being of both the human and the natural environment.
Our framework suggests that healthy communities – those with high
levels of trust, social engagement, equitable economic prosperity, for
example – are more likely to nurture healthy people. At the same time,
the health of a community itself is dependent on investments by indi-
viduals, families, and collective organizations (governments) and on
the health of the natural environment in which it is embedded. Com-
munity-level attributes, then (attributes such as past and current dif-
ferences in income and education, social capital, social cohesion,
and patterns of use/degradation within the natural and built environ-
ments), can mediate relationships between human and natural envi-
ronmental health.
By extension, then, ecological and social resilience and health are
interdependent (Folke et al. 1998) and exist together in a particularly
powerful relationship in resource-dependent coastal communities
(Adger 2000), since both human and community health are struc-
tured within natural environmental conditions (Hancock 1993, 2000).
A healthy natural environment (environmental viability) provides the
wherewithal for human well-being and individual health, and also for
the livelihoods of people in resource-based communities (economic
adequacy). Of course, since there are now very few, if any, relatively
undisturbed natural environments left to us, the present environment
is formed by previous as well as current human activities and manage-
ment practices. These in turn are mediated by knowledge, culture,
technology, politics, and ownership patterns. Ecologically sensitive and
sustainable management of the natural environment, then, promotes
healthy biophysical systems and maintains healthy ecosystems and thus
the resources upon which humans depend in the long term.
These nested parts of the ecosystem (human, community, biophysi-
cal environment) are themselves situated within dynamic and complex
broader environments, of course. Our view of social-ecological health
takes into account the constant change and interactions of the macro
environment and observes that restructuring (whether environmental,
political, economic, or social) provides the context within which
health determinants operate. For example, regime shifts in the bio-
physical environment can affect human health by influencing the fit
between knowledge systems and the natural and social world (Berkes,
Colding, and Folke 2003), social and environmental policy, social
cohesion, and social capital and support, as well as income, employ-
ment, work environments, and nutritional and leisure alternatives.
Broader-scale changes in the form of cumulative human-induced
effects can also affect environmental health by reducing biodiversity
and productivity and by changing disease prevalence and ecosystem
capacity to degrade wastes. Indeed, we can speak of a social-ecological
footprint6 – the impact that activity in one part of the total system has
on its other constituent parts and the extent and duration of that
impact. That is, our social-ecological definition of health recognizes
that restructuring/health interactions are historically situated, can
change over time and space, and will have uncertain future outcomes.
It also recognizes the need to draw upon various methods, actors,
knowledge systems, and scales of investigation in order to understand
and monitor the relationship between restructuring and the health of
people, communities, and natural environments (Murray et al. 2002).
Our work was designed to allow us to test out these ideas at the level
of two coasts and two regional rural, resource-based, and relatively
remote economies. In this study we show that the key diagnostic fea-
tures of social-ecological restructuring and health are that they are
(1) interactive processes with (2) bio-physical and human health con-
22 How We Got Here
sequences that have followed on appropriate multi-scale alignments

(when successful) and misalignments (when not), and therefore will
require (3) multi-scale governance models if social-ecological systems
are to operate effectively, promoting creativity and resilience at all lev-
els of the national metasystem.
methodology
In this book, we report on this new approach and describe our analysis
of the stress that is manifest in the human and biological communities
of Canada’s East and West Coasts. We do this because we recognize
that nowhere has the whole complex adaptive process of coastal social-
ecological health and restructuring been thought through in detail
before or tested beyond stand-alone case studies. We are attempting to
tackle the seemingly intractable decline of coastal communities by
using a new methodology put together by natural scientists, social sci-
entists, humanists, and health researchers. It has seven major dimen-
sions. First is interdisciplinarity. Integration of the natural and social
sciences, as well as a health determinants focus, provides an apprecia-
tion, not just of the work of other disciplines, but also of their complex-
ity. This is particularly important when it comes to science-informed
resource management, where disciplinary boundaries can mask inter-
actions that may be damaging to both human and biological commu-
nities. To be without the input of social scientists – sociologists,
anthropologists, and historians, as well as economists and health
researchers – is to repeat the old mistake of thinking you can manage
(for example) fish through regulations that ignore the realities of
stakeholders’ lives. That in turn is to ensure that solutions to resource
management issues will continue to falter.7 It is important to under-
stand the range, complexity, and motivations for human behaviour
and how these might be successfully addressed if we are to resolve diffi-
cult issues. That understanding requires the building of social and nat-
ural science partnerships that look jointly at the complexities of
resource management. It also means working with social communities
and their representatives to create better outcomes.
Coasts Under Stress has taken interdisciplinarity seriously. Members
of the team have been working together as biologists, anthropologists,
sociologists, biogeochemists, oceanographers, geographers, ethnobot-
anists, ecologists, education and community health specialists, histori-
ans, ethicists, and political scientists.8 We did this because we were
convinced that the problems we face as a consequence of restructuring
require the kind of integrated and nuanced analysis that can speak to
people in their historical and contemporary environments. We also
knew that interactions between the various kinds of restructuring,

including policy, industrial, and other social changes have crucial and
poorly understood consequences. We needed to understand our
coasts – the marine environment, the terrestrial one, the substrate (for
oil and gas), the littoral, and the watersheds, and also the way these are
all linked together ecologically, geographically, and temporally. To do
this we had to cut across traditional boundaries and work with new con-
ceptual frameworks and research methods in order to capture the
complex (mal)adaptations that occur as human and environmental
communities interrelate. This is the only way to understand what has
happened to these social-ecological systems, and why.
The second major dimension of our methodology is the bicoastal
nature of our inquiry. Because the problems we face as a consequence
of restructuring require an integrated analysis that can speak to people
in their environments, research of this kind needs to be place-specific:
as Mackenzie and Norcliffe observe (1997, 6), “Restructuring is a geo-
graphically-situated process” where the local situation shapes “larger
socio-economic processes into place-specific outcomes.” Coasts are
interesting places to research. They are edges, boundaries, and/or
interfaces, depending on whether one is thinking about them from the
inside or outside or across a range of different places, not only geo-
graphically but also culturally, politically, and ecologically. Such
peripheral (both geographically and politically) places give us differ-
ent kinds of information from that gained at the continental or politi-
cal centre. Moreover, they have the great virtue of being national
bellwethers for change because of the delicate balance of their compo-
nent parts, human and ecological.
Culturally, the coastal communities we looked at (see map, figure
1.1) have been an interface between First Nations, colonial, and immi-
grant cultures. Economically they have been an interface between the
formal (colonial and then provincial) economy, the informal subsis-
tence economies, and the political structures of colonial merchant
capital and/or foreign and domestic industrial capital, while their peo-
ple have had to move back and forth between wages (of various kinds)
and subsistence. Today they are an interface between First Nations and
the dominant culture, between industrial and postindustrial econo-
mies, between hinterlands and metropoles, rural and urban. Politi-
cally, they are, or have been, on the edge of the us/Canada divide, or
the Newfoundland/Quebec divide, and the First Nations/settler
divide. Today they are distressed, peripheral, staple-based communi-
ties vulnerable to regional and national responses to globalization.
Ecologically, they are coastal zones, interfaces between land and sea,
marine and land-based ecosystems. Ecologically and culturally, as
24 How We Got Here
Turner, Davidson-Hunt and O’Flaherty (2003) argue, “they exhibit

high levels of species richness or biodiversity ... [and] are similarly rich
and diverse in cultural terms.” As edges, they exist on the edge of the
continental landmass, the edge of the continental shelves ... and the
edge (margin, periphery) of the continental macro-economy. As
boundaries, they are made up of divisions that delineate First Nations’
territories, urban and rural environments, resource-based and service-
based activities, and places that are “protected” and places that are
open to exploitation. Finally, the marine parts of these coasts – the
Hecate Strait and the Strait of Belle Isle – are themselves interfaces
between different marine ecosystems, providing us with yet another
element of complexity.
The third dimension of our methodology is that our work is commu-
nity-based. It is also regionally comparative and informed by larger-scale
changes, as is required in complex adaptive systems research. It is
place-intensive and time-extensive research that has uncovered the way
in which circumstances in the wider economy, which have been build-
ing for a long time, have moved Canada towards economic restructur-
ing. Place-extensive (globalization) and time-intensive (competitive
response to market demand) economic restructuring have created
capital-intensive and labour-extensive strategies for global competitive-
ness, which have had major impacts on coastal communities, but the
effects of such changes at the local, small scale seem to have either
passed unnoticed or been dismissed as inevitable.
Coastal communities developed and thrived in economies that were
essentially place-intensive and time-extensive. In the formal economies
of such places, the task was to exploit the local staple. This was fish
ubiquitously on the East Coast to start with and later, in some loca-
tions, forests. On the West Coast it was a string of different staples over
time, including fish and forests. These staples were exported to metro-
politan markets in colonial times and to national and international
markets more recently. The formal staple economy was everywhere on
the coasts supplemented by an informal economy that effectively subsi-
dized the formal economy by supplementing the very low pay of work-
ers in the staple sector(s) with a means of subsistence in colonial times
and with a back-up to the purchase of store products using money
obtained through employment (or, more recently, Employment Insur-
ance) in the wage economy. Both formal and informal economies
relied on their workers’ deep local knowledge of the environment.
Both as workers and as residents, people often migrated seasonally to
exploit a range of ecological niches (historically) or employment
opportunities (historically and today) that, taken together, reflected a
yearly round of activities whose purpose was to maintain community
and household flexibility during generations of change and uncer-

tainty at the local scale.
Today, however, as flexibility becomes an industrial requirement in
the search for global competitiveness, the voices of these small places
are barely heard in the clamour for urban renewal and globalization.
Their old modus operandi resulted from their need to be flexible and
environmentally aware: as such, it was demonstrably sustainable
(Ommer and Turner 2004). The kinds of flexibility that allow firms to
respond quickly to global production and market demands is danger-
ous for these social-ecological communities, however, since those
kinds of flexibility are built on political, technological, economic, and
social changes that enhance flexibility at the level of the postindustrial
firm and (sometimes) of governments, but at potentially grave cost to
local environments, individuals, and communities. This is because the
corporate and institutional flexibilities that have been developed in
the last thirty years or so often left coastal communities environmen-
tally damaged and with a specialized infrastructure devoted to staple
extraction that is no longer viable. While the staple-extracting corpora-
tions can now flexibly shift their operations from country to country,
communities are left with the old rigid infrastructures and impover-
ished environments that make adjustments to restructuring almost
impossible. These changes have also supported technologies that per-
mit the global abuse of nature (seen in dying oceans), while companies
have responded by searching for techno-fixes (such as biotechnology
of various kinds) when nature balks. We will demonstrate these points
in detail throughout this book.
The fourth methodological dimension is the use of linked case stud-
ies. This is the only way to deal systematically and collectively with com-
munities in detail, on two coasts and over time, while still paying
attention to the richness and diversity of the habitat, ecosystem, econ-
omy, society, culture, and history found in these areas. Of course there
are rich literatures associated with the investigation of such themes
and places, but when the coasts are studied in this inclusive, complex,
and interdisciplinary way, the analysis changes. The questions change
and the answers become integrated into a wider picture than single-
discipline, single-resource, or single-region analysis can provide.
Case studies allow us to focus on the complexities of one place – the
First Nations’ (Gitga’at, Coast Tsimshian) settlement of Hartley Bay,
for example. They let us “drill down” into one issue – oil and gas
impacts, for example, or marine governance. We can explore one form
of knowledge – local ecological knowledge (lek), for example – or one
facet of the restructuring crisis, such as its impact on youth in particu-
lar places. We can undertake one study of social development (the his-
26 How We Got Here
tory of a health care system over an extended period) or one

exploration of the pathways between industrial exploitation of a
resource and the impact of that exploitation in the coastal zone (log
boom debris in British Columbia, for example). Since we undertake
case studies within a wider study, however, these kinds of complexities
are always considered within the broader concerns of the overarching
research question for which these mini-studies provide detailed place-
specific and/or temporally extended examinations of particular parts
of the restructuring process.
Berkes and Folke (1998) spoke of the need for case studies as the
way to get at the complexities of place-specific and temporally dynamic
social-ecological interactions and demonstrated that need with a rich
array of case studies from around the globe. This study, however, is
deliberately not international and not a single-case study. The case
studies here are related to one another and examine different aspects
of the two regions we studied. Thus, by comparing and contrasting the
studies as the evidence demanded, it was possible to get close to the
rich and complex totality of lived existence in coastal areas. The case
studies covered all the major sectors affected by restructuring, includ-
ing education, health, environment, and several economic subsectors,
while holding “the state” constant, so to speak. The international
dimensions of restructuring, which are richly documented in Berkes
and Folke (1998), were sacrificed in order to achieve a subnational
focus, specifically because this focus permits an examination of the
linkages between the different facets that make up life on the East and
West Coasts of Canada. This illuminates, not just the impact of restruc-
turing on one place, but also the process of restructuring. If local par-
ticularities (kind of resource, weather, culture ... ) differ but outcomes
are the same or very similar, we can then legitimately start to interro-
gate the underlying political, ecological, ideological, scientific, and
other processes that may be fundamental to, or instrumental in, shap-
ing similarities in the face of difference.
The fifth dimension of our methodology is our particular investiga-
tion of health, which we have discussed in some detail above. Because
this book focuses explicitly on the interactions between social and envi-
ronmental restructuring and natural environmental, community, and
human health, it needs an integrated way of thinking about health as a
social-ecological process. Our definition does indeed draw on the con-
tributions from the ecosystem, population, and community health
fields of scholarship, capturing the human, social, and environmental
dimensions of health, and it reflects the link to restructuring by inte-
grating them into one framework that recognizes that processes oper-
ating within social, environmental, and cultural contexts have
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
Moreover, because he sees in the church a possible vanguard to
civilization, he rebels against its retrogressive and obstructive policy.
He laments that the working men do not trust the clergy:[330]
“They suspect them to be mere tubs to the whale—mere
substitutes for education, slowly and late adopted, in order to stop the
mouths of the importunate. They may misjudge the clergy; but whose
fault is it if they do? * * * Every spiritual reform since the time of
John Wesley, has had to establish itself in the teeth of insult, calumny,
and persecution. Every ecclesiastical reform comes not from within,
but from without your body. Everywhere we see the clergy, * * *
proclaiming themselves the advocates of Toryism, * * * chosen
exclusively from the classes which crush us down; * * * commanding
us to swallow down, with faith as passive and implicit as that of a
Papist, the very creeds from which their own bad example, and their
scandalous neglect, have * * * alienated us; * * * betraying in every
tract, in every sermon, an ignorance of the doubts, the feelings, the
very language of the masses, which would be ludicrous, were it not
accursed before God and man.”
Meredith expresses the same idea, with the difference that he

does not speak apologetically from within, but with the unqualified
disapproval of the outsider. Jenny Denham, an incisive and
thoughtful woman, says,[331]
“My experience of the priest in our country is, that he has
abandoned—he’s dead against the only cause that can justify and
keep up a Church; the cause of the poor—the people. He is a creature
of the moneyed class. I look on him as a pretender.”
In his subtle way Meredith satirizes the Catholic Church by having

the Countess de Saldar take refuge in and approve of it. Its great
asset is that its democracy includes even tailors. That it is the only
true spiritual home for a true gentleman she proves by citing an
example. A noble knight does not hesitate at telling a flat falsehood
to save a lady, being safe in morality because “his priest was handy.”
Her nature is defined as the truly religious, that is, one with need of
vicarious strength and a sense of renewed absolution. Another
exponent is Constance Asper, in Diana of the Crossways, whose
boudoir was filled with expensive Catholic equipments, affording
“every invitation to meditate in luxury on an ascetic religiousness.”
Butler was not content to view the Church from his external
position with the silence of George Eliot or the casual comments of
Meredith. The intensity of his iconoclasm demanded full expression,
—kept, however, from crudeness by his ironic finish, and from
injustice by his fundamental reasonableness. In Erewhon his chief
point is the perfunctory character of established religion. The
Erewhonians have two distinct economic currencies, one of which is
supposed to be the system, and is patronized by all who wished to
be considered respectable. Yet its funds have no direct value in the
community, whose actual business is conducted on the other
commercial system. The Musical Banks excel in architecture, and
keep up a routine of receiving and paying checks. But their patrons
are for the most part ladies and some students from the College of
Unreason. Mrs. Nosnibor, a staunch shareholder, deplores this
apparent lack of public interest, and remarks that it is “indeed
melancholy to see what little heed people paid to the most precious
of all institutions.” Her guest observes,—[332]
“I could say nothing in reply, but I have ever been of opinion that
the greater part of mankind do approximately know where they get
that which does them good.”
The Musical Bankers not only protest too much as to the

ascendancy of their institution, but consistently depreciate the other:
[333]
“Even those who to my certain knowledge kept only just enough

money at the Musical Banks to swear by, would call the other banks
(where their securities really lay) cold, deadening, paralyzing, and the
like.”
As to the cashiers and managers,—[334]

“Few people would speak quite openly and freely before them,
which struck me as a very bad sign. * * * The less thoughtful of them
did not seem particularly unhappy, but many were plainly sick at
heart, though perhaps they hardly knew it, and would not have
owned to being so. Some few were opponents of the whole system;
but these were liable to be dismissed from their employment at any
moment, and this rendered them very careful, for a man who had
once been a cashier at a Musical Bank was out of the field for other
employment, and was generally unfitted for it by reason of that
course of treatment which was commonly called his education.”
Erewhon Revisited deals more specifically with the miraculous and
doctrinal side of Christianity, mirrored in the account of the origin of
Sunchildism and its connection with the old Musical Banks. The two
main characters are Hanky and Panky, Professors respectively of
Worldly and Unworldly Wisdom. They are carefully distinguished:
[335]
“Panky was the greater humbug of the two, for he would humbug
even himself—a thing, by the way, not very hard to do; and yet he
was the less successful humbug; * * * Hanky was the mere common,
superficial, perfunctory Professor, who, being a Professor, would of
course profess, but would not lie more than was in the bond. * * *
Panky, on the other hand, was hardly human; he had thrown himself
so earnestly into his work, that he had become a living lie. If he had
had to play the part of Othello he would have blacked himself all over,
and very likely have smothered his Desdemona in good earnest.
Hanky would hardly have blacked himself behind the ears, and his
Desdemona would have been quite safe.”
The School is another favorite satirical topic. The only novelists
who refrain from depicting the shortcomings of the educational
system are Disraeli, Reade, Mrs. Gaskell, and George Eliot. On the
public side, Meredith might be added, as the theme of Richard
Feverel, though educational, is made an individual matter.
The adverse opinion handed down on the methods and results of
the prevailing system is more unanimous than is the case with other
subjects. On the main indictments, inefficiency and cruelty in the
lower schools, and inefficiency and carelessness in the higher, there
is no minority report. On the whole, the Victorians were innocent of
the partisanship that arose later over the great question of Culture
versus Efficiency as an educational ideal. The primary stages might
be allowed a modicum of the practical, though Gradgrind’s “facts”
are failures, and Squeers stands in solitary glory as an advocate of
applied arts and manual training. Mr. Tulliver is in line with his
Zeitgeist in fondly supposing the best thing he can do for Tom is to
send him to an expensive private school, to learn Latin along with
the son of Lawyer Wakem. An education was tacitly defined as that
which makes a gentleman of you. And though no one would dissent
from Thackeray’s dictum that “all the world is improving except the
gentlemen,” neither would any one suppose that the definition might
be modified or expanded.
A number realize that education begins at home. The close father
and son relationship satirized in the case of Sir Austin and Richard
because it was too close and inflexible, is presented as a beautiful
ideal in those of Pisistratus and Mr. Caxton, Kenelm and Squire
Chillingly, Clive and Colonel Newcome, and the Duke of Omnium and
his sons.[336]
In David Copperfield’s recollections of the metallic Murdstone,

Arthur Clennam’s of his childhood’s Sabbath and Alton Locke’s of his
mother’s fearful bigotry, we get glimpses into the pathos of the old
Puritan discipline. These are too sad for satire. Butler, no less sad, is
also angry enough to brand it with his caustic wit. Theobald and
Christina Pontifex are texts for a satiric sermon on parental
incompetence, no less disastrous although “All was done in love,
anxiety, timidity, stupidity, and impatience.” After the scene in which
Theobald, having punished little Ernest severely and quite wantonly,
rang the bell for prayers, “red-handed as he was,” his visitor reflects
that perhaps it was fortunate for his host—[337]
“* * * that our prayers were seldom marked by any very
encouraging degree of response, for if I had thought there was the
slightest chance of my being heard I should have prayed that some
one might ere long treat him as he had treated Ernest.”
The keynote of this most Christian system is unconsciously hit
upon by the bewildered little lad himself, who later concludes,—[338]
“* * * that he had duties towards everybody, lying in wait for him
upon every side, but that nobody had any duties towards him.”
Formal education naturally falls into the school and college
divisions. We have the former presented dramatically by Brontë in
Jane Eyre (and more impressionistically in Villette), by Thackeray in
The Fatal Boots and Vanity Fair, by Butler in The Way of All Flesh,
and by the zealous specialist in that field. It has been counted up
that Dickens deals with twenty-eight schools and mentions a dozen
others.[339] The most important are in Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey
and Son, David Copperfield, and Hard Times.
Major Bagstock is contemplating young Rob, a product of that
school where they never taught honor, but were “particularly strong
in the engendering of hypocrisy,” and deduces that “it never pays to
educate that sort of people.” Whereupon—[340]
“The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped his son,
the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged,
and taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his place of
schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound, might not have
been educated on quite a right plan in some undiscovered respect,
when Mr. Dombey, angrily repeating ‘The usual return!’ led the major
away.”
Young David Copperfield profits little by losing Murdstone and
gaining Creakle. The aspect of this pleasant pedagogue so fascinates
the gaze of the boys that they cannot keep to their books. When a
culprit is called before the tribunal,—[341]
“Mr. Creakle cuts a joke before he beats him, and we laugh at it,—
miserable little dogs, we laugh, with our visages as white as ashes,
and our hearts sinking into our boots. * * * Miserable little
propitiators of a remorseless Idol, how abject we were to him! What a
launch in life I think it now, on looking back, to be so mean and
servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!”
From this infant purgatory the step to the college seems a long
one, for that is by comparison an Elysium, however inane and
frivolous. Those whose satiric arrows speed thither are Peacock,
Lytton, Trollope, Kingsley, and Butler. Thackeray should be
mentioned for his two chapters on University Snobs, and the
preceding one on Clerical Snobs, in which he describes the colleges
as the last strongholds of Feudalism; concluding—[342]
“Why is the poor College servitor to wear that name and that
badge still? Because Universities are the last places into which Reform
penetrates. But now that she can go to College and back for five
shillings, let her travel down thither.”
Squire Headlong inquires in vain at Oxford for “men of taste and

philosophers.” Scythrop and Sir Telegraph were both cured at college
of their love for learning. Desmond describes the university system
as a “deep-laid conspiracy against the human understanding, * * * a
ridiculous and mischievous farce.” But Dr. Folliott refused to
succumb. Alluding to some one who cannot quote Greek, he adds,—
[343]
“But I think he must have finished his education at some very rigid
college, where a quotation, or any other overt act showing
acquaintance with classical literature, was visited with a severe
penalty. For my part, I made it my boast that I was not to be so
subdued. I could not be abated of a single quotation by all the
bumpers in which I was fined.”
The same critic says elsewhere of the curriculum:[344]

“Everything for everybody, science for all, schools for all, rhetoric
for all, law for all, physic for all, words for all, and sense for none.”
Pelham testifies that at Eton he was never taught a syllable of
English literature, laws, or history; and was laughed at for reading
Pope out of school. On his graduation from Cambridge, a place that
“reeked with vulgarity,” he is congratulated by his tutor for having
been passably decent. Whereupon he observes,—[345]
“Thus closed my academical career. He who does not allow that it
passed creditably to my teachers, profitably to myself, and beneficially
to the world, is a narrow-minded and illiterate man, who knows
nothing of the advantages of modern education.”
Trollope in The Bertrams, and Kingsley in Yeast and Alton Locke,

have a few words for the subject, but add no new idea, except that
Alton voices the disgust of the students themselves with their Alma
Mater. It is this same young neophyte who is advised by Dean
Winnstay to go to some such college as St. Mark’s, which “might, by
its strong Church principles, give the best antidote to any little
remaining taint of sans-culottism.”
In Butler’s Erewhonian Colleges of Unreason the leading subject is
Hypothetics, and the most honored Chairs are those of Inconsistency
and Evasion, both required courses. Genius and originality are
resolutely discouraged, it being a man’s business “to think as his
neighbors do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count
bad.” These Erewhonian professors, by the way, might have adduced
as evidence the well-known, horrified exclamation of Mary Shelley at
the suggestion that her son be sent where he would be taught to
think for himself. By refusing to “think like other people,” a man may
become a poet and even a beautiful, ineffectual angel, but he cannot
lead a comfortable nor a really effectual life. The problem as to who
may safely be intrusted to lead public opinion, and who are safest as
followers, is an intricate one, but it is certainly true that a sane and
modest agnosticism is not necessarily synonymous with “the art of
sitting gracefully on a fence,” which Butler concludes was brought to
its greatest perfection in the Colleges of Unreason.
On the subjects of Literature and the Press too much has been
said to be ignored, but not much of any great consequence. Trollope
took Journalism as a satiric province, with some little aid from
Meredith. He also takes a shot, not too well aimed, at the current
humanitarian fiction which purposes to set the world right in shilling
numbers. He adds,—[346]
“Of all such reformers, Mr. Sentiment is the most powerful. It is
incredible the number of evil practices he has put down. It is to be
feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the
working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper sized
pint bottles, there will be nothing left for him to do. Mr. Sentiment is
certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his
good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard,
and the genuinely honest so very honest. * * * Divine peeresses are
no longer interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern
peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much
twaddle as one of Mrs. Ratcliffe’s heroines, and still be listened to.”
A favorite theme, especially among the earlier writers, is the pose
of pessimism, alien to the self-satisfied optimistic spirit which
prevailed with little opposition—except from James Thompson and
Matthew Arnold—from Byron to Hardy.
The Honorable Mr. Listless finds the volumes of modern literature
“very consolatory and congenial” to his feelings:[347]
“There is, as it were, a delightful north-east wind, an intellectual
blight breathing through them; a delicious misanthropy and
discontent, that demonstrates the nullity of virtue and energy, and
puts me in good humour with myself and sofa.”
Pelham perceives—[348]
“* * * an unaccountable prepossession among all persons, to
imagine that whatever seems gloomy must be profound, and
whatever is cheerful must be shallow. They have put poor Philosophy
into deep mourning, and given her a coffin for a writing desk, and a
skull for an inkstand.”
Ganymede anticipates that Apollo’s new poem will be very

popular, for “it is all about moonlight and the misery of
existence.”[349]
It is in Meredith that we find the greatest point and depth in
literary criticism, as in most other things. Under cover of apology for
his own method of psychological analysis, he manages to convey his
impression of those who tell and who love the story for the story’s
sake. He cannot avoid, he explains, the slow start and detailed
exposition in which he unfolds the situation, and adds:[350]
“This it is not necessary to do when you are set astride the
enchanted horse of the Tale, which leaves the man’s mind at home
while he performs the deeds befitting him: he can indeed be rapid.
Whether more active, is a question asking for your notions of the
governing element in the composition of man, and of his present
business here. * * * All ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful
direction been brought to see with distinctness that man is not as
much comprised in external features as the monkey, will be devoted
to the task of the fuller portraiture.”
It is Meredith also who says the last word on the English, as
English. They are indeed the real objects under all these disguises of
their activities, but they are not often synthesized and called by
name. Yet—[351]
“An actually satiric man in an English circle, that does not resort to
the fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate the excessive fury
roused in his mind by an illogical people of a provocative prosperity, *
* * They give him so many opportunities.”
He seizes one of them by symbolizing England in the Duvidney
sisters; composed of such, it becomes—[352]
“* * * a vast body of passives and negatives, living by precept,
according to rules of precedent, and supposing themselves to be
righteously guided because of their continuing undisturbed. * * *
mixed with an ancient Hebrew fear of offense to an inscrutable Lord,
eccentrically appeasable through the dreary iteration of the litany of
sinfulness. * * * Satirists in their fervours might be near it to grasp it,
if they could be moved to moral distinctness, mental intention, with a
preference of strong plain speech over the crack of their whips.”
He had already decided, in Beauchamp’s Career, that “It is not too
much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at
once and entirely alter the face of the country.” Reade agrees with
this opinion, only he says bluntly that one is “an ass * * * to have
brains in a country where brains are a crime.” This national stupidity
and sentimentality are made impregnable by national complacency.
Lytton remarks on the egotistic nature of British patriotism:[353]
“The vanity of the Frenchman consists (as I have somewhere read)
in belonging to so great a country; but the vanity of the Englishman
exults in the thought that so great a country belongs to himself.”
These criticisms are all from within. Disraeli is able to contribute
one from without. He describes the British through his Jewish Besso:
[354]
“There is not a race so proud, so wilful, so rash and so obstinate.

They live in a misty clime, on raw meats, and wines of fire. They
laugh at their fathers, and never say a prayer. They pass their days in
the chase, gaming, and all violent courses. They have all the power of
the State, and all its wealth; and when they can wring no more from
their peasants, they plunder the kings of India.”
Nevertheless they all, even the Hebrew within their parliamentary
halls, believed in the English character and the civilization it was
blunderingly working out. The most incorrigible satirist of that
civilization was Peacock (who often, we suspect, gets carried away
by his own eloquence), and in his fervent summary of almost all our
public failures, he hints in the very phrasing, although ironically, at
the possibility of these failures being transformed into successes. Sir
Telegraph Paxarett, accused of extravagance, retorts with a
conditional promise of retrenchment:[355]
“When ecclesiastical dignitaries imitate the temperance and
humility of the founder of that religion by which they feed and
flourish; when the man in place acts on the principles which he
professed while he was out; when borough electors will not sell their
suffrage, nor their representatives their votes; when poets are not to
be hired for the maintenance of any opinion; when learned divines
can afford to have a conscience; when universities are not one
hundred years in knowledge behind all the rest of the world; when
young ladies speak as they think, and when those who shudder at a
tale of the horror of slavery will deprive their own palates of a sweet
taste, for the purpose of contributing all in their power to its
extinction:—why then, Forester, I will lay down my barouche.”
Satire, being frankly a destructive process, makes no pretense of
supplementing its iconoclasm by reconstruction. But such implication
of reform as may lurk in the criticism that paves the way may be
looked for more assuredly than elsewhere in attacks on institutions.
Such criticism is neither lowered by the recrimination that puts satire
of individuals below the normal satiric level, nor elevated by the
artistic detachment that lifts satire of human nature above it. For it is
not in the too small lump of the solitary specimen that the leaven
can best work, nor yet in the too large mass of the whole human
race. It is in the unit between these two extremes, the body politic
or social or religious or educational, that it may best perform its
fermenting ministrations.
Even so, however, the idealism of the Victorian novelists did not
take this positive turn. English genius has on the whole contributed
its share to the anthology of Utopian vision, even to the furnishing of
the name, but the nineteenth century, preëminent in criticism and
speculation, venting more talk about it than all the other centuries
put together, has to its credit in this line, aside from Erewhon and
The Coming Race, only Morris’s News from Nowhere, and that is too
naïve in its simplification of human nature and too absurd in its
glorification of medievalism to be taken seriously. More carefully
thought out as an Ideal State, more searching in its seriousness,
more pertinent in its satire, and more constructive in its conclusion,
than any of these, is the American product, Bellamy’s Looking
Backward.
The Victorians did their looking backward literally from their own
present instead of an imagined future. And since in so doing they did
for the most part but cast their eye on prospects drear, and since
they shrank from a future they could only guess and fear if they
thought about it at all, they wisely and practically spent themselves
on the present. And because of this acceptance of the present and
all its institutions as a whole, they could couch their lances only
against this or that detail, not against the challenge of civilization
itself.
The following instances show a characteristic difference in their
resemblance. “In England, poverty is a crime,” exclaims Lytton in the
nineteenth century. The observation is ironic, the tone scornful, and
the object of the ironic scorn is the snobbishness of those who from
the heights of wealth look down upon and despise the poor. The
rebuke is intended for the alien attitude toward that portion of
society which we may expect, according to Biblical authority, always
to have with us. Poverty itself is a mysterious dispensation, having
indeed many discernible compensations, and ever mitigable by
applied morality.
“Poverty is the only crime,” echoes Bernard Shaw in the twentieth
century. His assertion is meant literally, the tone is decisive, and the
indictment is lodged against society at large for being so stupid and
inefficient as to permit such a canker, pernicious but curable, to
infect its body.
To remedy the supercilious attitude toward the poor is still to
leave poverty intact and in permanent possession of the field. To
remedy the criminal carelessness which tolerates its presence is to
abolish the thing itself.
But even if the twentieth century has stated the problem, it has
not yet solved it. And while neither the statement nor the solution of
the nineteenth is reckoned adequate today, still the Victorians did
accomplish something if not much, and all we can say for ourselves
is that we have not accomplished much, if something. Moreover, to
flatter ourselves that we are the first to discover the social onus of
poverty and other ills, is to ignore the contributions not only of the
novelists but of Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Henry George. When the
remaining four-fifths of our century shall have been added to history,
we may perhaps applaud ourselves. At present it will do us no harm
to render unto Victorianism the acknowledgment that is its due.
CHAPTER III
TYPES
For that form of satire which deals with actual individuals,

photographed or caricatured, the designation personal is sufficiently
descriptive. But for that which deals with fictitious individuals,
wherein the models that sat for the portraits have passed through
the imaginative process that makes their portraiture a work of art,
there is no satisfactory name. Typical, in distinction from individual
and institutional, is tolerably expressive, but a term to be apologized
for. The school of art known as realistic, which was theoretically
adopted by the nineteenth century, repudiates creations that are
“mere types,” and claims for itself the achievement of true
individuals. The sign of individuality is a discordant complexity. Every
man may have his humour but he is not always in it. He may be
ruled by a master passion, but the rule is not a monopolistic
autocracy. Its supremacy is constantly disputed and threatened by
mob rebellion. Civil war is the usual rêgime, and the attainment of a
stabilized government is rare.
Tamburlaine, Volpone, Othello, Tartuffe, Blifil, are not untrue, but
they are only partial truths. We see much, undoubtedly the most
significant and dominating traits, but we cannot see all when the
searchlight is concentrated on a single spot. Agamemnon, Hamlet,
Tom Jones, Jaffeir, swayed, perplexed, inconsistent, at once infinite
and abject, are more nearly full length and complete drawings.
Milton’s Satan becomes humanized when, entering the human
abode, he grows hesitant, half regretful, half eager, a prey to
conflicting emotions and cross purposes.
Yet those desirable factors of art, unity and emphasis, must be
secured, and they can be secured only by throwing the emphasis on
some one feature, thus giving unity to the character. In the field of
satire a classification based on these qualities is the more easily
made in that any given character is usually satirized for some
particular trait, although the problem does not end there. We may
construct encampments for our army of characters—and in Victorian
fiction they come in battalions—and we may label them; but we shall
find it less simple to assign the companies to their own barracks and
keep them there.
The Father of the Marshalsea is a snob. He is also hypocritical and
foolish. Moreover, he is a sentimentalist and an epicurean. Withal he
is not villainous, but more pathetic than execrable. He has no
apparent kinship with the Countess de Saldar, yet she also may be
described in the above terms. The enumeration would not show the
difference. Thus not only does each real character refuse to be
known by one name and one only, but the congregation assembled
under any one denomination shows such diversity as to make the
category itself questionable. Mrs. Mackensie and Mrs. Clennam, Mr.
Dombey and Bertie Stanhope, Tom Tulliver and Sir Willoughby
Patterne, are all egoists; but they would find little congeniality in
their mutual egoism.
All that can be done is to indicate the range and the concentration
of the main types. These types will of course represent those
elements in human character which seem to the satirist such
deflections from an ideal as are amenable to comic exposure and
perhaps correction. It does not seem possible to reduce them to
fewer than seven or eight heads, as follows: hypocrisy, folly,
snobbishness, sentimentality, egoism, fanaticism, and vulgarity.
These various fields have their specialists. Hypocrisy, including
sycophancy and deliberate imposture of any kind, belongs to
Dickens, with Thackeray, Trollope, and others following not far
behind. He leads also in depiction of folly and incompetence, though
these prevail widely in Victorian fiction; and Meredith excels in
portrayal of mental incapacity and fallacy in reasoning. It is the latter
who comes to the front with sentimentality and egoism, having but
few predecessors. Thackeray handles snobbishness in all its
ramifications of worldliness and elegant ennui. But although he
contributes the name, the thing exists on the pages of Lytton,
Disraeli, Trollope, and Dickens. Fanaticism, bigotry, all sorts of fads,
make another common ground for Peacock and Butler, and crop up
in Reade, Brontë, and Kingsley. Coarse vulgarity is the rarest of all,
the Age of Propriety refusing to transplant this weed from life to
literature, but it is admitted by Dickens, Thackeray, Reade, and
Trollope.
Since satire is usually directed against the special thing in which
the satirist feels superior, we may deduce the favorite Victorian
virtues to have been sincerity, wisdom, rationality, refinement, and a
sense of proportion; a large order, but the nineteenth century would
scorn a smaller.
Dickens did not invent the hypocrite, nor did he supply anything
new to the investigation of the nature of this most subtile of all the
beasts of the field. He himself had not the subtlety to search out
causes and discover possible extenuations and values in a thing he
simply and flatly abhorred and saw no excuse for. What he does
furnish is an immense amount of data, with many variations,
showing in extenso this aspect of human nature. At least three
dozen of his three hundred characters exhibit the seamy side of
scheming and deceit. From Pickwick, wherein Mr. Winkle, unfrocked
as to skates and branded as a humbug and an impostor because he
assumed an accomplishment when he had it not, to Edwin Drood,
harboring Luke Honeythunder, professional philanthropist, who,
“Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of society, *
* * expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon Corner,” no
volume is entirely free from the trail of the serpent.
Most of the humbugs and impostors are, like the philanthropist,
professional. Dodson and Fogg, Sergeant Buzfuz, Mr. Tulkinghorn,
turn their intrigues into legal channels; Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann,
into civic; Dr. Blimber and Mrs. Pipchin, into pedagogic. Mr. Merdle
tricks the financial world, though Mr. Casby, operating on a smaller
scale, makes himself much more of a fraud. Mr. Crummles, Mrs.
Gamp, Mrs. Crupp, in their various capacities, abstain from giving
their patrons value received. The Barnacles, parasites clinging to the
Ship of State, pose as public servants and benefactors.
It happens, however, that those who confine their dissembling
and pretense to private life are of the highest hypocritical quality. Mr.
Mantalini expertly bamboozles his wife. Mrs. Sparsit successfully
plays her part for the benefit of Mr. Bounderby. Mr. Pumblechook
protests too much to little Pip, now grown up and prosperous, but
carries it off with an air. Mr. Carker, who “hid himself behind his
sleek, hushed, crouching manner, and his ivory smile,” and who, “sly
of manner, sharp of tooth, soft of foot, watchful of eye, oily of
tongue, cruel of heart, nice of habit, sat with a dainty steadfastness
and patience at his work, as if he were waiting at a mouse’s hole,”
finally catches his mouse, though only to be eluded again.
A perfect modern instance of the bubble pricked by the ancient
Socratic method is that of Mr. Curdle, eminent dramatic critic. He has
been talking big about the Unities of the Drama. Nicholas innocently
asks what they might be. He is informed:[356]
“Mr. Curdle coughed and considered. ‘The unities, sir,’ he said, ‘are
a completeness—a kind of universal dovetailedness with regard to
place and time—a sort of a general oneness, if I may be allowed to
use so strong an expression. I take those to be the dramatic unities,
so far as I have been enabled to bestow attention upon them, and I
have read much upon the subject and thought much. I find, running
through the performances of this child,’ said Mr. Curdle, turning to the
Phenomenon, ‘a unity of feeling, a breadth, a light and shade, a
warmth of colouring, a tone, a harmony, a glow, an artistical
development of original conceptions, which I look for, in vain, among
older performers. I don’t know whether I make myself understood?’
“‘Perfectly,’ replied Nicholas.
“‘Just so,’ said Mr. Curdle, pulling up his neckcloth. ‘That is my
definition of the unities of the drama.’”
The great trio, Pecksniff, Bagstock, and Heep, occur in the three
successive novels of the six years ending with the mid-century.
Pecksniff is the most gratuitous offender, for he encases himself in
piety and benevolence, and inserts his falseness into every word,
every deed, every relation of life. Heep’s specious humility is as
unrelaxed and vigilant, but it is more of a means to an end and not,
like Pecksniff’s, an end in itself. He fawns and flatters and cheats for
the benefits to be derived from such policies. Thus slippery are the
steps of Uriah’s ladder. He has, moreover, a word of self-defense
which forces his educational training to share the responsibility.
When he is reminded by Copperfield that greed and cunning always
overreach themselves, he retorts by implicating the school where he
was taught “from nine o’clock to eleven, that labour was a curse;
and from eleven o’clock to one, that it was a blessing and a
cheerfulness and a dignity,” and so on. Major Bagstock resembles
Heep in being servile in manner instead of pompously patronizing;
but while Chesterton may be right in calling him a more subtle
hypocrite than Pecksniff,[357] it is also true that the Major’s hypocrisy
is not quite his whole existence, as it is of both Pecksniff and Heep.
He is at least a gourmand in addition, if nothing more.
Before Dickens, in our period, the only character to exemplify this
trait, aside from Peacock’s Feathernest, is Lytton’s Robert Beaufort,
in Night and Morning. The author remarks in a later preface that this
character might be rated as a forerunner to Pecksniff; but he is in
reality more of the Blifil type, his brother Philip acting as his Tom
Jones.
Lytton, however, is inclined to discuss the subject by the way. In
one of his earlier novels he says,—[358]
“Honesty—patriotism—religion—these have had their hypocrites for
life;—but passion permits only momentary dissemblers.”
In a later one he analyzes a dubious citizen:[359]

“But our banker was really a charitable man, and a benevolent
man, and a sincere believer. How, then, was he a hypocrite? Simply
because he professed to be far more charitable, more benevolent, and
more pious than he really was. His reputation had now arrived to that
degree of immaculate polish that the smallest breath, which would
not have tarnished the character of another man, would have fixed an
indelible stain upon his.”
The same might be said of another banker, the respectable
Bulstrode, whom George Eliot presents with no satire and an almost
pitiful sympathy.
The wealthy plebeian Avenel is embarrassed by the inopportune
arrival of his rustic sister in the presence of his aristocratic guests.
By a brilliant counter-stroke of a candid and courageous confession,
he stems the tide and wins the day. But in private he is very severe
with the poor culprit, and then admits to himself, “I’m a cursed
humbug, * * * but the world is such a humbug!”[360]
The only Pecksniffian hypocrite outside of Dickens is the Reverend
Brocklehurst, whom Jane Eyre describes as lecturing to the half
starved and shivering girls at the school of which he was trustee, on
the beauty of asceticism and the holiness of economy, while his wife
and daughters sit in state on the platform, curled, bejewelled,
opulent in plumes and velvet.
The cant and manœuvering of the Thackeray and Trollope
hypocrites are necessary as first aid to the ambitious. By means of
them Becky Sharp achieves a husband, Mrs. Mackenzie a son-in-law,
Moffit and Crosbie a patrician father-in-law, and Lady Carbury a
literary reputation. Mr. Slope and the Pateroffs fail but no less bear
up beneath their unsuccess. Melmotte, another Merdle, succumbs,
like him, forced to realize that deceit may strike one with a tragic
rebound.
Jermyn and Grandcourt, the latter especially, indulge in deceit out
of pure selfishness, but in neither of them does George Eliot
consider hypocrisy a matter for even satirical mirth. In lighter vein
she does indeed show up the poseur in low life. Mr. Dowlas, oracle
of The Rainbow, laying down the law about ghosts, is too frightened
by the apparition of Silas Marner to speak. Having recovered and
feeling “that he had not been quite on a par with himself and the
occasion,” he intrigues to get appointed as deputy constable, and
consents to serve, after “duly rehearsing a small ceremony known in
high ecclesiastical life as nolo episcopari.” Mr. Scales, discoursing
largely on excommunication, is another caught in the Socratic trap
by being asked for definition of the term. He is no less ready than
Mr. Curdle, though more sententious:[361]
“Well, it’s a law term—speaking in a figurative sort of way—
meaning that a Radical was no gentleman.”
It is George Eliot who sees the necessity of the mask that most
are content simply to tear away or disfigure. Although she speaks
through a worldly wise character, she sounds no note of dissent:[362]
“‘I’ll tell you what, Dan,’ said Sir Hugo, ‘a man who sets his face
against every sort of humbug is simply a three-cornered impracticable
fellow. There’s a bad style of humbug, but there is also a good style—
one that oils the wheels and makes progress possible.’”
This is recognized also by Lytton, who quotes “an anonymous
writer of 1722:”[363]
“Deceit is the strong but subtile chain which runs through all the
members of a society, and links them together; trick or be tricked, is
the alternative; ’tis the way of the world, and without it intercourse
would drop.”
Trollope subscribes with qualification, by having the archdeacon
say, on the death of Mrs. Proudie,—[364]
“The proverb of De Mortuis is founded on humbug. Humbug out of
doors is necessary.”
At the extreme opposite from the hypocrites, shrewd, knowing,

wise at least in their own conceit, stand the incompetent, victims of
folly; satirized not for ignorance but for bland unconsciousness of it,
usually accompanied by a hallucination of efficiency. As the
hypocrites shade off into villains, to be rebuked without humor, such
as Jasper Losely, Randal Leslie, Bill Sykes, Sedgett, so the fools
merge into the artless, to be smiled at without rebuke, as Colonel
Digby and Colonel Newcome, Frank Hazeldean, the Vardens, Tom
Pinch, Captain Cuttle, and “poor, excommunicated Miss Tox, who, if
she were a fawner and a toad-eater, was at least an honest and a
constant one.”
It is Dickens again who contributes the most data to this study,
and particularly to the genus, Silly Dame. Here his amusement over
mere fatuous complacency becomes warmed into scorn when that
stupidity affects the home she has in charge, and lowers into a
failure the very thing that it is most important to raise into success,
—such success not being automatic. Mrs. Nickleby, Mrs. Wilfer, Mrs.
Finching, like Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Palmer, and Susan
Ferrier’s Lady Juliana Douglass, are comparatively harmless, and are
indulged accordingly. But an incapacity that may be picturesque in
easy circumstances deepens into a grave misdemeanor when joined
to a small income. Mrs. Micawber, Mrs. Pocket, Mrs. Pardiggle, and
especially Mrs. Jellyby are domestic pests, at whom we are more
exasperated than amused.
Aside from Dickens, the only artist much interested in this stratum
of human nature is the one who has given us Mrs. Tulliver and Mrs.
Vincy and her daughter, but they are not real sources of trouble,
except Rosamund, and her failure is more spiritual than material.
Mrs. Tulliver, a plaintive, hopelessly literal soul, is distressed over her
husband’s metaphoric speech about “a good wagoner with a mole
on his face.” She resents feebly the dogmatizing of the majestic Mrs.
Glegg, but would never go “to the length of quarreling with her any
more than a water-fowl that puts out its leg in a deprecating manner
can be said to quarrel with a boy who throws stones.” Under another
metaphor she is an amiable fish, which, “after running her head
against the same resisting medium for thirteen years, would go at it
again today with undiluted alacrity.”[365]
Out of her saddening experience Rosamund did emerge
somewhat wiser, but with none of the higher wisdom which
constitutes character.
“She simply continued to be mild in her temper, inflexible in her
judgment, disposed to admonish her husband, and also to frustrate
him by stratagem.”[366]
The other section of this class most fully recruited is made up of

the foolish young men. It might look as though in the novelist’s
world masculine folly were a malady incident to youth, while on the
other hand, the feminine sort appeared late. For it happens that
Lydia and Kitty Bennet have no real successors. There are indeed
plenty of Hetty Sorrels, Lucy Deanes, Rosa Mackenzies, Amelia
Sedleys, Dahlia Flemings; but their innocence and pathos protect
them from satire. And the merely vapid and vain school girl is
apparently too worthless a figure to be given a place on Victorian
pages. So also seems the man whose mental growth has not kept
pace with the years. Mr. Micawber may be taken as the exception
that proves the rule. Sir Lukin Dunstane likewise shows that one
may reach man’s estate and flourish therein on a small allotment of
intelligence. He makes his best record in a gossipy little conversation
with his wife, to whom he is giving an account of the Dacier-Asper
wedding. Emmy had commented on the eloquence of his report:[367]
“He murmured something in praise of the institution of marriage—
when celebrated impressively, it seemed.
“‘Tony calls the social world the “theater of appetites,” as we have
it at present,’ she said; ‘and the world at a wedding is, one may
reckon, in the second act in the hungry tragi-comedy.’
“‘Yes, there’s the breakfast,’ Sir Lukin assented. Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett
was much more intelligible to him; in fact, quite so, as to her speech.”
Folly is more ludicrous in the young man than in the maid, on

account of his greater conspicuousness in affairs, and the greater
things expected of him,—any failure divulging the discrepancy
between fact and fancy which is the basis of humor. It is also true
that he stands a better chance of having his foolishness shaken out
of him in his more exposed and strenuous life. Both these conditions
are implied in a reflection made by one of Trollope’s characters.
Isabel Boncassen, the frank American beauty, looks upon the young
man as a type:[368]
“Young men are pretty much the same everywhere, I guess. They
never have their wits about them. They never mean what they say,
because they don’t understand the use of words. They are generally
half impudent and half timid. When in love they do not at all
understand what has befallen them. What they want they try to
compass as a cow does when it stands stretching out its head toward
a stack of hay which it cannot reach. Indeed, there is no such thing as
a young man, for a man is not really a man till he is middle-aged. But
take them at their worst, they are a deal too good for us, for they
become men some day, whereas we must only be women to the end.”
Dickens is again a contributor of portraits, though not of the best,
and is joined this time by Thackeray, Trollope, and Meredith.
Tom Gradgrind, product of a system, and Edmund Sparkler,
product of a lack of system, deserve mention, as does Edward
Dorrit, though sketched without color. Rawdon Crawley and Joseph
Sedley, no longer in first flush of youth, are consistent exponents of
gullible good nature and ponderous vacuity. But the two prizes of
undeviating stupidity are Sir Felix Carbury and Algernon Blancove.
Sir Felix is a spoiled darling and an excrescence on the face of the
earth. His accomplishments are set forth in a description of his state
of enforced solitude consequent upon his latest exhibition of
monumental inefficiency:[369]
“He had so spent his life hitherto that he did not know how to get
through a day in which no excitement was provided for him. He never
read. Thinking was altogether beyond him. And he had never done a
day’s work in his life. He could lie in bed. He could eat and drink. He
could smoke and sit idle. He could play cards; and could amuse
himself with women,—the lower the culture of the women, the better
the amusement. Beyond these things the world had nothing for him.”
The complacent fool would be matter for pure mirth if he could

live for himself alone; but unfortunately his worthless existence is as
adequate as any for the promotion of disaster to others. Sir Felix is
comparatively harmless, for his wreckage is reparable, but Algernon
is made a deus ex machina, and lets his commission go by default.
Those who trusted him learn that “He that sendeth a message by
the hand of a fool cutteth off his own feet, and drinketh in damage.”
Or, as his own author says:[370]
“But, if it is permitted to the fool to create entanglements and set
calamity in motion, to arrest its course is the last thing the Gods allow
of his doing.”
He is, however, a fool of quality in that he has a philosophy of life,
and if he were pent up in his room, he could mitigate tedium by
reverie. One may indulge in anticipations without possessing the
faculty of foresight. His cousin “aspired to become Attorney-General
of these realms,” but he had other views:[371]
“Civilization had tried him and found him wanting; so he
condemned it. Moreover, sitting now all day at a desk, he was
civilization’s drudge. No wonder, then, that his dream was of prairies,
and primeval forests, and Australian wilds. He believed in his heart
that he would be a man new made over there, and always looked
forward to a savage life as to a bath that would cleanse him, so that it
did not much matter his being unclean for the present.”
The present sorry scheme of things also suffers him to wander

the streets in temporary bankruptcy:[372]
“He continued strolling on, comparing the cramped misty London
aspect of things with his visionary free dream of the glorious prairies,
where his other life was: the forests, the mountains, the endless
expanses; the horses, the flocks, the slipshod ease of language and
attire; and the grog-shops. Aha! There could be no mistake about him
as a gentleman and a scholar out there! Nor would Nature shut up
her pocket and demand innumerable things of him, as civilization did.
This he thought in the vengefulness of his outraged mind.”
Meredith keeps on the trail of this luckless youth with something
of the relentlessness with which Blifil, Reverend Collins, Mrs. Norris,
and Mrs. Proudie are pursued; but he gives a good Meredithian
reason for it. Twice he takes the trouble to explain him, both times
on the grounds of realism:[373]
“So long as the fool has his being in the world, he will be a part of
every history, nor can I keep him from his place in a narrative that is
made to revolve more or less upon its own wheels. * * * for the fool
is, after his fashion, prudent, and will never, if he can help it, do
himself thorough damage, that he may learn by it and be wiser.”
Again, an incident is followed by comment. Algernon, being loggy
after a dinner at the Club, fancies himself melancholy and profound:
[374]
“‘I must forget myself. I’m under some doom. I see it now. Nobody
cares for me. I don’t know what happiness is. I was born under a bad
star. My fate’s written.’ Following his youthful wisdom, this wounded
hart dragged his slow limbs toward the halls of brandy and song.
“One learns to have compassion for fools, by studying them: and
the fool, though Nature is wise, is next door to Nature. He is naked in
his simplicity; he can tell us much, and suggest more. My excuse for
dwelling upon him is, that he holds the link of my story. Where fools
are numerous, one of them must be prominent now and then in a
veracious narration.”
According to the old duality of satirized objects,—Vice and Folly,

identified with the deceiver and the deceived,—the two classes just
discussed would exhaust the list. But these signify folly in its
narrowest and most literal sense, a plain lack of brains and a general
incapacity. In its wider sense it includes misuse as well as want of
intelligence. These mortals, as Puck discovered, are indeed all fools,
at times and on certain points. The number may not be infinite, but
Lydgate discovered sixty-three kinds; and Barclay augmented the list
to nearly one hundred. Perfect wisdom would cast out not only
ignorance, but also frivolity, sentimentality, vanity, all sorts of false
standards and all manner of fallacies. Therefore snobs, romanticists,
egoists, fanatics, merely exemplify folly in its varieties and
ramifications.
The snob is defined by his great expositor as “one who meanly
admires mean things.” A modern scholar calls vulgarity “satisfaction
with anything inferior when a superior is attainable.”[375] These
definitions together indicate why snobbishness and vulgarity are
allied, though not identical. There is, however, this difference, that
satisfaction implies in itself a passive acquiescence, whereas
admiration leads naturally to imitation, and if possible, appropriation,
of the thing approved. Of course, satisfaction on a different plane
results from a feeling of attainment and possession; but it then
becomes pride or vanity, which in turn may or may not be of the
snobbish sort.
In popular apprehension, indeed, snobbishness and vulgarity are
rated as more opposite than allied. The snob is thought of as either
belonging to the polite world or trying to secure an entrance to its
polished circles. If he occupies the former position, he boasts of his
refinement, and from his eminence contemplates with scorn or at
best an affable condescension, the mob below. To this class belong
such members as Lytton’s and Disraeli’s aristocrats; such diverse
types in Dickens as Sir John Chester, the Monseigneur in Tale of Two
Cities, Mrs. General, and Mrs. Gowan; Thackeray’s Marquis of
Steyne, Major Pendennis, and the Misses Pinkerton; Trollope’s de
Courcys and the Chaldicote circle; Meredith’s Everard Romfrey and
Ferdinand Laxley.
But if the snob is engaged in climbing up instead of looking down,
he is likely to have some common clay still clinging to his shoes, as
well as to be dishevelled by the exertions of the ascent. Such
insignia of vulgarity are worn by a numerous clan, including the
politician Rigby, the money-lender Baron Levy;[376] the Veneerings
and Dorrits, and those patriotic American snobs whom Martin
Chuzzlewit found so insufferably vulgar; Barry Lyndon, Mr. Osborne,
and Becky Sharp; Mr. Slope, Mr. Crosbie, and the great Melmotte.
On the other hand, the frankly vulgar is reckoned among the
plebeians. As there is a snobbishness free from coarseness, so there
is a vulgarity unembellished even by pseudo-culture. In this ugly and
gross scum of the earth no novelist really delights except the creator
of Mrs. Gamp, Quilp, Squeers, and Fagin and his crew, though
Thackeray is able to depict Sir Pitt Crawley; Trollope, the Scathards;
and Meredith, Sedgett.
The compound of snobbishness and vulgarity has the additional
complexity of ramifying into hypocrisy on one side and sentimentality
on the other. The first conjunction is made because of the incitement
to that fawning, flattering servility that more than anything else
rouses satiric disgust. The second occurs when the flattering unction
is laid to one’s own soul instead of being paid to the possessions of
others. The first is obvious and its examples are legion. The second
is more subtle and obscure, though perhaps almost as prevalent. It
consists in an inaccurate orientation, a supposition that one has
arrived at a goal, when the case is otherwise. Such unwarranted
complacency cheers the lot of Mrs. Kirkpatrick, Mrs. Hobson
Newcome, Mrs. Proudie, and the Countess de Saldar.
This, however, is only one phase of sentimentality. It also may
exist independently, or otherwise combined than with snobbishness
or vulgarity. It is a term somewhat ambiguous because of a recently
changed connotation.
In the eighteenth century it was “sensibility,” and regarded as a
virtue until Jane Austen exhibited it in Marianne Dashwood and her
mother. At that time it was thought of as excess of feeling or
sentiment cherished for its own sake, without much regard for the
worthiness of its object. Marianne, disappointed in the vanished
romance she had built up chiefly from imaginative material, “would
have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at
all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have
been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had
she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she
lay down in it.”[377]
If Meredith, three-quarters of a century later, had been relating
the sad fortunes of a self-deceived young lady, he would have
stressed in his account of her character, the cause of the trouble,
that is, the process of constructing a Spanish castle with a flimsy
foundation in fact, rather than the effect, namely, the emotional orgy
which celebrated its inevitable but astonishing collapse. He would
have seen that preliminary process as possible because of the
disregard for facts which is the real mark of the sentimentalist.[378]
This later interpretation is not a contradiction of the earlier one, but
a shifting of emphasis. The common factor in the two definitions is
feeling, ranging all the way from simple preference or inclination to
strong emotion. But whereas formerly this element was accepted
without further analysis, it came later to be accounted for in its
relation to the intellect. Emotion is an excellent driver but an
untrustworthy leader. It is when it assumes leadership, when action
is not only impelled but guided by feeling, that the ensuing motion is
in danger of being erratic, unprogressive, perhaps calamitous. This
more or less wilful blindness, which is the essence of sentimentality,
is of course a very natural human trait. Since it is the function of
emotion to supply heat, and of intellect to furnish light, and since
warmth is as a rule more grateful than illumination, particularly if the
prospect does not please, we are much more likely to be warmed in
our passage through life than illumined. To refuse to see the
disagreeable is as instinctive as to seek the delightful. Nor could one
be regarded as more of a fault than the other until the love of truth
for its own sake became an ideal, accompanying the dominance of
the scientific spirit.
This accounts for the fact that, while Meredith did not invent the
sentimentalist any more than Dickens the hypocrite or Thackeray the
snob, he is the first to take a deep and conscious interest in this
species; being especially fitted for it by his own incisive, highly
rationalized nature as well as by the spirit of his time. His
predecessors in this field are Peacock, Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray,
and Eliot, although the last is rather a contemporary.
From Squire Headlong, the would-be savant, to Mr. Falconer, the
would-be Platonist and devotee of Saint Cecilia, Peacock traces a
vein of rather innocuous sentimentality, but of Miss Damaretta
Pinmoney he gives a definite account, followed by several examples:
[379]
“She had cultivated a great deal of theoretical romance—in taste,

not in feeling—an important distinction—which enabled her to be
most liberally sentimental in words, without at all influencing her
actions.”
Mrs. Shaw represents those who so appreciate the value of
romantic affliction that, lacking a grief, they manufacture a grievance
to cover the deficiencies of a too roseate existence. On a certain
melancholy occasion to be sure she orders “those extra delicacies of
the season which are always supposed to be efficacious against
immoderate grief at farewell dinners.” But her usual manner—[380]
“* * * had always something plaintive in it, arising from the long
habit of considering herself a victim to an uncongenial marriage. Now
that, the General being gone, she had every good of life, with as few
drawbacks as possible, she had been rather perplexed to find an
anxiety, if not a sorrow. She had, however, of late settled upon her
own health as a source of apprehension; she had a nervous little
cough whenever she thought about it; and some complaisant doctor
ordered her just what she desired,—a winter in Italy.”
It is Mrs. Kirkpatrick, however, who takes the prize in “pink

sentimentalism,” and holds it until the arrival of the Countess de
Saldar, and the Pole sisters. Behind the “sweet perpetuity of her
smile” is carried on an equally perpetual manœvering, which
ministers, under the auspices of refinement and the proprieties, to a
small and selfish tyranny. If by any chance she is detected or foiled,
she is deeply wounded, for if she hates anything, “it is the slightest
concealment and reserve.” Moreover, she never thinks of herself, and
is “really the most forgiving person in the world, in forgiving slights.”
She is overcome by the spring weather,—[381]
“Primavera, I think the Italians call it. * * * It makes me sigh
perpetually; but then I am so sensitive. Dear Lady Cumnor used to
say I was like a thermometer.”
But it is in her association with Lady Harriet that her sincerity and
candor shine forth. Apprised, on one occasion, of the intention of
that personage—an aristocrat in character as well as social station—
to honor her with a morning call, she dispatches to a neighbor her
stepdaughter Molly, of whose friendship with Lady Harriet she is
jealous, and keeps at home her own daughter Cynthia, to prepare
the especially delicious luncheon to which the guest is to be invited
as an impromptu bit of pot-luck. During this visit Lady Harriet brings
up the question of white lies, confessing to an occasional
indulgence, and asking her hostess if she never yielded to the
temptation. She is answered:[382]
“I should have been miserable if I ever had. I should have died of
self-reproach. ‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,’
has always seemed to me such a fine passage. But then I have so
much that is unbending in my nature.”
Dickens and Thackeray, like Lytton, Reade, and Kingsley, have too
much of this trait in their own temperaments to be able to view it
with complete detachment, but they present a few samples. Besides
Mrs. Wititterly, Harold Skimpole, and the ever illustrative Mr. Dorrit,
Dickens is most successful with Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, and Mrs.
Chick.
When Mr. Micawber, stimulated by the prospect of something
being about to turn up, presents poor Traddles, with great éclat and
ceremony, his personal note for the exact amount of his
indebtedness, David, a witness, reflects:[383]
“I am persuaded, not only that this was quite the same to Mr.
Micawber as paying the money, but that Traddles himself hardly knew
the difference until he had had time to think about it.”
Mrs. Chick, with true Dombian genius, having helped to loosen
her sister-in-law’s slender hold upon life, now enjoys the pathos of
the situation:[384]
“What a satisfaction it was to Mrs. Chick—a commonplace piece of
folly enough, * * * to patronize and be tender to the memory of that
lady; in exact pursuance of her conduct to her in her lifetime; and to
thoroughly believe herself, and take herself in, and make herself
uncommonly comfortable on the strength of her toleration! What a
mighty pleasant virtue toleration should be when we are right, to be
so very pleasant when we are wrong, and quite unable to
demonstrate how we came to be invested with the privilege of
exercising it!”
In her capricious cruelty to Lucretia Tox, she pretends to be

scandalized at what she had fostered all along, and taunts the
dismayed woman for the very thing she had been aiding and
abetting:[385]
“‘The scales;’ here Mrs. Chick cast down an imaginary pair, such as
are commonly used in grocers’ shops; ‘have fallen from my sight.’ * *
* ‘How can I speak to you like that?’ retorted Mrs. Chick, who, in
default of having any particular argument to sustain herself upon,
relied principally upon such repetitions for her most withering effects.
‘Like that! You may well say like that, indeed!’”
Thackeray is included in this list chiefly on the strength of the
Osbornes, Pitt Crawley, and to a less degree, Blanche Armory and
Mrs. Bute. Of the first he says, regarding certain declarations of
disinterested friendliness and admiration,—“There is little doubt that
old Osborne believed all he said, and that the girls were quite in
earnest in their protestations of affection for Miss Swartz.” And his
thrust at the hoodwinked Pitt’s delighted apprehension that the
clever Becky really understood and appreciated him, is a palpable
hit. He also arraigns under this head his favorite satirical object,
—“the moral world, that has, perhaps, no particular objection to
vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its
proper name.” On the other hand, more than any other novelist, he
has given us sentimentalists unaware; that is, in such characters as
Helen, Laura, and Arthur Pendennis, Lady Castlewood, and Colonel
Newcome, he shares their own unawareness of the possession of
this foible, though in all these it is of an innocent variety.
George Eliot is keenly alive to this blindness in human nature,
particularly as it manifests itself in the pernicious optimism of weak
and wilful youth; but as with other mortal failures, it is usually too
serious in her eyes for satire. Of all her novels, Felix Holt and Daniel
Deronda alone have no character of this type. In the others he
appears as Arthur Donnithorne, Stephen Guest, Godfrey Cass, Tito
Melema, and Fred Vincy; but rarely is he ridiculed, and then
ironically.
Of the bonny young Squire Donnithorne she draws the portrait as
he himself would see it:[386]
“* * * candour was one of his favorite virtues; and how can a
man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to
talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of
a generous kind—impetuous, warm-blooded, leonine; never crawling,
crafty, reptilian. ‘No! I’m a devil of a fellow for getting myself into a

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Tables and Figures vii

part one how we got here: historical

part two the human impact of restructuring and

10 Restructuring, Nutrition, and Diet on Both Coasts 273

part three towards social-ecological health:

6.1 Mean Carbon to Nitrogen Ratios (c/n) and Percentage of Terrestrial

8.10 Odds Ratios for Reporting Health Status by Logistic Regression

1.1 The Coasts Under Stress study area 6–7

5.2 Deaths registered at Anyox 136

13.6 Overview of the prototype computable general equilibrium (cge)

least in part, by such things as climate change. We take social restructur-

We wish to take this opportunity to thank the Social Sciences and

Rosemary E. Ommer, University of Victoria

acoa Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency

fpu Fishermen’s Protective Union

pccrrhs Provincial Coordinating Committee for Remote and Rural

Rural communities in Canada, and also in many other parts of the

Figure 1.1 The Coasts Under Stress study area

Figure 1.1 (continued)

able and nonrenewable. It was made clear to us that coastal communi-

The result has been distressed communities whose resource-based

lem was systemic in cause – a result of policy thrusts and economic

Following a substantial body of literature, we conceptualize what is

erodes effective democracy. Ecological degradation increases as regu-

(Ontario, British Columbia), while other regions have failed to shift

complex adaptive systems and

As we began our work, a new literature was emerging that sought to

was “profoundly affected by changes external to it, and continually

work that is concerned with “spatial and temporal dynamics developed

and structural analysis of complexity, drawing on both natural and

Sinclair and Ommer 2006). What it does do is speculate on the dynam-

the coasts under stress approach

This new literature is exceedingly important, and we build on it in our

ience thinking and will in the process generate new understanding of

sequences that have followed on appropriate multi-scale alignments

knew that interactions between the various kinds of restructuring,

Turner, Davidson-Hunt and O’Flaherty (2003) argue, “they exhibit

and household flexibility during generations of change and uncer-

tory of a health care system over an extended period) or one

Meredith expresses the same idea, with the difference that he

In his subtle way Meredith satirizes the Catholic Church by having