Graduate Students

Flurey, David - M.A

The Early Canadian Conservation Movement and The Emergence of Wildlife Preservation - Dr. James Snell, advisor

         The early Canadian Conservation movement defies any simplistic analysis which seeks to establish the artificial polarity of virtuous conservationists versus greedy and unenlightened exploiters. The essence of the movement lay in the interplay between pragmatism and idealism; the past and the future, the material and the spiritual. The movement to conserve Canada's natural resources, as it manifested itself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can be characterized as moderate. Devoid of any significant element of radicalism, it was representative of the strong desire of Canadian business and government to insure continued economic growth within the context of urbanization and industrialization.
         This paper will establish and explore a wider contextual framework for understanding the rise of both a continental and national Conservationism before examining in detail the activities of two groups concerned primarily with Canadian wildlife during the early-twentieth century - the Commission of Conservation's Committee on Fish, Game and Fur-Bearing Animals, and the Dominion Parks Branch. This will provide a basis for identifying many of the underlying principles and applications of Conservationism at that time, and for studying the earliest manifestation of ideals and practices which broadened existing notions of Conservationism into the new ideology of Preservationism.