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NOT LONG AFTER he was first elected premier in 1952, W.A.C. Bennett went on a tour of northern British Columbia. He asked his driver to pull over at a highway viewpoint where he could look out over the Peace River Valley. Perplexed at the sight of a motionless man in a suit gazing off into space, a passing trapper asked, "Mister, what are you staring at?" Bennett apparently pointed down at the valley and answered with a question of his own: "Look down there. What do you see?"
"I see a small, winding, muddy river."
"Well, my friend," said the premier, "I see dams. And I see power.
And I see development. I see roads, highways, bridges, and growing communities. I see cities - prosperous cities with schools, hospitals and universities. I see beautiful homes with housewives baking bread."1
For W.A.C. Bennett, the value of nature lay in its transformation. Altering nature would not just make British Columbia wealthy, it would also support the emergence of an industrial economy and a particular kind of society - one that was connected, institutionally anchored, urban, wealthy, and domestic The vision he articulated above the Peace was not limited to the North but was part of an overall plan for provincial development. For Bennett and his Social Credit party, making British Columbia modern depended on conquering the province's geography and realizing the economic potential of its forests, fisheries, rivers, and minerals through massively capitalized resource development.
While it is widely understood that large-scale, state-directed environmental exploitation drove the "rise of British Columbia" in the postwar years, rather less is known about the ideas and practices that informed this process - a process that geographer Eric Swyngedouw calls the "socionatural production" of modernity.2 Focusing on the 1964 Columbia River Treaty, this article examines the agents, techniques, and logic associated with the creation of a modern British Columbia through hydroelectric development, arguing that they were manifestations of an encompassing historically specific ideology of "high modernity." It then looks at the reaction to the treaty's provisions and the impact of the High Arrow Dam, making the point that, in their opposition, the "people in the way" of the dam articulated an alternative to the high modernism of Bennett and BC Hydro.3...