From Dismal Swamp to Smiling Farms: Socio-Ecological Change and Making Food in the Holland Marsh

In the early 1920s a three thousand hectare area of the Holland River lowlands, 60 kilometers north of Toronto, Ontario, was canalized, drained and transformed into fields. In the contemporary period, wetlands are places to protect not dredge, drain and farm. Yet in the 1920s support for the conversion of the Holland Marsh was virtually unanimous. Indeed in 1920 not converting the wetland to farmland would have been considered reckless. The pages that follow excavate the complex social, political, biophysical, and cultural processes that account for this significant divergence in ideas about, and uses of, land. Through a chronological environmental history of the area, important historical conjunctures and constellations of institutions, ideologies and technologies responsible for driving landscape change and the production of nature in the Holland Marsh are highlighted. Conceptually, I problematize the idea that the agricultural landscape is natural by drawing on Neil Smiths (2008 [1984]) provocative production of nature thesis. I combine this with more traditional political economic and political ecological approaches to the study of food agriculture in order to elaborate and extend Smiths work. I demonstrate that the context of natures production the actors, institutions, locale, history and politics both facilitate and impinge upon the production of nature.