The book
Against the Tides:
Reshaping Landscape and Community in Canada’s Maritime Marshlands
By Ronald Rudin, published by UBC Press
For four centuries, dykes held back the largest tides in the world, in the Bay of Fundy region of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. These dykes turned salt marsh into arable land and made farming possible, but by the 1940s they had fallen into disrepair. Dykeland was in danger.
Against the Tides is the never-before-told story of the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration (MMRA), a federal agency created in 1948. As farmers could not afford to maintain the dykes, the MMRA stepped in to reshape the landscape and with it the communities that depended on dykeland. Agency engineers borrowed from some of the farmers’ long-standing practices, but they were so convinced of their own expertise that they sometimes disregarded local conditions, marginalizing farmers in the process. The engineers’ hubris led to construction of tidal dams that compromised a number of rivers, leaving behind environmental challenges.
This book combines interviews with people from the region, archival sources, and images from the record the MMRA left behind to create a vivid, richly detailed account of the push–pull of local and expert knowledge, and the role of the state in the postwar era. Ultimately, Against the Tides is a compelling study of a distinctive landscape and the people who inhabited it that encourages us to rethink the meaning of nature.
Environmental historians and historians of Atlantic Canada will find this an absorbing account, as will individuals with an interest in water-related issues.
Reviews
Told using primary sources that have rarely, if ever, been exploited, Against the Tides is truly something new under the sun. Rudin succeeds in making the fragmented and chaotic story of the marshlands both understandable and highly interesting.
Against the Tides is an environmental story of people and place, of war and peace, of struggle and resilience, and of science and humanity … Rudin encourages and enables the reader to reflect on the sweep of time and tide across the Fundy marshlands; to contemplate anew the variety, intricacy, and consequences of human-environment relations; and to ponder – with some urgency – the future of our planet.
F
