Common Ground in a Liquid City. Matt Hern
Brought into outside focus so recently and then changed so rapidly, it is not an easy place to know.
In these circumstances, immigrant British Columbians fall back on simple categories of knowing and the exclusions they entail. They assume that British Columbia was wilderness and that they are the bearers of civilization. Living within this imaginative geography, they associate colonialism with other places and other lives—a racially segregated South Africa, Joseph Conrad’s fear-ridden Congo—where they can easily condemn its brutalities, yet are largely oblivious to its effects here. They turn the Fraser Canyon into a gold rush trail, a place where rugged land and sturdy miners met; a gondola gives them scenery and a touch of “gold pan Pete.” The equation is simple and powerful, but leaves out thousands of human years and lives. The Fraser Canyon was not empty when miners arrived; it had as dense an early-contact, non-agricultural population as anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. The ancestors of these people had been there for thousands of years.7
Vancouver’s official and vernacular disinterest in its past has a whole different tone than Salonica’s: Likely a colonialist requisite, there is some kind of quasi-psychological reflex to rewrite the memory of a place and deny that there was ever anything else of real importance here. Vancouver wants to relentlessly look forward, ignoring what was once here even while the ancestors of conquest are still all around us.
What city isn’t built on slaughter? Even though ours is so recent, there has to be a way to speak of fractured continuities, constant change, and an emerging city. In a lot of ways, Vancouver’s signature naïve energy and headlong optimism is attractive. It’s energizing to live in a place that believes that its best days are ahead of it, and I certainly feel and revel in that. But without reconciling with the real history of this place and developing a genuine understanding of what we are building on—and who we are standing beside—that optimism and energy is going to be facile and hollow.
I’m not interested in a sentimental approach to all of this. All culture involves forgetting and suppression, and sometimes (maybe even often) it is an excellent idea. It is a good thing, for instance, that the Confederate flag is not flying from the state house in Georgia. The issue is: who is remembering what, in what ways, and why? If we are going to build a real city, we have to get our ideas about our place—both within history and the natural world—clarified. Right now, the dominant narratives about both are pretty weird.
These dislocations were particularly naked in conversations that took place after a powerful windstorm ripped through the city and tore the shit out of Stanley Park in December 2006. There was massive damage to the park: the wind virtually clear-cutting huge swaths, knocking down thousands of trees, caving in long sections of the seawall, and setting off landslides.
The damage really was remarkable and humbling, but the outrage was equally colossal. Vancouver’s genteel public was horrified that the “crown jewel of the city,” our “heart and soul” could be so tarnished. A keen lament for the park echoed throughout the media, bathed in dismay that “Mother Nature” could be so capricious and unfair. Massive funds were immediately established; schools groups and volunteers scrambled over themselves to help clean up. It was estimated that $9 million was needed for “first-level restoration,” and solemn promises were made to restore the park to its “original” state.
But of course neither the Vancouver nor the touristic public has any interest at all in seeing the park in its “original” state, and much less interest in its state of indigenous habitation. What is being “restored” is a simulacrum of a natural state, a clean and tidy version of “nature” that doesn’t include fallen-down trees, collapsed roadways, reduced access, messy windstorms, or any lack of bathrooms or cappuccino stands.
Cleanup will take at least a year, according to head grounds-keeper Dennis Dooley, who is leading the crew clearing the roads and trails through the park. The trails that crisscross the park are impassable.
About 20 percent of the park’s trees were wiped out, Dooley said, damage that will take “generations” to heal.
“For the first couple of days the staff were devastated; a lot of them were just walking around with tears in their eyes,” he said.8
I’m sure that’s all true, and the deep feelings people have for the trees and the park in general are kind of touching, but there’s something profoundly obnoxious about claiming the park will take “generations to heal.” The suggestion that anyone has any interest in the park returning to anything like its “natural state” (whatever that might be) is absurd: Stanley Park is as much a construction as the concrete and glass buildings downtown.
In the fall of 2008, the Vancouver Museum opened a terrific exhibit exploring our paradoxical notions of the park called The Unnatural History of Stanley Park. I was impressed (in no small part because its sentiments echoed much of my previous writing) and talked to its curator, Joan Seidl.
When I arrived at the Vancouver Museum in 1992, there was a proposal on the table to do an exhibit called Stanley Park: A Love Affair. I did not want to do that exhibit. Of course we love Stanley Park; who would dispute that? But I am more interested in exploring the degree to which the park has been shaped by people. We’ve had our hands all over that park. We expound lovely rhetoric about the park as primeval and ancient, but meanwhile we are tap-tapping away, fixing nature—pruning a tree here, planting others there. I think that nature is in the cultural realm—I don’t know how we can have a relationship with all that stuff out there that isn’t cultural—even the word “nature” is cultural. I would like people to think about the meaning of nature in general, but especially what it means for an urban park like Stanley Park in a city like Vancouver.
We need to acknowledge that what we are managing is a largely human construction. Language like “the restoration of Stanley Park” seems to purposefully obscure the long history of human residence and park-making on the peninsula. Stanley Park would not necessarily be improved by “cleaning it up” and certainly not by tidying nature’s mess, but also not by eliminating the hodgepodge of accumulated, contradictory activities and events in the park. I am entertained by a park that contains Saturday night renegade bike courier races at Prospect Point and Sunday afternoon cricket on Brockton Oval. I like the paradox that we seek to commune with nature by walking on the seawall (a project that would never pass an environmental review today).
The old polar bear pit, now overgrown with blackberry bushes, wasn’t removed when the zoo was closed. Now it stands as a relic of the days when we had a different relationship with animals when it was okay to put animals in cages and stare at them for pleasure. I am glad that its concrete presence will not allow us to pretend that we weren’t those people.
But of course we were—and largely are—those people. And I’ll submit to you that getting honest about our urban relationships with nature is a prerequisite for constructing a real city—here or anywhere else.
Stanley Park is almost always one of the very first things visitors and residents alike speak of when they catalog what’s good about Vancouver. It was established in 1888, right at the city’s inception, and is one thousand acres of forest, gardens, trails, beaches, seawall, playgrounds, restaurants, and an aquarium in the heart of Vancouver, making it the third largest urban core park in North America. The park hosts more than eight million visitors annually, and occupies a central role in marketing the city.
Vancouver focuses much of its identity, branding, and advertising around its natural beauty, its proximity to the ocean and mountains, and its overall wholesome healthfulness. Stanley Park is a vital player in that effort, and reifying its “naturalness” and “untouched” splendor is critical both for Vancouverites and tourists in constructing an ideological space for the park. As an early city paper wrote in 1939:
A city that has been carved out of the forest should maintain somewhere within its boundaries evidence of what it once was, and so long as Stanley Park remains unspoiled that testimony to the