What lessons can designers, engineers and others engaged in the transformation of landscapes learn from the Mackenzie Tree Crusher? To answer this question, I suggest that the Tree Crusher can be conceptualised in three different ways — as a tool, as a monument, and as a metaphor — and that each category offers insights into the ways that we ascribe meaning and value to land. As a tool, the Tree Crusher is purposefully blunt and indiscriminate. It was designed to ignore the particular qualities of place according to the logics of speed and efficiency shared by the logging industry and the United States Armed Forces. These overlapping technical requirements are reflected in many of the tools now commonly used in design practice, which were originally created to facilitate surveillance and combat operations in enemy territory (such as GIS and remote sensing technologies). Similarly, the militarisation of land-clearance seen in the jungles of Vietnam is reflected in the BC Forest Service’s approach to site preparation for the Williston Reservoir: subalpine forests stood in the way of a particular political economic agenda, and the Tree Crusher provided a powerful weapon to advance the Government of British Columbia’s strategy of northern modernisation. As a monument along Highway 39, the Tree Crusher reflects the convergence of capital, labour and industrial ambition that carved the town of Mackenzie out of BC’s northern forests. It commemorates the men and women who established Mackenzie and prepared the land for the Williston Reservoir, many of whom went on to work in the pulp, paper, and timber mills which now dominate the town’s local economy. Yet Mackenzie’s economic future is uncertain. The forests surrounding the town are suffering due to combination of factors, including high tree mortality associated with invasive species such as the mountain pine beetle, as well as the increasing frequency and severity of wildfires linked to global climate change. As a result, many of Mackenzie’s mills have closed citing an ‘ongoing lack of economic [wood]fibre’. 8 Against these difficult odds, the Tree Crusher symbolises the struggle and resilience of Mackenzie’s founding citizens, and offers hope for the town’s future economic prosperity.
However, the Tree Crusher can also be read as a monument to the hubris of reckless resource extraction. Decades of industrial clear-cutting, mining, hydroelectric development and, increasingly, the construction of energy corridors and pipelines have reduced the forests surrounding Mackenzie to a fragmented patchwork. As subalpine boreal ecosystems struggle to cope with the pace and scale of industrial development, so too do the livelihoods that depend on them. This is acutely felt by Indigenous peoples who rely on these landscapes for food, medicine and traditional cultural practices, yet who have been socially and politically marginalised through processes of Canadian settler colonialism. Viewed in this light, the Tree Crusher embodies all the failed schemes and misplaced ambitions of many of Canada’s northern extractive landscapes. It is both a monument to failure and a reminder of ongoing forms of dispossession and violence inflicted upon northern lands and peoples. Lastly, as a metaphor, the Tree Crusher symbolises the ways in which historical (and ongoing) practices of resource extraction and infrastructure development in British Columbia (and elsewhere) fail to recognise the socio-ecological and multi-species relations embedded in all landscapes. Complex and dynamic relationships, such as mycorrhizal networks which enable trees to communicate and share resources with one another, have only recently come to the attention of Western science (although long understood by Indigenous knowledge). 9 The Tree Crusher is blind to these obligate relationships, as are many other tools which designers routinely use to observe, visualise and stage interventions in the material world. 10 We can witness this mentality in contemporary design projects that instrumentalise nonhuman relations through discourses of ‘ecosystem services’ or through the logics of industrial silviculture. Like the Tree Crusher, these land management approaches reduce complex landscapes to industrial throughputs for technical and economic systems. These strategies are not only reductive, but also deeply unjust. They deny the forest its vitality and agency as living being embedded within broader relational landscapes, of which humans are also a part. As it currently sits at the side of the road in a landscape increasingly marked by wildfires, flooding and biodiversity decline, the Tree Crusher offers a cautionary tale of the consequences for failing to uphold our earthly relationships. In other words, the Tree Crusher reminds us to learn from our mistakes.
below: LeTourneau Tree Crusher in operation near Mackenzie, British Columbia, 1966. below right: Le Tourneau Tree Crusher as monument on BC Highway 39, Mackenzie BC
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Photographer unknown. Image courtesy of Jim Wiens / Mackenzie and District Museum
Google street view, 2021
8 Oud, Nicole. “Paper Excellence Permanently Closes Pulp Mill in Mackenzie, B.C., at a Cost of 250 Jobs.” CBC News , 15 April 2021 9 Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest . New York: Penguin, 2021; Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants . Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013 10 Robb, Douglas, and Bakker, Karen. “Planetary voyeurism.” LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture , vol. 12, 2020. pp 50-55
acknowledgements This research was supported by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship program funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Many thanks to Jim Wiens at the Mackenzie and District Museum for providing archival photos, and to the staff at the Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives for their research assistance.
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