The Second World is often thought of in terms of destruction: in the West and East of Europe especially, historical narratives often emphasize the weaponry and technology that crushed cities, ended the lives of millions of people, and laid waste to the environment. While the brunt of the damage was suffered by the countries on whose land the war was fought, other nations further removed from the conflict felt the impact of the war upon their lands as well, often as sources or suppliers of multiple kinds of resources. Canada was one such country: when Britain lost their remaining allies and was cut off from their usual routes of supply, Canada became one of their biggest sources of goods, materials, and natural resources. However the processes of manufacturing or extracting these supplies leveled an unparalleled impact on Canada’s environments during this time. Terrain across the country, although particularly in Ontario and Quebec at the center of Canada, was fundamentally altered to support the already high and rapidly growing demands for products and supplies. Two of Canada’s biggest contributions to the Allies lay in the manufacture of aluminum and aluminum products, and in providing hydroelectricity to power the war effort. Providing and maintaining both resulted in drastic restructuring and reshaping of the landscape: factories were necessary to manufacture goods, processing facilities were needed to prepare the materials, and power was essential to increase in order to support the needs of factories and processing facilities, all of which was facilitated by the construction of buildings and other infrastructure. The construction that created the necessary facilities had some of the most visible impacts: the Shipshaw Dams and accompanying power plant on the Saguenay River in Quebec are prime examples of the extensive alterations made both to the geography and ecology of the environment. These would be used to supply hydroelectricity to locations such as the Arvida Aluminum Complex, also located in Quebec. As Canada’s largest aluminum processing and preparation facility during the war, Arvida was also one of the largest to engage in toxic and harmful practices to produce aluminum, and in such great quantities. Aluminum plants supplied factories such as the Canadian Car & Foundry located in Ontario, which produced airplanes and other aluminum based products during the war, and in doing so added their own pollution and waste products to the mix. Though often the last point of consideration, the impacts of construction, extraction, and production involved in the manufacture of aluminum, aluminum products, and the increase of hydroelectricity caused fundamental changes to the environment in Canada, changes which were often permanent and could be quite harmful in the long term. Comparing photographs from before and after these alterations took place helps to illustrate the blunt impact of the changes made to the environment, and the sheer magnitude of the transformation that took place. The impact of the Second World War upon the environment is important to take note of in that the environment became just one of the many casualties of total war, in ways that are still apparent in and relevant to the modern age.
Sunday, December 4, 2022
Shipshaw Dams and Power Plant, Saguenay River in Quebec
Juxtapose Image 1: Shipshaw Dam 1 under construction, 1941.
Juxtapose Image 2: Shipshaw Dam 2 under construction in the foreground, Dam 1 completed in the background, 1943.
Canada joined the Second World War on September 10th, 1939, and immediately afterwards began preparation for immersion in total war. Amongst other things, this meant that production of goods, weaponry, and technology of all kinds immediately escalated. As demand for wartime products increased, so too did demands for hydroelectricity to operate the facilities that would manufacture them, and hydroelectricity soon became vital to the war on all fronts. On this matter, most were in agreement: “power was not only critical to specific electrometallurgical industries such as aluminum and magnesium … but also served as the production matrix for many other industrial processes”(1). Hydroelectricity gave power to facilities in all major industries in Canada, increasing their capacity for production and output. At the time the war broke out, however, existing facilities were ill equipped to handle the massive increase in demands for hydroelectricity. One of the ways that they were met was through the construction and mobilization of hydro-electric dams and power stations. Several major projects were launched in Canada throughout the Second World War, including the Shipshaw Dam on the Saguenay River in Quebec, “one of the largest of all Canada's major wartime construction projects” that was capable of generating up to 900 kilowatts of power while operational (2). Construction on the Shipshaw Dam lasted over two years, beginning in mid 1941 and lasting until the project’s completion in late 1943, resulting in newly available power from two massive dams and their accompanying power station. The completion of the Shipshaw Dams afforded massive amounts of hydroelectricity to a number of facilities that needed it, though an emphasis was placed on supplying facilities processing and manufacturing aluminum, with “extra power for aluminum production being one of the highest of all wartime priorities” (3). Hydroelectricity was clearly one of the most vital elements geared towards powering the war effort, and the amount of time, money, and resources put into the facilities to produce it and increasing its availability at all costs aptly demonstrates that.
At the same time as they represent the triumph of an industry determined to meet demands to maintain the war effort, the Shipshaw Dams represent a massive, multimillion dollar campaign that severely disrupted the environment they were constructed on and continue to do so today. It not only reshaped the terrain through the construction process and the development of massive infrastructure over a two year period, but the finished project completely rerouted a section of the Saguenay River, and in doing so physically recast an entire series of wildlife habitats and ecosystems. “The new project which has changed the course of the river, moving it bodily from a valley to the top of a ridge, will have a rated capacity of 1,500,000 horsepower. This power will be used to make aluminum to make aircraft for the United Nations”, read the first publication made about the project, in 1943 (4). In addition to this, data collected before construction began in 1941 and in 1969 after its completion offered information as to the instability of ground conditions in the area, a long but little known concern that remained disregarded by the wider community (5). As such, ground instability and the neglect of geographical concerns can be added to the list of ways in which the environment was further compromised during construction to build infrastructure through which to increase power during the war. One other area impacted in constructing hydroelectric dams was the nearby or surrounding water. While hydroelectric dams act not so much to contaminate so much as to control the movement and flow of water, the process of the dams’ construction was itself a contaminant risk, as runoff from physical materials as well as those introduced by machines and workers had the potential to interact with and thus influence the composition of the water. This was even acknowledged at the time, as on viewing the completion of the first dam onlookers took note of “the top of a derrick protruding through the ice. It had fallen into the water and it was not worth the expense of retrieving it.” (6).
The pictures featured above look at two aspects of the Shipshaw Dams, first in 1941 and the next in 1943; the first picture shows the first Dam under construction, while the second picture, though it focuses primarily on the second Dam under construction, shows the completed first in the background. There were no photographs taken of the Shipshaw site before construction began for security purposes: because of the amount of money that went into the project, as well as its projected importance for the war effort, information about the project was kept as quiet as possible, and the project was heavily guarded by the military both during and after construction (7). The pictures shown below, the first a short film taken in 1952 showing the completed Shipshaw Dams and the power plants, and the second picture taken a few years ago in 2012, show that while the first of construction may have been completed during the war, the project has grown in the years since then and continues to expand. Throughout the process, construction was intense: it involved thousands of people and as mentioned above took over two years to complete, with the finished product spanning (as shown in the 1952 video) quite a large area of land and rerouting an entire segment of the Saguenay River. The length of time it took to construct, the number of people and the amount of machinery that was involved, and the expanse of land the project took over completely disrupted the environment and its ecosystems in this area, reshaping them entirely until they fit the needs of industry and the war effort. The Shipshaw Dams still function today, and still generate massive amounts of hydroelectricity per year, with periodical modifications or upgrades made to the existing facilities (8). Their presence remains a vivid reminder of the massive upheaval their construction caused and continues to cause to the surrounding environment, as well as the sheer power that they are capable of generating and its vitality to the war effort, in one area above all: aluminum.
Arvida Aluminum Complex
Juxtapose Image 1. Site of the Arvida Aluminum Complex, 1925.
Juxtapose Image 2. Aerial photograph of Arvida Aluminum Complex, 1938.
Aluminum was perhaps the most important metallic alloy of the Second World War: as a lightweight, easily malleable and mass produced metal, it was used in everything from small goods and wartime products to airplanes (9). As such, a lot of effort went into sourcing and obtaining bauxite reserves, and transporting the bauxite to aluminum plants in Canada, “where it was smelted in vast complexes powered by hydroelectricity” (10). The Arvida Aluminum plant was essential to the production of aluminum during the Second World War: though it was constructed during the 1920s, it was heavily modified and expanded during the war in order to increase its production capabilities as well as its output (11). At its peak capacity, Arvida was providing up to 350,000 tonnes of aluminum every year, a massive increase from its previous 50,000 tonnes of aluminum, and continued to thrive after the war was over as the biggest aluminum production plant in existence at the time (12). It received hydroelectricity directly from the Shipshaw Dams: in fact, Shipshaw was constructed almost entirely for the purposes of providing more hydroelectricity to the Arvida plant to help increase their output (13). In this way, hydroelectricity and aluminum production during the war were intrinsically connected, and especially during the war years one often affected the other's rates of growth. Aluminum itself was vital to the war effort, and its importance cannot be overstated: hydroelectricity was often specifically diverted to aluminum processing plants in order to increase their output, especially as aluminum was crucial to constructing airplanes and their related functions in defense at home and abroad (14). There were few other materials that gained the same level of importance to the war effort as aluminum did.
At the same time, however, the full process of creating aluminum has always had a highly detrimental impact on the environments its base materials are extracted from and the environments in which it is produced. Multiple studies confirm this: the effects of extraction and production "razed forests, polluted rivers and release[d] polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons into the air during the smelting process" (15), and other studies highlight the “extensive deforestation around mining sites, the degradation of surrounding agricultural lands, the pollution of local water supplies, [and] the emissions of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants from refineries and smelters” (16). Extracting bauxite (the base alloy that creates aluminum) is itself highly dangerous, toxic, and destructive upon the environment: the primary method of extraction is strip mining which devastates the landscape, and often produces respiratory risks through its dust or the harmful emissions produced through burning, and poses a risk of contaminating nearby water sources (17). While this discussion will not focus on the extraction of bauxite as most of Canada's supply during the war came from other countries, it is important to note that the process of extraction had and continues to have a devastating impact on the environments in which these processes take place, further compounded by the exploitation of both the land the bauxite is taken from as well as its peoples.
As mentioned above, issues around constructing facilities will always offer problems in terms of disruption to the environment and the introduction of foreign or potentially harmful materials. While construction of course poses the same kinds of risk for aluminum smelting facilities, it is the actual smelting and processing of aluminum that pose a greater threat. Some aluminum smelting processes will produce a ‘red mud’, a compound that is highly toxic, not easily stored, and has the potential to contaminate water sources if there are any leaks caused by improper or damaged storage (18). There is also the risk of industrial runoff, as one study takes note (19). If aluminum was a popular alloy during the war, it has become even more so today, and as more of it is produced, waste products such as red mud increase at the same pace. Other toxins and hazards such as those mentioned above also increase at the same rate. According to the slogan on their website, Alcan (the owner and developer of the Arvida plant) today has committed to developing and following safer and environmentally sustainable practices (20). Yet the history of such things shows that oftentimes if rules or regulations were not in place or did not exist at the time, there wasn’t much corporate consideration for them. This means that until Alcan committed to this course of action, it is unlikely there was much concern for conserving the environment in the pursuit of profit and mass production.
The set of pictures above showcases the Arvida site in 1925 before the processing plant was constructed, and again in 1938 just before the Second World War began. While the initial construction was finished and the aluminum plant established well before the war began, the juxtaposition of these photos demonstrates the impacts of construction upon the land, and that the growing importance of aluminum led to the expansion of the plant and, then the industry, in the first place. Arvida was the biggest aluminum plant in existence at the time the war began, and because of this quickly became established as the primary supplier of aluminum in Canada, and one of the biggest suppliers of aluminum to the Allied war effort. Had Arvida not been so well established at the time war broke out, it is unlikely that the facility would have become as notable as it did. The fact that most of the machinery and facilities needed were already set up at Arvida, coupled with its strategic position close to the Saguenay River, made it an obvious first choice for development. It was considered so important that its need for power led directly to construction of the Shipshaw Dams, allowing the plant to increase production swiftly and effectively over the course of the war. The pictures below showcase the Arvida Aluminum plant in 1945 as the war drew to a close, and again a few decades afterwards. Arvida was not only important to maintaining aluminum production during the war, it was also extremely vital to the development of the aluminum industry in the decades afterwards. It remained the largest aluminum processing facility for some time after the war ended, and even after its size and capabilities were surpassed, it was still considered important to maintaining the aluminum industry generally. At the same time that Arvida played an integral role in maintaining aluminum production for the war effort and helping to cement the establishment of the industry in the years after it ended, it also contributed a number of harmful and toxic side effects from its processing techniques and from the construction that took place as the plant was sporadically updated and expanded, and continues to do so today. Alcan has pledged itself to more environmentally sustainable practices, but this has only occurred recently and after decades wherein the effects of these practices and construction upon the surrounding environment were left to do as they would. Be that as it may, Arvida was instrumental in providing a surplus of aluminum to the many factories and interested parties that requested it, including those that constructed one of the most vital elements to defense: airplanes.
Image 3. Arvida History Center, & Digital Cultural Plan of Quebec. Arvida Aluminium Complex. Arvida Aluminium Complex - Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec (gouv.qc.ca).
Image 4. Arvida History Center, & Digital Cultural Plan of Quebec. Arvida Aluminium Complex - Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec (gouv.qc.ca).
Canadian Car & Foundry
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Though the Canadian Car & Foundry, or Can Car, was well established by the end of the 19th century, it played an integral role in manufacturing and creating many different types of aircraft for the military. Initially, the Foundry's production concerned railway cars and other related products, but with the onset of the war it quickly made accommodations for the production of aircraft instead, as many facilities were appropriated and altered to accommodate the war effort. Not only this, Can Car was one of the first facilities to employ women during the war, and also the place of employment of Elsie Macgill (originally from Vancouver. B.C.), who overcame polio and became Canada's first female engineer and Chief Engineer at the Foundry, helping to revolutionize the industry with her aircraft designs (21). Already a large facility, the demands of the war effort saw it increase the number of buildings, machinery, and staff over the six year period. Can Car & Foundry went from around 200 employees who produced the first of Canada's Second World War aircraft by the end of January in 1940, to employing over 3,000 people and producing approximately 20 planes every week (22). The Foundry would have been supplied with aluminum from processing facilities much like Arvida in order to make the planes, and with hydroelectricity from power plants much like Shipshaw in order to power their operations, receiving increasing amounts of both as the war dragged on and more supplies were needed to maintain levels of operation and production. This showcases the ways in which multiple industries were fundamentally interconnected on multiple levels: as demand for products increased, so too did demands for materials and power with which to make them, and as demands for material and power increased, it became necessary to build the facilities needed to meet those demands. While it eventually returned to its original functions after the war was over, all told, the Foundry would have been responsible for the creation of over 5,000 planes of all kinds, and would have helped to supply Britain as well as Canada with the aircraft necessary for defense.
The Foundry contributed much to the war effort, but in doing so it too had its detrimental impacts on the environment. The construction involved in the expansion of its facilities, much like the construction that occurred in conjunction with aluminum and hydroelectric power plants, of course would have presented its own issues: the use of heavy machinery and the materials involved in construction would have released pollution into both the air and the land surrounding the site, while also possibly affecting any nearby water sources at the same time. As the Foundry expanded, it took up more and more land, thus totally reconfiguring the environment on which it was constructed and reshaping that environment's ecology and ecosystems all at once. It was the operations of the Foundry itself, though, that would have had the biggest impact on a day-to-day basis. Operating a factory which relied on the use of heavy machinery for most of the day for the majority of the week would have taken its toll, especially given the exhaust and other emissions from the machines to be released into the atmosphere. Heavy foot traffic and the increased human presence in the area would have compounded these issues further. Some of the biggest impacts of aircraft production upon the environment in the long term occurred after the war was over, when there was no longer any need for mass production of airplanes and those that already existed had become redundant and, thus, worthless. Many planes were decommissioned and salvaged for parts after the war, however these same planes that had flown into battle often showed the ‘wear and tear’ of it, and as the technology of the time advanced ever more quickly, both the parts and the planes became useless and obsolete, leaving thousands of planes and mountains of parts that no one had any use for and no one wanted to rot (23). Thousands were incinerated over the next few years, adding to burning emissions already heavily affecting the atmosphere, while others were stored until they too met this fate or were dumped or abandoned; this was the unfortunate reality for many wartime products that existed in surplus at the end of the war and which the government had no use for, in spite of the post-war dearth of supplies (24). While perhaps not the worst or longest lasting of the impacts leveled on environments in Canada, the effects of Can Car's war work still took a toll on the surrounding environment in more ways than one.
The picture and short film above showcase the Canadian Car & Foundry in its heyday during the war, and again a few decades later in 1972. Between the video filmed during the war and the photograph taken in 1972, it is plain to see that the Can Car facilities expanded quite a bit over the course of the conflict: buildings were added, existing facilities were expanded, and machines to help with the streamlining of production were implemented. And while production and expansion at Can Car slowed down after the war ended, it still remained functional as a facility and production center. The Foundry is largely remembered in Canadian history for its contributions to the war effort, and has been immortalized as one of the biggest aircraft production factories during the Second World War as a national heritage site by the province of Ontario. At the same time that it served the war effort, its other longest lasting legacy is the one it left on the environment. The construction that went into its expansion, the byproducts its production facilities and machines created, and how product surplus and waste was dealt with in the aftermath of the war all left their marks on not only its province, but also throughout the rest of Canada for years after the war had ended.
21. National Film Board of Canada. “Rosies of the North”. 1999. 46 min. Rosies of the North by Kelly Saxberg - NFB.
"The dam at Shipshaw No. 1 looks like the side of a cathedral—a smooth sweep of light-colored concrete pierced by Gothic openings." (25). A brilliant description, to be sure, yet it fails to do the project justice when compared with actually viewing the imposing infrastructure of the Dams. Dorothee Brantz, in an article titled "Landscapes of Destruction", truly encapsulates why pictures and photographs are so much more striking as documentation. "Powerful photographs are able to depict a highly expressive moment, but they also transcend the instant of the image itself. They bridge the gap between a moment that is ripped from the flow of time and the historical narrative that weaves together a sequence of events.” (26). In viewing juxtaposing images of the same locations before and after they felt the effects of war and time, the very real impact of the changes and alterations that were made to the environment during the Second World War becomes brutally apparent. This was terrain that was physically, permanently altered in many different ways, and that is made nowhere as apparent than through the images documenting the progression of these alterations. The manner in which the environment was impacted during the Second World War is one that is a relatively new area of historical study. Chris Pearson, author of “Environments, states, and societies at war”, maintains that “historians of totalizing war have rarely considered environmental factors” or “the relationship between the Second World War’s environmental history and totalizing war”, even as it is acknowledged that the “Second World War was profoundly environmental” (27). As new work emerges that begins to fully detail this impact, historians of today learn more about how the environment was reshaped, exploited, and hurt by the drive for victory in the Second World War, and the ways in which many of these actions are still relevant and apparent in today's world. In many ways, each topic this discussion has explored influenced each other: as demands for one supply or product increased, so too did demands for the others, prompting massive geographical overhaul as the environment was changed to be able to meet these demands. The impacts of these changes and alterations have long withstood the test of time, with both their presence as well as their underlying effects proving themselves a reminder of the war and of the sacrifices Canadians made to meet its demands and surpass them. The Shipshaw Dams continue to provide massive amounts of power at the same time as they continue to reroute an entire segment of an enormous river; aluminum extraction and processing has become bigger than it ever was, but at the cost of the surrounding environments and often the people in them; though the Can Car Factory still exists and operates today, the tools and weapons with which the war was won no longer exist, or were destroyed in ways which left their own detrimental mark on the environment. All of these things continue to have a very real, very visceral effect on the environments and ecosystems in Canada, in ways that will transcend the memory of the Second World War, and in ways that we as a society are yet to fully realize.
25. Findlay, D. K. 1943. Pg. 16.
26. Brantz, D. 2015. “Landscapes of Destruction” (CHSWW, Vol. III, pp. 725-748). Pg. 728.
27. Pearson, Chris. 2015. Pg. 221.
Saturday, December 3, 2022
Works Cited
Alcan. “We Are Committed to Sustainability.” https://alcan.ca/index.php/en/sustainability.
Arvida History Center & Digital Cultural Plan of Quebec. Arvida, Cité de l'aluminium. May 25, 2018. https://www.citedelaluminium.ca/en/.
Brantz, Dorothy. (2015). “Landscapes of Destruction”. The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Volume 3, Total War: Economy, Society and Culture. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 725-748.
City of Thunder Bay. City of Thunder Bay Archives. City Archives - City of Thunder Bay.
Findlay, D. K. “Shipshaw: Maclean's: March 15, 1943.” Maclean's | The Complete Archive. Maclean's, March 15, 1943. https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1943/3/15/shipshaw.
Flickr. Yahoo!. City of Thunder Bay Archives. November 2012. https://www.flickr.com/photos/thunderbayarchives/.
Fraser, Blair. “Victory in Aluminum: Maclean's: February 1, 1944.” Maclean's | The Complete Archive. Maclean's, February 1, 1944. https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1944/02/01/victory-in-aluminum.
Gendron, Robin S., Ingulstad, Mats, and Storli, Espen, eds. 2013. Aluminum Ore : The Political Economy of the Global Bauxite Industry. Vancouver: UBC Press. Accessed December 2, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Goulet, Richard R., Janick D. Lalonde, Catherine Munger, Suzanne Dupuis, Geneviève Dumont-Frenette, Stéfane Prémont, and Peter G.C. Campbell. 2005. “Phytoremediation of Effluents from Aluminum Smelters: A Study of Al Retention in Mesocosms Containing Aquatic Plants.” Water Research (Oxford) 39 (11): 2291–2300. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2005.04.029.
Government of Canada. "Library and Archives - Collections Search". Collections Canada. Collection Search (bac-lac.gc.ca)
Government of Quebec. (2013). “Complexe D'aluminium D'arvida.” Complexe d'aluminium d'Arvida - Répertoire du patrimoine culturel du Québec. https://www.patrimoine-culturel.gouv.qc.ca/rpcq/detail.do?methode=consulter&id=191124&type=bien.
Legget, Robert F, and Pierre LaSalle. 1978. “Soil Studies at Shipshaw, Quebec: 1941 and 1969.” Canadian Geotechnical Journal 15 (4): 556–64. https://doi.org/10.1139/t78-059.
Massell, David. (2004). “As Though There Was No Boundary”: the Shipshaw Project and Continental Integration, American Review of Canadian Studies, 34:2, 187-222, DOI:10.1080/02722010409481198.
NFB Archives. National Film Board of Canada. https://archives.nfb.ca/home/.
National Film Board of Canada. https://www.nfb.ca/.
Pearson, Chris. (2015). "Environments, States, and Societies at War". The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Volume 3, Total War: Economy, Society and Culture. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 220-244.
Rio Tinto Alcan. “Rio Tinto Alcan Inaugurates the Completion of the Shipshaw Powerhouse Project in Saguenay, Quebec.”. Cision Canada, December 26, 2018. https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/rio-tinto-alcan-inaugurates-the-completion-of-the-shipshaw-powerhouse-project-in-saguenay-quebec-511171501.html.
Souchen, Alex. 2020. War Junk: Munitions Disposal and Postwar Reconstruction in Canada / Alex Souchen. UBC Press.-
Juxtapose Image 1. Site of the Arvida Aluminum Complex, 1925. Juxtapose Image...
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Juxtapose Image 1: Shipshaw Dam 1 under construction, 1941. Juxtapos...
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The Second World is often thought of in terms of destruction: in the West and East of Europe especially, historical narratives often empha...
