Okanagan Mountain Park as seen from West Kelowna.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Fruit, wine, a huge lake, beaches and mountains… Kelowna has it all. Enough to rival California, some may even argue. But is what we praise and revel in today the real artifact? Or is it the product of some tampering, irrigation, Western European ideals, and a good marketing campaign?

UBCO professor Greg Garrard says it's the latter and has conducted a study with master’s student Chhavi Mathur to prove it.

The inspiration for Garrard’s study came from the notorious rap video by local artist Dollar D, called “Kelownafornia.”

Garrard said that this comparison between Kelowna and California is nothing new.

“At various times the local authorities have tried to promote the idea of ‘Silicon Valley north’,” Garrard said. “And then you've got the 'Napa of the north', so it's like Napa Valley in California but it's in Canada.”

However, Garrard describes these comparisons as “optimistic formulations” of a “cosmic disproportion”.

“Because if California was a country it would be the fifth largest economy in the world,” he said. “It has a colossal wine industry and a tech industry that rules the world. It's always a bit amusing that sort of disproportion.”

The idea of a "Kelownafornia" also captures the historic representation of the Okanagan as a special place in Canada, Garrard said. But this portrayal has mostly relied on some clever marketing and human tweaking to the natural landscape. 

The starting point of this study focuses on the Beautiful British Columbia magazine, which was a government funded publication from 1959 until the mid-1980s and read worldwide.

“I grew up as an expatriate Canadian in various different parts of the world,” Garrard said. “Everywhere I lived, whether it was in Canada or in the Netherlands or in Lebanon, it seemed like everywhere there was a stack of Beautiful British Columbia magazines.”

In this magazine, the Okanagan is shown as an oasis in an arid desert. Advertisements in the magazine invite tourists and migrants to visit the region for apple picking, wine sampling or picnicking.

“There are a lot of articles which talk about blossom time in the Okanagan, all the bounty of fruit,” Mathur said. “Portraying it as this garden that's being made to bloom in the desert. Some of that also does draw on this Christian imagery of the garden of Eden.”

However, everything on offer in the Okanagan is the product of irrigation, Garrard pointed out. The fruit orchards and vineyards wouldn’t have been possible without it.

The magazine was also crucially trying to draw in more immigration from Europe and was specifically designed to target that audience. 

“If it had just been a tourist magazine for Americans which was obviously a big market... it would have been about fishing and hunting,” Garrard said. “But it had roads, it had sawmills, it had like a lot more stuff than that.”

At the same time, irrigation for farming had turned the land into the green agricultural landscape many British and other Western European readers were familiar with.

“Then it makes perfect sense to market the place as, like, ‘look! You know this! You know what this is,’” he said.

Farming had also helpfully removed a lot of the natural arid land and marshy wetlands that would have unappealing to European settlers, Garrard explained.

“Europeans don't like swamps, (but) they do like to live in the places where swamps used to be,” Garrard said.

Draining and appropriating that water has had the most substantial impact on the Okanagan’s natural landscape. Since settlement began, close to 95% of the Okanagan’s wetlands have been lost to development and urbanization.

According to Garrard, prior to the mid-19th century, wetland transformation was partly fuelled by a fear of miasma: the thought that bad smells caused disease. 

“People thought that bad smells would kill you,” Garrard said. “Where do bad smells come from? They come from swamps and marshes.”

In reality, it was the mosquitoes around the swamps that spread disease, but people’s ignorance led them to drain and cover wetlands nevertheless.

“In the early years of the industrial revolution the prevalent view was that cities were much safer because there at least it smelled of coal smoke rather than horrible stinky marshes and so you were likely less likely to die,” Garrard said. “People thought that coal smoke was healthful because it kept the miasma away.”

Drained marshes were also useful in creating the Okanagan’s agricultural industry, as the land left behind was very fertile.

On the other hand, the landscape has been transformed in more subtle ways, like the suppression of fire and Indigenous burning practices.

Garrard describes this process as “ab-natural”, where a natural process is made to go in a different direction under human influence.

“It is definitely conspicuously true if you know what to look for in this region,” Garrard said. “It's probably five to ten times as densely forested (now) as in pre-colonial times.”

And, of course, the landscape has changed drastically with urbanization and development and, once again, this development has taken on a very European style. Especially though our obsession with a neat and tidy front lawn.

Before settlement in North America, lawns were the luxury of the wealthy, as an extension of their stately homes, Garrard explained. 

“(Then) it crosses the Atlantic and becomes part of the vast wave of suburbanization,” he said. “The front lawn becomes the marker of middle-class respectability and of having 'arrived'.”

Your back garden is where you entertain guests, have barbeques or generally spend time. Your front lawn, however, is where you show people that you are a good neighbour, Garrard said.

“And you do that by having a lawn that you take good care of,” he said.

In Kelowna that means a whole lot of water use.

“The average consumption per household in Kelowna is 100,000 litres a year,” Garrard said. “That's vastly more than anywhere else in the whole of Canada… That's another example of a cultural ideal. It has no utilitarian function at all. Except to separate house from the road. But it has a huge impact on the water usage.”

In other words, the land has again been changed with a lot of effort, money and resources, to be more appealing to the first white settlers who arrived.

“This place has been idealized in the Canadian cultural imagination and that idealization has had material effects,” Garrard said. “Whether it's irrigation, whether it's migration and development, whether it's the economic value that has first been there for furs, and then for peaches, and then for grapes and now for property. All those things are all cultural ideas ultimately, and those values have transformed the landscape.”

Although this has undoubtedly brought industry and economic wealth to the region, it has also caused untold damage on the land's native and natural origins.  

“It's unquestionably bad for the indigenous inhabitants both human and non-human,” Garrard said. “They have not thrived under this regime.”

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