Review of All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia

While traveling through southeastern British Columbia recently, I inquired at a well-stocked bookstore for something about the Doukhobors, whose culture has influenced the area for a century, and about other regional communal groups.That the proprietress had little to suggest is confirmed by the sparse bibliography in this first true summary of "utopian experiments" in Canada's most westerly province.Pitifully little has been written about the subject.And yet, as Justine Brown, contends, "The richness of Utopian history in British Columbia offers countless images of alternative models, ideas, and opportunities."Her narrative confirms that observation.British Columbia's Utopian heritage ranges from the Tsimshian village of Metlakatla in the 1870s, to various ethnic communities (most notably the Finnish settlement of Sointula), to followers of the mystical Brother Twelve, to Russian Doukhobors, to the socialist Ruskin, to a plethora of hippie communes, to the Emissaries of Divine Light, and to artists' colonies of recent years.Brown summarizes these groups and others in a volume so slender that only a few paragraphs or-in rare instances-a few pages are allowed to each.There are the strait-laced and the free-spirited groups, the religious and the irreverent, the violent and the pacifist, the highly organized and the anarchistic.They are located in broad interior valleys, along the rain-sodden seacoast, in remote forest openings, and in cities and their fringes.The author presents a tantalizing overview of the characteristics of very different