Intended to delight and provoke, these short, beautifully crafted essays, enlivened with photos and illustrations, explore how humans have engaged with the Canadian environment and what those interactions say about the nature of Canada.
Tracing a path from the Ice Age to the Anthropocene, some of the foremost stars in the field of environmental history reflect on how we, as a nation, have idolized and found inspiration in nature even as fishers, fur traders, farmers, foresters, miners, and city planners have commodified it or tried to tame it. They also travel lesser-known routes, revealing how Indigenous people listened to glaciers and what they have to tell us; and how even the nature we can't see – the smallest of pathogens – has served the interests of some while threatening the very existence of others.
The Nature of Canada will make you think differently not only about Canada and its past but quite possibly about Canada and its future. Its insights are just what we need as Canada attempts to reconcile the opposing goals of prosperity and preservation.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1 Nature and Nation / Graeme Wynn
2 Painting the Map Red / Graeme Wynn
3 Listening for Different Stories / Julie Cruikshank
4 Eldorado North? / Stephen J. Hornsby and Graeme Wynn
5 Back to the Land / Colin M. Coates
6 Nature We Cannot See / Graeme Wynn
7 The Wealth of Wilderness / Claire E. Campbell
8 Imagining the City / Michèle Dagenais
9 Never Just a Hole in the Ground / Arn Keeling and John Sandlos
10 Every Creeping Thing … / Ken Cruikshank
11 The Power of Canada / Steve Penfold
12 Questions of Scale / Tina Loo
13 A Gendered Sense of Nature / Joanna Dean
14 Advocates and Activists / Graeme Wynn, with Jennifer Bonnell
15 Climates of Our Times / Liza Piper
16 Time Chased Me Down, and I Stopped Looking Away / Heather E. McGregor
Index
About the Author :
Colin M. Coates is the author of The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec and editor of Canadian Countercultures and the Environment. He is an associate professor of Canadian studies at Glendon College, York University. Graeme Wynn is a geographer, the author of Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History, the president of the American Society for Environmental History, and the editor of the UBC Press Nature History Society book series.
Contributors: Jennifer Bonnell, Claire Campbell, Colin M. Coates, Julie Cruikshank, Ken Cruikshank, Michèle Dagenais, Joanna Dean, Stephen J. Hornsby, Arn Keeling, Tina Loo, Heather E. McGregor, Steve Penfold, Liza Piper, John Sandlos, Graeme Wynn
Review :
And what a showcase it is. Yet another accomplishment of indefatigable editors…
- Ruth Morgan, director, Centre for Environmental History at Australian National University (NiCHE)
