Books & Profiles

Ice Blink: Navigating Northern Environmental History

Northern Canada’s distinctive landscapes, its complex social relations and the contested place of the North in contemporary political, military, scientific and economic affairs have fueled recent scholarly discussion. At the same time, both the media and the wider public have shown increasing interest in the region. This collection extends our understanding of the environmental history of northern Canada—clarifying both its practice and promise, and providing critical perspectives on current public debates.

Moving Natures: Mobility and the Environment in Canadian History

This collection highlights three quintessentially Canadian themes: seasonality, links between mobility and natural resource development, and urbanites’ experiences of the environment through mobility. It divides the intersection of environmental and mobility history into two approaches. The chapters in the first section deal primarily with the construction and productive use of mobility technologies and infrastructure, as well as their environmental constraints and consequences. The chapters in the second section focus on consumers’ uses of those vehicles and pathways: on pleasure travel, tourism, and recreational mobility.

Canadian Countercultures and the Environment

This collection contributes a sustained analysis of the beginning of major Canadian environmental debates between the 1960s and 1980s, and examines a range of issues related to broad environmental concerns, topics which emerged as key concerns in the context of Cold War military investments and experiments, the oil crisis of the 1970s, debates over gendered roles, and the increasing attention to urban pollution and pesticide use.

A Century of Parks Canada, 1911–2011

Over the past century, the Parks Canada agency has been at the center of important debates about the place of nature in Canadian nationhood and relationships between Canada’s diverse ecosystems and its communities. This edited volume explores its history as a rich repository of experience, of lessons learned—critical for making informed decisions about how to sustain the environmental and social health of Canada’s national parks.