Guardians of the Wild. Frontispiece.
Guardians of the Wild. Frontispiece.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 License.
Williams, M. B. Guardians of the Wild. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1936. Republished on the Environment & Society Portal.
Seven thousand five hundred square miles! It was a small kingdom! And it was all henceforth to be under Government control, removed from the operation of any other Act except the Criminal Code. The Commissioner and his small staff were to initiate policies of protection and development, to discharge on behalf of the Government a new public trust. When he had been offered the post, he had accepted it light-heartedly, thinking that the care of a few beautiful places would be almost too easy and delightful a task. “National Parks!” It was a strange, almost meaningless term, conveying little to the imagination. In Europe kings and great noblemen had had their parks for centuries, as preserves for their game and pleasure grounds for a select few. There had been, too, the small ornamental parks of the cities with their ordered flower beds, trim walks, and stretches of smooth green lawn. But these National Parks, it appeared, were something quite different. (Text from Chapter 1)
The 1936 Guardians of the Wild, the first book written by M. B. Williams, is also the first history of the Canadian national parks system. It was written and published in Great Britain, and Williams never mentions her own part in that history.
Public domain.
- Campbell, Claire Elizabeth. “Pragmatism and Poetry: National Parks and the Story of Canada.” In “Big Country, Big Issues: Canada's Environment, Culture, and History,” edited by Nadine Klopfer and Christof Mauch. RCC Perspectives 4 (2011): 101-11.
- Campbell, Claire, ed. A Century of Parks Canada, 1911–2011. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011.
- MacEachern, Alan. “MB Williams: Living & Writing the Early Years of Parks Canada.” Environment & Society Portal, Virtual Exhibitions 2018, no. 2. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/8305. ISSN 2198-7696 Environment & Society Portal, Virtual Exhibitions.
- MacEachern, Alan. “Banff Is … Hell? The Struggle of Being Canada’s First, Most Famous, and Most Visited National Park.” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia (Summer 2016), no. 10. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7623.
