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.

Anja Nygren reviews the 2017 book Green Wars: Colonization and Conservation in the Maya Forest by Megan Ybarra.

The authors explore the implementation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Indigenous knowledge (IK) in mapping efforts, taking cues from previous spatio-temporal visualization work in the Geographic(al) Information System(s)/Science(s) GIS community, and from temporal depictions extant in existing cultural traditions.

Drawing on interviews with 25 Australian environmental leaders, the authors ask how international instruments with cosmopolitan ambitions influence the discourse and practice of national and subnational environmentalists attempting to find common ground with Indigenous groups.