Despite the popular assumption that wildlife conservation is a recent phenomenon, it emerged over a century and a half ago in an era more closely associated with wildlife depletion than preservation. In Wildlife, Conservation, and Conflict in Quebec, Darcy Ingram explores the combination of NGOs, fish and game clubs, and state-administered leases that formed the basis of a unique system of wildlife conservation in North America. Inspired by a longstanding belief in progress, improvement, and social order based on European as well as North American models, this system effectively privatized Quebec’s fish and game resources, often to the detriment of commercial and subsistence hunters and fishers.
The foremost experts on the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation come together to discuss its role in the rescue, recovery, and future of our wildlife resources. At the end of the nineteenth century, North America suffered a catastrophic loss of wildlife driven by unbridled resource extraction, market hunting, and unrelenting subsistence killing. This crisis led powerful political forces in the United States and Canada to collaborate in the hopes of reversing the process, not merely halting the extinctions but returning wildlife to abundance. While there was great understanding of how to manage wildlife in Europe, where wildlife management was an old, mature profession, Continental methods depended on social values often unacceptable to North Americans. Even Canada, a loyal colony of England, abandoned wildlife management as practiced in the mother country and joined forces with like-minded Americans to develop a revolutionary system of wildlife conservation. In time, and surviving the close scrutiny and hard ongoing debate of open, democratic societies, this series of conservation practices became known as the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. In this book, editors Shane P. Mahoney and Valerius Geist, both leading authorities on the North American Model, bring together their expert colleagues to provide a comprehensive overview of the origins, achievements, and shortcomings of this highly successful conservation approach. This volume • reviews the emergence of conservation in late nineteenth–early twentieth century North America • provides detailed explorations of the Model's institutions, principles, laws, and policies • places the Model within ecological, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts • describes the many economic, social, and cultural benefits of wildlife restoration and management • addresses the Model's challenges and limitations while pointing to emerging opportunities for increasing inclusivity and optimizing implementation Studying the North American experience offers insight into how institutionalizing policies and laws while incentivizing citizen engagement can result in a resilient framework for conservation. Written for wildlife professionals, researchers, and students, this book explores the factors that helped fashion an enduring conservation system, one that has not only rescued, recovered, and sustainably utilized wildlife for over a century, but that has also advanced a significant economic driver and a greater scientific understanding of wildlife ecology. Contributors: Leonard A. Brennan, Rosie Cooney, James L. Cummins, Kathryn Frens, Valerius Geist, James R. Heffelfinger, David G. Hewitt, Paul R. Krausman, Shane P. Mahoney, John F. Organ, James Peek, William Porter, John Sandlos, James A. Schaefer
Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of people living in modern times. Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields to enrich our understanding of history inside and outside Canada’s borders. The book’s chapters examine how science and technology have allowed Canadians to imagine and reinvent themselves as modern. Focusing on topics including exploration, scientific rationality, the occult, medical instruments, patents, communication, and infrastructure, the contributors situate Canadian scientific and technological developments within larger national and transnational contexts. The first major collection of its kind in thirty years, Made Modern explores the place of science and technology in shaping Canadians’ experience of themselves and their place in the modern world.
As the nineteenth century ended, Ontario wildlife became increasingly valuable. Tourists and sport hunters spent growing amounts of money in search of game, and the government began to extend its regulatory powers in this arena. Restrictions were imposed on hunting and trapping, completely ignoring Anishinaabeg hunting rights set out in the Robinson Treaties of 1850. Who Controls the Hunt? examines how Ontario’s emerging wildlife conservation laws failed to reconcile First Nations treaty rights and the power of the state. David Calverley traces the political and legal arguments prompted by the interplay of treaty rights, provincial and dominion government interests, and the corporate concerns of the Hudson’s Bay Company. A nuanced examination of Indigenous resource issues, the themes of this book remain germane to questions about who controls the hunt in Canada today.
Transforming the Prairies proposes a new understanding of Canada’s Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA), complicating common views of the agency as a model of effective government environmental management. Between 1935 and 2009, the PFRA promoted agricultural rehabilitation in and beyond the Canadian Prairies with mixed and equivocal results. The promotion of strip farming as a soil conservation technique, for example, left crops susceptible to sawfly infestations. The PFRA’s involvement in irrigation development in Ghana increased the local population’s vulnerability to various illnesses. And PFRA infrastructure construction intended to serve the public good failed to account for the interests of affected Indigenous peoples. The PFRA is revealed as being a high modernist state agency that produced varied environmental outcomes and that contributed to consolidating colonialism and racism. This investigation affirms the importance of engaging historical perspectives to help ensure that contemporary environmental management efforts support more just and sustainable futures.
Thanks to increasingly extreme forms of oil extraction, Canada’s largest oil-producing provinces underwent exceptional economic growth from 2005 to 2015. Yet oil’s economic miracle obscured its ecological costs. Fossilized traces this development trajectory, assessing how the governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador offered extensive support for oil-industry development, and exploring the often downplayed environmental effects of extraction. Angela Carter investigates overarching institutional trends, such as the restructuring of departments that prioritized extraction over environmental protection, and identifies regulatory inadequacies related to environmental assessment, land-use planning, and emissions controls. Her detailed analysis situates these policy dynamics within the historical and global context of late-stage petro-capitalism and deepening neoliberalization of environmental policy. Fossilized reveals a country out of step with the transition unfolding in response to the climate crisis. As the global community moves toward decarbonization, Canada’s petro-provinces are instead doubling down on oil – to their ecological and economic peril.
For four centuries, dykes held back the largest tides in the world, in the Bay of Fundy region of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. These dykes turned salt marsh into arable land and made farming possible, but by the 1940s they had fallen into disrepair. Against the Tides is the never-before-told story of the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration (MMRA), a federal agency created in 1948 to reshape the landscape. Although agency engineers often borrowed from long-standing dykeland practices, they were so convinced of their own expertise that they sometimes disregarded local conditions, marginalizing farmers in the process. The engineers’ hubris resulted in tidal dams that compromised some of the region’s rivers, leaving behind environmental damage. This book is a vivid, richly detailed account of a distinctive landscape and its occupants, revealing the push–pull of local and expert knowledge and the role of the state in the postwar era.
Muskoka. Now a magnet for nature tourists and wealthy cottagers, the region underwent a profound transition at the turn of the twentieth century. Making Muskoka traces the evolution of the region from 1870 to 1920. Over this period, settler colonialism upended Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee communities, but the land was unsuited to farming, and within the first generation of resettlement, tourism became an integral feature of life. Andrew Watson considers issues such as rural identity, tensions between large- and household-scale logging operations, and the dramatic effects of consumer culture and the global shift toward fossil fuels on settlers’ ability to control the tourism economy after 1900. Making Muskoka uncovers the lived experience of rural communities shaped by tourism at a time when sustainable opportunities for a sedentary life were few on the Canadian Shield, and reveals the consequences for those living there year-round.
As environmental deterioration became a major political issue near the end of the twentieth century, activists in Nova Scotia stood together to defend the places they called home. They cooperated to protect local environments and economies, but they disagreed about the causes of environmental problems, the role of humanity in nature, and the place of environmentalists in the political process. In Defence of Home Places examines the diversity of environmental activism in Nova Scotia, illustrating how radicals and conservatives combined efforts to achieve early legislative and social success. It also chronicles the debates and disagreements over fundamental principles that then weakened and divided the powerful environmental movement. Placing the evolution of Nova Scotian environmental activism within a broader theoretical framework, Mark R. Leeming considers its development in national and international contexts, examining the environmental movement itself along with the choices and tactics that brought about its greatest successes and failures.
Stretching across Ontario, Manitoba, and Minnesota, the Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake basin spans boundaries and jurisdictions. Levelling the Lake explores a century and a half of social, economic, and legal arrangements through which the resources and environment of the Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake watershed have been harnessed and harmed. Jamie Benidickson traces the environmental consequences of mining, forest industries, commercial fishing, hydro-electricity production, and recreation, as well as their often unanticipated impacts on local residents, including Indigenous communities, which encouraged new legal and institutional responses. Assessing the transition from primary resource extraction toward sustainable development at a watershed level, Levelling the Lake also shows how interjurisdictional and transboundary issues – many involving the Canada-US International Joint Commission – continue to play a significant role throughout the region.
