Nature | History | Society

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Series editor: Graeme Wynn

Nature | History | Society is a series devoted to the publication of high-quality scholarship in environmental history and allied fields. Its broad compass is signaled by its title: "Nature" because it takes the natural world seriously; "History" because it aims to foster work that has temporal depth; and "Society" because its essential concern is with the interface between nature and society. The series is avowedly interdisciplinary and features the work of anthropologists, ecologists, historians, geographers, literary scholars, political scientists, sociologists, and others whose interests resonate with its mandate. It offers a timely outlet for lively, innovative, and well-written work on the interactions of people and nature through time in North America.

Showing 1-30 of 39 items.

Transforming the Prairies

Agricultural Rehabilitation and Modern Canada

UBC Press

Transforming the Prairies critically reassesses Canada’s Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration in light of its involvement in ecological changes and its role in consolidating colonialism and racism.

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Making Muskoka

Tourism, Rural Identity, and Sustainability, 1870–1920

UBC Press

Making Muskoka traces the first decades of Muskoka’s transformation from Indigenous homeland to a part-time playground for tourists and cottagers and uncovers the consequences for those who lived there year-round.

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Against the Tides

Reshaping Landscape and Community in Canada’s Maritime Marshlands

UBC Press

Against the Tides tells the compelling story of the rehabilitation of the Maritime marshlands, a project that reshaped not only the landscape of the Bay of Fundy region but the communities that depended on it.

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The Government of Natural Resources

Science, Territory, and State Power in Quebec, 1867–1939

By Stéphane Castonguay; Foreword by Graeme Wynn; Translated by Käthe Roth
UBC Press

The Government of Natural Resources is a revealing look at how science can extend state power through territorial and environmental transformations.

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Fossilized

Environmental Policy in Canada's Petro-Provinces

UBC Press

Fossilized reveals how Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador – blinded by exceptional economic growth from 2005 to 2015 – undermined environmental policies to intensify ecologically detrimental extreme oil extraction.

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Fixing Niagara Falls

Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall

UBC Press

Long considered a natural wonder, the world’s most famous waterfall is anything but. Fixing Niagara Falls reveals the engineering and politics behind the transformation of Niagara Falls.

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Levelling the Lake

Transboundary Resource Management in the Lake of the Woods Watershed

UBC Press

It’s one thing to live in a watershed. We all do. It’s another to manage one, as Levelling the Lake compellingly demonstrates.

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Who Controls the Hunt?

First Nations, Treaty Rights, and Wildlife Conservation in Ontario, 1783-1939

UBC Press

Tracing the connections between colonialism and the early conservation movement in Ontario, Who Controls the Hunt? examines the contentious issue of treaty hunting rights and the impact of conservation laws on First Nations.

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Montreal, City of Water

An Environmental History

UBC Press

Montreal, City of Water investigates the development of the city over two centuries, tracing the relationship between the city’s inhabitants and the waterways that ring its island and flow beneath it in underground networks.

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West Ham and the River Lea

A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshland, 1839–1914

UBC Press

This original account of industrial London’s expansion into West Ham’s suburban marshlands highlights how pollution, poverty, and water shortages fuelled social democracy in Greater London.

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In Defence of Home Places

Environmental Activism in Nova Scotia

UBC Press

In Defence of Home Places examines the diversity of environmental activism in Nova Scotia, placing its early social and legislative successes and eventual weakening and division within a national and international framework.

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Unbuilt Environments

Tracing Postwar Development in Northwest British Columbia

UBC Press

This book looks at the long-term social and environmental effects of imagined, abandoned, and failed resource-development schemes in northwest British Columbia.

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Where the Rivers Meet

Pipelines, Participatory Resource Management, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Northwest Territories

UBC Press

An examination of Sahtu Dene participation in the assessment of the Mackenzie Gas pipeline and other resource extraction projects, this book provides an in-depth account of the workings and effects of participatory environmental assessment in the Canadian North and its implications for the legitimization of resource co-management.

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The People and the Bay

A Social and Environmental History of Hamilton Harbour

UBC Press

This engaging history brings to life the personalities and power struggles that shaped how Hamiltonians used their harbour and, in the process, invites readers to consider how moral and political choices being made about the natural world today will shape the cities of tomorrow.

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A Town Called Asbestos

Environmental Contamination, Health, and Resilience in a Resource Community

UBC Press

In A Town Called Asbestos, a mining town’s proud and painful history is unearthed to reveal the challenges a small resource community faced in a globalized world.

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Resettling the Range

Animals, Ecologies, and Human Communities in British Columbia

UBC Press

This unconventional history looks at the resettlement of interior British Columbia from the perspective of campaigns to exterminate grasshoppers and wild horses, creatures considered by some to be pests.

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The First Green Wave

Pollution Probe and the Origins of Environmental Activism in Ontario

UBC Press

The First Green Wave examines the origins and development of first wave environmental activism (1967-86) in Toronto, home to one of Canada’s earliest and most dynamic communities of environmentalists.

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Tracking the Great Bear

How Environmentalists Recreated British Columbia’s Coastal Rainforest

UBC Press

A detailed account of the complex and contested process that resulted in the establishment of the Great Bear Rainforest in coastal British Columbia.

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Negotiating a River

Canada, the US, and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway

UBC Press

A revealing look at the planning and building of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project -- a megaproject that had a profound impact on North American history.

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Power from the North

Territory, Identity, and the Culture of Hydroelectricity in Quebec

UBC Press

This book explores how French Canada’s aspirations migrated north with natural resource development, creating a culture of hydroelectricity that continues to shape territorial planning and relations with Aboriginal peoples in the province.

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Wildlife, Conservation, and Conflict in Quebec, 1840-1914

UBC Press

A revealing look at the origins of modern wildlife conservation in Quebec.

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Inventing Stanley Park

An Environmental History

UBC Press

A timely exploration of how the interplay between attitudes toward nature, parks policy, public memory, and the force of nature helped shape one of the world’s most famous urban parks.

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Temagami's Tangled Wild

Race, Gender, and the Making of Canadian Nature

UBC Press

This book shows that wilderness is created rather than discovered, and describes how the creation of wilderness has led to the marginalization of Aboriginal peoples from their territories.

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Wet Prairie

People, Land, and Water in Agricultural Manitoba

UBC Press

This in-depth exploration of surface water management in southern Manitoba reveals how coping with environmental realities has altered both residents’ relations with each other and their ideas about the role of the state.

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Manufacturing National Park Nature

Photography, Ecology, and the Wilderness Industry of Jasper

UBC Press

Focusing on Jasper National Park, this richly illustrated book shows how photography has shaped and continues to inform perceptions of nature and ecological issues in Canada.

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Managed Annihilation

An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse

UBC Press

By examining one of the largest natural resource management failures of the twentieth century – the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery – this book seeks to understand the history of, and possible alternatives to, managerial responses to environmental issues.

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What Is Water?

The History of a Modern Abstraction

UBC Press

A history of the modern concept of water that traces how a scientific abstraction has helped to produce a global crisis.

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The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada

UBC Press

A revealing history of human impact in the Canadian North, this book focuses on the causes and consequences of the industries that replaced the fur trade.

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Sensing Changes

Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003

UBC Press

These narratives about state-driven megaprojects and technological and regulatory changes reveal how humans make sense of their world in the face of rapid environmental change.

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Home Is the Hunter

The James Bay Cree and Their Land

UBC Press

The James Bay Cree lived in relative isolation until 1970, when Northern Quebec was swept up in the political and cultural changes of the Quiet Revolution. Home Is the Hunter presents the historical, environmental, and cultural context from which this recent story grows.

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