Wildlife Conservation And Conflict In Quebec 1840 1914

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.

Organ, James Peek, William Porter, John Sandlos, James A. Schaefer

As the nineteenth century ended, the popularity of sport hunting grew and Ontario wildlife became increasingly valuable. 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.

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 draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields who write on topics ranging from exploration and infrastructure to the occult sciences and communications. The contributors use histories of science and technology to enrich our understanding of Canadian history and of Canada’s place in a transnational modern world. The first major collection of its kind in thirty years, this book explores the place of science and technology in shaping Canadians’ experience of themselves and their place in the modern world.

As environmental deterioration became a major social and political issue near the end of the twentieth century, activists in Nova Scotia stood together to defend the places they called home. Political radicals and conservatives alike worked to achieve legislative and social success, even as they disagreed over fundamental principles. In Defence of Home Places examines the diversity of this movement, its early accomplishments, and the disagreements that caused its eventual weakening and division. It places Nova Scotian environmental activism within national and international contexts and explores the choices and tactics that brought about its greatest successes and failures.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, industrial pioneers came to British Columbia with grand plans for resource development projects, many of which never materialized. Unbuilt Environments argues that these kinds of projects have lasting impacts on the natural and human environment – even when they fail. Jonathan Peyton examines a range of archival materials in five case studies. Looking at a closed asbestos mine, an abandoned rail grade, an imagined series of hydroelectric installations, a failed LNG export facility, and a transmission line, Peyton finds that past development failures continue to shape contemporary resource conflicts in the region.

For four centuries, dykes turned salt marsh into arable land in the Bay of Fundy region of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. But by the 1940s, the aging dykes were in poor repair. Against the Tides is the never-before-told story of the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration, a federal agency created in 1948 to reshape the landscape. Agency engineers sometimes borrowed from long-standing dykeland practices, but they also disregarded local conditions in building tidal dams that compromised some of the region’s rivers. This vivid account of a distinctive landscape and its occupants reveals the push–pull of local and expert knowledge and the role of the postwar state.

Thanks to increasingly extreme forms of oil extraction, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador underwent exceptional economic growth from 2005 to 2015. Fossilized investigates the environmental policy trends that supported this development trajectory, such as institutional restructuring that prioritizes extraction over environmental protection, alongside inadequate environmental assessment, land-use planning, and emissions controls. Angela Carter’s detailed analysis situates the policy dynamics of Canada’s largest oil-producing provinces within the historical and global context of late-stage petro-capitalism and deepening neoliberalization. As the global community moves toward decarbonization, Canada's petro-provinces are instead doubling down on oil – to their ecological and economic peril.