Category: Books and Resources

Books and Resources

The Last Great Sea: A Voyage Through the Human and Natural History of the North Pacific Ocean

Sockeye are disappearing, mackerel snap at hooks set for chinook, gray whales shun the coasts, common murres are quitting their colonies: the ecology of the North Pacific, writes Terry Glavin in The Last Great Sea, is being remade before our eyes. Just why North Pacific marine and coastal environments are so rapidly dying is a matter of much debate. For some fishing communities, Glavin writes, “it was the seals, it was urban development, it was logging, or the pollution of rivers, and always, it was the politicians and the bureaucrats and the Indians.”

Continue reading “The Last Great Sea: A Voyage Through the Human and Natural History of the North Pacific Ocean”

Books and Resources, Community Stewardship and Living

This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment

This Elusive Land introduces readers to women?s perceptions and experiences of the Canadian natural environment. This multidisciplinary anthology discusses the ways in which women integrate the social and biophysical settings of their lives, featuring a range of contexts and issues in which gender mediates, inspires, and informs a sense of belonging to and in this land. In particular, the historical association of women with “domestic” nature is challenged by the investigation of women?s lives in a broad range of environments.

Continue reading “This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment”

Books and Resources, Community Stewardship and Living

Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America

The European explorers who first visited the Northwest Coast of North America assumed that the entire region was virtually untouched wilderness whose occupants used the land only minimally, hunting and gathering shoots, roots, and berries that were peripheral to a diet and culture focused on salmon. Colonizers who followed the explorers used these claims to justify the displacement of Native groups from their lands. Scholars now understand, however, that Northwest Coast peoples were actively cultivating plants well before their first contact with Europeans. This book is the first comprehensive overview of how Northwest Coast Native Americans managed the landscape and cared for the plant communities on which they depended.

Continue reading “Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America”

Books and Resources, Natural Resources Management

A Stain Upon the Sea : West Coast Salmon Farming

On the West Coast, few subjects are as controversial as salmon farming. Every week, new studies raise alarming questions about the safety of farmed fish and the risk farms pose to the environment. But federal, provincial and state governments continue to support expansion of fish farms all along the coast. People are justifiably confused.

Continue reading “A Stain Upon the Sea : West Coast Salmon Farming”