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The Canadian prairies are often envisioned as dry, windswept fields; however, much of southern Manitoba is not arid plain but wet prairie, poorly drained land subject to frequent flooding. Shannon Stunden Bower brings to light the complexities of surface-water management in Manitoba, from early artificial drainage efforts to late-twentieth-century attempts at watershed management. She engages scholarship on the state, liberalism, and bioregionalism in order to probe the connections between human and environmental change in the wet prairie. This account of an overlooked aspect of the region’s environmental history reveals how the biophysical nature of southern Manitoba has been an important factor in the formation of Manitoba society and the provincial state.
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.
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.
Manitoba has always been a province in the middle, geographically, economically, and culturally. Lacking Quebec’s cultural distinctiveness, Ontario’s traditional economic dominance, or Alberta’s combustible mix of prairie populism and oil wealth, Manitoba appears to blend into the background of the Canadian family portrait. But Manitoba has a distinct political culture, one that has been overlooked in contemporary political studies.Manitoba Politics and Government brings together the work of political scientists, historians, sociologists, economists, public servants, and journalists to present a comprehensive analysis of the province’s political life and its careful “mutual fund mo...
Western Canada’s natural environment faces intensifying threats from industrialization in agriculture and resource development, social and cultural complicity in these destructive practices, and most recently the negative effects of global climate change. The complex nature of the problems being addressed calls for productive interdisciplinary solutions. In this book, arts and humanities scholars and literary and visual artists tackle these pressing environmental issues in provocative and transformative ways. Their commitment to environmental causes emerges through the fields of environmental history, environmental and ecocriticism, ecofeminism, ecoart, ecopoetry, and environmental journal...
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.
Mexicans in Alaska analyzes the mobility and experience of place of three generations of migrants who have been moving between Acuitzio del Canje, Michoacán, Mexico, and Anchorage, Alaska, since the 1950s. Based on Sara V. Komarnisky’s twelve months of ethnographic research at both sites and on more than ten years of engagement with the people in these locations, this book reveals that over time, Acuitzences have created a comprehensive sense of orientation within a transnational social field. Both locations and the common experience of mobility between them are essential for feeling “at home.” This migrant way of life requires the development of a transnational habitus as well as the...
This one-volume history chronicles a 150-year history of dramatic changes in fortune and attitudes in western Canada. From the Riel Rebellions and the Winnipeg General Strike to the founding of the CCF, Social Credit, and Reform parties, Canada's West has always been a hotbed of political, social, and economic change. In the early twentieth century those calls for change emanated from the left as farmers and workers fought for social and economic justice. In the past two decades, the protests and calls for change emanated from the right as the region gained a new role for itself in Canada. This history chronicles the rise and fall of such figures as Grant Devine, Bill Vander Zalm, Glen Clark, Roy Romanow, Stockwell Day, and Lorne Calvert -- and the emergence of Stephen Harper and the federal Conservatives. It describes how the West, the political wellspring of progressive changes over the years, has been transformed into the bastion of the right, culminating in the virtual annihilation of the NDP in Saskatchewan, the cradle of social democracy in Canada. This is the updated fourth edition of John Conway's classic book originally published under the titleThe West.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, legions of industrial pioneers came to northwestern British Columbia with grand plans for mines, dams, and energy-development schemes. Yet many of their projects failed to materialize or were abandoned midstream. Unbuilt Environments reveals that these lapsed resource projects had lasting effects on the natural and human environment. Drawing on a range of case studies to analyze the social and environmental impacts of unfinished projects, Jonathan Peyton considers development failure a productive concept for northwestern Canada. He looks at a closed asbestos mine, an abandoned rail grade, an imagined series of hydroelectric installations, a failed LNG export facility, and a transmission line – and finds that these unrealized developments continue to shape contemporary resource conflicts.
A megaproject half a century in the making, the planning and building of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project is one of the defining episodes in North American history. Possibly the largest construction undertaking in Canadian history, and one of the most ambitious borderlands projects ever embarked upon by two countries, it also required decades of negotiation and the controversial relocation of thousands of people. Negotiating a River looks at the profound impacts of this megaproject, from the complex diplomatic negotiations, political manoeuvring, and environmental diplomacy to the implications on national identities and transnational relations.