Books in the Nature | History | Society series

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Weaves together a series of narratives about environmental history in British Columbia's Chilcotin Plateau.

Hunters at the Margin examines the conflict in the Northwest Territories between Native hunters and conservationists, arguing that game regulations and national parks helped assert state authority over traditional hunting cultures.

Offers a fresh cultural history of sport and imperialism. focusing on nineteenth-century British big-game hunting and exploration narratives from the western interior of Rupert's Land.

This multi-award-winning book is one of the first to trace the development of Canadian wildlife conservation from its social, political, and historical roots.

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.

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.

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

This book explores how antimodern nostalgia and modern sensibilities about the landscape, child rearing, and identity shaped the history of summer camps.

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.