Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments

by Liza Piper (Editor), Lisa Szabo-Jones (Editor)

Overview

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 journalism.

This indispensable and timely resource constitutes a sustained cross-pollinating conversation across the environmental humanities about forms of representation and activism that enable ecological knowledge and ethical action on behalf of Western Canadian environments, yet have global reach. Among the developments in the contributors’ construction of environmental knowledge are a focus on the power of sentiment in linking people to the fate of nature, and the need to decolonize social and environmental relations and assumptions in the West.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781554589258
Publisher:	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date:	03/31/2015
Series:	Environmental Humanities
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	365
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Liza Piper is an associate professor at the University of Alberta, where she teaches environmental and Canadian history. She researches and writes about the relations between people and the rest of nature in the past, primarily in northern environments and with a particular focus on the roles of science and industry and the consequences for diet and health. She is the author of The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada (2009).
Lisa Szabo-Jones, a photographer and Trudeau Foundation Scholar, holds a PhD from the University of Alberta and teaches literature at John Abbott College. She is co-editor of Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments (WLU Press, 2015).

Table of Contents

Table of Contents for
Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments, edited by Liza Piper and Lisa Szabo-Jones

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: What if the Problem is People? | Liza Piper

Part 1: Acting on Behalf Of

Chapter 1: Grass Futures: Possibilities for a Re-engagement with Prairie | Trevor Herriot

Chapter 2: Wastewest: A State of Mind | Warren Cariou

Chapter 3: Sustaining Collaboration: The Woodhaven Eco Art Project | Nancy Holmes

Chapter 4: A Natural History and Dioramic Performance: Restoring Camosun Bog in Vancouver, British Columbia | Lisa Szabo-Jones and David Brownstein

Chapter 5: A Subtle Activism of the Heart | Beth Carruthers

Chapter 6: Sublime Animal | Maria Whiteman

Chapter 7: The Becoming-Animal of Being Caribou: Art, Ethics, Politics | Dianne Chisholm

Interlude: Creating Metaphors for Change | Lyndal Osborne

Part 2: Constructing Knowledge

Chapter 8: Poetry, Science, and Knowledge of Place: A Dispatch from the Coast | Nicholas Bradley

Chapter 9: Deception in High Places: The Making and Unmaking of Mounts Brown and Hooker | Zac Robinson and Stephen Slemon

Chapter 10: Escarpments, Agriculture, and the Historical Experience of Certainty in Manitoba and Ontario | Shannon Stunden Bower and Sean Gouglas

Chapter 11: Whatever Else Climate Change Is Freedom: Frontier Mythologies, the Carbon Imaginary, and British Columbia Coastal Forestry Novels | Richard Pickard

Chapter 12: Endangered Species, Endangered Spaces: Exploring the Grasslands of Trevor Herriot's Grass, Sky, Song and the Wetlands of Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge | Angela Waldie

Chapter 13: What Should We Sacrifice for Bitumen? Literature Interrupts Oil Capital's Utopian Imaginings | Jon Gordon

Interlude: Symphony for a Head of Wheat Burning in the Dark | Harold Rhenisch

Part 3: Maternal Expressions

Chapter 14: Propositions from Under Mill Creek Bridge: A Practice of Reading | Christine Stewart

Chapter 15: Understory Enduring the Sixth Mass Extinction, ca 2009-11 | Rita Wong

Chapter 16: Seeding Coordinates, Planting Memories: Here, There,&Elsewhere in W.H. New's Underwood Log | Travis V. Mason

Chapter 17: Re-Envisioning epic in Jon Whyte's Rocky Mountain Poem The fells of brightness | Harry Vandervlist

Chapter 18: Ware's Waldo: Hydroelectric Development and the Creation of the Other in British Columbia | Daniel Sims

Afterword: Humming Along With the Bees: A Few Words on Cross-Pollination | Pamela Banting

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Editorial Reviews

"The editors and writers of these thoughtful, challenging essays—diverse examples of the best work in the environmental humanities—take seriously the cultural assumptions that create and perpetuate contemporary environmental crises. With a scope that considers the potential of the poetic to alter the West's exploitative relationship with nature alongside cases of deteriorating ecosystems, which illustrate the need for a new social contract with the land, these writers call for radical change."

Deanna Reder