Throughout history most people have associated northern North America with wilderness, abundant fish and game, snow-capped mountains, and endless forest and prairie. Canada’s contemporary picture gallery, however, contains more disturbing images – deforested mountains, empty fisheries, and melting ice caps. Adopting both a chronological and a thematic approach, Laurel MacDowell examines human interactions with the land, and the origins of our current environmental crisis, from First Peoples to the Kyoto Protocol. This richly illustrated exploration of the past from an environmental perspective will change the way Canadians and others around the world think about – and look at – Canada.

Laurel Sefton MacDowell teaches Canadian history in the Department of History, University of Toronto. She is a co-editor of Canadian Working Class History: Selected Readings, 2nd edition and Patterns of the Past: Re-interpreting Ontario's History, a past editor of the journal Ontario History, and the author of numerous articles.

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MacDowell…mounts an impressive summary of how Canadian history has been rethought from an environment perspective over the last 40 years. She demonstrates this with a copiously illustrated and well-referenced exploration of the evolution of Canada’s landscape over millennia…a very accessible text for students and general readers, with excellent maps, illustrations, information boxes, and rich bibliographies for each chapter. Highly recommended.

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