Transformative Politics of Nature highlights the most significant barriers to conservation in Canada and discusses strategies to confront and overcome them. Featuring contributions from academics as well as practitioners, the volume brings together the perspectives of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts on land and wildlife conservation, in a way that honours and respects all peoples and nature.

Contributors provide insights that enhance understanding of key barriers, important actors, and strategies for shaping policy at multiple levels of government across Canada. The chapters engage academics, environmental conservation organizations, and Indigenous communities in dialogues and explorations of the politics of wildlife conservation. They address broad and interrelated themes, organized into three parts: barriers to conservation, transformation through reconciliation, and transformation through policy and governance.

Taken together, the essays demonstrate the need for increased social-political awareness of biodiversity and conservation in Canada, enhanced wildlife conservation collaborative networks, and increased scholarly attention to the principles, policies, and practices of maintaining and restoring nature for the benefit of all peoples, species, and ecologies. Transformative Politics of Nature presents a vision of profound change in the way humans relate to each other and with the natural world.

Andrea Olive is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Geography at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Olive completed her PhD at Purdue University in 2009 where she taught courses in environmental policy and was assistant professor at the University of Michigan, Dearborn before coming to the University of Toronto, Mississauga in the summer of 2012. She is the author of Land, Stewardship, and Legitimacy: Endangered Species Policy in Canada and the United States (UTP, 2014).

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Chance Finegan was most recently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

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Karen F. Beazley is a professor emeritus in the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University.

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