Wilderness and Waterpower: How Banff National Park Became a Hydroelectric Storage Reservoir explores how the need for electricity at the turn of the century affected and shaped Banff National Park. Today's conservationists and energy researchers will find much to think about in this tale of Alberta's early need for electricity, entrepreneurial greed, debates over aboriginal ownership of the river, moving park boundaries to accommodate hydro-electric initiatives, the importance of water for tourism, rural electrification, and the ultimate diversion to coal-produced electricity. It is also a lively national story, involving the irrepressible and impetuous Max Aitkin (later Lord Beaverbook), R.B. Bennett (local legal advisor and later prime minister), and a series of local politicians and bureaucrats whose contributions confuse and conflate issues along the way.

Christopher Armstrong is co-author, with H.V. Nelles, of The Painted Valley: Artists Along Alberta's Bow River, 1845-2000.

Christopher Armstrong's profile page

H.V. Nelles is the L.R. Wilson Professor of Canadian History at McMaster University and Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at York University. Both have written and published extensively on Canadian history and are widely recognized as two of the foremost scholars in the field.

H.V. Nelles' profile page

• Short-listed, FHSS Canada Prize in the Social Sciences
• Short-listed, BPAA Alberta Book Publishing Award for Scholarly and Academic Book

Wilderness and Waterpower undertakes a minute reconstruction of the business and political decisions surrounding the extension of the hydroelectric system of Calgary Power Company, cast within a narrative structured around the tensions between path dependence and policy hardening.

—Stéphane Castonguay, Technology and Culture

Wilderness and Waterpower offers a new perspective of park development . . . [it] will expand reader’s knowledge on a variety of historical issues from parks development, utility control and ownerships, political struggles, and the evolving meanings and understanding of nature and/or wilderness in an increasingly metropolitan area.

—Heather Green, Network in Canadian History and Environment