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Book Review
| Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940. By George Colpitts. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2002. x + 205 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $75.00, paper $29.95.
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| In recent years, environmental historians have written a great deal on nature conservation and wildlife preservation in North America. Frequently, they have focused on the disappearance and extermination of big game and on measures to protect these species from wholesale extirpation. The irony, as John Reiger makes clear in his classic American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (Winchester Press, 1975), is that wildlife protection measures were taken by the very people who killed these creatures for sport, namely the elite European and Euro-American hunting lobbies who encouraged the founding of national parks as breeding reserves and the enactment of strict game laws to secure the plentiful survival of their favored trophy species. |
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Colpitts acknowledges the importance of such studies, yet he himself follows a fundamentally different approach to wildlife in western Canada. Rather than consider game at the elevated level of the international sporting elite and its membership of predominantly absentee city dwellers, he examines the issues at a grassroots level of settler communities, of the people who lived locally but perpetuated a European mindset toward the native animals and the need to manage them. In an admirably fine-grained and multi-faceted analysis, Colpitt tells the story of how the newcomers' grappled with the wildlife as an integral part of regional settlement history and of the changing economic and social fabric of pioneer communities. |
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