Book Review

Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History. By Graeme Wynn. Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, and Oxford, England: ABC-CLIO, 2007. Nature and Human Societies Series. xxi + 503 pages. Maps, index, and bibliography. Cloth $85.00.
This volume, eighth in ABC-CLIO's Nature and Human Societies Series, represents the first attempt at a narrative sur-vey of the environmental history of the northern half of North America (essentially Canada and Alaska). The author, a well-respected historical geographer at the University of British Columbia, has been an important contributor to the field for over twenty five years, and one of the most active and generous supporters of young environ-mental historians in Canada. This book is a valuable source book for researchers and teachers in the field, but for a general audience or for univer-sity students, it is an unsatis-factory introduction to environmental history.	1
Despite recent growth, scholarship on the environmental history of Canada is not yet large or strong, but the weaknesses of this survey are not merely the inevitable product of the still-significant gaps and weaknesses in the literature. Wynn limited the scope of the narrative portion of the book (twenty-eight brief chapters in 391 pages), "to a considerable extent upon the ways in which human actions have shaped and reshaped northern North American environments" (p. xii). The broader reach of the thirty-one-page glossary of important people, events, and concepts, and the seventeen-page timeline compensates somewhat for this flaw. Wynn acknowledges, but unpersuasively defends this approach in his preface and in two reflective chapters, arguing that "the main drivers of the story of environmental change ... are trade ... and technology ..., rather than the swirl of ideas that conceived of nature as something other than a commodity or resource" (p. 373). If Wynn had convincingly defended the argument that economic demand and technological innovations explain environmental history in Canada, this would be a ground-breaking book. The narrative, apart from the preface and last two chapters, summarizes a selective part of the literature in Canadian and Alaskan environmental history without defending any overarching argument, identifying major themes or milestones, or suggesting ways in which the study of Canadian/Alaskan environmental history might contribute to the field more broadly. In short, although the book offers a valuable summary of the literature Wynn selected, there is little about the interpretation to make it greater than the sum of its parts.	2
The focus on the environmental effects of human economic activity and technological innovation means that this is not a comprehensive environmental history. In 391 pages of narration, a reader will encounter little about environmental movements in Canada—almost nothing about the influence of, and tensions among, utilitarian conservationists and aesthetic preservationists in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century. There is no discussion of the significance of the wave of post-World War II environmentalism, including the rise of the wilderness movement and Greenpeace, which directly affected the trajectory of environmental change in Canada. But because Wynn neglects them, he also does not discuss the significance of the history of the Commission of Conservation (1909–1921), conservation areas, forest reserves, or national, provincial, and urban parks. Neither does the book explore environmental controversies in any depth. The Spray River controversy (with its remarkable parallels to Hetch Hetchy) receives no mention at all. The emphasis on environmental change as the product of impersonal forces makes individuals, even central figures such as Clifford Sifton, Bob Marshall, J. R. Booth, James Little, William Pearce, Elihu Stewart, Arthur O. Wheeler, James Harkin, Roderick Haig-Brown, Ernest Thompson Seton, Jack Miner, David Suzuki, Pierre Trudeau, and Brian Mulroney, almost invisible in the narrative. Neither does Wynn discuss the significance of gender, class, or race in environmental history.	3
In sum, Wynn's history will be useful for those interested in the history of the environmental impact of changing human subsistence and economic activities, and technological innovation on the environment of Canada and Alaska. As a comprehensive survey of the environmental history of Canada and Alaska, it falls short.	4
Ted Binnema is associate professor of history at the University of Northern British Columbia. Author of Common and Contested Ground (Oklahoma, 2001), he is researching, at present, the history of science in the Hudson's Bay Company to 1821.

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