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Book Review
| This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment. Edited by Melody Hessing, Rebecca Raglon, and Catriona Sandilands. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2005. xx + 386 pages. Bibliographical references and index. Cloth $85.00, paper $34.95.
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| This Elusive Land is a broad-ranging multidisciplinary collection. The editors bring a critical approach to one of the nagging questions underlying the study of gender and the environment: how to build upon ecofeminist analysis. They argue, "ecofeminist scholarship could continue to benefit from a more thorough-going understanding of the intense particularities of gender and nature in specific places and how these are organized by the complex intersections of power based upon both physical and cultural environments" (p. xiv). |
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Do the chapters meet this challenge? Do they present the "intense particularities of gender and nature in specific places" (and, the historian might add, times)? Many do. Several chapters will be of interest to historians. Rebecca Raglon retrieves nature writer Catharine Parr Traill from under the shadow of her sister Susanna Moodie, and the condescension of scholars who have dismissed her as a "happy camper," by placing her in the tradition of naturalists like Gilbert White, and arguing that the "sufficient joy" she found in the natural world had real depth and meaning. Raglon shows how Traill adapted White's ecology of place to the ecological upheaval of the Canadian frontier. Daniel O'Leary turns our attention to the imperialist and anti-American tone of Agnes Dean Cameron's conservationist writing on the Arctic whale fisheries. Randall Roorda's irreverent account of a genre she dubs "wilderness wives" provides a nice counterpoint to Catriona Sandilands's descriptions of warden's wives and lesbian rangers in her survey of the interweaving of gendered and nationalist discourse in the history of the national parks. |
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Kathryn Harrison's fascinating account of breast milk and dioxin, while confined to the recent past, will be relevant to historians working on toxicity and the body. Despite indisputable evidence that breast milk contained harmful levels of dioxin, Harrison points out that environmentalists avoided the issue. As she explains: "In considering dioxins in breast milk, women are forced to think of their own bodies not only as contaminated, but also as toxic to those they most love and seek to protect" (p. 233). |
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There is a west coast feel to both the subject matter and the feminism of this collection that will appeal to students and the general reader. Jo-Anne Fiske's chapter on the masculine heroics of academic knowledge production includes notes from her private diary, and offers a politically charged personal counterpoint to her published research on Carrier women. Katherine Dunster and Martha McMahon draw on their experiences of alternative communities in the Gulf Islands; Dunster describes how to turn what she terms "map seduction" to feminist purpose. |
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These chapters, however, and others in the volume, occasionally lapse into a less reflective ecofeminism. The volume does not include a contribution by a historian, and, although historically minded scholars such as Sandilands and Raglon have made a significant contribution here, the strengths, as well as the weaknesses of the volume suggest the need for more historical research into the dynamics of gender and environment. |
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Joanna Dean is assistant professor in the Department of History at Carleton University in Ottawa where she teaches gender and environmental history. She is working on a social/cultural history of the urban forest. |
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