Book Review

This is a deceptive book. One might think, from the title, that it is a narrow history of the development of national parks in Atlantic Canada—a part of Canada to which they came late and contentiously. But that would be a serious underestimation of what Alan MacEachern achieves here.	1
MacEachern is not simply interested in the details of events and people and decisions. He is also centrally concerned with how visions of national parks, aesthetic preferences, and views of appropriate nature-culture relations change over time, interact, and affect such specific choices as what areas to protect as parks and what activities to allow in them. And so this book does not have a merely descriptive, or even interpretive agenda. The author seeks to combine several "planes," or intellectual scales, if you will. First is the interaction of nature and culture in nineteenth and twentieth century North America and the need for a means, environmental history here, to describe nature and its independent role in history. Second is the institutional and political history of the Canadian Parks Branch (as it was then; now Parks Canada) and its efforts to balance park preservation and use, as a "real-life rendition of the theoretical struggle between nature and culture" (p. 9). Third are the detailed stories of the parks themselves and the ways they illustrate both bigger intellectual and institutional debates, and the very specific contradictions in individual and societal desires for preservation and exploitation of places.	2
Each of the planes is introduced and discussed in a concise yet illuminating way in the introductory chapter. Then, Part One of the book includes five chapters, the first on James Harkin and the National Parks Branch (Harkin was its first and longest serving director), followed by chapters on each of the four parks. Part Two includes three cross-cutting and integrative chapters: one addressing use in the four national parks, the next on ecology, science and preservation, and finally a concluding chapter.	3
To be sure, this book provides a detailed and coherent history of the establishment and early years of the first four Atlantic national parks in Canada: Cape Breton Highlands (in Nova Scotia) and Prince Edward Island in 1936, Fundy (in New Brunswick) in 1947, and Terra Nova (in Newfoundland) in 1957. It is history that ranges from National Parks headquarters debates over whether there was anything at all in the Atlantic Provinces worth protecting, to details of the legendarily poor treatment of local residents during and after park establishment. But this book provides much more, from capsule critical discussions of key intellectual and methodological issues in environmental history, to illustrations of changing ideas about parks within and outside the Parks Branch, to critical interpretations of broader national parks history in Canada, and fine discussions of key issues in Canadian and other national parks, notably the nature and extent of development in relation to the purposes of parks, and the role of science and ecology and what that means for intervention and management. This book is also very well written, with effective and even touching anecdotes that clearly reflect a deep and lasting study and engagement with the parks and the Atlantic region generally. MacEachern has remained interested in these issues and we can only look forward to the fuller discussion of, especially, the science, ecology, and intervention issues in his work on fire management in Banff National Park.	4
D. Scott Slocombe is professor of geography and environmental studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

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