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Historians have not usually identified British Columbia as a rural province. B.C. historiography has been dominated by mining, logging, and fishing, and theorized within the context of large-scale, laissez-faire capitalism and economic individualism. Silences in the historical record have exacerbated this situation and lent tacit support to the dominance of resource-based capitalism as the shaping force in B.C. history. The essays in Beyond the City Limits, all published here for the first time, decisively break this silence and challenge traditional readings of B.C. history. In this wide-ranging collection, R.W. Sandwell draws together a distinguished group of contributors who bring experti...
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In the early 1900s, British Columbia embarked on a brief but intense effort to manufacture a modern countryside. The government wished to reward veterans of the Great War with new lives: soliders and other settlers would benefit from living in a rural community, considered a more healthy and moral alternative to urban life. But the fundamental reason for the land resettlement project was the rise of progressive or “new liberal” thinking, as reformers advocated an expanded role for the state in guaranteeing the prosperity and economic security of its citizens. This ideological shift pushed the government to intervene directly in the management of not only society but also the natural environment. As most arable, accessible land in British Columbia was already being farmed by 1919, the state had to undertake environmental engineering projects on a scale not yet attempted in the province. Creating a Modern Countryside examines how this process unfolded, identifies its successes and failures, and demonstrates how the human-environment relationship of the early twentieth century shaped the province as it is today.
The ranchers who resettled BC’s interior in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depended on grassland for their cattle, but in this they faced some unlikely competition from grasshoppers and wild horses. With the help of the government, settlers resolved to rid the range of both. Resettling the Range explores the ecology and history of the grassland and the people who lived there by looking closely at these eradication efforts. In the claims of “range improvement” and “rational land use,” author John Thistle uncovers more complicated stories of marginalization: the destruction of wild horses worked to dispossess aboriginal people, while the campaign to exterminate grasshoppers exposed class conflicts and competing versions of resettlement among immigrant ranchers. This unconventional history examines the lasting effects of range improvement, revealing a fascinating – and troubling – chapter of BC history.
The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology presents a comprehensive and authoritative examination of the rapidly growing field of political ecology. Located at the intersection of geography, anthropology, sociology, and environmental history, political ecology is one of the most vibrant and conceptually diverse fields of inquiry into nature-society relations within the social sciences. The Handbook serves as an essential guide to this rapidly evolving intellectual landscape. With contributions from over 50 leading authors, the Handbook presents a systematic overview of political ecology’s origins, practices and core concerns, and aims to advance both ongoing and emerging debates. While th...
Postcolonialism, Multitude, and the Politics of Nature explores the latest developments of Nordic human geography in the Finnish-Russian Greenbelt, also known as the Fennoscandian Greenbelt, located at the long north-south border between Finland and Russia. Through case studie...
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