Awards

• Winner of Clio Award (North), Canadian Historical Association 2010 (Canada)
• Winner of K.D. Srivastava Prize 2010 (Canada)

Overview

Between 1821 and 1960, industrial economies took root in the North, transgressing political geographies and superseding the historically dominant fur trade. Imported southern scientists and sojourning labourers worked the Northwest, and its industrial history bears these newcomers’ imprint. This book reveals the history of human impact upon the North. It provides a baseline, grounded in historical and scientific evidence, for measuring subarctic environmental change. Liza Piper examines the sustainability of industrial economies, the value of resource exploitation in volatile ecosystems, and the human consequences of northern environmental change. She also addresses northern communities’ historical resistance to external resource development and their fight for survival in the face of intensifying environmental and economic pressures.

Full Product Details

9780774815321

Table of Contents

Reviews

This is a fine piece of scholarship and a wonderful handling of the topic. It makes a very significant contribution to the field, both by demonstrating to environmental historians that Northern topics are of broader interest and by providing Northern historians with an impressively detailed illustration of the importance of environmental perspectives. - Ken Coates, Professor of History and Dean of Arts at the University of Waterloo

Liza Piper captures with detail and insight an essential episode in northern environmental history ... in telling this story Piper provides an immensely valuable perspective not just on northern history, but on the practice of environmental history itself ... she also exhibits an impressive sensitivity for the meanings embedded in both action and language. But where she especially excels is in situating this history in a specific place, and in invoking its material basis in living organisms: lakes and rivers, water and ice, earth and fire. This history has dirt under its fingernails. -- Stephen Bocking Northern Review, Fall 2009

Author Information

Liza Piper is an associate professor of history at the University of Alberta.

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