The Atlas of US and Canadian Environmental History (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Atlas of US and Canadian Environmental History Matthew Evenden The Atlas of US and Canadian Environmental History. Edited by Char Miller. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. viii, 248, illus. US$150.00 This atlas could best be described as an edited collection of illustrated entries on important problems in the environmental history of Canada and the United States, as much an encyclopedia as an atlas. The volume makes no pretence to North American coverage; Mexico does not appear in these pages. Seven chapters organize the over ninety entries into key themes, defined by process and period rather than place. The volume opens with two chapters on European expansion: the colonial era and conflict from 1492 to the 1850s. Two chapters on industrialization and the conservation era organize entries covering the period from 1850 to 1920. Another chapter, 'From the Depression to Atomic Power,' brings the volume up to the 1960s. Two final chapters treat the rise of the environmental movement and contemporary environmentalism. Within each chapter recurring organizational categories (Agriculture; Wildlife and Forestry; Land Use Management; Technology, Industry and Pollution; Human Habitats; and Ideology and Politics) ensure a continuity of focus. Over the course of the volume, nevertheless, one moves from broadly conceived entries and change on a continental scale to increasingly topical and politically-oriented problems. The rationale for this design and emphasis is not clearly articulated. Somewhat unusually for a North American volume of this kind, there is a range of Canadian and trans-national entries written primarily by Canadian scholars. Particularly valuable entries that provide crisp and balanced introductions to complex topics include those by Larry McCann on urban parks, Alan MacEachern on conservation, Jennifer Read on the Boundary Waters Treaty, and George Warecki on wildlife preservation. One suspects that the inclusion of so many Canadian or trans-national entries is due to the participation of Canadian historian Jennifer Read as 'editorial adviser' to the project, though her role is not specified in the editor's brief preface. Most atlases consist primarily of maps. This atlas consists primarily of words, graphs, and images. Entries for such topics as the fur trade, sustainable forestry, and the collapse of inner cities and industrial centres contain no maps. In fact, only slightly more than half of the atlas entries contain small inset maps. The best maps in the volume are the reproductions of historical cartography or those that have been previously published. The maps drawn specifically for this project are poorly conceived and sometimes misleading. Many of the maps simply reproduce data or maps taken from government Web sites and construct them [End Page 638] at a scale that is hard to comprehend. One map of the East Coast fisheries, for example, encompasses a vast section of the continent, extending west to Saskatchewan, even though all of the relevant data, drilled down in coloured dots, are to be found along the East Coast. A map of the numbered treaties neglects to include all of the treaty areas. Another on Canadian land use locates Native reserves with red dots that bear no connection to scale. This gives the uninformed reader the mistaken impression that a vast portion of British Columbia's land base, for example, is bounded within Native reserves, even though most of the reserves identified by a red dot encompass a small area. On the same map, national parks are identified in green with small parks appearing as green dots. In locations where national parks exist near to reserves, red dots trump green. An entry on Canadian dams and rivers contains only those dams and sites mentioned in the text, but not others relevant to the subject. Given that the author of the entry, Jean Manore, has written widely on river-development problems in Canada, one can assume that these absences were produced at the cartographic and editorial end of this project and not necessarily at the hands of the individual entry author. The Historical Atlas of Canada may well have conditioned Canadian historians to expect a good deal from historical atlases. At their best, historical atlases should contain original research and maps that present spatial data clearly and in a visually attractive manner...