The Frontier Environment and Social Order

Abstract

The Canadian wild west of the mid-19th century-the Ottawa River and its tributaries-is the setting for Redclift's examination of how human alteration of the biophysical environment depends on human social structure and ideology, and vice versa. The data consist of letters home to England from Francis Codd, who was a country doctor in British and Irish (Upper) Canada. Broadly, the book is of interest to those studying human-environment interfaces, and to those familiar with Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis, which holds that the egalitarian nature of the U.S. frontier was instrumental in the development of democracy. Methodologically, ethnohistorians might be intrigued by Redclift's extraction of ethnoecological precepts of that time period from the letters he analyzes.