Sustaining the West
Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments
La description
Western Canada’s natural environment faces intensifying threats from industrialization in agriculture and resource development, social and cultural complicity in these destructive practices, and most recently the negative local effects brought about by global climate change. In Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Western Environments Past and Present, arts and humanities scholars and literary and visual artists tackle these pressing environmental issues in provocative and transformative ways. Their commitment to environmental causes emerges through the fields of environmental history, environmental and ecological criticism (ecocriticism), ecofeminism, ecoart, ecopoetry, and environmental journalism. The complex nature of the problems being addressed calls for productive, interdisciplinary solutions.
Reviews
"The editors and writers of these thoughtful, challenging essays—diverse examples of the best work in the environmental humanities—take seriously the cultural assumptions that create and perpetuate contemporary environmental crises. With a scope that considers the potential of the poetic to alter the West's exploitative relationship with nature alongside cases of deteriorating ecosystems, which illustrate the need for a new social contract with the land, these writers call for radical change."
- Deanna Reder