The Nature of Canada

  • Colin M. Coates &
  • Graeme Wynn
ON POINT PRESS: 2019. 376PP. $30

A natural history of Canada was always going to be a product of its time, and this edited volume reflects the multi-cultural, post-modern nation that Canada has become. It is not just the range of topics — some of the largest open-pit mines on earth, epidemics that ravaged 90% of First Nations peoples, the supply of cod and beaver pelts that made Canada the ‘Potosí of the north’ — that makes for insightful and entertaining reading, but also the interdisciplinary approach and inclusive tone used by the contributors, all of whom are professors but endeavour to make the chapters as accessible as possible for a wide audience. Edited volumes can often be a struggle to read straight through, but when they’re done this well, they’re not just a historical treasure, but a treat as well.

The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health

  • Jennifer Thomson
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS: 2019. 216PP. $30

Earlier this summer, a television dramatization of the events and aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion became a critical hit in the United States, sparking a discussion of just how the Soviet Union could have failed its people so badly. But Jennifer Thomson’s history of how Americans also failed to safely confront its own disasters at Love Canal and Three Mile Island couldn’t have come at a better time to illustrate that such outcomes cannot be so easily boiled down to simply the faults of capitalism or communism, but instead of bureaucratic systems that govern, and sometimes dismiss, the health of humans and nature. The emergence of planetary health as a concept is a testament to the people who rallied during those fateful days when America’s environmental path was bitterly contested along multiple battle lines reflecting political, environmental and class divisions.

Managing without Growth: Slower by Design, not Disaster (Second Edition)

  • Peter A. Victor
EDWARD ELGAR PUBLISHING: 2019. 432PP. £35.00

Growth does not make economic sense, argues economist Peter A. Victor, and we should redesign our economy now rather than later when a disaster triggers change. The second edition of his popular book models countries’ economies over several decades to show how the relatively recent obsession for growth in economic policies worldwide will not take us far in the future. That growth hijacks our prospects for broader prosperity cannot be repeated enough. This book also offers excellent theoretical background for the non-specialist to avoid reinventing the wheel and moves this crucial discussion further.