Sustaining the West

Liza Piper is an associate professor at the University of Alberta, where she teaches environmental and Canadian history. She researches and writes about the relations between people and the rest of nature in the past, primarily in northern environments and with a particular focus on the roles of science and industry and the consequences for diet and health. She is the author of The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada (2009).Lisa Szabo-Jones, a photographer and Trudeau Foundation Scholar, holds a PhD from the University of Alberta and teaches literature at John Abbott College. She is co-editor of Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments (WLU Press, 2015).

• Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments, edited by Liza Piper and Lisa Szabo-JonesList of illustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: What if the Problem is People? Liza PiperPart 1: Acting on Behalf OfChapter 1: Grass Futures: Possibilities for a Re-engagement with Prairie Trevor HerriotChapter 2: Wastewest: A State of Mind Warren CariouChapter 3: Sustaining Collaboration: The Woodhaven Eco Art Project Nancy HolmesChapter 4: A Natural History and Dioramic Performance: Restoring Camosun Bog in Vancouver, British Columbia Lisa Szabo-Jones and David BrownsteinChapter 5: A Subtle Activism of the Heart Beth CarruthersChapter 6: Sublime Animal Maria WhitemanChapter 7: The Becoming-Animal of Being Caribou: Art, Ethics, Politics Dianne ChisholmInterlude: Creating Metaphors for Change Lyndal OsbornePart 2: Constructing KnowledgeChapter 8: Poetry, Science, and Knowledge of Place: A Dispatch from the Coast Nicholas BradleyChapter 9: Deception in High Places: The Making and Unmaking of Mounts Brown and Hooker Zac Robinson and Stephen SlemonChapter 10: Escarpments, Agriculture, and the Historical Experience of Certainty in Manitoba and Ontario Shannon Stunden Bower and Sean GouglasChapter 11: Whatever Else Climate Change Is Freedom: Frontier Mythologies, the Carbon Imaginary, and British Columbia Coastal Forestry Novels Richard PickardChapter 12: Endangered Species, Endangered Spaces: Exploring the Grasslands of Trevor Herriot's Grass, Sky, Song and the Wetlands of Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge Angela WaldieChapter 13: What Should We Sacrifice for Bitumen? Literature Interrupts Oil Capital's Utopian Imaginings Jon GordonInterlude: Symphony for a Head of Wheat Burning in the Dark Harold RhenischPart 3: Maternal ExpressionsChapter 14: Propositions from Under Mill Creek Bridge: A Practice of Reading Christine StewartChapter 15: Understory Enduring the Sixth Mass Extinction, ca 2009-11 Rita WongChapter 16: Seeding Coordinates, Planting Memories: Here, There, & Elsewhere in W.H. New's Underwood Log Travis V. MasonChapter 17: Re-Envisioning epic in Jon Whyte's Rocky Mountain Poem The fells of brightness Harry VandervlistChapter 18: Ware's Waldo: Hydroelectric Development and the Creation of the Other in British Columbia Daniel SimsAfterword: Humming Along With the Bees: A Few Words on Cross-Pollination Pamela BantingBibliographyContributorsIndex

"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, Department of First Nations Studies and Department of English, Simon Fraser University; co-editor, with Linda M. Morra of 'Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations' (WLU Press, 2010)