Sustaining the West ― Cultural Responses to Western Environments, Past and Present

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.

This indispensable and timely resource brings together creative writers, literary scholars, historians, curators, visual artists, naturalists, and geographers in a sustained cross-pollinating conversation across the environmental humanities about forms of representation and activism that enable ecological knowledge and ethical action on behalf of Western Canadian environments, yet have global reach. Common developments in the contributors’ construction of environmental knowledge include a focus on the power of sentiment in linking people to the fate of nature, and the need to decolonize social and environmental relations and assumptions in the West.