Drained by a half-dozen major watersheds, cut by a network of deep ravines and fronting on a Great Lake, Toronto is dominated by water. Like most cities, though, Toronto has mismanaged its water, from the decades-long transformation of the citys creeks into sewersheds to the alteration of Torontos waterfront. Recently, the trend of fettering Torontos water and putting it underground has been countered by persistent citizen-led efforts to recall and restore the citys surface water. In H...

Listen carefully and you will hear cottage country whispering lessons that can make our lives less frenetic, less complicated. The mournful call of the loon, the wind sighing in the trees, the hammering of the pileated woodpecker remind us that we are a part of a more natural world too often lost in our urban societies.Reflections from a still lake and a flickering campfire help us to realize that things might go easier for humankind if more issues were examined in softer, reflecti...

Beavers are the great comeback story—a keystone species that survived ice ages, major droughts, the fur trade, urbanization and near extinction. Their ability to create and maintain aquatic habitats has endeared them to conservationists, but puts the beavers at odds with urban and industrial expansion. These conflicts reflect a dichotomy within our national identity. We place environment and our concept of wilderness as a key touchstone for promotion and celebration, while devoting signifi...

Expanding on his landmark Globe and Mail series in which he documented his travels down sixteen of Canada's great rivers, Roy MacGregor tells the story of our country through the stories of its original highways, and how they sustain our spirit, identity and economy—past, present and future.No country is more blessed with fresh water than Canada. From the mouth of the Fraser River in BC, to the Bow in Alberta, the Red in Manitoba, the Gatineau, the Saint J...

How did Jenny Butchart turn an ugly, disused limestone quarry into the world’s most famous private garden? Over 100 years later Butchart Gardens still attracts almost a million visitors from around the globe, to enjoy a world created by an unrivalled green-thumb visionary.The stuff of legend is what makes a good story, and the stuff grows here as quickly as a well-tended flower bed. Legends cannot be proved or disproved, merely recounted and enjoyed. Mystery and sp...

Tim Beatley has long been a leader in advocating for the "greening" of cities. But too often, he notes, urban greening efforts focus on everything except nature, emphasizing such elements as public transit, renewable energy production, and energy efficient building systems. While these are important aspects of reimagining urban living, they are not enough, says Beatley. We must remember that human beings have an innate need to connect with the natural world (the biophilia hypothesis). And ...

When Nathalie Chambers and her husband, David, first took over Madrona Farm, 27 acres on southern Vancouver Island with a deep history, they never thought their small-scale agricultural business would blossom into an international political act. As pressures from heirs, land developers and industrial farmers grew alongside their rows of organically produced food, the Chambers took action. Considered by many to be revolutionary and by some to be rebellious, their story opened many eyes to t...

Nearing the end of a lifetime in the boreal forest, a retired forester writes a passionate plea for rational, science-based forest management.The boreal forest is constantly changing, often dramatically. We like to picture it as a stable, balanced system. Really, it is anything but stable. The boreal forest is dynamic.For over sixty years, forester Malcolm F. Squires has seen mature forests within protected areas devastated by insects, moose, wind, and wild...

In early December 2006, a powerful windstorm ripped through Vancouver's Stanley Park. The storm transformed the city's most treasured landmark into a tangle of splintered trees and shattered a decades-old vision of the park as timeless virgin wilderness. In Inventing Stanley Park, Sean Kheraj traces how the tension between popular expectations of idealized nature and the volatility of complex ecosystems helped transform the landscape of one of the world's most famous urban parks. ...

Saskatchewan is the anchor and epitome of the ‘prairie’ provinces, even though half of the province is covered by boreal forest. The Canadian penchant for dividing this vast country into easily-understood ‘regions’ has reduced the Saskatchewan identity to its southern prairie denominator and has distorted cultural and historical interpretations to favour the prairie south.Forest Prairie Edge is a deep-time investigation of the edge land, or ecotone, between the open prairi...

Award-winning author and artist Michael Kluckner takes another look at a city where the only thing that doesn't seem to change is the rapid pace of development. The original Vanishing Vancouver, published in 1990, explored Vancouver's changing landscape by neighbourhood, from the earliest dwellings to the aftershocks of Expo '86. Its light-filled watercolours and well-informed prose spoke to the concerns of rapid expansion versus historical conservation, and it won the accolades of the Cit...

Alberta's iconic river has been dammed and plumbed made to spin hydro-electric turbines and used to cleanse Calgary. Artificial lakes in the mountains rearrange its flow; downstream weirs and ditches divert it to irrigate the parched prairie. Far from being wild the Bow is now very much a human product: its fish are as manufactured as its altered flow changed water quality and newly stabilized and forested banks. The River Returns brings the story of the Bow River's transformation f...