Ebook: Canadian Wetlands: Places and People

The book aims to promote the conservation of Canadian wetlands by showcasing their values as places of new life and as sites historically of sustainable agriculture, and by critiquing the negative press that has accrued to them in the past as places of disease and horror, of the melancholy and the monstrous. It does so in part by reading the Canadian canon against the grain, critiques its representation of wetlands and proposes alternatives by highlighting the work of recent and contemporary Canadian writers, such as Douglas Lochhead and Harry Thurston, who wrote appreciatively about wetlands and by entering into dialogue with American writers about wetlands. This book will promote dialogue between wetlands conservationists, researchers and universities both within Canada, particularly between English and French Canadians, and with the UK, US and Australia. It will be a major contribution to Canadian studies and to environmental cultural studies in Canada, the US, UK and Australia. It will enhance the understanding of wetlands internationally. Despite distance and vastly different geographies, Canada and Australia as colonies of the British Empire share many similarities, not least in regard to colonial European perceptions of wetlands as places of disease and horror, melancholy and the monstrous, as well as indigenous peoples life with wetlands. Both countries also eventually perpetrated similar destructive impacts on wetlands via capitalism, industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation. This book discusses all of these aspects. This book will create an international dialogue between researchers about the history and contemporary cultural values of wetlands in their respective countries and about their differences and similarities. It will enhance mutual respect between researchers for the contribution that different disciplinary approaches can and do make to the study and conservation of wetlands internationally. Canadians have largely been fixated on mountains, lakes and prairies as the national landscapes. Canadian wetlands have largely been neglected, yet Canada possesses 26% of the world s wetlands, many of which have international conservation status as Ramsar Convention Wetlands of International Importance. "