Natural Selections traces the history of the first four parks in Atlantic Canada through the selection, expropriation, development, and management stages. Alan MacEachern shows how the Parks Branch's preconceptions about the landscape and people of the region shaped the parks created there. In doing so he details the evolution of the park system, from the conservation movement early in the century to the rise of the ecology movement. MacEachern analyzes Parks Canada's efforts to fulfill its twin mandates of preservation and use, arguing that the agency never favoured one over the other but oscillated between more or less interventionist in ensuring both. Touching on a wide range of matters - from landscape aesthetics to tourism promotion, from DDT to Martin Luther King - Natural Selections expands our understanding of the relation between nature and culture in the twentieth century.

Claire Campbell is an associate professor in the Department of History and the Coordinator of Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University. She is the author of Shaped by the West Wind: Nature and History in Georgian Bay and co-editor of Groundtruthing: Canada and the Environment, a special issue of the Dalhousie Review.

Alan MacEachern's profile page

"Alan MacEachern has written an exemplary study of the national parks, exploring the prevailing mid-century definitions of beauty and showing quite wonderfully the interactions between different human agencies with a stake in the definitions, in land management, and in the emerging national park ethic." Robin W. Winks, author of The Civil War Years: Canada and the United States and The Blacks in Canada: A History. "A major contribution to the field of environmental history ... Natural Selections is well-grounded in an international and interdisciplanary field of study that is very much underrepresented in Canada." D.A. Muise, Department of History, Carleton University