Buffalo conjure up the West the way no other symbol can. They hold a special place in our culture and imagination. In this prize-winning collection, writers reveal the buffalo in plains ecology and culture from prehistoric times to its present and uncertain future.

Adults need playgrounds. In 1907, the Canadian government designated a vast section of the Rocky Mountains as Jasper Forest Park. Tourists now play where Native peoples once lived, fur traders toiled, and Metis families homesteaded. In Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park, I.S. MacLaren and eight other writers unearth the largely unrecorded past of the upper Athabasca River watershed, and bring to light two centuries' worth of human history, tracing the evolution of trading routes into the Rockies' largest park. Serious history enthusiasts and those with an interest in Canada's national parks will find a sense of connection in this long overdue study of Jasper.

Mapper of Mountains follows the career of Dominion Land Surveyor Morrison Parsons Bridgland, who provided the first detailed maps of many regions of the Canadian Rockies. Between 1902 and 1930, this unheralded alpinist perfected phototopographical techniques to compile a series of mountaintop photographs during summers of field work, and spent his winters collating them to provide the Canadian government and tourists and mountain climbers with accurate topographical maps. Bridgland was also a great climber and co-founder of the Alpine Club of Canada. Mapper of Mountains tells the story of the Rocky Mountain Repeat Photography Project, which studies the changes sustained in the Rockies, repeating the field work accomplished by Bridgland almost a century ago.

When Canada created a Dominion Parks Branch in 1911, it became the first country in the world to establish an agency devoted to managing its national parks. Over the past century this agency, now Parks Canada, has been at the centre of important debates about the place of nature in Canadian nationhood and relationships between Canada's diverse ecosystems and its communities. Today, Parks Canada manages over forty parks and reserves totalling over 200,000 square kilometres and featuring a dazzling variety of landscapes, and is recognized as a global leader in the environmental challenges of protected places. Its history is a rich repository of experience, of lessons learned-critical for making informed decisions about how to sustain the environmental and social health of our national parks.