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.

Northern Canada's distinctive landscapes, its complex social relations and the contested place of the North in contemporary political, military, scientific and economic affairs have fueled recent scholarly discussion. At the same time, both the media and the wider public have shown increasing interest in the region. This timely volume extends our understanding of the environmental history of northern Canada - clarifying both its practice and promise, and providing critical perspectives on current public debates. Ice Blink provides opportunities to consider critical issues in other disciplines and geographic contexts. Contributors also examine whether distinctive approaches to environmental history are required when studying the Canadian North, and consider a range of broader questions. What, if anything, sets the study of environmental history in particular regions apart from its study elsewhere? Do environmental historians require regionally-specific research practices? How can the study of environmental history take into consideration the relations between Indigenous peoples, the environment, and the state? How can the history of regions be placed most effectively within transnational and circumpolar contexts? How relevant are historical approaches to contemporary environmental issues? Scholars from universities in Canada, the United States and Britain contribute to this examination of the relevance of historical study for contemporary arctic and sub-arctic issues, especially environmental challenges, security and sovereignty, indigenous politics and the place of science in northern affairs. By asking such questions, the volume offers lessons about the general practice of environmental history and engages an international body of scholarship that addresses the value of regional and interdisciplinary approaches. Crucially, however, it makes a distinctive contribution to the field of Canadian environmental history by identifying new areas of research and exploring how international scholarly developments might play out in the Canadian context. With contributions by: Tina Adcock, Stephen Bocking, Emilie Cameron, Hans M. Carlson, Marionne Cronin, Matthew Farish, Arn Keeling, P. Whitney Lackenbauer, Tina Loo, Paul Nadasdy, Jonathan Peyton, Liza Piper, John Sandlos, Andrew Stuhl

Environmental Activism on the Ground draws upon a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship to examine small scale, local environmental activism, paying particular attention to Indigenous experiences. It illuminates the questions that are central to the ongoing evolution of the environmental movement while reappraising the history and character of late twentieth and early twenty-first environmentalism in Canada, the United States, and beyond. This collection considers the different ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists have worked to achieve significant change. It examines attempts to resist exploitative and damaging resource developments, and the establishment of parks, heritage sites, and protected areas that recognize the indivisibility of cultural and natural resources. It pays special attention to the thriving environmentalism of the 1960s through the 1980s, an era which saw the rise of major organizations such as Greenpeace along with the flourishing of local and community-based environmental activism. Environmental Activism on the Ground emphasizes the effects of local and Indigenous activism, offering lessons and directions from the ground up. It demonstrates that the modern environmental movement has been as much a small-scale, ordinary activity as a large-scale, elite one.

Twentieth-century circumpolar epidemics shaped historical interpretations of disease in European imperialism in the Americas and beyond. In this revisionist history of epidemic disease as experienced by northern peoples, Liza Piper illuminates the ecological, spatial, and colonial relationships that allowed diseases – influenza, measles, and tuberculosis in particular – to flourish between 1860 and 1940 along the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers. Making detailed use of Indigenous oral histories alongside English and French language archives and emphasising environmental alongside social and cultural factors, When Disease Came to this Country shows how colonial ideas about northern Indigenous immunity to disease were rooted in the racialized structures of colonialism that transformed northern Indigenous lives and lands, and shaped mid-twentieth century biomedical research.