The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

(north, wilderness) as one of the regions,
and shows scant awareness of this country
in its chapters on the Rockies, Great Plains,
or Northwest. Tony Oppersdorf's Coastal
Labrador: A Northern Odyssey (Nimbus,
n.p.) assembles some sweeping photographs
of this largely unwritten part of
Canada. The photos of icebergs, and the
effective use of inset photographs, caught
my attention, but essentially this is a book
for quick scanning, where the issues of
human economy, military presence and
wildlife preservation raised in the
Introduction have little resonance. The
patient compiling of dala to determine
which areas of the Canadian north are richest
in wildlife is a central story in The
Kazan: Journey into an Emerging Land
(Yellowknife: Outcrop, $21.00), edited by
David F. Pelly and Christopher C. Hanks.
In this record of an expedition of scientists
and 24 young people from 11 countries, the
photos and drawings are rather minor. For
seven weeks the group travelled along this
river west of Hudson Bay; the text records
in a casual, almost random way, their
attempt to identify and record species and
to discover their interdependencies. Scott
Cazamine's Velvet Mites and Silken Webs:
The Wonderful Details of Nature in
Photographs and Essays (John Wiley,
$29.95) balances photographs and text
more carefully. Each close-up photograph—of
lichen, icicles, a flea, a male frog
bloated with his mating call—is accompanied
by a three-page essay, both personal
and informative, an unusually literary epigraph,
and a short list of further reading.
Cazamine tries to tell stories which convey
a great deal of biological information: the
format makes intriguing browsing.
To put some of the concerns of these
large-format books into context, I suggest
beginning with Roderick Frazier Nash, The
Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental
Ethics (U Wisconsin P, n.p.). Ranging from
St. Francis of Assisi to Aldo Leopold, and
from Magna Carta to the Endangered
Species Act (U.S. 1973) and beyond, Nash
compactly and intelligently traces the ideas
which have coalesced in the greening of late
twentieth century culture. It is a valuable
place to begin. Application of environmental
ethics to Canadian landscapes, particularly
to the grassland prairies, can be found
in the short journalistic pieces of Stan
Rowe's Home Place: Essays on Ecology
(NeWest, n.p.). Rowe's personal reflections
are readable enough, and I can't help but be
sympathetic to his memories of a prairie
boyhood, but a much more challenging
work, if still very readable, is David Cayley's
The Age of Ecology (James Lorimer, $16.95),
transcripts of broadcasts on CBC Radio's
Ideas from 1986-1990. This is an absorbing
work, especially because of its multiple
voices. One passage from the concluding
essay may suggest its provocative teaching:
"Arguments must take a logical form; but
as [John] Livingstone says, 'the existence of
the whooping crane is not logical.' This is
why arguments for 'environmental ethics'
always turn tautological and end up chasing
their own tails....Environmentalism,
finally, becomes its own enemy by arguing
away exactly what it intends to conserve:
the independent existence of nature." More
vernacular versions of this anthropocentric
contradiction are found in Jennifer Bennett's
Lilies of the Hearth: The Historical Relationship
Between Women and Plants (Camden
House/Firefly Books, $14.95), a book I
found useful for its cataloguing overview
but frustratingly frenetic and lacking in
analysis, and in Alexander Wilson's The
Culture of Nature: North American
Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez
(Toronto: Between the Lines,
$24-95/$i9.95), an energetic and entertaining
multidisciplinary look at the cultural
assumptions implicit in built landscapes
from road signs in P.E.I, to the architecture
at Expo 67 and such TV shows as "Wild
Kingdom." L.R.