Judging Homosexuals
In 2004, the first same-sex couple legally married in Quebec. How did homosexuality – an act that had for centuries been defined as abominable and criminal – come to be sanctioned by law?
Judging Homosexuals finds answers in a comparative analysis of gay persecution in France and Quebec, places that share a common culture but have diverging leg …
Slumach's Gold
Slumach’s Gold chronicles what is possibly Canada’s greatest lost-mine story. It searches out the truth behind a Salish man’s hanging for murder in 1891 and tracks the intriguing legend about him that grew after his death. It was a legend that turned into a drama of international fascination when Slumach—the hanged criminal—was mysterious …
Manufacturing National Park Nature
National parks occupy a prominent place in the Canadian imagination, yet we are only beginning to understand how their visual representation has shaped and continues to inform our perceptions of ecological issues and the natural world. J. Keri Cronin draws on historical and modern postcards, advertisements, and other images of Jasper National Park …
Grandpere
Anzel, a widow in her sixties, lives quietly on her small farm with her grandfather, a Carrier elder from Northern BC. Grandpère and Anzel pass the time playing fierce cribbage games, cutting firewood and tending the vegetable garden. As the days pass Grandpère tells his life story, sharing heart-breaking memories: the death of his family in a de …
The Grizzly Manifesto
Provocative, passionate and populist, RMB Manifestos are short and concise non-fiction books of literary, critical, and cultural studies.
The grizzly bear, once the archetype for all that is wild, is quickly becoming a symbol of nature’s fierce but flagging resilience in the face of human greed and ignorance—and the difficulty a wealth-addicted …
The Pig War
On May 15, 1859, an American settler on San Juan Island shot a pig belonging to the Hudson’s Bay Company. This seemingly insignificant act was the spark that almost set aflame the strangest of many confrontations between Britain and the United States on the northwest coast of North America.
On one side of the border dispute over the strategicall …
Things Go Flying
Shari Lapeña takes the wit of David Sedaris and the outrageousness of Douglas Coupland to create a dark, hilarious and wildly inventive contemporary comedy about how the past can come back to haunt you. Literally.
In Things Go Flying, Harold Walker is desperately average and listless at mid-life, stemming in part from the abrupt death of his one-ti …
Winging Home
In British Columbia's remote and exotic Cariboo Plateau, "Everything is slow. Everything is happening at the same speed, which is no speed at all." Harold Rhenisch has spent eleven years watching birds every day from his house on the shore of 108 Lake—at this speed, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Winging Home. Known as "one of Canada's m …
The Chief Factor's Daughter
Chief factor: In the Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trade monopoly, the title of chief factor was the highest rank given to commissioned officers, who were responsible for a major trading post and its surrounding district.
Colonial Victoria in 1858 is an unruly mix of rowdy gold seekers and hustling immigrants caught in the upheaval of the fur trade gi …
Act of Evil
Hal Bannatyne is a successful actor in town to shoot a big-budget film. Spotting an old flame, Mattie, he immediately becomes involved with her family. When Mattie’s father-in-law tries to protect his land from the hands of a fervent land developer, Bannatyne soon finds he is mixed up in the conflict. Thus the intrigue begins, with a crooked land …
British Columbia’s Inland Rainforest
The vast temperate rainforests of coastal British Columbia are world renowned, but much less is known about the other rainforest located 500 kilometres inland along the western slopes of the interior mountains. The unique integration of continentality and humidity in this region favours the development of lush rainforest communities that incorporat …
Administering the Colonizer
Harbin of the 1920s was viewed by Westerners as a world turned upside down. The Chinese government had taken over administration of the Russian-founded Chinese Eastern Railway concession, and its large Russian population. This account of the decade-long multi-ethnic and multinational administrative experiment in North Manchuria reveals that China n …
Panoptic Dreams
The number of Canadian cities using video surveillance systems to monitor city streets is growing. In Panoptic Dreams, Sean Hier explores how and why Canadian cities introduced street surveillance programs between 1981 and 2005 and brings to light the governance structures and privacy protection policy frameworks that made these programs possible. …
Managed Annihilation
The Newfoundland and Labrador cod fishery was once the most successful commercial fishery in the world. When it collapsed in 1992, many pointed to failures in management, such as uncontrolled harvesting, as likely culprits. Managed Annihilation makes the case that the idea of natural resource management itself was the problem. The collapse occurred …
Maskepetoon
As a leader, Maskepetoon was respected for his skill as a hunter, his generosity and his wisdom. He was considered a “lucky” chief, a man who found buffalo on the edge of the plains, who avoided unnecessary conflicts with enemies, but protected his camp like a mother grizzly with her cubs. And in the turbulent mid-1800s, that’s exactly the ki …
A Dynamic Balance
A Dynamic Balance illuminates the importance of understanding the social dimension of sustainability as it examines the links between social capital and sustainable development within the overall context of local community development. Looking at case studies in both Australia and Canada, it draws upon lessons that can be learned to reconnect large …
Adaptive Co-Management
In Canada and around the world, new concerns with adaptive processes, feedback learning, and flexible partnerships are reshaping environmental governance. Meanwhile, ideas about collaboration and learning are converging around the idea of adaptive co-management. This book provides a comprehensive synthesis of the core concepts, strategies, and tool …
Do Glaciers Listen?
Do Glaciers Listen? explores the conflicting depictions of glaciers to show how natural and cultural histories are objectively entangled in the Mount Saint Elias ranges. This rugged area, where Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory now meet, underwent significant geophysical change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which …
The Sea Wolves
The Sea Wolves sets out to disprove the notion of "the Big Bad Wolf," especially as it is applied to coastal wolves—a unique strain of wolf that lives in the rainforest along the Pacific coast of Canada.
Genetically distinct from their inland cousins and from wolves in any other part of the world, coastal wolves can swim like otters and fish like …
Oka
On July 11, 1990, tension between white and Mohawk people at Oka, just west of Montreal, took a violent turn. At issue was the town's plan to turn a piece of disputed land in the community of Kanesatake into a golf course. Media footage of rock-throwing white residents and armed, masked Mohawk Warriors facing police across barricades shocked Canadi …
The Legacy
In this expanded version of an inspiring speech delivered in December 2009, David Suzuki reflects on how we got where we are today and presents his vision for a better future. In his living memory, Suzuki has witnessed cataclysmic changes in society and our relationship with the planet: the doubling of the world’s population, our increased ecolog …
The Patched Heart
This is the story of a brave puppy whose delight in life contributes to his own healing. It is a tale of going to the hospital to get well, and also a tale of friendship and its power to heal. It is a longing for community—doctors, nurses, friends and family—all working together to help their patient. This story will touch your heart and bright …
Tar Sands
Winner of the prestigious Rachel Carson Environment Book Award.
“Andrew Nikiforuk's Tar Sands... is, in essence, a revolting, blush-making case for Canada to develop integrated energy and environmental regulation suitable for the post-carbon age.”—Globe & Mail
Newly updated, Andrew Nikiforuk's Tar Sands is a critical exposé of the world's la …
Unsettled Legitimacy
Under what conditions do individuals and communities accept globalized decision making as legitimate? And what political practices do individuals and collectivities under globalization use to exercise autonomy? To answer these questions, the contributors explore the disruptions and reconfigurations of political authority that accompany globalizatio …
Wings of Glass
Married to a successful lawyer and mother to two healthy, well-adjusted children, she was living the life many people only dreamed about. She should be happy, her husband tells her. But she is not. The memories of her controlling and manipulative adoptive mother haunt her day and night and threaten to poison her numb, present-day existence.
As the p …
Chasing Clayoquot
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First published in 2004, and now with a new preface by the author, this book of natural history, environmentalism, and politics explores one of the earth's last primeval places: Clayoquot Sound. Close to a million visitors come to this unesco Biosphere Reserve along Vancouver Island's west coast, drawn by its unspoiled natural beauty. Robert Kenne …
The Rescue of Nanoose
On September 23, 1994, an unusual rescue operation took place in the chilly waters off Telegraph Cove, a tiny, picturesque village perched on Vancouver Island’s north coast. It was not stranded hikers or fishermen who needed help, but a large humpback whale, which had become hopelessly entangled in a rope that had fallen off a fishing boat.
The r …
More Good News
In this edition of their bestseller, the sequel to the best-selling Good News for a Change, authors David Suzuki and Holly Dressel provide the latest inspiring stories about individuals, groups, and businesses that are making real change in the world. More Good News features the most up-to-date information about critical subjects, such as energy an …
City Farmer
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""It's wonderfully soul-nourishing to read a book that's all about impossibilities made possible, and how to plant your dreams and watch them grow."" -- Globe & Mail
City Farmer celebrates the new ways that urban dwellers are getting closer to their food. Not only are backyard vegetable plots popping up in places long reserved for lawns, but some r …
Ten Technologies to Save the Planet
"P class=""book_description"">Energy Options for a Low-Carbon Future Practical solutions for meeting our energy demands while combatting climate change on a large scale, from ""the David Suzuki of Britain.""
Respected, authoritative, award-winning author Chris Goodall adds new material to the climate change debate. His engaging and balanced volume - …
The Gnome's Eye
In the spring of 1954, when her father announces that the family has a chance to immigrate to Canada, Theresa's life changes forever. She and her family are wartime refugees from Yugoslavia, so it shouldn't be hard to leave Austria. But the weathered barracks of Lager Lichtenstein are the only home she knows, and they are filled with family and fri …
The Salmon Bears
Extensively illustrated with Ian McAllister's magnificent photographs, The Salmon Bears explores the delicate balance that exists between the grizzly, black and spirit bears and their natural environment, the last great wilderness along the central coast of British Columbia.
Key to this relationship are the salmon that are born in the rivers each sp …
Skin Like Mine
In Skin Like Mine, Garry Gottfriedson offers a suite of poems that peel away the skin of contemporary first nations society to reveal an inside view of individual experience. Gottfriedson speaks of "minds full of anticipation" yet with "tongues pointing arrowheads." Today's youth, he says, are "afraid of themselves." He finds that both individuals …
The Madonna Painter
At the end of the First World War, to protect his village from the spanish “u epidemic brought home by returning soldiers, a young priest recently arrived in the Parish of Lac St-Jean commissions a wandering Italian painter to decorate the walls of the local church with a fresco dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The painter is to choose, among four l …
Dodging the Toxic Bullet
Dodging the Toxic Bullet presents workable strategies that show how we can live longer, healthier lives by breathing clean air, eating healthy food, drinking safe water, and using non-toxic products. Author David R. Boyd provides accessible background on a range of hazards including mercury in fish, carcinogens in cleaning products, lead in toys, a …
The Canadian War on Queers
From the 1950s to the late 1990s, agents of the state spied on, interrogated, and harassed gays and lesbians in Canada, employing social ideologies and other practices to construct their targets as threats to society and enemies of the state.
In this path-breaking book, Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile use official security documents and interview …
Who Owns the Arctic?
"In this comprehensive book, Byers addresses ownership of the oil and gas reserves in the Beaufort Sea, the Arctic activities of the Russians (we shouldn't feel threatened), and the not-so-burning question of who owns tiny Hans Island. As an Arctic-issues primer, this timely, cogent, focused work cannot be beat." -- Globe and Mail
A topical and info …
The Trespassers
The Trespassers unfolds over the course of a few weeks in a town in the middle of nowhere—not small enough to be a quaint place or large enough to be in any way an interesting one. They once had a sawmill here, which was a going concern before it was shut down in a labour dispute, and it now crowns a sort of half-town, gutted of its reason for be …
Big Steel
World steel production has grown dramatically as countries industrialize and add their own steel-producing capacity. China's prodigious expansion of steel output has increased the industry's natural vulnerability to oversupply and volatile prices. And the merger of the two largest steelmakers, Arcelor and Mittal, portends consolidation as a prime s …
Empires and Autonomy
Globalization is one of the most significant developments of our time. But which elements of contemporary globalization and forms of autonomy are novel and which are merely continuations of long-standing trends? This book brings together a distinguished group of scholars who focus on historical moments that involved the establishment or protection …
Forestry and Biodiversity
As global demand for forest products increases, conserving biodiversity has become more urgent and challenging. Forestry and Biodiversity advocates adaptive management – a structured approach to learning by doing – to sustain biodiversity in managed forests. It draws on the theory and principles of conservation biology and forest ecology and il …