Alan MacEachern Natural Selections

Annotation

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.