This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment

Margaret Conrad is Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at
the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Atlantic Canada: A
Region in the Making and co-author of Intimate Relations: Family and
Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1

This collection of 16 essays is based on the assumption that a gendered
lens is useful in exploring environmental issues in Canada and that an
understanding of gender is enriched by addressing environmental
questions. Wide-ranging in focus and methodology, these essays gain some
coherence by being grouped into four parts—explorers and settlers;
making a living, making a life; environmental politics; and rethinking
the environment—each prefaced with a helpful introduction. Within this
framework, readers move from a reassessment by Rebecca Raglon of the
work of Catharine Parr Traill in the context of 19th-century nature
writing to Marion Scholtmeijer’s exploration of First Nations
women’s writing, which, she argues, articulates and preserves “the
experience of a natural environment and its inhabitants as one
community, with a shared history, a shared memory, and shared
interests.” Between these temporal poles, essays explore, among other
things, the writing of “wilderness wives” who accompany their
far-ranging husbands; the health of female fish-processing workers in
Newfoundland; women on the margins of the British Columbia forest
industry; gender, nation, and nature in Rocky Mountain national parks;
the context of women’s quality-of-life activism in urban southern
Ontario; the environmental movement’s problematic relationship to the
high levels of dioxin in breast milk; the political value of community
mapping (literally); and feminist approaches to wilderness protection.

For the most part these are excellent articles—multidisciplinary,
scholarly, thought-provoking, and accessibly written. While they are
likely to be read primarily by scholars in the fields of environmental
and women’s studies, they invite a wider audience. Anyone interested
in ecofeminist spirituality, for example, could do no better than to
consult Heather Eaton’s essay in this volume. And any readers who
doubt the dual assumption on which this anthology is based might start
by reading the brief summary of the 1994 Clayoquot Sound protests in the
introduction to Part 3, which underscores, as do the essays as a whole,
that employing gendered and environmental lenses simultaneously yields
important and timely insights.