Coming West: A Natural History of Home

Patrick Colgan is the former executive director of the Canadian Museum
of Nature.

The author, an Alberta outdoorsman, has written a collection of articles
centred on “a natural history of home.” Organizing topics include
activities (e.g., hunting, fishing) and locality (e.g., Rockies,
foothills, rivers, prairies). The text is a pleasing blend of travels in
the wilderness, family reminiscences, and reflections on nature and our
place in it. There are good descriptions of the natural world with
respect to its geology, seasons, and species. Although anglers and
hunters will enjoy pertinent material, other readers may see the claim
that hunters become “one with the ecosystem” through their predation
as an exercise in self-deception: catch-and-release may work for angled
trout, but it doesn’t work for hunted mammals.

The degradation of wilderness is described in the context of such
industries as logging, cattle raising, and dam construction—industries
that view nature only as so many “resources” to be exploited. Van
Tighem calmly but forcefully outlines the human impoverishment
(especially emotional and educational) that attends wilderness
degradation. The final section, “Coming Home,” consists of three
essays in which the issue of home in a habitat is explicitly addressed.

As Van Tighem correctly points out, many people are so alienated from
nature that they do not know what they are missing. His articles on
whether our national parks have failed us, and on a “better
anthropocentrism” in which nature fulfils but does not replace human
interest, are the best in the volume. Recommended.