Eastern Arctic Study Annotated Bibliography

Dixon Thompson was Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Calgary.

As air and water pollution have been resource management problems of the last century or more, so information pollution will be in the next. Information is a resource. It is made useful through publishing. However, as with other resources, quality is as important as quantity. When a resource is contaminated with unwanted material, its value decreases to the point where it can become a liability. Therefore, any bibliography should clearly delineate the criteria used to include or reject material and should apply those conditions scrupulously. In this one, for example, references to articles in Time, Business Week, or Canadian Business should have been excluded unless they were particularly important. General sources that are not cited specifically (such as Tundra Times, various articles 1976-1979, or Minutes of Hamlet Council meetings) should have been listed under a separate heading that would list all general sources. Similarly, the guidelines for how notes were decided upon should have been given. Justice Bergen’s two volumes on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry and CARC’s two-volume Northern Transitions were not annotated, whereas an 11-page document with an 18-word title received a 50-word review. The keyword index is very useful. It compensates somewhat for failure to separate the documents by topic or source. Small inaccuracies in some entries cause one to wonder about the overall quality. ( e.g., Oil Under the ice is not listed by the authors — Pimlott, Brown, and Sam).

The foreword states that the collection is by no means definitive, which is an acceptable disclaimer. However, given the interest in the impact of the settlement of land claims, there would seem to be a number of works that are conspicuous by their absence. For example: Native Rights in Canada (Cumming and Mickenberg; The Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada, 1972); As Long as This Land Shall Last (Fumoleau; McClelland and Stewart, n.d.); Maps and Dreams (Brody; Douglas and McIntyre, 1981); This Land is Not for Sale (McCallum; Anglican Book Centre, 1975); The Past and Future Land (O’Malley; Peter Martin, 1976); Arctic Oil (Livingston; CBC, 1981); Bob Blair’s Pipeline (Bregha; Lorimer, 1979); People, Peregrines and Arctic Pipelines (Peacock; Douglas, 1977); and Arctic Alternatives (Pimlott, Vincent, and McKnight; CARC, 1973). These books cover topics that are much broader than local government and the mining industry, but they would seem to be important background.

So, while useful, this bibliography leaves something to be desired. Compilers and editors will have to be more careful if we are to avoid information pollution, which will render the resource useless.