Northern Ecology and Resource Management Memorial Essays Honouring Don Gill

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

This collection of 17 essays is a useful addition to the literature on the North. It is a tribute to Dr. Don Gill, University of Alberta geographer, who was killed in an automobile accident in 1979.

The articles range from pure and very detailed descriptive science to a very pragmatic and thoughtful assessment of and prescription for decision making on land use issues. Topics about Canada’s North include soil, soil temperature, snow and living things, pine martin, dall sheep, caribou, moose, wood bison, polar bear, revegetation along the Canol pipeline route, land use planning in the NWT, exploratory well impacts in the northern Yukon, and Aklavik, “the town that did not die.” There is a paper on wind erosion in Lapland and one on energy development, tourism and nature conservation in Iceland. All the papers are carefully footnoted so that interested readers can find primary sources. There are no grounds to dispute the scientific quality of the work. The very good illustrative photographs include eight pages of George Calef’s excellent colour photography. Maps, tables and diagrams are clear and the technical editing is very good.

The first three quarters of the book are largely descriptive science with only hints at larger resource management issues, while the last quarter finishes the trend to resource management and land use issues. In the first three parts (abiotic and animal and plant communities) the papers on pine martin and dall sheep do move away from strictly descriptive material to management issues. However, they stop short of addressing the problems of how to ensure effective use of the harvesting figures they derive.

The book suffers from three major flaws. It is not at all clear whom the book is designed for. The use of jargon and of very detailed methodologies and results (two tables take up 26 pages) suggests that it is meant for readers who are already experts in northern ecology. However, the purpose of the book seems to include helping Canadians “to understand the impact of development on the northern ecosystems and the appropriateness of mitigative measures.” If this is the case, the jargon, the detail, and the lack of interpretation of the meaning, for resource development, of the subsystems described completely defeat that purpose.

The second problem is that there is no integration of the seventeen separate pieces: there is no glue to hold it together. This could have been remedied by appropriate introductory material and “bridging” pieces, or by requiring the individual authors to read the other papers before completing their final versions, or both.

The third problem is the lack of attention to the resource management half of the title by most of the authors. Some leave it entirely to the reader to decide what, if anything, their writing has to do with resource management: others only hint, or very briefly state the most immediate management implications.

This book is a welcome addition to the rapidly growing volume of material on the North. Unfortunately, it falls short of the expectations raised by the title.