Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935-1970

William A. Waiser is a professor of history at the University of
Saskatchewan. He is the author of Saskatchewan’s Playground: A History
of Prince Albert National Park and Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of
Western Canada’s National Parks, 1915–1946

This is the story of the establishment and early history of the first
four national parks in the Maritimes: Cape Breton Highlands (1936),
Prince Edward Island (1936), Fundy (1947), and Terra Nova (1957). The
creation of the parks was part of a renewed effort to establish a truly
national system of special places at a time when national parks were
largely identified with Western Canada.

Alan MacEachern sees national-park expansion into the Maritimes as
significant on a number of levels, besides the fact that the four
Maritime parks were the only new national parks to be added to the
system between 1930 and 1968. Park planners were not particularly
enthralled with the Maritime landscape, especially in comparison to the
scenery of the mountain parks. The region had also been settled for
centuries and any park creation would unavoidably involve expropriation
and the restoration of the land to its presettlement state. The biggest
challenge, though, was meeting the national parks’ ecological mandate
while at the same time responding to recreational pressures.

MacEachern provides a skilful, balanced account. He not only situates
the story in the recent writing on environmental history, but provides
valuable insight into the national parks bureaucracy and how it evolved
over the period. He also makes good use of interviews and other
anecdotal material to give an understanding and appreciation of what the
national park areas meant to the local population. Above all, Natural
Selections demonstrates that national parks are created landscapes and
that their histories are rife with tensions between competing interests
and uses. The only disappointment is the lack of photographs; they would
have enhanced a fine book.