Organizing Nature

Turning Canada's Ecosystems into Resources

Author: Alice Cohen and Andrew Biro

Drawing from concrete examples in the contemporary Canadian context, this book gives readers the tools to think critically about Canadian environmental issues, ranging from theory to practice.

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Summary

Drawing from concrete examples in the contemporary Canadian context, this book gives readers the tools to think critically about Canadian environmental issues, ranging from theory to practice.

Description

Organizing Nature explores how the environment is organised in Canada's resource-dependent economy. The book examines how particular ecosystem components come to be understood as natural resources and how these resources in turn are used to organise life in Canada.

In tracing transitions from 'ecosystem component' to 'resource,' this book weaves together the roles that commodification, Indigenous dispossession, and especially a false nature-society binary play in facilitating the conceptual and material construction of resources. Alice Cohen and Andrew Biro present an alternative to this false nature-society binary: one that sees Canadians and their environments in a constant process of making and remaking each other. Through a series of case studies focused on specific resources fish, forests, carbon, water, land, and life the book explores six channels through which this remaking occurs: governments, communities, built environments, culture and ideas, economies, and bodies and identities.

Ultimately, Organizing Nature encourages readers to think critically about what is at stake when Canadians (re)produce myths about the false separation between Canadian peoples and their environments.

Critic Reviews

"Engaging and accessible! Organizing Nature takes aim at a complex relationship - the one between society and environment - and illustrates in clear terms its symbiotic character. From fish to forests, the authors show how Canadians impact their environment. But the reader is also asked to reflect on how Canada's nature and natural resources influence the very fabric of the country's political and social institutions as well as the resulting policy (or policy failure)."

--Andrea Olive, Professor in the Department of Geography, Geomatics, and Environment and the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto Mississauga

"The idea that our environmental ills began with ideas turning 'nature' into 'natural resources' has been around for many years. But rarely has this idea been developed empirically so fully and explained so clearly. Focusing on the Canadian experience, Cohen and Biro give us a fascinating and richly developed account of the 'channels' through which this transformation has occurred, and at the same time how society has been shaped by these transformations of water, forests, coal and oil, fish, land, and bodies from ecological phenomena into resources. A brilliant way into the study of environmental politics."

--Matthew Paterson, Director, Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester

"Lucid and engaging, this must-read analysis charts a compelling path for the future of environmental and resource management in Canada."

--Karen Bakker, Professor in the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

About the Author

Alice Cohen is an associate professor in the departments of earth & environmental science and environmental & sustainability studies at Acadia University.

Andrew Biro is a professor in the department of politics at Acadia University.

More on this Book

Organizing Nature explores how the environment is organized in Canada's resource-dependent economy. The book examines how particular ecosystem components come to be understood as natural resources and how these resources in turn are used to organize life in Canada. In tracing transitions from "ecosystem component" to "resource," this book weaves together the roles that commodification, Indigenous dispossession, and especially a false nature-society binary play in facilitating the conceptual and material construction of resources. Alice Cohen and Andrew Biro present an alternative to this false nature-society binary: one that sees Canadians and their environments in a constant process of making and remaking each other. Through a series of case studies focused on specific resources - fish, forests, carbon, water, land, and life - the book explores six channels through which this remaking occurs: governments, communities, built environments, culture and ideas, economies, and bodies and identities. Ultimately, Organizing Nature encourages readers to think critically about what is at stake when Canadians (re)produce myths about the false separation between Canadian peoples and their environments.