Urban Explorations Environmental Histories of the Toronto Region

The publication of Urban Explorations, the first collection to tour the environmental history of Canada's foremost city, is so welcome. Its sixteen chapters trace how the economic and demographic development of the Toronto region has remade the environment, and how that in turn has affected the peoples and societies living here. The book chronicles not just how people and nature related in the past, but also how that has shaped the present, and what that suggests for the future. But more than this, the book's existence signals that Canadian environmental history, often preoccupied by the Canada of the north and the Canada of the wild, is giving increasing consideration to the Canada of cities, the places where the majority of Canadians actually live. - Alan MacEachern Inspired by the field trips organized for the American Society for Environmental History's 2013 conference in Toronto, Urban Explorations invites readers to look for nature in the built environment, and the built environment in the natural world. Maps, images and essays guide readers through sixteen different journeys in the region, from downtown Toronto to the Oak Ridges Moraine, from the Leslie Street Spit to Niagara Falls, from the sacred Indigenous mounds of High Park to the queer groves of David A. Balfour Park, from the engineering achievements of R.C. Harris to the imagined landscapes of Lawren Harris.