Wolf Mountains: A History of Wolves along the Great Divide (review)

Environmental history has taken far too long to get off the ground in English Canada. We dwell in a nation with the second-largest land mass in the world, where staple commodities dictated our economic discourse for generations and where the legacy of abuse from resource extraction haunts everything from the water we drink to social justice issues at the centre of negotiations around Aboriginal self-government. Durham wheat, softwood lumber, and fisheries permeate palaver with our neighbours. Yet 80 per cent of us live in cities; we proclaim proudly that we are an urban people. In the promotion of Canada to the tourist market, we trip over ourselves assuring potential visitors that we are no longer bush league, but thoroughly postmodern. With every truckload of garbage Toronto sends to Michigan, the death of outports, the trashing of our agricultural sector, and our erosion of biodiversity, we also continue unabated in our arrogance, and willful ignorance, to demonstrate a fundamental lack of respect for the land that sustains us.

Historians are in a unique position to speak to this situation by reflecting on evidentiary records habitually overlooked, from perspectives often marginalized. Mercifully an emerging group of scholars has taken up the challenge. In predecessors such as Carl Berger, Bruce Hodgins, Jamie Benidickson, Patricia Jasen, Graeme Wynn, Bill Waiser, Brian Osborne, Suzanne Zeller, and Ramsay Cook they are not without fine mentors, but from Jean Manore, Alan MacEachern, George Warecki, Claire Campbell, George Colpitts, Clinton Evans, Anders Sandberg, Stephen Bocking, Neil Forkey, and Matthew Evenden - to mention a few young colleagues who come immediately to mind - we are being introduced to some stimulating new analytical insights. Among the newest members of this group is Karen R. Jones, whose recently revised doctoral dissertation, completed at Bristol University under the guidance of British scholars interested in comparative environmental history, is the subject of this review.

Wolf Mountains is an exemplary work of scholarship nested in fluid analytical prose. The research is broad, involving an extraordinary range of archival sources, government reports, newspapers, films, personal interviews, and conference proceedings drawn from locations across the continent. After carefully reviewing the secondary literature on her subject, Jones takes her reader on a critical journey through four national Rocky Mountain parks - Yellowstone and Glacier in the United States and Banff and Jasper in Canada - recording, from their formal establishment to the present, the evolution of attitudes towards and the treatment of wolves within their respective boundaries. Although each park receives its own detailed chapter, Jones's purpose goes well beyond merely chronicling divergent management practices and park policies. Nor is her project strictly ecological. As she herself puts it, the study 'considers wolves in the country of the mind' as much as in 'the material environment.' It might be more accurate to say that the book makes of wolves and parks, and of our relationship with them, metaphors for opposing and intersecting Canadian and American social constructions of nature. Jones is playfully intrigued by North Americans' political preoccupation with borders, boundaries, grids, and territories and by the behaviours of the wolves that ignore them in spite of us. She also gets wonderful mileage out of her (often nicely ironic) analysis of Canadian and American bureaucrats, scientists, politicians, and historians duking it out over which nation is noblest in its regard for nature.

As managerial units, the four parks examined by Jones share in common a space (the Rocky Mountains), several mammalian species in symbiosis (bears, wolves, coyotes, cougars, deer, moose, elk, caribou, etc.), and the attitudes of humans who assume power over both. While space and species operate according to their own laws, those with power attempt to contain selected elements, reshaping and accommodating them to recreational, hunting, and agricultural needs, effectively recasting wilderness as humane nature. Jones documents the history of her parks, demonstrating how...