The Oak Ridges Moraine is a unique landform that generated heated battles over the future of nature conservation, sprawl, and development in the Toronto region at the turn of the twenty-first century. This book provides a careful, multi-faceted history and policy analysis of planning issues and citizen activism on the Moraine's future in the face of rapid urban expansion.

The Oak Ridges Moraine Battles captures the hidden aspects of a story that received a great deal of attention in the local and national news, and that ultimately led to provincial legislation aimed at...

Post-industrial urban spaces typically include abandoned factories, disused rail lines, old pits and quarries, and de-commissioned landfills. In these places, different visions compete for dominance with respect to current and future land uses. Neighbours often view such urban greenspace as polluted, unkempt and weedy, harbouring undesirable biophysical features and people. These are spaces that often become the focus of some form of revitalization, reinvestment and restoration. From the perspective of civic authorities and urban planners, transforming post-industrial landscapes into...

This book examines the challenges and possibilities of conducting cultural environmental history research today. Disciplinary commitments certainly influence the questions scholars ask and the ways they seek out answers, but some methodological challenges go beyond the boundaries of any one discipline. The book examines: how to account for the fact that humans are not the only actors in history yet dominate archival records; how to attend to the non-visual senses when traditional sources offer only a two-dimensional, non-sensory version of the past; how to decolonize research in and beyond...