Description
Today, efforts at environmental protection commonly take the form of
“top-down” measures, in which overarching plans, usually
based on scientific reports, are implemented through environmental
legislation, which is then enforced at the local level. Fish Wars
and Trout Travesties offers an instructive glimpse into an earlier
era, before the state assumed its present degree of regulatory control
over the environment. In southern Alberta of the 1920s, townspeople and
civic leaders took a spirited interest in the management of their local
rivers and streams and often held strong opinions about which species
of fish should be conserved and by what methods. Often these opinions
reflected a growing division between the traditional, rural
understanding of nature as the means to survival and an emerging urban
conception of nature as recreational space. Such conflicting
perspectives – founded, as they were, on differing views about
the relationship of human beings to the natural world – meant
that local debates could be quite heated.