A List
4/7/03

SLU PROF'S BOOK TELLS UPPER CANADA ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY

CANTON - A new book by a St. Lawrence University professor provides 
a look at Canada's Trent Valley in the 19th century, that its 
publishers call "a microcosm for wider human and environmental 
changes throughout North America."
	Shaping the Upper Canadian Frontier: Environment, Society, 
and Culture in the Trent Valley, by Neil S. Forkey, visiting assistant 
professor in Canadian studies and the First-Year Program, has 
recently been published by the University of Calgary Press.
	"Forkey makes a significant contribution to the growing body 
of work on Canadian environmental history," the publishers state. 
"Themes of ethnicity and environment in the Trent Valley are brought 
into wider perspective with comparisons to other areas of contemporary 
settlement throughout the British Empire and North America."
	Forkey begins by placing his study within the literature of 
settler societies of Upper Canada and North America. The Trent 
Valley's geography, prehistory and Native peoples - the Huron and 
the Mississauga - are discussed alongside the Anglo-Celtic migrations 
and "resettlement" of the area. Four distinct case studies of 
environmental, social and cultural change are presented. The book 
gives special attention to the life and nature writings of Catherine 
Parr Traill; her descriptions of life and environmental changes 
in the valley illustrate Canadian attitudes about the natural 
world during the 19th century. 
 	A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Forkey earned 
a master's degree from the University of Maine and the Ph.D. from 
Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

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