Taking the Air: Ideas and Change in Canada’s National Parks (review)

Reviewed by: Taking the Air: Ideas and Change in Canada’s National Parks Brad Martin Taking the Air: Ideas and Change in Canada’s National Parks. Paul Kopas. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008. Pp. 248, $85.00 cloth, $32.95 paper In comparison with scholarly historical literature on national parks in other nations, particularly the United States, Canada’s is sparse. A few [End Page 589] excellent recent studies notwithstanding, existing work lacks analytical depth and often focuses on circumstances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is especially telling that on the eve of the centenary of the Canadian national parks branch in 2011 we still have no adequate scholarly treatment of the national park system as a whole. Therefore, Paul Kopas’s Taking the Air, a study of environmental policy in the national parks since the mid-1950s, is a welcome contribution. It is especially valuable because it situates institutional change in the parks branch within a wider context of social and political developments and draws attention to the critical roles played by environmental interest groups and northern Aboriginal peoples in shaping park management. Unfortunately, while the book may be well received by policy analysts and political scientists, its schematic conceptual framework and flawed methodology will likely limit its appeal among historians. The book is organized into four substantive chapters that correspond with Kopas’s periodization of postwar environmental policy development. These chapters are bracketed by a brief discussion of the history of the national park system before mid-century, an introduction that explores the social meanings of national parks and outlines the book’s analytical objectives, and a conclusion that summarizes the findings of each chapter. Throughout the book, Kopas focuses on the relationships among the ideas, institutions, and interest groups that have defined the arena in which national park policy has taken shape. His main argument is that broad ‘contextualizing ideas’ about such matters as government decision-making, the economy, and state–society relations provide the most convincing explanation for changes in the provisions for environmental protection in the National Parks Act. In developing this line of argument, he examines how key developments on the national and international stage have influenced the parks branch and how policy formation within it has recently been ‘repossessed by the state’ following years of meaningful input by public interest groups in the 1970s and 1980s. While Kopas’s effort to provide a historical perspective on parks policy is commendable, weaknesses in his research design result in significant problems. First, his treatment of historical events often glosses over important complexities in the name of theoretical tidiness. The upshot is a cut-and-paste narrative in which nuanced and multifaceted developments are dramatically simplified in order to make analytical points. At other times, he doesn’t take advantage of recent scholarship to offer more critical perspectives on historical events. In particular, his discussions of the impacts of the northern land claims [End Page 590] movement on parks policy and the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and environmentalists would have been far more penetrating had they carefully considered the rich body of historical and anthropological literature on northern conservation and natural resources. Moreover, Kopas makes numerous claims about historical events that are simply not supported with evidence or properly referenced. For example, footnotes are absent from large sections of this book and, while the authors’ interviews with a number of important figures in national park history are valuable contributions, he apparently made little attempt to corroborate their testimony by examining the documentary record. Indeed, perhaps the biggest flaw in this book is that the author chose not to consult the available organizational records of Parks Canada and its predecessor agencies at Library and Archives Canada, instead focusing his investigations primarily on public documents. In the absence of such an inquiry, Kopas can shed only dim light on internal discussions among park administrators, which leads one to question the causal link he posits between policy developments and the broader policy context in which they occurred. Fundamentally, Taking the Air (the title is never adequately explained) is less about politics per se than the broad intellectual and institutional conditions that have facilitated changes in the...

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