McGill-Queen's Rural, Wildland, and Resource Studies

The Price of Gold traces the troubling history of one of Canada’s most contaminated mine sites and the Indigenous community, labour unions, and environmentalists who fought back against the federal government and the mining companies.

A rallying cry for climate justice, The Rough Poets introduces the reader to poetry that is ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest, and to oil-worker poets who grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the future of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just.

Lake Ontario has materially enabled and enriched the societies that have crowded its edges, from fertile agriculture landscapes to energy production systems to sprawling cities. *The Lives of Lake Ontario *examines the myriad ways Canada and the United States have used and abused this remarkably resilient and uniquely vulnerable resource.

Drawing on the writing of over one hundred diarists, this book takes us into the heart of informal neighbourhood labour exchanges known as “bees” and the context of farm families’ daily lives in Southern Ontario. It sheds light on the workways of rural people and on how neighbouring was a dynamic and progressive aspect of agricultural change, as well as a key element in fashioning rural culture.

Cultivating Community explores women’s critical involvement in agricultural fairs’ growth and prosperity in Ontario throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Examining women’s roles as society members, exhibitors, performers, volunteers, and fairgoers, the book shows how women used fairs to present different versions of rural womanhood.

As it follows Trent through the different stages of his long life, Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent explores the complexities of class and colonialism, gender roles within the rural family, and the transition from youth to manhood to old age. The diaries provide a rare opportunity to read the thoughts and follow the experiences of a man who who, like many Victorian-era immigrants of the privileged class, struggled to adapt to the Canadian environment during the rise of the industrial age.