Introduction: Uncovering Canada's Environmental Cultural Politics

Abstract

Political action is a product of soçio-cultural processes, drawing on values, ideas, institutions, discourse and other cultural resources to create particular policy instruments that fit the social and political Zeitgeist of the times. It is widely recognized that ideas of "nature" or "the environment" are dialectically produced by material and symbolic practice. Many scholars have demonstrated and unsettled the primacy of a "wilderness" trope as dominating Canadian identity. Yet greater attention needs to be devoted to the cultural dimensions of the environment and environmental politics in Canadian Studies. Such politics lie at intersections of natural and social sciences and the humanities, and in the interplay of rhetoric, practice, policy, social norms, and organizational forms.