New books by Rod Giblett and Gregory Kennedy
I attended an excellent book launch on Sunday for two new volumes related to wetlands and their cultural perceptions and use. The event was appropriately held at the Landscape of Grand Pré visitor’s centre, which commemorates the Acadian culture that arose on ‘reclaimed’ Bay of Fundy marshland in the 1600s. The site is Canada’s only cultural agricultural landscape listed by UNESCO for World Heritage. The event was hosted by Rob Summerby-Murray, lately the Dean of Arts and Social Sciences here at Dalhousie, and now President at Saint Mary’s University, whose own scholarship on the Tantramar marshes nicely tied the two topics together. The discussion that followed was rich, focussing largely on the Grand Pré landscape itself, as a case study of place, culture, ecosystem and landscape management challenges, particularly in the face of climate change, as my own recent research on dykelands (still in review) has found.
