The Nature of Cities: Perspectives in Canadian Urban Environmental History

Abstract

Capilano Canyon seems in a realm quite separate from Vancouver. Steep rock walls, mossy and wet; rapids and pools tracing a thin line from snowpack to ocean; ferns and Douglas firs—all remote from the suburbs that surround them. To descend into the park is to pass between two worlds; from one of humans, to another of nature. But traces within the park undermine this distinction. Cedar stumps display notches made by loggers, and in a remote corner a timber railway rots quietly away. These testify to Vancouver’s history of timber-cutting, when the "forest vanished and up went the city."1 Around a bend in the river, Cleveland Dam’s concrete bulk suddenly appears, storing and diverting the river, annexing it to Vancouver’s water system. Today, though, loggers and engineers have been displaced by strollers and tourists, catered to by gentle paths and a bus parking lot. The park testifies to the evolving place of nature within a Canadian city.