An environmental history of the first four national parks in Atlantic Canada: Cape Breton Highlands, Prince Edward Island, Fundy, and Terra Nova.

Natural Selections traces the history of the first four parks in Atlantic Canada through the selection, expropriation, development, and management stages. Alan MacEachern shows how the Parks Branch's preconceptions about the landscape and people of the region shaped the parks created there. In doing so he details the evolution of the park system, from the conservation movement early in the century to the rise of the ecology movement. MacEachern analyzes Parks Canada's efforts to fulfill its twin mandates of preservation and use, arguing that the agency never favoured one over the other but oscillated between more or less interventionist in ensuring both. Touching on a wide range of matters - from landscape aesthetics to tourism promotion, from DDT to Martin Luther King - Natural Selections expands our understanding of the relation between nature and culture in the twentieth century.