Includes bibliographical references.

pt. I. Introduction to environmental history. Doing environmental history / Donald Worster ; The uses of environmental history / William Cronon ; Nature and narrative / Carolyn Merchant ; A death-defying attempt to articulate a coherent definition of environmental history / Douglas R. Weiner -- pt. II. Pre-contact environmental history. The pristine myth : the landscape of the Americas in 1492 / William M. Denevan ; Fire / Shepard Krech -- pt. III. Biology and imperialism in North American environmental history. Ecological imperialism : the overseas migration of Western Europeans as a biological phenomenon / Alfred W. Crosby ; Making a garden out of a wilderness / Ramsay Cook ; Averting disaster : the Hudson's Bay Company and smallpox in Western Canada during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries / Paul Hackett -- pt. IV. Pre-industrial resources and the changing culture of nature. Marketing wildlife : the Hudson's Bay Company and the Pacific Northwest , 1821-1881 / William A. Dobak -- pt. V. Industrialization. Rivers of sawdust : the battle over industrial pollution in Canada, 1865-1903 / R. Peter Gillis ; Blighted areas and obnoxious industries : constructing environmental inequality on an industrial waterfront, Hamilton, Ontario, 1890-1960 / Ken Cruikshank, Nancy B. Buchier -- pt. VI. Sustainability and conservation. 'Let us heed the voice of youth' : laundry detergents, phosphates, and the emergence of the environmental movement in Ontario / Jennifer Read -- Where the scientists roam : ecology, management, and bison in Northern Canada / John Sandlos ; Changing ecologies : preservation in four national parks, 1935-1965 / Alan MacEachern.