Brett McGillivray. Geography of British Columbia: People and Landscapes in Transition, 2nd ed. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005. 282 pages. $95.00 cloth.

Regional geography, the analysis of a defined area's physical and human characteristics, has a long tradition within geography. But in the

aftermath of the discipline's so-called Quantitative Revolution in the late 1950s and early '60s it fell into disrepute for being too descriptive. As a consequence, regional geography courses became relatively rare on U.S. college campuses. Other social scientists stepped into this vacuum and area studies centers were created to undertake work previously done by human geographers. Against this background it was refreshing to read Brett McGillivray's Geography of British Columbia: People and Landscapes in Transition. This introductory college-level text provides a comprehensive portrait of Canada's third most populous province. The second edition, published in fall 2005, attests to the book's popularity and to regional geography's vitality north of the 49th parallel.

Chapters 1 and 2 introduce human geographic concepts and physical processes that have shaped the province. At the end of Chapter 1 McGillivray subdivides British Columbia into eight regions and provides a description of each one's physical and human geography. Chapter 3 builds upon this foundation, surveying physical threats to human settlement including flooding, wildfires, avalanches, and earthquakes. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 provide a historical context by outlining the territorial evolution of the province, British colonial policies, and the treatment of First Nations and Asian immigrants by European settlers. The confiscation of Natives' land, cultural genocide, the forced removal of Japanese Canadians from the coast during World War II, and efforts to restrict Asian immigration remain scars on the province's history. An appreciation of these events is crucial to understanding the ongoing Land Claims process and efforts to compensate Chinese Canadians for the immigration head tax. McGillivray limits his analysis of population geography to Asian and First Nations issues, but in the next edition he might wish to consider broadening his account to include other groups that have enriched the province.

Chapters 7 through 10 focus on managing the province's forest, fish, and mineral resources. Globalization has provided serious challenges for each resource, including access to foreign markets (softwood lumber), falling commodity prices (coal), and foreign competition (wild salmon fishery). At the same time the sustain-ability of the resource economy is threatened. More wood is being harvested than is accommodated by natural regrowth and replanting, while habitat destruction, disease, and overfishing have almost destroyed the wild salmon fishery. The future viability of resource-based communities is dependent upon finding a balance between conserving resources, and satisfying both the demands of private capital to make a profit and government's desire to maintain a tax base.

Sustainability is a major theme of Chapters 11, 12, and 13, which examine energy, agriculture, and water in the province. The need to develop renewable energy resources is essential if Canada and the province are to meet their obligations under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. In the past, B.C. has promoted energy mega-project developments, constructing huge dams and new towns to support coal mining operations, for example. But as McGillivray indicates, these developments have unintended consequences with the loss of wildlife habitat and rising town maintenance costs accompanying mine closures. The province has little arable land, and some of its most productive land is located in the Lower Mainland, close to the rapidly expanding Vancouver metropolitan area. To protect farmland the government established agricultural land reserves in 1972. But while this policy helped conserve land, it limits opportunities for farmers to "cash in" on rising land values, a situation which is almost necessitated by low farm incomes. British Columbia has Canada's wettest climate, but just as there is "water, water everywhere" it inconveniently falls during the winter months when demand is low, creating the need for storage to meet high summer demands. At the same time, its quality is threatened by a lack of controls on watershed development.

Many B.C. communities have looked to the tourist industry to reduce their dependence upon primary resources, and they have discovered that that industry's fortunes also rise and fall with events outside local control, such as currency fluctuations and fears over personal safety arising from disease outbreaks such as SARS (Chapter 14). Despite the vagaries of this market, successive provincial governments have developed a tourist infrastructure and, with the assistance of the federal government, promoted mega-events such as the 1986 World's Fair and the 2010 Winter Olympics. Chapters 15 and 16 focus on human settlements--the problems of single-resource communities and the historical development of the province's urban hierarchy. In providing a provincial perspective McGillivray ignores the opportunity to examine in detail Vancouver's rise to prominence as a global city and its success in urban regeneration. The city is unique among large North American cities; its population has increased over the past 20 years without any change in its boundaries, and it has gained a global reputation for innovative urban planning.

The latest edition of Geography of British Columbia maintains the same chapter structure as the first edition, published in 2000. Chapters have been updated to include recent legislation and events such as the disastrous forest fires of 2003, and the list of websites at the end of each chapter has been expanded. The text is clearly written and devoid of jargon. The consistency of chapters could be improved with the inclusion of a statement of purpose at the beginning; some chapters have such a statement (Chapters 4 and 5) and others don't (Chapters 12, 13, and 14). In an otherwise excellent introductory chapter, McGillivray fails to include a discussion of the core-periphery model that is at the heart of explaining the Lower Mainland's sustained economic and population growth compared with the rest of the province. After reading this book, the reader will be well informed as to the major historical forces that have shaped British Columbia and the economic challenges confronting its future. It deserves to be read beyond the college geography textbook market.

Michael J. Broadway

Department of Geography

Northern Michigan University