Canada and Australia - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 126

the river that bears his name, and in 1793, he reached the Pacific Ocean
over the Rocky Mountains. By 1778 James Cook, George Vancouver,
and other English naval captains had explored and claimed present-day
British Columbia.
The Europeans encountered native peoples whose ancestors had migrated
to Canada from Asia via the Bering land bridge prior to 13,000 BC. The
eastern woodland Indians both fought the colonists and cooperated with
them in the fur trade. With their hunting, gathering, and a little farming,
their impact on the land was slight. In the Arctic the Inuits (Eskimos) had
arrived much more recently, around AD 1000. Likewise, the Inuit impact
on the land was slight.
In area, Canada is the second largest in the world. Although cold weather
limits agriculture, the country exports much wheat. Only 4% of the land
is arable. In terms of geology, half of the country consists of the Canadian
Shield, which is rich in minerals like iron, copper, and nickel but is deli-
cate in terms of exposure to acid rain. Oil and natural gas are plentiful in
Alberta. Farther west, the Rocky and Coastal mountains offer spectacular
scenery. The temperate rain forests of the Pacific Coast have some of the
highest species diversity in the world and support a large timber industry.
Almost the entire population lives in the south, within a hundred miles of
the US border. To the north, the land is forested, with the trees dwindling
to tundra toward the Arctic.
Even today the mountains and remote areas support many animals like
bears, wolves, and eagles extinct elsewhere. The fur trade was respon-
sible for much of the country's early development. The Grand Banks of
the coast of Newfoundland was the most abundant fishery in the world.
Historically, access there was contested by the English, French, Portuguese,
and Spanish. The Peace of Utrecht regulated the fishery, making it the
earliest example of a natural resource conflict resolved by an international
treaty. In 1868, the newly created national government passed the Fisheries
Act. Besides fish, the Grand Banks was home to the Great Auk. This big
bird was flightless, but an expert swimmer and diver, with a range from
the St. Lawrence Gulf to Iceland. Hunting drove it to extinction in 1844.
The Romantic Movement came late to Canada. The few early poets
tended to rather slavishly imitate the British. A major tenet of the move-
ment was nationalism, but Canada was late to become a nation. In 1832
Major John Richardson published Wacousta , a novel of the Pontiac con-
spiracy. Richardson was considered the father of Canadian fiction. Charles
Sangster published St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and other Poems in