The book promotes a landscape approach as a method for understanding
and addressing the complex interdependent issues of environmental and
climatic change, ecological degradation, and socio-cultural
inequalities.
The twenty-three book essays are structured into five sections around
concepts of urban landscape systems, ecology, politics, territory, and
practice. By linking individual sites and local communities to
territorial socio-ecological systems and processes, they discuss issues
of urban growth and development, remote areas of extraction and
production, environmental degradation and transformation, and social
inequality and discrimination. While the book allows for parallel
readings of such issues in multiple cultural and geographical contexts,
a geographic focus is placed on Canada and other environmentally complex
and sensitive northern regions. One key theme is the integration of
Indigenous knowledge, experience, and storytelling throughout several of
the chapters. The book draws lessons that are grounded in inclusive,
contextual, and multi-scalar readings which suggest landscape-informed
practices that are both socially and environmentally resilient, just,
and sustainable.