Inventing Stanley Park

Book excerpt: In early December 2006, a powerful windstorm ripped through Vancouver’s Stanley Park. The storm transformed the city’s most treasured landmark into a tangle of splintered trees, and shattered a decades-old vision of the park as timeless virgin wilderness. In Inventing Stanley Park, Sean Kheraj traces how the tension between popular expectations of idealized nature and the volatility of complex ecosystems helped transform the landscape of one of the world’s most famous urban parks. This beautifully illustrated book not only depicts the natural and cultural forces that shaped the park’s landscape, it also examines the roots of our complex relationship with nature.