How Bison Returned to Banff National Park
by Karsten Heuer;
foreword by Leroy Little Bear;
introduction by Harvey Locke
GREYSTONE BOOKS
2026/$28.95/192 PP.

Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch once said he believed that “Books find their writers.” A book will come into being when it finds the writer most likely for the story. Viewed from this perspective, the Porcupine caribou herd found Karsten Heuer to tell their story in his 2007 book, Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd, and his life partner, Leanne Allison, to film it in Being Caribou. “Karsten,” writes conservationist Harvey Locke, “was an adventurer with an enormous capacity for rough travel and an appetite to initiate big projects.” Heuer’s big project to hike and explore the possibility of a wildlife corridor running north–south through the west resulted in his first book, Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bears’ Trail. In his latest, Buffalo Lessons, he writes: “Y2Y’s vision to connect and protect reserves along the Rocky Mountains with wildlife corridors was so meaningful to me that I decided to hike its 3,400-kilometre distance, as a wolf or grizzly might, to see if the concept was possible. I discovered it is.” From the start, then, Heuer’s biology degree and his desire to see the world from the points of view of other animals coalesced to make him the perfect warden for the reintroduction of buffalo to Banff National Park, and an ideal storyteller for northern caribou and plains bison. As Leroy Little Bear writes in his foreword, Heuer and Allison were first “cariboued,” and then they were “buffaloed.”

The chapters are sequenced chronologically as the project unfolds and are titled as a series of the “lessons” Heuer and his small team learned both from experienced buffalo managers and from the animals themselves. Some of the titles sound managerial (“Seize Opportunity,” “Leverage Your Success”) and others more like insights into bison psychology (“Embrace Individuality,” “Make Your Idea Their Idea”). Given that an attempt in the 1970s by Parks Canada to restore bison to Jasper National Park failed when the animals dispersed way beyond the park, Heuer undertook a lot of research and preparation in advance. While the book might work too as a manual for wardens and ranchers, its scientific, ecological and even spiritual material makes it a compelling read akin to the works of Alberta naturalists Andy Russell and Charlie Russell, former park warden Sid Marty and UBC forestry professor Suzanne Simard. It also reminded me powerfully of Freeman House’s Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species, another rich account of species restoration.

For a book that details the reintroduction of these animals, it is surprising when the prologue begins with Heuer having to shoot one of the buffalo whose life story he had been party to from its birth. But it has ventured beyond the invisible, largely unfenced boundaries of the park, a trespass the Alberta government will not forgive. Even prior to the first chapter, then, two deaths, both premature, have been recorded or anticipated: that of this young wayfaring bull and that of the author himself. Heuer wrote the book during the final months of his life, and it has been published posthumously. The loss of this man who, together with Allison, in essence apprenticed himself to other-than-human animals to understand their specific ways of being, is deeply tragic.

Throughout, Heuer details the remarkable amount of labour involved in this ambitious project. I was blown away by the physical work, skill range and stamina demanded of the wardens, and the logistics. Heuer had to plan for everything from age, number, biological sex and genetics right down to rubber tubing for the animals’ horns so they would not gore one another during transport from Elk Island to Banff National Park. First Nations’ managerial and spiritual expertise with the buffalo were also integral to this project of ecological restoration and reconciliation. Heuer writes that when not sorting animals “I helped erect teepees, partook in pipe ceremonies and listened to prayers, speeches and songs to bless the animals and the upcoming transfer [from Treaty 6 to 7]…. Looking across the teepees and feeling the drumbeats of Native singers in my chest, I saw I was just a Parks Canada pawn in something much larger about to play out: the prophecy of bison returning from the sky and the mountains.” Anishinaabe writer Richard Wagamese characterized humility as “the ability to see yourself as an essential part of something larger. It is the act of living without grandiosity.” This sense of humility with which Heuer approached the world, allowing him to enter at times into profound relationship with the land, also finds ironic expression in his mildly self-deprecating humour about his role in parks bureaucracy and playing “poker” with wily bison.

Buffalo Lessons does not aspire to didacticism but to be a gift to those who come after in the same way as the buffalo are a gift to the land and the people who live here. Printed on FSC-certified glossy paper with lots of photographs of the bison and some of the wardens, including Heuer, who reintroduced the animals into their ancestors’ territory and witnessed how they transitioned to a free-roaming life in the mountains, this book represents only part of Karsten Heuer’s legacy of science, activism and commitment to the multispecies world we inhabit, whether we realize it or not. Buffalo are now living wild in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta!

Pamela Banting writes articles about park warden literature, multispecies studies and ecocriticism.

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by Ted Binnema, François Lanoë and Heinz W. Pyszczyk
University of Alberta Press
2025/$39.00/232 pP.

When it comes to navigating in unfamiliar terrain, today’s travellers have many options based on GPS systems. I’m a bit of a luddite with my boat anchor of an iPhone, but it does have the county map on it showing every quarter section of land, and landowner’s name, for miles around. If all else fails, I have topo maps for old school route finding, thanks to generations of cartographers who have plotted the entire country in a series of grids based on calculations of latitude and longitude. But in Cartographic Poetry we learn that Indigenous people, the Siksika and Gros Ventre, had a totally different way of navigating, based not on mathematical measurement but on landmarks, particularly rivers, that were, and are, of cultural, historical and spiritual significance. The authors note that “Poetry is language condensed: Siksika cartography is landscape distilled,” that is to say, not only landmarks but the history of a nation was distilled in the minds of the First Nations travellers and guides. Every river, every mountain, every buffalo jump was a living story in the mind of the people.

This was the mental cartography the early fur traders relied on, while exploring the west with Cree and other Indigenous guides. One notable explorer was Peter Fidler, a Hudson’s Bay Company surveyor and map maker. In 1792, guided by Sakatow and his band of Piikani, he made a winter journey from Buckingham House on the North Saskatchewan River south to the Oldman River gap. Nearly a decade later he established the short-lived HBC trading post of Chesterfield House, where he asked the Siksika leader Ac ko mak ki (Old Swan) to draw a map of the land south of the post, an area that at the time was a blank spot on European maps. Fidler, writes author Ted Binnema in one of his chapters, took great care in getting his guides to draw on paper the maps they held in their minds. Among explorers in that era, he “was unique in his systematic efforts to preserve and document Indigenous cartographic conventions.” Indeed, Cartographic Poetry contains a wealth of ethnographic detail on place names thanks to the meticulous care Fidler took with his Siksika and Gros Ventre informants.

The maps drawn for Fidler are very different from the European tradition of mapping. They are minimalist by necessity, since they would have been typically drawn in the snow, in sand or mud, or upon a piece of hide using charcoal or other medium. They show the Rockies, the “Back-Bone of the Earth” to the Piikani people, as a pair of double lines in Alberta bending east to the Musselshell River in Montana and then south again to the Big Horn Mountains. From it, the major rivers are drawn simply as lines leading out to the plains with the Indigenous names attached by Fidler. We are then shown their transition in Fidler’s hands to maps a fur trader might understand. Next, this Indigenous knowledge passes from the HBC to the famous British cartographer, Aaron Arrowsmith, for his 1802 map of North America. The authors point out that Fidler, if allowed, would have made a much better map than Arrowsmith. The latter, to “…make his depiction plausible to a western reader, invented sinuous river courses and confluences even though he had no evidence for them.” His map was relied on by Lewis and Clark for their much-ballyhooed continental transit in 1804 (which had already been done with zero fanfare by Alexander Mackenzie in 1793), but Arrowsmith’s map “…contributed nothing to the success of the Corps of Discovery.”

Today these maps “are priceless treasures,” write the authors. In publishing them they hope others will “become as fascinated by the maps, their authors and the territories they depict as we are.” With this respectful, evocative study, they have succeeded.

Sid Marty’s most recent book is Oldman’s River, which won the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize in 2024.

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edited by Jennifer Brady and Jacqui Gingras
UNIVERSITY OF REGINA PRESS
2025/$45.95/384 PP.

As an anthropologist-turned-doctor that cares for people who are at high risk of poor health outcomes yet also face the highest barriers to care, I found Changing Care: Advancing Social Justice in the Health Professions to be a lifeline. Edited by two Canadian feminist scholars—dietitian Jennifer Brady and sociologist Jacqui Gingras—the book is rich with subversive strategies, examples and practical tips demonstrating not only why but also how we can arrive at more socially just health and social care. The collection transcends discipline-based silos while challenging oppressive practices and structures. Drawing broadly on anthropology, nursing, social work, occupational therapy and more, the authors guide us through geographies traversing classrooms, clinics and communities from coast to coast.

Sarah L. Dobrowolski’s chapter, “Critical Rooting,” will resonate with those who feel that education of healthcare providers too often promotes a detached, scientific “gaze” while disregarding, in the name of objectivity, the practitioner’s own position vis-à-vis patients and clients. Dobrowolski describes how we can counter such habits by practising and teaching “critical reflexivity,” a “process of deepening our understanding of who we are and how we are in relationship with others.” This focus, she explains, better equips healthcare providers to create and sustain a collaborative, social justice-oriented practice.

“Documentation as a Tool for Oppressive Violence and Resistance,” a practical chapter by occupational therapists Marie-Lynn Grenier and Janna MacLachlan, challenges the myth of healthcare practitioner neutrality. How we document clinical encounters is identified as a “deeply political act” that wields “the potential to either sustain or resist dynamics of power and hegemony.” Moving quickly beyond theory, the bulk of the chapter workshops how to teach and model clinical charting and note-taking in a way “that includes the service user’s truth, affirms their rights and recognizes/honours world views other than the ones held by Western institutions.”

At the peak of the COVID-19 and drug poisoning epidemics, many jurisdictions in Canada were instructed, for fear of virus transmission, to cease rescue breathing and give only chest compressions when responding to an overdose. Communities where drug poisoning events were skyrocketing faced a terrible dilemma. My favourite chapter in Changing Care describes how a peer-led group in Toronto resisted this policy. In “The Right to Oxygen,” by Christian Hui, Nick Rondinelli and Samuel Lopez, voices of lived experience and expertise detail how non-medical responders were trained to use a hand-held mask in place of mouth-to-mouth rescue breathing. This both empowered community members and saved lives. The authors point out that “[g]iving lay responders more tools and options will make all the difference and is simply the right thing to do.” At that time in Calgary, a grassroots group I work with did the exact same thing. It was physically, mentally and emotionally taxing. Sometimes, it was heartbreaking. I am grateful to these authors for their tenacity in finding a way to care for their community under great strain, for demanding that policy makers take heed, and for reporting it here so others can learn from and be inspired by their knowledge and courage.

Although Changing Care is full of techniques that individual practitioners and small communities can apply to effect change, more attention could go to policy- and systems-level advocacy. Additionally, the editors acknowledge gaps regarding mental health, disability, non-binary and trans justice, but also declare their intention to address these issues in a second volume. If they do, I look forward to reading it. In the meantime, Changing Care is both a refreshing critique and practical guide for anyone who holds a stake in health and social care. That is, all of us.

Bonnie Larson is a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Calgary.

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by George Colpitts
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2026/$34.99/258 PP.

As European settlers pushed in greater numbers into the Canadian west in the early 20th century, they found huge numbers of fish in Alberta’s lakes, streams and rivers—and excellent sport fishing. But as the pressure on those fish populations grew and catches declined, sport fishermen turned to conservation. Their attempts to protect the rivers and streams—and the battle over whose  interests to prioritize—is the focus of George Colpitts’s newest book, Troubled Tributaries.

Colpitts is a professor at the University of Calgary who specializes in environmental history. His book tracks “anglers,” sport fishermen using rod and reel, who pulled major hauls from Alberta’s rivers before the First World War but then saw ever more people lining the banks. Colpitts tracks the different paths taken by local groups that sprang up to protect fishing holes or to lobby for the closure of specific streams and areas. In High River, for instance, a “massive, grassroots movement” emerged to protect the upstream “nursery” areas of the Highwood River to “guarantee a supply of fish” downstream near town. In contrast, in the coal mining area around Crowsnest Pass, where “fish was still a major staple in coal miners’ diets, poaching was rampant, and stream dynamiting common,” conservation-minded anglers pursued a more inclusive approach that included co-operation in conservation efforts. They even pushed for the use of hatcheries to help increase fish populations.

The introduction of the automobile brought major tensions between small-town anglers and their big-city counterparts. Calgary outdoors enthusiasts could now reach what were once secluded fishing spots, pulling out the best fish and leaving behind a mess. Protecting the fish from this onslaught was a major concern of local angler groups.

But other forces were at play, which we can better see now in hindsight. Around Crowsnest Pass, notes Colpitts, “the industrialization of the river threatened to wipe out cutthroat, mountain whitefish and especially the bull trout population.”

Largely missing from this narrative of fishing in the early 20th century are the voices of Indigenous people. That likely says less about narrative choices and more about the fact that settlers coming west paid scant attention to the Indigenous people they were quickly outnumbering and displacing.

What Colpitts brings to light is an early conservation debate and the way settlers viewed their new environment. While the narrative is at times dry, it’s still a fascinating look at what was considered important for conservation more than a century ago.

Justin Bell is a journalist in Edmonton.

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by Trina Moyles
KNOPF CANADA
2026/$36.00/328 PP.

Dear reader, first I have to tell you this is a biased book review. I met Trina Moyles in a non-fiction workshop for our Master of Fine Arts degrees, where she wrote a piece that discussed the stupidity of pheasant hunting. As someone who self-identifies as a pheasant hunter, I took great affront to this insult to both my heritage and my life calling. So, to counter her making fun of my life’s passions almost a decade ago (but I hold a grudge), I will tell you all about why you shouldn’t read her latest memoir, Black Bear.

When Trina was 5, her wildlife biologist father brought home an orphaned black bear cub before sending it south to the Calgary Zoo. This sparked her lifelong fascination with bears. When young, she also revered her older brother. But as they grew up, and he went to work in the oil patch and partied, this relationship grew difficult. If you like books that soft-pedal a delicately balanced conversation about addiction and the toll it can take on family relationships and dynamics, as well as how we can perhaps better understand those going through struggles, then don’t read this. Trina says she wasn’t sure who she understood less, her brother or the bear. Her writing about these relationships is provocative, yet tuned to moments of joy, and as the book unfolds you can see how thin is the line we all walk between heartbreak and love.

Don’t read this book if you like stories that seek to bridge the urban and rural divides of life in Alberta. Trina counters her upbringing in Peace River and the facets of life in a resource-extraction-driven town with her young adult years in Edmonton. But there’s not a lot of overlap. As someone who spent his formative years trying to be funny in Drayton Valley and then significantly less funny in Edmonton, I was brought back to the way the transition to the city can be jarring for those who know a very different style of life than an urban existence. To the book’s benefit, Trina doesn’t sugarcoat rural life but instead tells it like it is, allowing the reader to gather their own information about imposed machismo, the inherent fear and expected roles that women are often placed in, and the rampant abuse of booze and drugs that exists. But with all of that, Trina also shows the reader the beauty and complexity of the boreal forest and the characters, both human and bear, that inhabit it.

Throughout the book there’s a constant sense of impending climate catastrophe, whether that’s loss of wildlife, habitat, the changing weather systems, fires, human–wildlife conflict. Trina weaves her observations and research on these subjects into the personal narrative in a way that’s accessible yet articulate. She includes scientific terms but doesn’t twist the story to push an agenda. So, if you want a book that is thought-provoking and hard to put down, then I guess this might be your thing.

Trina is well known for her previous memoir, Lookout, about her experiences working in a fire tower in northern Alberta, scanning the forest through a spotting scope while also navigating challenges in her love life. Black Bear expands on that immersive experience but in a different way. Trina forms a relationship with a mother black bear and her cubs at the lookout tower. As I read about the similarities of that relationship to the one with her brother, I thought of my own past and the connections I probably misread. Maybe I misread that initial encounter with Trina and she didn’t actually make fun of pheasant hunting (she did). But maybe I was wrong about holding a grudge and you should definitely read Black Bear.

Conor Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian author in Edmonton. His novel Prairie Edge was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.

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by Dagmar Jamieson and Mark Rawleigh, Durvile & UpRoute Books, 2025

This work explores how blind and visually impaired people use artificial intelligence (AI) in their lives. Through essays from editors Dagmar Jamieson and Mark Rawleigh, four other contributors, and interviews conducted by Jamieson, we learn about smart glasses that can read documents and identify colours, GPS-enabled white canes, search engines that work better with screen readers, and how AI was used to edit sections of the book and design the cover. J.R. Rizzo’s essay on his experience testing and creating new technologies is notable. Generative AI “can be both practical and liberating,” he writes, but “incorrect information can be devastating if the user relies on it.” AI provides greater accessibility, but whether it can do so in an affordable, ethical and safe manner remains to be seen.

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, Scribner, 2025

From the early 2000s, “Apple used China as a base from which to become the world’s most valuable company,” writes journalist Patrick McGee, but “after years of Apple seemingly calling the shots, with Chinese provincial governments and suppliers bending over backward to win orders, the power dynamics have shifted.” McGee, who grew up in Calgary and is now a correspondent for The Financial Times, reveals shocking stats in this highly readable book. By 2015, for instance, Apple was investing $55-billion per year in China. It has paid off—in 2024 the company made $94-billion in net profit—but it has also come with a cost. As McGee shows, while helping China become the world’s leading manufacturer, Apple “bound its future inextricably to a ruthless authoritarian state.” “Beijing has allowed Apple to exploit its workers, so that China can in turn exploit Apple.”

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by Glen Hvenegaard, Jeremy Mouat and Heather J. Marshall
University of Alberta Press
2025/$32.99/280 PP.

The first book I ever bought with my own money was The Birds of Alberta, by Ray Salt and Albert Wilk. In 1959 it cost $5. What few bird books were then available focused more on eastern North America—and here was a comprehensive, hardcover illustrated guide to the birds of my home place. It was a game changer for an aspiring birder.

I never knew this newfound treasure was largely the product of a humble Alberta naturalist from the Camrose area: Frank Farley. Farley died in 1949, at the age of 79, but his data and observations served as the primary basis for the book, and his name should have been on the cover too. That’s okay, though: Farley’s contributions to our knowledge of Alberta’s nature and to conservation history have finally earned due credit with the publication of Frank Farley and the Birds of Alberta.

Written by Glen Hvenegaard, a professor of environmental science at the University of Alberta, Jeremy Mouat, a professor emeritus at the U of A, and freelance writer and graphic designer Heather J. Marshall, Farley’s biography stands out both for the depth and quality of the archival research that went into it and for the authors’ approach to building historical context. The latter makes it more than just a biography. It’s Frank Farley in the context of his times. After reading the book I felt like I still hadn’t quite connected with Farley as an actual person, but my understanding of the early years of ornithology and nature conservation in western Canada was now much deeper than before.

Farley grew up in an era when young naturalists collected eggs and shot birds they couldn’t identify. After moving from Ontario to central Alberta as a young man, his interests expanded to promoting ethical hunting practices and conserving bird habitat. The early 20th century was a time of unabashed boosterism and development; there seemed to be plenty of nature and no limits on enterprise. As a prominent businessman, Farley contributed to the fragmentation of Alberta nature even while being a strong voice for conservation and restraint. The authors do an exceptional job of exploring the degree to which Farley personified the cognitive dissonance of that era.

Miquelon Lake Provincial Park, between Edmonton and Camrose, is part of Farley’s legacy to Albertans. Noting its exceptional productivity for waterfowl, he decried the degree to which trigger-happy game hogs were exploiting it: “…it was a disgrace to civilized man, to see the piles of ducks that were shot and in a good many cases allowed to rot and spoil before they were taken away.” After Miquelon was finally designated a federal wildlife sanctuary in 1920, Farley was appointed as its guardian.

The town of Camrose hosts an annual purple martin festival to celebrate the abundant local population of these unique large swallows. As the birds dart overhead, they trace the signature of another conservation legacy across the sky. It was Farley who initiated the public awareness program and birdhouse projects that led to today’s abundance.

Conservation doesn’t happen by accident. If luck is involved, it’s the kind of luck that puts the right people in the right place at the right time. Frank Farley was one of those. This biography is a long overdue recognition of a man, and a time, that Alberta would do well to remember.

Kevin Van Tighem is the author of Understory: An Ecologist’s Memoir of Loss and Hope (RMB, 2025).

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by Merilyn Simonds
RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
2025/$35.00/272 pp.

Walking past me on the sidewalk, would you see me I mostly prefer to blend in, but the question struck me reading Walking with Beth, by Merilyn Simonds. Merilyn refers to her age as “Biblical three-score and ten.” I am not far behind. What do women “of a certain age” have to offer that the world should take notice of Merilyn’s answer: plenty.

Part memoir, part philosophical treatise on aging, part celebration of later life and the cohorts we are lucky enough to have by our side on that journey, Merilyn’s book invites us along on her walks with her friend Beth (Elizabeth) Robinson, whose colourful passions and no-nonsense reflections as a centenarian brand her a quiet radical. Many of those walks happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the book reminds us that the world of COVID-19 was (is?) justifiably frightening, especially for the most vulnerable.

Walking outdoors in and around Kingston, Ontario, became a safe and welcome escape for Merilyn and Beth. Over three years, their far-reaching conversations on those regular walks ultimately give the reader insight into “what the view is like from here… looking forward” from the ages of 70+ and 100+.

On one walk they discuss “retirement,” which Merilyn describes as carrying a “whiff of solitude, of separation from active life, of defeat.” Beth pushes back against the word. “Not retirement but re-engagement. Not working for economic survival but taking up activities that stir the soul. Not giving up but striding forward.”

Merilyn Simonds is a Governor General’s Award finalist who has authored 20 books, including personal essay, memoir, travel, literary fiction and creative non-fiction. Her writing is exquisite. Writers and oral storytellers alike will relate to her description of the human need for narrative. “This is how we fashion stories,” she writes, “weaving together the slender threads of what is known with what we imagine, what we hope.”

Estimates for 2025 suggest that of Alberta’s 65+ population, 54 per cent are women. And our numbers are growing. Beth has lessons to offer us on aging well: “We all need to take care of ourselves physically and emotionally. And we all need a passion that is our own. How can we navigate a journey that pushes and pulls at us as hard as life does, unless we can imagine?”

Will Walking with Beth appeal to a younger demographic, such as women under 30 If they are helping their parents manoeuvre through a later life landscape, perhaps. If not, they’ll be keen to snatch up this book when they come face to face with their own mortality. Which is as certain as the requirement for them to file an income tax return for 2025.

Doreen Vanderstoop is the author of Watershed (Freehand).

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by Lorne Fitch
ROCKY MOUNTAIN BOOKS
2025/$25.00/352 pp.

Barry Lopez makes the case, in The Rediscovery of North America, that in the wake of the rampage of greed and violence unleashed by Christopher Columbus and his men in their search for wealth, subsequent waves of European settlers of “the New World” followed his tone rather than learn about the land and its peoples. Lopez argues that because settlers still know little about Turtle Island, we could embark upon a grand project of learning who has been here all along and thereby give new dimensions of clarity and meaning to our lives.

Biologist Lorne Fitch’s new book, Conservation Confidential, both calls for this kind of Ecological Literacy 101 and provides a “manual” for such an imaginary course on how to live a good life in Alberta. Writing in the tradition of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and Stan Rowe’s Home Place and Earth Alive, Fitch wrestles with the problem of how to awaken people with “buttons for eyes” (as naturalist John Burroughs wrote) to the power of the natural world. He laments the effects of “shifting baseline syndrome”—whereby only elders remember and old photos record natural abundance (e.g., deafening levels of birdsong, epic fishing)—while later generations assume that extirpation, scarcity and their own lack of experience with wild animals and plants is the way it has always been.

Particularly in the first half of the book, Conservation Confidential is a fishing tackle box spilling over with tantalizing knowledge about cutthroat trout, bison, magpies and more. Did you know, for instance, that along creeks in Alberta, “A five-centimetre-deep mat of plant roots provides 20,000 times more erosion protection than unvegetated stream banks”?

Some of the later essays trace mitigation and restoration projects, including the lengthy processes of negotiation with multiple levels and departments of government. While at first I longed for the natural history of the first half, I soon became re-engaged by stories about the dedication and teamwork of biologists, hydrologists and a gifted backhoe operator in the restoration of the Cascade River, not only to prevent future inundations of human infrastructure but also to support the fish. Full of aphorisms and colourful extended metaphors, the essays are engaging and inspiring, especially in terms of what can be accomplished through collaboration, not by individuals alone. As Fitch shows, knowledge of place includes conservation awareness, scientific, historical and geographical information, aesthetic appreciation and a culturally shared, collective project of attending not just to who we are but where we are in the land.

Pamela Banting teaches nature writing at the U of C.

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by Janna Klostermann
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
2025/$24.95/188 pp.

Janna Klostermann’s new book, At the Limits of Care, comes at a necessary time. The book looks at the lived experiences of careworkers, who even after the COVID-19 pandemic remain unappreciated for their work. Klostermann, a sociology professor at the University of Calgary, drew upon her graduate research for this book, in which early on she writes candidly of her time working at L’Arche, an international non-profit organization of communities that provide support to people with developmental disabilities. It was this work, and the experiences of hard, underpaid labour and structural challenges (defined now as “moral injury”) that contributed to a deterioration in her mental health and to leaving the agency, and the work, behind.

Motivated by her experience at L’Arche, Klostermann went on to study the conditions in which careworkers labour, focusing in particular on the intersection of carework with gender. Many carework jobs, such as in the non-profit sector and healthcare, are female-coded, and the work is undervalued and underpaid. Some of the interview participants she spoke to for her research (described in the book) are open about their experiences, while others are hesitant and fearful to speak. In non-profit organizations that provide services to people with developmental disabilities, nearly all the jobs are non-union and are done mainly by women and immigrants. I also began my social work career in this field and heard stories from many careworkers about the fear they had in advocating for themselves—stories of being given the most challenging clients and of work visas “mysteriously” unrenewed.

At the Limits of Care still has traces of the academic thesis it came from, with passages on methodology that the average reader might glide through. Those readers would benefit from absorbing the whole. Klostermann’s narrative voice is strong and has authority, and the process-on-process structure of the book is key, I think, to its central concern. Carework is personal, situated in relationship and in the body. How do we keep those values of care and service, however they are defined, she asks, while not exploiting the people who provide it?

By the book’s end, I couldn’t stop wondering—I still am—what comes next. Klostermann imagines possibilities of how we might redefine carework to make it more equitable. I fear, however, that the careworker’s experiences of burnout relayed in detail in the book leave little room for hope. Greater recognition of carework is needed. And maybe, for myself and anyone involved with carework—all of us, really—it’s about reckoning with that word “limits.”

Bryn Evans is a writer and social worker in Calgary.

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