We live in a pretty big country. Including land and sea territory, Canada covers 9.98 million square kilometres. That’s a vast territory consisting of thousands of ecosystems each with its own operational quirks, patterns and idiosyncrasies. These ecosystems and the landscapes that encompass them cycle on timescales that can reach far beyond a mere couple of centuries. In surveying the scale of recent Canadian land-use (residential, agricultural, forestry, mining, etc.) and the relative swiftness with which that land-use has pervaded the landscape, it can be tempting to attribute this expansion to technological advances and the “superiority” of modern land management. But this notion of “frontier”-ism, or the primacy of the recent past fails to acknowledge that this vast territory and its multitude of ecosystems were already well understood by the…