knowledge were considered intrinsic and valuable?” (p. 94). Claire Campbell points to a Canadian addiction to wilderness, or at least the concept of the frontier, as a hobby that leads to shopping malls where one can purchase a “wilderness identity” (p. 179). As the book pulls and pushes at the nature of Canada and Canadian identity, it illus- trates clearly our founding fiction was that “economics is more im- portant than ecology” (p. 118). This lesson has not yet been learned as Canada continues to grapple with biodiversity loss and climate change. The book hits on the many themes and ideas first explored by Harold Innis. All the familiar narratives around hydroelectricity, min- ing, fur trading, and resource extraction are present in The Nature of Canada. There are a few surprising essays, such as the one on patho- gens and another on gender, which feel like misfits but are important for exactly that reason. Canada needs to expand its understanding of its own nature. Ultimately, the book is a celebration of Canadian en- vironmental history, in all its ugliness. Many questions about the pre- sent, and even more about the future, are unanswered and uncertain. This is why there is no conclusion in the book. There are instead six- teen unnumbered essays that “teach us how to learn” and provide a vivid portrait of our “place in time” (p. 349). Andrea Olive University of Toronto doi: 10.1093/envhis/emz107 A History of Silence: From the Renaissance to the Present Day. By Alain Corbin. Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. viii þ 156 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. Cloth $64.95, paper $19.95. A History of Silence includes consistently engaging philosophical mus- ings that provide several diverse meanings for silence within the west- ern canon. Alain Corbin, within his seminal The Foul and the Fragrant (Harvard, 1988) and Village Bells (Columbia, 1998), set the outlines for the study of the sensorium within diverse historical environ- ments. Following phenomenological analysis from Maurice Merleau- Ponty, the sociology of Georg Simmel, and later anthropologists who articulated the cultural construction of sensation, Corbin became one of the foundational scholars for the current field of sensory studies. In recent years, Corbin had entered into more popular fields, Environmental History 25 (April 2020) 402 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article/25/2/402/5762768 by University of California, Los Angeles user on 08 August 2020