Island Lecture Series presents: the environmental turn in Island tourism

The February presentation in the Island Lecture Series features Dr. Edward MacDonald speaking about tourism and the environment. The lecture will be held Tuesday, February 18, at 7 pm in the Faculty Lounge of UPEI’s SDU Main Building.

Tourism has always traded on Prince Edward Island’s pastoral landscapes and pristine beaches, but as the old summer trade became mass tourism in the 1970s, promoters and planners began to worry that uncontrolled development would kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Around the same time, advocates of the Island’s natural landscape began to argue that the Island's “wilderness” was a tourist asset that should be promoted. Promotion and protection made uneasy bedfellows during the decades of the 1970s and ’80s. This lecture, based on a forthcoming history of Island tourism, will explore the sometimes controversial connection between tourism and the environment.

MacDonald teaches in the history department at UPEI. His research focus is the social, cultural, and environmental history of Prince Edward Island. Along with Dr. Josh MacFadyen and Dr. Irene Novaczek, he is co-editor of Time and A Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island, co-published by Island Studies Press and McGill-Queen’s University Press. The best known of his seven books is If You’re Stronghearted: Prince Edward Island in the 20th Century (October 2000).

Admission to the lecture is free. Everyone is welcome. For more information, please contact Laurie at iis@upei.ca or 902-894-2881.