The Island Lecture Series February lecture features a lecture by Dr. Ed MacDonald (History): The Goose and the Golden Egg: The Environmental Turn in Island Tourism, 1970-1990. The lecture will be held Tuesday, February 18, 2020, at 7 p.m. in the SDU Main Building Faculty Lounge on the UPEI campus.  

Tourism has always traded on Prince Edward Island's pastoral landscape 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. At 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 decade 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.

Dr. Edward MacDonald teaches in the History Department at UPEI. His research focus is the social, cultural, and environmental history of Prince Edward Island. Along with Josh MacFadyen and 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).