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list price: $16.95
edition:Hardcover
also available: eBook
category: Nature
published: Sep 2008
ISBN:9781897522103
publisher: RMB | Rocky Mountain Books

The Weekender Effect

Hyperdevelopment in Mountain Towns

by Robert William Sandford

tagged: mountains, regional planning
Description

Praise for The Weekender Effect:

 

What happens to paradise when you carve it up into lots and sell it? Bob Sandford writes about it with clarity and a deep love of the places he knows so well. Sandford's story of one town's mutation from a quiet mountain haven to an overcrowded, generic 'outpost of globalization' is essential reading for those who care about community and our last few glorious spaces. —Thomas Wharton, author of Icefields, Salamander and The Logogryph

 

Equal parts manifesto, meditation, and love song to mountain communities everywhere, this calmly passionate book belongs in every house, condo, tent and backpack in the mountain West and on university courses on nature writing, the environment, community, citizenship, sense of place, human geography and many more. This is essential reading for anyone who lives in, lusts after or loves the mountains. —Pamela Banting, President, Association for Literature, the Environment and Culture in Canada

 

As cities continue to grow at unprecedented rates, more and more people are looking for peaceful, weekend retreats in mountain or rural communities. More often than not, these retreats are found in and around resorts or places of natural beauty. As a result, what once were small towns are fast becoming mini cities, complete with expensive housing, fast food, traffic snarls and environmental damage, all with little or no thought for the importance of local history, local people and local culture.

 

The Weekender Effect is a passionate plea for considered development in these bedroom communities and for the necessary preservation of local values, cultures and landscapes.

About the Author

Robert William Sandford

Robert Sandford is the EPCOR Chair of the Canadian Partnership Initiative in support of the United Nations "Water for Life" Decade and also sits on the Advisory Committee for the prestigious Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy. He is a director of the Western Watersheds Climate Research Collaborative; an associate of the Centre for Hydrology at the University of Saskatchewan and a fellow of the Biogeoscience Institute at the University of Calgary. As well, he sits on the advisory board of Living Lakes Canada and is co-chair of the Forum for Leadership on Water and a member of the Advisory Panel for the RBC Blue Water Project. In 2011, he was invited to be an advisor on water issues by the InterAction Council, a global public policy think tank composed of more than 20 former national leaders, including Jean Chrétien, Bill Clinton, and Vicente Fox.

Robert is the author of some 20 books on the history and heritage of the Canadian mountain West, including Ecology and Wonder in the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site (AU Press, 2010), Water, Weather and the Mountain West (RMB, 2007), Restoring the Flow: Confronting the World's Water Woes (RMB, 2009) and Ethical Water: Learning to Value What Matters Most (RMB, 2011). He lives in Canmore, Alberta.

Editorial Reviews

Sandford takes a refreshingly positive spin on the future of these communities. Current trends in land development threaten the integrity and value of these communities, he acknowledges, but all is not lost if we can learn from the recent history of the "Mountain West."—Jeremy Derksen, Vue Weekyl


I agree that The Weekender Effect is a passionate plea, and a good one. While it does focus on North America’s Mountain West, its lessons are transferable, especially the contemplation of just what is "sense of place"—does it still exist, and if so, how can we foster it and use it as a tool to conserve what unique rural communities and values we have left? The Weekender Effect should be compulsory reading for anyone planning to leave their city life and head for the hills to secure their"place in the woods."—The Mountain Library blog


Making oneself at home in a place takes time, and will be achieved not by attempting to seal oneself off from change, but by working with others to discuss, develop and implement a form of community that is both flexible and resilient. It is this underlying ethos that makes The Weekender Effect necessary reading.—Jenny Kerber, The Goose

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