Abstract
In her short story Silence, Alice Munro tells us about a woman in British Columbia who loses her husband and her daughter. The husband, a fisherman, heads out one morning when the waters of the bay on which the family lived were hardly choppy. A storm strikes and, by the time the fury ends close to midnight, three boats have been lost, including the husband’s. All on board are drowned. Although Munro never gives us the reasons for the daughter’s disappearance, we learn that she is still alive and has become a mother. After her husband’s death, the wife, the story’s main character, moves from the small fishing town in coastal British Columbia to Vancouver. In a short passage, only loosely related to the general progress of the narrative, Munro describes her character’s thoughts on this move:
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- 1.
Alice Monro. 2004. Runaway – Stories. Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 335 p.
- 2.
See David Satterthwaite, Gordon McGranahan, and Cecilia Tacoli. 2010. Urbanization and its implications for food and farming. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 365, 2809–2820. Different references provide slightly different numbers but the general pattern is the same for all of them.
- 3.
See references in Edward Glaeser. 2011. Triumph of the City. Penguin Books, New York. 338 p., Wikipedia entry for Vancouver.
- 4.
Woolsey, Matt (24 August 2007). “World’s Most Overpriced Real Estate Markets”. Forbes. See also links in Wikipedia entry for Vancouver.
- 5.
Day, J., J. Gunn, W. Folan, A. Yanez, and B. Horton. 2012. The influence of enhanced post-glacial coastal margin productivity on the emergence of complex societies. The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, 7, 23–52.
- 6.
We will come back to the topic of peak oil in Chap. 7.
- 7.
See Chap. 4.
- 8.
Wendell Berry. 1972. A Continuous Harmony – Essays Cultural and Agricultural. Shoemaker and Hoard, Washington, DC.
- 9.
Edward Glaeser. 2011. Triumph of the City. Penguin Books, New York, 338 p.
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Day, J.W., Hall, C. (2016). Introduction. In: America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions. Copernicus, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3243-6_1
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