The Last Great Forest: Japanese Multinationals and Alberta's Northern Forests.

Local/global issues lie at the heart of contemporary analyses of environmental issues, analyses which frequently focus on regional economic, political, cultural and scientific concerns. A thriving avenue for research into these issues is historical regional studies, of which Larry Pratt's and Ian Urquhart's extraordinary book is exemplary.

The book's title, The Last Great Forest: Japanese Multinationals and Alberta's Northern Forests, provides topical immediacy, the social and ecological locale, and the key political and economic interactions of concern. The central point of the book, however, is that the character of the state and the form, content and interplay of interests within public decision-making together determine the development, sustainability and social character of nature. The authors focus on the state's mediation of economic processes, social movements …