This Land I Love: Waterloo County: 05/12/17

In January my husband spent ten days in the Kitchener-Waterloo area of Ontario to interview for a job transfer. As it was looking pretty serious (in that we would have moved starting this May had the company as a whole re-organized it's headcount) I asked him to get some books on the area — of the sort we wouldn't be able to find here in California.

This Land I Love: Waterloo County by Carl Hiebert is one of the books he brought home, purchased from KW Bookstore. He chose it for two main reasons: it's a photography book and it features aerial shots of the surrounding countryside (to answer the question of what does the area look like).

At first glance the book is a compilation of landscape photographs taken form an ultralight plane of regional municipality of Waterloo (which contains the cities of Cambridge, Kitchener, and Waterloo, as well as the townships of Woolwich, Wilmot, Wellesley, and North Dumfries. The photographs cover the landscape over the different seasons, with the emphasis being on farmlands.

The text though, fills in the story behind these photographs and the farms. These are Mennonite farms and the stories are from people from two of the more conservative groups. The author explains at the close of the book that there are four distinct communities, plus a transplanted Amish community, but he chose to take stories from the two most conservative, as they are struggling with increasing land prices and the growing number of tourists who purposely seek them out as entertainment.

The photographs are beautiful and the text painted a portrait of the area I would otherwise not have known.

Five stars

Comments (2)

Comment #1: Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 11:12:54

Dragonfly

I always wondered how Amish community felt about getting so much attention from tourists :(

Comment #2: Tuesday, May 16, 2017 at 13:24:00

Pussreboots

A necessary evil, more and more. Land prices and farm equipment prices are rising faster than food and livestock prices. More and more the gap in what they earn vs what they need is being filled with tourism money. But would you want to be a tourist attraction? I know, I wouldn't.