Interweaving geography, biology and resource economics with history, this is a deft examination of the Strait of Georgia from the 1850s to the modern era. It is not mere coincidence that two-thirds of the population of British Columbia occupies lands bordering its great inland sea, the Strait of Georgia, and connected waterways collectively known as the North Salish Sea. Averaging forty kilometres in width and stretching some three hundred kilometres from Vancouver and Victoria in the south to Powell River and Campbell River in the north, the North Salish Sea has long sheltered a bounty of habitable lands and rich maritime resources ideal for human settlement. While the region's intricate shoreline of peninsulas, promontories, estuaries and plains has been occupied by human communities for millennia, the last century and a half has been an unprecedented age of rapid colonization, industrialization and globalization. Many books have been written about individual communities and industries around the great waterway, but none have examined the region as a geographical unit with its own dynamic systems, which can best be understood as an interrelated whole.