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In this article, I trace the tangled relationships between law, nature, and empire as they figure in Canadian national geographies, imagined and real. While the nature-culture dichotomy has long been contested by cultural geographers, anthropologists, and historians, to date, socio-legal scholars and legal theorists have spent less time problematizing the law-nature distinction. With the exception of natural law, law and nature are commonly perceived to be opposing and ontologically distinct. In this article, I argue that law, nature, and empire have overlapping genealogies that demand critical attention. Law and nature, I contend, are ontologically related categories that shape the Canadian nation by working in and through each other. While both are prominent symbols in the national imaginary, real spaces of nature - wilderness landscapes, including parks - are also legal constructs that normalize nature as law's constitutive exterior and as the nation's myth of (empty) origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study that discussed the historical development of the British Columbia community college, university college, and institute system through the influence of the three dichotomies. Review of the literature of the North American context; Discussion of the research design and methods used in the study; Findings from the British Columbia literature and the interviews; Conclusions of the study.