1 ON A SUNNY THURSDAY, AFTER A LONG WEEK of conferencing, their local hosts loaded the word-weary delegates into carriages and took them from Charlottetown on a day-long excursion across the tumbled green hills of Queen’s County to the North Shore of Prince Edward Island. After drinking in the handsome countryside and savouring the gulf breezes on the northern coast, they hurried back to Charlottetown to dress for a conference-ending banquet featuring local delicacies. It was 8 September 1864. With the heavy lifting of nation-building behind them, the Fathers of Confederation were playing tourist.1

2 For nearly a century and a half, its pastoral landscape has permeated the tourist appeal of Canada’s smallest province – Prince Edward Island – and shaped its cultural identity. Within the meta-landform of Canada, historically defined in terms of harsh extremes of climate and geography, Prince Edward Island is an anomaly – not only because of its small scale, but also its absent "wilderness"; roughly 95 per cent of the land mass is arable land that has at some point been cleared for farming. Nowhere, as poet Milton Acorn famously wrote, "is there a spot not measured by hands."2 Promoters have long played on that geographic difference.3 But the nexus of culture, environment, and tourism is, of course, far more complex than a glib grab bag of catchphrases can suggest. Even as the landscape created by settlement simultaneously reflected and molded Island culture, both, in turn, were refracted by the tourist lens.

3 Tourism promotion on the island began in the 19th century by extolling the health benefits of salt-sea breezes for well-heeled travellers fleeing the summer swelter of urban America. By the interwar period, tourism marketing had begun to equate the Arcadian landscape created by European colonization with a pre-industrial, rural culture. Tourism marketing could thus eulogize the consequence of economic stagnation as a restorative, antimodernist escape from North Americans’ urban-industrial angst.4 As the postwar tourism industry expanded and professionalized, it increasingly commodified the visitor experience in a manner that arguably trivialized the complexities of both the pastoral landscape and the culture associated with it. Meanwhile, the same modernizing trends that drove tourism to package Prince Edward Island fundamentally altered the reality of what was being promoted to visitors even as tourism imaging arguably began to blur Islanders’ own perceptions of themselves and their society.

4 As the new millennium unfolded, both pastoral landscape and pastoral identity faced a new challenge as economic pressures drove the farmers that fostered them both out of business. With less than four per cent of the Island population actually living on farms by 2006, there was a widening disjunction between tourism image and lived experience in the "Garden Province."5 The new realities stretched ever thinner the plausibility of a marketing message rooted in an agrarian landscape.

5 At 566,572 hectares (roughly 1.4 million acres), Prince Edward Island is only one-tenth the size of the next smallest Canadian province. Its heavily indented coastline measures about 224 kilometres from tip to tip along the crescent curve of its northern coast, while its width varies from six to forty-eight kilometers. To the casual observer, the uniformity of the Island landscape is as striking as its difference from the geography of the adjacent mainland. There are no significant natural barriers within the province. For the most part it is gently rolling hill country – more arable than fertile, but well adapted for farming and grazing.6 Variable weather and the volatile blend of maritime and continental climates can make winter and spring on Prince Edward Island challenging, and wintertime isolation has, until recent times, intensified the sense of otherness created by islandness. But the insistent sea breezes typically take the edge off the summer’s heat and, in general, the summer and fall are highly seductive seasons.7

6 Ten thousand years of Amerindian occupation made little imprint on the environment but, after 1720, steadily increasing European settlement radically transformed the Island landscape. By 1891 the population topped 109,000 people, drawn overwhelmingly from four ethnic groups (Scots, Irish, English, and Acadian) and spread out more or less evenly across the landscape. Thereafter, the limited carrying capacity of the Island economy prompted a sustained period of out-migration that bottomed out the provincial population at approximately 86,000 inhabitants in the mid-1920s. Afterwards, the numbers slowly increased.8

7 European settlement patterns by 1860s had largely cleared the Island of the Acadian forest cover of the pre-contact period. The colony still had its share of pioneer, stump-filled clearings, but long-settled areas already presented the "patchwork quilt" farmscape that would be eulogized by so many 20th-century writers. There might be wilderness of a sort – woodland and sand dunes, marshland and peat bog – but there was little that was "wild." All bore the visible marks of human intervention. Certainly, there was nothing in the landscape that met the aesthetic standard of the Romantic or the sublime. Instead, it was widely perceived as a garden, a trope profligately employed by travel writers and, later, tourism promoters.9 That garden was crosshatched with small, mixed farms, most nursing their own little woodlot and many with views across water. It was, in other words, a working landscape – a landscape dotted with the figures that had created it and who now toiled to wrest a living from it. There was nothing in it to inspire awe, yet it had a subtle appeal for visitors as the Island’s first tourism marketers soon discovered.

8 "This Island is becoming a very favourite summer resort for Canadians," S.E. Dawson noted approvingly in 1884.10 In fact, the first tourist resorts had begun appearing in the late 1860s. Most were relatively modest establishments. The more ambitious of them had paid for engravings in J.H. Meacham’s Illustrated Historical Atlas of Prince Edward Island in 1880.11 While individual resorts might thus advertise, concerted tourism promotion took longer to materialize. In the final decades of the 19th century, traffic-hungry railway and steamship lines began to produce guidebooks that included sections on Prince Edward Island. As the need to promote the Island to prospective visitors, immigrants, and investors became more apparent to Islanders, both the private sector and the state stepped in. By the turn of the century, the provincial government had begun publishing a promotional tract, Prince Edward Island: Garden Province of Canada, and both Charlottetown and Summerside soon opened information bureaus. In 1904 the province contributed $500 to the Charlottetown-based Development and Tourism Association, which set an important precedent.12 Thereafter, despite some false starts, faint hearts, and occasional cross-purposes, the private and public sector would partner in promoting the Island to tourists and tourism to Islanders.

9 There were two strands to early Island tourism. Out-migration had produced a growing supply of expatriate Islanders with a powerful homing instinct.13 Since they generally stayed with relatives their economic impact was limited, but they came largely without coaxing. The challenge was to lure the second kind of summer visitor – wealthy North Americans who could spare the time and the expense for summer travel. Without the benefit of polls or market research, early tourism promotion took aim at their real and imagined needs. In the process, Prince Edward Island gradually discovered the essence of its tourism appeal.

10 What was the attraction? In the beginning, climate mattered more than culture or even landscape. The Island’s salt air and cooling breezes made it a healthy antidote to the smothering heat of urban North America. It should come as no surprise to find that most of the early tourism resorts were located on or near the seacoast, although it would take time to confirm the shore of choice as the northern coastline of central Prince Edward Island, locally known as the "North Shore." "The majority of the tourists," observed W.H. Crosskill’s Handbook of Prince Edward Island in 1906, "go to the North Shore – the concave side of this sun-kissed crescent – to revel in the surf and strong air of that famous region."14

11 For an island to exploit the intersection – even if undramatic – of sea and land was as natural as it was useful. Of course, many places could boast seashore and cool breezes. Prince Edward Island’s shoreline had the added virtue of being user-friendly. It was sandy, easily accessed, more or less sunny, and generally fog-free. It was also pretty. And unlike the resort meccas along the eastern seaboard of America, it was uncrowded and uncommercialized.

12 The beach is a borderland between sea and land and, in the end, the attraction of the Island’s shoreline was subtly shaped by both. To reach the shore on Prince Edward Island meant traversing the province’s gently rolling farm country. Its Old World, garden-variety beauty had long helped to define visitors’ experiences, and pastoral images had consistently dominated early travel accounts and early promotional literature. Now, as the 20th century unfolded, tourism, like an invading army, moved off the beach and headed inland towards the pastoral vision of the rural landscape. Henceforth, both land and sea would figure largely in tourism promotion.

13 It was the spirit of that pastoral landscape that L.M. Montgomery captured so memorably in the descriptive prose of her internationally acclaimed children’s novels, beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables.15 For many readers, the evocation of setting was part of the allure of Montgomery’s books.16 Like Montgomery herself, her Island protagonists were inextricably connected to place. The Island itself – that is, Montgomery’s stylized version of it – becomes almost a character in her stories. Thus, the initial encounter between heroine and Island home is invariably auspicious. Consider Anne Shirley’s first glimpse of Avonlea:

13 Emily Byrd Starr has a similar revelation when she comes to New Moon: "The old pasture ran before her in a succession of little green blossoms right down to the famous Blair Water – an almost perfectly round pond, with grassy, sloping, treeless margins. Beyond it was the Blair Water valley, filled with homesteads, and further out to the great sweep of the white capped gulf. It seemed to Emily’s eyes a charming land of green shadows and blue waters."18 And, finally, Jane of Lantern Hill wakes to a revelation of her new home:

13 In Anne of the Island, the twinning of person and place is embedded right in the title. As the novel opens, Anne and her "kindred spirit," Diana Barry, look out on Avonlea:

13 Rhapsodic descriptions such as this – there are hundreds of examples – are far more than scenic window-dressing. They speak to a landscape that Montgomery had absorbed deep into her imagination and then poured into her prose.

14 Montgomery’s novels provide two refuges for readers: one is a terrain of human relationships where happiness and happy endings are possible while the other is a physical landscape where beauty flourishes and is shielded. For Montgomery, as for her characters, the Island provided a physical and emotional haven. A note of longing suffuses the much-quoted passage from her 1939 essay on her home province: "Peace! You never know what peace is until you walk on the shores or in the fields or along the winding red roads of Abegweit on a summer twilight when the dew is falling and the old stars are peeping out and the sea keeps it nightly tryst with the little land it loves. You find your soul then . . . you realize that youth is not a vanished thing but something that dwells forever in the heart."21 Here was a place that was at the same time real and intensely imagined, a projection of Montgomery’s own needs.

15 Montgomery’s spirit of place clearly touched a chord with many readers. Within a decade of the appearance of Anne of Green Gables, even as Montgomery dutifully churned out new variants on the familiar formula, Anne tourism had begun. It had two overlapping components: tourists seeking sites associated with Anne and tourists seeking the Prince Edward Island that had enraptured her. "You ask in your letter if ‘Cavendish has become a place of pilgrimage for my admirers?’" L.M. Montgomery wrote her Scottish friend G.B. MacMillan in February 1928. "Alas, yes. . . . Cavendish is being over-run and exploited and spoiled by mobs of tourists."22 It is seldom entirely clear when Montgomery was being disingenuous in her reaction to celebrity, both for herself and the community she had fictionalized. Although she professed to feel that Anne tourism demeaned her private landscapes, clippings in Montgomery’s scrapbooks carefully charted its rise.23 But in such comments one also glimpses a counter-narrative to the "touristification" of the landscape that her novels celebrated. This comment to MacMillan came around the same time that she had begun to notice a visible decline in the "real" Cavendish of her own youth. After a trip home in July 1924, Montgomery confided in her journal: "Cavendish is getting so shabby. Almost all the houses are unpainted and dowdy. Times are hard, of course, but I fear there are other reasons – indifference, the dying out of the old families."24 Even as she was expressing her reluctance to share "her" Cavendish with tourists, Montgomery was lamenting its passing. Whether tourists noticed the difference is questionable.

16 It took tourism promoters a while to catch up with the trend, but when Montgomery returned to Cavendish for a visit in the fall of 1929 – she had been living in Ontario since 1911 – she found signboards erected by the provincial government pointing the way to "Avonlea Beach" and "Green Gables." "It seems of no use," she reflected in her journal, "to protest that it is not ‘Green Gables’ — that Green Gables was a purely imaginary place."25 But then, arguably, so was her version of Prince Edward Island.

17 Even as Montgomery pondered the cult of literary celebrity,26 two other trends were sharpening the landscape focus of Island tourism. The advent of the automobile, delayed for a decade on Prince Edward Island by a legislative ban, was transforming tourism on Prince Edward Island by the 1920s just as it had tourism across the developed world. Travelling by ship and train, earlier generations of tourists had tended to settle in one place for extended vacations. The automobile liberated travel by multiplying tourists’ potential destinations. At the same time, it altered the way the landscape was encountered. It made the journey itself – the act of sightseeing – a more central part of the tourist experience. Lack of all-weather roads would for decades limit the automobile’s impact on local community and culture, but since most visitors travelled in the summer, when the Island’s clay roads were the least objectionable, the automobile opened up the whole rural landscape to the "tourist gaze."27 From the 1920s on, in steadily increasing numbers, tourist autos fanned out across the province.28

18 Auto tourism meant closer encounters with people as well as places. In the process, Island tourism gained a new dimension. Picturesque land and sea now defined – and were defined by – another attraction: the Island’s picturesque culture. For the Island was not only rural; it was rustic and, as the Island economy trailed further and further behind in the "march of progress" (the provincial economy would unintentionally skip straight from a pre-industrial to a post-industrial phase), its people would appear more and more rustic compared to urban, industrial North Americans. As Ian McKay has provocatively argued with respect to Nova Scotia, middle class promoters transformed failure to progress into an antimodernist virtue in the interwar period, and marketed a pseudo-authentic "folk" to visitors.29 For its part, instead of being "behind the times," Island culture was now promoted as being somehow "out of time" – its people the stewards of old-fashioned, authentic virtues.30 The long-established literary trope of the "island" as escape or haven was not invoked in the literature, but wa everywhere implicit; that Prince Edward Island society was physically and culturally self-contained only added to its particularity. The text of the first Official Motoring Guide of Prince Edward Island (1928), for instance, emphasized to tourists that Prince Edward Island was "pre-eminently a land of refreshing rest where the visitor can escape the rush and noise of every day life, for, though in daily touch with the outside world, it is protected by its insular position."31 Writing in the 1920s, geographer F.A. Stilgenbauer estimated that 70 per cent of Islanders had never been off-Island. "Many rural folks have never been out of their community," he claimed, "and very rarely can they tell the visitor much about distant communities."32 When Will R. Bird toured the province three decades later, he, too, remarked on the marked sense of otherness he found there: "Nowhere on earth are there good folk who can compare with Islander for clannishness and an attitude in general that almost makes them a race apart. . . . You sense that in their heart of hearts they feel sorry for your hard luck in not being born on the Island."33

19 Here, too, L.M. Montgomery’s writings played a role. They portrayed a pre-industrial, rural society – an idealized escape for angst-ridden urbanites. Montgomery, whose private journals often showed more affection for Cavendish than its people, nevertheless ennobled Islanders. "Perhaps change comes more slowly in Prince Edward Island than elsewhere," she reflected in a 1939 essay. "We are not hide-bound or overly conservative but we do not rush madly after new fads and fashions because they are new. . . . Loyal and upright in dealing, hospitable . . . oh, how hospitable! . . . with a sense of responsibility and a little decent reserve still flowering fully on the fine Old Country stock."34

20 The promotional literature produced by the province’s tourism promoters may have lacked the famous writer’s appeal (or her intensity), but it worked from the same script.35 At the same time as Montgomery was eulogizing Islanders’ becoming blend of hospitality and restraint, the promotional tract for 1939, Prince Edward Island: Vacationland of Heart’s Content, was inviting visitors to escape to yesterday: "Here you will find sun and surf and wholesome food, and all the simple enjoyments that afford complete relaxation from the geared-up turmoil of modern life in the great cities. Here you will find an old-fashioned spirit of hospitality and a sincere welcome among a sturdy, friendly folk unspoiled by present-day hurry and rush. This booklet is your invitation and your passport to carefree days. Come to ‘the Island’ this year – and rest!"36

21 Curiously, Islanders were themselves largely absent from the images that promoted them. The tourist landscape was essentially empty of locals. Instead, that space was reserved for visitors, who could project themselves into the places of the proxy-tourists posing in the publicity pictures. While it was assumed that a pastoral landscape made a pastoral people, that landscape was not so much rooted in history as existing outside of it.37 There is seldom any reference to how exactly the landscape in question came to exist and no hint that the nature of its society might change over time. Yet, as poet Milton Acorn would later remind Island readers suffering from historical amnesia, "The Figure in the Landscape Made the Landscape." For Acorn, a Marxist convinced of the ubiquity of class struggle, the centrality of the "folk" as agents of history in Island life was paramount, and he professed to see in the deceptively peaceful landscape evidence of their struggles rather than bucolic content. Acorn believed "every part of it [the landscape] was laid out for war" against grasping landlords from the Island’s colonial history. Yet the tourists in his closing stanza wonder "at the beauty and gentleness" of the Island and its people: "‘A lovely land,’ they say, ‘and peaceful’."38

22 Alan MacEachern has pinpointed the creation of the Prince Edward Island (PEI) National Park in 1937 as a seminal event in the evolution of Island tourism.39 Not only did it provide a physical focus for the tourism industry, but it embodied the emergent elements of that tourism. The nation’s smallest national park, it stretched along a ribbon of prime beachfront on the Island’s North Shore, encompassed Cavendish, the inspiration for the world of Anne of Green Gables, and set aside the necessity of wilderness in a national park in favour of a pastoral, people-centered concept. Of course, in this instance, the figures who had made the landscape were literally excluded from it; the land for the national park was expropriated from its owners. Whether or not the new park attracted more tourists to the province than might otherwise have come in the years ahead, it unmistakably provided a focus for their visit. In 1937, park attendance was 2,500 people. A decade later it topped 84,000 and, by 1962, more than 1,000,000 people had visited Prince Edward Island National Park, making it the second most-visited national park in Canada.40

23 And so, by a process of accretion, layer by layer, a tourism image of Prince Edward Island had formed by the Second World War that bound together its climate, landscape, and people into an experiential package. That package would prove admirably durable. While other tourist destinations were forced by changing trends or conditions to re-invent themselves,41 Prince Edward Island’s tourist promoters (both public and private) would cling to creative variants on the traditional themes. What nature, history, and selective description had created in the early decades of tourism was increasingly refined, commodified, and marketed in the postwar era as the state sought to nurture – and manage – a sustainable tourism industry in the province.

24 The Prince Edward Island Travel Bureau, which the province had taken over from the PEI Tourist Association in 1940, began to issue yearly visitors’ guides during the 1950s.42 Meanwhile the Department of Industry and Natural Resources spawned its Tourism Division, which in turn was raised to the dignity of a cabinet portfolio in 1960. In the private sector, the PEI Innkeepers’ Association, incorporated in 1947, had by 1958 mutated into the PEI Tourist Association.43 As if in response to all this attention, tourism grew exponentially during postwar era. By 1960 annual tourism numbers had soared from an estimated 35,000 visitors at the start of the 1950s to 208,000. A decade later, that number had nearly tripled (to 573,000).44

25 In truth, the dramatic boom in Island tourism reflected larger trends as much as increased effort. The postwar era had popularized the notion of "recreational democracy" in North America – a belief that recreation time, including a yearly vacation, was a right and not a privilege. A booming economy, rising standards of living, improving transportation infrastructure, and the gradual spread through the work force of annual paid vacations allowed many people to exercise that right, and the Baby Boom further boosted the number of potential travellers.

26 That the pool of tourists was growing did not exempt Prince Edward Island from having to compete for them. The nature of its climate ensured that Prince Edward Island remained essentially a summer destination. This was an unpromising reality that tourism promoters invariably railed against, and tourism planners increasingly campaigned to redress, especially after the state took on the job of trying to manage the tourism industry in the mid-1960s.45 Fostered by consultants (Acres Research and Planning of Toronto), and nourished by federal development dollars, the Island’s post-1967 tourism strategy pursued five goals: more tourists, who stayed longer, who spread out more evenly across the seasons, who spread out more evenly across the province, and who spent more.46 As tourism numbers ebbed and flowed over the subsequent four decades, planners and promoters would refine their methods; but these objectives remained constant.

27 So, too, did the product. In 1967, Acres Consulting identified the countryside as tourism’s greatest resource:

27 Twenty years later, though, the Annual Report of the Department of Tourism and Parks contained an added dose of rural archetype into the recipe: "Prince Edward Island is equated with a leisurely pace of life – something about the way a farmer waves to you on a country road, an evening walk on a beach and the smell of freshly-cut hay on a warm country breeze. It’s a wholesomeness and informality that our visitors feel instantly."48

28 It was only a small step from such images as unhurried farmers waving at travellers from a country road to the much-vaunted "Island way of life" that many Islanders found hard to define but were quick to defend in the late 20th century. During the Island’s 1973 centennial, the Brothers and Sisters of Cornelius Howatt, a loose assemblage of social critics, heaped satirical scorn on the tourism industry as little better than pandering.49 They were responding in part to the commodification of their culture and in part to the crassness of cookie-cutter tourism attractions such as wax museums, enchanted castles, and fun parks. Writing a decade later, with such dissonance still echoing across Island society, Judith Adler even framed the history of the postwar Island tourism industry as a conflict between "tourism" and "pastoral."50 But the tension was more apparent than real. State support for tourism in the 1960s and the 1970s sought to modernize tourism infrastructure and professionalize tourism marketing, but state-driven marketing did not tamper with the core product (other than to treat it more as a product). Catchphrases and slogans provide a rough index of this continuity. For almost a century, "Garden Province" and "Garden of the Gulf" cropped up on everything from postcards to promotional booklets to license plates. The slogans of the late 20th century played variations on the same theme: "Discover an Island" (1977-1986), "Feel Our Warmth" (1980-1982), "One of the World’s Great Islands" (1986-1989), and, for one brief year, an overtly environmental theme, "Touch Nature." The current era of tourist branding has yielded "The Gentle Island."51

29 The practical limits of how much the Island’s blended human and natural environment could be commodified had already been demonstrated in the 1970s, when local opposition derailed a federal-provincial agreement to create a second national park on 8,000 acres of mixed-use farmscape at the eastern tip of Prince Edward Island.52 The initial plan, reflecting Parks Canada’s renewed emphasis on ecology within its parks, was to create a wilderness park in contrast to the existing PEI National Park, one of the most heavily visited in the entire national park chain. The eventual proposal, the result of pressure from the provincial government and expropriation controversies over new national parks in New Brunswick and Newfoundland, was to create a national park within which local residents could lease back their land and continue, within certain limits, to pursue their traditional occupations. It would be a sort of "cultural landscape park," a perfect iteration of the Island’s traditional landscape tourism. At the same time, planners intended to create a buffer zone around the park’s boundaries to prevent unsightly commercial development.53

30 Initially enthused about a development that they thought might provide needed employment, locals grew increasingly upset at the prospect of becoming something akin to cultural exhibits within a park that exalted the pastoral landscape even as it fettered economic opportunity by curtailing commercial development around the fringes of the park. Caught in a political firestorm, the premier tore up the park agreement at a dramatic public meeting in Fairfield, PEI, in June 1973. When a new national park was finally established in eastern PEI – as an "annex" to the existing national park – it was in an ecologically sensitive, depopulated piece of quasi-wilderness on the Greenwich peninsula.

31 By the 1970s the concept of sustainability had begun to creep into tourism planners’ vocabulary. In 1970 the Department of Tourist Development and Natural Resources created its own planning unit. After subscribing to the usual list of tourism objectives (greater numbers, spending, seasonality, and spatial dispersion), the planning unit’s mission statement emphasized that all projects must preserve the Island’s "natural environment," which was considered the province’s "prime tourist resource." In 1974 the Tourism Marketing Branch of what was now the Department of Environment and Tourism added one more objective to the customary list: "To ensure the development of a viable tourism sector."54

32 Such references to viability and preservation aside, one must not read too much into the twinning of Tourism and Environment within one department between 1971 and 1975.55 For most Islanders of the 1970s, after all, "environmental" generally translated as "tidy"; cheap, not clean, energy was most desired; and sustainability was defined in very narrow, economic terms.56 Nevertheless, the crisis of cultural confidence that accompanied the massive social and economic changes orchestrated during the Comprehensive Development Plan period (1969-84) on Prince Edward Island did give voice to concerns about the long-term integrity of the Island tourism industry, concerns that time has since magnified.57

33 Tourism promotion has always sold a way of life on Prince Edward Island that grew organically out of a natural landscape that was itself a product of human intervention. But what is the carrying capacity of that landscape? How many people can "get away from it all" before they have essentially brought "it all" with them, especially if the bulk of these people arrive in July and August? The ebb in tourism numbers over the past decade has only masked the potential pitfalls of overcrowding.58

34 Even more significant, in the long term, is the question of the province’s cultural carrying capacity. Island tourism is caught on the horns of a seemingly insoluble dilemma. As Dean McCannell long ago observed, tourists crave authentic experience.59 But their hunger for authenticity must be weighed against their taste for convenience. Convenience requires professionalization to ensure a uniform experience, and reliably efficient service to cater to ever-larger numbers of visitors. In short, it demands commodification.60 And the inevitable byproduct of commodification – even of authentic features – is a relentless reductionism, a process of selection and simplification that belies the diversity and complexity of any culture. This process in recent years has been taken to another level in the advertising shorthand of "branding," which distills products and peoples into a handful of buzzwords. And because Islanders also consume the province’s tourism messaging, the promotional image of Prince Edward Island continually reflects back into the local culture – putting many Islanders in a position where they may well come to believe the version of themselves that they see held up in tourism’s mirror.61 That fact raises the stakes for any tourism promoters who honestly seek a proper (and profitable) balance between necessary commodification and a debasing commercialism.62

35 But the challenge runs deeper than finding ways to avoid becoming just another cookie-cutter summer destination, a readily consumed culture gift-wrapped in cliches. For the first time in its history, the pastoral landscape is itself at risk, and the danger runs deeper than the possibility of lasting environmental damage through pollution, erosion, "inappropriate" development, or even climate change. The most potent threat to the pastoral landscape on Prince Edward Island is not ecological but demographic, for the landscape that tourism has defined and marketed since the 1860s was not created by or even for tourists. It was the by-product of a rural people wresting a living from their environment. Today, the figures in that landscape are rapidly vanishing. In 1931, for example, 55,500 Islanders lived on farms; 75 years later, there were just 5,300 people.63 Alone among Canada’s provinces in 2006, Prince Edward Island’s population remained majority rural (55 per cent); but if the Charlottetown and Summerside "census agglomeration" were factored into the urban population statistics, perhaps as much as three-quarters of the Island’s population lived in a rurban/urban environment. A century ago, there were almost 14,000 farms on Prince Edward Island: most of them family-owned and most of them mixed operations, with an average size of 87 acres. Three decades later, 12,200 farms remained. The most recent census (2006) puts the number at 1,700, and most of these are corporate enterprises and most specialize in one commodity, with an average size of 365 acres.64

36 The demographic changes were mirrored in the physical landscape. Between 1931 and 2006, the number of hectares being farmed fell by almost 50 per cent. Field sizes did just the opposite, as hedgerows were bulldozed to accommodate the heavy farm machinery of corporate agriculture.65 During the Development Plan-era of the 1970s, protesters had fought to save the family farm. By 2010, it was long since dead and the traditional culture that it had fostered was on life support.66

37 While to the casual observer the look of the land might seem the same, in both cultural and physical terms, the placid veneer of the pastoral landscape had grown perilously thin by the turn of the new millennium. As the gap steadily widens between the tourist face of Prince Edward Island and its actuality, the implications for tourism promotion are obvious. How many tourist seasons will pass before the only place that the Island’s pastoral culture and landscape meet is within the glossy covers of the visitors’ guide?