As we are continually reminded, Canada is now an overwhelmingly urban country. Mythic vastness notwithstanding, most of its people and certainly its mobile “creative class,” presumed driver of the knowledge economy, live in major cities, whose policy requirements have captured a good deal of national attention in the past decade. By contrast, rural Canada has been reduced to the status of the space in-between. Its resource-based communities and livelihoods—farming, fishing, forestry—live with the downward price pressures of global commodity trade as well as the most intractable trade disruptions. Its public services and social infrastructure have been diminished. Aside from pretty places that have become recreational or residential enclaves, its population typically is declining and aging. Its widespread sense of abandonment so far has generated only inchoate, perhaps incoherent political responses. Meanwhile, the growing consensus among newspaper editorialists and think-tank policy specialists is that “dependent” and “unsustainable” rural Canada has been subsidized long enough for sentimental reasons at the expense of real needs elsewhere.

This slim book rests on some clear and contrary propositions. One is that rural communities, however vulnerable, are a “vital link between society and the natural environment” (4). A second is that rural communities represent a “wealth of knowledge, range of skills, and diversity of people” (6)—in short, alternative ways of living that benefit the larger society. Put another way: “Rural communities should not survive just because they have learned to adapt to the demands of the global market. They should survive, and thrive, because they are home to many people, places of employment, centres of learning, and hives of biodiversity” (7). A third is that “corporate globalization” has had a distinctive, destructive impact on rural communities. Not only has it deepened historic practices of hinterland domination, it plays on current vulnerabilities to induce a rural municipal entrepreneurialism sufficient to enter the bidding war with other communities for the only kind of future imagined—that is, industrial projects that create low-wage jobs, mess up the landscape, and extract wealth from the region to reward outside investors.

It is a tall order to imagine other rural futures or to enable rural people to imagine them. This is essentially Sumner's project. Her argument moves from what might be called a critical utopianism—this against the idea that there are no alternatives—to a rehabilitation of the much co-opted idea of sustainability as a core principle around which to think and act. The great strength of the book is its conceptual and structural clarity. Readers from across academic disciplines, as well as outside the academy, should find accessible and useful its three-legged theoretical stool (Gramsci on hegemony, Habermas on communicative action, McMurtry on “life” and “money” codes of value), though it should be said that while those positions might pull in the same broad critical direction, the significant differences among them are left mostly untended here.

The book's most promising conceptual opening concerns the civil commons. By this it means those resources, institutions, rules and spaces—protective and enabling—that are accessible to members of a community on terms other than market-based pricing. The civil commons encompasses everything from safe water to public schools to producer cooperatives to local cultural organizations. It represents a “social fabric” (97) and a “social immune system” (100). In this light, Sumner effectively highlights what is at stake in rural communities in the erosion of public services and cooperative practices for the sake of either efficiency or market emulation. The implication she draws for sustainable rural communities is intriguing and intuitively correct: that the focus should be on structures and practices that build the civil commons, rather than on the narrower pursuit of “economic growth” that is characteristic of the commonplace, extractive model of rural municipal entrepreneurialism.

For all its compact conceptual strength, Sustainability and the Civil Commons is too short and skeletal a book. Its claims about corporate globalization make the appropriate references to the political economy literature, but sometimes have the character of brisk polemic rather than the kind of sustained analysis intended to persuade fair-minded skeptics. More than that, the book maintains a curious, high-level remoteness from the rural communities that constitute its subject. It seldom touches down to the extent of naming particular rural places, or, with the exception of Wal-Mart, the corporate names that are so close to the experience of rural people. That means its analysis, though universal enough, lacks the force it might have gained, say, from a comprehensive case-study chapter that helped readers to understand how hegemony operates in a rural community, what municipal entrepreneurship looks like, how depopulation and poverty are not “natural” but an outcome of political-economic choices, and how the civil commons is the contested space and key to a sustainable future.