Nature's Past Podcast

Hauling in Seines - B.C. Salmon Fisheries. Source: Albertype Company/Library and Archives Canada/PA-031646

The need for thoughtful histories on contemporary Canadian environmental issues has never been more critical than it is regarding the present state of the country’s fisheries. In June 2012, funding for fisheries-related research and protection was significantly curtailed as part of federal government cuts and amendments to the Fisheries Act included in the C-38 omnibus budget bill. These changes, however, are not unprecedented. By placing Canada’s fisheries and marine environments in greater jeopardy than they’ve ever been, the changes fit into a longer pattern of government undermining of the law that go back as far as the 1970s. In response, dozens of environmentalists, researchers and scientists have criticized the cuts as misinformed and dangerous. In a letter to the Globe and Mail soon after bill C-38 was announced, four former Fisheries and Oceans ministers wrote they believe these changes “will inevitably reduce and weaken the habitat-protection provisions” of the Fisheries Act.

Canada’s fisheries have been subjects of controversy and sites of tension for over 200 years. On the east coast, small-scale, inshore fisheries (the norm since the seventeenth century) gave way to large-scale, scientifically-managed commercial fisheries. Technological advances, globalizing market structures, and an ever-increasing reliance on experts, created a context in which the Department of Fisheries and Oceans shifted the purpose of fisheries from meeting human needs to meeting maximum sustainable yields and total allowable catches. The result was the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery in the early 1990s. On the west coast, the defence of the salmon fishery against hydroelectric development on the Fraser River in the middle of the nineteenth century is one bright spot in a story of over-fishing, habitat loss, and the negative side-effects of commercial-scale aquaculture. The artificial state border between Canada and the United States in the Salish Sea, which did not reflect the migratory lives of pacific salmon, created the conditions for unmanageable fish banditry. Inland, freshwater fisheries have experienced similar stories of over-harvesting, threats to fish habitat, and denial of Native resource rights. Around the Great Lakes, First Nations experienced competition from non-native commercial fishermen as early as the 1830s, spent much of the late nineteenth century resisting efforts by the Ontario government to eliminate their traditional rights, and fought a series of legal battles during the twentieth century to regain autonomy over their fisheries.

While certain species have begun to recover in the Great Lakes, several species found in Canada’s coastal waters have not. According to the Fisheries and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, roughly 75% of global fish stocks are fully exploited or have collapsed. Canada has played a leading role in bringing us to the brink of global fisheries collapse. Given this scenario, insights from scholars writing on the history of fisheries in Canada is critical if further catastrophe is to be avoided.

On this episode, we speak with five leading historians of Canadian fisheries, including Dean Bavington, Stephen Bocking, Douglas Harris, Will Knight, and Liza Piper.

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Visit the main page at http://niche-canada.org/naturespast

Suggested Readings:

• Arnason, R. and L. Felt, eds. The North Atlantic Fisheries: Successes, Failures, and Challenges. Charlottetown: University of Prince Edward Island Press, 1995.
• Bavington, Dean. Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.
• Bocking, Stephen."Science, Salmon, and Sea Lice: Constructing Practice and Place in an Environmental Controversy," Journal of the History of Biology (2012) 45: 681–716.
• Bogue, Margaret Beattie. Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783-1933. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.
• Drews, Keven. “Changes to federal Fisheries Act draw fire from three B.C. scientists” Winnipeg Free Press, June 21, 2012.
• Galloway, Gloria. “Ex-Fisheries directors urge Harper to reverse freshwater-research cuts” Globe and Mail, June 22, 2012.
• Gough, Joseph. Managing Canada’s Fisheries: From Early Days to the Year 2000. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2008.
• Harris, Douglas C. Fish, Law, and Colonialism: The Legal Capture of Salmon in British Columbia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
• Harris, Douglas C. Landing Native Fisheries: Indian Reserves and Fishing Rights in British Columbia, 1849-1925. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2008.
• Harris, Douglas C. "Food Fish, Commercial Fish, and Fish to Support a Moderate Livelihood: Characterizing Aboriginal and Treaty Rights to Canadian Fisheries" Arctic Review on Law and Politics 1 (2010): 82-107.
• Hubbard, Jennifer. A Science on the Scales: The Rise of Canadian Atlantic Fisheries Biology, 1898-1939. University of Toronto Press, 2006.
• Koenig, Edwin C. Cultures and Ecologies: A Native Fishing Conflict on the Saugeen-Bruce Peninsula. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.
• Kinsey, Darin. “ ‘Seeding the Water as the Earth': The Epicenter and Peripheries of a Western Aquacultural Revolution.” Environmental History 11, No. 3 (2006): 527-566.
• Knight, William. "Samuel Wilmot, Fish Culture, and Recreational Fisheries in Late 19 Century Ontario." Scientia Canadensis 30, no. 1 (2007): 75-90.
• MacDonald, Douglas, David McRobert, Miriam Diamond. “How Ottawa fumbled the fisheries file” Globe and Mail, Friday July 6, 2012.
• McEvoy, Arthur. The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850-1980. Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• Newell, D. and R. Ommer. Fishing Places, Fishing People: Traditions and Uses in Canadian Small-scale Fisheries. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1999.
• Parenteau, Bill. “’Care, Control and Supervision’: Native People in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867-1900.” Canadian Historical Review. 79 (1998): 1-35.
• Parsons, L.S. Management of Marine Fisheries in Canada. Ottawa: National Research Council of Canada and Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 1993.
• Piper, Liza. The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009.
• Rose, Alex. Who Killed the Grand Banks?: The untold story behind the decimation of one of the world’s greatest natural resources. Mississauga: John Wiley and Sons, 2008.
• Siddon, Tom, David Anderson, John Fraser, Herb Dahliwal, “An Open Letter to Stephen Harper on Fisheries” Globe and Mail, June 1, 2012.
• Wadewitz, Lissa K. The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012.
• Young, Nathan and Ralph Matthews. The Aquaculture Controversy in Canada: Activism, Policy, and Contested Science. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.

The environmental movement is one of the most popular topics in Canadian environmental history. At present, the environmental movement in Canada is at a bit of a crossroads. Having finally moved beyond simply outlining worst practices and their consequences, the last decade has witnessed proactive solutions and workable alternatives to every kind of environmental problem. Yet, this comes at the same time as economic turmoil and ideological opposition from government. Recently, David Suzuki has even gone so far as to argue that “Environmentalism has failed.” Given this crossroads, environmental historians offer the context needed to understand the state of the environmental movement in this country today.

From the earliest efforts to establish national and provincial parks at the end of the nineteenth century to the more politically-conscious groups of the post-WWII era, historians of the Canadian environmental movement have demonstrated how changing ideas of nature informed non-utilitarian approaches to dealing with the non-human world. The inspiration for many of these ideas came from critiques of modernity and capitalism, which saw nature as either a set of commodities or an externality within the wider framework of progress and civilization. In response to this trend, concerned individuals and groups mobilized environmental sciences, such as conservation and ecology, to justify alternative relationships between humans and the natural world. This reaction to modern society and economy was shared with the United States, but also developed its own distinctive Canadian character, as well as specific regional approaches to environmental issues across Canada.

As in the United States, the first efforts to protect the environment in Canada arose out of anxieties about the loss of wilderness and the importance of preserving an essential national character at the end of the nineteenth century. Over half a century later, the postwar environmental movement in Canada evolved alongside that of the U.S. following the publication of Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring. In New Brunswick, activists fought to stop the spraying of DDT, while in Ontario a group known as Pollution Probe used the media to raise awareness of environmental issues, and in British Columbia the provincial government was obliged to enact protective legislation in order to placate opposition from environmentalists. In each case, changing ideas about nature combined with particular Canadian political and cultural contexts to transform the way most Canadians thought about and treated the environment.

On this first part of our look at the history of the environmental movement in Canada we speak with Canadian environmental historian, Neil Forkey about his new book Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century.

Please be sure to take a moment to review this podcast on our iTunes page and to fill out a short listener survey here.

Suggested Readings:

• Duke, David Freeland. Canadian Environmental History. Toronto: Canadian Scholar's Press, 2006.
• Gaffield, Chad and Pam Gaffield. Ed. Consuming Canada: Readings in Environmental History. Mississauga: Copp Clark, 1995.
• MacDowell, Laurel Sefton. An Environmental History of Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012.
• MacEachern, Alan and William J. Turkel. Ed. Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental History. Toronto: Nelson, 2009.
• Wynn, Graeme. Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007.

Works Cited

Image: SS Manhattan at Port of Chester, Philadelphia, 1969. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Since the World Conference on Changing Atmosphere was held in Toronto in 1988, Canadians have participated in discussions of climate change prevention and adaptation. The UN-established and Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change includes Canadian members and Canada supported the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, though it withdrew from the treaty in 2011 when faced with financial penalties for failing to meet its greenhouse emissions reduction goals. The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) Act established and maintains the NRTEE as a federal agency, advocating adaptation and suggesting Canada must “adapt and prosper” in the face of climate change, seeking out the “opportunities” climate change offers Canadians. The Canadian government recently announced that the NRTEE will be eliminated as of March 31, 2013. In spite of this and other political setbacks, Canadian climatologists have continued Impact and Adaptation Studies among Canadian communities, and historians of climate change in Canada examine the ways in which these biological, political, and social changes have taken place, providing context for assessing their efficacy. Organizations such as the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) continue to support projects examining climate change in Canada, such as the Early Canadian Environmental Data Project.

Changes in Earth’s climate have always occurred and have varied over time, with no consistent pattern of warming or cooling emerging until the 1820s. Before the Industrial Revolution, eras such as the Medieval Warm Period could be followed by periods of cooling, such as the Little Ice Age, though the effects of climate change have not been consistent around the globe. After the Industrial Revolution, however, a pattern of consistent global atmospheric temperature increase due to human activity, called anthropogenic climate change, became apparent. The scientific community began discussing this phenomenon and its causes as early as 1896, with Svante Aarhenius’s calculation of atmospheric warming due to industrial gases released into Earth’s atmosphere. As the twentieth century progressed and patterns of anthropogenic climate change became more apparent and alarming to the scientific community, the discussion moved into the public realm as scientists, politicians, and bureaucrats attempted to address climate change through public policy. Nations and international agencies then began formulating regulations in attempts to curb climate change. The discussion increasingly focused on economics and has now shifted from finding ways to fight anthropogenic climate change to creating means of adapting economies to its effects.

Historians have credited historical climate change with creating environmental opportunities for human action, including Norse exploration of the Canadian Atlantic coast, the Thule peoples’ movements across the Arctic, eighteenth-century adaptations of South Saskatchewan River Basin peoples, and economic diversification of contemporary logging communities in British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alberta, to name a few. Climate change and knowledge of the environment in Canada now exist in a colonial context that includes local knowledge and indigenous participation as climatologists and policy makers seek ways of creatively adapting to changes in the Canadian climate.

On this episode of the podcast, we hold a round-table discussion about the role of climate in Canadian and global history with James Daschuk, Joshua MacFadyen, and Dagomar Degroot. We also speak with Ross Coen, author of the recently published book Breaking Ice for Arctic Oil: The Epic Voyage of the SS Manhattan through the Northwest Passage.

Please be sure to take a moment to review this podcast on our iTunes page and to fill out a short listener survey here.

Visit the main page at http://niche-canada.org/naturespast

Suggested Readings:

• Coen, Ross. Breaking Ice for Arctic Oil: The Epic Voyage of the SS Manhattan through the Northwest Passage. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2012.
• Cohen, Stewart J. and Melissa W. Waddell. Climate Change in the 21st Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.
• Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005.
• Daschuk, Jim., and G. Marchildon. Climate and Aboriginal Adaptation in the South Saskatchewan River Basin, AD 800-1700. Institutional Adaptations to Climate Change Project, 2005.
• Fagan, Brian M. The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.
• Hare, Frederick Kenneth, and Morley K. Thomas. Climate Canada. Toronto: Wiley, 1974.
• MacFadyen, Joshua. “Breaking Sod or Breaking Even? Flax in the Northern Great Plains and Prairies, 1889-1930,” Agricultural History 83(2) (Spring 2009): 221-246.
• McKibben, Bill. “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” Rolling Stone Magazine, July 19, 2012
• Ministère des Transport, Direction de la Météorologie. Le Climat du Canda. Ottawa: Canada, Ministère des Transport, Direction de la Météorologie , 1960.
• National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. Degrees of Change: Climate Warming and the Stakes for Canada. Ottawa: National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, 2010.
• Riedlinger, Dyanna and Fikret Berkes, “Contributions of traditional knowledge to understanding climate change in the Canadian Arctic” Polar Record Vol.37 (2001), pp 315-328
• Simpson, Jeffrey. “Canada and climate change: all plan, no action.” The Globe and Mail, May 12, 2012. Accessed May 22, 2012.
• Smith, Jesse and Julia Uppenbrink, eds. “Earth’s Variable Climatic Past.” Special Issue of Science 292 (27 April 2001): 657-693.
• St. George, Scott and Dave Sauchyn. “Paleoenvironmental Perspectives on Drought in Western Canada.” Canadian Water Resources Journal 31.4 (2006).
• Weaver, Andrew. Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World. Toronto: Penguin, 2008.

Photo Credit: Fox hunting, Montreal Hunt Club, Montreal, QC, about 1885, McCord Museum, VIEW-2580.1

Last year, the University of Pittsburgh Press published its first book on Canadian urban environmental history titled Metropolitan Natures: Environmental Histories of Montreal. This diverse collection of essays was edited by two leading scholars of Quebec environmental history, Stephane Castonguay and Michele Dagenais. This episode of the podcast explores some of the environmental histories of Montreal.

Montreal is one of the oldest metropolises in North America with a history of Euro-American resettlement and urban development that spans more than four centuries. Prior to European colonization, the island of Montreal was home to the fortified Iroquoian village of Hochelaga. Needeless to say, organizing a series of case studies of the environmental history of Montreal is no easy task. Castonguay and Dagenais decided to organize the collection along three broad themes: representations, infrastructures, and hinterlands. The essays in the first section, representations, focus on changing human perceptions of Montreal and its region beginning with the earliest observations of the Island of Montreal and Mount Royal by Jacques Cartier in the 1530s. The following section on “Infrastructures” examines socio-technical systems in the urban environment with particular focus on water systems and roadway infrastructure. In the concluding section of the book on “Hinterlands” the authors explored the changing relationship between city and countryside as Montreal developed as Canada’s leading metropolis.

On this episode of the podcast, I spoke with two of the authors from this edited collection, Darcy Ingram and Daniel Rueck.

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Dance Pavilion at Winnipeg Beach, 1911 (Archives of Manitoba, Still Images Section.
M. I. Guthrie Collection. Item Number 19.)

In the late decades of the nineteenth century, urban North Americans sought refuge from congestion, noise, and pollution. As the environmental problems of industrial cities grew worse, city councils across the continent established urban parks while federal governments in both Canada and the United States developed national parks systems. Parks, as constructed natural spaces, were just one option for city-dwellers seeking relief from polluted urban environments. Many flocked to the shores of oceans, lakes, and rivers where beach side resorts emerged as yet another recreational destination.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Winnipeggers turned to the shores of Lake Winnipeg to the north of the city in the hopes of finding an outlet for their leisure time. There the Canadian Pacific Railway established the beachside resort community of Winnipeg Beach. For more than half a century, Winnipeg Beach was one of the most popular recreational retreats for Manitoba’s urban population. Thousands of people enjoyed the lake views and boardwalk entertainments of Winnipeg Beach for many years until the community went into decline by the end of the 1960s.

On this episode of the podcast, we discuss the history of Winnipeg Beach with author, Dale Barbour.

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Environmental historians have recently been thinking about future directions for their sub-discipline. Last year, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society co-sponsored a workshop held in Washington, D.C. to explore such future directions and published some of the findings here [PDF]. Canadian environmental historians gathered in Burlington, Ontario last spring to ponder similar matters at EH Plus. At both meetings, participants discussed the many roles that environmental history plays outside of the academic community. It seems clear that environmental historians want their research to reach broader public audiences.

On this month’s episode of the podcast, we consider the role of environmental history outside of academia, as public history. To explore this topic and some of its challenges for the field, I spoke with a group of environmental historians with experience working in public history settings.

Agricultural expansion is a central component of the history of the resettlement of the Canadian prairies in the nineteenth-century. Popularly, that history has been characterized by the challenges of aridity on a dry prairie landscape. The characterization of the prairies as a dry place, however, is really only accurate for the highlands of south-western Manitoba to the foothills of southern Alberta. It does not accurately represent Manitoba’s southern lowlands.

This is the subject of a new book by environmental historian, Shannon Stunden Bower. Wet Prairie: People, Land, and Water in Agricultural Manitoba explores the history of this southern lowland region of Canada’s first prairie province. Combining methodologies in both environmental history and historical geography, Wet Prairie, takes readers through the complex past of the relationship between people and surface water in a region that is especially prone to flooding.

This month, we speak with Dr. Shannon Stunden Bower, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Research Fellow from the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta.

Please be sure to take a moment and review this podcast on our iTunes page.

Visit the main page at http://niche-canada.org/naturespast

On May 19, 2011, Parks Canada celebrates its 100^th anniversary, commemorating its founding in 1911 as the world’s first national parks service. Preceding the creation of the National Park Service in the United States by more than five years, the federal government of Canada created a new unit within the Department of the Interior, known as the Dominion Parks Branch, to oversee and administer the country’s forest reserves and a nascent assemblage of western national parks. Over the course of the next century this government agency would, as Canadian historian Claire Campbell writes, “convince Canadians that in their national parks resided the true wealth of a kingdom.”

In recognition of this occasion, the Network in Canadian History and Environment sponsored the publication of a new edited collection called A Century of Parks Canada, 1911-2011 that explores episodes of Canada’s national parks history from coast to coast to coast. This book is the first to be published in NiCHE’s Canadian History and Environment series in partnership with the University of Calgary Press as an open access publication. Listeners can download a digital copy and order a print copy today from the book's website.

This book features the work of leading environmental history researchers who met to circulate papers covering a range of topics in Canadian national parks history, including wildlife management, archaeology, Aboriginal peoples and parks policy, population displacement, auto-tourism, and hunting.

On this episode of the podcast, we speak with the editor of A Century of Parks Canada, Claire Campbell, and two of the contributing authors, George Colpitts and Gwynn Langemann.

Please be sure to take a moment and review this podcast on our iTunes page.

Toward the end of the Great War, Canadians were struck by the most devastating influenza epidemic in the young country’s history. More than 50,000 Canadians succumbed to this virulent strain of influenza that swept the globe in 1918 and 1919. Nearly as many Canadians died from this disease as those who were killed in combat overseas during the First World War. While the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919 has received recent scholarly attention outside of Canada, Canadian historians have only begun to examine the social consequences of this devastating event.

The social history of disease and environmental history intersect because both sub-disciplines take into consideration the role of non-human actors in the past. The influenza virus that spread throughout Canada in 1918 and 1919 placed biological and material limits on human agency during this critical period in Canadian history. While the course of the epidemic was shaped by social and political factors, the disease itself ultimately came to have a significant social impact on Canadians.

To learn more about the impact of this epidemic in Canada, we speak with Esyllt Jones about her book Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg.

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The provincial government of British Columbia describes Desolation Sound Marine Provincial Park as a “yachter’s paradise” located at the confluence of the Malaspina Inlet and Homfray Channel just north of the town of Power River. The calm, warm waters of Desolation Sound are a popular destination for boating tourists, swimmers, and scuba divers. Most visitors to this marine provincial park, however, are largely unaware of the interconnections between this park and the province’s history of colonization and the displacement of the region’s Aboriginal population.

On this episode of the podcast we interview Jonathan Clapperton, a history doctoral candidate from the University of Saskatchewan, about his research on the history of the relationship between Desolation Sound Marine Provincial Park and the local Sliammon First Nation.

Also, we continue the conversation about local and regional parks by speaking with participants from the recent NiCHE-sponsored symposium, Historical and Global Perspectives on Provincial and Local/Regional Parks.

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From 1945 to the early 1970s, technological innovations helped to transform American agriculture. The introduction of industrial chemicals and new machinery to US farm operations in the decades after the Second World War ushered in, what some historians have characterized as an agricultural revolution. These changes certainly altered food production and agricultural output. They also altered the practice of farming itself, leading ultimately to fewer farmers tending larger and larger farms. What caused farmers to adopt these new chemical and mechanical technologies? How did this affect the business of farming in the second half of the twentieth century? What were the environmental and human health consequences of these substantial changes in agriculture?

On this episode of Nature's Past, Joe Anderson joins us to discuss his book Industrializing the Corn Belt: Agriculture, Technology, and Environment, 1945-1972, a detailed study of the adoption of industrial chemical and mechanical technologies on US farms in the decades following the Second World War.

Also, Jim Clifford discusses his new role as Project Coordinator for the Network in Canadian History and Environment.

North American environmental history is punctuated by notorious episodes of species extinctions, most notably the cases of the passenger pigeon and the bison. In both cases, humans exhausted what they believed were unlimited resources in the absence of any scientific management or regulations.

The collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery in the 1990s stands out from these previous events because of the industry’s dependence on scientific management. This month, we speak with Professor Dean Bavington from Nipissing University about his research and the publication of his new book Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse.

Also, Marco Armiero, a senior researcher from the Italian National Research Council, tells us more about EMiGR, the Environment and Migration Group of Research.

Please be sure to take a moment and review this podcast on our iTunes page.

Between 1920 and 1960, Canada's northwest subarctic region experienced late-stage rapid industrialization along its large lakes. These included Lake Winnipeg, Lake Athabasca, Great Slave Lake, and Great Bear Lake. Powered by high-energy fossil fuels, the natural resources of the northwest were integrated into international commodity markets and distributed throughout the world. Whitefish from the large lakes found their way onto dinner plates in New York while uranium from Canada's northwest fueled the world's most destructive weapons, atomic bombs.

Professor Liza Piper joins us this month to discuss her new book The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada from UBC Press. This book explores a region unfamiliar to most Canadians and how that space was transformed through industrial processes in the twentieth century. Rather than finding industrial technologies dominating the landscape of the northwest, Professor Piper found that humans used those technologies to assimilate nature.

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How have online digital technologies changed environmental history research, communication, and teaching? This episode of the podcast explores this question in the context of the recent NiCHE Digital Infrastructure API Workshop held in Mississauga, Ontario. Online-based Application Programming Interfaces or APIs are just one digital technology that holds the potential to change the way environmental historians access resources, analyze historical data, and communicate research findings. Within the past decade alone, the development of online digital technologies has offered the potential to transform historical scholarship.

This episode includes a round-table conversation with some leading figures in the realm of digital history as well as an interview with Jan Oosthoek, the producer and host of the Exploring Environmental History podcast.

Please be sure to take a moment and review this podcast on our iTunes page.

The history of the resettlement of Canada by European peoples and the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their land was, in part, a struggle over natural resources. Since 1867, the federal and provincial governments of Canada have on many occasions come into conflict with different First Nations over the control of land and access to natural resources. This episode of Nature's Past looks at a historical case study of one such conflict in northeastern Ontario in the Temagami region.

Jocelyn Thorpe, a SSHRC postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, speaks about her recent article in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, which examines the social construction of the Temagami region as a wilderness area and its implications for the Teme-Augama Anishnabi.

Also, we speak with Dorothee Schreiber and Siomonn Pulla, organizers of the 14th annual International Wanapitei Aboriginal History and Politics Colloquium. The colloquium will be held from September 17-20 and you can download the most recent Call for Papers here.

Please be sure to take a moment and review this podcast on our iTunes page.

Teaching environmental history at the undergraduate level poses several challenges for instructors in this burgeoning subfield of history. As more and more universities add environmental history courses to their calendars, it is important to take some time to reflect on how we teach environmental history. This special episode of the podcast on teaching draws from the experiences of four environmental history instructors from the University of British Columbia: Matthew Evenden, Eagle Glassheim, Sean Kheraj, and Tina Loo.

Also, we speak with Alan MacEachern, co-editor of Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental History, about textbooks in the field.

The typical model of the environmental justice literature has focused on cases in which local communities fought to have government recognize their neighbourhoods as environmentally hazardous and fix the problem. Ken Cruikshank and Nancy Bouchier's research on the environmental history of the Hamilton, Ontario waterfront since 1955 turns this story around by looking at who determines the environmental health of a community.

Also, we speak with Graeme Wynn and Emily Jane Davis about NiCHE's Forest History Cluster.

This month's episode focuses on resource development in British Columbia. Last November, the Nature/History/Society group hosted a roundtable on hydro in BC, featuring Jeremy Mouat (University of Alberta), Tina Loo (University of British Columbia), and Paul Hirt (Arizona State). In this episode we highlight a selection from Tina Loo's talk on hydro-electric development and high modernism called 'Towards an Environmental History of 'Progress'.

You can listen to the full roundtable on hydro in BC in the NiCHE audio archive.

Also, this month we feature an interview with Jonathan Peyton, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography at UBC who is studying the history of resource conflict in the Stikine Plateau region of northern British Columbia.