Nature's Past Podcast

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.