Time and a Place (TnP), after

I had intended to blog daily from the weeklong “Time & a Place” – aka, TnP – event on PEI, but there was something about the limited internet access at my parents’ place, the 6am wake-up calls (thanks, Dad), & the 10:00pm arrivals back home that talked me out of it. Here instead is a flock of tweets from the week:

• To create an environmental history event dedicated to a place, and to places, start with the best local ingredients (ex. Ed MacDonald, Kate MacQuarrie, Helen Kristmanson). Combine with national and international flavours (ex. Harriet Ritvo, Daniel Pauly, Graeme Wynn). Fold in students from across Canada, plus a dash from the US. Take out of classroom at mid-day and place on bus. Stir. Stuff with seafood and scones. Periodically marinate. Remove from daily routine. Feeds 55-60.
• The Minigoo Fisheries, 45-days young when we visited.
• Pun of the week: Colin Duncan re “bully pulpwood”. Nineteenth-century forestry humour.
• As always, impressed by Donald Worster, trouper. He was harbouring a chest infection when he arrived on PEI, and it lasted for his entire stay. Yet he gave a sparkling public lecture on “North Americans in an Age of Limits,” tracing from
  Scarcity and Growth to Limits to Growth, and from Columbus to Copernicus along the way. You’ll read it, eventually, I’m sure. Then, Don was off to the Edinburgh to pick up Scotland's biggest literary prize for A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. Congratulations, and thanks for coming, Don.
• A highlight for me was showing PEI off to Don Worster and Colin Duncan the day before TnP began. I used it as an excuse to pop into DeSable to see a historical plaque a few miles away from where I grew up, but which I’d never visited: the birthplace of Franklin K. Lane, who was the US Minister of Interior that helped set up the US National Parks Service (not to mention the only US Minister of Interior quoted in Nabokov’s Pale Fire). Don, however, thinks of Lane as John Muir’s nemesis during the Hetch Hetchy controversy, and wondered whether I was trying to provoke him. Never.
• I introduced Harriet Ritvo by citing the first sentence of her great book, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age: “When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds.” I drew attention to the economy of “swung”, and suggested a lesser writer, like me, would have taken considerably more words to make considerably less effect. After, I realized that I’d proven myself right, by going on in detail about the sentence. Same here. Sigh.
• Michael DelVecchio, did you get a look at that rooster? (For those who weren’t there, you had to be there. You weren’t.)
• Interested in Canadian forest history? Get your hands on the comprehensive, three-volume work done by Douglas G. Sobey, Early Descriptions of the Forests of Prince Edward Island. It’s very impressive.
• Much enjoyed meeting George Main of the National Museum of Australia. Here’s his “Waterhole Project” research blog. Thanks for recommending Tom Griffiths’ Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica, George.
• Of all the public talks, Graeme Wynn’s on “Time, Place, & Trees” was perhaps both the most wide-ranging and the most focused on PEI. That’s Graeme, able to move from the macro – forestry over the past five centuries in eastern North America – to the micro – nicely-turned phrases, a la “difficult lives on thin soils” – and ending with a top-10 list to ensure his points are made, heard, and understood. There are lessons there for any speaker.
• Boyde Beck’s 45-minute bravura, extemporized talk on the history of fishing on PEI, as told through the cod, mackerel, and lobster fisheries – wish I could have bottled it. But wait, we did! His and many other TnP talks will soon be on our website. I knew Boyde a lifetime ago, when he was an introvert and I wasn’t.
• How important to a good networking event is food? Calories to remember: lobster at the Bluefin, of course; mussels at the Greenwich beach shelter; rhubarb crisp at Sweet Clover Farm. Conversations while chewing, to remember: Rosemary Curley (favourite place on PEI? Alaska – look it up); Lauren Wheeler (re Helio Hose, outside Canmore); Minister of Environment, Energy, & Forestry Richard Brown (re jobs for Islanders); Claire Campbell (how can someone so kind be so snarky, or vice versa?).
• Daniel Pauly’s “Pauly-graphs” about global fishing. …1/4 of the world’s catch is discarded …. 36% of world catch is turned into animal (often fish) food … for years, China overreported its catch, as a sign of strength …until the 1960s, Canadian fish management and science was world-respected … the great cod catch of the mid-60s to early 80s …. See the Sea Around Us Project.
• Graeme Wynn calls for us to turn from talk of “sustainability” to the (more realistic?) talk of “resilience” – of what is more likely, or has already proven, to work for a longer time.
• At Greenwich, with the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the background, we listened to Anna Karlsdóttir of the University of Iceland talk about her nation’s experience with the introduction of Individual Transfer Quotas (ITQs) in the fisheries in the 1990s, and what it meant to the island’s economy and ecology. Most striking was one economist’s discussion of how the process had turned fish into fully-capitalized entities, and so “became alive.” (I would love the full quotation, Anna, and links to your work.)
• I look forward to seeing the published version of geographer Matthew Hatvany’s transcription & annotation of the 1836-82 diary of Marshfield, PEI farmer David Ross.
• It was a thrill to have George McRobie, associate of EF Schumacher, and author of Small is Possible, at TnP. McRobie spoke of being greatly inspired by PEI’s (too-short) turn to alternative energy in the 1970s, as manifest in the Ark and the Institute of Man & Resources (I wrote about those here). On TnP’s final day, McRobie was able to catch up with ex-Premier Alex B Campbell, who had been so responsible for setting PEI on that path in the ‘70s.
• I loved Stephen Mannell (Dalhousie U, College of Sustainability) observation that Canada 1964-78 was an “irony-free zone”, a time when we wanted to make changes and believed we could.
• One of the people I felt fortunate to meet and learn from on PEI was Hans Schreier, professor at UBC’s the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at UBC. His talk on land use change & its impact on water was a revelation. It made me want to learn more about permeable concrete, about the relationship between impervious surfaces and biodiversity, about Kelowna’s new bylaw that new houses must have 1 foot of topsoil, to hold water, about planting trees people don’t want in developing countries so they don’t cut them down, and, admittedly, about ToolBook software. Visit Hans here.
• Bill Glen’s argument that, on PEI, native species should be planted on “unploughed forests”, but that exotic species are fine on “ploughed [ie, 2nd-growth] forests.”
• The “Learning from Environmental History” policy panel – Deputy Minister of Environment, Energy & Forestry John MacQuarrie, Executive Secretary of the PEI Commission on the Land and Local Governance JP Arsenault, and environmental consultant and self-proclaimed “policy wonk” Dave Barrett – was a splash of water on the faces of scholars and students who had spent the week listening their way through the province’s history. What do environmental historians and historical geographers have to offer policymakers? How can our work inform policy today and tomorrow? Arsenault spoke to the importance of the built and cultural heritage on PEI (to tourism, but more importantly to the way-of-life), and felt that those with historical interests could do more to develop interest in the cultural landscape on the Island. All the panelists were polite, of course, but by the end I was feeling a twinge of “relevence envy.” Then Dave Barrett came up to me. He wondered if I remembered him: he had taken a correspondence course in Environmental History from me 15 years ago at Queen’s. He’d liked & remembered it. It’s easy for academics, obsessed with our own research, to forget, but it’s often – most often – in our teaching that we’re likely to have the most impact.
• Related to the previous, perhaps? I was directed to Don Mitchell’s "Confessions of a Desk-Bound Radical”.
• Thanks again to Irene Novaczek for organizing this on the ground, with her crew of Jonathon Driscoll, Alison, Fogho, Joan, and all. And special thanks to Josh MacFadyen for representing NiCHE on the ground during the past months.