A reflection on Time and a Place

The evaluation form I submitted for Time and a Place contains so many superlatives--about the speakers and participants, the firm yet calm shepherding by the small crew and the masterly timekeeping, the fresh garden-plucked spinach, the warm strawberry-rhubarb pie, the Theresa Doyle jazz trio. I could go on.
For me, the forestry presentations (Sobey, Glen, Wynne, Schneider) were particularly insightful, identifying PEI’s unique trajectory given the context of 18th century industrial forestry in the rest of Atlantic Canada and New England. But all this was glimpsed in the context of the other themes. Alternative ways of seeing around aboriginal culture, men and women in the fishery, organic agriculture and prehistory will inform my subsequent work for a long time. Presentations by Karlsdottir, Schreier and Hatvany provided particularly exciting portals into methodology and professional practice spanning the global and local. All together, it worked really well to look through a human-scaled island lens.

Back to back with Time and a Place, I attended the Ninth Biennial International Conference ‘L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature’ at UPEI last week. As NiCHErs found out, one cannot visit PEI without some exposure to Anne of Green Gables and her creator, Lucy Maud Montgomery. Close reading of Montgomery’s later journals and fiction offers much more than superficial romance. Newly labelled as a proto-ecofeminist, LMM wrote passionately of and for the natural world during the early 20th century, seeking to transcend cultural and gendered mores depicted as both cultural and natural. If we are to adopt two-eyed seeing in the context of PEI, LMM’s work should also be seriously considered as a major cultural influence, a depiction of binary relationships in opposition, and a vital resource in any environmental historian’s toolbox. Further information on LMM is available at www.lmmontgomery.ca/.

Kathleen Stuart
PhD Scholar
Fenner School of Environment and Society
Australian National University (ANU)