A reflection on Time & a Place

Prince Edward Island. By msprague

The ‘Time and a Place’ conference on the environmental history of a very special place – Prince Edward Island, Canada – offered an opportunity for critical reflection on the interaction of history and geography. Historians and historical geographers assign particular emphasis to the meanings of time and place, in the past and with respect to their relevance to present conditions. And although Prince Edward Island is a small island and a small part of Canada, it served all week as a case study for islands and even regions anywhere. The scope of investigation ranged from micro to macro. For example, on the micro side we had an opportunity to walk along the beach and sand dunes at Greenwich National park. Red-winged blackbirds and pitcher plants, the floral emblem of Prince Edward Island, survive there because they are protected from human development. I was lucky to see a clump of pitcher plants in bloom on the walk! On the macro side, we heard about populations of larger beings – fish and fishers, trees and foresters, farmers, artists and activists. Micro and macro mean more than the size of an organism, and lectures and discussions ranged from the small populations of off-shore mussels and mussel farmers to island cultures in Canada, Iceland, Chile, and Australia.

We compared the traditions of First Nations with the ethics and habits of those who arrived later. While Prince Edward Island is a special place, islands and other geographic regions all over the world share similar concerns, and this I believe was the strength of this conference. When I came home and back to my own work – studying the history of crop agriculture in southern Ontario – I was able to look at it from a new perspective. Even though I have always believed that farming is a means of managing and exploiting a natural resource, I am now even more certain that I must consider the soil and its products as well as the climate, topography, settlement patterns and markets as part of this history. The environmental community of a southern Ontario farm extends outward to other environmental communities around the world, but it also extends inward to the plants, animals, farm families and rural communities which it embraces.

And this reminds us of the importance of community in environment. During the week of the conference, a community of scholars and students converged, and during our bus rides we exchanged experiences and ideas. For many Prince Edward Islanders, membership in a community means shared values and goals about ways of managing environmental resources; the Two-Eyed Seeing described by elder Albert Marshall combines the knowledge of physical with the wisdom of spiritual knowing which is part of Mi’kmaq life. Members of a community may also have disparate and even conflicting values and goals. Within the agricultural community of Prince Edward Island, organic farmers disagree with high-input corporate farmers, especially potato farmers. Some resolution of differing standards must occur to maintain the political, economic and social integrity of a community.

I found particular meaning in the exercise led by poet Deirdre Kessler, Writing the Landscape. I examined a piece of wood, an artefact from the litter of a forest floor. This artefact represented a chronology of lives lived. Some were lived in the past – the tree, insects, birds, lichens, wood-cutters, farmers and eventually town and city people, which acted together to create that forest at Strathgartney Provincial Park. Some lives are yet to be lived as long as the park and forest are maintained. Together, they all embody the symbiotic relationships which must exist between members of the human race and other creatures in communities. These symbiotic relationships make the natural environment possible in a world of manufactured communities.

Pat Bowley
PhD Candidate
Department of History, University of Guelph