Marine Zoogeographies in the North Atlantic: Connecting Canada to Bermuda
In November 2011, I travelled to Bermuda to start my postdoctoral project, “Marine Biogeographies: British Navy and Military Cultures of Natural Science in the Nineteenth-Century North Atlantic.” Building on my doctoral work on the intersection between British military culture, and ideas and practices of ornithology, my postdoctoral project aims to understand how natural history knowledge of Canada, Bermuda, and Britain helped to produce a militarized maritime bioregion in the 19th-century North Atlantic. During this time period, Britain established an imperial defense network of fortifications and bases to secure economic and colonial control in the British Atlantic, and to prevent the United States from invading Canada, “since Bermuda, conjointly with Halifax, holds in check the whole Atlantic coast of the United States” [(T.L. Godet, Bermuda: Its History, Geology, Climate, Products, Agriculture, Commerce (London: Smith, Elder, Co. 1860), 3]. The Royal Navy commanded the sea while the British military secured strategic ports and waterways, extending the imperial network from Bermuda to the Great Lakes of Canada.
From this network emerged the collection and documentation of marine flora, fauna, rivers, weather patterns, and seascapes (through maps, specimens, charts, watercolours, photographs) by British navy and military officers who were patrolling and garrisoning the various sites in British North America and Bermuda. My primary concern is how the production, circulation, and reception of natural history knowledge and material culture by these individuals helped to constitute the British North Atlantic as a meaningful place and contributed to the production of ideas and practices of marine biogeography – the scientific study of the distribution of marine fauna – and the migration of species.
During my short visit to Bermuda, I focused primarily on the documentation of primary source materials available in the archives and museum collections, and explored some of the military and navy sites of the nineteenth century, tracing the numerous connections between Canada and Bermuda, and the ways in which the movement of people, ideas, and things helped to shape the British North American region. I toured the historic Royal Naval Dockyard and the Commissioner’s House (now part of the National Museum of Bermuda), overlooking the vast Atlantic Ocean (Figure 1). Once considered the “Gibraltar of the West,” the infrastructure located on Ireland Island served as the wintering grounds for the North America and West Indies Station (also known as the North America and Lakes of Canada Squadron, and the River St. Lawrence and Coast of America Station, among other titles). The summer station for the Royal Navy in the Americas, of course, was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, resulting in the relocation of naval manpower with the changing seasons in spring and autumn (Figure 2). How did these trans-imperial movements between Nova Scotia and Bermuda impact ideas of climatic regions and species migration in the “New World”?
While sitting outside the Bermuda Natural History Museum, I spotted a Great Blue Heron standing motionlessly on a small boat, waiting to pounce on its prey. My previous encounters with the bird involved observing it in eastern Canada, stalking fish in freshwater wetlands and rivers, amidst cattails, rushes, and willow trees. The heron I observed on this day occupied a different habitat all together. Found in the inland waters of Flatts Village, herons abound with squid, tropical fish, and seashells from the tidal ocean waters of the Atlantic. According to John Matthew Jones, John L. Hurdis, and John Walter Wedderburn in The Naturalist in Bermuda: A Sketch of the Geology, Zoology, and Botany (1859, 78) the Great Blue Herron (Ardea Herodias) was “a wary bird… not frequently met with on the shores or creeks of the Bermudas.” As the authors explained, the bird was migratory and arrived in the autumn, with a few remaining throughout the year.
Figure 1: “Breeding haunts of the tropic bird – South shore,” (Jones et al. 1859, vii)
Interestingly, all three authors of The Naturalist in Bermuda lived in the maritime colonies of Canada. Jones fostered an extensive network of British military and Royal Navy officers, shipmasters, and colonists in his pursuit of natural knowledge, and contributed significantly to the natural history of Nova Scotia while a resident. Hurdis worked as Controller of Customs in both Prince Edward Island and in Bermuda, which gave him access to information from ships travelling to and from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI. As part of his trans-Atlantic military service, Captain Wedderburn, 42nd Regiment (Black Watch), served in Halifax and Bermuda, making a vast collection of North American birds now housed in various museums in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Again, my fieldwork investigations sparked questions on links between imperial and “natural” connections, and the ways in which colonial environmental knowledge emerged from networked, mobile knowledges in the British North Atlantic.
At the Bermuda Archives, I had the opportunity to research watercolour albums and manuscripts. Such materials included Captain Henry Maurice Drummond-Hay’s (42nd Regiment) 70 watercolours of the fishes of Bermuda, circa 1840s (Figure 4). I was drawn to his image of the Green Moray, which he painted vividly with different shades of green and very sharp teeth. Other fish included the Toadfish, Garfish and Mackerel. I viewed a collection of watercolours of Bermuda landscapes and seascapes by Royal Navy officer Sir Michael Seymour, who served on HMS Vindictive in the British North America and West Indies Station, 1845–1848. Many of his British North America views are housed at the Musée du Québec, Québec City. I also studied the watercolours of Edmund Gilling Hallewell, 20th Regiment, who later served in Québec City and Kingston, where his watercolour of Fort Henry is housed at the Queen’s University Archives.
Figure 2: Many of Drummond-Hay’s watercolours of fish are illustrated in Fishes of Bermuda (1999), included the four images on the cover of the book
My investigations at the archives also allowed me to learn about the politics of “race” in Bermuda, impressing on me the delicacy of dealing with such tensions. I viewed an original Slave Register that was used to record all of the enslaved persons in Bermuda for the compensation of plantation owners after Abolition in 1833. While Bermuda’s physical geography limited the formation of a plantation economy familiar in the Caribbean, a romanticized version of the slave past has emerged that has focused on the betterment of slaves as skilled sailors, pilots, and housemaids. Despite this version of the past, the fact remains that the island slavery existed in Bermuda, where enslaved peoples lived without freedom, were sold as commodities, and were placed in precarious situations. Bermudian-born Mary Prince was one of the first people to provide first-hand descriptions of the brutalities of enslavement, which were recorded, and perhaps altered, by Susannah Strickland (later Moodie).
The issue of “race” will continue to be a focus on my postdoctoral work. I learned that army-naturalist John Tavenier Bartram, 20th Regiment, sold his commission and left his wife in England to settle in Bermuda. He lived with a Black Bermudian woman, a behaviour viewed as “degenerate” by British middle and upper class in Victorian times. Lady Brassey included a description of Bartram (Bertram in her book) and his popular natural history collection In the Trades, the Tropics & the Roaring Forties (1885) (Figure 5). Some of Bartram’s naturalist notebooks can be found at the Bermuda Archives, and a few of his avian specimens are at the Bermuda Natural History Museum. Bartram became a centre of naturalist activity in Bermuda, making connections with other British military officers such as Philip Savile Grey Reid, Royal Engineers, who published Birds of Bermuda (1884). Reid also connected with John Matthew Jones when stationed at Halifax.
While I only scratched at the surface of my research project, I was fortunate to visit Bermuda and to meet such wonderful and generous people, including Andrew Bermingham (Bermuda Historical Society); Dr. Robbie Smith and Lisa Greene (Bermuda Natural History Museum); Dr. Edward Harris and Elena Strong (Bermuda National Museum); Mandellas Lightbourne and Karla Ingemann (Bermuda Archives); and Dr. Duncan McDowall, who facilitated my trip from Kingston, Ontario. I look forward to future research and collaborations.
Kirsten Greer is a Visiting SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History, University of Warwick, UK. She is the Coordinator for the Transnational Ecologies project with NiCHE, and a member of the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick.
From a Wet to a Rehabilitated Prairie: An Interview with Shannon Stunden Bower
JC: What is your current position?
I am a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta. I completed a PhD in Geography at the University of British Columbia.
JC: I understand you recently published a book in the Nature | History | Society series at UBC Press. Could you describe this project?
As many people will know, southern Manitoba is often threatened by flooding. Wet Prairie: People, Land and Water in Agricultural Manitoba (2011) is an examination of surface water management in the agricultural regions of southern Manitoba. Due to the Canadian federal government’s inflexible settlement system as much as to the local environment, many newcomers who intended to farm shared the experience of finding themselves confronted with flooded lands. In a bid to reconcile agriculture and surface water, and in keeping with the liberal tradition of facilitating economic development, the provincial government undertook substantial drainage efforts. Water-flow patterns, whether altered by drainage or not, became the subject of intense, long-running debate among provincial officials, drainage experts, and Manitoba residents.
The book seeks to explain patterns of engagement between people, government, and environment over a long period stretching from 19th century efforts to drain the Manitoba landscape to late 20th century attempts to establish watershed management. New alliances and rivalries emerged amidst shifting social, political and environmental contexts, with enduring consequences for both the landscapes and people of the wet prairie.
JC: Are you working on something new?
I’m researching the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration [PFRA], a federal agency created in 1935 in response to the drought and depression afflicting the agricultural regions of the Canadian prairies. Until 1969, the PFRA operated within the federal government’s Department of Agriculture. Through a historical perspective on the PFRA’s first 34 years, this project examines the role of the PFRA in facilitating the transformation of prairie agriculture.
I anticipate the project will culminate in a monograph in which I will argue the PFRA in this period be understood as a low modernist agency. The term ‘low modernist’ was coined by rural sociologist Jess Gilbert as a counterpoint to anthropologist James Scott’s influential concept of high modernism. In his widely-cited Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Scott explains the role of a high modernist ideology, defined as an over-reaching confidence in scientific progress, the mastery of nature, and the management of humanity, in the failure of many 20th century state-led attempts at human improvement. In his analysis of the actions of United States farm officials in the years of the American New Deal, Jess Gilbert find something wholly different from high modernism: a set of positive encounters between agents and agriculturalists that, for a time, supported farmers in their own efforts to adjust to change in agriculture. I will argue that out of the drought and depression of the 1930s, through the shifts in agricultural practices and markets that continued through the mid-twentieth century, the PFRA embodied many of the principles of low modernism. The monograph will also address a profound irony: it was the PFRA, through its low modernist practices, that facilitated the entry of prairie farmers into the world of globalized, chemical-dependent, large-scale farming -- an agricultural mode vulnerable to the sort of catastrophic failure documented by James Scott in Seeing Like a State.
As I go through historical materials related to the PFRA, I’m also collecting information related to another project, one that remains quite preliminary at this point. I’m interested in the idea of development as conceptualized and deployed by Canadian federal and provincial governments in the mid to late decades of the 20th century. As I believe the PFRA played a key role in defining development, I’m finding quite a bit of relevant material in my current research. At this point, I anticipate this later project will consider how Canadian development agencies dealt with people and places considered to be underdeveloped, such as certain rural regions and many Aboriginal communities. I’m also interested in making a connection between domestic and international efforts at development. Indeed, the project is in part an effort to figure out just what the PFRA was doing in Ghana in the 1960s and 1970s.
JC: Are there any major themes or emphases uniting your past, present, and future projects?
I use historical methods to study past efforts at government planning, with a particular focus on plans with environmental aspects. From drainage districts and watershed conservation districts in Manitoba, through the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, to the 1960s and 1970s concept of development as it played out on national and international scales, I am interested in how people have worked together through government authority to address perceived problems, whether human or environmental. I’m interested in the outcomes, both positive and negative, of these efforts. Who benefited? Who didn’t? What were the consequences for people and places?
JC: You can order a copy of the hard cover of Wet Prairie: People, Land and Water in Agricultural Manitoba from the UBC Press website.
A Transnational History of the American Canoe Association
In August 1880, a small group of men, called together by author and traveller Nathaniel Holmes Bishop, gathered by the shores of Lake George in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. For four days, those in attendance slept under canvas, discussed sailing and paddling techniques and technologies, and competed in canoeing races. In spite of the poor turnout (Bishop had predicted upwards of two hundred men would attend), the event was deemed a success, and the American Canoe Association (ACA) was born.
Despite its partisan name, from the outset, the ACA was envisioned as a transnational organization, open to Canadian and American enthusiasts. The organization used annual encampments to realize its goal of “unit[ing] all amateur canoeists for the purpose of pleasure, health, or exploration.” Although the initial plan was to hold the meetings on Lake George, the site quickly became impractical and, in 1882, the decision was made to take the show on the road, so to speak. Between 1883 and 1902, the yearly encampments moved between out-of-the-way, if not entirely wild sites in New York, Ontario, and New England. Destinations included Lake Champlain, Muskoka, the Hudson River, the St. Lawrence River, and Cape Cod. Growing concerns about financing a mobile encampment prompted the organization to purchase an island in the St. Lawrence in 1900, and in 1903 the organization moved the annual meeting to Sugar Island permanently. Members of the ACA continue to gather at Sugar Island, a stone’s throw away from Gananoque, ON, to this day.
My dissertation, which is being conducted at Carleton University under the supervision of John C. Walsh, is a postcolonial feminist examination of the annual meetings of the American Canoe Association from the organization’s founding until 1910. This was not my original dissertation project. When I began the PhD, I was exploring women’s varied encounters with canoes and canoeing between 1870 and World War II. However, as I got deeper into the research, I came to realize that it was impractical as a dissertation topic, not least because of its breadth. Around the same time, I was working on a chapter on the place of women at the annual encampments of the ACA, as well as a paper on mobilities at the annual meetings for the Environments of Mobility in Canada Workshop at Glendon College. As I wrote, I began to see the possibilities of looking closely at a single event held over a number of years at a variety of different locations. Much like the Industrial Exhibitions that are the subject of Keith Walden’s Becoming Modern, the annual meetings of the ACA were events with their own logics and rhythms. However, they were also deeply embedded in late-nineteenth-century middle-class culture. As such, they shed light on the important relationships between recreation, politics, economics, society, nature, and culture. That they took place at “natural” locations far from the urban centres that were at the heart of middle-class identity in this period made them all the more interesting to me.
The shape of the annual meetings provides the structure for the dissertation. In other words, I follow the organizers and attendees as they prepare for, travel to, and participate in the meets. The chapters are organized thematically, each focusing on a different practice that was central to encampment life: organizing, navigating, governing, inhabiting, competing, working, and documenting. My hope is that the final product will be a mediation on community, place, and the politics of everyday life in the Victorian era, with some snazzy photos of sailing canoes and “pimped out” tents thrown in!
One of the best parts of my research experience thus far has been the opportunity to travel to archives off the beaten path, but close to water. In August 2010, for example, I spent a week in Mystic, CT (home of Mystic Pizza) working at “the Museum of America and the Sea,” Mystic Seaport. When I wasn’t in the research centre, I was usually off exploring the coastline on one of the town’s free bicycles, watching the Bascule drawbridge or enjoying local seafood and beer. Another one of my favourite destinations is the New York State Historical Association Library in Cooperstown, NY. Not only does the reading room overlook beautiful Lake Otsego, but the local amenities include the Baseball Hall of the Fame, the Ommegang Brewery, and the Fennimore Art Gallery and Farm Museum. Add to these locations, Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondacks, the Muskoka Lakes Museum in Port Carling, and the Antique Boat Museum in Clayton, New York, and you have one happy paddlin’ scholar.
Jessica Dunkin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Carleton University.
Exploring the History of Golf Course Construction in North America
Landscapes, both their meanings and their physical substance, have always fascinated me. Their histories are layered and afford an opportunity for me to combine my interests in environmental history, cultural history, and the history of science and technology. A few years ago, having completed my Master’s project exploring the relationship between landscape representations and American tourism in the Eastern Townships of Quebec during the late nineteenth century, I wondered if there was a dissertation topic that would allow me to continue exploring the landscapes created out of the relationships between people and their surrounding physical environments.
As luck would have it, while mulling over possibilities, I passed by a local golf course in my hometown and was struck with an idea: golf courses have become an increasingly visible and environmentally significant landscape in Canada. I wondered what patterns and processes lay behind the establishment and expansion of these landscapes. My dissertation project began to take form and I have since come to realize that the history of golf course landscapes or golfscapes is a much more complex narrative than I originally imagined.
For almost five centuries, prior to golf’s 1873 organized debut in North America, the game developed its core socio-cultural and environmental attributes in the United Kingdom, especially in Scotland. It was this manifestation of golf that spread throughout the world, including North America. Between 1873 and 1945, North American golf transformed from a rudimentary game played on farmers’ fields to a well-recognized pastime able to draw memberships and tourists to a variety of clubs across the continent. In my dissertation, I bring together several key layers of the history of golfscapes to provide an overall account of why and how golf courses became a significant presence on the Canadian landscape. My research surveys golf’s expansion across the country; the connections among golf, tourism, and the development of the national parks in Canada; the evolution of golf course architecture; and the growth of golf course construction and maintenance products. Combined, these elements illustrate how golf courses in North America grew out of a long United Kingdom tradition, yet charted their own paths on this side of the Atlantic as a result of the game’s interaction with the unique socio-economic and physical environments found in Canada and wider North America.
As part of this analysis, I examine the relationships among urban development, transportation, and golf course relocation, which coincides with the expansion of (sub) urban developments across Canada as well as the growth of three types of golf courses: the private club, the municipal course, and the resort course. I consider the paradoxical relationship between the desire for and necessity of connectedness to urban centres and that of wanting to remain separate from such urban landscapes and technologies. I examine how golf became part of a meaningful tourist experience, promoted by Canadian Pacific Railway, the Canadian National Railway, and the federal government, and which expanded the nuanced understandings of nature promoted in national parks across the country.
Furthermore, I contend that golf architects, who worked on both sides of the Atlantic, combined in their course designs existing ways of experiencing nature with new, golf specific forms of conceiving human/nature relationships, that appeared as a result of interactions with the diverse physical environments encountered across North America. Golf architects pursued two overarching design principles: to make the golf courses aesthetically pleasing and strategically playful.
Finally, I consider how the tools and products (including soil, turf grass, fertilizers, pesticides, excavation machinery, irrigation systems, and mowing equipment) necessary to construct and maintain golfscapes in Canada relied heavily on the mobility of material and products within Canada and from international markets. Turf grass, a major concentration in the final section of my dissertation, provides an example of these connections, as the development of turf nurseries and organizations (like the Green Section of the United States Golf Association) became increasingly important throughout North America due to the realization of regional differences, which continued to augment the need for specific North American methods but also facilitated the movement of grass seeds around the world.
As with all landscapes, golf courses reflect the myriad of ways in which humans view and use the physical environments around them and, conversely, how those physical environments influence the ideas and activities of humans living, working, and relaxing in them. They are particular to time and place. Golfscapes represent specific ways that nature has been conceptualized, shaped, and experienced. They present a unique framework in which to explore the evolution of a particular way of viewing and interacting with nature that both reflects and highlights change within wider Canadian society.
Elizabeth Jewett is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.
Varieties of Nova Scotian Environmentalism
Like many others who do 20th century history, I came to my subject out of a desire to know why things turned out the way they did in my own lifetime. And like everyone who writes history, I bring to it my own way of looking at the world. What those two things mean for me, in the midst of researching the history of environmentalism in Nova Scotia, is that I began with an observation of difference and I have carried out my research ever more as an inquiry into differences among environmentalists.
Difference was such an inspiring starting place only because there was supposed to have been so little of it among the first generation of Nova Scotian environmentalists. In the early 2000s, battles over wind farms and other technological cures for pressing problems visibly divided a provincial movement that claimed to have enjoyed a strong sense of unity through the industrial forestry campaigns of the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Activists could point for example to the herbicide trial of 1983, which prompted fund-raising efforts from Yarmouth to Sydney and collected plaintiffs with names like Francis, MacGillivray, Doucette, Googoo, Calvert, and Schneider, and mournfully wonder what had happened to their sense of common purpose. It seemed like the movement had found in climate change that “moral equivalent of war” for which it had searched so long, only to fall apart over the sense of urgency it demanded. I wanted to know why.
As it turns out, however, today’s divisions are there in the archives as well; the unity cry of the greens is a rhetorically useful but factually dubious bit of theatre. Looked at from a perspective that doesn’t extend a false recollection of unity into the past, the longest campaign ever fought by environmentalists is the one they have ceaselessly fought amongst themselves to define their own activities. The key question with research like mine then becomes simple: what was and is “environmentalism”? For years the movement has uncomfortably worn the mantle of middle-class reaction. Usually that means reaction to the modernist project. (Sometimes, it includes reaction to the work of nature itself, at least when environmental history remembers itself.) But it has become clearer with the piling up of work by Ramachandra Guha, Robert Gottlieb, Juan Martinez-Alier, and others over the last two decades that environmentalism is marked by diversity in its roots and branches both. My project therefore deals with the urban/rural divide, aboriginal environmental justice, the influence of scientific thinking, and political/economic power, among other themes, and how they all come together to fill the empty word, “environment,” with meaning.
Nova Scotia, aside from being the inspiration for my project, offers the perfect site for an investigation of environmental activism, one that can tell the story of life in Canada’s late 20th century environmental movement better than a national story can. It is big enough to support a diverse movement (a Canadian Environment Week newsletter published in 1981 lists 27 different environmental activist groups in the province), and small enough to study without omitting too many of the local actors. Since the 1970s, Nova Scotian environmentalists have also had close connections with Canadian, American, and European activists, as well as with the provincial and federal governments.
At the moment I am tracing the story of two periods of activist group formation, one in the early 1970s, partly in response to the provincial government’s attempt to build a 12,000 MW nuclear power station on a small south shore island in the middle of the richest lobster fishing area in the province, and another in the early 1980s, in response to increased use of pesticides in forestry and to an application by a French company to begin uranium mining. I hope in the end to be able to show how the negotiation of meaning in environmentalism by the “first wave” influenced the second, as well as how inevitable and valuable different definitions of environmentalism have been in the past, regardless of their being concealed and denied.
Mark Leeming is a Doctoral Candidate in the History Department at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
Seizing Opportunities in Marine Space
In September of 2008 the Canadian Coast Guard seized an American fishing vessel on the Grand Banks after aircraft on patrol spotted it fishing within the 200 mile limit of Canadian territorial seas. The rich history of international confrontation on these fishing grounds, among the most nutrient-rich and commercially productive tracts of marine real estate known to human history, and the lengthy process of articulating territorial limits between nations for the purposes of stewarding the resource and regulating its extraction would have made this episode interesting enough. However, this case would prove even more compelling because the vessel seized was the F/V Sea Hawk and the captain was best-selling author Linda Greenlaw, who was, at the time, also starring in the first season of the Discovery Channel’s reality series, Swords: Life on the Line. Despite her literary successes Greenlaw is probably most famous for having been depicted in the film version of Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.
Rather than seize (so to speak) a golden opportunity to present the “reality” of the modern international fishery, both the Discovery Channel and Greenlaw, who authored a book about the same voyage, opted instead to regale their audiences with familiar, even somewhat tired, stories of man battling the elements, facing down the specter of bankruptcy, and overcoming personal demons like self-doubt, age, and inexperience. In fact, Original Productions, which also produced the successful series The Deadliest Catch, edited out the entire episode of Greenlaw’s seizure, arrest, and arraignment and any mention of it that may have come later. Greenlaw told interviewers that the incident could not be shown for legal reasons, but that she would deal with it in her book. Granted, it’s more of a book about her than about fishing, but her treatment of the seizure incident, in Seaworthy, is primarily restricted to her effort to reconcile her transgression of international law with her “goody goody” self image. There is no discussion of why such laws exist or the politics of enforcing them. Oddly, Greenlaw doesn’t mention anywhere in the chronicle of her voyage that there was even a camera crew on board. So the cameras won’t show us the seizure and Greenlaw won’t show us the cameras!
While no one seems interested in contextualizing it, Greenlaw’s seizure is only the latest in a nearly two century long tug-of-war over resource management in the North Atlantic fisheries. My research looks at the efforts on the part of the fishermen, scientists, politicians, and diplomats to manage fisheries in the U.S. and Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The vessel seizure, it turns out, has been a brilliant lens through which to do so. As Karl Jacoby finds in the Adirondacks, law making and law breaking can tell us a great deal about the relationships between humans and nature because such episodes create collisions between the “inarticulate” classes of resource users and the hyper-literate classes of lawyers, judges, politicians, and diplomats. Fishermen’s transgressions were occasioned by depositions and testimony in which they describe the nature of the fishery and their place in it to those who would arbitrate questions of law. And within management regimes, wardens, officers, and overseers communicated their movements and activities to their superiors along with their observations and opinions on the efficacy of the existing structure of institutions and practices. Correspondence between regulatory bureaucracies in adjacent jurisdictions illuminate the struggles of regulating access to species that migrate freely across jurisdictional boundaries—particularly complicated when such jurisdictions are also divided by international borders. While the modern press labeled Greenlaw everything from a poacher to an environmental terrorist to a swordfish serial killer, you can but imagine the rhetoric of the notably vitriolic press of the late nineteenth century on the occasion of similar incidents.
Environmental history is just beginning its movement offshore. Just as the stories our popular culture feeds us about the fishery tend toward the simplistic and sensational, much of the early work on the oceans has come out of the same tradition of quantification that has guided our management approaches in recent decades. While valuable, this inevitable, and somewhat predictable, tale of depletion and decline from unimaginable abundance to dire scarcity reinforces a fallacy that resource management is, at best, a twentieth century creation. The story I tell not only places earlier management regimes under the microscope, exposing them to the kind of scrutiny that will enable us to refine and perfect them, it provides some context for the statistical portrayals. Catch statistics are as much social as they are biological. They are created, compiled, reported, archived, and referenced by people with varying sets of motivations and objectives. Catch is not a reflection of how many fish existed in a given place at a given time. Even in the nineteenth century complex webs of laws were debated, passed, enforced, and broken that dictated where fishermen could be, when they could be there, what they could take, and what they could use to take it. The tales of decline are not wrong. But to tell them with the context edited out is irresponsible. My work looks to bring us closer to understanding the reality of past marine ecosystems and their users.
Robert Gee is a PhD candidate at the University of Maine. He is also a 2011-2012 Fulbright Scholar at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Cottage Country and Sustainability
I’ll be the first to admit that I come at my dissertation project from a fairly privileged and personal starting point. Each summer growing up, my parents took me and my siblings to our cottage on Lake Joseph in Muskoka. For those who do not know this area two hours north of Toronto, Muskoka was an exclusively Aboriginal place prior to 1850, was resettled by eurocanadians in the second half of the nineteenth century, experienced a brief period as a major centre for timber extraction and saw-milling before the turn of the century, and became Ontario’s premiere tourist destination as early as the 1880s. From an early age, I learned there was something special about our cottage and the place it occupied in Muskoka. The island where the cottage is located was purchased from the Crown in 1873 by a lawyer from Toronto named James MacLennan. MacLennan also bought several other islands at the same time in order to save them from logging. As a consequence, most of the woods surrounding our 125 year-old cottage is old growth forest. For many years, MacLennan and his guests reached the cottage by railroad and then steamer, which dropped passengers and their trunks off at a wharf that no longer exists, but whose cribs still rest on the bottom of the lake next to a point of land beside the cottage. In the late nineteenth century, MacLennan and his family came up and stayed for most if not all of the summer, bought supplies from local settlers, and seldom traveled more than a few kilometers. Although their reasons for being in Muskoka were much the same then as they are now (escaping the city, being close to nature), limited mobility and closer relationships with permanent residents distinguishes the past from the present.
Knowing a bit about the history of my own cottage quickly piqued my interest in Muskoka more generally, and how the area became such a popular place for cottagers and summer visitors. This lead me to a Master’s Thesis at Queen’s University with Colin Duncan on energy use in Muskoka between 1850 and 1920. While conducting research for my MA, I quickly discovered that Muskoka has a fascinating environmental history, which demanded further study. Thus, I am now working with Colin Coates at York University, on my doctoral dissertation entitled Poor Soils and Rich Folks: Societal Metabolisms and Sustainability in Muskoka, 1850-1920.
My project seeks to explore how life in Muskoka became more or less sustainable over time and place. Since nothing is completely sustainable, only more or less sustainable, what I hope to accomplish is to identify the ways of living and the particular arrangements between humans and their environment that were most sustainable in Muskoka during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By taking the material and energy flows of everyday life as my starting point, I am attempting to assess the social, economic and environmental implications of life on the Shield for First Nations peoples, eurocanadian (re)settlers, tourists and cottagers, and the logging and tanning industries. My overarching take-away for the dissertation is that life on the Shield was (and still is) unavoidably reliant on inputs from outside the region, and that because of this the most sustainable arrangements and ways of living in Muskoka were those that maximized the consumption of local resources, for local consumption, made possible by locally-based interconnections. The most sustainable communities (socially, economically and environmentally) were those that learned how to benefit from the local rather than become dependent on exogenous imports.
In addition to Library and Archives Canada and the Ontario Archives, my research has taken me to numerous small public and private collections of documents. The curators and archivists of local museums, heritage centres, community archives and libraries have been extremely helpful in helping me dig up sources that would not have been available to me otherwise. Doing a microhistory project has enabled me to get to know many members of the community and develop a level of trust that most researchers do not experience. Muskoka is a place steeped in its own romantic and fanatical history. It is my hope that this project will enhance the sense of place people in Muskoka have already, and that through my work I may become an active member of the community able to demonstrate that an understanding of the past is useful and vital to shaping responsible and sustainable choices and policies for the future.
Andrew Watson is a Phd Candidate in the history department at York University in Toronto.
An Interview with Ruth Sandwell
JC: Where do you work? How does environmental history contribute to your job?
RS: I teach in the History and Philosophy of Education Program, Department of Theory and Policy Studies, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Environmental history does not play a major role in my teaching, which focuses on the history of education, and history teaching in Canada, though I do discuss with my students the importance of environmental history, and explain what it is. Environmental history does come into the research part of my work, in my work on the history of rural Canada, and of energy use in the home.
JC: What is your current research project?
RS: I am currently working on two major projects, writing a general history of rural Canada, 1870-1940 for the University of Toronto’s Issues in Canadian History Series, and I am conducting research into a SSHRC funded project “Heat, Light and Work in Canadian Homes: A Social History of Fossil Fuels and Hydro-electricity.”
JC: What got you interested in this topic?
RS: In connection with my earlier work in the history of the family and rural history in Canada (with a focus on British Columbia), I conducted a number of interviews with rural people. I was surprised at how late fossil fuels and hydro electricity were adopted in their homes. And I was impressed with how keen my interview subjects were to talk to me about the transformations that electricity finally brought to their lives – it was clearly a subject of great importance to them.
JC: Does this current project build on your earlier publications?
RS: My history of rural Canada builds on my dissertation research, published as R.W. Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space: Land Policy and the Practices of Settlement, Saltspring Island, British Columbia, 1859-91 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), and a collection of essays that I edited, R. W. Sandwell, ed. , Beyond the City Limits: Rural History in British Columbia, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999). It also builds on a couple of articles, “Missing Canadians: Reclaiming the A-Liberal Past” Jean-François Constant and Michel Ducharme, eds. Liberalism and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 246-273, and “History as Experiment: Microhistory and Environmental History,” Alan McEachern and William Turkel, eds., Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental History (Toronto: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2008) ), 122-36. My work on changing fuel use in the home draws from these works to the extent that my research into rural Canada has explored the continued importance of the family and household to the economic, cultural and political history of Canada well into the twentieth century.
JC: What contribution do you hope to make the wider field with this project?
RS: I hope that the rural history project will document and explore the extremely close ties between people and their local environments in Canada until the 1940s, and the key role that these varied relationships played in the “development” of local, regional, national and global economies and societies. I hope that “Heat, Light and Work in Canadian Homes” will expand our understanding of the ways that changing domestic fuel and energy use has transformed the relationship between people and their local environments, between the household and the larger Canadian society, and among people within the household. Women’s lives in particular have been transformed over the past century by changing fuel use in the home. Documenting the varieties of fuels and the technologies that they involved might also be useful as our society moves over the next half century to a world without cheap fuels.
The Big Tree, Forestry in New Brunswick, and the Value of Nature
In Victoria County, New Brunswick, there is a certain tree which the locals refer to as the “Big Tree.” This particular tree sits atop a knoll alongside the Trans-Canada Highway, approximately 10 kilometres north of Perth-Andover and directly across from the Hamlet of Aroostook’s water tower. Hundreds of thousands of tourists, truckers, and regular folks going about their daily routines pass by this tree every year, but very few ever notice it. Surrounded by brush and many ordinary-looking trees, there is nothing spectacular about the tree on the knoll that would make it stand out to someone driving by on the highway. However, once you leave your car and actually walk to the base of the tree, then you can understand why locals have named it as they have. At more than two metres in diameter, ecologists estimate the Big Tree is no less than 500 years old. What is even more remarkable is that it is an eastern white pine, the tree species most valued by Eastern Canada’s forest industries in the 18th and 19th centuries. Luckily for the Big Tree, its trunk branches out in several directions a few metres above the ground, making it of little economic value for lumberers (not much “straight wood”).
The Big Tree is a reminder of how badly New Brunswick’s forests have been managed. Hardly any large white pines, or large examples of any other species of tree for that matter, have survived more than two hundred years of intensive forestry in New Brunswick. In a series of transitions starting in the late 18th century, the province’s forest industries shifted from the production of ship masts to square timber to long lumber and finally pulp and paper in the 1920s. Successive industries simply cut the biggest and the best trees they needed to supply a particular market, a process commonly known as “high-grading.” By the mid-20th century, this valuation of the forests in purely economic terms had prompted a debate about forest management policy in New Brunswick. My doctoral dissertation examines the competing visions of various forest stakeholders, including pulp and paper companies, lumber companies, woods workers, independent woodlot owners, and environmentalists, as to how the provincial government should manage the Crown (public) forests after the Second World War. Each group valued the forests differently. The pulp and paper industry, for example, considered the Crown forests valuable solely as industrial landscapes, while the environmentalists were more concerned with the forests as vibrant natural ecosystems (their intrinsic value).
In the 1970s, the poor state of the province’s forests and a cyclical downturn in international pulp and paper markets provided an opportunity for the New Brunswick government to seriously consider alternatives to the dominant industrial model of forest management. In particular, the provincial government formally established the New Brunswick Forest Authority in October 1973, a Crown corporation that administered more than 400,000 hectares of forests near Bathurst as part of a massive forest management experiment. The Bathurst Pilot Project was unparalleled in the history of North American forestry. If it had been judged successful after the initial five years, all Crown land leases in New Brunswick would have been withdrawn and placed under the control of the Forest Authority. The Authority, as the sole harvester of wood on Crown lands, would have assured mills an annual “guaranteed volume” of wood. For a variety of reasons, the project failed by the end of the 1970s and the industrial forestry valuation of landscape/ideology of use became well implanted within government and industry circles. The industrial forestry model has informed Crown forest management policy in New Brunswick to the present day.
At the dawn of the new millennium, the Big Tree suddenly garnered a lot of attention at the local and provincial levels. The New Brunswick government was in the process of expanding the Trans-Canada Highway from two lanes to four, and the section of the new highway through Victoria County was projected to bisect the Big Tree. The potential loss of the tree sparked significant protest from ecologists, environmentalists, historians, and local residents. For them, the tree was valuable as an ecological specimen, as a symbol of what the province’s forests had once looked like, and as a possible tourist attraction (to this day, many claim that it is the largest tree in New Brunswick). This campaign to save the Big Tree was one of the reasons why the provincial government ultimately changed the highway’s course a couple of hundred metres to the east. In this instance, alternative valuations of nature challenged economic orthodoxy. It has yet to be seen if something similar will ever occur in the management of New Brunswick’s Crown forests.
Mark J. McLaughlin is a PhD Candidate in history at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. He is also on the CHESS 2011 organizing committee.
Exploration is dead—long live exploration!
In his well-known, much-loved song “Northwest Passage,” the Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers testified to the enduring fascination of exploration. While travelling west over the prairies, the song’s modern protagonist recalls the storied journeys of early European explorers over the same spaces. He proclaims himself heir to their tradition of travel; he is the “tardiest explorer / driving hard across the plain.” This notion of tardiness well captures the way in which the language and imagery of exploration lingers throughout the twenty-first-century world. The Explorers’ Club of New York, once host to Cook, Peary, and Amundsen, now touts contemporary “explorers” and “expeditions” on Twitter (@ExplorersClub). Certain exploratory acts also retain rhetorical power, as several Russians realized when they “claimed” the North Pole at its seabed in 2007 by planting their country’s flag upon that “virgin” territory. Meanwhile, the Canadian government pursued another act of exploration: the mapping of Canada’s portion of the Arctic submarine continental shelf. This activity recalls the most uniquely modern facet to exploration—its equation with the ever-widening industrial search for lucrative minerals and fossil fuels buried in the earth’s crust and demanded for human consumption.
How and why does exploration continue to resonate in a supposedly post-exploratory age? This conundrum was as pertinent one hundred years ago, when the heroic age of exploration was thought to be drawing to a close, as it is today. It also lies at the heart of my doctoral dissertation, which examines the culture of northern Canadian exploration in the first half of the twentieth century. I focus on the writings and actions of four self-defined explorers: the mining engineer George Douglas (1875-1963), the surveyor Guy Blanchet (1884-1966), the ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962), and the photographer and filmmaker Richard Finnie (1906-1987). Arguing against the notion that northern exploration was unilaterally replaced by professional scientific fieldwork in this period, I demonstrate that these men developed and performed specifically exploratory identities throughout their lives. They adhered to an older, natural historical style of exploratory praxis, characterized by their wide networks of correspondence and their location of authority within their private libraries and archives. Exploration thus produced different kinds of knowledge about the North than that stemming from overtly scientific fieldwork. Far from being a nostalgic, anti-modern activity, as it is often figured, exploration also enabled these men to wrestle with and resolve specifically modern concerns about the role and agency of the individual in an increasingly homogeneous and mass-produced society. Discursive ideas of modernity in southern North America significantly influenced these men’s experiences in the North and shaped their representations of the northern environment.
Exploration was key to the early twentieth-century “opening” of the Canadian North, in which northern landscapes were made legible to southern government and industry and became entangled in related networks of power and capital. Yet a deep and heartfelt ambivalence about the region’s modernization pierces that era’s enthusiastic narratives of progress and development. Many who worked and lived there—northerners and southerners, natives and non-natives alike—remained attached to older configurations of labour and material engagement with the land. That same dissonance still inflects current debates about local and regional development in the North. Exploration, after all, was never only about imperial knowledge and control. It was predicated also on serendipitous travel through unknown landscapes, through spaces of endless imaginative speculation and pleasure too vast to know or control. Exploration enthralls us still because it inspires us, through contact with the new and unforeseen, to imagine different and better ways of being ourselves and living in the world with each other. We seem to need this optimistic desire for the betterment of human affairs as much in this century as ever.
For exposition on the title's phrase, see Felix Driver, “Modern explorers,” in New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century, eds. Simon Naylor and James R. Ryan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 241-9.
Christina Adcock recently completed her doctoral degree at the Scott Polar Research Institute of the University of Cambridge. She is now a postdoctoral fellow at UBC.
History from the Urban Fringe
Toronto’s Lower Don River slides unceremoniously along the eastern limits of the old city core, its muddied, placid channel host to the scattered wreckage of twenty-first-century urban living: plastic bags snagged at intervals along its length; a rusting shopping cart marooned on a broken tree limb; faint spirals of purple and blue motor oil caught in a back-eddy. Viewed most frequently through car windshields on the adjacent Don Valley Parkway, the river is often difficult to make out: a strip of grey-brown water among like-coloured strips of pavement, its moving surface barely distinguishable from the expressway exit ramps that criss-cross the bend near its mouth. Moving into the river valley on foot or bicycle, one is struck by the strange juxtapositions of a post-industrial landscape: a newly paved recreational path alongside an industrial brownfield bordered in chain-link; a recent planting of native vegetation; freight trains running down a still-active rail corridor. It is the kind of place that compels the question, what happened here? Or, as Claire Campbell has said of her own research into the environmental history of Canada’s historic landscapes, “what once were you”?
My doctoral dissertation, completed in 2010, explored the social and environmental history of this changing urban landscape from the late eighteenth century to the present. I was particularly interested in investigating the river valley’s relationship with the city as it grew and developed, charting not only the history of environmental and human-induced change in the watershed, but also the social history of this place at the urban fringe: who used the valley at different times, and for what purposes?
Environment, I found, played an important role in precipitating and perpetuating the valley’s status as a place “at the margins.” A yawning valley difficult to bridge, steep ravine slopes that impeded development, and miasmatic lowlands that fueled malaria outbreaks all contributed to perceptions of the area as a wasteland unfit for development. Despite plans to locate the original town plot near the mouth of the river, Toronto consistently moved north and west as it developed, leaving in the area around the river mouth a vacuum to be filled by less desirable uses: breweries, packing houses, soap factories and tanneries. (For a geospatial representation of these developments, consult the Don Valley Historical Mapping Project, developed with support from NiCHE and the University of Toronto Map and Data Library as a companion initiative to my doctoral research). The river provided a convenient disposal mechanism for industrial wastes and later municipal sewage, with predictable results for ecological integrity and public health.
Following the logic of centres and peripheries, the valley absorbed not only the material wastes of the urbanizing centre, but also human “undesirables,” people who for various reasons and circumstances found themselves pushed to the edges of society. In addition to the institutionalized “others” of the Don Jail, House of Refuge, and valley isolation hospitals, a small number of squatters, hoboes, gangsters, and Roma travellers sought refuge in the valley over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There they found not only respite from authorities, but also a place that provided the means for limited subsistence: water, sources of wood and plant materials for shelters, cast-away items from abandoned dump sites in the valley, and in some cases, fish and other sources of food. In this way, the Don Valley operated (and continues to operate) as a place where various kinds of marginality can be seen. A borderland between rural and urban, the valley also served as a liminal space within which “old” and “new” political economies, modern and premodern lifeways overlapped and asserted themselves. Cottagers who occupied the valley with “back-to-the-land” ambitions carried this sense of the valley as a space apart into the mid-twentieth century.
My current research picks up upon this interest in the persistence of what we typically think of as "rural" activities--cottaging, farming, gathering--in the neglected or undeveloped spaces of the urban landscape. I am currently exploring these themes in a study of the history of bee-keeping in twentieth-century Ontario and New York State as a “traditional” economy that existed alongside and in relationship with urban (and rural/agricultural) industrial norms.
Jennifer Bonnell is a SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow in History at the University of Guelph
Suggested Reading
Ph.D. Thesis, “Imagined Futures and Unintended Consequences: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley,” http://hdl.handle.net/1807/24690
“A Social History of a Changing Environment: The Don River Valley, 1910-1931,” in
Gene Desfor and Jennefer Laidley, eds., Reshaping Toronto’s Waterfront
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming, March 2011).
An interview with Michael Egan
JC: Where do you work? How does environmental history contribute to your job?
ME: I'm an associate professor in the History Department at McMaster University. My position was originally created to develop a curriculum in the history of science and technology, but I have managed to integrate undergraduate courses in the history of environmental sustainability. McMaster is also developing a real graduate strength in environmental history; I offer a graduate seminar in global environmental history, and have worked with some tremendously talented graduate students in this field.
Further afield, I am an active member of the American Society for Environmental History. I am currently the chair of the Society's Sustainability Committee, and have been a longtime presenter at the annual meeting. With friends and colleagues from ASEH, I started the Sustainable Future History Project in 2008; the Project is a loose cabal of early-career scholars committed to making environmental history more relevant to contemporary debates about the environment, resting on the premise that in order to fully understand the social, political, economic, and ecological context of contemporary environmental problems we need to be conscious of their historical contexts. Resolving local and global environmental quandaries requires careful thought and planning; future success depends upon a deeper appreciation of the past. Historicizing sustainable and unsustainable futures is based less on the notion that we should learn from past mistakes, but rather on the premise that solving the environmental crisis will demand the most and best information available, and history provides valuable insight into the creation and proliferation of the environmental ills we hope to curb. In 2010, the Sustainable Future History Project inaugurated a new book series with the MIT Press, "History for a Sustainable Future." The series will publish peer-reviewed works designed primarily for the undergraduate classroom and a popular audience, though they should also be useful for scholars in the field. Accessible writing and clarity of purpose will serve as the cornerstone for titles under consideration. Books will be limited to 50,000 words (including notes) and firmly grounded in original, primary research.
JC: What is your current research project?
ME: I'm working on a global history of mercury pollution in the twentieth century. My project is, fundamentally, a global or transnational (I'm still playing with these variants) history of environmental toxicology since World War II, using mercury as its lens. However, I engage not only with the accumulation of scientific knowledge but also with the social and political application of that knowledge in the form of environmental policymaking. Drawing primarily from scientific journals and conference proceedings and governmental documents and reports, I'm investigating the role of scientific knowledge in national and international environmental policy. I'm particularly interested in the struggle for epistemic clarity in and between knowledge creation and policy making—how it worked (when and where), how/why it didn't, and the difficulties inherent in communicating scientific knowledge.
The challenges inherent in understanding and regulating this dangerous and prolific environmental pollutant across boundaries, jurisdictions, and constituencies constitute a vital testing ground for the examination of how environmental knowledge and policy travel in tandem over time and across boundaries; it also comprises one of the most critical chapters of a larger history of the hazardous chemicals regime—a series of independent but functionally related treaties and programs—that emerged after World War II to address the proliferation of new chemicals and pollutants introduced into the environment. In the decades after World War II, mercury was identified as a pollutant deriving from fungicides, mildew-resistant paint, run-off from gold mining, coal-fired power plant emissions, and the construction of hydroelectric reservoirs. Devastating mercury “epidemics” struck local populations in Japan, Guatemala, Ghana, Pakistan, Iraq, and Canada; high concentrations of mercury were discovered in water systems throughout the developed world, most notably in Sweden, Canada, and the United States; and as mercury became universally recognized as a toxic hazard, its disposal posed myriad new problems. In a focused study of this problem, I propose to examine the development of environmental toxicology in light of growing international concerns over mercury pollution after World War II, and put the budding scientific field in conversation with the policies that urgently sought to control mercury’s dangers. I'd also like to think that I stay true to my environmental history roots with this project: In exploring a single pollutant and the scientific and regulatory efforts to control that pollutant, I see my project as contributing to a world environmental history from mercury’s point of view.
When not concentrating on mercury, I'm putting together a short history of sustainability. This comes straight out of my teaching; this past fall, I gave a lecture course on the global history of environmental sustainability, and I hope to use my lectures as the rough draft for a pared-down manuscript, which I hope to prepare this summer for "History for a Sustainable Future."
JC: What got you interested in mercury?
ME: Even though I was trained in environmental history, I've been a lurker in history of science and STS circles. As a graduate student, I was fascinated with the various social nuances that manifested themselves in the production and consumption of scientific knowledge, especially as they pertained to the environment. I've long felt that most environmental knowledge is the product of what the conservation biologist Michael Soulé famously called "crisis disciplines," where decision making has to happen before scientific consensus is reached. This raises a series of important questions about what kinds of decisions are made and by whom. On the one hand, scientific knowledge constitutes an essential form of expertise in environmental policymaking, but when the luxury of certainty isn't available, how do decisions get made? Uncertainty, agnotology, and expertise are fantastic avenues of inquiry in STS and the history of science, and I think there are some fruitful opportunities here for environmental historians, too. As a vehicle for these kinds of explorations, the mercury project began in earnest in 2004; I spent a year on a postdoctoral fellowship in Philadelphia at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, which was a terrific place to examine the scientific and political history of an element.
JC: Does this current project build on your earlier publications?
ME: I think there's a fair amount of continuity. In general, my work examines how scientific knowledges and political knowledges interact and how they constitute each other. Insofar as the mercury project is opening new research directions (for me) into the relationship between science and governance, especially in the global arena, it also pursues a number of themes that drove my previous work. It follows scientists in the public arena and concerns about environmental and human health. In my first book, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (MIT, 2007), I examined the social and scientific career of the biologist Barry Commoner and his influence in redirecting the priorities of American environmentalism. Central to that work is the public and scientific debate over environmental risk, and the importance of translating and communicating technical scientific information for a lay audience. During the 1960s, Commoner also spent considerable energy making mercury pollution issues an environmental priority in the United States. My initial inspiration for a research project on mercury in the global environment came from my immersion in Commoner’s work on the subject.
JC: What contribution do you hope to make the wider field with this project?
ME: This project aims to put the disparate fields of world history, policy history, environmental history, and the history of science in concert. In transcending national boundaries, mercury pollution brought together scientific communities and governing bodies that demand the input of a number of different historical subfields. In its praxis, then, this project challenges historians to move beyond the parameters of human, state, or intellectual history to think about how concentration on a non-human agent can alter our perspective on human discourses and the human condition.
But an analysis of mercury pollution and regulation also makes a number of contributions outside the academy. As mercury continues to influence fish consumption and pollute air and water systems, mercury pollution remains a hotly debated issue in various countries and world governing organizations like the United Nations and World Health Organization, the legislative effects of which will undoubtedly have a profound impact on future decisions regarding energy production, petrochemical manufacturing, and food consumption. A more nuanced reading of mercury’s place in recent history could provide a valuable guide in national and international decision-making processes.