Wikipedia in the Classroom
Last term I outsourced my teaching. A bunch of people I’ve never met and whose identities and whereabouts I don’t know taught my students. They did it more effectively than I could and they did it for free. And what’s more, you could do the same thing. Just e-mail me your bank account and Social Insurance Number and I’ll fill you in.
Seriously, it doesn’t involve call centres in India or child labour. What it does involve is the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). The WMF has many projects, but the one most people know about is Wikipedia, the world’s most popular online reference work, attracting some fourteen per cent of global internet traffic daily.
Concerned about the quality of Wikipedia’s entries, the WMF established an education program now global in reach, aimed at enlisting university faculty and students in the task of grounding Wikipedia articles in the existing scholarly literature. My course was part of the Canada Education Program, the only history course enrolled so far.
I substituted writing Wikipedia articles for the usual term papers as the major assignment in HIST 396, my third year North American environmental history class at UBC, which has an enrollment of sixty. The students worked in teams to improve existing articles and to write brand new ones. In all, they wrote on thirteen, all subjects in Canadian environmental history.
While it’s obvious why the WMF would want to avail itself of free expertise, it probably isn’t clear why I’d volunteer my own labour and that of my students to its program.
I’d like to say that it was because I was attracted by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’ philosophy of making knowledge accessible (at least to those who have an internet connection). As he puts it - somewhat more grandly - “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we’re doing.” Certainly in the context of the battles between some Canadian universities and Access Copyright, as well as the international rebellion against academic publisher Elsevier, his arguments resonate. It’s odd that we seem to be in the midst of an intellectual enclosure movement at the very same time open-access journals and crowd-sourced knowledge are gaining momentum and legitimacy.
While Wales’ philosophy is appealing, what led me to experiment was something far more prosaic and self-centred; namely my frustrations in the classroom. For the past two years, a pile of unclaimed HIST 396 term papers has accumulated in the corner of my office, evidence of my failure to engage students adequately. It was as if the energy and anxiety that went into these fifteen- to eighteen-page tomes dissipated completely when they were handed in. The authors of these abandoned papers didn’t, it seems, care how their ideas and arguments resonated with their audience - me. Increasingly, it seemed ridiculous to have students spend time doing something they weren’t interested in and for me to spend time doing something they weren’t interested in; namely writing comments.
While anyone can assign a Wikipedia article as a class project, there are some important benefits that come along with participating in the WMF’s Global Education Program. Some of these were material: I got access to the learning resources that the WMF had developed, and more importantly, I got help in the form of people: I could e-mail or Skype the Education Program Advisor for Canada and rely on the help of WMF-trained “campus ambassadors” who essentially were TAs for the assignment. These campus ambassadors were graduate students at UBC (and NiCHE members!) who volunteered to do the training as a form of professional development; a way of augmenting their teaching portfolios.
I also had the assistance of three “online ambassadors.” They’re members of the Wikipedia community, expert editors who volunteered to help my students and me with writing articles because they just happened to be interested in the subject matter. Beyond their handles – “The Interior,” “Wetman,” and “maclean” – and what each said about themselves on their Wikipedia "Talk" pages, I have no idea who they are. Their names materialized on my Wikipedia assignment syllabus within hours of me putting it up.
These online ambassadors are the key to understanding the major benefit of having students write Wikipedia articles; namely, the experience they get of the process of knowledge creation through their engagement with a broader community of knowledge makers. Anyone can write and edit a Wikipedia article. And of course, anyone can read what’s written and comment on it. And they do.
The public nature of Wikipedia, and the fact students felt they were contributing to something that would live on after the class was over made the task of writing an entry exhilarating and intimidating at the same time. The self-consciousness that came from writing something that wasn’t just for me, a TA, or, at most, the other students in the class, translated into a level of care about both the form and content of their writing that I don’t always see.
Nor was it just the size of the audience that made them self-conscious; it was also who was in the audience. For instance, the entries on hydro dams in British Columbia attracted the attention of an engineer with Hydro Quebec (a self-confessed “dam geek”), a bureaucrat with the provincial Ministry of Energy and Mines, and people who lived in communities adjacent to the dam.
When Wikipedians like these took issue with what they wrote, the students couldn’t just be self-conscious: they also had to respond. Learning how to explain why they had written what they had, to defend it respectfully, and to modify it in light of valid criticism was incredibly valuable. I was impressed with how the students stood up for themselves, especially given that not all community members abided by the first rule of Wikipedia: “Don't bite the newbies!” Take this salvo on the Talk page for the W.A.C. Bennett Dam:
Improvements? Well, not quite
Now, I guess I am not a true “Ambassador” of whatever project or class you guys at the University of British Columbia must be, but I don't think the effort to improve the article was entirely successful. Let me list a few PROBLEMS I see so far....My basic question is this: Was this dam put there to serve the governmental and social agendas of its namesake and other bureacrats [sic], or was it put there to make some money for the province or its people? It's like painting an elephant on the side of a bus and coaxing people to "ride the elephant to work." It's a bus, people. This is a dam, not a social studies project. [Emphasis in original.]
Before the students could respond, other members of the community jumped in:
Give them some time before jumping to conclusions. According to the plan posted in the section right before this one, there are two sections devoted to construction of the dam (which is something I pointed out above, btw. Bouchecl (talk) 17:32, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
Uruiamme, thanks for taking the time to comment and provide some analysis. This article, like all of Wikipedia, is a work in progress. The article has indeed improved since the beginning of the year (compare then and now).... maclean (talk) 02:54, 25 March 2012 (UTC)
No amount of in-class peer review or comments from me on drafts could replicate the range of questions that came from the Wikipedia community. Agree or not with the substance or tone of their comments, the contributions these anonymous Wikipedians made to my students’ learning is why I consider that I outsourced part of my teaching last term.
In the end, the value of the Wikipedia assignment lies in giving students first hand experience in constructing knowledge. Writing the articles showed them how it’s made; that it changes over time, and it does so in part as a result of competition and cooperation. Knowledge is a compromise, willing and grudging. It’s the outcome of exercising power and it is powerful.
Even though students wrote encyclopedia entries rather than conventional essays, the way they did so – through a Wiki – taught them important lessons about the nature of knowledge and the construction of arguments. In this case, the [social] medium was the [learning] message.
People interested in what I did should look at the Wikipedia assignment syllabus for HIST 396 for details. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
The articles the students wrote are listed there as well. This is just the syllabus for the Wikipedia assignment. I have a whole other one for the course itself.
You may wonder how much class time I spent on Wikipedia. I certainly didn't want this to become a class in social media or Wikipedia. Learning how to format things for Wikipedia isn't difficult, and there are lots of online resources on Wikipedia itself to instruct students in how to italicize, change font size, do references, etc.
I lectured for 1.5 hours a week, and perhaps 0.5 additional hours per week (at most) were spent on taking the students through the basics of Wikipedia. Students met an additional 1 hour a week in tutorials that were organized around articles or book chapters. In other words, it was a conventional history course in all respects but the major assignment.
You might also be wondering if this assignment was more labour-intensive than the standard term paper. My honest answer is yes - but only a little more, and if I do it again, for this class or any of the others I teach, it will be easier.
Finally, you might be thinking that asking students to write encyclopedia articles contradicts everything we try to teach them! After all, we put lots of effort into helping students identify arguments and make them. An encyclopedia entry isn’t an argument: it’s a different genre of writing all together, a synthesis of the existing knowledge on a subject.
True, but I’ve come to see that writing a Wikipedia article can make students more critical of what they subsequently read. Moreover, writing an encyclopedia entry calls on a somewhat different, but equally valuable, set of skills; namely, ones of synthesis and balance. It also calls on students to deal with a subject as a whole, for an audience that was seeking a variety of information from these entries. One of my students laughed at herself when she recalled an exchange she had with one Wikipedian who pointed out that in writing about a hydroelectric dam she hadn’t mentioned it was built to generate electricity! “Oh, right….”
Here are my insights on what needs to happen to make this assignment work:
- You need to do a fair amount of work ahead of time. I gave the students a list of possible articles they could write on, along with a preliminary bibliography of sources. Wikipedia articles are encyclopedia entries; they are meant to be syntheses of the existing scholarly literature. That means there has to be a sufficient secondary literature for students to use. Articles are not primary research papers, though I suspect one might push the envelope (I did) and allow students to use newspaper and magazine sources from the time.
- It's important to let students write on something they're interested in. I had students give me their top four or five choices and I made up the teams. Almost everyone got their first choice, but to do so I had two teams of two people.
- That brings me to my third tip: many students hate working in teams, usually because of the free rider problem. I confess that in making the teams I engaged in some social engineering. In consultation with my Teaching Assistant, I made sure that each team had a core of able students - insofar as we could assess their abilities early on in the term.
- Assessing individual performance for a team project is challenging. I instituted a form of peer and self-review (twice during the duration of the project), and I had everyone write a “reflective essay” in which they could comment on the teamwork aspect of the assignment, among other things. I also used the tools on Wikipedia for assessing performance: it is possible to see the number of edits each student has done, for instance.
- It’s possible to use Wikipedia in the classroom in a variety of ways. Having students write articles is just one. There are even more ways to cultivate student engagement – and they need not involve social media. I certainly would never argue that digital technology is necessary to involve students more deeply in their courses and thinking critically!
Tina Loo is a History Professor at the University of British Columbia
Aménagement du territoire et normativité de l’espace. Quelle place pour la forêt?
On dit souvent qu’une image vaut mille mots… Celle-ci illustre mieux qu’aucun discours l’état d’âme des ingénieurs forestiers confrontés, dans la deuxième moitié du 20e siècle, au courant émergent de l’aménagement du territoire. Elle nous rappelle aussi combien ont été liés (et le sont encore), les questions d’exploitation des ressources naturelles et celles de l’aménagement du territoire, et combien il peut être difficile d’assurer une répartition de l’espace entre les différents usages. Plus largement, on y retrouve certains jalons de notre façon d’appréhender collectivement l’environnement.
Bien qu’elle trouve ses fondements dans la première moitié du 20e siècle, la formulation d’une réflexion sur l’espace en termes d’aménagement du territoire se répand en occident après la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Elle s’inscrit en cela dans le foisonnement de ces années fastes en changement : hausse démographique, accroissement de la productivité, montée de l’urbanisation, déclin du rural. Tous ces changements, les ingénieurs forestiers y sont confrontés et les ajoutent sans détour à leurs débats, que ce soit à l’occasion des congrès ou symposiums qu’ils tiennent chaque année. Comme le dit si bien le titre de l’article de l’aménagiste Georges Robert, [1] il s’agit de trouver la juste place pour chaque chose, ces « choses » se multipliant, depuis l’étalement urbain jusqu’aux routes, en passant par la mise en place de lignes électriques et la création de parcs. Mais au-delà d’une gestion technicienne de l’espace, l’aménagement du territoire est intimement associé aux transformations de l’organisation du politique. Il est d’abord lié à une certaine ingénierie de l’État, qui devient une entité de plus en plus spécialisée et au sein de laquelle scientifiques et ingénieurs prennent place. D’autre part, l’aménagement du territoire est une réponse à la démocratisation de certains mécanismes décisionnels. Il est devenu impossible de prétendre organiser l’espace et le répartir entre différents utilisateurs sans prendre en compte l’opinion populaire. Rappelons que le Québec est alors en pleine réflexion sur l’abolition des concessions forestières et des clubs privés de chasse et de pêche… Le territoire et son aménagement deviennent les lieux privilégiés de l’action publique et du partage du pouvoir entre différents acteurs influents (politiques, industriels et économiques avec, en toile de fond, une opinion publique de plus en plus manifeste).
À l’image se joignent les mots pour exprimer le défi qui se présente alors aux aménagistes : « Les moyens employés pour l’exploitation inconditionnelle des ressources naturelles et le perfectionnement des techniques industrielles sont considérables; par contre totalement dérisoires sont ceux alloués à l’aménagement du territoire et à la préservation de notre environnement… […] L’aménagement du territoire consiste à traduire en programmes, la science et la sagesse des techniciens et des hommes politiques en se basant en très grande partie sur les volontés et les intuitions populaires.[2]
Dès lors, ce retour sur l’aménagement du territoire nous ouvre certaines perspectives pour une compréhension plus large de notre rapport à l’environnement. Il permet de constater qu’historiquement, l’un a eu de l’influence sur l’autre. Un rapport dont l’évolution peut être observée dans les archives des associations, corporations et ordres professionnels qui ont dû s’adapter et manœuvrer avec cette nouvelle notion de l’aménagement du territoire. Dans les années 1960, les forestiers voient de nouvelles questions émergées : de quelle façon l’aménagement du territoire viendra-t-il influencer l’aménagement de la forêt, et inversement, quel sera le rôle de la forêt dans l’aménagement du territoire? Les réponses sont multiples et varient selon les protagonistes.
Une tendance semble néanmoins se dessiner. Au Québec, l’aménagement du territoire comme outil de planification participe à une approche normative de la gestion de l’environnement, à travers notamment la mise en place d’un système de zonage. On y perçoit les efforts déployés par un État qui, sans pour autant perdre ses prérogatives sur les ressources, tente de répondre à la multiplication des demandes pour l’utilisation du territoire. À nos yeux, ce retour sur l’introduction de l’aménagement du territoire offre un point de vue sur les fondements de ce qui structure politiquement notre rapport à l’environnement. Un environnement souvent compris en termes technicistes, divisés selon des catégories d’usage restrictives, mais néanmoins réconfortantes. Dans le cas de la forêt, on retrouve une palette allant des zones d’exploitation intensive aux aires protégées, à laquelle s’ajoutent toutes les nuances tentant de répondre à autant de demandes.
[1] Georges Robert, « L’aménagement du territoire ou une place pour chaque chose », Forêt Conservation, vol. 41, no 10, décembre 1975, p. 24-25.
[2] Georges Robert, « L’aménagement du territoire ou une place pour chaque chose », Forêt Conservation, vol. 41, no 10, décembre 1975, p. 24-25.
Suggestions de lecture :
- Corporation des Ingénieurs forestiers de la province de Québec, 1966, L’ingénieur forestier face à l’aménagement du territoire, Québec, La Corporation.
- Fréchette, Alain, et Nathalie Lewis, 2011, « Pushing the boundaries of conventional forest policy research: Analyzing institutional change at multiple levels », Forest Policy and Economics, no 13, p. 582–589.
- Gélinas, Cyrille, 2010, L'enseignement et la recherche en foresterie à l'Université Laval : de 1910 à nos jours, Québec, Société d'histoire forestière du Québec.
Cette réflexion sur le lien entre l’aménagement du territoire et la foresterie résulte d’un projet de recherche et de ma thèse de doctorat en cours mené sous la direction de Mme Nathalie Lewis, au département Sociétés, territoires et développement de l’Université du Québec à Rimouski.
Une table-ronde portant sur la sortie du livre Metropolitan Nature
Une table-ronde portant sur la sortie du livre Metropolitan Nature. Environmental Histories of Montreal a permis à trois spécialistes de réfléchir sur l'apport de l'histoire environnementale sur l'intérêt - ou non- d'une perspective historique pour saisir les enjeux contemporains de l'environnement urbain. Laurent LEPAGE, Professeur à l'Institut des sciences de l'environnement (UQAM), Dinu BUMBARU, Directeur des politique d'Héritage Montréal, Jean-Pierre COLLIN, Professeur à l'INRS - Urbanisation Culture et Société ont à tour de rôle commenté cet ouvrage publié dans la collection "History of the Urban Environment" que dirigent Joel Tarr et Martin Melosi aux University of Pittsburgh Press. Le livre est le fruit d'un travail collectif conduit sous l'égide de Stéphane Castonguay et Michèle Dagenais. En fournissant une interprétation originale et totalisante de l'histoire de Montréal par le prisme des rapports sociaux à la nature, depuis les débuts de la colonie jusqu'à nos jours, cet ouvrage collectif démontre la contribution des méthodes de l'histoire environnementale à la recherche historique pour renouveler notre connaissance d'un chantier a priori fortement balisé. Les quatorze chapitres du livre sont rassemblés en trois sections : les représentations et la culture urbaine, les rapports entre la ville et la campagne, et les systèmes sociotechniques. À l'intérieur de celles-ci, l'environnement est abordé dans son sens large et inclue le paysage donné et façonné, les infrastructures publiques et le cadre bâti, les loisirs et l'agriculture, la pollution industrielle et les catastrophes naturelles, pour inscrire dans un cadre neuf le processus d'urbanisation d'une des plus vieilles villes en Amérique. Les chapitres démontrent comment la métropole s'est formée et reformée non seulement en fonction des particularités géographiques distinctes de la ville, mais aussi en fonction de dynamiques particulières aux processus de colonisation, d'urbanisation et d'industrialisation qui ont marqué l'histoire de Montréal et de sa région immédiate.
P.E.I. Farmers Muddy the Notion of Sustainable Agriculture
One research question that motivates me is how did – and how might – Canadians stay warm and fed in a world without oil? Rural historians know plenty about the transition to fossil-fuel based fertilizers, field work, and modes of transportation, and we are learning more about the gradual adoption of coal heat and hydroelectricity in rural homes. But by focusing on new agricultural technology and its ecological fallout we often overlook, oversimplify, or romanticize the people who farmed with alternative forms. The use of “mussel mud” and other marine fertilizers on Atlantic Canadian farms is a case in point. In this post I explain how a unique organic fertilizer helped solve a local food shortage and why it was ultimately replaced by imported commercial fertilizers.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Prince Edward Island farmers extracted a local, organic fertilizer from the estuaries which dramatically increased food production for a period of up to 15 years per application. This seemingly sustainable alternative to imported fertilizers became known as “mussel mud.” In reality the mud consisted of mostly oyster shells, and as the shells broke down over time they released calcium carbonate into PEI’s highly acidic soil and increased its pH level. Digging the calcareous fertilizer through holes in the river ice and transporting it to nearby fields (all by horse power) became a PEI winter tradition, and a unique part of the province’s folklore.
Mussel mud digging is usually depicted in PEI books, articles, poetry, and museum websites as an example of a simpler time and a more sustainable form of agriculture. The farmers are portrayed as resourceful and self-sufficient, and their use of mussel mud is seen as a form of traditional knowledge that contributed to a golden age in the region’s agriculture. I think this requires qualification, but I too was fascinated by what this could tell us about Canadian food production in a system where inputs such as seed and fertilizers are produced locally. I was also fascinated by the unique connection farmers had with the coast. Not only were the estuaries a form of transportation and a source of seafood, waterfowl, and marsh hay, but they also contained rich fertilizers such as seaweed and mussel mud.
Hay grew poorly on PEI’s acidic soil – a major problem for an economy that demanded a large horse and ruminant population. The most important source of animal fodder in the early British resettlement period was marsh hay. This grew naturally in all of the Island’s salt marshes and on dyked wetland, but the amounts were small and the demand for beef and draft animals quickly outpaced the capacity of the marsh hay harvest.
PEI does not have any significant limestone deposits, and importing lime to increase soil alkalinity was expensive and unpopular. Coastal farmers have used crushed or burnt oyster shells as a lime substitute for centuries, but the amounts were small and required a fishery. As early as 1815, PEI farmers like George Meggison harvested “canoe loads of mussel shells for the land.” They also used seaweed and even live lobsters as manure, but in 1832 a surprisingly proactive conservation law prohibited PEI farmers from burning live oysters. Still, hundreds of acres of ancient shell beds provided a reservoir of seemingly free, limitless and long-lasting soil treatment right at the doorstep of PEI’s farmers.
Mussel mud distribution as a proportion of cleared land within 2 miles of
the coast, PEI, 1871, Source 1871 Census
The simple barrier that stood between farmers and these shell beds was the nature of the coast itself. For one half of the day sea waters covered the shell beds with strong tides and dangerous currents, and when the tide went out the beds were separated from shore by a buffer of impassible muck. As a result, crop yields languished in the acidic soil, livestock suffered through the long winter on a few hundred pounds of hay each, and observers like John MacGregor wondered “how many of the settlers raise enough to support their families.” In 1860, a Land Commission evaluated farms on a number of criteria, including distance from sea manure, and it noted that farmers found it “impossible to preserve land in this Island in a state of fertility, for any length of time, without the application of lime, or some other good substitute such as mussel mud, which but few can procure.”
In the 1850s and early 1860s, Island farms experienced a serious shortage in the amount of hay for livestock. Contemporary experts argued that the average cow required one ton of hay and plenty of straw to survive the winter. In the early 19th century the average hay-fed animal (horses, cattle, and sheep) survived on 700 pounds of hay, a small quantity of oats, and whatever they could forage through the snow, but by 1861 the amount of hay available per animal dropped precipitously by more than half.
According to David Weale, some innovative PEI resident developed a mechanical digger in the early 1860s that allowed operators to harvest the mud through holes in the ice and distribute it across the Island, first by sleigh and later by train. More than just an invention, mud digging required farmers to change their patterns of work. Much of their winter activity was thus converted from woodcutting to gathering sea manure in a dangerous, cold, and time-sensitive environment. By 1871, over 1,400 digging machines dotted the landscape, and ten townships along the Island’s central estuaries had coated over 15 percent of their cleared land with mud.
The mid 19th century yield problem was solved by an enormous outflow of time and capital, and the most dramatic effect of increasing soil pH was a significant increase in hay production. The hay crop doubled in the 1860s, and grew by 125% in the 1870s. By 1875, farmers like William Whitehead argued that without “mussel-mud we would starve on the farms-both man and beast. We could not grow hay enough to feed one horse.” Alexander Blue also testified that he “Couldn't keep one horse if not for mud.” John McLeod claimed he was barely making a living from his farm before mud was introduced, and the soil treatment “increased the crop of hay 10 times.”
Through the adoption of mussel mud digging, PEI farmers effectively converted the cleared uplands into extensions of the salt marshes. With few external (i.e. “mainland”) inputs to the soil fertility cycle, farmers were able to maximize the productivity of mixed farming. However, no one in the 1870s would have considered this “traditional” farming; this was a new technology, and tradition meant hungrier animals and poorer farmers.
Mussel mud diggers on Bedeque Bay, PEI, Undated, Minnie Anderson Album,
Courtesy of Winifred Wake
Almost immediately, this new form of soil treatment took on aspects that we commonly associate with industrial farming. Many, and probably most, of the diggers were commercial operators, selling loads of mud to farmers for 8-10 cents. The principles of supply and demand shaped the industry from there. Only the wealthiest and most established areas of the island had any significant amount of mud on their farms according to the 1871 Census of Prince Edward Island (not yet in the Dominion of Canada). Most of this mud was extracted from 3 or 4 central estuaries, and reports of exhausted shell beds appeared in smaller rivers as early as 1875. By 1893, the Federal Department of Fisheries intervened to identify and protect live oyster beds, and they drew lines in the ice that became flashpoints of confrontation in a predominately agricultural province. After two decades of attempting to manage farmers and fishers, Ottawa handed the mud problem over to the Province which began to dig mud at St. Peter’s bay and distribute it to farmers by rail. By the 1920s, Federal officials discouraged the use of sea manures, and farmers slowly began to adopt chemical fertilizers and imported limestone.
Further Reading
Andrew Hill Clark. Three Centuries and the Island: Historical Geography of Settlement and Agriculture in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 1959.
Matthew Hatvany. “‘Wedded to the Marshes’: Salt Marshes and Socio-Economic Differentiation in Early Prince Edward Island.” Acadiensis, XXX (2) (Spring 2001): 40-55.
Joshua D. MacFadyen, “Drawing Lines in the Ice: Regulating Mussel Mud Digging in the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence,” in Claire Campbell and Robert Summerby-Murray eds., Environmental Histories of Atlantic Canada (Fredericton: Acadiensis, 2012 [forthcoming]).
Colin MacIntyre, “The Environmental Pre-History of Prince Edward Island 1769-1970: A Reconnaissance in Force,” MA Thesis, University of Prince Edward Island, 2010.
David Weale. “The Shell-Mud Diggers of Prince Edward Island.” Canadian Papers in Rural History 2 (1980): 41-57
For Historians, the Journey is Just as Important as the Destination
Last week’s annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History included scholars from all over the world, including China, Japan, Singapore, Australia, South Africa, several European countries, Puerto Rico, the US, and Canada. The conference also witnessed the largest contingent of Canadians at an ASEH: 34 presenters plus several others just attending. This assortment of delegates (there were over 600 this year!) in Madison really embodied this year’s theme: From the Local to the Global. In keeping with the theme, a great many of the papers focused on how local contexts existed within the framework of wider global relationships and dynamics. So, it might be useful to consider how the ASEH itself had an impact from the local to the global as a result of our collective travel carbon footprint.
The sustainability of the conference has been a concern of the ASEH for the last several years, and the Association has committed a great deal of time and effort to promoting and adopting ways of reducing the meeting’s overall footprint, including the creation of a sustainability committee, a move towards providing more locally-produced foods, and the purchase of carbon credit offsets. (http://aseh.net/about-aseh/aseh-sustainability) Some year, the organizing committee might decide it is important to draw up a total carbon footprint for the transportation of all its delegates so that there is a better sense of the true impact of the meeting every year. In the meantime, it is important for each of us to consider the impact we have when we travel long distances to attend important gatherings, such as the ASEH.
Last year, I attended my first ASEH in Phoenix. The distance was too far to rent a car and drive given my time constraints (although I do know someone who did drive from Toronto to Phoenix for the conference). Once I had committed to fly I had to decide whether I wanted to save some money and book a flight with one or more stop-overs, which would also have increased my overall carbon footprint. Ultimately I chose a direct round-trip flight from Toronto to Phoenix (mainly because I had some funding to attend the conference). Using the emissions calculator from atmosfair, I discovered that my carbon footprint was 1,740kg of CO2. According to the Zero Footprint Calculator that round-trip flight accounted for 36% of my total carbon footprint last year! With that in the back of my mind, I decided that Madison was close enough to Toronto - where I live and work - that I would drive to the ASEH this year.
But, driving instead of flying would also save me money. A round trip flight from Toronto to Madison was going to cost me about $600! A car rental for a week, including gas would only cost $560. On my own that’s not much of a savings. But, if I found two or three others who wanted to join me, it would be much less (plus, I wouldn’t have to drive the 12 hours all on my own). In fact, I found five others who wanted to drive with me! Since a car promised to be a little tight for five gentlemen for half a day, we opted for a mini-van instead. The total cost, including gas, ended up being roughly $1,000, or about $200/person.
While the cost was an important part of the appeal in driving instead of flying, each of us were also interested in avoiding the carbon footprint of flying somewhere we could drive instead. According to the ‘Fly or Drive Calculator’ at BeFrugal.com, our trip from Toronto to Madison by road was supposed to have totaled 613 kg of CO2. The gas receipts from our trip, however, showed that we used approximately 230 liters (roughly 60 gallons), which, according the US Environmental Protection Agency’s ‘Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator’, equates to 533 kg of CO2. Divided by five people this total breaks down to about 107 kg of CO2 each. Using atmosfair’s emissions calculator again, a direct flight from Toronto to Madison would attribute 260 kg of CO2 to just one of us. In other words, by driving the 12 hours instead of flying, we each saved about $400, and avoided 153 kg of CO2. Put another way, driving cost 66% less than flying and emitted 59% less CO2.
So, let’s scale this up in a very crude manner. Let’s assume everyone who attended the ASEH traveled there from Toronto (considering a few came from the other side of the planet, and some came from down the street, this might not be such a horrible estimation). There were approximately 600 delegates at the conference this year. If everyone flew, the ASEH’s combined travel carbon footprint would have been about 156,000 kg of CO2. If everyone had driven in mini-van teams of five, that total would have been closer to 64,200 kg of CO2. That’s a difference of 91,800 kg of CO2!! According to atmosfair, 91,800 kg of CO2 is the equivalent of the annual climate compatible budget of CO2 for approximately 31 people (the site is based in Germany, so presumably so is this average annual budget).
All of this is not to suggest that driving is a viable alternative for everyone, or to accuse anyone who did fly of not caring about climate change. After all to purchase offsets ($1 = 22kg of CO2) for just one flight from Toronto to Madison would cost just $22, and for the entire conference just $4,173. But, what this demonstrates is that given the time (my time is worth about $35/hour, which makes a twelve hour car ride worth $210 more than the six hours it would’ve taken to go through the international terminal at the airport), it is possible to substantially avoid the heavy costs to your wallet and the planet. And, after all isn’t the journey just as important as the destination? We are historians after all.
Special thanks to Jim Clifford and Dan Rueck for sharing the driving with me, Colin Duncan for being navigator, and Dagomar Degroot for laughing at all our jokes, even the bad ones.
A New Alchemy on the Land: Scientists, Hippies, and an Ecological Society
“To protect the seas, restore earth, and inform the earth’s stewards.” With this motto a small group of countercultural scientists and technophile environmentalists launched the New Alchemy Institute in 1970. In its quest for an eco-technical utopia the New Alchemists worked closely with E.F. Schumacher, Buckminster Fuller, and Stewart Brand. Their work also prefigured the emergence of bioregionalism and helped to found the green architecture movement.[1] From the Institute’s Cape Cod base, its short-lived center on Prince Edward Island, and through a sister organization in Costa Rica the New Alchemists played an influential role within the Canadian and American environmental movements throughout the 1970s.
My research focuses on this group Hip Scientists’ because their work demonstrates the important role science, technology, and counterculture played in 1970s Environmentalism. Building on the work of Andrew Kirk and Peder Anker my research argues that environmental groups often held neither the anti-modern or the anti-technology stance commonly attributed to environmentalists and, in fact, downplayed wilderness preservation to offer progressive visions in which correctly science and technology would solved environmental problems.[2] By focusing on alternative environmental visions I hope to illustrate the diverse heritage of post-Rachel Carson environmentalism. From my point of view environmentalism has always been about much more than wilderness and declensionist narratives, the New Alchemists’ ecological-technological environmental vision being a prime example.
The New Alchemists’ environmental vision was comprised of three elements: Ecology, Progress, and Counterculture. Ecological Science played a central role in the New Alchemists thought. It defined both their understanding of nature and their vision of how society should be organized. Throughout the New Alchemist’s writings, particularly those of their leader John Todd, the work of ecologists such as Eugene and Howard Odum had prominent place.[3]
Drawing on the mechanistic and cybernetic work of the Odum brothers the New Alchemists argued that North American society was ecologically unsustainable, but ecological science could be used applied to both the environment and human society to correct any problems. To the New Alchemists a correctly managed society could gradually progress towards a sustainable and non-oppressive form if important factors such as social and ecological diversity were continually enhanced. In this way ecology helped the New Alchemists construct a progressive vision for the future, a plan to realize a something close to Ecotopia.[4]
With this progressive vision The New Alchemist broke with the Declensionist narrative common within environmental thought. To the New Alchemists human intervention could cause environmental problems, but if properly managed it could also be socially and environmentally beneficial. For instance, the New Alchemists argued that ecology could be used to bring the environment into the urban areas creating liveable cities, sustaining ecological diversity, and using natural systems to mitigate environmental damage.
PEI Ark S Soucoup Harrowsmith vol1 no2 july 1976
The New Alchemists merged this emphasis on ecology and progress with Countercultural Values. For instance, they drew upon the counterculture and the back-to-the-land movement for inspiration, organizing the institute along the lines of a libertarian commune. In their work they rejected the hierarchical structures which had pervaded the academic institutions where many of them had been employed. Instead they adopted an egalitarian organizational structure based on the participatory models of the New Left. Further, drawing upon then common countercultural beliefs the New Alchemists argued only decentralized communities employing small and simple technologies could be truly democratic and avoid the creeping authoritarianism of “technocratic society.”[5] Thus alongside ecology, small is beautiful thinking became a second foundation of their ecological society.
With the New Alchemists in mind, I think it is important to emphasize that science, technology, the counterculture, and environmentalism worked together surprisingly well. The New Alchemists use of ecology and counterculture to construct an optimistic vision which balanced human and environmental needs through the application of science played a central role in their success. This suggests the possibility of moving past the wilderness ethic in our emanations of environmentalism to focus on the constructive solutions to environmental problems environmentalists envisioned during the 1970s.
[1]Peder Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: a History of Ecological Design (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); Nancy Jack Todd, A Safe and Sustainable World: the Promise of Ecological Design, (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2005); Peter List, Radical Environmentalism: Philosophy and Tactics (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1993).
[2]Peder Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: a History of Ecological Design (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).
[3]Eugene Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1971); Howard Odum, Environment, Power, and Society (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1970).
[4]Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: the Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (Berkeley: Banyan Tree Books, 1975).
[5]Jordan Kleiman, “The Appropriate Technology Movement in American Political Culture” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2000); Timothey Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999).
History of the Future Redux
[Michael Egan first posted this on his new environmental history blog.]
Since graduate school, I’ve been fascinated with the history of the future. Not so much as historians having some special felicity with predicting the future (nope), but how the future is a wildly understudied facet of the human past. We’re constantly thinking about the future (even historians), from checking the weather, to making grocery lists for the week, to looking forward to vacations or travel or time off, etc. It would be very interesting to develop a larger historical project on these kinds of mundane features of the future, but my focus has tended toward the history of technology and its relationship to the environment. More significantly, planning—political, economic, environmental—is a much-neglected historical perspective. There’s a compelling element in the human drama to examine not just what people did, but what they thought they were doing. And what they thought they might achieve: how were they forward-looking. One aspect of this analysis might consider how effectively/accurately different people and societies planned for the future and in what kinds of capacity have past societies been most successful in so doing.
There are a lot of interesting entry points into this investigation. I think my own was prompted by the simple question: why have we been so relatively poor at anticipating the future? This was spurred by the litany of environmental disasters that were derived from unanticipated consequences, but the question can be expanded to ask where our private jetpacks and sky cities, etc. are. I think the short answer has to do with the social and cultural influences of technological systems and the manner in which system-entrenching technologies become so ingrained that it becomes difficult to imagine how technologies alien to the existing system might work. But that’s only part of a simplistic, macro-explanation that deserves further examination.
Sverker Sörlin, Libby Robin, and Paul Warde have been doing some exciting work on environmental prediction, which is starting to concentrate on the 1940s and 1950s. And I know of a few historians who have taken an interest in futurism (which only interests me as an historical project, not as an expression of historians’ expertise with time—that we should be able to look forward as easily as we look backward). Recently, Paul Warde pointed me towards these sessions at the European Social Science History conference, which meets next month (scroll down to sessions Y-9 and Y-10). His paper abstract reads:
Expertise for the Future: the Emergence of ‘Relevant Knowledge’ in Environmental Predictions and Global Change, c.1920-1970.
What characterizes an expert in the field of ‘environmental futures’? This paper considers why certain scientific methods have been favored historically, and especially in the breakthrough moment for the modern concept of ‘environment’ in the post-war years. One important point of departure for the paper is the idea that the emergence of the environment implied new demarcations for what counted as expertise, often transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries, and closely related to the practice and expectation of prediction. Another is point of departure is the increasing extent to which expertise relied on quantification, numeric assessments and iterative methods which had previously been developed as parts of various sciences but reemerge with new institutional and political implications when attached to environmental futures. The predictions that concern us here have clear similarities with the (self-)proclaimed expertise used in projecting futures in financial, economic, demographic and other areas, and their legitimization. Relevant knowledge, especially of integrative techniques such as mathematical modeling is often construed as transcending these, thus establishing new specific realms of expertise which in recent decades have coalesced into phenomena such as ‘global change’ and ‘environmental issues’. This paper will focus a number of issues in surveying the emergence of global change thinking: climate, energy, population, and biodiversity.
Similarly, his co-panelist Jenny Andersson’s (Sciences Po) paper looks very interesting:
The Political Life of Prediction. The Future as a Space of Scientific World Governance in the Cold War Era
This contribution explores the role of the future as a space of scientific exchange and dialogue in the Cold War period. We argue that problems of future governance were, East and West, conceptualized in similar ways as problems that challenged notions of politics and expertise but also led to the development of new forms of scientific governance which sought explicitly to depoliticize the future and turn it into a new transnational domain of technocratic politics. The paper thus focuses on the exchange between American and Soviet futurologists and on important forms of scientific cooperation primarily around the creation of the IIASA, but it inserts this case into a larger discussion of the future as a technoscientific space beyond political dispute – and embryo of new forms of global future governance.
I wish I could be there. But this is a rich and fruitful entry into an important and understudied avenue of historical inquiry. My own timeframe interests are more consistent with the papers in the second panel. After having done some work on The Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb, I’m especially interested in the techniques used during the 1960s and 1970s (especially the early iterations of computer modeling). The second panel includes papers that overlap with my timeline rather nicely, but the central theme seems to be forecasting doom, which is an important element of the period, but ground I covered indirectly while writing about Commoner (chapter 4 examined the role of the environmental jeremiad in American environmentalism and focused on the Commoner-Ehrlich debate over population and pollution). I’d be more interested to explore the practical aspects of future-planning and its relationship with science and policy. Here are a couple of paper abstracts from that second session. First, Elke Seefried (Augsburg University):
Futures Studies of the 1960s and early 1970s: From Creating Futures to Predicting Doom?
‘Future’ became a central political and scientific category in western industrialized countries during the 1960s. As a result of dynamic changes in science and technology and an increasing orientation towards planning, the so-called futures studies (or futurology) boomed. These were scientific approaches to forecast, plan and think about the future. In a process of circulation of knowledge, transnational networks of experts were established as well as national institutions of futures studies in Western industrialized countries during the 1960s. In this paper, I would like to focus on futures studies in West Germany and Britain, arguing that considerable parts of futures studies particularly in West Germany underwent a change around 1970, and this led to profound political consequences. In the 1960s, futures studies were shaped by a perception that the future was open and feasible, based on a belief in modernization and technical progress within the framework of the industrial society. Around 1970, parts of the field were permeated by a polyvalent, especially ecologically tinged criticism of growth and apocalyptic scenarios whereas the belief in planning strategies persisted. The debate on The Limits to Growth and other ‘prophecies of doom’ gave rise to the concepts of ‘quality of life’ and qualitative growth, later to become sustainability. This is particularly true for West Germany where futures studies had a considerable impact on politics by anticipating and constructing the ‘crisis’ of the 1970s and by reconceptualizing the notions of growth and progress towards qualitative and ecological aspects. In contrast, British futures studies and politics were much more bound up with paradigms of industrial society.
And, second, Elodie Vieille Blanchard (Centre Alexandre Koyré):
Technoscientific Cornucopian Futures versus Doomsday Futures: Forecasting and Modelling in the Debate over the Limits to Growth
This paper focuses on the emergence of the “limits to growth” paradigm concerning demography and industry in the developed world during the period 1945-1970. This was a context of generalized material affluence and confidence about the future. Indeed technology was supposed to allow the diffusion of the Western way of life to the whole world, and to solve all social and environmental problems this affluence could bring. The paper also shows the specificity of the Club of Rome project, under contrasted influences of cornucopian futures studies -focused on technology- and of the doomsday theories of environmentalists. It explains how these specific views about future led to the elaboration of a particular model, utilised in the publication of the Limits to Growth in 1972. Finally, the paper brings out how, in the debate over the “limits to growth” in the 1970s, particular visions of technology, environment and social priorities led to different modelling enterprises, which brought about radically divergent conclusions concerning the future of demography and industry. In the broader perspective, my contribution aims to show how the initial controversy over growth gave way to discussions about the specific characteristics of sustainable growth, while the criticism of industrial growth, and the urge to cease it, became the prerogative of very few scientists and activists.
The second paper, especially, is something I’d like to read, especially since I found myself so wrapped up in The Limits to Growth and the work that Jay Wright Forrester pioneered in system dynamics.
The history of the future has also been a teaching interest of mine. I’ve taught “The History of the Future” twice at McMaster over the past few years as a third-year course, and after removing the course from our calendar to make way for teaching the history of sustainability, I reintroduced it this past year, and hope to teach it again soon. Here’s a copy of the syllabus from the last time I taught it: 3UU3_Syllabus_2009. I had a really good group of students who bought in and made this a really fun class. I had roughly 100 students in the room, but the culture of the class made it feel more like a seminar with lots of good questions during and after each session. I’ll write more about the course concepts in the future; this was an interesting and effective way to talk about technological systems.
The next time I teach “The History of the Future,” I will likely revise the courseware materials and the course direction, in order to try to organize the course around the future writing project. I suspect the next iteration of the course will be organized around “Thinkers,” “Planners,” and “Makers.” Loosely, the first involves an intellectual history of the future (and touches on futurism, sci fi, etc.); the second considers planning, design, and prediction; and the final section is still fairly poorly conceived, but I want a place to investigate the Jay Wright Forresters and Buckminster Fullers of the world. Or at least that’s the current plan.
“Here is everything advantageous to life”: Teaching environmental history and the humanities
Most of NiCHE’s activity has, quite rightly, been focused on research. But for many of us, teaching is an equally, if not more, important part of our lives. I teach environmental history in the guise of both History and Canadian Studies classes, but also as one of two co-instructors for the first-year class in Dalhousie’s College of Sustainability. All College teaching faculty meet twice a month to discuss everything from “Where can we teach numerical literacy?” to “How do we get students to stop Facebooking in class?” So I’ve had more opportunities than many, I suspect, to talk about teaching, but I hope we in NiCHE talk more about teaching environmental history. What are we teaching, and how, and to whom, and why? What are we trying to accomplish? Does our teaching look different with a HIST course code than with a SUST one? How is it being received across the country, by students and faculty? (Do other people get asked, “Is it a fad?”) How do we create teaching positions in environmental history?
For this post, though, I wanted to talk content over institution, and specifically, how and how well environmental history fits in the landscape of the humanities. I’ve long had a chip on my shoulder about the image (both within and without) of environmental studies: to wit, that greenhouse gas formulas or water use statistics are more fundamental to sustainability than the ideas within the Group of Seven paintings or the search for the Northwest Passage. Or in other words, that the scientific data is essential while the arts are merely ornamental. And I sometimes wonder if the environmental history community perpetuates this distinction by emphasizing how our work is a bridge to the sciences − different from conventional history in its ability to incorporate measures of change in flora, fauna, climate, and so forth. Yet the majority of Sustainability students declare a B.A., just as most people want to understand the environment as literate citizens, not biologists. Where can these students pursue – and integrate – environment and humanities? (Not in Dal’s [“environmental and resource studies”] graduate program, that’s for sure.)
Francois Boucher, Portrait de la Marquise de Pompadour,1756
As one of the very few humanists Sustainability students see (and sometimes the only one – although this year a philosopher of ancient Greece did a guest lecture on Prometheus), I’m especially aware of two things. I think it’s crucial to show them how humans generally have conceived of the “environment” not as a compendium of biophysical features, but in strategic, functional, and imaginative ways. Second, I feel compelled to represent the humanities and the arts as broadly as possible.
Nicolas Lancret, The Cup of Chocolate (or, Lady and Gentleman with two girls in
a garden), 1742
In a class on water in the Canadian imagination – a deliberate counterpoint to a section on water use calculations – we look at paintings, an NFB film, and DND photographs of the 2011 Arctic exercise. Reading external expectations of Acadia in the language in Longfellow’s Evangeline (1847) or a 1920s tourist guide helps explain contemporary pressures on the Annapolis Valley. We can see the material costs and benefits of global trade in the luxury consumables of Francois Boucher’s portrait of la Marquise de Pompadour (1756) or Nicolas Lancret’s The Cup of Chocolate, or, Lady and Gentleman with two girls in a garden (1742). And to introduce ecological imperialism, there is the beautiful parallel between Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611):
The air breathes upon us here most sweetly/Here is everything advantageous to life…
How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green!...
Had I plantation of this isle, my lord …/nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance.../To excel the golden age.
…and Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh (1925):
On his land he was master; he knew just how to act.
Both articulate the idealized possibilities of the New World, and the colonial ambitions for ordered, productive, proprietorial, and monocultural landscapes.
I think I do a pretty good job at conveying the historical and environmental messages contained in these sources. And it’s enormous fun to spend hours in ARTstor. But … what the hell am I doing teaching Shakespeare and eighteenth-century art? One year I showed medieval illuminations of the story of Jonah (to demonstrate the evolution of the whale from monster to resource in tandem with early modern marine technology) and I could just imagine the horrified reaction of the history department’s medievalist.
So there’s a lot of flying without a net. But if not me, then who? How do I get the English professor interested in green literature and the Music professor studying nature in opera to teach these as applicable to environmental sustainability, in the same way the sciences do? And how do we sell that connection to an audience (students and faculty), an institution, and a society that defines the environment as greenhouse gases rather than Shakespeare, as disconnected from human thought, belief, and action?
Jonah and the Whale in the Barlow Psalter (1321-41)
Of Mycobacterium and Men
I am in the midst of teaching a new senior seminar at the University of Alberta on Health and Environments in Canadian History. Turning my research on the intersection of health and environments in northern Canada into a course in Canadian history, and now well into the semester, I am struck by the important perspective on environmental history enabled by the study of illness and health.
I enjoyed developing the syllabus for this course (and I acknowledge its idiosyncrasies and omissions) given the wealth of materials available—a marked departure from the situation I faced, almost a decade ago now, when I developed my first senior seminar in Canadian Environmental History at York. Most of the best books on health and environmental history – with the exception of Parr’s Sensing Changes – are not Canadian, but rather American (Nash, Mitman, Langston), or from other national and international contexts (Walker, Webb, McNeill, Anderson). There are, nevertheless, rich histories of health, medicine, and health geography, and an ample article literature in Canadian health and environmental history, to provide the foundation for weekly discussions about Canada’s past.
I found myself identifying materials that have been overlooked in Canadian environmental history, in spite of the familiarity of the authors. Jennifer Read, for instance, whose article on Pollution Probe is well-known, has a valuable analysis published in Scientia Canadensis of epidemic typhoid and the implications in the transnational environment of the early-twentieth-century Great Lakes. Neil Forkey’s 1998 article on dam building in Upper Canada is a significant contribution to our understanding of malaria. Even Hackett’s A Very Remarkable Sickness, which can hardly be characterized as a lesser-known work, is nevertheless far from a staple of Canadian environmental history. That these works lie outside of the canon of Canadian environmental history (and to the extent that such a “canon” exists outside of my own head) says something important about the preoccupations of the field to date.
Environmental historians focus on the non-human (bunnies, trees, and rocks) in their efforts to bring the rest of nature into our understanding of the human past. Pathogens occupy an ambiguous place in nature and by extension in environmental history. Pathogens do have their own histories; the viruses and bacteria we know today have not been transmitted unchanged through the centuries. The 1918-19 influenza virus, for instance, was a significant mutation, hence the vulnerability of so many millions of people across the globe. But I would argue it is more of a challenge to tell compelling histories from a viral point of view than it is, say, from that of a fish. To the extent that our own familiarity with other animals or environments facilitates the stories we tell about them, a virus is at once more alien than a fish (and even a very alien-looking one, like a sturgeon or a hammerhead shark), while the environment in which many viruses thrive, the human body, is far more familiar than a forest. (We all know at least one body intimately, even if we don’t have an equivalent grasp of any single tree).
This is a problem I faced in my research. I found myself wishing to understand the non-human aspects of disease, but always having to come to terms with human bodies. It feels like a riddle: if the environment of disease is the human body, then does that make the environmental history of health a social history? For the course, I embraced this ambiguity. It enabled me to draw on the rich historiographies of the social history of health and Aboriginal health histories, in particular works by Maureen Lux and Mary-Ellen Kelm. We have explored the different approaches to thinking about the intersection of health and environment in the past as these works address matters of importance to the environmental historian (sanitation, nutrition, the physical places where health or illness thrived). Finally, this ambiguity doesn’t always hold. With diseases that involve non-human vectors or reservoirs, such as malaria or bovine tuberculosis, there’s plenty of non-human nature to engage with.
In our seminar discussions, I am struck by the different tone that arises in addressing the history of health and environment. When considering the unintended consequences so prominent in Canadian environmental history, the possibilities for irony have to be tempered by reconciling oneself with the fact that the consequences under examination led to the painful death of someone or many people in the past. I was thankful, likewise, that I read Walker’s Toxic Archipelago and Langston’s Toxic Bodies, while on maternity leave and not when I was pregnant - I would have had a breakdown otherwise. Similarly, I think it is valuable to explore an area of environmental history where declentionist narratives can be sidelined. Gregg Mitman made this point at the ASEH conference in Portland a couple of years ago. Mitman pointed out that for health historians, the twentieth century had brought not devastation but celebration, with improvements in health, life-span and infant mortality across much of the globe. Unless one wishes to resurrect Malthus or the Ehrlichs’, such improvements to the human experience do not fuel the kinds of pessimistic readings of the past century that are common to environmental historiography.
What do my students have to say about all this? Rather than re-envisioning history from the perspective of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis or mosquitoes, they are most interested in learning about the role of environment and environmental changes in recent decades in contributing to the forms of ill-health with which we are especially familiar (cancers and allergies in particular). Many infectious diseases feel passé, while the health consequences of intensified industrialization, particularly for us living here in the midst of the mountains and oil fields of Alberta, take on a more pressing character.
“Dread Smallpox Still Spreading,” Toronto Daily Star, Monday, March 18, 1901. Front page.
Changing the Canadian Wheat Board, Part III
The End of the Wheat Board: What next?
Wheat. The Golden Crop of the west, what was once the backbone of prairie farms, is facing a new/old future. Perhaps the low-carb diets and labeling of wheat as a potential allergen in food products (bread: may contain wheat!) is tearing into wheat’s popularity and profitability? Not really. World population is growing exponentially, and wheat still packs a commercial punch – it is highly portable, easy to store, and full of potential food energy.
What’s new is the way that western Canadian farmers will market their product to that vast, faceless, hungry world population. The Canadian government, in a move that splits the farm community along viscerally divisive lines, has ended the 70 year monopoly of the Canadian Wheat Board.
Critics and proponents of the Wheat Board – in letters to editors of various national, regional, and special interest newspapers, in blog posts, in corporate press releases, in political speeches, and in small-town coffee shops and cold hockey arenas – spent the fall of 2011 in a flurry of decisions, court injunctions, and media manipulation.
Just search ‘Canadian Wheat Board’ in your internet search engine under ‘news’, and you can spend the rest of the day viewing both sides of the discussion. You’ll see everything from erudite and precise legalese to the kinds of words associated with all-out barroom brawls.
The most divisive spread seems to be political: a Conservative government has made no bones about its intention to dismantle the CWB, and has been attempting to do so (and has been both thwarted and supported) since 2006. Legal battles abound; constitutionality has become both an issue and a potential crisis.
What, you might ask, is the Canadian Wheat Board, and what was its purpose? The short answer is, the CWB was essentially a single desk grain buyer for all of the wheat and most of the barley grown in western Canada (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the Peace River region of British Columbia). The CWB in turn acted as a marketing agent on the world market.
From the farmgate perspective, it worked like this: you grew wheat on contract with the Canadian Wheat Board. When you delivered it to the elevator (no matter which one), you received an initial payment and your wheat went into a particular ‘pool’ depending on the date you brought it in, the type of grain (hard red spring wheat, durum, etc.) and its grade. That initial payment was guaranteed by the federal government, which provided base financing until the Wheat Board was able to sell the grain to a buyer. Interim and final payments would bring the farmer’s total to 100% (minus, of course, selling fees, elevation and freight fees, and other check-offs).
If you were a farmer in Ontario or Quebec, or elsewhere, you were not required to sell to the Canadian Wheat Board. And therein lies the sting: why is there a double standard? Are western Canadian farmers such poor marketers that they require a single desk seller to market their collective product?
So, Bill C-18, “An Act to reorganize the Canadian Wheat Board and to make consequential and related amendments to certain Acts", otherwise known as the "Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act" passed the now-majority Conservative Parliament and was given royal assent on December 15th, 2011. The CWB will cease to operate as a single desk buyer for western cereal crops on August 1st, 2012 – just before the next harvest begins.
From the farmgate, the question swings into a whole new dimension: what now?
The CWB still exists; and, for the next five years, its pooling prices will be guaranteed by the federal government. What was once a single desk, though, now has to compete on the open market – and it won’t be an even playing field. With no elevators, terminals, or grain handling facilities, the CWB is busy ‘negotiating’ with grain companies to allow it room to manoeuver. Grain companies, delighted with the CWB’s changed status, expect higher profits -- now might be a good time to buy shares in Cargill and Viterra. Yet, profits for private companies irk the farm community and push farmer’s trust back onto the CWB (even in its new, untested format).
The CWB has another option for reinventing itself. A revised suite of marketing programs, which addresses forward planning, hedging, and professional crop sales advisory roles, has been introduced. If the new order works out, the CWB could potentially expand to marketing oilseeds and pulses, as well as grains. But they have competition: marketing advisors are popping up everywhere, promising to sell your grain profitably. And some will no doubt be successful.
Around the kitchen table at our farm, we’re planning our next crop year, but with wary eyes in all directions. Contracts being offered from grain companies sound good, but they don’t have enough information on prairie shipping premiums, foreign exchange, or grade dockage. We forward contract canola, but wheat – with its increased risks due to frost, pests, wet years, dry years, hail, and a myriad of other environmental issues – is a tough crop to predict with any degree of confidence. Signing a contract promising to deliver no. 1 wheat is an incredible risk.
So, uncertainty reigns. And, it will for at least another eighteen months, until the new system works itself through one full crop year, and farmers have a chance to analyze their options in full.
This is the third part of a three-part series on the history of the Canadian Wheat Board and the implications of the recent policy changes of the federal government concerning the CWB.
For more, see Merle's website: http://merlemassie.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/canadian-wheat-board/