NiCHE : Network in Canadian History & Environment | Nouvelle initiative Canadienne en histoire de l'environnement

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Nature's Past Episode 001: The Environmental History of the Don River
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2008-12-10) Kheraj, Sean
On this pilot episode of the show, we introduce listeners to the study environmental history by speaking with Jennifer Bonnell, a graduate student at the University of Toronto who is researching the history of Toronto’s Don River. Jennifer’s research spans the long history of the Don River and its place in the social and environmental history of the city. From nineteenth-century grist mills to Depression-era hobo jungles to Hurricane Hazel in 1954, we find out more about this river valley on Toronto’s eastside. Also, we speak with Adam Crymble, the website administrator for the Network in Canadian History & Environment, about web resources for environmental history at niche-canada.org.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 002: Natural Resource Development in British Columbia
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2009-01-19) Kheraj, Sean; ; dc. description. abstract
This month’s episode focuses on resource development in British Columbia. Last November, the Nature/History/Society group hosted a roundtable on hydro in BC, featuring Jeremy Mouat (University of Alberta), Tina Loo (University of British Columbia), and Paul Hirt (Arizona State). In this episode we highlight a selection from Tina Loo’s talk on hydro-electric development and high modernism called ‘Towards an Environmental History of ‘Progress’. You can listen to the full roundtable on hydro in BC here.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 003: Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2009-10-21) Kheraj, Sean
We turn our attention northward in this month’s episode with an extended interview with John Sandlos, author of the award winning book Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories. Professor Sandlos discusses how he came to write this book and explores some of his main argument regarding Canadian federal wildlife conservation policies in the Northwest Territories. This book makes a persuasive argument about the relationship between wildlife conservation and the colonization of Canada’s sub-arctic and arctic regions. Sandlos challenges previous literature on the history of wildlife policy in Canada by considering the implications for Native people in the Canadian North.
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Nature's Past Episode 004: Environmental Justice on the Hamilton Waterfront
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2009-03-16) Kheraj, Sean
The typical model of the environmental justice literature has focused on cases in which local communities fought to have government recognize their neighbourhoods as environmentally hazardous and fix the problem. Ken Cruikshank and Nancy Bouchier’s research on the environmental history of the Hamilton, Ontario waterfront since 1955 turns this story around by looking at who determines the environmental health of a community. Also, we speak with Graeme Wynn and Emily Jane Davis about NiCHE’s Forest History Cluster.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 005: The Storm History of Stanley Park
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2009-04-22) Kheraj, Sean
In 2006, Vancouver’s Stanley Park was struck by an extreme windstorm event, which blew down more than ten thousand trees in the park. This was just one of a series of regular windstorms to strike the park in the twentieth century, including major storms in 1901, 1934, and 1962. The nature of windstorms in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland is incredibly complicated and the research of Wolf Read, a graduate student in the Department of Forest Sciences at UBC, will help us try to make sense of it. Also, Professor Joanna Dean from Carleton University’s Department of History tells us about the upcoming Canadian History & Environment Summer School in Ottawa.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 006: Teaching Environmental History Special
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2009-05-19) Kheraj, Sean
Teaching environmental history at the undergraduate level poses several challenges for instructors in this burgeoning subfield of history. As more and more universities add environmental history courses to their calendars, it is important to take some time to reflect on how we teach environmental history. This special episode of the podcast on teaching draws from the experiences of four environmental history instructors from the University of British Columbia: Matthew Evenden, Eagle Glassheim, Sean Kheraj, and Tina Loo. Also, we speak with Alan MacEachern, co-editor of Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental History, about textbooks in the field.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 007: E-Waste and Obsolescence
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2009-06-15) Kheraj, Sean
The problem of e-waste grows with each new mobile phone, music player, laptop computer or other type of consumer electronic device. Because many of these products are made with toxic substances, disposal is a major challenge. The environmental crisis of e-waste can be attributed to a strategy of industrial manufacturing developed over the course of the twentieth-century known as obsolescence. On this episode of the podcast, we hear from Giles Slade, author of the award-winning book Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, on this historical trend in manufacturing.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 008: Aboriginal People and Resource Conflicts in Canada
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2009-07-14) Kheraj, Sean
The history of the resettlement of Canada by European peoples and the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their land was, in part, a struggle over natural resources. Since 1867, the federal and provincial governments of Canada have on many occasions come into conflict with different First Nations over the control of land and access to natural resources. This episode of Nature’s Past looks at a historical case study of one such conflict in northeastern Ontario in the Temagami region. Jocelyn Thorpe, a SSHRC postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, speaks about her recent article in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, which examines the social construction of the Temagami region as a wilderness area and its implications for the Teme-Augama Anishnabi. Also, we speak with Dorothee Schreiber and Siomonn Pulla, organizers of the 14th annual International Wanapitei Aboriginal History and Politics Colloquium. The colloquium will be held from September 17-20 and you can download the most recent Call for Papers here.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 009: Digital Technologies and Environmental History
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2009-09-21) Kheraj, Sean
After our brief summer break, the podcast returns with an episode that looks at environmental history graduate studies in Canada. Last May, we recorded a round-table conversation with four environmental history graduate students following the Canadian History & Environment Summer School in Ottawa, Ontario. These students discussed their own experiences studying and researching and they spoke about the unique qualities of environmental history training. Also, Will Knight, the New Scholars in Canadian History & Environment representative, joins us to talk about the New Scholars group and future project ideas.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 010: Digital Technologies and Environmental History
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2009-10-21) Kheraj, Sean
How have online digital technologies changed environmental history research, communication, and teaching? This episode of the podcast explores this question in the context of the recent NiCHE Digital Infrastructure API Workshop held in Mississauga, Ontario. Online-based Application Programming Interfaces or APIs are just one digital technology that holds the potential to change the way environmental historians access resources, analyze historical data, and communicate research findings. Within the past decade alone, the development of online digital technologies has offered the potential to transform historical scholarship. This episode includes a round-table conversation with some leading figures in the realm of digital history as well as an interview with Jan Oosthoek, the producer and host of the Exploring Environmental History podcast.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 011: Animals, History, and Environment
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2009-11-22) Kheraj, Sean
Environmental history is primarily concerned with the relationship between humans and non-human nature, but the study of non-human nature holds a different set of problems and poses a different set of questions when considering non-human animals. As environmental historians continue to explore the place of animals in stories of the past, they increasingly cross into the rich literature and theory of historical animals studies. This episode of the podcast looks at the place of animals in environmental history. We begin by speaking with Erica Fudge, the author of several books in historical animal studies, about her 2006 essay “The History of Animals” on the H-Animal Discussion Network. Then Sharon Kirsch joins us to discuss her new book What Species of Creatures: Animals Relations from the New World.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 012: Industrialization in Subarctic Environments
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2010-01-19) Kheraj, Sean
Between 1920 and 1960, Canada’s northwest subarctic region experienced late-stage rapid industrialization along its large lakes. These included Lake Winnipeg, Lake Athabasca, Great Slave Lake, and Great Bear Lake. Powered by high-energy fossil fuels, the natural resources of the northwest were integrated into international commodity markets and distributed throughout the world. Whitefish from the large lakes found their way onto dinner plates in New York while uranium from Canada’s northwest fueled the world’s most destructive weapons, atomic bombs. Professor Liza Piper joins us this month to discuss her new book The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada from UBC Press. This book explores a region unfamiliar to most Canadians and how that space was transformed through industrial processes in the twentieth century. Rather than finding industrial technologies dominating the landscape of the northwest, Professor Piper found that humans used those technologies to assimilate nature.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 013: New Directions in Urban Environmental History & Abandoned Mines
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2010-03-03) Kheraj, Sean
On this episode of the podcast, we feature a preview discussion about a round-table panel for next week’s ASEH meeting called “Urbs in Horto: New Directions in Urban Environmental History”. Matthew Klingle, Ellen Stroud, Karl Appuhn, and Sean Kheraj sit down to discuss new developments in the field of urban environmental history and invite listeners to post comments or questions. Please let us know what you think. Also, John Sandlos and Arn Keeling stop by to talk about their new project on abandoned mines in the Canadian North. This project examines the social and environmental consequences of large-scale mining operations for local Aboriginal people in northern Canada.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 014: Management of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2010-04-20) Kheraj, Sean
North American environmental history is punctuated by notorious episodes of species extinctions, most notably the cases of the passenger pigeon and the bison. In both cases, humans exhausted what they believed were unlimited resources in the absence of any scientific management or regulations. The collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery in the 1990s stands out from these previous events because of the industry’s dependence on scientific management. This month, we speak with Professor Dean Bavington from Nipissing University about his research and the publication of his new book Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 015: Forestry Education in Canada
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2010-05-26) Kheraj, Sean
In 1907, the University of Toronto opened Canada’s first forestry school to undergraduate students. This was the beginning of formal forestry education in Canada and great step forward for the profession. However, the history of the Faculty of Forestry reveals a troubled past filled with struggles to balance the interests of the provincial government, private industry, and the university administration. Mark Kuhlberg joins us for an extended interview about his new book One Hundred Rings and Counting: Forestry Education and Forestry in Toronto and Canada, 1907-2007 in which he chronicles the first century of this foundational institution and fills a significant gap in the literature on the history of the development of professional forestry. Also, Lauren Wheeler, from the New Scholars in Canadian History and Environment Group discusses an upcoming virtual environmental history workshop for graduate students called Place and Placelessness.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 016: The Industrialization of Agriculture
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2010-09-28) Kheraj, Sean
From 1945 to the early 1970s, technological innovations helped to transform American agriculture. The introduction of industrial chemicals and new machinery to US farm operations in the decades after the Second World War ushered in, what some historians have characterized as an agricultural revolution. These changes certainly altered food production and agricultural output. They also altered the practice of farming itself, leading ultimately to fewer farmers tending larger and larger farms. What caused farmers to adopt these new chemical and mechanical technologies? How did this affect the business of farming in the second half of the twentieth century? What were the environmental and human health consequences of these substantial changes in agriculture? On this episode of Nature’s Past, Joe Anderson joins us to discuss his book Industrializing the Corn Belt: Agriculture, Technology, and Environment, 1945-1972, a detailed study of the adoption of industrial chemical and mechanical technologies on US farms in the decades following the Second World War. Also, Jim Clifford discusses his new role as Project Coordinator for the Network in Canadian History and Environment.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 017: Virtual Field Trips, Automobiles, and Global Commodity Chains
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2010-10-30) Kheraj, Sean
Over the summer, the NiCHE New Scholars group organized a virtual environmental history workshop that invited graduate students from around the world to participate in two days of discussion and review of working papers on a variety of topics in environmental history. Students from Canada, the US, Britain, France, Japan, and Australia were connected using Skype, Google Groups, and a WordPress blog to review compelling new graduate research in environmental history. One of the hallmarks of the workshop was the virtual field trip. Because field trips play such a prominent role in environmental history workshops and conferences, the New Scholars organizing committee wanted to somehow include a field trip component in the virtual workshop. Using a combination of the photo-sharing service, Picassa, Google Maps and Google Earth, the workshop participants created an impressive collaborative geo-tagged photo essay on the topic of the automobile and its impact on landscapes as a global commodity.Workshop participants were asked to upload and geo-tag photos of the impact of automobiles on their local environments and provide brief annotations and captions for each picture. Those images were then three-dimensionally mapped, using Google Earth, to allow each participant to virtually travel this global commodity chain through images of the impact of automobility in all of the participant countries and regions. On this episode of the podcast we speak with some of the participants from this virtual environmental history field trip and ask them about their collaborative work on this project.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 018: Local and Regional Parks
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2010-11-21) Kheraj, Sean
The provincial government of British Columbia describes Desolation Sound Marine Provincial Park as a “yachter’s paradise” located at the confluence of the Malaspina Inlet and Homfray Channel just north of the town of Power River. The calm, warm waters of Desolation Sound are a popular destination for boating tourists, swimmers, and scuba divers. Most visitors to this marine provincial park, however, are largely unaware of the interconnections between this park and the province’s history of colonization and the displacement of the region’s Aboriginal population. On this episode of the podcast we interview Jonathan Clapperton, a history doctoral candidate from the University of Saskatchewan, about his research on the history of the relationship between Desolation Sound Marine Provincial Park and the local Sliammon First Nation. Also, we continue the conversation about local and regional parks by speaking with participants from the recent NiCHE-sponsored symposium, Historical and Global Perspectives on Provincial and Local/Regional Parks.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 019: Metropolitanism and Environmental History
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2011-01-24) Kheraj, Sean
In 1954, Canadian historian James Maurice Stockford Careless published an influential article in the Canadian Historical Review, titled “Frontierism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History” which offered a new approach for understanding the course of Canadian history and the development of the Canadian nation-state. Instead of adopting the US model of a Frontier Thesis, which saw the expansion and development of the United States connected directly to the extension of a westward settlement frontier, Careless proposed a different model based on a Metropolitan Thesis which understood the development of the Canadian nation-state as a function of the interconnections between metropolitan centres and their regional hinterlands. Under this model for understanding Canadian history, the contours of the country’s expansion were determined not by a continuous line of frontier settlement but instead by the radial expansion of urban influence on rural hinterlands. Careless’s notion of metropolitanism has since played a significant role in environmental history research, most prominently in the work of William Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis and other works in urban environmental history. Borrowing from Careless, this research examines the urban environment in its relationship to rural hinterlands, extending our understanding of the meaning of urban environments beyond the municipal boundaries. The exploitation of natural resources in distant hinterland regions in North America, as far as the northern reaches of the Canada, has in some fashion been influenced by urban consumer demands. Cities consume more resources than their physical footprint can supply and, therefore, they rely upon drawing in resources from an extended hinterland region. As such, metropolitanism as an approach to understanding the interconnection between cities and hinterlands has been quite influential in environmental history. On this episode of the podcast, three prominent Canadian environmental history scholars debate the role of metropolitanism in environmental history research.
Open Access
Nature's Past Episode 020： The 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic in Winnipeg
(Network in Canadian History and Environment, 2011-02-27) Kheraj, Sean
Toward the end of the Great War, Canadians were struck by the most devastating influenza epidemic in the young country’s history. More than 50,000 Canadians succumbed to this virulent strain of influenza that swept the globe in 1918 and 1919. Nearly as many Canadians died from this disease as those who were killed in combat overseas during the First World War. While the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919 has received recent scholarly attention outside of Canada, Canadian historians have only begun to examine the social consequences of this devastating event. The social history of disease and environmental history intersect because both sub-disciplines take into consideration the role of non-human actors in the past. The influenza virus that spread throughout Canada in 1918 and 1919 placed biological and material limits on human agency during this critical period in Canadian history. While the course of the epidemic was shaped by social and political factors, the disease itself ultimately came to have a significant social impact on Canadians. To learn more about the impact of this epidemic in Canada, we speak with Esyllt Jones about her book Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg.

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