It seems like oil spill history is playing an especially important role in the current debate over the Keystone XL pipeline and Northern Gateway pipeline projects. I recently wrote up a short piece on oil pipeline spills in Alberta’s history. This history of recent oil pipeline spills associated with Enbridge underlines how important it is to remember the environmental history of this kind of industrial activity before making decisions about pipeline construction.
Read the full story here.
Episode 27 Wildlife Histories: 24 January 2012
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[43:05]
Last year, in an effort to foster conversation and discussion among scholars, the journal Environmental History published a special forum of short essays on wildlife histories and the legacy of Peter Matthiessen’s 1959 book Wildlife in America, edited by Peter Alagona. Eleven scholars published short articles in which they discuss the impact of Wildlife in America and future directions for environmental historians who study the history of wild animals and the idea of wildlife. On this episode of the podcast, three members of the Toronto Environmental History Network sit down to share their thoughts on this provocative collection of articles.
Also, we speak with Amanda Di Battista and Andrew Mark about their forthcoming special podcast series on environmental studies called CoHearence.
Please be sure to take a moment to review this podcast on our iTunes page and to fill out a short listener survey here.
Visit the main page at http://niche-canada.org/naturespast
Works Cited
Music Credits
After a year of fumbling our way through various efforts to produce an environmental history mobile application for iOS, Jim Clifford and I are finally ready to demo Environmental History Mobile 1.0 Beta. As we mentioned in our previous update, the goal of this project was to create an iOS mobile application that would facilitate the dissemination of online content relevant to the environmental history community, including news, blogs, and podcasts. What you can try out below is a demo of our first attempt to aggregate all of that content into a simple application.
Please keep in mind that not all of the components of the application in the web demo will function properly, as it would on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Nevertheless, you can click through most of the different sections of the application, including:
EH Top News
This top button on our first tab is our attempt to aggregate environmental history news sources and blogs from across the web. We created a new website, http://envhist.com as a way to bring together content from a collection of relevant blogs and other online sources of environmental history content. We are currently looking for content for this section of the app and we invite all environmental history bloggers to contact us about adding their RSS feeds to http://envhist.com.
EH Tweets
Twitter has rapidly grown into one the best channels for environmental history content on the web. A large community of #twitterstorians have coalesced around the hashtag #envhist as real-time tool for sharing links and discussing environmental history matters on Twitter. Wilko von Hardenberg recently posted this visualization of #envhist activity on Twitter. To tap into this active and ongoing online conversation, we’ve added this button to take you directly to a stream of tweets with the #envhist tag (unfortunately, this button currently doesn’t work on the web demo).
NiCHE News
To keep users in the loop on all NiCHE activites, we’ve added a feed of all NiCHE news and annoucements.
H-Environment
The H-Environment email listserv continues to be an active source of news, announcements, and occasionally debates about environmental history. This feed keeps an updated list of the last twenty posts to H-Environment.
EHTV
NiCHE’s web video series EHTV has published ten short web documentaries about environmental history research. This button takes you to links to watch all of these videos in the app.
The remaining tabs take you to posts from The Otter and episodes of Nature’s Past. Take and look and have fun. Post your feedback in the comments section below.
Nature’s Past, the Canadian environmental history podcast that I produce, was recently awarded a 2011 Crymble Award. Digital history scholar and doctoral candidate, Adam Crymble, just posted his list of digital projects that have most influenced his own work in 2011. Readers should check it out to get a good run-down of some very interesting work (including Nature’s Past!). I am very honoured to have made the list this year and I hope to make it on the list again next year, if possible.
For those of you unfamiliar with his work, Adam blogs at “Thoughts on Public & Digital History” and you can follow him on Twitter @Adam_Crymble. He is known for a number of digital projects, including his work with the Network in Canadian History and Environment and his successful digital publications, The Programming Historian (co-authored with William Turkel and Alan MacEachern) and How to Write a Zotero Translator: A Practical Beginners Guide for Humanists.
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a public lecture at the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History titled “Order and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Toronto”. This lecture is based on my current research project on the history of urban animals and it focuses on the regulation of domestic animals in Toronto from 1834-1900. I also presented this research to the Toronto Environmental History Network last week. If you missed either of these events, I have posted audio from this lecture and my PowerPoint slide presentation below. If you have any questions or comments, please post them in the comments section.
Order and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Canada – mp3 file
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[46:30]
For those of you in Toronto next week, the Robarts Centre’s environmental history lecture series, Transforming Canada: Histories of Environmental Change, continues with its third speaker, Professor Graeme Wynn from the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Professor Wynn’s lecture, titled “Worlds in Motion: Migration and the Nature of Canada”, will be held on Monday, December 5 at 2pm in 305 York Lanes. Here is the full text description of this lecture:
This talk takes a broad view of migration – broad in time and broad in the range of migrant phenomena considered – as the basis for reflection on the influence of movement on the nature of Canada. Adapting Fernand Braudel’s conception of the past as comprised of geographical time, that of the environment or “longue durée,” a “moyenne durée” of cycles or conjonctures, and the time of surfaces and deceptive effects, or “courte durée” proper, it will begin with literal worlds in motion, considering the roles of continental drift and plate tectonics in shaping the nature of the territory now known as Canada. It will also attend to the effects of long cycles of glacial and interglacial epochs in constituting the biogeographical characteristics and habitability of northern North America, before turning to consider the roles of more recent migrations, by people and their portmanteau biota, in shaping Canadian nature.
Episode 26 Environmental History as Public History: 29 November 2011
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[33:50]
Environmental historians have recently been thinking about future directions for their sub-discipline. Last year, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society co-sponsored a workshop held in Washington, D.C. to explore such future directions and published some of the findings here [PDF]. Canadian environmental historians gathered in Burlington, Ontario last spring to ponder similar matters at EH Plus. At both meetings, participants discussed the many roles that environmental history plays outside of the academic community. It seems clear that environmental historians want their research to reach broader public audiences.
On this month’s episode of the podcast, we consider the role of environmental history outside of academia, as public history. To explore this topic and some of its challenges for the field, I spoke with a group of environmental historians with experience working in public history settings.
Please be sure to take a moment and review this podcast on our iTunes page and take a moment to fill out a short listener survey here.
Visit the main page at http://niche-canada.org/naturespast
Works Cited
Music Credits
On this final episode of a five-part series on the history of asbestos mining in Quebec, Dr. Jessica Van Horssen examines the effects of the decline of the asbestos industry and its impact on the people of Asbestos, QC. Furthermore, she discusses the internationally condemned policy of the federal government to abandon the use of asbestos in Canada while simultaneously marketing the mineral in developing countries.
Viewers should also visit the website for Asbestos, QC: The Graphic Novel to further explore Dr. Van Horssen’s work on this topic.
Visit the full EHTV website at: http://niche-canada.org/ehtv
The following is the text of an open letter to Toronto City Council from Canadian historians at Toronto’s universities regarding the proposal to close four city museums:
As professors of Canadian History in Toronto’s three universities, we are deeply disturbed to learn that the city is contemplating closing four city museums. We are writing to urge you not to do so.
Everyone knows that history is important. All the way from elementary schoolrooms to our university classrooms, the teaching of Canadian history plays a vital role in the creation of a common civic culture. Studies also reveal that people of all ages find their own way into that history through the immediate, familiar stories of their own families and communities. That means that, for the people of this city, the history of Toronto is especially important.
Teachers at all levels of the school system also know that understanding our history is enhanced when students can see and touch the past by climbing the ramparts of a two-hundred-year-old fort, sitting by the fire in a nineteenth-century tavern, taking a lesson in an old schoolhouse, or admiring the splendour of a 1920s mansion. Every year, school tours to historic sites give thousands of Toronto students this experience of stepping into the past, as a direct outreach from their classroom curriculum. Many more people continue to explore their local history long after they have left school by visiting Toronto’s heritage sites. A quarter of a million visitors a year pass through the city museums.
Toronto has the unenviable reputation of being almost the only major city in North America without a central city museum. Its ten historic sites provide a more decentralized, yet nonetheless fascinating panorama of the past. Closing the four that have been named in the media would shut down Torontonians’ ability to discover first-hand the nineteenth-century worlds of schooling (Zion Schoolhouse), tavern culture (Montgomery’s Inn), and genteel rural life (Gibson House) in their city. They would lose the opportunity to see parts of the city’s enormous collection of art and artefacts that regularly appear in the Market Gallery, which is also the only place for more diverse exhibitions without the specific mandates of the other sites. They would also lose contact with the special-event programming run by these museums that makes them a vibrant part of their local communities.
It is not all clear what would happen to the buildings and the valuable collections that they house if city funding were removed. These museums incorporate within their walls years of valuable research and meticulous preservation, and house major collections of historical artefacts and records worth a great deal of money. The city cannot afford to let such a rich legacy slip from its grasp.
Closing these places would be a false economy. It would damage the cultural life of the city by blocking Torontonians’ access to their heritage. We urge you in the strongest possible terms to keep all Toronto’s museums open and to provide them with the funding necessary to continue providing valuable windows on the city’s past. Knowledge of where we have been is crucial to knowing where we’re going.
Paul Axelrod, Faculty of Education, York University
Carl Benn, Department of History, Ryerson University
Bettina Bradbury, Department of History, York University
Colin Coates, Canadian Studies Program, Glendon College, York University
Paul Craven, Department of Social Science, York University
Geoffrey Ewen, Canadian Studies Program, Glendon College, York University
Ross Fair, Department of History, Ryerson University
Douglas Hay, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University
Craig Heron, Department of History, York University
Franca Iacovetta, Department of Humanities, University of Toronto Scarborough
Susan Houston, Department of History, York University (Emeritus)
Sean Kheraj, Department of History, York University
Laurel Sefton MacDowall, Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga
Marcel Martel, Department of History, York University
Sean Mills, Department of History, University of Toronto
Janet Noel, Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga
Steve Penfold, Department of History, University of Toronto
Roberto Perin, Department of History, Glendon College, York University
Carolyn Podruchny, Department of History, York University
Ian Radforth, Department of History, University of Toronto
Geoffrey Reaume, Critical Disability Studies Program, York University
Ian Ross Robertson, Department of Humanities, University of Toronto Scarborough (Emeritus)
Myra Rutherdale, Department of History, York University
Marlene Shore, Department of History, York University
Jennifer Stephen, Department of History, York University
William Westfall, Department of Humanities, York University
David Wilson, Department of History, University of Toronto
Asbestos worker at Johns-Manville Factory in Quebec, 1944
The fourth part in Dr. Jessica Van Horssen’s mini-series on the history of asbestos mining in Quebec investigates the decades after the Second World War when global awareness of the adverse health effects of asbestos led to import bans and ultimately the decline of the industry. As medical science unequivocally linked a variety of cancers and lung diseases to inhalation of and exposure to asbestos fibers, the industry suffered. By the 1970s, Quebec asbestos miners, asbestos corporations, and the federal government stood alone as defenders of the fireproof mineral.
Viewers should also visit the website for Asbestos, QC: The Graphic Novel to further explore Dr. Van Horssen’s work on this topic.
Visit the full EHTV website at: http://niche-canada.org/ehtv
I am an assistant professor in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Ontario. I am also the producer and host of Nature's Past, the Canadian environmental history podcast.
My research focuses on the historical relationship between people and animals in urban environments.
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© 2009 Sean Kheraj, Canadian History and Environment. All Rights Reserved.
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