Yesterday’s news of the Plains Midstream Canada oil pipeline spill on the Red Deer River and Glennifer Lake has attracted some much needed attention to Alberta’s pipeline system. While this most recent spill of between 1,000 and 3,000 barrels (~159-477 cubic metres) of light sour crude oil garnered a lot […]
Water
5 posts
Download episode In the second of our two-part look at Niagara Falls, Merle Massie explores two of the dimensions of the tourist landscape of the falls. On the one hand, Niagara is a natural wonder that has draw tourists to its sights for more than one hundred years. On the […]
Episode 24 Draining the Wet Prairie: September 20, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past24.mp3][34:17] Agricultural expansion is a central component of the history of the resettlement of the Canadian prairies in the nineteenth-century. Popularly, that history has been characterized by the challenges of aridity on a dry prairie landscape. The characterization of the […]
One of the most exciting things about environmental history research is the opportunity to do field research. It’s fun to get away from the desk and get outdoors. I did just that this afternoon when I heard that a grey whale had wandered into False Creek. After running down to […]
Last winter, I had a couple of students in my North American environmental history course come to me with ideas for research essays on the environmental history of bottled water. The topic is far too big for a relatively short undergraduate paper, but the more I thought about it, the […]