Episode 27 Wildlife Histories: 24 January 2012 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past27.mp3][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. […]
Podcast
Episode 26 Environmental History as Public History: 29 November 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past26.mp3][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 […]
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 […]
The second episode of EHTV: Live from the Field is now online, featuring a look at local food and butchery. On this episode of the series, a group of new scholars in environmental history gather to learn how to butcher a lamb as part of an effort to understand historical […]
This week Lauren Wheeler and I launched a new video series for the Network in Canadian History and Environment called EHTV: Live from the Field. NiCHE director, Alan MacEachern, kick-started the idea a couple of months ago with a proposal to get video cameras into the hands of environmental history […]
Episode 23 The Next Chapter of Canadian Environmental History: May 26, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past23.mp3][29:33] At the end of April 2011, a group of more than 40 researchers in the fields of Canadian environmental history and historical geography met for an extraordinary workshop in Burlington, Ontario called EH Plus: Writing the […]
Episode 22 A Century of Parks Canada: May 16, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past22.mp3][33:16] On May 19, 2011, Parks Canada celebrates its 100th anniversary, commemorating its founding in 1911 as the world’s first national parks service. Preceding the creation of the National Park Service in the United States by more than five […]
Nature’s Past, the Canadian environmental history podcast, will be recording a live round-table discussion with Claire Campbell and some of the contributors to a new edited collection called, A Century of Parks Canada, 1911-2011, on Monday, April 11th at the University of Calgary (MLT 909, 12pm to 2pm). This event […]
Episode 21 Migratory Birds on the Pacific Flyway: March 31, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past21.mp3][36:07] Migratory birds, by the nature of their behavior, cross boundaries. They are transcontinental species whose habitat in North America ranges from the Canadian arctic to Mexico. As such, the human conservation of these species has historically been […]
Episode 20 The 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic in Winnipeg: February 27, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past20.mp3][46:04] 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 […]
Episode 19 Metropolitanism and Canadian Environmental History: January 24, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past19.mp3][42:58] 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 […]
Episode 18 Local and Regional Parks: November 21, 2010 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past18.mp3][45:50] 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 […]