Premier Redford’s remarks yesterday following the recent Plains Midstream Canada pipeline failure north of Sundre really underlined the importance of keeping track of the history of oil pipeline spills in Alberta in both the the recent and deeper past. “It’s actually an exception,” Redford said in regard to the Red […]
Prairies
[This article was updated on June 8, 2012] Late Thursday evening on June 7, 2012, the Sundre Petroleum Operators Group, a not-for-profit society, notified Plains Midstream Canada of a major oil pipeline failure near Sundre, Alberta that spilled an early estimate of between 1,000 and 3,000 barrels of light sour […]
This weekend I am in Guelph, Ontario for the 2012 Canadian History and Environment Summer School, an annual gathering of environmental history faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students affiliated with NiCHE. This is one of the most interesting environmental history events and I look forward to attending each year. The […]
Download Episode This episode of EHTV features an interview with Dr. Shannon Stunden Bower about her research on the history of Oak Hammock Marsh, a substantial wetland complex situated northwest of the City of Winnipeg, capital of the Canadian Province of Manitoba. The wetland initially served as a habitat for […]
Download Episode This episode of EHTV was shot by Dr. Merle Massie, a postdoctoral fellow from the University of Saskatchewan. Her research focuses on local and regional histories of Western Canada. In her dissertation, Dr. Massie examined the deep history of the Paddockwood/Lakeland region north of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Titled […]
Episode 28 Winnipeg Beach: 22 February 2012 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past28.mp3][34:28] In the late decades of the nineteenth century, urban North Americans sought refuge from congestion, noise, and pollution. As the environmental problems of industrial cities grew worse, city councils across the continent established urban parks while federal governments in both Canada […]
Last November, ahead of the House of Commons vote on the elimination of the Canadian Wheat Board purchasing monopsony, the federal Minister of Agriculture, Gerry Ritz, and his provincial cohorts from Alberta and Saskatchewan held a press conference to celebrate the achievement of the federal Conservative Party’s long-held policy objective. […]
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 […]
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 […]
On Friday, 29 April 2011, Plains Midstream Canada quietly issued a press release, informing the public of a crude oil spill from the Rainbow Pipeline east of the Peace River in northern Alberta near Little Buffalo, AB. Four days later, following the Canadian federal election, Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board […]
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 […]
Last December, Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange claimed that his organization had coined a new type of journalism called “scientific journalism”. According to Assange, “[s]cientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge […]