The Network in Canadian History & Environment New Scholars group will be hosting its own graduate student workshop this October, but it’s a different kind of workshop. If you visit the Place and Placelessness website at http://virtualeh.wordpress.com/ you’ll see that this is no ordinary workshop. There’s no conference centre and […]
The Stanley Park Ecological Society (SPES) has released its 2010 State of the Park Report for the Ecological Integrity of Stanley Park. This project emerged following the 2006-07 windstorms. As the Park Board and other community stakeholders began to sort out how to respond to the freshly wind-torn landscape, they […]
Unusual urban animal sightings abound in Canada this month. Last week I wrote about the grey whale that visited Vancouver’s False Creek, the first to be seen in the vicinity of the city in living memory. Canada’s increasingly complicated relationship with wild animals in urban environments continues this week in […]
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 […]
David Brownstein from the Department of Geography at UBC has posted an excellent interview with Jill Delaney from the Library and Archives of Canada about the use of historical photography in scholarly research. Dr. Delaney is involved in the Mountain Legacy Project, an interdisciplinary repeat photography and archival research project […]
Cory Doctorow recently posted a link to a great short documentary called “When Copyright Goes Bad”. It explores, in brief, some of the implications of modern copyright law for consumers, artists, and educators. I thought this served as a pretty good resource for explaining some of the current debates surrounding […]
Episode 14 Management of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse: April 20, 2010. [audio:http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past14.mp3][42:40] 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 […]
To wrap up the post-war years on my course in Western Canadian history since 1885, I’ve decided to focus on the impact of northern mining on the economies and societies of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Since the 1940s, both provinces transitioned from agricultural-based economies with predominantly rural populations to more diversified […]
Last week, we hosted a writing workshop for history and geography graduate students at the University of British Columbia called “Reaching a Popular Audience” sponsored by the Network in Canadian History & Environment and The History Education Network. The intent of the workshop was to introduce graduate students to some […]
On Friday afternoon, I will be leading a session at the Reaching a Popular Audience Writing Workshop at UBC about blogging and online self-publishing. Historians and academics have been blogging for many years now, but it is still a generally uncommon practice in academia. However, online publishing through academic blogging […]
Next week the Nature|History|Society group at UBC will be hosting another special event in environmental history. This term’s event features Dr. Dean Bavington from Nipissing University. On Monday, March 22nd Dr. Bavington will be giving a public lecture about the history of cod fishery management in Newfoundland based on his […]
Unfortunately, I’ve only been able to attend just this one full day of the ASEH annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, but it has been pretty good. This morning I attended a panel titled “Natural and Unnatural: Bodies, Health, and Space in the 20th Century.” Broadly speaking, both the panelists’ (Samantha […]