Episode 50: Canadian Energy History [54:06] Download Audio According to a study by Richard Unger and John Thistle, Canadians consumed 430 petajoules of energy in 1867. Combining energy from animal labour, food, firewood, wind, water, coal, crude oil, natural gas and electricity, by 2004 Canadians reached a historic peak […]
On November 12, 2015, we held a joint “History and Computing”/teaching workshop in the Department of History at York University. We held a round-table discussion with instructors who have previously taught online courses in history at York and at other universities. The discussion covered a wide range of issues from […]
Following Monday night’s election results, Canada may have marked a shift in the downward trend of voter turnout over the past twenty-seven years. According to early figures from Elections Canada, 68.5% of eligible voters (17,546,697 people) cast ballots. This is up considerably from the historic low turnout of 58.8% in […]
Episode 49: Wildlife Conservation in Quebec [40:17] Download Audio There is a lot of good historical writing on wildlife conservation in Canada. Historians, including Janet Foster, George Colpitts, John Sandlos, Tina Loo, and others have provided excellent and important studies of the topic. But our understanding of wildlife conservation policy […]
In March 1950, four Alberta “pipeline walkers” spoke with a reporter from Canadian Press about their tireless work. Each worker walked twelve to fifteen miles per day, checking on pipeline facilities in the Edmonton district and looking for leaks, a consistent problem for Alberta’s booming oil industry in the mid-twentieth […]
The National Energy Board is currently considering a proposal to triple the capacity of the Trans Mountain Pipeline to 890,000 barrels per day (bpd). On Wednesday, May 27, 2015, the City of Vancouver published a series of expert reports on the pipeline expansion proposal and the Mayor, Gregor Robertson, announced […]
Last fall, we held a workshop in the Department of History at York about data management for historical research. Dr. Daniel Heidt gave a presentation titled, “Data Overload? Software Solutions for Academic Researchers.” In that presentation, Dr. Heidt reviewed many of the challenges of managing digitized archival sources and he […]
Episode 47: Pollution Probe and the History of Environmental Activism in Ontario [50:31] Download Audio Environmental activism has a long history in Canada. Like others around the world, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canadians became involved in a number of environmental non-governmental organizations. Picking up on a prevailing […]
Last week, British Columbians once again witnessed the effects of oil on Burrard Inlet. Local authorities cautioned residents to avoid the water along the shores in Vancouver and West Vancouver after a large slick of bunker fuel oil appeared on the surface of Burrard Inlet. Around 5pm Wednesday, April 8, 2015, a boater notified Port […]
I just published a review of Darcy Ingram’s book, Wildlife, Conservation, and Conflict in Quebec, 1840-1914. The review appears in H-Net Reviews here. You can download a PDF version of the review here. Conservation in a Distinct Society Wildlife conservation in Quebec was distinct from the rest of Canada not […]
If you weren’t able to attend the 2015 annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History in Washington, D.C. last week, we’ve got you covered. In fact, the collective #envhist community on Twitter documented the whole thing minute-to-minute. I’ve created archives for a couple of ASEH meetings and this […]
This week is the 2015 annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History and scholars from across Canada will be making the journey to Washington D.C. to share their research at the conference. To help you find them, I have compiled this list of posters, panels, and round tables […]