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from the editors
| WE CONCEIVED THIS SPECIAL ISSUE to lay the basis for more engagement between Canadian and international environmental history scholarship. In recent years, the environmental history field has been extremely active in Canada. A host of new positions in history and geography departments, the creation of endowed Canada Research Chairs in environmental history, the rise of NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History and Environment / Nouvelle initiative canadienne en histoire de l'environnement, and a growing volume of publications suggest that the field holds a new institutional and intellectual presence in Canadian scholarship and letters.1 In the past three years, no fewer than four Canadian journals have published environmental history theme issues, and another is in the offing.2 UBC Press has established the Nature/History/Society series under the general editorship of Graeme Wynn, which has to date published six titles.3 The Canadian field is gaining a wide domestic audience as well as recognition. Tina Loo's States of Nature (UBC Press, 2006), reviewed in this issue, received the John A. Macdonald prize from the Canadian Historical Association in 2007 for the best book in Canadian history. That we received over fifty proposals to our call for papers also provides a hint of the current state of affairs. In some respects, the special issue simply rides a wave. |
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Despite all this, Canadian environmental history has yet to make much of an impact internationally. This is surprising for two reasons. First, being home to a wide range of environments and histories, Canada is well-suited to comparative study. It can be examined in contrast to and alongside other northern states such as Russia and Norway. Its colonial past makes it an apt comparison to the centers of empire in France and Great Britain and to other former colonial peripheries like New Zealand and Australia. And its unique relationship with the United States—united longitudinally by climate, geology, and biology, separated latitudinally by politics, culture, and even language—makes the two countries' comparative experiences useful in understanding the complex interplay of nature and culture in making history. Second, Canada is an important case for transnational study. It is a vast realm, the second largest country in the world, bounded by three oceans, and host to diverse natural areas from boreal forest to desert to Arctic tundra. Over centuries, this northern space has been actively shaped and reshaped by a complex succession of peoples, diseases, technologies, modes of production, ideologies, and state systems, all bound up in processes of global exchange and influence. We hope that this issue reveals insights about Canada in particular, while prompting comparative, transnational, and historiographical reflections. |
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Canadian historical scholarship of recent decades has tended to shy away from grand national narratives and instead emphasize place and region. This special issue is no exception. It provides a range of regional and comparative insights, but cannot pretend to anything like comprehensive treatment. By far the greatest regional emphasis of the current issue is on northern Canada. Liza Piper and John Sandlos interrogate the use and limits of Alfred Crosby's ecological imperialism thesis in a sub-Arctic and Arctic context, Stephen Bocking considers the development of scientific disciplinary perspectives on northern environments, P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Matthew Farish analyze the environmental dimensions of Cold War activities in the north, and Tina Loo explores a major northern dam development in British Columbia and its cascading effects on ecosystems and peoples downstream. Shannon Stunden Bower offers a contribution on the prairies region in her study of the watershed concept and the conflicts over the wet prairie of Manitoba. Two essays consider various dimensions of Quebec environmental history. Stéphane Castonguay examines the changing nature of flooding on the St. Francis River and the shifting social contexts and perceptions of flood phenomena. Sherry Olson compares Montreal and Baltimore, Maryland, to test the particular and general characteristics of urban metabolism in growing industrial cities. By happenstance rather than design, this special issue contains no essay considering Ontario or the Atlantic provinces. Several articles reach to a national and transnational scale. Joan Schwartz introduces a wide-ranging series of photographs in a gallery essay on representations of Canadian landscapes. In two short reflections essays, Stephen Pyne places the history of Canadian fire in a North American context and James Feldman and Lynne Heasley outline a comparative program of research on the Great Lakes. |
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International readers seeking a single, overarching introduction to Canadian environmental history will not find that here, but we can suggest some alternatives. Any scholar interested in Canadian topics and the potential for comparative and transnational research should investigate the sizeable and growing Integrated Database in Canadian Environmental History prepared and maintained by Stéphane Castonguay.4 Several historiographic papers that offer guidance and perspective also have been published in the past five years.5 A one-volume environmental history of Canada recently authored by Graeme Wynn offers an important examination of human and environmental change from the Pleistocene to the present.6 There is more work on the horizon. Neil Forkey is preparing an environmental history of Canada for the University of Toronto Press. And NiCHE has organized an undergraduate reader focused on research practices: Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental History, edited by Alan MacEachern and William J. Turkel, will appear with Nelson Education in 2008. No doubt more will follow.
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THIS SPECIAL ISSUE is in every sense a collective creation. We are indebted to Steve Anderson of the Forest History Society, who first suggested that we develop a Canadian special issue; editor Mark Cioc, who has supported the idea and given great encouragement along the way; Melissa Wiedenfeld, who, in seeing the book review section to completion, has become a quick study of the Canadian field; Eric Leinberger, who with his usual precision and style prepared all of the maps and most of the figures; and Eve Munson, who guided the issue through its final edit. We also thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the funds that allowed NiCHE to provide seed-funding for this project, our colleagues in NiCHE for advice and encouragement, the authors and reviewers for their enthusiasm and hard work, and the individuals who submitted proposals that we were obliged to decline. Finally, we would like to thank our families, who put up with much along the way: Genevieve Warner and Sadie MacEachern, as well as Kirsty Johnston and Maggie Skye Evenden.
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| THIS ISSUE IS DEDICATED to two scholars who did much to develop the field of environmental history in Canada. Elinor G. K. Melville, a Latin Americanist, taught History at York University. Richard Stuart, an Africanist turned Canadianist, was a historian at Parks Canada. We miss them both. |
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MATTHEW EVENDEN AND ALAN MacEACHERN
GUEST EDITORS
NOTES
1. See http://niche.uwo.ca.
2.BC Studies 142–143 (Summer/Autumn 2004), edited by Graeme Wynn; Urban History Review/ Revue d'Histoire Urbaine 34 (Fall 2005), edited by Stephen Bocking; Globe, Revue internationale d'études québécoises 1 (2006), and Revue d'histoire de l'Amerique Francaise 60 (été-automne 2006), both edited by Stéphane Castonguay. A call for papers for a theme issue in environmental history recently has been circulated by Left History (http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=157475).
3. See http://www.ubcpress.ca/books/series_nhs.html.
4. See http://www.cieq.uqtr.ca/fci_hec/index_en.php.
5. Stéphane Castonguay, "Faire du Québec un objet de l'histoire environnementale" Globe, Revue internationale d'études québécoises 9 (2006): 5–35; Graeme Wynn, "'Shall We Linger Along Ambitionless?' Environmental Perspectives on British Columbia," BC Studies 142–143 (summer/autumn 2004): 5–67; Matthew Evenden and Graeme Wynn, "'54:40 or Fight': Writing Within and Across Borders in North American Environmental History," in Nature's End: History and the Environment, ed. Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin (London: Palgrave, forthcoming, 2008).
6. Graeme Wynn, Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO, and Oxford, England: ABC-Clio, 2007).
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