[01:38:37]

Tar Sands in Alberta (ca. 1900-1930). Source: Library and Archives Canada, 12-2 L.10 A48 (21B)

The northern Alberta tar sands (or bitumen) resource is the most well-known environmental issue in Canada today. Representing both a significant component of the nation’s resource economy, and the single greatest threat to ecosystems across the country, the development of tar sands petroleum in western Canada has contributed to a restructuring of the nation’s political economy, a reconsideration of regulatory legislation and government oversight, and a transformation of the perception of Canada internationally. Indeed, the development of the tar sands has become a primary objective of the current government. In December 2012, representatives of the Energy Framework Initiative (who represent the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association, and the Canadian Gas Association) wrote a letter to Peter Kent, Minister of the Environment, and Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources, to request “regulatory reform” of “out-dated” legislation that would allow for “timely licensing and permitting” of major resource projects in Canada’s energy sector without “duplication and overlap between federal and provincial processes.” In the letter, the National Energy Board Act, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the Species at Risk Act, the Fisheries Act, the Migratory Birds Convention Act, and the Navigable Waters Protection Act were all listed by name as “existing laws and regulations related to energy regulation, environmental assessment, and environmental protection” that the authors felt were worthy of reform. Four months later, in April 2012, the Conservative government introduced Bill C-38, which included significant changes to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the Fisheries Act, and the National Energy Board Act. Six months after that, in October 2012, the government introduced Bill C-45, which altered the Navigable Waters Protection Act.

In many respects, the political pressure exerted by the tar sands industry is not new. As early as the 1930s, the Alberta government experienced pressure from Imperial Oil and other smaller producers to limit conservation legislation, which these companies saw as a deterrent to outside investment in the development of the province’s oilfields. After the Second World War, the development of oil resources in Alberta came to dominate the provincial economy, generating enormous revenue from royalties that allowed the government to pay off debts and provide important social services, while at the same time assuming a larger role in federal politics. By the 1970s, the oil and gas industry “accounted for almost 40 percent of all value added in the province.” [1] Throughout the early years, efforts to prevent over-production or regulate the industry came up against political expedients that saw the best interests of the province met through industry royalties. Since then, the importance of the tar sands to the provincial economy has grown considerably. For instance, between 1947 and 1967, public revenues from the industry totaled $2.25 billion. In 2010-2011, the province received $3.7 billion in revenue from tar sands production. The rapid growth of the industry in the twenty-first century has also translated into much more influence for Western Canadian interests in federal politics. When considered within a larger historical context, the close relationship between tar sands development, economic growth, and political power in the country today reflects the important place natural resources have always occupied in Canadian history. Canadian historians have long debated the importance of natural resources, or ‘staples’ (cod, fur, timber, wheat), in shaping society, economy, and politics. Bitumen seems destined to rejuvenate this historiographical debate. Indeed, a recent report on tar sands mega-development, released in early 2013 by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, has referred to the bitumen deposits in northern Alberta as Canada’s newest “staples trap”. While many features of tar sands development are unprecedented, the similarities with previous staples economies are striking.

This episode features an interview with Dr. Andrew Weaver, a climatologist from University of Victoria and recently elected Green Party of BC Member of the Legislative Assembly. It also includes the plenary session from the 2013 American Society for Environmental History Annual Meeting titled, “The Fossil Fuel Dilemma: Vision, Values, and Technoscience in the Alberta Oil Sands,” featuring Warren Cariou, Sara Dorow, Imre Szeman, and Graeme Wynn.

[1] Alvin Finkel, The Social Credit Phenomenon in Alberta (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 100

Please be sure to take a moment to review this podcast on our iTunes page and to fill out a short listener survey here.

Visit the main page at http://niche-canada.org/naturespast

Suggested Readings:

• Breen, David H. Alberta’s Petroleum Industry and the Conservation Board. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1993.
• Chastko, Paul A. Developing Alberta’s Oil Sands: From Karl Clark to Kyoto. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004.
• Clarke, Tony, Jim Stanford, Diana Gibson, Brendan Haley. The Bitumen Cliff: Lessons and Challenges of Bitumen Mega-Developments for Canada’s Economy in an Age of Climate Change. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2013.
• Climate Action Network Canada’s ‘Tar Sands Database’
• “Dirty Oil Sands: Uncovering the Canadian oil sands disaster”
• Finkel, Alvin. The Social Credit Phenomenon in Alberta. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989.
• Gilmour, Don. “Shifting Sands” The Walrus, April 2005.
• Gismondi, Mike, and Debra J. Davidson. “Imagining the Tar Sands 1880-1967 And Beyond” Imaginations, Issue 3-2 (2012), 68-103.
• Goodine, Claudia. “Ship Spotting” The Walrus, July/August, 2012.
• Homer-Dixon, Thomas. “The Tar Sands Disaster” The New York Times, April 3, 2013.
• Kheraj, Sean. “The History of Oil Pipline Spills in Alberta, 2006-2012” Active History, 12 June 2012.
• Lemphers, Nathan and Dan Woynillowicz. In the Shadow of the Boom: How Oilsands Development is Reshaping Canada’s Economy. Pembina Institute, May 2012.
• Nikiforuk, Andrew. Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2010.
• Pratt, Larry. The Tar Sands: Syncrude and the Politics of Oil. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1976.
• Weinhold, Bob. “Alberta’s Oil Sands, Hard Evidence, Missing Data, New Promises” Environmental Health Persepctives, Vol.119, No.3 (March 2011), pp.A126-A131.

Works Cited

• Sean Kheraj, Canadian History & Environment
• Weaver, Andrew. Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World. Toronto: Viking, 2008.
• Stacy Nation-Knapper on Twitter
• Andrew Watson on Twitter

Music Credits

• “Big John stems” by copperhead
• “Fm120-GTR-impro_dry” by Javolenus
• “Just Don’t Know What I’m Playing” Doxent Zsigmond
• “The Rumble of Ukulele and Trombone” by Kara Square

Laying pipe for pipeline between Turner Valley and Calgary, southern Alberta, 1920s. Source: Glenbow Archives, NA-4859-7

Leslie Young, Anna Mehler Paperny, Francis Silvaggio, and a production team from GlobalNews.ca have just compiled and published the most comprehensive chronology of Alberta oil spills, spanning a period from 1975 to 2013. Following an eleven-month investigation, the reporters acquired a nearly complete set of records regarding spills of crude oil, crude bitumen, and synthetic crude in the province of Alberta for the past thirty-seven years. The data came from Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development and the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB), revealing the spill volume, location, cause of spill, and facility operator for each spill incident.

Here are some of the highlights from this ground-breaking report:

• Since 1975, Alberta has averaged two oil spills every day
• Between 1975-2013, Alberta’s oil pipeline transportation network (which now totals more than 400,000 kilometres) has suffered 28,666 crude oil spills
• The largest oil spill in Alberta since 1975 occurred in December 1980 on a pipeline operated by Pembina that released more than 6.5 million litres of crude oil (41,500 barrels) into an area east of Valleyview
• The province does not keep records of oil spills under 2,000 litres that originate from somewhere other than a pipeline (wells, pump stations, etc…)

The most useful feature of this impressive investigative report is its geographic information. The GlobalNews.ca team acquired geographic data for each of the 28,666 crude oil spills and plotted that data on a searchable map. While I hope the team makes this data readily available for other researchers, the current tools are quite useful for understanding the spatial dimensions of this history of oil spills:

Map of the Number Oil Spills in Alberta, 1975-2013

This map plots the number of oil spills on pipelines and other facilities regulated by the Energy Resources Conservation Board between 1975 and 2013. It is searchable by company and by cause. Unfortunately, the data on this map is not sortable and it cannot be extracted easily for further analysis.

Look-Up Map of the Volume and Location of Oil Spills in Alberta, 1975-2013

This map shows the volume, location, operator, and cause of all oil spills in Alberta on pipelines and other facilities regulated by the Energy Resources Conservation Board. It includes a tool to search by location. Again, this map has its limits. For some reason, users cannot zoom out fully to see the entire map of Alberta. It also does not permit users to extract the data for analysis.

In spite of the inability to analyze this data with more detail, this report is outstanding. It comprehensively uncovers the chronology of oil spills in Alberta history in staggering detail and provides excellent context and analysis of the contemporary regulations that govern the industry. This work now calls for historians to chart the findings on a timeline, analyze the data, and explain the context for this important period of Canadian economic and environmental history.

Such analysis of historical data is necessary for assessing the potential risks associated with future oil pipeline construction. The most recent field surveillance summary report from ERCB indicates that liquid hydrocarbon spills on pipelines and other oil facilities continues to be a problem in the province of Alberta. In 2011, more than 5 million litres of liquid hydrocarbons spilled on the provincial oil pipeline network. According to ERCB data in this report, the volume of oil spills has been variable from year to year, spiking in certain years as a result of particular catastrophic oil spills, such as the 2011 spill near Little Buffalo. Hopefully, the complete set of oil spill records from ERCB will be made publicly available online so that researchers can analyze the complete timeline of this important historical period.

Inventing Stanley Park: An Environmental History is a landscape biography, environmental history, and social history of Vancouver’s landmark urban park. It is an exploration of the changing relationship between humans and a relatively small peninsula on the Northwest Coast of North America that became a world-renowned urban park in the late nineteenth century. The book covers the long history of Vancouver’s Stanley Park from its deep geological past to the present, from its original occupancy by Coast Salish First Nations to its resettlement by European and Asian colonists to its transformation into an urban park. Today Stanley Park is synonymous with Vancouver and Vancouverites jealously guard nature in this park from both human and nonhuman disturbance. In this book, I attempt to explain how this came to be and what role nature itself played in the development of this extraordinary urban park in Canada’s third largest metropolitan area.

Appearing in the UBC Press Nature|History|Society series, the hardcover copy of Inventing Stanley Park is now available and the paperback edition will be available later this year. The e-book is also available now (and it’s on sale!). You can read the foreword and introduction here. I have also put together a companion website for the book where I will soon post some additional content, including an audio podcast, extra images, maps, and short articles on the history of Stanley Park that did not make it into the book. Check out http://inventingstanleypark.com for more.

Preview chapter available here. [PDF]

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth unveiling the National War Memorial, 21 May 1939. Source: Library and Archives Canada, C-002179.

Last week, a number of historians and newspaper columnists spilled a lot of virtual ink in response to a decision of the federal parliament’s Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage to launch “a thorough and comprehensive review of significant aspects in Canadian history.” Critics and supporters of the government have been debating the merit, value, and intent of such an investigation. The editorial board of the the Globe and Mail concluded that “The Conservatives are not rewriting history; rather, they are interested in making sure Canadians understand that the rights and freedoms we enjoy are a precious inheritance that deserves celebration.” Ian McKay and Jamie Swift, while drawing attention to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s recent verbal attack on Alexandre Boulerice for denouncing the First World War as “butchery,” remain convinced that “A determined group of uber-patriots we call the New Warriors is struggling to rebrand Canada as a Warrior Nation.” And today, Tom Peace wrote in the National Post that “In its policies, the Harper government has pushed back against the social and cultural contributions to Canadian history.”

As I argued in my own contribution to this discussion, the primary focus of these new “history war” debates should be on the steady erosion of federal funding for independent historical research and preservation. Within the last five years, the federal government has substantially reduced funding to the main public institutions for historical research and preservation, including Parks Canada, Library and Archives Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The government has shifted funding away from such arms-length institutions and programs and focused its funding for historical research and commemoration on short-term programs that fall under direct cabinet control.

The debate over the policies of the Conservative government and its particular concern with Canadian history was aired on CBC’s “The 180″ last Friday. The episode featured Ian McKay and Jack Granatstein. If you missed the broadcast, you can listen to the full episode here:

“Does Canada’s History Need an Update?” The 180 [15:58]

The debate over the public representation of Canadian history and the role of the federal government in the financing of historical research, preservation, and commemoration will continue to dominate discussion online among the historical research community. Hopefully we will find the space to explore these matters at the upcoming annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association. For a thorough round-up of all of the recent online articles on this subject, check out the list Peter Anderson has been keeping at historyapplied.com.

Library and Archives Canada Building, Ottawa

The new history wars are not battles over the meaning of Canadian history. They are battles over public financing of historical research and historical preservation. Historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, librarians, and archivists all have a stake in these important conflicts and debates. Recent federal efforts to commemorate the War of 1812 and to create a Canadian Museum of History by rebranding the Canadian Museum of Civilization have triggered new arguments among historians that echo the history war debates of the 1990s, but these arguments distract from the broader (and more important) challenge of the steady reduction of federal public financing for historical research and preservation.

In the 1990s, Canadian historians were allegedly at “war” with one another. A segment of the first generation of post-war Canadian historians approaching retirement expressed discontent with historiographical changes that had occurred over the course of the 1970s and 1980s which shifted scholarship away from national political histories toward a wider spectrum of academic inquiry that considered the histories of women, ethnic minorities, regions, and labour. Furthermore, their discontent was directed toward new revisionist interpretations and analyses of Canadian history that tended to foreground criticism of the state and highlight crimes and sins of the past, including the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, the oppression of Aboriginal peoples, and the subjugation of women. The conflict among academic historians famously spilled out onto the national stage during the controversy and subsequent Senate inquiry into the production of the CBC television documentary series, The Valour and the Horror. Some military historians and veterans’ groups expressed outrage at the work of Brian and Terence McKenna, the writers and producers of this documentary series.

The discontent of those historians who lamented the scholarly shift away from national political histories found its loudest voice in Jack Granatstein’s 1998 extended polemical essay, Who Killed Canadian History?. In one-hundred and forty-nine blistering pages, Granatstein took aim at the degradation of public knowledge of Canadian national and political history, what he believed to be “the basic nuts and bolts of Canadian historical knowledge.” [1] Who was to blame? Who killed Canadian history? In a buckshot fashion, Granatstein offered a frenetic list of homicide suspects, including elementary and high school teachers, university professors, “TV, movies, comic books, and the Internet,” the Constitution (which “gives control over education to the provinces, which guard their rights jealously”), provincial ministries of education that “bought holus-bolus every trendy theory to emerge from faculties of education,” “the millions of immigrants who have poured into and continue to flood, Canada,” and federal multicultural policy that “promotes a very weak nationalism.” [2] Needless to say, Who Killed Canadian History? was a landmark work in these so-called “history wars” of the 1990s.

The echos of Granatstein’s cant have found their way back into public discourse regarding the commemoration of Canadian history. Terry Glavin’s recently published op-ed artilce took direct aim at a “history establishment” that has allegedly turned its back on Canadian history. “For too long,” Glavin writes, “academic historians have neglected to tell our story.” He claims that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his cabinet have chosen to celebrate the War of 1812, the start of the First World War, the bicentennial of the birth of John A. Macdonald, and the 150th anniversary of Confederation because, in Harper’s own words, “These milestones remind us of a proud national story rooted in the great deeds of our ancestors and in a centuries-old constitutional legacy of freedom.” He warns his readers, however, that “If it’s ‘a proud national story rooted in the great deeds of our ancestors’ you’re after, the very last place to go looking for it would be the history faculty of a Canadian university.” Glavin blames the failure of the academy to “tell our story” on New Left politics of the 1960s when, according to his understanding of Canadian historiography,  “history was activism, and the old order was upended in order to focus on the marginalized and oppressed.” Christopher Dummitt, associate professor of Canadian history at Trent University, endorsed Glavin’s hypothesis, alleging that “The historical profession has become kind of an activist organization. The result is we have lost authority, as a discipline, and we can’t talk about history writ large.”

Both Glavin and Dummitt then find fault in the “activism” of academic historians. They contend that this is the root of the shift away from national and political history. The implication is that academic historians have become too sympathetic with leftist politics and that their active engagement with such politics has somehow rendered them illegitimate authorities on the history of Canada and no longer relevant to the broader Canadian public. The primary problem with this argument is that it makes normative another kind of activist historian, nationalist active historians.

A small group of nationalist active historians have, in fact, found great success in persuading the federal government to endorse and promote their particular (and arguably narrow) vision of Canadian history. Jack Granatstein has, in some ways, become the foremost nationalist active historian. As he made plain in 1998, he consistently “preached the gospel of Canadian history and national history to thousands of students.” He wrote popular commercial books on topics in Canadian military history and he has appeared so regularly on television and in newspapers that he has become a metonym of Canadian history. Christopher McCreery, a graduate from the doctoral program in Canadian history at Queen’s University, has also had tremendous influence on the policies of the federal government. He currently sits on the board of trustees for the Canadian Museum of Civilization (soon to be renamed the Canadian Museum of History). He previously served as a senior adviser to the Leader of the Government in the Senate and he played a prominent role in the renaming of the maritime command of Canadian Forces to the Royal Canadian Navy. Finally, Michael Bliss, another retired professor of Canadian history who has emphasized a desire to promote national and political history, has also been appointed to the board of trustees for the Canadian Museum of Civilization. [3]

Academic historians have lost the ear of government (if they ever had it to begin with) not because they have been less engaged with the public or the national history of Canada, but because they have been less sympathetic to the interests of the state in their analyses of the past. As such, their histories have less use for governments interested in bolstering or promoting nationalism and ignoring or eliding class conflict, racial and ethnic oppression, the legacies of colonialism, gender and sexual inequalities, and environmental degradation.

But revisiting the history wars, as Tom Peace recently suggested, overlooks numerous examples of current historical scholarship in national political history and does not adequately acknowledge significant changes in Canadian historiography in the last fifteen years. It might also miss the point of the current debate over the commemoration of Canadian history and the relationship between the federal government and academic historians. This revival of the history wars of the 1990s, including the debates over the place of national and political history in undergraduate teaching and Canadian historiography, is to some extent a red herring or distraction. The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage has taken this kind of misdirection so far as to call for “a thorough and comprehensive review of significant aspects in Canadian history.” The new history wars, however, are not being fought over plaques, statues, reenactments, museum exhibits or documentaries. They are being fought in the federal budget and the publicly funded institutions that foster, support, and promote Canadian history research.

Like other branches of the civil service in Canada, the primary public institutions for Canadian history have felt the impact of the austerity policies of the federal Conservative government. Parks Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Library and Archives Canada  have all suffered significant reductions in base funding that have limited the capacity of each of these institutions to support independent historical research. The Canadian Association of University Teachers has compiled the full details of these budget cuts and their implications for historical research at http://www.canadaspastmatters.ca/

Last year, Parks Canada was the hardest hit by layoffs in the civil service. As a result of the 2012 budget, the federal government reduced funding for the agency’s programs by $29 million annually resulting in an estimated 638 job losses. Parks Canada is not only responsible for the management of Canada’s national parks and park reserves, but it is also responsible for 167 national historic sites. The job cuts have reduced Parks Canada to just twelve archaeologists and eight conservators. These cuts have severely circumscribed the both the historical research and historical preservation capacities of Parks Canada, one of the primary branches of the civil service responsible for such work.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the primary public funding council for Canadian historical scholarly research, has not been immune to such austerity policies. Between 2008 and 2012, SSHRC experienced a 10 per cent base funding reduction of $41.1 million. In its wake, the federal government has also redirected funding away from basic research programs to special one-time grants and projects for applied research, diminishing the support for independent historical scholarship.

Finally, Library and Archives Canada also experienced a wave of job losses last summer with the termination of twenty-one archivist and archival assistant positions, a fifty per cent reduction in digitization and circulation staff, and the elimination of the interlibrary loans program. The cuts compounded past reductions in the LAC budget and the series of “modernization” policies that have reduced public access to archival materials and compromised the ability of LAC to acquire new records.

Even Professor Granatstein tried to raise alarms about the threat these cuts and policy changes pose to the preservation and knowledge of Canadian history. But, in his June 2012 article in the Globe and Mail, he seemed puzzled by these policies:

The Harper government has genuinely seemed to be more concerned with honouring history than most of its predecessors. The emphasis given to the War of 1812 is only the most recent example, and the Prime Minister’s own efforts at writing the history of hockey in Canada (during which he must have used LAC’s collections and books) indicate his personal interest in the past. But the treatment of LAC will hurt research and scholarship now and forever. It shows nothing so much as contempt for the past and, regrettably, for the future as well.

Granatstein’s concern for the fate of LAC is shared by many academic historians, but he is likely alone in his naivety regarding the Conservative government’s interest in the past. Like the crow whose vanity led him to be tricked by the flattery of the fox, Granatstein seems to have failed to see the broader picture of the relationship between the federal government and Canadian history.

As I wrote in February, the federal government has not invested more public funding into Canadian history. It has shifted funding away from arms-length government institutions that typically have supported independent historical scholarship. In its place, the federal government has focused on commemorative events and projects that fall under direct cabinet or ministerial control. In 2012, the government devoted $28 million to commemorate the War of 1812 and it retained direct control over most of that funding through Heritage Canada and Treasury Board. It also promises to invest $25 million into the rebranding of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. At the same time, it cut $29 million from Parks Canada, $41.1 million from SSHRC, and $9.6 million from Library and Archives Canada.

This is the challenge that Canadian historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, librarians, and archivists now face. What role will public financing play in historical research? What effects will the reduction of federal support for historical research have on academic scholarship about Canada’s past? What impact will the reallocation of federal public funding for selective commemorative events have on public knowledge of Canadian history? How will direct cabinet control over the representation of Canadian history through commemorative events and museums shape our understanding of the past?

[1] J.L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998), 11-12.

[2] Ibid, 11-16.

[3] Ibid, xvii-xviii.

[55:25]

First Nations farmer ploughing field on Western Canadian Indian reserve, 1920. Source: Library and Archives Canada.

The history of Canadian food and agriculture is an enormous topic with both a global and deeply personal scope. All humans require food to live and agricultural products become food for our consumption, demonstrating the profound interrelatedness of food and agriculture. Beyond sheer survival, food serves social and cultural purposes for all people, from planting and harvesting, through preparation, and ultimately with consumption. Communities and families coalesce around these activities and have done so for all of human existence. Food is a source of pleasure and for many people is intricately linked with spirituality. Examining the environmental history of food and agriculture in Canada reveals the ways in which our complex relationships with nature and each other inform this most intimate aspect of our daily lives.

On this second part of our look at agri-food systems in Canadian history, we discuss Canadian food history and we speak with the editors and authors of a new anthology from University of Toronto Press called, Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. This round table interview features Franca Iacovetta, Valerie Korinek, Marlene Epp, James Murton, and Ian Mosby.

Please be sure to take a moment to review this podcast on our iTunes page and to fill out a short listener survey here.

Visit the main page at http://niche-canada.org/naturespast

Suggested Readings:

• Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. “An Overview of the Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food System, 2012”
• Andrews, Geoff. The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008.
• Bradbury, Bettina. “Pigs, Cows, and Boarders: Non-Wage Forms of Survival Among Montreal Families, 1861-91,” Labour/Le Travail, 14 (Fall 1984), 9-46.
• Carter, Sarah. Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993.
• Derry, Margaret. Art and Science in Breeding: Creating Better Chickens. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
• Iacovetta, Franca, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp. Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.
• Mosby, Ian. “‘That Won Ton Soup Headache’: The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, MSG and the Making of American Food, 1968-1980.” Social History of Medicine 22, No. 1 (April 2009): 133-151.
• Murton, James. Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007.
• Russell, Peter A. How Agriculture Made Canada: Farming in the Nineteenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012.
• Turner, Chris. “The Farms are not All Right” The Walrus, October 2011.
• Wall, Ellen, Barry Smit, and Johanna Wandel. Farming in a Changing Climate: Agricultural Adaptation in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007.
• Winson, Anthony. The Intimate Commodity: Food and the Development of the Agro-Industrial Complex in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.

Works Cited

• Sean Kheraj, Canadian History & Environment
• Iacovetta, Franca, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp. Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

Music Credits

• “Gm125-GTR-Harmonics-impro” by NiGiD
• “Cate’s First Day” by Javolenus
• “Atelier – 80bpm” by NiGiD

Peace Tower, Ottawa

Hot on the heels of last week’s annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, this week marks the start of the National Council for Public History conference. This year the NCPH meets in Ottawa from April 17-20 and I will be there to present on a roundtable panel on the use of digital technologies in environmental history for public outreach. The session is titled “Making Environmental History Public through Digital Technologies” and it will be held between 3:30pm and 5:00pm in Ballroom A on Thursday, April 18.

This panel will examine the ways in which historians can use digital technologies to adapt a public history approach to disseminate environmental history and place-based historical research to wider audiences. Panelists will speak about specific digital environmental history projects that facilitate the public dissemination of research. Their discussion will cover a broad range of digital tools, including podcasts, mobile application development, geographic information systems, digital content aggregation tools, augmented reality, and online community management. The panel will pick up directly on many of the themes explored in the 2004 special issue of The Public Historian on “Public History and the Environment/Environmental History and the Public.”

I will be joined by Ronald Rudin, Daniel Macfarlane, Jim Clifford, Joshua MacFadyen, William Knight, and James Opp. Each panelist will provide a brief demo of a digital environmental history project before opening the floor to questions and discussion with the audience. We held a similar session at the ASEH in Madison, Wisconsin last year and we are hoping to generate some conversation and spread some ideas about the advantages and challenges of using podcasts, websites, mobile apps, and other digital technologies for connecting environmental history scholarship with wider audiences.

Here is a list of links to the projects we will discuss on this roundtable:

Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast

Environmental History Mobile App Project

Returning the Voices to Kouchibouguac National Park

Active History

Flax History

Network in Canadian History and Environment

Geospatial Historian

Sunken Villages, St. Lawrence River

Rideau Timescapes

If you are currently working on such a project or you are interested in learning more about the intersections between digital history, public history, and environmental history, please join us.

Roundtable: Making Environmental History Public through Digital Technologies
Thursday, April 18
3:30pm to 5:00pm
Ballroom A

Full conference schedule and details available here.

At Canadian universities, we run into this situation most commonly with Ebrary, one of the largest e-book lending systems commonly used in our libraries (owned by parent company, Proquest). For many books in the Ebrary collection, the number of simultaneous readers is restricted and the ability to download full copies of e-books is also often limited to fourteen days (when available at all). This can occasionally pose a problem when, for instance, you want to assign an Ebrary book for a course or when a large number of students require access to one for a research assignment.

This model for e-book lending is a major challenge for public libraries across Canada and the United States. Libraries and publishers are trying to develop a system that balances the interests of readers, libraries, authors, and publishers. At times, the lending system for e-books can be complicated and downright baffling. To make some sense of it all, Nora Young hosted an excellent panel discussion on her CBC radio program, Spark, featuring Jane Pyper, City Librarian for the Toronto Public Library, Carolyn Wood, Executive Director of the Association of Canadian Publishers, and David O’Brien, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Click here or use the player below to listen to this episode.

“E-book Lending in Libraries” Spark, 3 April 2013

If you missed the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Environmental History in Toronto, you can relive the experience on Twitter. I have archived all of the #ASEH2013 Tweets from March 31 to April 7. You will find notes, comments, links, and photos from this superb conference. Enjoy!

]]> http://www.seankheraj.com/?feed=rss2&p=1461 0 http://www.seankheraj.com/?p=1461 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SeanKherajCanadianHistoryAndEnvironment/~3/C76yqyLolLQ/ http://www.seankheraj.com/?p=1455#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:10:44 +0000 seankheraj http://www.seankheraj.com/?p=1455 (More)…]]>

Frozen pigs, St. Anne’s Market, Montreal, QC, about 1870. Source: McCord Museum, MP-0000.1828.82

Animal history will be well-represented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History this week in Toronto. If you are already interested in attending the Saturday morning panel, “Controlling Animals? Human and Animal Agency in North America” featuring Susan Nance, Jessica Wang, Jennifer Bonnell, and Tina Adcock, I would encourage readers to join us in the afternoon for our panel on urban animals titled “International Perspectives on Urban Animals in the Nineteenth Century.”

This Saturday, April 6th from 3:30pm to 5:00pm in the Quebec Room at the Royal York Hotel, I will be presenting research from my current project on the history of animals in Canadian cities alongside Andrew Robichaud (Stanford University), Catherine McNeur (New York Historical Society and the New School), and Chris Pearson (University of Liverpool). Here are the details on our panel:

Saturday, April 6, 2013
3:30pm to 5:00pm
Quebec Room

Abstract:

This panel examines the role of domestic animals in nineteenth-century urban environments from an international perspective, including case studies from Canada, the United States, and France. Industrialization and urban development in the nineteenth century transformed cities in North America and Western Europe, creating environments with very dense populations of humans. These cities, however, were not exclusively human habitats. Instead, industrial cities emerged as multi-species habitats in which humans and non-human animals not only co-existed, but were interdependent. The papers in this panel explore the different ways in which non-human domestic animals were co-actors in industrial urbanization in the nineteenth century. The case studies include an examination of the spatial dimensions of the regulation of animals in San Francisco from 1860 to 1900, public health controversies and city politics in New York relating to the keeping of pigs and cows in the 1850s, the spread of equine influenza in Canadian and US urban centres during the Great Epizootic of 1872-73, and the complicated relationship between Parisian police and dogs in fin-de-siècle France. Each paper speaks directly to the broader conference theme of “Confluences, Crossings, and Power” as they look at the boundaries between peoples, species, and cultures in urban environments.

Papers:

Andrew Robichaud, “Making and Remaking Animal Space in San Francisco, 1860-1900″

From 1860 to 1900, amid a surge of urbanization, American cities sought to radically remake urban space through a series of new regulations aimed at urban animal populations. This paper traces the spatial changes in animal populations in San Francisco from 1860 to 1900, focusing on the creation of new spaces within that city for certain domesticated and semi-domesticated species. New regulations on animals came, most notably, from two emergent organizations with vast powers: the city’s Department of Health, and the private police force imbedded in the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Combined with new commercial pressures, these organizations helped shape where and how animals lived out their lives in San Francisco, changing the lives of animals, and the relationships between people and animals, in profound ways.

Through GIS mapping of animal businesses, animal laws, and animal enforcement patterns, this paper seeks answers to a few major questions: What spaces did certain animals inhabit in San Francisco? How and why did the spatial extent of certain species and animal businesses change over time? And, finally, how did various organizations police animals across real space?

Catherine McNeur, “Hog Wash and Swill Milk: Corrupt Politics and Urban Animals in 1850s New York City”

There were two well-publicized campaigns against urban animals in New York City during the middle of the nineteenth century.  One focused on the pigs kept in pens on the outskirts of the city and the other targeted the cows housed in sheds near distilleries.  Both sets of animals were an important food source for lower-class New Yorkers looking for inexpensive pork, beef, and milk.  The animals, housed close to the city, were fed food waste in the form of kitchen scraps, offal, or the swill left over from the process of distilling liquor.  The proximity of these animals to city residents paired with the threat of corrupt food, unsanitary conditions, and unwholesome smells fueled newspaper exposés that pressured the municipal government to evict New York’s livestock and take control of the quality of urban food. Politicians did not treat the hogs and cows equally, however, and this paper will address the reasons behind this disparity.  While the piggeries were destroyed in the dramatic “Piggery War” of 1859, swill milk remained an issue through the end of the nineteenth century.  This paper will look at the connections between corrupt food, corrupt politics, and the treatment of urban livestock.

Sean Kheraj, “The 1872-73 Canadian Horse Distemper”

In early October 1872, a mysterious illness swept through the urban horse population of Toronto. The Globe first reported the phenomenon on 5 October 1872, noting that “[f]or some time past a large number of horses in the city have been affected with disease of the respiratory organs, but during the present week another disease has prevailed to an alarming extent among the horses in this district.” Horse owners and other observers were perplexed and assumed the disease to be a “catarrhal fever.” Horses throughout the city suffered from sore throats and hacking coughs which kept them from working for up to two weeks. It was, as Dr. Andrew Smith from the Ontario Veterinary College wrote, a “considerable loss and annoyance to owners of horses and to the community generally.”

The outbreak of disease among the horses of Toronto in the autumn of 1872 was the beginning of a continent-wide pandemic known as “The Great Epizootic.” Following the events in Toronto, the disease spread throughout North America from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts and into parts of Central America, reaching as far south as Nicaragua. This paper will trace the origins of this disease, eventually thought to be a virulent strain of equine influenza, and its impact on urban life in North America in 1872-73 as it spread outward from Toronto to nearly all of the major cities of North America, including Montreal, Chicago, New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Galveston, and San Francisco. The Great Epizootic not only illustrated the centrality of domestic animals to the functioning of nineteenth-century North American cities, but it also demonstrated that these cities, which were multi-species habitats, generated unique ecological conditions and a networked disease pool capable of producing animal disease environments that were distinctly urban in character.

Chris Pearson, “Securing the City: The Police and their Dogs in fin-de-siècle Paris“

The Parisian police force experienced a complex and contradictory relationship with Paris’s dogs in the fin-de-siècle period. Having spent much of the nineteenth-century combating stray dogs and fighting the perceived threat of canine-borne rabies, Paris’s police force began to train dogs for specialized police work. This was a time of increased professionalization of police in Paris. A training school opened in 1883 to teach recruits about crowd dispersal, first aid and how to behave so that they would ‘merit the esteem of everyone by the order and dignity of their private lives and their conduct.’ The police also developed new crime detection techniques based on finger-printing, centralized record-keeping and photography. They introduced more specialist units, such as a river brigade team in 1900, and by 1909 all police stations were linked by telephone. The training and deployment of dog teams to fight crime was part of this process at a time when bourgeois Paris was seemingly threatened by roaming ‘Apache’ gangs.

Based on detailed archival research in Paris’s police archives and analyses of training manuals and newspaper reports, this paper will explore the police’s mobilization of dogs and its public reception, as well as their campaigns against stray dogs. It will argue that these contradictory attitudes towards dogs can be explained by the desire to secure the city from the interlinked threats of disease, crime and disorder, which seemingly threatened the health and security of Paris. As part of a wider project on dogs and the making of modern cities, this paper aims to make a contribution to urban history, animal studies, and the environmental history of cities. It also shows how the state-building of the modern period was a ‘more-than-human’ process that involved animals as well as humans.

To find out more about all the panels at this year’s American Society for Environmental History annual meeting in Toronto, visit http://aseh.net