Environmental History at Work: New Environmental Histories of Canada and Atlantic Canada

Abstract

Environmental History at Work: New Environmental Histories of Canada and Atlantic Canada Blair Stein (bio) WHAT IS “ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY”? Who produces it, and who is it for? These are questions environmental historians encounter often: while teaching, in grant proposals and book pitches, and in job application letters. In many ways, the three recent edited volumes in review here – Colin Coates and Graeme Wynn’s The Nature of Canada, Claire Campbell, Edward MacDonald, and Brian Payne’s The Greater Gulf, and Edward MacDonald, Joshua MacFadyen, and Irené Novaczek’s Time and A Place – all do what we expect from environmental histories.1 They tell stories of human and non-human interactions with the natural world. They examine the environmental aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural change. They centre the winds and waters, the plants and animals, the rocks and trees and beaches. More than anything, though, these three volumes hint at all of the things that environmental history can do. The environmental history community in Canada is robust, as the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) and the University of Calgary’s related open-access “Canadian History and Environment” series suggest.2 These three volumes – the arguments, themes, etc. – engage with what we might call “traditional” Canadian environmental history, but also put it to work by expanding its boundaries. As a set of books, the Nature of Canada, the Greater Gulf, and Time and a Place act as a sort of matryoshka doll of the cutting edge of Canadian environmental history. Each makes its own critical and crucial intervention [End Page 135] by expanding under-studied areas, deflating over-studied ones, and opening the field to new practitioners and audiences, all while sitting comfortably within each other as a set of concentric narratives that generally cancel out each other’s flaws. This essay will explore how these books probe the ways that environmental history is, has been, and can be mobilized as well as how the contributors to each engage with common themes in Canadian environmental history: economies, commodities, and work; geopolitics; tourism and culture; and the histories of non-human actors.3 The Nature of Canada is the broadest in temporal, thematic, and geographic scope, and the editors and authors have deliberately removed their “common scholarly blinkers” in favor of “provocative arguments” that present a highly nuanced and hopeful picture of the past, present, and future of human-nature interactions in Canada.4 The “nature” in the Nature of Canada has multiple meanings; not only are the contributors interested in what we might imagine as “the natural world” – trees, animals, rivers, minerals – but they also interrogate Canada’s nature as a settler colony. What role has the environment played in constructions of Canada, they ask, and what have those constructions in turn done to the environment? To answer these questions, the contributors address both the content and context of environmental history in short essays written largely by historians or historical geographers that run from geological-scale “deep time” to the early 21st century. Because this book is focused on “the nature of Canada (and Canadians),” we hear voices that have long been central to thinking about Canadian environments, such as Tom Thomson, Northrop Frye, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and David Suzuki.5 But the contributors to the Nature of Canada also remind us to “listen for different stories.” Julie Cruikshank is a good example of this as her essay forces us to re-consider who gets to be an “expert” on the environment and how even Indigenous “Traditional Environmental Knowledge” (TEK) is only seen as valuable once it is made palatable to the “modern bureaucratic state,” forcing Indigenous ways of knowing nature into commensurability with settler time-spaces.6 Each of the essays in the Nature of Canada, by design, takes a fairly common topic in Canadian environmental history and manipulates it by looking for a [End Page 136] different story, listening for a different voice, or asking an existential question. More than anything, the authors look to the past to try to better understand the present and future. Ken Cruikshank asks what will happen to the Canadian preoccupation with using communications technologies to have control over the “Dominion...