Water and the Expanding Subfield of Canadian Environmental History

Abstract

Water and the Expanding Subfield of Canadian Environmental History Mark J. McLaughlin Bouchier, Nancy B. and Ken Cruikshank – The People and the Bay: A Social and Environmental History of Hamilton Harbour. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016. 344 p. Bradley, Ben, Jay Young, and Colin M. Coates, eds. – Moving Natures: Mobility and the Environment in Canadian History. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016. 352 p. Dagenais, Michèle – Montreal, City of Water: An Environmental History. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017. 256 p. MacDonald, Edward, Joshua MacFadyen, and Irené Novaczek, eds. – Time and a Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. 460 p. The subfield of Canadian environmental history—the study of humans and nature in the past in the geographical space now known as Canada—has expanded significantly since the 1990s. Topics now associated with environmental history have long been part of Canadian historiography, but it has only been within the last 20 to 30 years or so that the contours of the subfield have become more well defined. But it is also a subfield in flux, young enough that it is still searching for definition. Within all of this, it is important to note the key role that has been played by the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE; http://niche-canada.org) in nurturing the expansion of the subfield since the organization’s founding in 2004. One of the themes within Canadian environmental history that helps illustrate the subfield’s dynamic state is that of the human relationship with water. Recent contributions, all featuring major involvement from members of NiCHE, point to this dynamism: Montreal, City of Water: An Environmental History by Michèle Dagenais; The People and the Bay: A Social and Environmental History of Hamilton Harbour by Nancy B. Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank; Time and a Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island, edited by Edward MacDonald, Joshua MacFadyen, and Irené Novaczek; and Moving Natures: Mobility and the Environment in Canadian History, edited by Ben Bradley, Jay Young, and Colin M. Coates. Each of these books relies on human-water relationships to some degree [End Page 651] to help expand the subfield’s boundaries of historical inquiry. The two single-authored books, Montreal, City of Water and The People and the Bay, draw our attention to the role of water in the growth of two Canadian cities from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Meanwhile, one of the edited collections, Time and a Place, focuses on the environmental history of Canada’s smallest but most densely populated province, Prince Edward Island (PEI), surrounded as it is on all sides by water. The other edited collection, Moving Natures, delves into the history of humans moving through Canadian environments, with many of the chapters incorporating water and water-based forms of transportation and sports. And yet, the degree to which the books revolve around water must not be overstated, and this is particularly true about the edited collections. Altogether, these four books suggest that the expanding subfield of Canadian environmental history will be producing many stimulating and innovative offerings for many years to come. Of the four of them, Michèle Dagenais’s Montreal, City of Water is the one in which water occupies the most central role within its conceptual foundation. The first French-language book translated for the Nature-History-Society Series with UBC Press, it is a study of how the industrialization and urbanization of Montréal, a city on an island in the St. Lawrence River, has been inextricably intertwined with water. As Dagenais explains: It is the aim of this book to show the centrality of water and water-related infrastructure in the production of new urban forms since the early nineteenth century. Montreal’s history is discussed with reference to water as a constitutive dimension of its development. Such an approach calls for conceiving of this history as the outcome of close interaction with nature, and I will therefore elucidate the mutual transformations of the city and its hydrology over more than two centuries. More than a...