Episode 26 Environmental History as Public History: 29 November 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past26.mp3][33:50] Environmental historians have recently been thinking about future directions for their sub-discipline. Last year, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society co-sponsored a workshop held in Washington, D.C. to explore such future directions and published some of […]
Environmental History
173 posts
Download episode This week EHTV continues its five-part series on asbestos in Quebec with the second installation. In Part II of “A Town Called Asbestos”, Dr. Jessica Van Horssen continues her survey of the history of asbestos in Quebec by examining the first asbestos industry boom between 1914 and 1939. […]
Download episode This week EHTV launches the first part of an fascinating five-part series on the history of Quebec asbestos by Dr. Jessica Van Horssen. For more than one hundred years, Quebecers have mined this unique and dangerous mineral from the northern region of the Appalachian mountain range. This episode […]
Episode 25 National Parks Beyond the Nation: 24 October 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past25.mp3][40:56] While Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan’s six-episode PBS documentary series framed national parks as “America’s Best Idea”, that idea has not been limited to the borders of the United States. The world’s first national parks service was established […]
Download episode In the second of our two-part look at Niagara Falls, Merle Massie explores two of the dimensions of the tourist landscape of the falls. On the one hand, Niagara is a natural wonder that has draw tourists to its sights for more than one hundred years. On the […]
Last year, Jim Clifford and I received funding from the Network in Canadian History and Environment to develop an iOS mobile application to facilitate the dissemination of environmental history news and other online content. With more researchers and educators using smartphones and other mobile internet devices to connect with one […]
Episode 24 Draining the Wet Prairie: September 20, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past24.mp3][34:17] Agricultural expansion is a central component of the history of the resettlement of the Canadian prairies in the nineteenth-century. Popularly, that history has been characterized by the challenges of aridity on a dry prairie landscape. The characterization of the […]
Download episode On this episode of EHTV, Daniel Macfarlane, a SSHRC post-doctoral research fellow from the Department of History at Carleton University, takes us on a tour of the hydro-electric landscape of Niagara Falls. Both the site of mass nature tourism and mass power generation, the manufactured waterscape of Niagara […]
Nature’s Past, the Canadian environmental history podcast, returns next week with its twenty-fourth episode. After our summer hiatus, the podcast returns with an interview with Dr. Shannon Stunden Bower, the author of the new book Wet Prairie: People, Land, and Water in Agricultural Manitoba. As we prepare for the return […]
Below is a copy of my recently published review of Zachary Falck’s Weeds: An Environmental History of Metropolitan America. You can also download a PDF copy here. Zachary J. S. Falck. Weeds: An Environmental History of Metropolitan America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Illustrations. 280 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN […]
Download episode This month, EHTV takes us to Atlantic Canada alongside two environmental history graduate students as they explore historical sites and archives in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in a superb video shot and produced by Sinead Earley, featuring Kirsten Greer. You can read a full account of their […]
My current research on the history of animals in Canadian cities has been motivated, in part, by my interest in examining overlooked aspects of the past. If nineteenth-century North American cities were replete with horses, pigs, chickens, and cattle, why do they seem so absent from urban history? This week […]