For those of you in Toronto next week, the Robarts Centre’s environmental history lecture series, Transforming Canada: Histories of Environmental Change, continues with its third speaker, Professor Graeme Wynn from the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Professor Wynn’s lecture, titled “Worlds in Motion: Migration and the Nature of Canada”, will be held on Monday, December 5 at 2pm in 305 York Lanes. Here is the full text description of this lecture:
This talk takes a broad view of migration — broad in time and broad in the range of migrant phenomena considered — as the basis for reflection on the influence of movement on the nature of Canada. Adapting Fernand Braudel’s conception of the past as comprised of geographical time, that of the environment or “longue durée,” a “moyenne durée” of cycles or conjonctures, and the time of surfaces and deceptive effects, or “courte durée” proper, it will begin with literal worlds in motion, considering the roles of continental drift and plate tectonics in shaping the nature of the territory now known as Canada. It will also attend to the effects of long cycles of glacial and interglacial epochs in constituting the biogeographical characteristics and habitability of northern North America, before turning to consider the roles of more recent migrations, by people and their portmanteau biota, in shaping Canadian nature.
