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from the editors
| WE CONCEIVED THIS SPECIAL ISSUE to lay the basis for more engagement between Canadian and international environmental history scholarship. In recent years, the environmental history field has been extremely active in Canada. A host of new positions in history and geography departments, the creation of endowed Canada Research Chairs in environmental history, the rise of NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History and Environment / Nouvelle initiative canadienne en histoire de l'environnement, and a growing volume of publications suggest that the field holds a new institutional and intellectual presence in Canadian scholarship and letters.1 In the past three years, no fewer than four Canadian journals have published environmental history theme issues, and another is in the offing.2 UBC Press has established the Nature/History/Society series under the general editorship of Graeme Wynn, which has to date published six titles.3 The Canadian field is gaining a wide domestic audience as well as recognition. Tina Loo's States of Nature (UBC Press, 2006), reviewed in this issue, received the John A. Macdonald prize from the Canadian Historical Association in 2007 for the best book in Canadian history. That we received over fifty proposals to our call for papers also provides a hint of the current state of affairs. In some respects, the special issue simply rides a wave. |
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Despite all this, Canadian environmental history has yet to make much of an impact internationally. This is surprising for two reasons. First, being home to a wide range of environments and histories, Canada is well-suited to comparative study. It can be examined in contrast to and alongside other northern states such as Russia and Norway. Its colonial past makes it an apt comparison to the centers of empire in France and Great Britain and to other former colonial peripheries like New Zealand and Australia. And its unique relationship with the United States—united longitudinally by climate, geology, and biology, separated latitudinally by politics, culture, and even language—makes the two countries' comparative experiences useful in understanding the complex interplay of nature and culture in making history. Second, Canada is an important case for transnational study. It is a vast realm, the second largest country in the world, bounded by three oceans, and host to diverse natural areas from boreal forest to desert to Arctic tundra. Over centuries, this northern space has been actively shaped and reshaped by a complex succession of peoples, diseases, technologies, modes of production, ideologies, and state systems, all bound up in processes of global exchange and influence. We hope that this issue reveals insights about Canada in particular, while prompting comparative, transnational, and historiographical reflections. |
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Canadian historical scholarship of recent decades has tended to shy away from grand national narratives and instead emphasize place and region. This special issue is no exception. It provides a range of regional and comparative insights, but cannot pretend to anything like comprehensive treatment. By far the greatest regional emphasis of the current issue is on northern Canada. Liza Piper and John Sandlos interrogate the use and limits of Alfred Crosby's ecological imperialism thesis in a sub-Arctic and Arctic context, Stephen Bocking considers the development of scientific disciplinary perspectives on northern environments, P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Matthew Farish analyze the environmental dimensions of Cold War activities in the north, and Tina Loo explores a major northern dam development in British Columbia and its cascading effects on ecosystems and peoples downstream. Shannon Stunden Bower offers a contribution on the prairies region in her study of the watershed concept and the conflicts over the wet prairie of Manitoba. Two essays consider various dimensions of Quebec environmental history. Stéphane Castonguay examines the changing nature of flooding on the St. Francis River and the shifting social contexts and perceptions of flood phenomena. Sherry Olson compares Montreal and Baltimore, Maryland, to test the particular and general characteristics of urban metabolism in growing industrial cities. By happenstance rather than design, this special issue contains no essay considering Ontario or the Atlantic provinces. Several articles reach to a national and transnational scale. Joan Schwartz introduces a wide-ranging series of photographs in a gallery essay on representations of Canadian landscapes. In two short reflections essays, Stephen Pyne places the history of Canadian fire in a North American context and James Feldman and Lynne Heasley outline a comparative program of research on the Great Lakes. |
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