A note about our chapter, "Stories of People, Land, and Water: Using Spatial Technologies to Explore Regional Environmental History" (available for download here) in the recently released book, Historical GIS Research in Canada, edited by Jennifer Bonnell and Marcel Fortin, and published by the University of Calgary Press. My colleague Barbara Znamirowski and I wrote this chapter, and Barbara and her team developed its Geographical Information Systems foundation, to explore the potential for GIS to serve as a teaching and research tool in regional environmental history.
Our focus is on south-central Ontario (centered on Peterborough). The region has a wide range of landscapes � from the forested Canadian Shield in the north, to the rolling hills of fields and forest along Lake Ontario in the south. It also has a rich cultural and economic history. And we're using HGIS to explore it, developing a wide range of online resources: historic topographic maps, historic aerial photos, maps of the distribution of hundreds of sawmills and other historic objects, and much else.
Our goal is to use HGIS to tell the stories of regional environmental history. We describe a few of these stories in our chapter: land clearing for agriculture and settlement, expansion and erosion of industry across the region, the emergence of a recreational landscape, and formation and contraction of the 19thcentury timber industry on the Canadian Shield.
HGIS is a great tool for doing and teaching environmental history; check out our chapter to see how we are doing it!
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| Lots of environmental history in this landscape (near Peterborough, Ontario) |
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