Exploring Environmental History in the Field

Me preaching on forest history (photo: Mark McLaughlin)

Last Monday my Environmental History class took a field trip to one of our campus nature areas.  It's about 150 hectares of rolling countryside, with a diverse array of habitats, from cedar forests to abandoned farm fields � overall, a great sample of the history of land uses in this part of southern Ontario.

 And here's a slide show of the area, with some observations about local environmental history.  These photos tell stories about glaciation, settlement, the timber industry, clearing and then abandoning land, and the ecological processes woven throughout the history of these activities.

Trent University is such a fabulous place to do environmental history, with seriously rich materials for field study just outside our door.