Environmental History: First Class of the New Term

Yesterday we had the first meeting of my fall term class of Environmental History (ERST-CAST-HIST 4670H).  58 students are registered, distributed across a variety of B.A. and B.Sc. majors: Environmental Studies, Environmental Science, Ecological Restoration, History, Canadian Studies, and Biology.  We had some great discussion of environmental history: what it is, and how it's done.  Here's what we did:

After introducing myself and the teaching assistant (Magen Hudak), we reviewed the components of the course:

As the list of topics indicates, this course ranges widely.  My goal is to provide a broad overview of environmental history, from global perspectives, to the history of our local campus environment (which will be the basis for field work we'll be doing later in the term).

Then the students formed into small groups, and spent some time brainstorming to identify what they considered to be some key events, ideas or people that could be included in the history of our relationship with the environment.  They came up with a really wide range of ideas, everything from the London Smog of 1952, to Aldo Leopold, to the role of staple resources in Canadian history.  It was a lot of fun recording the ideas on the board:

Then I asked the question: How would we write an environmental history of Trent University?  I started with a sample of the "official" history of the university, as embodied in a plaque just outside the library:

And then I showed some photos of evidence from the campus landscape, suggesting that there's more to this history than is contained in the official account.  This evidence includes the remnants of houses and farms that were here before the university was built -- the point being that environmental history is about combining many kinds of evidence, and that we can use that evidence to construct alternative histories of the places we live and work:

And then we wrapped up with an exercise we'll do at the end of every class: the students identify in their small groups what they consider to be the key ideas from that class, and hand in their reflections:

The students came up some terrific ideas, and connected them to a few broader concepts that I'd touched on in my discussion during the class.

And so that's the start of a new term!  Next week: examining how we do environmental history, through a more detailed look at how we would construct a history of our university and our region.