Yesterday we had the second meeting of my fall term Environmental History course. The focus was on understanding what environmental history is all about, and how it's done. We did this by examining the history of the Trent University campus, and then connecting that history to some of the current literature. Here's how we did it:
We started with an "official" account of the university's history, presented on a plaque outside the library:
Then we got going on making the story more complicated. I surveyed some of the evidence in the field of the history of the campus (picking up on where I left off last week, but with some new images too):
These pictures portray fragments of the history of the campus: settlement, transportation, agriculture and the end of agriculture, and mysterious structures near the river:
Then we moved onto considering what information local historians can provide us -- with examples such as plaques prepared by the Peterborough Historical Society, and books by local authors:
As an example, we looked at a surveyor's report from 1833, when the river that runs through our campus was surveyed for the Trent-Severn waterway -- telling the story of how this river (now a series of placid lakes) was once a single long set of rapids:
And we looked at some other basic information provided by local histories:
Then we turned to maps, looking at the Peterborough County Atlas -- one of a series of such atlases produced in the 1870s that give useful overviews of different parts of our province during that period:
And then onto other primary sources, such as old settlers' photos of the campus:
As well as a photo from 1896 of the sawmill once located on campus (where Trent is now was once a major industrial centre -- surprising to anyone who knows it only in its current bucolic state):
The campus history therefore gives us a window on the rise and decline of one of the dominant resource industries of 19th century Ontario: the white pine timber industry. In particular, it was the site of active concern about the environmental impacts of the sawmills, especially the tons of sawdust dumped into the river, suffocating fish habitats and impeding navigation. A government report from 1889 tells about this episode, and a report from the Canadian Commission of Conservation (1913) gives us the numbers describing the decline of the industry:
At this point, we turned to the day's readings (which it seemed everyone had read -- great students), and we had a good discussion connecting them to what we had learned so far about the environmental history of Trent:
Donald Worster, "Doing Environmental History," in: D. Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 289-307.
William Cronon, "The Uses of Environmental History," Environmental History Review, 1993, 17(3): 10-22.
Alan MacEachern, "An Introduction, in Theory and Practice," in: Method & Meaning in Canadian Environmental History, Alan MacEachern & William J. Turkel, eds. (Nelson, 2009), pp. ix-xv
Then it was back to the history of Trent, examining other kinds of evidence, including old newspaper articles, as well as photos taken just before and during the construction of the campus:
The next topic was changing ideas about the landscape, particularly as reflected in the idea itself of locating the university at this location in the countryside. An excerpt from the Trent Master Plan was a useful primary source for examining this:
And then onto another aspect of environmental history: environmental politics, using as a case study arguments around the acquisition of land for the university in the early 1960s:
Summing up, we reviewed the various kinds of evidence available to environmental historians: how they can tell us different things, and how we need to combine them in order to make sense of the past:
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