Environmental History course: Seventh class: Transforming Landscapes

Yesterday we returned from Reading Week, to begin the second half of the term.  The focus in our Environmental History course was on the transformation of rural landscapes during the last decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century.  We examined the history of our own region around Peterborough, but made connections where we could with the larger economic and political history of Canada (particularly the rise and fall of influential industries, and the emergence of conservation politics).  We also situated local issues in relation to trade and other flows.

To introduce the topic I showed an excerpt from a wonderful historical documentary produced by The Land Between, an organization that is very active in raising awareness about the region north of Peterborough, along the boundary between the agricultural region of southern Ontario and the Canadian Shield.

Topics discussed today are also directly relevant to the local environmental history project that the students are working on now, as quite a few traces of this history -- land clearing, agricultural settlement and abandonment, the timber industry, forms of movement (waterways, railways, roads), the leisure economy -- are present on the Trent campus.  As I mentioned in class, the campus serves well as a "laboratory" of regional and national environmental history.