Environmental History -- Fifth Class: Perceptions of the Canadian Environment

This week in my Environmental History (ERST-CAST-HIST 4670H) course, we looked at two episodes in the encounter between people and the Canadian environment: early European (French) experiences in the 1600s, and scientific perspectives on Canada during the 1800s.  Our discussion was grounded in two readings: Ramsay Cook's "Making a Garden out of a Wilderness," and excerpts from Suzanne Zeller's Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation. These provided frameworks within which we placed our analysis of a variety of primary sources -- a significant part of the course.

Much of our time was spent reading and discussing several primary sources, including reports written by French travelers such as Marc Lescarbot (1609), Nicolas Denys (1672), and the Jesuit Relations (1611-1616).  The excerpts I chose included passages in which these authors described their natural history observations, as well as their encounters with Indigenous people, and so they provided lots of opportunities to think about how to interpret such sources both critically and sympathetically.

Then we turned to Canadian science in the 1800s: examining this in the context of the formation of settlement surveys and the experiences of colonists such as Catharine Parr Traill (a local author, famous for The Backwoods of Canada [1836] and other works), and also the construction of the idea of science as a government activity.  The primary sources we examined included various discussions from the mid- to late-1800s of the value of the Geological Survey of Canada, of practical entomology, and of agricultural science, among other topics.  These sources gave us much materials with which to think about the relation between scientific ideas and cultural and economic priorities.