Environmental History -- Tenth Class: Environmental History of Parks

This week in my Environmental History course (ERST-CAST-HIST 4670H), we considered the history of parks.  I framed the initial discussion in terms of changing ideas about nature and the concept of "protected areas" -- how ideas about what is to be protected, and protected from what, have changed over time.  Cronon's influential paper from 1996, "The Trouble with Wilderness" provided part of the grounding for this, as a way of challenging unexamined ideas about the virtues of parks.

The core of this class was an exploration of different ways of understanding the history of parks.  I see this topic as a good opportunity to examine some ways in which we ask more general questions about how change occurs.  In this case, I presented five different historiographical perspectives that have been applied to parks, and how these could imply different explanations of who established parks, how they came to be, and why.  These different perspectives also have a variety of political and social implications, particularly for those most closely affected.  The history of displacement of Indigenous communities to make way for parks is part of this history, and we examined this by looking at Banff National Park (drawing here on Binnema & Niemi, "'Let the Line be Drawn Now': Wilderness, Conservation, and the Exclusion of Aboriginal People from Banff National Park in Canada, Environmental History, 2006).

A second case study, of Point Pelee National Park here in Ontario, provided a way of exploring the relations between park creation, local interests and conflicts, and environmental change.  For this I drew on John Sandlos's study (Federal Spaces, Local Conflicts: National Parks and the Exclusionary Politics of the Conservation Movement in Ontario, 1900-1935, Journal of the CHA, 2005), and on a visit of my own to that park last year.

And finally, parks gave us another opportunity to think about the connections between these larger themes and the history of our own campus.  Trent has 12 nature reserves on campus, ranging in size up to about 100 hectares, and the way they were designated (which involved, among other things, removing people) presents an interesting example of the workings of history in our own landscape.