Weekend Reading: Moving Natures: Mobility and the Environment in Canadian History

Movement has been attracting much attention from historians.  The agenda has been to redefine mobility as not simply about getting to the places where history happens, but to understand movement itself as essential to ideas, motivations, and practical consequences, for both society and the environment.

I found Moving Natures: Mobility and the Environment in Canadian History useful in refining some of my own thoughts about movement.  The authors examine the environmental transformations that have accompanied mobility, as experienced through waterways, railways, and roads.  They also consider how landscapes have been created and reinterpreted through movement -- everywhere from suburban golf courses, to the Rocky Mountains, to the "folkloric" landscapes of the Gasp� Peninsula.  And I was impressed by the quality of writing throughout all the chapters.  As an edited collection, this book clicked.

But it was interesting, too, to think about what was left out -- such as some technologies, especially airplanes, that have been so fundamental to Canadians' relationships with their landscapes.  The mid-century transformation of transportation networks, as airplanes and cars replaced railways for both long and short trips, has been central to not only Canadian environmental history (in both northern and southern Canada), but to our ideas about modernity.  Highways also received relatively little attention, and I only remember one mention of one of my favourite topics: bikes (there was a brief comment on bicyclists as part of the late nineteenth century lobbying campaign for better roads).

And I noticed, too, how most chapters focused on the movement of people, but not so much the rest of nature (whether through the movement of commodities, like farm crops, or oil and minerals; or of other species, like migrating birds, fish, or other animals).  In that sense, the title, Moving Natures, seemed a little ironic.  But overall, I learned a lot from this book.  It may inspire me to include in my Environmental History course a class, or perhaps a study option, on mobility.