Weekend Reading: The People and the Bay: A Social and Environmental History of Hamilton Harbour

It's a valuable exercise to dive deeply into a place: to seek to understand how a local environment -- say, a lake, river, or island -- has changed over time, through the actions and reactions of human communities and those of other species.  That's one reason I've enjoyed just now reading Nancy Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank's The People and the Bay.  It's a wonderful model of how to understand 150 years in the life of a place -- in this case, the harbour of a mid-sized Canadian industrial city.  They consider social and natural history, urban and economic history, political and planning history, and draw the threads together very nicely.

Many details of Canadian life in the Victorian era and the twentieth century come to life: tensions over fishing practices that are rooted in class differences; evolving ideas about the roles of governments, business, planners and other experts; anxieties about maintaining order in nature and the city.  The underlying mission is that of urban environmental history: to show how to incorporate nature and natural processes into our understanding of the history of cities.

I learned a lot.  But I found two points, both often made only implicitly, to be of particular interest.

First, that knowledge of this place has been a complicated mixture of everyday observations, aesthetic judgements, "common sense," and science, all coming together in different ways in debates about pollution, ecological restoration, and the balancing of various interests.

And second, that this place has always been embedded in larger forces and issues.  The harbour has been less a site with a self-contained history, than a node in which these forces and issues have come together in interesting ways.  For example, local environmental politics reflected wider views -- whether these were Victorian ideas about social order, or environmentalism in the 1970s.  And in return, local issues gave meaning to these larger ideas.  The growth of the city reflected its position in national and international economies and trading relationships centered in the Great Lakes region and beyond.  And similarly in ecosystems: local changes, like the growing population of cormorants over the last 20 years (something also seen elsewhere in the Great Lakes) -- have been the product (in part) of the accidental introduction of a new food source, the round goby, that came all the way from Europe.  The history of Hamilton Harbour has never been bounded by its watershed.