54, 40 or Fight: Writing Within and Across Borders in North American Environmental History

Knowing Nature Through History

“…The emphasis on people, culture, and policy is, according to Evenden and Wynn, entirely appropriate: For all that environmental historians seek to insert nature into their accounts of the past, as historians they must surely remain mindful of Marc Bloch's assertion, that 'it is man that history seeks to grasp.' 30 That said, nature has yet to be normalized as a historical actor and non-environmental historians continue to write histories with the environment painted onto the background. Thus, environmental historians still have work to do in ensuring that nature is taken into account in interpreting Canada's past, and in being attentive to those instances where our relations with nature, our own natures, and non-human nature have played particularly significant roles in shaping a common history.…”

The Historiography of the Enigmatic North

“…One way to do this is to make the research more internationally comparative. Acknowledge and adopt the research interests of major communities of colleagues, revisit the national or local scales, and find, perhaps, 30 Perhaps an explanation for this Canadian conundrum -that there is so much scholarly interest in the North but still so little articulation of its overarching ''problem'' -is to be found in Janice Cavell's observation that Canada's northern orientation came only in the first half of the twentieth century, after an agrarian, east-west direction had been dominant. 31 If one regards figures such as Stefansson and Diefenbaker as the first major wave of northern propagandists and mythomoteurs, perhaps we should regard the more probing but yet confirming commentators of national identity, such as Margaret Atwood, as the second.…”

Reconsidering the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River: History, cartography, law, and ecology

“…Our approach is inspired by debates about borders and by borderlands studies, particularly in relation to environmental history and studies (Feldman and Heasley 2007;Evenden and Wynn 2009;Graybill 2014). Borders are a theme that is central to all the papers.…”

“…Borders are a theme that is central to all the papers. Our approach is inspired by debates about borders and by borderlands studies, particularly in relation to environmental history and studies (Feldman and Heasley 2007;Evenden and Wynn 2009;Graybill 2014). In these domains, where the objects of investigation are defined notably by their ecological characteristics, transcending political borderswhether they are regional or national-is considered essential in order to properly take into account the geographical and physical continuities of the phenomena studied, and to favour environmental criteria as much as, if not more than, cultural and political factors.…”

“…Furthermore, the drawing of borders has been done according to political considerations and dealings that often do not correspond to the geographic realities of the environment, thereby dividing regions or natural entities. Such is the case of the Canada-United States border, which cuts through numerous watersheds such as those of the Columbia and Red Rivers, as well as the Great Lakes (Evenden and Wynn 2009).…”