History on the beach

Now this is a historical conference!

I don't understand why this year the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities is not holding its enormous conference of all the "learned societies" of Canadian academic disciplines. Is it just that Zoom is trying to kill every kind of in person human contact? 

Nevertheless, the Canadian Historical Association is bravely going ahead with its own annual multi-day meeting in Charlottetown, June 1-3. (Program here; registration is now closed). 

But if I was tempted to attend an academic conference, I could really get behind the one the Canadian History and Environment Summer School is holding the day before the CHA one starts. Since it's just one day, Sunday, May 31, they are calling theirs SpeedCHESS. The program:

9:00-10:00 Bus to St. Peter’s on the Island’s North Shore.

10:00-1:30 Tour the Canadian Centre for Climate Change; hear from Don Jardine on the environmental history of the Greenwich peninsula; & enjoy lunch from Black & White café.

1:30-4:00 Bus takes us to Greenwich Interpretation Centre, PEI National Park, where we get a guided tour from Parks Canada staff; hear from Barbara Rousseau about coastal change; and have a great walk at Greenwich Beach.

4:00-5:00 Bus takes us back to UPEI.

5:30-6:45 Prof. Dagomar Degroot, Georgetown U, author of Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean & host of The Climate Chronicles podcast will give a public talk, “Reflections on Resilience: 20,000 Years of Climate History,” at UPEI’s Murphy Student Centre 110 (McMillan Hall).

Take some sunscreen. 

 

Doesn't Cultural Sovereignty Matter too?

NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History and Environment, has a new article about about how the Carney government is decommissioning the Parks Canada library, a collection of some 200,000 items that includes:

everything from wildlife and vegetation inventories of national parks to visitor surveys, historical reports, early provisional master plans, reports related to the establishment of various types of protected areas by Parks Canada, and interpretive plans and reports dating from the 1960s onwards. There are also town and a range of other types of planning reports that address areas within protected areas and themes within those protected areas.

"Decommissioning" turns out to mean getting rid of -- shredding, if necessary  -- for some paltry savings "to meet up to 15 per cent in savings targets over three years" in the government's ongoing cut our way to sovereignty initiative. 

Amid the endless cutting of heritage, environmental, and cultural agencies of the federal government, it's important to remember that Mr Carney, smart and charming and articulate as he is, spent his career as a millionaire working with billionaires, and the billionaire worldview just ain't like ours. In a world where we need the Westons and Thomsons just to preserve essential items of Canadiana, it seems the cultural part of sovereignty just is not a public priority right now. 

 

History When the Levees Break

Yesterday I noted some highlights in the new Canada's History issue.  Since then I have spent more time with the issue, and I need to say a little more about one article in particular, "Watershed Moments," by Toronto journalist and activist John Lorinc.  (Digital version accessible here.)

Lorinc has a solid historical story here:  vivid accounts of the immense Winnipeg flood of 1950, and of the 1948 Fraser River flood that devastated much of British Columbia's lower mainland, and of Hurricane Hazel's lethal impact on Toronto in 1954. He also describes Halifax's flooding in 1942, which effectively isolated the central city on its peninsula from outlying areas -- and the rest of Nova Scotia. 

It's a good story, well studded with quotes from environmental historian Jennifer Bonnell and other historians. Gerald Friesen is quoted about flooding around Winnipeg in 1997. But it gets added heft from Lorinc's care in linking these disasters to the ways local authorities reacted in the short and long term.

After 1950 Winnipeg (eventually) got started on building its Big Ditch bypass for Red River overflows. Ontario began developing its system of Conservation Authorities, and they led the way in forbidding urban development in low-lying ravine floors in Toronto and other cities.  Halifax invested in bypasses and overpasses. 

Lorinc contrasts these with British Columbia's limited responses on the Fraser River, which so far has not faced a full repeat of 1948, despite flooding in 2007 and 2021. "There's no political consensus as to which level of government should take responsibility for flood protection," Lorinc writes. 

He notes also that Ontario is busy dismantling the watershed-level planning undertaken by the conservation authorities since Hurricane Hazel. It's this political sting in his history that really elevates Lorinc's article. At the conclusion, he quotes Professor Bonnell: "It's important to do the work of stitching that back in time to remind people that this is not a totally anomalous event."  Well said.

I have loved ones who live below sea level behind the dikes in Richmond, B.C. And the place from where I write overlooks one of Toronto's ravines (now almost entirely parkland). I look out sometimes wondering how big a flood it will take to surmount the steep bank that's just below my window.

History of the fall of a fence.

Osgoode Hall, fence, and trees, c1868

The grounds of Osgoode Hall have been under threat almost as long as they have existed.  And they have existed a long time. The hall was first built by the Law Society of Upper Canada in 1832, and its grounds were soon encircled by wooden fencing. A handsome wrought-iron fence replaced the wooden one in the 1860s, by which time the Hall also housed the superior courts of Ontario. Ever since, the grounds have been a rare green oasis in the concrete jungles of downtown Toronto. 

And pretty much ever since, someone or other has seen a need to encroach upon the green space with some urgent developmental need. 

In the nineteenth century the University of Toronto thought itself entitled to encroach on the space for University Avenue, the route to its new campus. 

During the Second World War, Osgoode Hall was a rare holdout when most of the wrought-iron fences around churches, gardens, and public and private buildings in Toronto were taken down to provide iron for the war effort. In almost every case, the lawns and gardens inside were gradually replaced with street widenings and parking spaces as soon as the fences were removed

In the 1950s the City of Toronto planned to expropriate a broad strip of the grounds in order to widen Queen Street. 

In the 1960s , the Ontario government proposed building an office tower on the grounds at the corner of Queen and University. 

In the 1970s the law society quailed at the cost of renovating the fence, and considered transferring it to the provincial government, and it was argued that the fence was a symbol of exclusion, exclusion, and barriers to justice -- a suggestion that was revived in the early 2000s.

It's fair to say that the survival of the fence, at considerable cost to the Law Society, was indeed assisted by the Law Society's -- and the Ontario legal profession's -- sense of noblesse oblige, "a positive obligation to preserve the legacy of 'a handful of barristers who built thsi marvellous building to our great joy today.'" The other factor was the very substantial clout that leading lawyers and judged always had in dealings with the provincial governments of all stripes at all times.

The gardens and the fence triumphed over all these challenges.  But it looks like they will succumb to the Doug Ford government and Metrolinx, its transit-building arm, which have expropriated a corner of the gardens and are about to level all the trees on it as part of planning for a new subway station. The law society has been resisting the erosion of its domain, but not very effectively or successfully.  Authoritarian, headstrong governments and their "arm's length" agency are no longer subject to the informal restraints that once prevailed, and are likely to get their way, even on stupid things.

(Much of the detail here is drawn from my own The Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario's Lawyers 1797-1997, University of Toronto Press, 1997)

History of hurricanes

At Active History, Alan MacEachern has a nicely historical essay about Hurricane Fiona of 2022 and Storm Five of 1923, each of which hit Prince Edward Island hard, and about how each was reported in its time.

They had lost everything, but Mr Macdonald had saved his wife and children, and "That was what mattered," he asserted.

        -- From a report of the 1923 storm from St. Peters's PEI, 1 October 1923 -- though it could be from just about any hurricane report.

Image: Active History -- created by (with credits) by Alan McEachern 

            

History of Climate change II: a role for historians?

I read recently that the authoritive history of climate change studies is The Discovery of Global Warming ("this book is a history of how scientists came to imagine [climate change]") by Spencer R. Weart, an American physicist who retrained as a historian of science.

Browsing through Weart's Discovery, I find the quotation above is very precise. Weart's book is entirely about scientists.

Briefly, Weart reports that the role of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, in keeping the earth's surface warm -- and the potential of their absence to bring on glaciation -- was established by John Tyndall in 1859. But most considerations of climate change continued to look to sunspots or orbital fluctuations. The possibility of human influence was discounted until the 1950s, when some California weather scientists and geochemists began to consider the possibility of human contributions to carbon-dioxide production. Concern about a human-driven rise in global temperatures were widespread enough by the 1990s to produce the Kyoto Accords on the reduction of carbon gas emissions. But conclusive confirmation of human-caused climate change, Weart reports, had to wait until 2001, with the publication of the famous "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures over a thousand years. The first edition of his book appeared in 2003.

Weart notes that a lack of communication of scientists in different diciplines long impeded research into the subject of climate change and its causes. What strikes me is how his book lacks any suggestion of communication between scientists and historians.

Historians have long been aware that climates change. The "little ice age" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was familiar to European historians, and equivalant shifts had been observed elsewhere in the world. The French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published "Histoire et Climat" in the journal Annales in 1959. His Times of Feast, Times of Famine: History of Climate Since the Year 1000 first appeared in French in 1967, drawing on many indicators from historical sources  (such as centuries of data on the advance and retreat of viable agriculture in the French Alps) as well as scientific sources (such as ancient tree ring analysis). 

Today environmental history thrives. Historical studies often make large speculations that climate change, including human-caused climate change, lay behind all sorts of historical changes. Did the population decline and consequent reforestation that followed the Black Death cause the Little Ice Age? Maybe. Did worsening climate doom the failed European settlement efforts in North America before 1600? Worth proposing. 

Now, Weart is probably right to assume that the scientists had to find their own way to measure global warming and its causes.  Historical studies could and did document changes in climate over time, but they did not identify causes for such changes. But a certain ambition for history was always there.  Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie was part of a generation of historians who argued that history, far from being dependent on other disciplines, should be "the federative discipline," the one that brought the work of scientists, social scientists, and other scholars together to produce greater understanding.

Weart's book, a history of science with no interest in the history of historical studies, does not give support to that argument, let us say. There is no sense that historical studies did much to provoke the scientific curiosity about the causes of climate change that developed after 1950. So is environmental history -- history generally, if you like -- "federative?" Or mostly dependent?

 

History of smell

Regulate THIS!

In 1657 a London barber was prosecuted for making and selling ‘a liquor called “coffee,’ to the ‘great nuisance and prejudice of the neighbourhood.’

At the London Review of Books, Keith Thomas considers the history of smells. He's reviewing Smells: A Cultural History of Odours in Early Modern Times (mostly in France, actually, he says) by Robert Muchembled, translated by Susan Pickford, and also The Clean Body: A Modern History by UBC historian Peter Ward. 

The scent of coffee quickly became acceptable, if not essential, in urban neighbourhoods, Thomas tells us. But "nuisance" as a legal concept has created a long history of attempts to regulate smell. Adjudicating whose smells are acceptable and whose not has been a legal issue for centuries, as essays in this book, particularly Eric Reiter's on Montreal's stables, demonstrate. 

In the mid 19th century, rural aristocrats across Europe at first expected the courts to defend their estates from the smell and noise of new railroads, quarries, and mills, but gradually had to give way. Residential neighbourhoods in cities mostly had to tolerate the smell of nearby stables, as courts concluded stables were essential industries in a horse-borne society. In the 20th century, the courts began to apply similar conclusions to the smell of oil refineries and other industries. Now, farmers near growing cities are sometimes in danger of being prevented from spraying fertilizer on their fields.  

Book Notes: Wynn and Coates (and friends) on The Nature of Canada

The Ormsby Review draws my attention to a new collection of environmental history essays.   The Nature of Canada is curated by historical geographer Graeme Wynn and historian Colin Coates, and published by the OnPoint imprint of UBC Press. Reviewer Jenny Clayton writes:

I was impressed by how much each author was able to cover and how they brought together case studies from various regions of the country. Most chapters whet my appetite to know more about particular topics, and they provide the means to do so with detailed “References and Further Reading” sections. Seeking to create a collection of “lively, wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and informative reflections on topics of broad significance to Canadians in the twenty-first century,” the editors and contributors have certainly accomplished these goals.

And the publishers claim:

Intended to delight and provoke, these short, beautifully crafted essays, enlivened with photos and illustrations, explore how humans have engaged with Canadian nature and what those interactions say about the nature of Canada.\

Tracing a path from the Ice Age to the Anthropocene, some of the foremost stars in the field of environmental history reflect on how we, as a nation, have idolized and found inspiration in nature even as fishers, fur traders, farmers, foresters, miners, and city planners have commodified it and tried to tame it.

Ancient ecological history: rabbits to Britain

From Britain's History Today, a remarkable essay on the changes wrought to Britain's flora and fauna by the incursion of the Romans.

To the occupying Romans, Britain’s food left much to be desired.... The Romans set about expanding the cuisine to suit their tastes, introducing at least 50 new species of plant foods, most originating in the Mediterranean Basin. These included fruits, such as peach, pear, fig, mulberry, sour cherry, plum, damson, date and pomegranate, along with almond, pine nut, sweet chestnut and walnut. They brought vegetables, from cultivated leek and lettuce, to cucumber, rape and possibly turnip, and new varieties of cabbage, carrot, parsnip and asparagus, in addition to the varieties which already grew wild in Britain. Black pepper, coriander, dill, parsley, anise and black cumin brought new seasonings and the oil-rich seeds sesame, hemp and black mustard were also among the arrivals.

Do you get the impression that everything good about Britain comes from the Continent -- and always has?

Whale history

Historian Daniel Francis reviews Mark Leiren-Young's The Killer Whale Who Changed the World, which explores the unintended consequences of the 1964 accidental live capture of "Moby Doll":

Moby Doll’s time in captivity was brief but it was a transformative event in the history of the BC coast. It marked the beginning of a remarkable change in public perception and scientific understanding. This is the real subject of Leiren-Young’s book and the reason why he argues that Moby Doll “changed the world.” Able to get close to an orca for the first time, people began to recognize that it was a peaceable, intelligent animal, not a fearsome monster.

The review appears in The Ormsby Review, a new initiative in British Columbia historical journalism named in honour of the mother of British Columbia history, the late Margaret Ormsby.