193 research outputs found
Pine Point Mine: History in the Landscape
No full textThe Pine Point lead-zinc mine was operated from 1964 to 1988 on the south shore of Great Slave Lake in northern Canada. This film shows images of the abandoned mine from the summer of 2009, along with reflections from two Memorial University professors, John Sandlos and Arn Keeling, who are writing a history of the mine and its impact on local people
Mining and Communities in Northern Canada
Get PDFFor indigenous communities throughout the globe, mining has been a historical forerunner of colonialism, introducing new, and often disruptive, settlement patterns and economic arrangements. Although indigenous communities may benefit from and adapt to the wage labour and training opportunities provided by new mining operations, they are also often left to navigate the complicated process of remediating the long-term ecological changes associated with industrial mining. In this regard, the mining often inscribes colonialism as a broad set of physical and ecological changes to indigenous lands. Mining and Communities in Northern Canada examines historical and contemporary social, economic, and environmental impacts of mining on Aboriginal communities in northern Canada. Combining oral history research with intensive archival study, this work juxtaposes the perspectives of government and industry with the perspectives of local communities. The oral history and ethnographic material provides an extremely significant record of local Aboriginal perspectives on histories of mining and development in their regions. With contributions by: Patricia Boulter Jean-Sébastien Boutet Emilie Cameron Sarah Gordon Heather Green Jane Hammond Joella Hogan Arn Keeling Tyler Levitan Hereward Longley Scott Midgley Kevin O'Reilly Andrea Procter John Sandlos Alexandra Winto
Pollution, Local Activism, and the Politics of Development in the Canadian North
No full textThis article addresses the often ignored history of Indigenous responses to environmental pollution. Focusing on resistance to arsenic pollution from Giant Mine in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Sandlos and Keeling explore how Indigenous communities mobilized knowledge around environmental pollution, conducting their own studies when government research minimized or ignored their concerns about the health impacts of pollution, participating in public hearings, and continuing to push for research into the long-term health effects even after the mine closed. The authors show how this resistance to environmental racism is connected to other Indigenous struggles over industrial development and to issues such as land claims, sovereignty, and colonial dispossession
‘Born in an atomic test tube’: landscapes of cyclonic development at Uranium City, Saskatchewan
No full textDrawing together insights from neo-Innisian geography and environmental history, this paper explores the landscape and environmental changes engendered by ‘cyclonic’ patterns of development associated with uranium production at Uranium City, Saskatchewan. Strong postwar demand for uranium led to the establishment and rapid expansion of Uranium City on the north shore of Lake Athabasca as a ‘yellowcake town,’ dedicated to producing uranium oxide concentrate to supply federal government contracts with the United States military. In spite of optimistic assessments for the region’s industrial future, the new settlement remained inherently unstable, tied to shifting institutional arrangements and external markets, and haunted by the spectre of resource depletion. The planning and development of the townsite at Uranium City reflected both neo-colonial desires to open the north to Euro-Canadian settlement and efforts by the state to buffer the stormy effects of resource dependency. Ultimately, however, quixotic government efforts to implant an outpost of industrial modernity in the Athabasca Region failed to forestall the inevitable winds of change, which left in their wake destructive legacies of social dislocation and environmental degradation, already evident with the near-collapse of the uranium export market by the early 1960s
Review of \u3ci\u3eDark Storm Moving West\u3c/i\u3e, by Barbara Belyea
Get PDFIn the freshet of scholarly and popular studies accompanying the recent bicentennials of Lewis and Clark\u27s and David Thompson\u27s westward explorations, Dark Storm Moving West forms an eddy of reflection on the practical, communicative, and philosophical challenges of understanding Euro-American exploration in western North America. English professor turned exploration historian Barbara Belyea eschews traditional narratives or grand theses in favor of dense rumination on particular episodes, personalities, and questions. Swirling and riffled at the surface, these waters yet find more subtle coherences in their depths than Belyea herself admits.
Her essays are focused loosely on the figure of Peter Fidler, a Hudson\u27s Bay Company (HBC) fur trader and explorer. Fidler\u27s exploration and surveys of the northern Great Plains and the Athabasca district made key contributions to the HBC\u27s struggle with David Thompson\u27s Northwest Company for domination over the interior fur trade and, more generally, to the completion of Euro-American maps of western North America. The elusive, protean figure of Fidler guides Belyea\u27s observations on scientific cartography, field surveying and exploration, the use of Native cartographic insights and methods, and the nature of Native-newcomer interactions along the fur-trade frontier
“We Are Scholars”: Using Teamwork and Problem-Based Learning in a Canadian Regional Geography Course
No full textThis pedagogical reflection recounts the implementation of a team-based and problem-based
learning format in a regional geography of Canada course at a Canadian university. Regional geography
courses, popular in many collegiate geography departments, often rely on the “transmission” mode of
learning, which relies on the presentation of factual information about regions and its recitation in
examinations. This format tends to reify existing regional divisions, whether political or otherwise, and
makes it difficult for students to comprehend the dynamic, historical and constructed nature of regions.
Team-based and problem-based learning was deployed in this third-year course to enliven and enrich the
study of regional geography through the use of learning groups which produced regular research
products during a series of thematic modules. Based on student feedback and the instructor’s reflections,
the article highlights key benefits of teamwork in terms of learning outcomes and student personal
development
Charting Marine Pollution Science: Oceanography on Canada’s Pacific Coast, 1938-1970
No full textIn drawing attention to how ‘place’ situates and configures scientific practice, recent scholarship examining historical geographies of science tends to overlook how natural places shape scientific ideas, practices and institutions. This paper suggests that environmental factors may be conceived in terms of the interplay of ‘site and situation’ in environmental science. It examines the pioneering marine pollution research program developed at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada’s Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Beginning with an analysis of pulp mill effluent in Alberni Inlet on Vancouver Island, oceanographers at the station undertook studies aimed at minimizing threats to commercial fisheries from aquatic pollution on the B.C. coast. As a key site of pollution research, Alberni Inlet was situated within a variety of environmental, institutional and social contexts: the politics of resource exploitation in B.C., institutions of fisheries research and regulation, and the disciplinary practices of marine pollution science on the Pacific coast. By the 1960s, the board’s Pacific Oceanographic Group had developed a leading research program in marine pollution science, and the Alberni experience formed the basis for a coast-wide inventory of environments receiving industrial wastes. Oceanographers framed pollution control in terms of ‘assimilative capacity,’ or the ability of natural waters to dilute, disperse and absorb industrial wastes without harm to valuable commercial fish species. As subsequent pollution problems revealed, however, this instrumental approach to environmental management tended to ignore ecological complexity and variability, and the unforeseen consequences of engineering natural systems as waste sinks
Andrew Szasz, "Shopping Our Way to Safety: How we Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves" (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
No full textUrban Waste Sinks as a Natural Resource: The Case of the Fraser River
No full textThe discursive and material construction of rivers as natural waste-treatment systems highlights important historical connections between urban sanitary networks, conservation ideology, and urban environmental values in the twentieth century. Early-mid-century sanitary engineers oversaw the transformation of space and nature in North American cities through the planning and construction of sewerage and drainage networks. In doing so, they drew from the ideas and methods of the technocratic conservation movement, which advocated the expert management of natural resources to ensure their maximum beneficial utilization. Pollution control and conservation were linked through the doctrine of “assimilative capacity,” a concept used by engineers to describe the ability of natural waters to absorb, dilute, and disperse urban and industrial wastes. Using powerful new quantitative representations of nature, sanitary engineers proposed to incorporate natural biophysical processes into technological networks for waste disposal. This approach to urban waste-disposal problems is exemplified by the case of Vancouver's Fraser River, which was enrolled by engineers and planners as a sink for urban wastes. However, the attempt to construct the river as a kind of “organic machine” for waste disposal resulted in long-term environmental problems in the river's estuary. By the late 1960s, this pollution, along with Vancouverites' changing environmental values, led to political and social protest over the exploitation and degradation of the river.Le travail inconstant pratiqué sur les rivières pour en faire des systèmes naturels de traitement des déchets met en lumière un lien historique important entre les réseaux sanitaires, l’idéologie de conservation et les valeurs urbaines vis-à-vis de l’environnement au XXe siècle. Les ingénieurs du début et du milieu de ce siècle supervisaient la transformation de l’espace et de la nature des villes nord-américaines au moyen de la planification et de la construction de réseaux d’assainissement et de drainage. Ce faisant, ils se sont appuyés sur des idées et des méthodes propres au mouvement de conservation technocratique, lequel prônait la gestion des ressources naturelles par des experts pour assurer leur utilisation positive maximale. Le contrôle de la pollution et la conservation étaient reliés par la doctrine de la « capacité d’assimilation », une notion dont se servent les ingénieurs pour décrire la capacité des eaux naturelles de diluer, de disperser et d’absorber les déchets urbains et industriels. Par l’intermédiaire de nouvelles représentations quantitatives de la nature, les ingénieurs sanitaires proposaient d’incorporer les processus naturels biophysiques aux réseaux technologiques pour évacuer les déchets. La rivière Fraser à Vancouver, dont les ingénieurs et les urbanistes ont fait un réservoir pour les déchets urbains, est un exemple de cette approche à l’égard du problème urbain d’évacuation des déchets. Cependant, la tentative de faire d’une rivière une sorte de « machine biologique » pour l’évacuation des déchets a entraîné des problèmes environnementaux à long terme dans l’estuaire de la rivière. À la fin des années 1960, cette pollution a fait l’objet d’un mouvement de protestation politique et sociale concernant l’exploitation et la dégradation de la rivière par les Vancouvérois qui adhéraient alors à de nouvelles valeurs environnementales
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