"Pollution" (2008) by Bob August. Licensed under Creative Commons.

By Ryan O’Connor

One of the challenges I confronted while researching my dissertation was figuring out who the founders were of Toronto’s pioneering environmentalist organizations. This might sound like a simple task, but records of this sort are often difficult to find.

Sometimes the records that exist present a one-sided story. In Front Row Centre: A Perspective on Life, Politics and the Environment, former alderman Tony O’Donohue makes reference to his founding of the Group Action to Stop Pollution (GASP) in 1967. While O’Donohue makes the organization sound like a solo creation, an ensuing conversation with James Bacque, the former chief editor at Macmillan Company of Canada, lawyer Joseph Sheard, and their spouses led to a claim that GASP’s genesis occurred during a meeting in Sheard’s living room. To the best of their knowledge, O’Donohue was not at this meeting. All of the aforementioned attended the group’s public launch in December 1967. The following month saw the creation of GASP as a legal entity. The accompanying document was signed by Bacque, Sheard, and three others. So, who are the founders? Would it be the people present when the idea of forming an anti-pollution group was first proposed? Would it be the people attached to the organization when it made its public debut? Or would it be the people who signed the group’s legal charter?

For some, this may seem trivial. That said, this is a country where a small but vocal segment of the population believes Louis Riel deserves to be recognized as a Father of Confederation, even though he did not attend any one of the Charlottetown, Quebec, or London conferences that led to the creation of Canada.

The group at the centre of my dissertation is Pollution Probe, Canada’s first high profile environmental activist organization. Over the years, many of Pollution Probe’s early members have risen to prominent positions elsewhere within the movement. Some have cited themselves as founders of the organization even though they did not join until several months after it began operations. Further confusing the matter is the fact that a small number of its members were officially recognized by the organization as “founders” several years ago. One person that was recognized as such later told me that she was not involved with Pollution Probe until autumn 1970. (Pollution Probe held its first meetings in spring 1969.) As she explained, “I was credited with being there earlier because I think they wanted to say that there were more women involved …. It was a politically correct move to call me a founder.”

The most evident case of historical revisionism within Canada’s environmentalist community is that of Greenpeace. As it turns out, two of the organization’s former members have seen their status as founders publicly renounced. Greenpeace evolved out of the Don’t Make A Wave Committee (DMAWC), which was created to oppose nuclear testing in the Aleutian Islands. In 1971 a crew supported by DMAWC loaded onto a chartered vessel, the Phyllis Cormack, with the goal of sailing into the test site. Traditionally, members of DMAWC and the environmentalists aboard the Phyllis Cormack have been recognized as Greenpeace’s founders. However, Patrick Moore, one of the latter, has noted that various branches of the organization have written him out of their history.  Paul Watson, who was involved in DMAWC as well as the Aleutian campaign as a member of the shore crew, had also been recognized as one of the founders of Greenpeace.  However, in recent times Watson, like Moore, has been stripped of this recognition. According to Moore, Greenpeace is distancing itself from him due to his outspoken support for nuclear energy. Watson, on the other hand, was voted off of the Greenpeace board of directors in 1977, and has since then denounced the corporatization of the organization while adopting more radical tactics in his own work. Recognition as founders of Greenpeace, and the credibility this provides, is a valuable commodity for Moore and Watson. However, it appears that Greenpeace wishes to deny this to figures whose views it disagrees with.

Who, then, is a founder? The definition is up for debate, and apparently varies from organization to organization. That said, two things are clear. Being a founder has inherent value, and there are people who want to control who receives this recognition. It is the historian’s job to be aware of this and to prevent a Big Brother-styled rewrite of the past.

Ryan O’Connor is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Trent University. A historian of Canada’s environmental movement, he maintains a research blog at www.thegreatgreennorth.com.  You can follow him on Twitter: @ryaneoconnor

By Brittany Luby, PhD Candidate, York University

While I was growing up near the Winnipeg River, sturgeon was not part of our local diet. Given the high levels of mercury – the result of industrial dumping practices and the release of organic mercury from rotting flooded vegetation – Dad limited the size of our locally caught filets to less than two pounds. A 100 – 150 pound Grandfather Fish was far beyond our family-set “safety standards.” Of course, sturgeon filets also existed outside of the realm of possibility; according to some reports, the Winnipeg River had been barren for approximately one hundred years.  It wasn’t always this way.

Written evidence of large scale fishing by the Anishinabek in the region west of the Lake Superior watershed to Lake Winnipeg – a region which includes Lake of the Woods – extends back to 1660 when trader Pierre Esprit Radisson claimed to see over 1000 sturgeon being dried on the south shore of Lake Superior. By the end of the eighteenth century, fur traders noted that Anishinabek in the Lake of the Woods District were difficult trading partners, “content to live upon sturgeon and other native foods rather than engage in trade” (Holzkamm and Waisberg, 29). An unidentified Canadian official, writing after 1857, attributed Anishinabek refusal to trade consistently with the Hudson’s Bay Company to an “abundance of sturgeon” (ibid, 30). Indeed, large scale fisheries and a steady supply of food led Euro-Canadians to criticize Anishinabek as “independent; sometimes even a little saucy” from contact until treaty (ibid, 30). The same sturgeon formed part of the local diet at Ochiichagwe’Babigo’Ining Ojibway Nation, as evinced in Major Stephen H. Long’s Narrative of an expedition to the source of St. Peter’s River, Lake Winnepeek, Lake of the Woods (1824). Reflecting on his traverse of the Dalles Rapids, Long wrote “While we were resting on one of the islands, an Indian came up in his canoe with his family and supplied us with fresh sturgeon and with dried huckleberries” (106). Sturgeon was eaten fresh, but also made into a product like bison pemmican “consisting of a special blend of sturgeon oil and dried and pounded sturgeon meat packed into sturgeon skin bags,” making it a valuable multi-seasonal resource (Holzkamm and Waisberg, 28).

Non-written sources like totemic symbols suggest that fishing was important to Anishinabek since time immemorial. Anthropologist Basil Johnston identified four fish clans north of Lake Superior. Anishinabek used totemic symbols like family names which functioned as the “genealogical chain by which bands are held together” (Schenck, 199). Anishinabek also tried to emulate the character of their totemic animal, the sturgeon, which symbolized depth and strength (Johnston, 53). Totems also informed human behavior; Anishinabek men and women incorporated their clan fish into how they understood their world. The existence and significance of the fish clans reflects the social, spiritual and economic importance of fishing to the Anishinabek peoples. Indeed, totemic symbols suggest that fishing was part of daily life – fish were social markers, behavioural guides, and dinner.

Pressure on the sturgeon population grew in direct correlation with the extension of the Canadian Pacific railway which made it possible to ship fish to eastern markets. Duane R. Lund, a retired educator and member of the Minnesota Historical Society, has noted that “Commerical fishing was identifiable as an industry on Lake of the Woods by 1885 when commercial pound nets were used for the first time” (68). By the 1890s, the Canadian government began licensing large-scale commercial fisheries, favoring corporate contact over continued trade with Anishinaabe fisheries. Tim Holzkamm and Leo Waisberg have argued that this change in heart “marked a switch from a harvest that had the capacity for long-term sustained yields under Anishinaabe management to a commercial harvesting process, directed by white entrepreneurs able to lobby the Fisheries Minister that emphasized short-term productivity for an open-ended export market” (Holzkamm and Waisberg, 34). According to the histories relayed at home, dried sturgeon – high in oil – made an excellent source of fuel for steam ships (see also ‘Lake Sturgeon, Dinosaur of the Great Lakes’). Some Kenora residents today claim that within five years of fishing for fuel, the sturgeon fishery on Lake of the Woods and the Winnipeg River collapsed.

Of course, American and Canadian-run commercial fisheries are not solely responsible for the collapse of the sturgeon population. While overfishing caused the collapse of the sturgeon fisheries, mill dumping (beginning in the 1920s) reduced oxygen levels in the river, jeopardizing the survival and eventual reproduction of remaining fish. Industrial dumping from the Kenora paper mill reduced oxygen levels on the Winnipeg River, putting sturgeon in direct competition with micro-bacteria for oxygen. As Scott Brennan and Jay Withgott explain, “if nutrients flow into water bodies faster than they flow out or are broken down, the water bodies may become increasingly laden with plant material and lower in dissolved oxygen” (224). As the mill dumped sludge into the Winnipeg River, increased bacterial activity lowered oxygen levels – more sludge meant more “nutrients” for more bacteria. It is hard to believe, but as early as 1970, Kenora residents learned that bark “deeper than a standing human” had accumulated along the river bed. Just last year, Ron Cobiness, a band member of Ochiichagwe’Babigo’Ining and the fisheries technician, pulled out a bucket of wood from the Winnipeg River. The mill closure in 2006 has not erased large bark deposits on the river bed, but it has meant fewer artificial nutrient injections, providing the river an opportunity to rebound.

As oxygen competition for the sturgeon has decreased, local hopes for the revival of the sturgeon industry have grown exponentially. Following the release of sturgeon fry into the river, former chief of Ochiichagwe’Babigo’Ining Ojibway Nation, Larry Henry, explained “We are hoping survival rates are going to be high so we have sturgeon for our next generation….This is one of those cases where we hope to bring it back to life in our area.” What results it not only the hope that our children will be able to enjoy “traditional fare,” but that we will be able to compete with the sustainable sturgeon fisheries of British Columbia.

And so, I continue to wonder, could the closure of the Kenora paper mill have breathed fresh life into Kenora’s specialty food market?

The author would like to extend special thanks to Yvan Prkachin and Allan Luby for reading and commenting on earlier renditions of this blog post. Meegwetch

Sources Cited

Tim Holzkamm, Victor Lytwyn, Leo Waisberg, “Rainy River Sturgeon: An Ojibway Resource in the Fur Trade Economy,” Canadian Geographer 32, no. 3 (1988).

Tim Holzkamm and Leo Waisberg, “Native American Utilization of Sturgeon,” Sturgeons and Paddlefish of North America, eds. William Beamish, Greg LeBreton, and Scott McKinley (New York, NY: Springer US, 2004).

Stephen H. Long, Narrative of an expedition to the source of St. Peter’s River, Lake Winnepeek, Lake of the Woods, &c., &c (Philadelphia: H.C. Carey and I. Lea, 1824).

William Warren, History of the Ojibway People (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1984).

Theresa Schenck, “William W. Warren’s History of the Ojibway People: Tradition, History, and Context,” Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History, eds. Jennifer S. H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert (Toronto, ON: Broadview Press, 2003).

Basil Johnston, Ojibway Heritage (Toronto, ON: McClellan & Stewart, 2003).

Duane R. Lund, Lake of the Woods: Yesterday and Today (Cambridge, MN: Adventure Publications, Incl, 1998).

Scott Brennan and Jay Withgott, Essential Environment: The Science Behind the Stories (San Francisco, CA: Pearson Education Ltd., 2005).

By Joshua MacFadyen

It is 24 April, and although some Canadians have been mowing grass for weeks the spring plants on Prince Edward Island are only beginning to overcome the cold nights and occasional flurries that visit this island in April. Still, this is an early spring by historical accounts. On this day in 1879, John MacEachern recorded the following diary entry in Rice Point:

“Ice drifting out of Harbour and Nine Mile Creek, boats can get to Town now, a Ltr [boat] from East Point [arrived] back at Governors Island Tuesday.”

The day before he had recorded a similar view from the farm:

“pulverizing lea land today & yesterday, ice still unbroken outside harbour & inside St Peters Island.”

Thirteen years earlier the ice was more fluid, moving along the South Shore of the Island on 18-19 April until there was finally “no ice in sight” on the 23^rd.  This did not mean winter had passed; MacEachern noted “frosty ground, hard all day,” on 24 April, and frost deep enough to prevent stumping and ploughing all that week.  Usually we think of historical weather reports and almanacs as about as exciting as reading the phone book, but diary entries like these reveal dramatic changes in our environment and our climate when we read them in real time.

Spring 2012 has already set several record high temperatures.  The last snow banks receded from the hedgerows weeks ago and the Northumberland Strait, the body of water that contained unbroken ice on this day in the nineteenth century has been ice-free for well over a month.  People have short memories, and although the effects of climate change are becoming more obvious on a year-to-year basis, comparing our current weather with data from 1.5 centuries ago suggests we are living in an eerily different climate.

According to Environment Canada’s Climate Archive, the average temperature between 1 March and this date in 1879 was negative 1.8.  This year it has averaged positive 1.8.  The average daily highs are even more striking, jumping from 2 degrees in 1879 to 6.7 in 2012.  A difference of around 4 degrees might not seem like much global warming over such a long span, but to farmers like John MacEachern the effects on daily life and the surrounding environment today would be obvious.

Scientists who examine modern weather station data work primarily with a small number of relatively recently established stations, and they recognize the importance of volunteer reporting to ensure an accurate and representative data set (Yukon farmer Hugh Bradley has recorded the weather twice a day since 1954).  Farm diaries are perhaps the largest pre-twentieth century volunteer weather database, and historians who at one time may have glanced over the mundane repetition of daily weather reports are beginning to explore journals and diaries for their phenological, or seasonal indicator, data (Phenology is the study of how plants and animals develop with seasons and cycles.). Liza Piper was one of the first historians to systematically examine Canadian climate through farm diaries.  Other projects such as the Thousand Eyes program in Nova Scotia built on work by Adam Fenech, Don MacIver, Heather Auld, and Stu Beal and analysed the early twentieth century phenological calendar for native plants. Naturalists who study Aldo Leopold’s phenology argue that spring events are coming two to three weeks earlier in Wisconsin today.

Real Time Farming offers a new way to digest historical weather observations – in real time!  The journals of farmer-naturalist Francis Bain are replete with phenology, and several of his climate observations have been transcribed on the blog.  Farmers recorded a range of everyday phenological observations such as the flocks of migrating Canada Geese noted by John MacEachern on 8 April, 1879, or 19 March, 1866; the depth and consistency of snow in the woods on 5 April 1866 and 17 March 1879; and the constant references to travel conditions on, and hence the thickness of, river and sea ice.  Similar observations of ice travel conditions and the first sailing of ferries and other boats were routinely recorded in newspapers as well.

Mussel mud digging was another routinely generated climate record found in farm diaries.  The location and stability of the ice was critical information for farmers; the information also provides a serendipitous record of interest to climate historians.  Most farmers recorded the date that they set their heavy and cumbersome mud digging machines out on the ice and the date they pulled them back in.  On 18 March Basil McNeill figured “the hauling is over for this year” due to a mild spell and spring freshets that weakened the roads and ice.  The mild weather proved temporary, and a cold “Nor West Wind” mobilized the diggers for another two weeks. In the first week of April, McNeill recorded a massive snow storm, and to his surprise, weather that was “cold for the time of year” meant one of his neighbours continued “hauling mud yet.” Roderick Munn’s record of mussel mud digging provides a history of the ice conditions on the Hillsborough River and a snapshot of coldest winters throughout the 1880s.

The routinely generated records of nineteenth century farmers are valuable sources of historical climate data. Through academic research, public projects like Thousand Eyes, and new digital initiatives like Real Time Farming, these farmers and naturalists may become an earlier set of “volunteer climate observers” to join 21^st century climate history database.

By Dagomar Degroot

Last March, 15,000 heat records were shattered across all American states. While monthly temperatures soared over 15 degrees Celsius above twentieth century American averages, unseasonal warmth also affected much of Canada. In Toronto, hushed, apologetic admissions that there might be something to climate change after all quickly yielded to unabashed celebration of global warming as spring sprung a month early. Of course, if a similar heat wave settled over the city in July or August a very different – if equally shrill – chorus might have drowned my Twitter or Facebook feeds. Still, much of the Northern Hemisphere is uncomfortably cold more often than it’s uncomfortably warm. A month ago I couldn’t help but think that individual, corporate and state responses to climate change in the west might be more serious if the world was cooling.

This is the third article in a series that explores how historians can engage some of today’s debates about global warming. In a previous post I described how I uncover relationships between the turbulent history of the early modern Netherlands and the climatic fluctuations of the “Little Ice Age.” Many historians are now aware that colder, wetter, stormier weather prevailed across most of the northern hemisphere between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Not surprisingly, then, this Little Ice Age has been described as a vital influence behind everything from changes in fashion to the coming of the Enlightenment. However, such sweeping narratives ignore a simple reality: the Little Ice Age was neither little, nor entirely icy, nor an age. Some decades were certainly extremely cold, yet others were quite warm, and changes in, for example, patterns of prevailing wind were as important for contemporaries as shifts in temperature. More importantly, colder, wetter, stormier periods like the Grindelwald Fluctuation or the Maunder Minimum were interrupted by relatively warm, dry, tranquil decades. So how does that relate to our attitudes towards global warming?

Because the Little Ice Age was distinguished more by climatic variability than persistent cold, I study both warmer and cooler decades to explore what changed and what stayed the same. Before I examine how a particular manifestation of the Dutch Republic was influenced by climatic fluctuations, I often need to refine scientific reconstructions of the Little Ice Age. While ice cores or tree rings record seasonal changes in warmth or precipitation, surviving written sources like ship logbooks or weather diaries allow me to reliably track weather changes by the day and, sometimes, by the hour. In other words: I spend a lot of time figuring out what early modern Europeans thought about warmth, cold, and other weather conditions. As I considered whether to install my air conditioner in early March, I realized that their impressions might not have been so different from our own.

Literate Europeans described frigid winters in gripping detail. If you’re ever in the mood for some especially nerdy, historically minded entertainment, scan through the diary of Samuel Pepys, Chief Secretary to the English Admiralty, during the coldest winters of his career. Writing during an especially chilly stretch of the Little Ice Age, Pepys on January 14th, 1664 described how, “I find myself as heretofore in cold weather to begin to burn within and pimples and pricks all over my body, my pores with cold being shut up.” On a freezing February night in the following winter Pepys related that, “it was a frost, and had snowed last night, which covered the graves in the churchyard, so as I was the less afeard for going through.”

Similar references to cold winter weather and its consequences – both petty and serious – abound in contemporary European writing. Cold weather that persisted deep into the spring was vividly described, while “years without summer,” where temperatures never approached their normal seasonal highs, entered into western folklore. Months of exceptionally cold weather were linked to earthquakes, plagues, and other natural disturbances, and most suspected some supernatural influence was behind it all, whether from heaven or hell. On the other hand, exceptional summer heat was frequently ignored in surviving written sources, except when it combined with unusual dryness to set the stage for fire. Warmth during spring or fall typically received only passing mention, usually when it thawed the last remnants of winter ice.

The written remains of early modern Europeans reveal that they – like us – responded more vociferously to weather that exacerbated the most uncomfortable or dangerous elements of their accustomed climate. Last April I spent a week in Phoenix, where temperatures had already exceeded 30 degrees Celsius. I asked a local how she coped with Arizona’s scorching summers, and she answered quite practically: the same way you Canadians handle your cold winters. After my plane made a harrowing landing through a winter storm in Toronto, I realized that global responses to a warmer planet might not be split only along economic or cultural fault lines. Voices from Europe’s climatic past remind us that as the extreme weather stimulated by global warming becomes more common, the widening schism between approaches in the North and South may be deepened by locally different meanings of warmth as threatening or benign.

Dagomar Degroot is a PhD Candidate at York University, where he explores the relationship between the climatic and human histories of the Dutch Republic. He is the creator of HistoricalClimatology.com, and the co-administrator of the Climate History Network.

By Merle Massie

A major drought of unknown intensity and duration is about to hit the Oxbow Basin in Canada. With a population of about three million people over a landbase of 175,000 square kilometers devoted primarily to agriculture, water management will consume all levels of governance, from the farmstead to the largest city.

What are you going to do?

Send members of the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute for Water Security and the School of Environment and Sustainability into action! And oh yes — include an environmental historian.

Recognize the Oxbow Basin? It is a fictional place, created for the recent Invitational Drought Tournament sponsored by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada on March 2, 2012 in Saskatoon. What, you might ask, is a drought tournament? A new card game? A new version of The Farming Game [TM]? Well, not yet, but something interesting is certainly growing.

The Invitational Drought Tournament is a new, interactive game tool, “designed to help institutions build their capacity around drought preparedness” (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada 2012). Part workshop, part competition, the idea was to bring (ideally) multi-disciplinary teams into one room in a game format. Five University teams from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba competed in the event. Working with both existing drought mitigation options and creating new adaptations, the drought tournament was a fun venue to try to identify gaps and vulnerabilities in drought preparedness.

The room was filled with experts: climate change scientists, hydrologists, water modellers, soil scientists, policy analysts, engineers, economists… and the list goes on. David Sauchyn, well known in environmental and drought circles for his proxy tree ring research, brought an impressive group from Regina. Two teams from the University of Alberta complemented a group from the University of Manitoba – who candidly stated that if this had been a flood tournament, they would have wiped the floor with us. True enough. No one knows flood like Manitoba.

What was a historian doing there? I asked myself the same question – especially after I became the U of S team captain. But as an environmental historian who studies drought and flood events (and owns a farm, to boot), there was a space for me. I knew both the context (past drought events) and the on-the-ground implications of agricultural drought mitigation decisions.

University of Saskatchewan Invitational Drought Tournament Team in action, March 2 2012

The energy and research put into the game by its creators is extraordinary. Past extreme climate events – and yes, the Dirty Thirties certainly topped the list – were balanced with information on risk assessment, stream flow and water storage, regional characteristics of the fictitious basin, temperature and precipitation tables, and existing adaptation options from which we could choose.

I was humbled by my team. With players from the global south, the middle east, Israel, the far east and Canada, the U of S drew experience and innovative ideas from around the world. My team had put weeks of work into building scenarios, constructing models to predict the impact of drought on the overall water supply in the basin, economic potentials and drawbacks, and social stress on the system. I was lost. And I was enormously impressed.

University of Saskatchewan Round #2 drought adaptions and modeling

The drought tournament was an opportunity to work with others in a truly multi-disciplinary (and incredibly fast-paced) team environment. With the time clock ticking, negotiating and selecting short and long-term water, land, and financial management options and technological innovations left little time for exploratory discussion or debate. The game went through three years of intensifying drought.

We also opted to create some social innovations. Would you like to come to the Rain Dance we organized with the local Grand Council of the regional aboriginal reserves? With the lakes drying up and tourism plummeting, we all need something fun to look forward to. And how do you know – it might even work!

After the judges scored the overall results, the U of S team took top prize.

What is the point of all this, besides telling you about a fun day?

Increasingly, I see a shift within academia and governmental policy. While positivist natural science and qualitative social science methods are still fundamental to research streams, humanistic skills and perspectives are budging in, too. More and more, large multi- or inter- or trans-disciplinary teams are looking for the skills that historians bring to the table: document analysis; the ability to track landscapes over time and relate it to human dimensions of environmental change; and (I’m told) our ability to synthesize knowledge.

A sense of humour, some imagination, and a willingness to reach out helps, too.

Merle Massie at Invitational Drought Tournament, March 2 2012, in Saskatoon

I know that as an environmental historian, I’m a bit like a magpie: I find all kinds of neat, shiny bits of information from anthropology and archaeology, ecology, hydrology, geography, geology, soil science, economics, government reports, traditional knowledge, photographs, maps, and archival research and put it all together to create a more holistic picture of whatever it is I’m studying. What others consider “context” is my data!

In terms of the Invitational Drought Tournament game, the U of S team – like all the others – offered their multi-disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives not only to the day and the Saskatoon event, but to the game itself. We suggested a host of ways for the game to be improved for future iterations. Ultimately, the game will become a tool that multiple governance systems and levels can use to identify and mitigate extreme climate events.

Because extreme events will happen. Let’s work together, pooling all of our talents and expertise, to identify and rectify the gaps, and suggest positive innovations, while we can.

Merle Massie is a writer and historian, and a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Saskatchewan. Find her blog at: http://merlemassie.wordpress.com/.

The interactive map above, produced by Leo Bonanni, the CEO of Sourcemap.com, demonstrates the impressive power of geographical analysis in the early 21st century. The map shows the supply chains for a typical laptop computer and provides a fascinating insight into the complicated mix of natural resources and manufacturing labour needed. It raises questions about the environmental and social consequences of the computers that many of us interact with daily.

To what extent has geography emerged as a more powerful tool than history to shed light on the social and environmental consequences of today’s global economic and political systems? I don’t make it a habit to quote from the French philosopher Michel Foucault in my posts for ActiveHistory.ca, or for that matter in most of my academic writing. However, there is an idea from a lecture first given in 1967 that has stuck with me since I first came across it in during my early years in graduate school. The quote, taken from the 1986 English translation, argues that geography (space) increasingly surpassed history in the twentieth century: “The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past… The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed”. (Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 1986) The literary critic,  John Berger, provides another often quoted passage building the same idea and argues that it is now “space not time that hides consequences from us”:

It is scarcely any longer possible to tell a straight story sequentially unfolding in time.  And this is because we are too aware of what is continually traversing the storyline laterally…  Such awareness is the result of our constantly having to take into account the simultaneity and extension of events and possibilities.  There are so many reasons why this should be so: the range of modern means of communication: … the degree of personal political responsibility that must be accepted for events all over the world: the fact that the world has become indivisible: the unevenness of economic development within that world… Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection; it is space not time that hides consequences from us. (Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 22)

The popularity of posts by Karlee Sapoznik and the Alliance Against Modern Slavery on this website (which have been read by thousands of visitors) suggest an awareness among our readership of the political significance the geographical divisions in our world. When considering the common chocolate bar, it is hard to not agree with Berger that space, not history, hides the consequences of moderns slavery from consumers. Though it is equally true that history remains a powerful tool for explaining how and why the world developed in this way and our ability to contrast modern slavery with historical slavery remains very important. So I do not believe geography has surpassed historians, but with the ongoing process of globalization, there are many examples of geography’s growing importance. Moreover, a lot of historians, myself included, have become increasingly interested in the geographical aspects of the past.

My current research project attempts to look at the growth of the global commodity trade in the 19th century and to write a history of space and distance hiding consequences. I’ve been looking for a way to visualize this history. A week ago I learned about Sourcemap.com. I’ve begun working on a map to trace the raw materials that flowed into factories in East London during the nineteenth century and I plan to develop a series of maps that better show the vast expansion of global trade during between 1800 and 1914. I hope that blending geography and history with a powerful digital tool like Sourcemap.com will provide new insights into the development of the global economy and present the material in a uniquely dynamic and accessible format on the internet.

By Sean Kheraj

Reposted from the Otter.

Last November, ahead of the House of Commons vote on the elimination of the Canadian Wheat Board purchasing monopsony, the federal Minister of Agriculture, Gerry Ritz, and his provincial cohorts from Alberta and Saskatchewan held a press conference to celebrate the achievement of the federal Conservative Party’s long-held policy objective. Alberta Agriculture Minister, Evan Berger proudly declared that “I believe we are giving back a property right, a freedom of choice, to farmers who make large investments, who have the wherewithal to sell their grain to whomever, whenever, at what price they see fit.” When asked why Stan Struthers, Manitoba’s Agriculture Minister, was absent, Minister Ritz derisively explained that, “Mr. Struthers and his government continue to be mired in the past.” But just what that past is remains unclear in the political and media debate over the fate of the Canadian Wheat Board. History, of course, plays a very significant role in this debate because this is not the first time the Conservative Party has tried to eliminate the Canadian Wheat Board.

In 1920, Prime Minister Arthur Meighen pulled a “mean trick” on Western Canadian farmers by eliminating the Canadian Wheat Board and reinstating the Winnipeg Grain Exchange as the predominant institution of the Canadian grain trade. After four consecutive wheat harvests sold under a state-controlled market, Meighen’s Conservative government sought to restore an open market in wheat which had been suspended since 1917.

In 1917, the government of Robert Borden — Meighen’s predecessor — overrode the open market in wheat by imposing a fixed price under the authority of the newly created Board of Grain Supervisors in an effort to halt the rapidly accelerating growth in wheat prices precipitated by wartime inflation during the Great War. From September 1, 1917 to July 21, 1919, the Board suspended all trading in wheat futures on the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. Wheat acreage grew during the war years in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta from 9.3 million acres in 1914 to 16.1 million acres in 1918 as, according to John Herd Thompson, “[t]he demand of the Allies was primarily for wheat, and the Western farmer rushed to meet this demand.” The Board of Grain Supervisors issued price controls on wheat in order to stabilize the cost of wheat for wartime purposes. [1]

Following the emergency of the Great War, the federal government attempted to return the wheat trade to an open market and permitted the trading of futures on the Winnipeg Grain Exchange on July 21, 1919. Following ten days of frantic trading, speculators had driven the price of wheat up so quickly that Ottawa was compelled to again step in to reduce the inflationary pressure. On July 31, the federal government created the Canadian Wheat Board as the exclusive marketer of prairie wheat, replacing the Board of Grain Supervisors. Unlike the wartime Board, the CWB did not buy and sell wheat at a fixed price. Instead, it bought wheat at a fixed advance and later distributed a proportionate share of any additional funds from the total sales of the crop to Western Canadian farmers. [2]

The first Canadian Wheat Board remained in operation for just one year as an emergency measure to control inflation and limit the escalation of food prices. Farmers, however, saw great value in the high prices and stability afforded by the government marketing system. The Saskatchewan Co-operative Elevator Company passed a resolution at its annual meeting in December 1919 stating “that we favor the national marketing of our grain through a body similar to the Canadian Wheat Board, on which the farmers shall have adequate representation.” While this sentiment was not unanimous among Western Canadian farmers, it was clear that most farmers did not want to return to the open market on the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. [3]

When Meighen thrust farmers back onto the pre-war open market system for the 1921 crop year, farmers were shocked by the sudden drop in prices. According to Dominion Bureau of Statistics records, the average annual price per bushel dropped from $2.51 in 1920 to $1.65 in 1921. While the staggering downward price pressure cannot be solely attributed to the open market system, grain growers were convinced that the abandonment of the CWB had been a mistake. Following disastrous crop years in 1921 and 1922, Western Canadian farmers chose to abandon the open market and by-pass the speculators on the Winnipeg Grain Exchange by establishing co-operative wheat pools. In 1923-24, all three prairie provinces established wheat pools and conducted their pooling activities through a collective Central Selling Agency, which effectively supplanted the speculators on the Winnipeg Grain Exchange. During its years of operation between 1923 and 1931, this collective wheat pool effort then subverted the open market. [4]

From 1931 to 1935, the Canadian wheat trade suffered from the dual environmental and economic disasters of the Great Depression and was highly modified by federal government liquidation and stabilization activities before the re-establishment of the Canadian Wheat Board in 1935 under a voluntary government marketing system. Finally, after more than twenty years of farmer protest and agitation, the monopsony authority of the CWB was restored in 1943 and persisted until 2012, nearly seventy years.

The early history of state-regulated wheat marketing through the Canadian Wheat Board provides crucial perspective on the decision of the federal government in late 2011 to rescind the CWB purchasing monopsony. This history provides several important revelations:

1. Western Canadian farmers have not independently sold wheat on a fully open market as independent sellers since 1922. That market operated for just two years before it was abandoned by many farmers in favour of cooperative wheat pools. This means that there is likely no Canadian with living memory of a truly open wheat market in Western Canada. Furthermore, a sustained open wheat market has not operated in Western Canada for longer than a two year period since before the Great War, nearly a century ago. Therefore, forcing Western Canadian wheat farmers into an open market constitutes a radical economic transformation to a market condition that last existed when the horse was the predominant form of transportation in Canada. Who then is mired in the past?
2. Many prairie farmers preferred government purchasing and marketing of wheat and opposed the decision of the Meighen government to eliminate the Canadian Wheat Board. The CWB system offered stable wheat prices and often higher wheat prices than that which could be obtained through the futures market on the Winnipeg Grain Exchange.
3. The decision of the federal government to rescind the CWB purchasing monopsony does not, in fact, return Western Canadian wheat farmers to a fully open market system because the CWB will continue to operate on a voluntary basis as it did from 1935 to 1943. The current Conservative government has framed its policy shift as an attempt to restore the rights of farmers to act as individual commodity producers, ignoring the history of cooperative wheat pools in the prairies as an alternative to a truly open market. Farmers may choose not to participate independently on the open market and instead choose the path of their predecessors and stay with the government-supported cooperative wheat pool of the CWB. After all, in an open market with many more sellers than buyers, commodity prices will be driven down as sellers compete with one another and profit-driven buyers benefit from a flood of supply.

[1] John Herd Thompson, Harvests of War: The Prairie West, 1914-1918 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978) 61.

[2] Vernon C. Fowke, The National Policy and the Wheat Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973 [1957]), pgs. 171-173.

[3] The Grain Growers’ Guide, 31 December 1919, pg. 8.

[4] Fowke, The National Policy and the Wheat Economy, pgs. 196-197.

This is the first part of a three-part series on the history of the Canadian Wheat Board and the implications of the recent policy changes of the federal government concerning the CWB.

By Shannon Stunden Bower.

Reposted from the Otter.

The current iteration of the Canadian Wheat Board was established in 1935, during a period of regional emergency. Prairie farmers struggled amidst the difficult circumstances created by the twin crises of widespread agricultural drought and the Great Depression. The authority of the Wheat Board was expanded during World War II. In 1965, the Board’s governing legislation was amended to remove any time limit, establishing the Wheat Board as a permanent fixture on the Canadian Prairies.

Permanent until now, that is. Through Bill C-18, which gained assent 15 December 2011, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government eliminated the Wheat Board’s monopsony as the sole buyer of Canadian prairie grain. Those who think like Prime Minister Harper see economic freedom in this move; others fear the elimination of what they see as the advantages the Board offered to Prairie farmers.

While the legislation governing the Board has been amended over the years, the major principles governing its operation have endured through seven decades. As a drastic transformation of the agency takes place, it is perhaps appropriate to review some of the changes in prairie agriculture that have occurred during the agency’s tenure.

The difficulties of the 1930s were a final illustration of some of the mistakes made in the period of prairie settlement, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Land had been occupied without adequate consideration of its environmental characteristics, and inappropriate agricultural techniques were widespread. On the Canadian Prairies as elsewhere, the conclusion of World War II saw the application of wartime technologies to peacetime pursuits. While the era of industrial agriculture started decades earlier, it was the post-war years that brought the large-scale adoption of new agricultural machinery. Tractors, trucks, and combines became more common, with numbers increasing at a great rate in the period immediately following the war. At the same time, chemicals became more widely available for agricultural purposes, with many prairie farmers adopting pesticides and herbicides with enthusiasm. After decades of expanding in geographical extent, from the mid-20^th century onward, prairie agriculture was changing in character.

A key change was an expansion in the size of farms and a corresponding drop in their number. Fewer farms meant fewer people, as the rural landscape of the prairies became less populous. At the same time, prairie economies were diversifying, even while extractive industries remained key economic motors. Each prairie province found its own path through these changes, with distinctions in political character and economic orientation becoming more pronounced. Indeed, it became more difficult, in this period, to speak in any meaningful way of the prairies as a coherent region.

The prairies of 2012 are quite different from the prairies of 1935. But these changes do not explain the movement to transform the Canadian Wheat Board. Understanding the motivations of those who think like Prime Minister Harper requires reference to another series of events. Explaining the impending transformation of the Wheat Board means paying attention to the rise of neo-liberal economic thinking in Britain and the United States. Neo-liberalism is a political ideology that emphasizes deregulation of the financial sector, retrenchment of the state through privatization, and constraints on the labour movement. It is associated with the leaderships of Margarent Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States. The Canada-US Free Trade Agreement of 1988 and the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 were Canadian policies in some ways in tune with neoliberalism. Former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein (in power from 1992 to 2006) was among the first Canadian politicians in power to wholeheartedly embrace neoliberalism. Over the past 25 years, neo-liberal ideology has come to seem like commonsense to some in Canada. This has laid the groundwork for an assessment of the Canadian Wheat Board as an intolerable incursion on the economic freedom of prairie farmers.

Over the past seven decades, much has changed on the Canadian prairies. Understanding the transformation of the Canadian Wheat Board, however, means looking beyond the borders of the Prairie Provinces, indeed, even outside the Canadian nation. It is in the context of this wider history that it becomes possible to understand the short title of Bill C-18, the Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act. The Conservative government is here invoking a particular neo-liberal vision of freedom, one that bolsters the individual’s ability to choose at the expense of the community’s capacity to achieve collective gains. Prime Minister Harper’s actions amount to the wholesale application of the international economic logic of neo-liberalism to agriculture on the Canadian prairies. After decades of dramatic regional transformation, this may prove to be the biggest change yet.

This is the second part of a three-part series on the history of the Canadian Wheat Board and the implications of the recent policy changes of the federal government concerning the CWB.

By Merle Massie

Reposted from the Otter.
Wheat. The Golden Crop of the west, what was once the backbone of prairie farms, is facing a new/old future. Perhaps the low-carb diets and labeling of wheat as a potential allergen in food products (bread: may contain wheat!) is tearing into wheat’s popularity and profitability? Not really. World population is growing exponentially, and wheat still packs a commercial punch – it is highly portable, easy to store, and full of potential food energy.

What’s new is the way that western Canadian farmers will market their product to that vast, faceless, hungry world population. The Canadian government, in a move that splits the farm community along viscerally divisive lines, has ended the 70 year monopoly of the Canadian Wheat Board.

Critics and proponents of the Wheat Board – in letters to editors of various national, regional, and special interest newspapers, in blog posts, in corporate press releases, in political speeches, and in small-town coffee shops and cold hockey arenas – spent the fall of 2011 in a flurry of decisions, court injunctions, and media manipulation.

Just search ‘Canadian Wheat Board’ in your internet search engine under ‘news’, and you can spend the rest of the day viewing both sides of the discussion. You’ll see everything from erudite and precise legalese to the kinds of words associated with all-out barroom brawls.

The most divisive spread seems to be political: a Conservative government has made no bones about its intention to dismantle the CWB, and has been attempting to do so (and has been both thwarted and supported) since 2006. Legal battles abound; constitutionality has become both an issue and a potential crisis.

What, you might ask, is the Canadian Wheat Board, and what was its purpose? The short answer is, the CWB was essentially a single desk grain buyer for all of the wheat and most of the barley grown in western Canada (Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the Peace River region of British Columbia). The CWB in turn acted as a marketing agent on the world market.

From the farmgate perspective, it worked like this: you grew wheat on contract with the Canadian Wheat Board. When you delivered it to the elevator (no matter which one), you received an initial payment and your wheat went into a particular ‘pool’ depending on the date you brought it in, the type of grain (hard red spring wheat, durum, etc.) and its grade. That initial payment was guaranteed by the federal government, which provided base financing until the Wheat Board was able to sell the grain to a buyer. Interim and final payments would bring the farmer’s total to 100% (minus, of course, selling fees, elevation and freight fees, and other check-offs).

If you were a farmer in Ontario or Quebec, or elsewhere, you were not required to sell to the Canadian Wheat Board. And therein lies the sting: why is there a double standard? Are western Canadian farmers such poor marketers that they require a single desk seller to market their collective product?

So, Bill C-18, “An Act to reorganize the Canadian Wheat Board and to make consequential and related amendments to certain Acts”, otherwise known as the “Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act” passed the now-majority Conservative Parliament and was given royal assent on December 15^th, 2011. The CWB will cease to operate as a single desk buyer for western cereal crops on August 1^st, 2012 – just before the next harvest begins.

From the farmgate, the question swings into a whole new dimension: what now?

The CWB still exists; and, for the next five years, its pooling prices will be guaranteed by the federal government. What was once a single desk, though, now has to compete on the open market – and it won’t be an even playing field. With no elevators, terminals, or grain handling facilities, the CWB is busy ‘negotiating’ with grain companies to allow it room to manoeuver. Grain companies, delighted with the CWB’s changed status, expect higher profits — now might be a good time to buy shares in Cargill and Viterra. Yet, profits for private companies irk the farm community and push farmer’s trust back onto the CWB (even in its new, untested format).

The CWB has another option for reinventing itself. A revised suite of marketing programs, which addresses forward planning, hedging, and professional crop sales advisory roles, has been introduced. If the new order works out, the CWB could potentially expand to marketing oilseeds and pulses, as well as grains. But they have competition: marketing advisors are popping up everywhere, promising to sell your grain profitably. And some will no doubt be successful.

Around the kitchen table at our farm, we’re planning our next crop year, but with wary eyes in all directions. Contracts being offered from grain companies sound good, but they don’t have enough information on prairie shipping premiums, foreign exchange, or grade dockage. We forward contract canola, but wheat – with its increased risks due to frost, pests, wet years, dry years, hail, and a myriad of other environmental issues – is a tough crop to predict with any degree of confidence. Signing a contract promising to deliver no. 1 wheat is an incredible risk.

So, uncertainty reigns. And, it will for at least another eighteen months, until the new system works itself through one full crop year, and farmers have a chance to analyze their options in full.

This is the third part of a three-part series on the history of the Canadian Wheat Board and the implications of the recent policy changes of the federal government concerning the CWB.

For more, see Merle’s website: http://merlemassie.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/canadian-wheat-board/

By Karen Dearlove

Restored tall grass prairie at Chiefswood National Historic Site

Historic house museums and other restored living history sites provide visitors with firsthand experiences of what life was like during different periods of the past.  These types of sites generally involve restored historic buildings filled with period furniture and furnishings, as well as costumed interpreters.  Many of these sites now include historic gardens and other historic landscape re-creations as part of the visitor experience.  Like historic houses and artifacts, historic gardens offer a glimpse into the past.

There is a wide variety of historic gardens and landscapes in Ontario.  Fulford Place National Historic Site in Brockville, for example,  is home to recently restored significant historic designed gardens.  The original gardens were designed by the American landscape firm the Olmsted Brothers, known for their work on New York’s Central Park.  Using archaeological evidence of the original planting beds, historic photographs and sources, the Olmsted Brothers’ garden was brought back to life at Fulford Place.  Historic designed gardens range from restored elaborate designs like the Olmsted Brothers’ gardens at Fulford Place, to the whimsical “pocket garden” of McDougall Cottage in Cambridge.

Historic gardens take many forms, not just elaborate designed landscapes.  Vernacular historic kitchen gardens, or vegetable gardens, provide opportunities to educate about agricultural history, culinary history and household economies of the past.  In the Grand River watershed the living history site Doon Heritage Village, features several examples of historic vernacular gardens.  The Martin Farm Garden is a restored “four-square” kitchen garden, rife with religious symbolism drawn from Mennonite life.  In the nearby Sararas-Bricker garden a variety of heritage vegetables are grown that would have fed the family and supplemented the household economy.  The Joseph Schneider Haus museum in nearby downtown Kitchener also features a kitchen garden representing the early pioneer family.

Another type of historic landscape is the restored tall grass prairie found at Chiefswood National Historic Site.  Unlike vernacular gardens or designed gardens, Chiefswood’s tall grass prairie appears unplanned and wild.  As part of the restoration of the historic house in the late 1990s a Historic Landscape Conservation Study was conducted that utilized historical photos and accounts, as well as archaeological evidence to document the history of Chiefswood’s grounds from 1856 to the present.  The study concluded that during the period that Chiefswood was occupied by the Johnson Family, the grounds contained several distinct areas of use, including a productive nut grove (walnut, butternut and hickory trees), an orchard, a kitchen garden with a melon patch, cultivated grape vines and raspberry bushes, and a large grassy meadow.  The results of this study outlined plans for the restoration and conservation of Chiefswood’s grounds to their historical state.

Towering Indian Cup plant in Chiefswood's tall grass prairie.

Complete restoration or rehabilitation of the grounds was deemed largely unfeasible, and instead, rehabilitation or adaptive re-use was considered the most appropriate course of action for Chiefswood.  The study recommended rehabilitation of the meadow into a tall grass prairie featuring plants indigenous to the area.  Tall grass prairies are natural grassland habitats that used to be found throughout the central United States, Ontario and Manitoba.  Today, less than 1% of this original habitat remains, much lost to agriculture, development and invasive species.  Common plants in Chiefswood’s tall grass prairie include Ohio Spiderwort, Wild Bergamot, Milkweed, Virginia Mountain Mint, St. John’s Wort, Yellow Coneflower, and the towering Indian Cup Plant.

At Chiefswood visitors can walk along pathways through the tall grass prairie, and with the use of seasonal brochures (Spring, Summer and Fall), can identify the different plants and learn about their traditional medicinal and other uses.  The Indian Cup plant, for example, which grows to an astounding 12 feet tall at Chiefswood, was commonly used by different First Nations people for pain relief and to prevent vomiting.  The sap from the plant was also collected and chewed like gum.  Chiefswood’s tall grass prairie not only provides an important habitat for indigenous plants rarely found elsewhere in the Grand River watershed, but an opportunity to explore a historic landscape that demonstrates how First Nations people in the Grand River watershed interacted with their natural environment.