Deer steaks or venison are nearly indistinguishable from other forms of red meat. Photo from Wikipedia Commons.

by Mike Commito

On December 21st 2011, the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters tweeted a link to a National Post article, “Wild Game Meat not Welcome at Ontario Food Banks,” which reported that a Lanark, Ontario food bank had decided to reject donations of wild game meat. The post piqued my interest for several reasons. First, while the economy has improved since the onset of the recession three years ago, data reveals that food bank usage is still high. Food Banks Canada recently released a report entitled “Hunger Count 2011” in which it revealed that 700,000 Canadians – roughly 2% of our population – rely on food banks every month. The holidays can be a particular stressful and trying time for families and individuals in need, so the timing of the food bank’s decision was curious. Second, as an environmental historian and an avid hunter, the issue raises some intriguing concerns for me about how our society views the consumption of wild game meat.

The Lanark decision was backed by Food Banks Canada, which had recommended that Ontario food banks should reject any meat neither raised in captivity nor killed in a provincially-licensed abattoir. However, in previous years, groups such as the Safari Club International have donated deer steaks and ground venison during the holiday season. While club members kill the animals, the meat is always cut, wrapped and frozen by a provincially licensed butcher.

This was the first time a food bank rejected the Safari Club’s donation. Opponents of the decision argue that wild game meat is the most organic meat available to Canadians. Provincial legislation dictates that individuals cannot distribute meat unless the animal was killed and processed in a government-licensed abattoir. Yet, in years past, Ontario food banks have turned a blind eye to the legislation and openly accepted the donations. The Lanark decision marks a departure from other provincial food banks in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, many of which actively campaign for donations of wild game.

On the other side of the border, naturalist Jackson Landers of Virginia has suggested that Canada geese in New York should be hunted in order to control the population and help feed the poor. He began to push this idea after New York City officials in 2010 rounded up 150,000 geese, poisoned them and dumped the carcasses in a landfill as a population control measure. Imagine how many tables these geese would have enriched; instead, these animals were treated like garbage.

Historically, Canada is a country that was built on the consumption of wild meat. Subsistence hunting has been an integral part of First Nations culture, but it was also significant for our nation’s European settlers. When domestic meat products were unavailable, game meat served as an alternative protein source that was both readily available and easily transportable. With the development of the railway and more advanced refrigeration techniques since the late nineteenth century, many Canadians began to consume less wild game meat, although it was still significant to many communities and groups across the country. As historian Gerald Killan has demonstrated, wild game meat continued to be important during times of crisis. During World War I, the Superintendent of Algonquin Provincial Park, George W. Bartlett, arranged to have a significant number of deer culled from the park in order to alleviate the wartime meat shortage.

While certain methods of hunting have come under scrutiny in recent years – most notably the cancellation of the Ontario spring bear hunt in 1999 – statistics show that hunting is on the rise with younger generations. Nonetheless, many Canadians are still against the sport and its obvious by-product, wild game meat.

As the sole hunter in my family, I experienced this type of opposition following my first successful duck-hunting trip on Manitoulin Island in fall 2009. After bringing the duck in one night from the barbecue while the rest of my family dined on an alternative dish, my parents and sister were repulsed by what was on my plate. Not only did they believe the duck was emanating an offensive odour, but they were also put off by the reality that I had killed and butchered the birds myself.

My family held no qualms with the process that their poultry had gone through to arrive in our household. I tried to convince them that they were missing out on an opportunity to consume fresh and organic meat, but my efforts were dashed as they all staunchly refused to sample my cuisine. Today where the pitfalls of genetically modified food are readily accessible and the mistreatment of farm animals are well documented, it is no wonder that organic food is increasing in popularity. For example, this past summer, some of my colleagues from York University produced a video for the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) that detailed their efforts in butchering four lambs acquired from Kawartha Ecological Growers.

As my family’s refusal of my dinner offerings illustrates, many people still do not connect wild game meat as organic. My dissertation chronicles the history of black bear hunting and management practices in Ontario. Yet I believe that I also have a duty as an environmental historian to educate the public on the benefits of safe and careful hunting.

Responses to the National Post article ranged from insightful to misguided. Some believed that the Lanark decision came from senior government officials eager to continue promoting an anti-gun and anti-hunting agenda. For example, one individual disagreed that wild game meat is more organic than domestically-raised protein, and even suggested that moose and deer contain more mercury and dioxin than their bovine counterparts. To my knowledge, no studies have been undertaken that prove ungulates such as deer contain more toxins than farm animals. But, as game animals are not inspected, wild meat enthusiasts should always be mindful of the parasites and bacteria that these animals could carry. This means that extra care should always be taken to ensure that wild game meat is cooked properly and thoroughly.

It is important that we make informed decisions about where our food comes from and how it is processed. While some may disagree with the opinions I hold about the value of subsistence hunting, it is an important part of our heritage. With more and more people making conscious decisions to obtain organic and cruelty-free protein, it is time to start reconsidering the value of wild game meat. This does not necessarily mean that everyone should take up hunting, but Canadians should keep an open mind to the idea of consuming wild game meat, be it duck or venison.

Mike Commito is a second-year PhD student at McMaster University. His dissertation, tentatively titled ”Orphaned Cubs and Responsible Hunters: Conflicting Values and the Management of Black Bears in Ontario, 1900-2000″ focuses on the development of black bear hunting policy and management strategies in Ontario. He is interested in how various groups in the province such as biologists, policy-makers and the lay public viewed bears and how this perspective has changed over time.

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Heritage White Oak Tree in Cambridge

- Sergeant Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

While many of us may be familiar with the designation of built heritage properties under the Ontario Heritage Act, recently municipalities have been using the Ontario Heritage Act to designate individual trees as heritage trees.  Municipalities like Burlington, Pelham, Thorold, Cambridge, and most recently Brant, have designated individual trees under the Ontario Heritage Act.

First enacted in 1975, the Ontario Heritage Act enables municipalities to pass by-laws designating individual properties as having cultural heritage value through Part IV of the Act.  This designation provides some protection for the property from demolition, as well as regulates potential alterations to the property to maintain its heritage value.  Larger areas can be designated under Part V of the Act as Heritage Conservation Districts.

In recent years the definition of cultural heritage resources covered under the Ontario Heritage Act has been expanded to include not only the commonly understood Built Heritage Resources, defined as “one or more significant buildings (including fixtures or equipment located in or forming part of a building), structures, earthworks, monuments, installations, or remains that have cultural heritage value,” but also Cultural Heritage Landscapes.  Cultural Heritage Landscapes are defined as a “geographical area that human activity has modified and that has cultural heritage value.”  These areas can include “one or more groupings of individual heritage features, such as structures, spaces, archaeological sites, and natural elements, which together form a significant type of heritage form distinct from that of its constituent elements or parts…villages, parks, gardens, battlefields, mainstreets and neighbourhoods, cemeteries, trails, and industrial complexes of cultural heritage value.”  The addition of Cultural Heritage Landscapes as well as other amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act made in 2005, have included natural landscape features, such as trees, as integral parts of cultural heritage landscapes and built heritage properties that should be protected.

With these changes in the understanding of cultural heritage, municipalities began designating individual trees under the Ontario Heritage Act.  In 2008 the City of Cambridge passed a by-law to designate a 130 year-old White Oak tree under the Ontario Heritage Act.  This tree survived a disastrous flood of the Grand River in 1974.  Several one-hundred year old workers’ cottages in the vicinity of the tree had to be demolished after the ’74 flood, with the construction of a levee system along the banks of the Grand River and the raising of the grade of the land by five feet.  At that time John Kingswood, forester for the City of Cambridge, decided to save the then 100 year old White Oak Tree on the grounds.  He constructed a well around the tree and a system of drainage pipes to feed the tree’s root system.  Today the heritage designated White Oak tree is a center-piece of the Cambridge Sculpture Garden on the banks of the Grand River in downtown Cambridge.  At the time of its designation, Cambridge’s White Oak was only one of ten heritage designated trees in Ontario.

The most recent heritage designated tree in Ontario is a massive Black Walnut tree located in Brant County.  Estimated at more than 150 years old, the tree may have originally been planted as a cultivated nut-bearing tree on a country estate.

While there are few examples of preserved built heritage in Ontario dating back over 200 years, there are at least two heritage designated trees that have been standing for over 250 years.  Oakville has designated a 250-year old White Oak that was narrowly saved from being cut down for a road expansion project in 2006.  Nearby Burlington designated a 300 year-old White Oak, that for hundred of years appeared on surveyors’ maps as a significant landmark distinguishing borders like Brant’s Block, and the border between Burlington and Aldershot.

The designation of these trees and others in Ontario speaks to a growing realization that cultural heritage isn’t just about old buildings and quaint downtowns, but the preservation of diverse elements of our landscape, including natural heritage and trees, that capture our human history and the history of our environment.

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British politicians and planners are using the 2012 Olympic games to “revitalize” the Lower Lea Valley, a post-industrial landscape, situated between four inner-suburban boroughs in the East of London, including West Ham, which was the focus of my dissertation research.

A century ago R. A. Bray described West Ham “as that of a spot somewhere near London to which people went with reluctance if they had business there, and from which they returned with joy as soon as the business was over.”[1] Sadly, I don’t imagine most people would describe it any differently today.

Half a century of rapid industrial and population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century transformed the once green wetlands of the Lower Lea River and Thames Estuary into a dirty manufacturing suburb with a range of social problems that matched the extensive environmental decline. Despite this troubled history and the scarred landscape it left, I would suggest travelers to London should venture eastward and see a different side of London from the regal and imperial parks and buildings in Westminster. The Docklands Light Rail lines make it easy to travel through East London and they are above ground, so you can see where you are going. Most of the West Ham sites listed below are within walking distance of a DLR station.

View Olympic Neighbourhoods in a larger map
Here are a few highlights:

• The Olympic Park: While the stadium is visible from a lot of places in the Lower Lea Valley, the park was blocked by high blue walls the last time I was in London. At that time, the best views were from the elevated Dockland Light Rail trains traveling from Stratford to Bow. You can get off at the Pudding Mill Station for a longer view. The building is starting to accelerate and each time I visited more of the buildings are taking shape. I imagine at least some sections of the park are now open to the public. You can see the two Back Rivers that flow through the Olympic park.
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• Abbey Mills Pumping Station (Cathedral of Sewage): This amazing building located alongside a polluted stream and old factories looks really out of place. It is even more bazaar when you realize its function: to pump sewage through the massive main drain underneath the green-way path you’ve just walked on to find this Victorian relic. The architecture provides a reminder of the civic pride the came with the construction of the integrated sewage system in the 1860s.
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• Three Mills Island: This is the oldest remaining tidal water mill in England. There have been tidal mills on the Lower Lea since before the Norman Invasion in the 11th century and the House Mill building dates back to the early 18th century. You can also admire the massive gasometers just south of Three Mills and consider the changing scale of industry between the 18th and 19th centuries.
• The Royal Docks and the Excel Centre: The former docks provide an excellent opportunity to see the process of revitalization underway in this region, as the warehouse have been replaced with a university, an airport and a large conference facility. The Excel Conference centre will host some of the Olympic events and this is one of the better places in West Ham to find a cluster of nice restaurants.
• The Thames Barrier: Taking the train out to the amazing flood barrier bring your past the handful of remaining industrial sites in West Ham, including the Tate and Lyle sugar refinery.
• The Lea Towpath: If you are lucky enough to be in London during nice weather the many tow paths along the old canals are great locations for walks. You can walk north along the River Lea miles, all the way to Waltham Abbey if you are feeling really ambitious.
• 

[1] R. A. Bray, “Review: West Ham A Study,” The Economic Journal 18, no. 69 (March 1908): 60-64.

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Pipeline route, Kbh3rd - Aquifer Map

Transborder pipelines are nothing new. There is a long history, forgive the pun, of such enterprises in North America. In fact, Canada has historically been a pipeline pioneer. Yet the Keystone XL project has attracted what is likely unprecedented environmental opposition for a transnational pipeline, including protests featuring celebrities and arrests outside of the White House. Perhaps this pipeline has become a potent symbol of wider dissatisfaction with our current petro-regimes and environmental approaches?

The Keystone project involves several different elements: the initial Keystone oil pipeline runs from Alberta to Illinois, in part utilizing existing pipelines, while the expansion (Keystone “XL”) entails extending pipeline all the way to Texas refineries and eventually the Gulf of Mexico (see adjoining map or see a more interactive map). Both lines will be able to move over around half a million barrels of oil per day. The original Keystone line is already finished, and the extension is expected to be completed in the next few years, provided that it receives the necessary agreement from the American government. This expansion phase, however, has been greeted by visible protest.

This pipeline debacles speaks to many of the themes that I try to address in my research, which generally focuses on the history of transborder Canadian-American environmental issues. To this point, I’ve concentrated mainly on water (such as the St. Lawrence Seaway/Power Project and Niagara Falls), but there are many parallels between the history of transnational water and oil/gas pipelines projects. Earlier this year I began considering the history of Canadian-American transnational pipelines as a future research project (after a student queried the paucity of sources on such a topic). I found that little had been done from a historical perspective, aside of William Kilbourn’s book Pipeline; at about the same time, the public outcry about the Keystone XL grew, further piquing my interest.

Let’s take a crash course in pipeline history. In the 1850s, the first natural gas pipeline in Canada, and perhaps the world, stretched some fifteen miles to Trois Rivieries. The world’s first oil pipeline was built between Petrolia and Sarnia in the 1860s, and after Confederation a pipeline system was stretched around the Great Lakes region. Before the end of the 19^th century, Canada was already sending gas via pipeline into the U.S. (e.g. Detroit).

It was soon discovered that the western areas held far greater reserves, and their exploitation – and concomitant pipelines – took off in the 20^th century on both sides of the border. By the early Cold War, Canada and the United States had pipelines stretching across much of their respective countries. Technological advancements and further petro discoveries made the idea of the TransCanada pipeline feasible, and, in one of the great Canadian parliamentary controversies, legislation was passed in 1956 and the pipeline constructed in the following years. Since then, a vast network of transborder (state, province, and country) have proliferated in North America.

By chesapeakeclimate (8/22/11 uploaded by Ekabhishek)

But if the Keystone XL pipeline is just business as usual, why is there so much resistance? In past pipeline disputes (e.g. TransCanada pipeline) there was certainly vociferous opposition, but it generally had to do with sectional, regional, political, and nationalist concerns. Many of those issues are at play in the current debate, but more than in previous cases, detractors are focused on environmental repercussions (see, for example, a New York Times editorial). In particular, opponents point out that, on top of the damage of the construction phase itself, pipelines inevitably result in spills and encourage the continual exploration and exploitation of oil and gas resources with their concomitant destructive effects, such as greenhouse emissions and global warming. For more detail on the impact of the tar sands, see Andrew Nikiforuk’s Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent as well as the tar sands aerial photography by Louis Helbig).

American proponents argue that the pipeline will bring jobs and help the economy, and provide the U.S. with energy security. On top of environmental concerns, critics reply that the job boom will only be short-term, and that much of the oil will actually be exported outside of North America. The argument has been made that Canada is going to develop and sell oil anyway, and if the Americans don’t take the oil and the concomitant jobs, someone else will.

It is claimed that worries about leaks, including the potential threat to the Ogallala aquifer, are overblown. But leakage fears are justified. There have been many pipelines leaks and spills in past years – as Sean Kheraj has shown on his Nature’s Past blog in regard to Alberta spills – and perhaps the major 2010 Enbridge spill in Michigan (Enbridge also owns a transnational pipeline) is behind the increased resistance to the Keystone XL. And that is to say nothing of the horrendous BP Gulf oil spill.

The history of resource development suggests that we take heed of the law of unintended consequences. It also shows that, even with environmental assessments, public input forums, and other checks and balances, the state and industry will continue to create environmentally destructive megaprojects to exploit natural resources because there is money to be made. But the long-term sustainability of the ecosystem outweighs short-term profits, even from a selfish perspective (e.g. more money won’t do much good if we don’t have clean water to drink).

Canada has a dirty history when it comes to developing and exporting natural resources, from oil to asbestos. The Americans can choose not to take part in the Keystone XL project, but the reality is that both countries (and the developed world) are locked into patterns of fossil fuel dependency, and it is going to take a long time and a lot of effort to change. Unless fundamental structural transformations are made, the view that these sorts of things are going to happen anyway has a lot currency, both metaphorically and tangibly.

  Daniel Macfarlane is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University. He is finishing a book, based on his doctoral dissertation, titled To the Heart of the Continent: The Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project. He is widely interested in Canadian-American environmental relations, and is also conducting research on the transborder manipulation of Niagara Falls and co-editing a collection on the history of Canadian-American water relations.

Viewers should also visit the website for Asbestos, QC: The Graphic Novel to further explore Dr. Van Horssen’s work on this topic.

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On October 31^st the United Nations announced the birth of the seven billionth person. Many stories were published on this event, but to me the most revealing was by David Suzuki, the venerable leader of Canada’s environmental movement. As Suzuki pointed out, the human population has increased three-fold during his lifetime. Nonetheless, he refused to blame population growth for our ecological malaise. As Suzuki argues, “most environmental devastation is not directly caused by individuals or households, but by corporations driven more by profits than human needs.” According to his line of thinking, it is overconsumption by the wealthy, not the ever-increasing population, that is causing the problem.

There was a time when population size was a central concern within the environmental movement. Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 treatise, The Population Bomb, sat alongside Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on environmentalists’ “must read” list. Full of doom and gloom, this book linked exponential growth of the human population with ecological destruction, resource exhaustion, mass starvation, and political instability. The only solution, according to Ehrlich, was to reduce the rate of population growth to zero percent. A variety of solutions were prescribed, including tax incentives to men that voluntarily underwent sterilization, luxury taxes on children’s goods, the promotion of abortion and other forms of birth control for women, and an end to foreign aid to countries that did not put a check on their population growth. The Population Bomb sold millions of copies, Ehrlich became a media darling, and the goal of reducing the global population became standard within the American environmental movement.

As Roy Beck and Leo Kolankiewicz have pointed out, support for population control among the environmental movement’s leadership in the United States “was paralleled, and bolstered, by widespread agreement among influential researchers and scholars in the natural sciences throughout the 1960s and 1970s.” By the 1990s, however, this support had subsided. Beck and Kolankiewicz note many reasons for this drop, chief among them being the fact that it proved to be politically incorrect to critique immigration, the main source of the United States’ population increase in the years following 1972.

The population control movement failed to gain significant traction within Canada’s environmental movement. It had advocates within mainstream groups such as Pollution Probe, but rarely made its way into their action campaigns or policy work. This was largely left to Zero Population Growth Canada, which peaked in 1971 with eight chapters and a membership of 500. Given Canada’s relatively low population density and birth rate the members of this group were given short shrift by elected officials. As Ontario premier John Robarts wrote to one of its members in May 1970, “Where overpopulation may become a problem on a world basis some time in the future, it is certainly not the case in Canada nor here in Ontario.”

It is worth noting that while Suzuki dismissed the advocates of population control as rich white conservatives, the chief benefactors of Zero Population Growth Canada were George and Barbara Cadbury. It is true that the Cadburys were wealthy, but they were hardly conservative. Important players within the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the couple left England for Canada when George decided to work for David Lewis’ Co-operative Commonwealth Federation government in Saskatchewan. George later served as president of the New Democratic Party of Ontario.

According to a survey released in July by the Association for Canadian Studies in Montreal, 54 percent of Canadians felt that the current population was “the right number of people,” while 33 percent felt it was “not big enough.” Those advocating a larger population include Robert Kaplan, the former Solicitor General of Canada, who wrote an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail calling for a Canadian population of 100 million – roughly triple its current size. Advocates of population control, meanwhile, have been assigned to the fringes of the internet, where a variety of organizations continue to operate. The dominant paradigm from forty years ago now appears to have been assigned to the dustbins of history.

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Viewers should also visit the website for Asbestos, QC: The Graphic Novel to further explore Dr. Van Horssen’s work on this topic.

Visit the full EHTV website at: http://niche-canada.org/ehtv

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In Part II of “A Town Called Asbestos”, Dr. Jessica Van Horssen continues her survey of the history of asbestos in Quebec by examining the first asbestos industry boom between 1914 and 1939. The outbreak of war in Europe and the advent of aerial bombing in urban areas created a new market for the inflammable mineral. In the years after the war, asbestos found its way into a number of industrial products as both a flame retardant and as insulation. This growth in demand led to an expansion of mining activities and the establishment of large, multi-national asbestos mining corporations.

Viewers should also visit the website for Asbestos, QC: The Graphic Novel to further explore Dr. Van Horssen’s work on this topic.

Visit the full EHTV website at: http://niche-canada.org/ehtv

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For more than one hundred years, Quebecers have mined this unique and dangerous mineral from the northern region of the Appalachian mountain range. This episode examines the early origins of asbestos mining in Quebec and some of the early uses of the miraculous fire-proof material.

Viewers should also visit the website for Asbestos, QC: The Graphic Novel to further explore Dr. Van Horssen’s work on this topic.

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