Concrete Afterlives: Carceral Landscapes in Canada’s Great Acceleration

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Alicia Carefoote

This is the fifth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

When environmental historians describe the “Great Acceleration,” they usually point to dramatic post-Second World War transformations in human activity.1 Carbon emissions surged. Industrial production expanded. Highways, suburbs, pipelines, and hydroelectric megaprojects reshaped landscapes at unprecedented speed and scale. In Canada, the decades after 1950 saw massive infrastructural expansion: hydroelectric development across northern rivers, the growth of extractive industries, and the spread of transportation networks that integrated previously remote regions into national and global markets.

Yet these familiar indicators – energy production, extraction, industrial output – tell only part of the story. As economic and technological systems expanded, states simultaneously developed new forms of governance to manage the social disruptions produced by accelerated capitalism, urbanization, and settler colonial expansion. One of the most significant yet overlooked infrastructures in this process is the prison. Prisons have rarely been considered within environmental histories of the period, limiting how scholars understand the full scope of postwar transformation.

Carceral institutions must be understood as part of this broader process. Prisons are not simply social institutions that confine individuals; they are material landscapes that reorganize land, water, labour, and energy. Across Canada in the postwar decades, the growth of carceral systems reshaped rural environments, altered local economies, and reinforced systems of territorial control which were deeply entangled with wider environmental change. Recognizing prisons as environmental spaces opens a new perspective on Canadian environmental history in the age of the Anthropocene. This essay argues that the Great Acceleration in Canada was driven not only by intensified extraction and production, but also by the expansion of governance infrastructures designed to manage the social and environmental consequences of rapid change.

Three-quarter view of the main entrance of Kingston Penitentiary, with guard tower in background, entrance in the foreground.

Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario. Carceral institutions functioned as large-scale infrastructures embedded within regional landscapes during Canada’s postwar expansion. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

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Confirmation Bias and the Indian Act: How Common Knowledge Can Fuel Anti-Indigenous Racism

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Daniel Sims

This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series

In May 2024, I attended a meeting of Parks Canada’s Indigenous Cultural Heritage Advisory Council in Sydney, British Columbia. One of our agenda items was the federal government’s commemoration of upcoming historical events, including the passage of the Indian Act in 1876. The hope was that we would tell the federal government how to commemorate these events in an Indigenous way or at least in a manner that reflected the value of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous values. To say the council was not particularly excited was an understatement. Truth be told, the individual who presented the item to the council was equally unenthused. Yet it highlighted something the council kept running into during the entirety of its existence. How are celebration and commemoration related, and what do you do when things like the Indian Act hit a milestone in their history?

The National Aboriginal Veterans Monument, Ottawa (source).
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Mining Data and Canada’s Great Acceleration

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Josh Sandlos

This is the fourth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

Each year in my “Canadian History Since Confederation” survey class, I take my students on a deep dive into something that has high potential to be boring: Statistics Canada tables on historical mineral and energy production. I usually put several data tables on a screen and ask the students to form as tight a semi-circle as possible. Faced with columns showing mineral production rates by pound, and the value of the ore by dollar, I ask the students what a historian might do with such seemingly impenetrable collections of numbers. The broader purpose of the activity is (spoiler alert!) to illustrate the vast increase in material production that accompanied the Great Acceleration—the unprecedented surge in industrial production that occurred in Canada beginning  in the 1890s.

After a fair bit of squinting, students inevitably offer their interpretations of the first batch data. Often the first thing they note is the dramatic change in copper between 1896 to 1914, roughly a sevenfold increase from just over 9,393,000 to 75,763,000 pounds. What might have caused this, I inevitably ask? “A big copper discovery,” is usually the first answer, not so far from the truth considering the commencement of copper production in Sudbury and elsewhere occurred withing this date range. “But,” I suggest, “nobody is going to invest money into big copper mines unless there is demand for it, so what big contextual changes in Canada during this period might be driving the production of so much copper?” Often a student will make the connection to the rapid development of electrical infrastructure during this period. “For sure,” I answer back, “think about what we talked about in other classes: urbanization, the rise of factory production, and rapid economic growth, all depended on electrical power, making copper wiring one of the hottest commodities of the day.”

A map of Canada showing a selection of major mining developments from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, identified by mineral type and nearest population centre.
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Reservoir Modernity: Lake Diefenbaker and the Great Acceleration on the Prairies

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John W. Bessai

This is the third post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

Lake Diefenbaker concentrates the Great Acceleration within one prairie watershed. It shows how postwar Canada joined environmental transformation, settler state authority, hydraulic control, agricultural expansion, and the reordering of Indigenous sacred geography within one infrastructure system. Postwar governments accelerated production through large technical systems that reorganized environments and extended administrative control over land and water.1 Under a 1958 federal-provincial agreement, the Government of Canada and the Government of Saskatchewan advanced the South Saskatchewan River Project. Between 1958 and 1967, its main works, Gardiner Dam and Qu’Appelle River Dam, created a 225-kilometre reservoir, fixed the reservoir’s full supply level at 556.87 metres, and established storage of about 9.4 million cubic decametres of water. These dimensions mark a major transformation in the environmental history of the Canadian Prairies.2

Gardiner Dam gave that transformation its physical form. The dam stands 64 metres high and 5,000 metres long and remains one of the largest earthfill dams in the world. Its construction brought the South Saskatchewan River valley under a new regime of storage, release, and control. Seasonal flow became retained volume, scheduled discharge, and regulated supply. The South Saskatchewan River entered a system designed to stabilize production, expand irrigation, and support long-range settlement and development. Hydraulic engineering operated here as a large instrument of postwar environmental change. In Great Acceleration terms, Gardiner Dam converted a river system into a state-managed instrument of production, storage, settlement, and regional planning.3

Close view of the spillway gates at Gardiner Dam, emphasizing the infrastructure that regulates storage and water release.
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Canada Post and Labour Activism: An Interview with Evert Hoogers

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For the second feature in Active History’s series on Canada Post, we sat down with Evert Hoogers, a retired postal worker, long-time union activist, representative, and organizer with the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. Throughout our interview Evert shared his recollections, memories, and insider knowledge from a long career in postal work and as a labour activist.

This interview was conducted by the series editors, Annabelle Penney and Raffaella Cerenzia, and has been shortened for publication.

Active History: Let’s talk about your initial involvement with the CUPW in 1972. Can you clarify how you came to be involved with the union itself and tell us a little bit about the atmosphere of the union when you first joined?

Evert: When I started in ‘72, it was only five years since the certification of what was called the CPU, the Council of Postal Unions certification. It was only three years since the first negotiated collective agreement under what was known as the Public Service Staff Relations Act, the act that governed labour relations in the federal government. In 1965 there was a recognition strike…by the postal unions that forced this emerging legislation to include conciliation and the right to strike rather than simply compulsory arbitration. So at the time that I started in ‘72, the vast majority of the leadership of the Vancouver Local that I was in, were made up of people who had gone through the experience of that recognition strike and were a product of the understanding that when workers get together, when they unite, when they decide that they’re going to make their case known, that many things can be accomplished.

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Commercial Tattooing – What’s Old is News

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By Sean Graham

This week, I’m joined by Jamie Jelinski, author of Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tatooing in Canada. We talk about Jamie’s interest in the history of tattoos, the connection to art history, and the beginnings of tattoos as an industry in Canada. We then discuss questions over regulation and the criminalization of tattooing before chatting about some of the unique case studies in the book.

Historical Headline of the Week

Steven Dyer, “Tattoos in the workplace, how has society’s perception of ink changed?” CTV News, September 21, 2024.

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Hydro Power, Energy Transitions, and the Onset of Canada’s Great Acceleration

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Daniel Macfarlane

This is the second post in a series exploring the potential of the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

If the Great Acceleration – the dramatic increase in human activity and the resulting impact on the Earth’s natural systems since the mid-20th century – is a valid framework, then surely Canada helped set the pace.1 After all, Canada emerged as a major producer of fossil fuels during the Cold War and has earned the moniker of climate villain with one of the highest per-capita emissions in the world.

The start of the Great Acceleration (GA) is generally held to be about the midpoint of the twentieth century (for many, the GA is intertwined, even synonymous, with the Anthropocene). That the 1947 Leduc oil strike, marking Canada’s ascent as a major oil-producing nation, occurred at this time seems to solidify the applicability of the Great Acceleration frame.

But Canada was an energy superpower long before fossil fuels became one of the country’s major exports. And that was in the realm of hydroelectricity. Electricity has proven to be the foundational driver of modernity (and also of both the GA and the Anthropocene). To illustrate, while fossil fuels are deeply embedded in the consumption patterns of most Canadians, I can imagine my life free of hydrocarbons much more easily than I can imagine it devoid of electricity.

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Child of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration and a Reconnaissance of Canadian Environmental History

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Andrew Watson

This is the first post in a series exploring the potential of the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

In 2016, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke made the bold prediction that “the Great Acceleration will not last long. It need not and cannot.”1 A decade later, there are signs that this companion (some same synonymous) phenomenon of the Anthropocene endures. As one example, the energy required to generate the electricity needed to power accelerated servers that carry out the computational work of artificial intelligence (AI) is the next surge of the Great Acceleration.2 And as with so much else during the Great Acceleration, Canada seems poised to play an important role in the rapid rise in the use of AI.3

According to Steffen, et al., the term, the Great Acceleration, “aims to capture the holistic, comprehensive and interlinked nature of the post-1950 changes simultaneously sweeping across the socio-economic and biophysical spheres of the Earth System.”4 By many measures, as a social, cultural, and political idea, as much a socioecological and socioeconomic reality, Canada is a child of the Anthropocene. As the planet shifted from the Holocene into a new epoch, Canada served as an incubator for its defining concepts, a laboratory for the experiments that gave it form, and ground zero for witnessing its consequences.5

The concept of the Great Acceleration, therefore, offers a potentially valuable framework for a reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history, and a better understanding of the field within a broader global and planetary context. Several environmental historians have written synthesis overviews to provide coherence to the field.6 These early efforts to explain what is distinctive about Canadian environmental history will continue as scholars pursue new questions, sources, and innovative methods. What has been missing from these efforts, however, is a unifying theory or concept that researchers can apply, or work within, to investigate what helps the field hang together across time and space.

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A Modern History of Monsters

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Michael Egan

Somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, I remember César Aira writing that “monsters manage to escape from the net that brings humans to the surface.” It’s a compelling image, but I don’t think he’s right. I’m not so sure there is a clear distinction between humans and monsters—or that the net is so selective, or that monsters are particularly good at escaping the net’s clutches.

After years of teaching history, I can assert that monsters are good to think with. They are instantly recognizable and one of the great universals across time and place: because monsters are everywhere, their study invites comparative investigation of myth, stories, and beliefs all over the world. Monsters constitute a familiar entry point into tackling a broad array of social and cultural questions, because they hold up a mirror and reflect the fears and anxieties of a people as a means of warning. This prompted me to develop a course on the history of monsters at McMaster University in 2019; I have been teaching variations of that original course since. HIST 2GR3 (the course code may be some of my finest work…) meandered through foundational mythologies from every continent, the medieval and early modern worlds, before turning its attention to modern popular culture and the horrors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I never pretended toward any kind of comprehensive survey, but rather invited students to follow their own enthusiasm within (or beyond) the content I laid out. I subscribe to the notion that teaching and learning the tenets of historical methodologies is infinitely easier if students are already captivated by historical content that is meaningful to them. My presentation of the course had a clear narrative arc, but the real thrust of the course was around student discovery and helping them to navigate their own wonder and curiosity.

The Latin roots for monster—monstrum and monstrare—mean divine omen and to point out or show. These roots suggest that monsters have always been meant to show us something about the world. Contemporary scholarship takes that charge seriously, asking what lessons these creatures have to offer. Through these warnings, monsters and their stories foster conformity and discourage deviance. And they continue to possess considerable currency in the modern world. But history is full of human monsters too, and it is equally important to recognize the shared space between human and mythical monsters within a singular narrative.

PAZI SNAJPER: watch out: sniper. One of many such markings in Sarajevo. Photo credit: Paalso, July 1996

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Writing Canada’s Military History – What’s Old is News

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By Sean Graham

In this episode, I talk with Jean-Michel Turcotte, Acting Chief Historian of the Directorate of History and Heritage at the Department of National Defence and the convenor of the 2025 Shannon Lecture Series. We talk about Jean-Michel’s background, how that influenced the series theme of ‘Revisiting Canadian Armed Forces Experiences’ and some of on-going projects at the Directorate. We also discuss the changing nature of military history, incorporating more voices into the stories of Canada’s armed forces, and how those changes relate to broader historiographical trends.

The final session of the Shannon Lecture Series, entitled The Transnational Making of United Nations Peacekeeping by Brian Drohan, will take place on May 6 at 4p ET on Zoom. You can find more information here.

Historical Headline of the Week

Defence Stories, “Web portal to military historical documents open to the public.” June 11, 2024.

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