Category Archives: Environment

Knowledge and Science in Canada’s Great Acceleration

Satellite image of Lake Winnipeg's southern basin, showing the lake's teal-green water surrounded by flat agricultural land and boreal terrain in Manitoba, Canada. Partial ice cover is visible in the lower portion of the lake.

Shannon Stunden Bower This is the sixth 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. In The Great Acceleration, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke proposed four paired concepts as avenues into the global transformations they see as defining the period from the end of World… Read more »

Concrete Afterlives: Carceral Landscapes in Canada’s Great Acceleration

The Prison des Patriotes (Au Pied-du-Courant) in Montreal in winter, with deep snow in the foreground, a stone monument dedicated to the Patriotes in the left foreground, and a blue sky overhead.

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… Read more »

Mining Data and Canada’s Great Acceleration

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… Read more »

Reservoir Modernity: Lake Diefenbaker and the Great Acceleration on the Prairies

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… Read more »

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

Aerial black-and-white photograph of the Queenston-Chippawa hydroelectric generating station, showing the large powerhouse building at the base of a cliff with penstocks (water conduits) visible along the slope, surrounded by rural farmland and roads, likely taken in the early 1920s during or shortly after construction.

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… Read more »

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

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,… Read more »

An Ode: A History of Lilacs in Canada

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This week marks the 10th anniversary of Unwritten Histories, a project created by Andrea Eidinger that has shaped how many of us think about the past—how it’s written, shared, and understood. In the coming weeks, the site will be taken offline. The material won’t be lost: Andrea is in the process of building a Pressbook to house the content, and the… Read more »

Interregnums, Morbid Symptoms, and Climate Denial

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By Don Wright The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. – Antonio Gramsci What will future historians – say in 2150 – call this historical moment? The 100-Year Terror, perhaps, a century marked by wars, migrations, and civil breakdowns,… Read more »

Call for Contributors: Canada’s Great Acceleration

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Long exposure photograph of light trails on a highway at night, with white and yellow streaks curving to the left and red streaks on the right against a black background

Andrew Watson Proposal Deadline: 18 February 2026 Extended to 25 February 2026 As a social and political idea, as much a material and socioeconomic reality, Canada is a child of the Anthropocene. If the Earth has shifted from the Holocene into a new epoch of planetary history, then Canada has served as an incubator for its defining concepts, a laboratory for the… Read more »

Wolves in the Human Imagination, Wolves in Human Histories

The wiping out of wolves had a spiritual mission to resist evil, as well as political, economic, and national intentions.