From Fukushima to Chernobyl: Bringing the Past to Bear on the Future
A historian’s reflections on the long-term consequences of the world’s four major nuclear energy disasters.
Category Archives: Environment
Historians and Global Warming
As part of a small but growing number of environmental historians exploring the relationship between climatic changes and human affairs, Dagomar Degroot discusses how he is drawn into modern debates about global warming whether he likes it or not.
2012 Olympic Park: Remediating the Environmental and Social Conditions
Will the 2012 Olympics force the poorer people living in the Lower Lea Valley to relocate as the environmental conditions improve.
Buy Domestic, Buy Local, Buy Union? Historical Lessons for Today’s Consumer Activists
A look at some of the problems with current consumer activist campaigns and some lessons we can learn from the past.
Ecological Indigenization: Buffalo-Clad Imperialists at the 49th Parallel
Scrub oak speaks: It speaks Sioux. It speaks Anishinaabe. English now. Maybe – since Trudeau – it even learned some French. If you listen carefully, beneath the roar of stories about colonialism, it will whisper we were here, we were here.
If you go out to the woods today….From the “rest cure in a canoe” to “nature deficit disorder”
“In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.” Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder (7) In Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder journalist and child activist Richard Louv defends his argument about the need to… Read more »
New ActiveHistory.ca Paper – Cancun Summit: The True Reasons for the ‘Failure’ of the Green Movement by Jean-François Mouhot
As the 2010 UN Climate summit in Cancun seems unlikely to make any significant advances, the green movement has been blamed for failing to convince the public that action on climate change is both urgent and necessary, in particular because of its refusal of technologies such as nuclear energy and geo-engineering. However, looking at a previous period of “boom and… Read more »
Archival Activism: from House of Amnesia to House of Memory
This post was also published on the NiCHE website I am a new arrival to Kingston, Ontario. I have been tossed into the ‘gown’ tribe, mingling with the many curious and creative folks at Queen’s University. Every day I walk from my home on the ‘north’ side, across the central town artery known as Princess Street, to the university campus…. Read more »
Jennifer Bonnell on the history of prisons, pollution, and homelessness in Toronto’s Don River valley: History Matters series podcast
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Bonnell-History-Matters-talk.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadHistorian Jennifer Bonnell recently gave a talk called “Isolating Undesirables: Prisons, Pollution and Homelessness in Toronto’s Don River Valley, 1860-1932” at the Berndale branch of the Toronto Public Library. The lecture is part of the Toronto Public Library’s History Matters series. The lecture is based on research for Bonnell’s PhD dissertation, which examined… Read more »
An environmental 9/11
by Jeff Slack Public outrage mounts with every successive failure to mend the gaping wound in the Gulf of Mexico seabed. Struggling to affirm his leadership in the spill’s wake, President Obama recently described the disaster as “an environmental 9/11,” underscoring the need for a bold new energy-environment policy. Through reference to the still-poignant memory of 9/11, the president seems… Read more »