Tag Archives: Canada’s Great Acceleration Series

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 »

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 »