Alberta's coal industry experienced decline and resurgence in the mid-twentieth century, including the expansion of surface mine operations throughout the 1960s after a major energy transition saw the rise of oil and gas alongside the dramatic contraction of underground coal mining. Surface coal mining was seen as the best hope for profitable ongoing coal extraction. However, surface operations came at a cost as the destruction of the land threatened agriculture, watersheds, wilderness, and tourism. This destruction was most visible in the eastern foothills and Rocky Mountains. Many different groups of Albertans, including coal miners, urban residents, farmers, and outdoor enthusiasts called on the provincial government to impose restrictions on surface mine operations. Surface mining became a flashpoint for 1960s environmental activism and led to major 1970s environmental legislation. Mine reclamation became the centrepiece to a firmly expanding extractive ideology within Alberta - one that guaranteed the continued extraction of coal in a manner that promised to make as little long-term environmental impact as possible, satisfying the demands of both industry and activists. With the election of Peter Lougheed's Progressive Conservatives in late 1971, public hearings brought these different voices to the table, leading to the passage of the 1973 Land Surface Conservation and Reclamation Act. These hearings and the policies they informed served to defuse public opposition through promoting reclamation as the solution to environmental problems, obscuring the ongoing destructiveness of strip mining through the promise of a future in which the land could be restored.

Indigenous peoples and local communities in mineralized regions are under increasing pressure to support mining on their lands. The promise of reclamation is commonly used to help secure support for a project, yet proposed reclamation outcomes are often vague during impact assessment. We asked how local understandings of reclamation success interact with deliberations on whether to support a proposed mine through a case study in the Yukon Territory, Canada. We conducted a qualitative content analysis of written submissions by Yukon people and organizations to public engagements about mining from 2010 to 2021. We found Yukoners require “proper” reclamation for approval of mining and conceptualized success as “as close as possible to the pre-mining state”. We problematize the concept of “reclamation as reversal” as it (falsely) implies that mining is a reversible process. We further demonstrate how reclamation as reversal appears ethically responsible but constrains Indigenous self-determination in decision-making and can create artificial agreement on goals. We conclude that a robust understanding of realistic reclamation outcomes is required during impact assessment for meaningful public participation and for Indigenous peoples to provide/withhold consent. To achieve this, local engagement on reclamation must be premised on transformational change to landscapes, not a return to a past state.

To thrive along the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers in the nineteenth century required expertise rooted in generations of living on the land, along with some good fortune. Arriving in greater numbers after mid-century, many fur traders and missionaries lacked the skills to sustain themselves and keep their hunger at bay. These failures, combined with a colonial focus on agriculture and its limits in the North, served to create a nineteenth-century culture of food insecurity. Where northern Indigenous stories about hunger reassured, protected, educated, and enriched, colonial stories about hunger often stoked fear and anxiety; they described northern places as impoverished and unreliable. This essay explores this early culture of food insecurity through stories told by Oblate missionaries about their failed hunts, conflicts between traders and missionaries over securing land for gardens, accounts of starvation, "fasting," and their interpretation, and the experience of one exceptionally hard winter (1888-89) which reinforced southern perceptions of the North as an intrinsically harsh environment and food-insecure place. The essay closes with an examination of the impacts of the whaling industry on caribou hunting among the Gwich'in and Inuvialuit to demonstrate how colonial extraction created new forms of food scarcity, foreshadowing the environmental impacts of twentieth-century resource exploitation. This article argues that food insecurity was both a cultural expression and ecological consequence of nineteenth-century colonialism in the North.

This paper examines the place of ice and snow in the process of Euro-Canadian colonisation of what are today the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Using oral histories and accounts of Indigenous life experiences from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the paper opens with an examination of the ways in which ice and snow, freeze-up and break-up, were inextricable from wider social and cultural relationships between Indigenous northerners and otherthan-human nature. Intensified trade and missionary activity after the mid-nineteenth-century along the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers and their tributaries created new colonial geographies, rhythms, and knowledge. These paid close attention to the character of ice, the timing of freeze-up and break-up, and the transportation possibilities of the open water season especially. By examining the histories of a scarlet fever epidemic in 1865 and an influenza epidemic in 1928, this paper uses the role of ice and its transformations in shaping the movements of pathogens to trace emerging northern colonial ecologies between 1860 and 1930.

Polar history can be seen through four different temporal lenses. There is Deep Time with its geological timescales against which to interpret and understand change. There is the ‘golden age’ of polar history, approximately 1800 to 1930, which orients the significance of the poles through the perspective of colonial exploration. There is the Anthropocene, our post-Holocene human-dominated epoch, which scholars have dated (not without controversy) to the 1950s and after. The Anthropocene is part of the geological timescale, but in the polar regions it corresponds to a temporality traditionally rooted in geopolitics: the Cold War era of militarization and intensified scientific interest in the polar regions.

This article examines the history of diphtheria in the Yukon and the Mackenzie district of the Northwest Territories in the first half of the 20th century. This analysis follows the traces of this now largely forgotten disease and its treatment to illuminate the constraints - intrinsic and constructed - on the provision of health care commensurate with the expectations and needs of northern Indigenous peoples. While diphtheria was never the most serious infectious disease, nor a major cause of death compared with tuberculosis or influenza at this time, examining its history offers significant insight into the creation of medical and public health infrastructures in Canada's northern territories, and the ways in which those infrastructures served, and failed to serve, different northern populations.

fibre or oil. Consequently, most farmers did not devote much time to it; instead, they rented their land to the millers to grow it, making it an early form of agribusiness. For harvest labour, flax processors often turned to marginalized peoples. Indigenous peoples were especially eager to take on the work, not only for income but also because it allowed them to retain something of the seasonal nomadic existence that their ancestors once enjoyed. This system brought capital and investment westward and linked people to national and international trade networks. For this reason, the centre of the flax cultivation followed settlement, moving from the Great Lakes to the Great Plains regions. Flax processing, however, remained largely rooted in the east as the burgeoning railways permitted easy access to more distantly produced raw material. MacFadyen’s focus is transnational, as the us-Canada border was inconsequential for the cultivation and marketing of flax. Flax processors sought supplies and markets on either side of the border. Furthermore, the crop shared a common North American “knowledge network” as agricultural scientists paid little attention to the border when it came to disseminating the knowledge to boost and improve flax production. Unfortunately for them, MacFadyen’s treatment also demonstrates a common observation amongst scholars of agricultural science: many farmers were reluctant to accept the advice of scientific improvers. This reticence was practical as most preferred to plant flax only on newly broken ground, devoting their established fields for more profitable and less labour-intensive crops. The most consequential effect that science had on the flax industry was in improving how its oil was refined for industrial products. In Flax Americana, MacFadyen offers an intricate portrait of the modernization of an ancient product, the links between the agrarian and industrial economies, and how human desires shaped the flax plant for our uses. His transnational approach is refreshing, and his investigation sheds light onto important elements of social, cultural, labour, and scientific history as well. The book is extensively illustrated, containing many informative graphs, maps, and photographs detailing the extent of flax cultivation and processing and the methods, facilities, and personalities involved. It is an important and welcome addition to North American rural scholarship. david l. bent University of New Brunswick

Previous articleNext article No AccessReflectionsReflections: Environmental History in the Era of COVID-19Peter Alagona, Jane Carruthers, Hao Chen, Michèle Dagenais, Sandro Dutra e Silva, Gerard Fitzgerald, Shen Hou, Dolly Jørgensen, Claudia Leal, John McNeill, Gregg Mitman, Gabriella Petrick, Liza Piper, Libby Robin, Edmund Russell, Christopher Sellers, Mart A. Stewart, Frank Uekötter, Conevery Bolton Valencius, and Marco ArmieroPeter Alagona, Jane Carruthers, Hao Chen, Michèle Dagenais, Sandro Dutra e Silva, Gerard Fitzgerald, Shen Hou, Dolly Jørgensen, Claudia Leal, John McNeill, Gregg Mitman, Gabriella Petrick, Liza Piper, Libby Robin, Edmund Russell, Christopher Sellers, Mart A. Stewart, Frank Uekötter, Conevery Bolton Valencius, and Marco ArmieroPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 25, Number 4October 2020 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 265Total views on this site Citations: 5Citations are reported from Crossref Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emaa053 PermissionsRequest permissions Views: 265Total views on this site Citations: 5Citations are reported from Crossref HistoryPublished online October 13, 2020 © 2020 The Authors. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Vanessa Heggie Medicine in the field: Growing connections between environmental and medical history, History Compass 21, no.1010 (Sep 2023).https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12786Johana Herrera Arango Environmental History and Commons for the Colombian Caribbean Challenges, Sustainability 15, no.1010 (May 2023): 7798.https://doi.org/10.3390/su15107798Casey Merkle, Bryce DuBois, Jesse S. Sayles, Lynn Carlson, H. Curt Spalding, Ben Myers, Shreya Kaipa Self-Reported Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Stewardship Organizations and Their Activities in Southeast New England, USA, Frontiers in Sustainable Cities 3 (Jan 2022).https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2021.772880Leander Diener COVID-19 und seine Umwelt: Von einer Geschichte der Humanmedizin zu einer ökologischen Medizingeschichte?, NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin 29, no.22 (Apr 2021): 203–211.https://doi.org/10.1007/s00048-021-00299-3Tim Soens, Raf De Bont, Maïka De Keyzer At the Edge of Resilience: Making Sense of COVID-19 from the Perspective of Environmental History, Journal for the History of Environment and Society 5 (Jan 2020): 9–20.https://doi.org/10.1484/J.JHES.5.122459

Previous articleNext article No AccessRecentDóra Vargha. Polio across the Iron Curtain: Hungary’s Cold War with an Epidemic. (Global Health Histories.) xi + 254 pp., figs., bibl., index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. £75 (cloth). ISBN 9781108420846.Liza PiperLiza Piper Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 110, Number 4December 2019 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/706886 Views: 48Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2019 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2021, Isis 112, no.S1S1 (Dec 2021): 1–300.https://doi.org/10.1086/717575

The Trump administration has undertaken an assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an agency critical to environmental health. This assault has precedents in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The early Reagan administration (1981-1983) launched an overt attack on the EPA, combining deregulation with budget and staff cuts, whereas the George W. Bush administration (2001-2008) adopted a subtler approach, undermining science-based policy. The current administration combines both these strategies and operates in a political context more favorable to its designs on the EPA. The Republican Party has shifted right and now controls the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. Wealthy donors, think tanks, and fossil fuel and chemical industries have become more influential in pushing deregulation. Among the public, political polarization has increased, the environment has become a partisan issue, and science and the mainstream media are distrusted. For these reasons, the effects of today's ongoing regulatory delays, rollbacks, and staff cuts may well surpass those of the administrations of Reagan and Bush, whose impacts on environmental health were considerable.

This article examines the political economy of coal in the second half of the twentieth century, with particular attention to the resurgence of coal production beginning in the 1960s after a decline in the immediate post-war period. After 1962, the coal industry in Alberta was transformed compared to its early twentiethcentury counterpart as it shifted from producing a transport fuel to producing a fuel for electric power generation and came to occupy a different place in Alberta's and Canada's energy networks. The shift to strip-mining in the post-war period, which was part of a global transition, enabled intensified exploitation of the resource at greatly reduced costs. A new coal industry in Alberta was born after 1962 that depended less on the labour of skilled coal miners than on the transferable skills of heavy equipment operators. A shift in markets for coal produced in Alberta fundamentally changed the place of coal in the provincial political economy. This article also contributes to the national and international energy literatures by presenting a case study of the mid-century energy transition in Alberta, complicating our understanding of which energy sources prevailed in this transition and why. While Alberta exported oil and gas, coal provided for the intensifying energy demands within the province itself. Coal was thus wholly integrated into the fossil fuel economy of the late twentieth century.

Environmental historians have yet to engage with the history of polio. This article uses a 1949 outbreak that occurred during the global height of polio epidemics but in an unexpected place, Chesterfield Inlet in the Canadian Arctic, to examine the influence of Arctic environments on midcentury biomedical research into poliomyelitis. This influence arose in part because of the historical role of such environments and their indigenous inhabitants as laboratories and research subjects, respectively. This influence also reflected the ongoing importance of environmental etiologies to the study of polio, specifically through the significance of epidemiological and immunological research. The article explores the role of environment in the transmission and perception of the disease in Chesterfield Inlet, as well as the research into climate, food, and immunity that arose out of the epidemic. The Chesterfield Inlet outbreak reveals the significance of the historical colonization of Arctic peoples and environments in shaping the course of the epidemic and the medical knowledge that was created in response to it. The outbreak also demonstrates the ecological perspective shaping an understanding of immunity to polioviruses and encouraging the development of a vaccine.