Time and a Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island ed. by Edward MacDonald, Joshua MacFadyen, Irené Novaczek (review)

I begin by acknowledging that although I read Time and a Place as a professional historian, I also read it as a Prince Edward Island (pei) farmer seeking to better understand the environmental context that shapes my working life. When an excavator operator digging ponds for me a number of years ago struck wood six feet below the surface, I was reminded, as I often am, of the merits of sorting out how my farm’s present circumstances fit with, and reflect, the past. Was I really witnessing erosion losses from the adjacent fields that were sufficient to bury wood under six feet of topsoil? (The answer is “yes,” and knowing that this is so underlined the sense of urgency I felt to sow perennial crops that would preserve the farm’s soils.) And what about the farm’s flora and fauna, including the coyotes that cause us great concern, the alders that choke and dam the streams, and the welcome, but rare, large beech trees in the woodlot and fence rows? How do they fit into the broader environmental history of pei, and what does an historically informed sense of the present suggest for crafting farm plans based on responsible stewardship? In short, I read this book seeking answers to a host of everyday experiential questions. And I was not disappointed.

One of the goals the editors set for Time and a Place was to provide a deep historical understanding of the present in the hope that good research might inform contemporary decision making on the island. They had the wisdom to recognize that this was appropriately an interdisciplinary project that should include authors with working knowledge of their subjects. The collective strength of the volume, which includes essays by a past director of planning and development for the pei Department of Agriculture, the director of Aboriginal Affairs and Archaeology for the province, and a retired provincial biologist, and draws from scholarship grounded in the sciences as well as the humanities and social sciences, lies with the diversity of approaches it contains.

The broad temporal scope of many of the articles is a strength as well. David Keenlyside and Helen Kristmanson, for instance, provide a superb overview of the peopling of what has come to be known as pei, contextualizing human movements and choices in terms of thousands of years of post-glacial environmental change. Doug Sobey’s history of the forests of pei, though more limited in its temporal scope (a mere two centuries spanning the period 1720 to 1900), parallels Keenlyside and Kristmanson’s work in its willingness to pursue big and difficult questions concerning the past and, as well, in its synthesis of his own long engagement with his subject. Other big-scope essays include Josh MacFadyen’s account of the history of agricultural land use in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Kathleen Stuart’s analysis of changing energy technologies from pre-contact to the present, and Edward MacDonald and Boyd Beck’s excellent examination of the big patterns of the history of the island’s fisheries.

Essays on humans’ relationship with the island’s wildlife, by Rosemary Curley, and human’s use of the sea plants of its coasts, by Irené Novaczek, also effectively use a big temporal frame to situate facets of the present. Jean-Paul Arsenault’s analysis of the environmental impact of agriculture since 1969 complements the scope of MacFadyen’s work by bringing the history of agriculture on the island up to the present. Other well-crafted essays in the volume address issues that are more exclusively of academic interest, including consideration of how we might conceptualize the histories of islands (John Gillis), insights into the ways in which pei was conceptualized in the twentieth century (Graeme Wynn), and the changing tourist image of pei (Alan MacEachern). [End...