Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2003 by Joy Parr (review)

All humans, past and present, shape and are shaped by the environments in which they live. We experience our environments through our sensing bodies, bodies that breathe, bleed, touch, taste, smell, experience emotions, hear, produce waste, see, give birth, and, yes, ultimately die. (This is true for other animals as well, but they are not the subject of discussion here.) Yet in spite of the inescapably embodied character of human existence, historical accounts do not usually offer a palpable appreciation of the centrality of smells, sounds, and tastes to the human ability to make sense of the world. Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes is an exception. In it, Parr examines the bodily effects of and adaptations resulting from state-driven, post–World War II megaprojects – such as dams and nuclear power plants – that remade landscapes and thus altered people’s ways of being in place. Megaprojects offer a productive avenue for exploring what an ‘embodied historical practice’ might look like because, by disrupting people’s sensory experiences of place through dramatic changes to the landscape, they bring what usually remains unconscious and unspoken to the forefront of consciousness, making it speakable and researchable.

Parr’s six case studies, all Canadian, include the establishment of a Canadian Forces Training Base in New Brunswick that dislocated settlers from land they wanted to keep; nuclear power generation stations in Ontario and New Brunswick that required changes in the bodily practices of workers who adapted from workplaces structured by physical dangers to those shaped by the insensible dangers of nuclear radiation; the relocation of the village of Iroquois in Ontario to make way for the St. Lawrence Seaway; the changes experienced by locals when the Arrow Lakes in British Columbia became a power storage reservoir; the installation of a plant to produce heavy water for nuclear reactors which led to the production of a smelly and potentially lethal gas and the closure of an Ontario provincial park; and E. coli water contamination in Walkerton, Ontario, that caused the deaths of seven residents and widespread disillusionment with local ways of sensing the safety of drinking water. Together, the case studies amply support Parr’s assertion that paying attention to ‘corporeally embodied knowledge that resists representation in language’ will lead to richer histories of environments, technologies, and everyday life. The case studies also show the disproportionate burden placed upon some Canadians for projects often understood to be for the common good. Her argument would be expanded with the inclusion of at least one study of the sensed changes in aboriginal communities living in proximity to or dispossessed by megaprojects. While Parr occasionally refers to the displacement of aboriginal peoples that predated the mega-projects she concentrates on, her focus on white settlers’ experiences of megaprojects leaves the false impression that First Nations either were not present on the landscape or were not affected by megaprojects after 1950.

Parr’s work reminds us of the inextricable connection among the environmental, social, and embodied effects of human-initiated environmental change: changes to the environment shape our very beings. The book begs us to question what we are doing in the name of progress, with what consequences, and for whom. Sensing Changes is also, as Graeme Wynn states in his foreword, a beginning. It challenges historians, and indeed all writers, to recognize the malleability and contextual specificity of bodies and to strive to include in written accounts even those senses that defy representation.