Missed Connections: Why Canadian Environmental History Could Use More of the World, and Vice Versa

Global environmental history is one of the most stimulating areas of a field that is still considered relatively new. Its attraction lies in its promise to connect different scales, from the local to the international, by following the flow of commodities through the networks of capital, knowledge, and people that made their extraction, production, and movement possible. Those flows transformed as they connected, changing environments and societies, often violently and sometimes irrevocably. As Alfred Crosby has shown, the plants, animals, and microbes that humans brought along with them – what he calls their “portmanteau biota” – were crucial to the “demographic takeover” by Europeans of the temperate parts of the world. First articulated in 1986, his concept of “ecological imperialism” is still being deployed to great effect. Gregory T. Cushman’s recent book on guano makes the case that the transformation of North America and Australasia into “neo-Europes” was only possible because of the enormous transfers of soil nutrients from the Pacific world. In other words, the world as we know it is bird shit.¹

Following commodities, and the people whose hands they pass through around the world, has become a powerful way to tell stories: it is a way to humanize the space of flows and capture the impacts of our consumption. In “A Tank of Gas, A World of Trouble,” journalist Paul Salopek traced the fuel from a suburban Illinois gas station to Nigeria, Iraq, Venezuela and back, making visible the human consequences of something as banal (to North Americans) as filling up.² Photographer Edward Burtynsky told the same kind of story visually, capturing the far-reaching effects of consumption. From the terrible beauty of Sudbury’s nickel mines, to the cavernous Chinese factories where armies of workers assemble circuit boards, the massive container ships that bring the finished products to us, and the landfills that become their final resting place, Burtynsky highlights our unacknowledged entanglement in the lives of peoples and places that can be half a world away.³

Whatever their form, these renderings of the flow of commodities by historians, journalists, and artists are meant to cure us of our collective amnesia. As William Cronon put it, “if we wish to understand the ecological consequences of our own lives – if we wish to take responsibility for those consequences – we must reconstruct the linkages between the commodities of our economy and the resources of our ecosystem.”⁴

Canadian history lends itself to this kind of analysis. In fact, it could be argued that some of the most influential work on the country’s past was a kind of global environmental history, even if its practitioners did not call it that. Beginning in the 1930s, Harold Innis and Arthur Lower analyzed how factors as diverse as fashion, the geopolitics of empire, and war shaped an international demand for the fish, fur, and timber of the colonies that would become Canada.⁵ They, and the scholars who followed them, went on to show how staples extraction shaped settlement patterns, changed relationships among Indigenous groups, shifted the species composition of British North America’s furbearers and forests, and influenced its political culture.⁶ But, unlike current global environmental historians, these scholars paid less attention to the changes that extraction wrought on the European metropolitan centres that financed it.

In that sense, Canada could do with more of the world; its environmental history could be more globalized if more historians used the “following” method to trace the afterlives of its fur-bearing animals or the journeys of its coal, oil, and uranium, casting Canada as but one circuit in larger, transnational networks of power. Or, given the international dominance of the nation’s mining companies, historians might look at the emergence of Canada as an extractive, imperial “metropolis,” tracing how its entrepreneurs and capital came to exploit the human and material resources of other “hinterlands” with the same voracious appetite and devastating effects on local peoples and places as were visited upon it in earlier centuries.

And yet. Despite the promise of the global, Canada...