My parents emigrated from Northern India to Ontario Canada in the early 2000’s. The historical environments of my family have mainly been rural and suburban locations in India and Canada. I will show how differences in generational values have influenced views and relationships to the environment for different generations in our family.    My grandparents were born and raised in India, in the city of Amritsar. Occupationally my grandfather worked at a local university. On my fathers side, my grandfather worked for an early telecommunications company. He traveled from a rural village to a major city to conduct business…

I grew up in a small Scottish town called Fergus. in a middle class household. As the small town I once new started to grow, open fields became grocery stores and new developments, and I became more aware of urban sprawl and the disappearance of nature. Moving forward, in my teenage years, Nestle bought land next to my hometown to extract large quantities of groundwater to be bottled and sold. The organization was very present in the community, they put up signs and fliers all over town. This is my first exposure to environmental activism, and opened my eyes to…

Growing up in Hawai’i, I have always felt deeply connected to the land and ocean that surround me. This connection is not just personal, but generational, woven into the histories of my family members who came before me. Reflecting on my environmental history, I see how the landscapes my grandparents, parents, and I have inhabited have shaped our values and relationships with nature. My grandmother, who is now 82 years old, grew up on O‘ahu. Ethnically she is part Hawaiian and part Korean, a heritage that influenced her experience of the land in many ways. Growing up in the mid-20th…

For this essay I have decided to reflect on my father’s side of the family for two generations-distant environmental history. My father’s parents had six children. As the story goes, they had four consecutive daughters while trying for a son, before having my dad, their fifth. Having a boy this time game them hope for another boy, however, their sixth child turned out to be their fifth daughter. Here they called it quits on procreating. This story speaks (in my experience) to a very different time and culture. Of course, there are people today carrying out similar life choices to…

I would like to preface this exercise with a statement: Unfortunately, my family does not have close relationships. I did not grow up hearing stories of my family or even knowing relatives, distant or close. This experience has taught me a lot about my extended family, and I look forward to learning more in the future. As a child, my passion for nature was encouraged by my father; we would camp and hike with his constant reminder, “Take only pictures, leave only footprints.” However, while I was taught to respect nature, I was never taught about understanding the ecosystem or…