Family Environmental History
January 12, 2025 By: Jennifer R. Paulsen
Mark Butorac
HIST 3991: Environmental History.
January 11, 2025.
Family Environmental History
My environmental history going back to my maternal and paternal great-great-grandparents begins on a farm somewhere in North America. I recently reached out to a distant cousin who mailed me pages upon pages of my genetic and geographical history going back as far as the 12th century CE. This topic reinforces my acute awareness that access to personal history is a privilege I am granted by virtue of my colonial ancestor’s obsession with writing things down and one which through the disruption and attempted eradication of Indigenous family structures and oral histories- that my ancestors are also implicit in- has been taken away from colonized and enslaved Indigenous peoples all over the world. In the late 1800s The second-great grandparents mentioned above on my father’s side left their farms and orchards in Akershus, Norway and Norfolk England, for greener (or perhaps greener) pastures in Alberta and BC while those on my mother’s side stayed on the farmland their families had been occupying in Ontario and Quebec since the late 1600s at least.
Generations later, my paternal grandparents bought a farm in Silver Creek, near Salmon Arm, which consisted of fields from which hay was harvested, several cows (one of whom my grandfather named after me on account of our matching hair color), a bull, a German Shepard named Max, and a massive garden built in three tiers on the slope of a hill. My grandmother was an avid gardener and in addition to the vegetable plots and raspberry patches (that I remember enjoying the fruits but definitely not the labors of as a child), she planted decorative gardens around the grounds populated with flowers native to England from seeds that friends and relatives would send her as gifts. The farm was not a commercial endeavor, the cows were milked for personal use, the hay was grown to feed the cows, and the produce was harvested to feed the family. This labor-intensive land-thirsty lifestyle provided the means of survival at the cost of 40 acres of land.
After leaving their farm in the Township of Sherbrooke Quebec where my mother and her older brother grew up, my maternal grandparents settled in Armstrong, BC where they bought a place in town and raised my auntie. My grandmother was a homemaker, and my grandfather worked as a trainer at a local pony farm. Their indirect use of the land is hard to quantify because they were very much on the grid. They had a lawn which they attempted to keep green even in the hot dry BC interior summers, they bought groceries from the supermarket which had been produced in factories and transported across vast distances, and although the exclusion of labor from the process of feeding themselves left them with a decent amount of free time to go for coffee at the local A&W, there contributions to resource consumption were compounded in ways that they probably did not consider.
My parents both grew up on farms. My father was raised on the farm in Silver Creek BC described above, and my mother on the farm in Sherbrooke Quebec that her parents left shortly after she graduated from nursing school. The experiences that my parents had were influenced by their genders to a significant extent. As a girl, my mother was not expected to toil away in the fields or operate dangerous heavy machinery and aside from a lifelong fear of birds associated with a negative berry-picking incident life on the farm was a positive experience. As a boy, my father’s experience on the farm was weighted with responsibility and long hours of hard work that could even be dangerous. A fact that his father was well aware of having lost his own father to a “threshing accident” on their farm in Alberta when he was a child himself.
The 40-acre farm that supported my paternal grandparents’ existence is equivalent to roughly 16 hectares. This share of all the productive land on earth represents the ‘ecological footprint’ of 2 average North Americans or 20 people from India.1 While the amount of land that my maternal grandparents actually occupied was far less, they were reliant on commercial agriculture, and infrastructure which increased their ‘ecological footprint’ in multiple, more difficult to calculate, ways. This brings me at last, but certainly not least, to my own environmental history, much of which has yet to be written. In the past 42 years I have lived in dozens of places from Lone Bute to Moscow. This lifestyle, especially during my formative years, did not facilitate a connection to any specific land, rather it reinforced my perception of the world as a global community. The most notable characteristic of my personal history is that it is playing out during a time of heightened awareness about the global consequences of local actions and the ensuing sense of responsibility not only to a specific region, community, or plot of land but to the earth and humanity as a whole. No pressure.
Reference:
Ellwood, W. (2015). Globalization: Buying and Selling the World. New Internationalist. (p.120).