Exercise #1: Local Environmental History
Instructions
For Exercise #1, you will bring environmental concepts home by looking at your neighbourhood’s environmental history.
- Using the submission form, post a photo of your area (Google Street View if you do not want to show your home) on this interactive map and explain the ecological history of this space, as per this example.
- Write a 700 to 1100 word of the ecological history of this physical environment, including where applicable: pre-contact use and settlement; wildlife past and present; early settlement and resource extraction; invasive species; urban development; stewardship actions (urban stormwater retention systems; community gardens; composting facilities).
- You must show where you found your information, either through footnote citations or with links embedded in the text, or a combination of both.
- The writing can be informal, as per the Exercise 1 Sample (you may even use first person, which definitely will not fly with your historiography and major essay projects!) but correct spelling and grammar are expected.
- In most cases, given the readily available information online, this exercise need not take more than 6–8 hours to complete. It is meant to help you think historically about your environment—to read it through an ecological lens. If you live in a rural area or small town, you may think that there is less to say than what you read in the sample based on a Vancouver neighbourhood, but this is not the case. The environmental history will be very different, and you might focus far more on, say, the settlement period of the late nineteenth century, or the implications of the introduction of cattle or irrigation and less on events of the 1960s and 70s.
- Please note, you should write and edit your submission in a separate file then copy and paste it into the submission box. Once submitted to the HIST 3991 trubox site, you will not be able to edit your post.
Are you a student of HIST 3991? Click here to add a submission to this assignment.
Submissions
Latest Posts
Exercise #1 Local Environmental History
February 21, 2023 By: Nahian Adiba
I live in Khilgaon, Dhaka, Bangladesh, a small area in the capital. However, for this assignment, I will describe the local environmental history of the whole city. The capital and the largest city of Bangladesh is Dhaka. It was formerly known as Dacca. It is the busiest and most populated city in this country. It is the ninth-largest and seventh-most densely populated city in the world, with 8.9 million residents as of 2011 and over 21.7 million residents in the Greater Dhaka Area (1). It is called the city of dreams by the local people in Bangladesh. Before beginning this task, I…
Hutuo River
February 6, 2023 By: Jiayi Han
I live in Shijiazhuang, China, a city located in the plains of northern China. The Hutuo River is the most important river in our city. However, in the mid-1970s, the Hutuo River broke off and the river became so sandy that it gradually turned into a belt full of rubbish. This is because the area through which the river flows has long been an area of severe water shortage and also particularly polluted. With insufficient surface water supply, there has been massive over-extraction of groundwater, resulting in the largest existing cluster of groundwater leaks in the world in Hebei. To…
My Local Environmental History
December 10, 2022 By: Ellen Ross T00611006
See attachment also …. There is a satellite map and researched statistics of the Powell River area. Key points from the second map shows first nations in the past had multiple tribes scattered through out the area and now only 1 is left. We have gone from a self sufficient community with food security, to an area that is now food dependent on goods being shipped here. Our 1 industry town has gone to a town fully dependent on the service industry as our principal source of incomes
Richmond, BC – Local Environmental History
November 23, 2022 By: Yang Ni
I live in Richmond, BC, just around Vancouver YVR airport. Richmond was incorporated as a municipality on November 10, 1879, and designated as a city on December 3, 1990. It is located at the meeting point of the Fraser River and the Pacific Ocean, which puts my city adjacent to some of the most productive ecosystems in the world. Fraser River is responsible for my city’s islands’ outlook and growth. Citing the history of Lulu Island by Thomas Kidd, the outline of the islands evidence the formation of the Greek letter Delta. History has it that the matter carried down by…
Burnaby，British Columbia – Local Environmental History
November 22, 2022 By: Siyuan Ge
I live in Burnaby Mountain, a low forested mountainous area in Vancouver, Canada. The area accommodates Simon Fraser University, a school that is near the area where I live. I discovered on Wikipedia that in November 1995, Simon Fraser University and British Columbia had an agreement that saw 330 hectares of land under the University dedicated to Burnaby City to aid its inclusion in the Burnaby Mountain Conservation Area[1]. From a resource guide detailing the history of the Burnaby area, I learned that before its existence, the lands were populated by the ancestors of several indigenous Central Coast Salish Nations….