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
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Exercise #1: Ladner Local Environmental History
April 17, 2023 By: Alexis Begg - T00047868
Exercise #1: Local Environmental History The area I will be focusing on for local environmental history is the small town of Ladner, BC. Edward Ladner was a Cornish tenant farmer who emigrated to a settlement of Cornish lead miners and his eldest son, William Henry Ladner, joined him in 1948 and subsequently brought a younger brother, Thomas Ellis Ladner [1]. After the death of their father in 1851, Willian and Thomas travelled overland for the California gold fields, but they had little success in placer mining. Due to the consequent bankruptcy of William’s business concerns and with the responsibility of…
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I live in Woodcroft Complex in North Vancouver, BC, located in a region known as the Pacific Northwest which is characterized by a temperate rainforest climate and abundant biodiversity. Pre-contact Use and Settlement North Vancouver was home to several Indigenous nations long before the arrival of European explorers and settlers. These nations include the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam, who have lived in the region for thousands of years and continue to do so today [1,2]. The Indigenous peoples of North Vancouver were expert hunters, fishers, and gatherers who relied on the abundant resources of the land and sea for their…
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Exercise #1 Local Environmental History
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Hutuo River
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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…