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.
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Submissions
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Assignment #1 Exercise # 1
January 24, 2022 By: Aaron Wagner
Vernon has tones of freshwater as it is connected to two major lakes these being Kal lake and lake Okanagan Vernon was settled upon by the Okanagan people a very long time ago a major reason for this was because Vernon was connected to two major lakes and by being connected to the Okanagan lake it provided them access to good trading routs.
False Creek Vancouver
September 8, 2021 By: Student Example
I live in Southeast False Creek, on Quebec Street, just outside of downtown Vancouver. My neighbourhood is part of the 2006 Southeast False Creek Public Realm Plan, with the construction of Olympic Village for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games at its forefront, so it’s a very new neighbourhood. From Wikipedia I learned that human settlement on False Creek began 8-10,000 years ago. Citing the Historical Atlas of Vancouver, this Wikipedia page points out that settlement began when the as the Sumas Glacier retreated, but thousands of years before salmon appeared. Salmon runs began about 5000 years ago, in tandem with…