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
Local Environmental History
June 13, 2025 By: Bryce Feltrin
I wasn`t born in Vancouver but I’ve been lucky to be able to call this my home for the past 3 years. Specifically the neighbourhood on Vancouver’s west side called Kerrisdale. Kerrisdale has a large ecological history that mixes Indigenous heritage, natural landscapes, and urban development. Getting to explore where I live really transformed my ideas of Kerrisdale from its pre-contact era to today. Before Kerrisdale became the residential neighbourhood it is today, it was part of the ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. For thousands of years, the Musqueam lived in this region, relying on the…
Cau Giay district, Hanoi, Vietnam
June 8, 2025 By: Anh Vu
I live in Cầu Giấy district, located to the west of urban Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam. My neighborhood is a relatively new urban landscape as it historically was a rural agricultural area with some artisanal villages. Since officially becoming a district in 1996, Cau Giay experienced rapid urbanization and is expected to have no farmland left by the late 2020s. (1) Though Cầu Giấy’s early ecological history isn’t well-documented, understanding Hanoi’s broader landscape evolution helps demonstrates how the changes have shaped my neighborhood. As part of Red River Delta’s floodplain, Hanoi’s 5000-year history began as a rice farming…
Cau Giay district, Hanoi, Vietnam
June 8, 2025 By:
I live in Cầu Giấy district, located to the west of urban Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam. My neighborhood is a relatively new urban landscape as it historically was a rural agricultural area with some artisanal villages. Since officially becoming a district in 1996, Cau Giay experienced rapid urbanization and is expected to have no farmland left by the late 2020s. (1) Though Cầu Giấy’s early ecological history isn’t well-documented, understanding Hanoi’s broader landscape evolution helps demonstrates how the changes have shaped my neighborhood. As part of Red River Delta’s floodplain, Hanoi’s 5000-year history began as a rice farming…
Burnaby Lake Regional Nature Park – Piper Avenue Area
June 1, 2025 By: Rashad
Burnaby Lake might seem like just another city park at first glance, but it is actually very rich in history. Long before roads and suburbs showed up, this area was cared for by the Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam peoples. They used the lake and surrounding wetlands to fish, gather plants, and live in rhythm with the seasons. It was managed and respected back then until the late 1800s, where things started changing fast. Settlers drained parts of the lake, built sawmills, and brought in invasive plants like blackberry bushes that still grow wild today. The area went from a vital wetland…
Enderby BC
May 27, 2025 By: Shelsey Ambrosi
I live in I Enderby, British Columbia, on Knight Avenue, on the traditional Secwepemc territory. My house is part of the city of Enderby’s historical tour (#39 on the list) and can be seen here: https://www.enderbymuseum.ca/pdfs/Enderby_Historical_Walking_Tour.pdf. My home and the two homes beside it are all similar gable style and on long, narrow lots built by the same man in 1907. Our location is just blocks away from a small downtown, the Shuswap River, the Enderby Cliffs, and the Splatsin community center. The Splatsin community shares on their website https://splatsin.ca/your-government/story that the Secwepemc people have resided in the region…