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
Salmon Arm, British Columbia
July 15, 2026 By: Morgan Turland
The ecological history of Salmon Arm reflects a shifting relationship between humans and the environment. The region has undergone significant ecological transformations since colonization, but still remains very connected to Shuswap Lake and the Salmon River. Located on a bay where the Salmon River empties into Shuswap Lake, Salmon Arm is a highlight in British Columbia’s Thompson Okanagan region. It is surrounded on all sides by mountains; Mount Ida to the south, Fly Hills to the west, and Bastion Mountain north across the lake (Salmon Arm – British Columbia Travel and Adventure Vacations, 2012) Salmon Arm sits on the traditional…
Salt Spring Island
July 12, 2026 By: Julia Morgan
I live on Fulford-Ganges Road on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. My home is surrounded by sheep pastures, hay fields, wetlands, second-growth forests, and a few rural homes. At first, it seems like a quiet farming community, but the land has changed over thousands of years. Long before Europeans arrived, Coast Salish peoples managed the forests, wetlands, meadows, and shoreline nearby. After European settlement, activities like logging, farming, building roads, and bringing in livestock and invasive species changed the area even more. Many of these changes are still visible today, but local efforts such as wetland restoration, regenerative farming, and…
Burke Mountain
July 6, 2026 By: David Kim
I live in a neighbourhood called Burke Mountain, which is in Coquitlam, British Columbia. It is a quiet suburban area that is located on Mount Burke, hence its name, and is still currently under several developments with new schools and a shopping center that is supposedly in the works. While it is a developing location, it still maintains its natural feel, as trees surround us, and the further one goes up Coast Meridian Street, the more undeveloped it feels. For someone who likes a balance of nature and the quietness of a suburb, it is truly a wonderful place to…
Environmental History of Silica Street and Hall Street, Nelson, BC
July 1, 2026 By: MANLI CHEN
I live near Silica Street and Hall Street in Nelson, British Columbia. When I stand near this intersection, I see heritage houses, maple trees, steep streets, Kootenay Lake, and forested mountains. The photo I chose shows this clearly: an ordinary residential street, but also a lake town built into a mountain landscape. I moved here three years ago in winter. My first impression was that the snow, hills, and old houses made the neighbourhood look like a wonderland. Nelson also feels different from a large city like Vancouver. People here often talk about “Kootenay time”: slow down, take your time,…
Fairview
June 30, 2026 By: Nicole Collette
Sitting on my patio at Heather and 16th, I am surrounded by a completely human-engineered environment, yet looking closely reveals layers of a hidden ecological history. Before the rigid grid system carved up this hillside, this was part of a rich coastal wilderness where towering temperate rainforests met a complex web of wild, salmon-bearing creeks.¹ For millennia, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations sustainably managed this ecosystem. This equilibrium shattered in the 1860s when colonial loggers completely clear-cut the slopes to feed local sawmills, destroying the ancient watershed canopy and causing massive topsoil erosion.² By the early 1900s, streetcar lines…