My family’s relationship with the environment has changed dramatically over just two generations. My grandparents were born in a rural village in northern Yemen, where the mountains shaped everything from how people built their homes, what they ate, how they moved through the world. They lived close to the land, not out of choice but necessity. My grandfather farmed terraced fields carved into steep hillsides, growing wheat, barley, and qat, while my grandmother kept goats and chickens. Water was scarce, so they built stone catchments to store rain and dug deep into the mountains for wells. Their lifestyle was minimalist…

My grandparents left the Soviet Union in the 1930s, where they were small-scale farmers in a Mennonite community in the south. At this time, millions were dying from starvation under Joseph Stalin. My grandparents rarely talked about their lives there but often shared fond memories about life in Canada. After leaving the Soviet Union, they started their new lives in Drumheller, Alberta, where my grandfather and his nine siblings and parents lived on a farm. Although they had land and room to grow food, supporting a family of 11 was difficult. They had a couple of cows and grew a…

   My parents emigrated from Northern India to Ontario Canada in the early 2000’s. The historical environments of my family have mainly been rural and suburban locations in India and Canada. I will show how differences in generational values have influenced views and relationships to the environment for different generations in our family.    My grandparents were born and raised in India, in the city of Amritsar. Occupationally my grandfather worked at a local university. On my fathers side, my grandfather worked for an early telecommunications company. He traveled from a rural village to a major city to conduct business…

I grew up in a small Scottish town called Fergus. in a middle class household. As the small town I once new started to grow, open fields became grocery stores and new developments, and I became more aware of urban sprawl and the disappearance of nature. Moving forward, in my teenage years, Nestle bought land next to my hometown to extract large quantities of groundwater to be bottled and sold. The organization was very present in the community, they put up signs and fliers all over town. This is my first exposure to environmental activism, and opened my eyes to…

Growing up in Hawai’i, I have always felt deeply connected to the land and ocean that surround me. This connection is not just personal, but generational, woven into the histories of my family members who came before me. Reflecting on my environmental history, I see how the landscapes my grandparents, parents, and I have inhabited have shaped our values and relationships with nature. My grandmother, who is now 82 years old, grew up on O‘ahu. Ethnically she is part Hawaiian and part Korean, a heritage that influenced her experience of the land in many ways. Growing up in the mid-20th…