Exercise #2: Family Environmental History
Instructions
For Exercise #2, you will bring the environmental concepts home by looking at your own and your family environmental history.
Our lives and present environments are products of history. Our parents and grandparents grew up in very different environments from those of today. In our study of environmental history, it is helpful to think about our families’ past environments and their meaning for us today.
- Write an informal essay, between 700 and 1100 words, reflecting on your personal environmental history going back to your grandparents, parents, and your own generation. See the Exercise 2 Samples for a guide to this exercise.
- In formulating your response, consider the environments in which they and you have lived. Where were they located? What natural resources sustained your families and their communities? To what extent were those environments “natural” or human-made, native, or exotic (that is, transformed by European or other non-native species)? How have your families helped to transform their environments? Does your own ethnic and class heritage or gender play a role in the way you and your family have related to and valued the environment? How did the relationships your grandparents and parents had with their environments differ from the ones you have had in the past and wish to have in the future?
- Post your response by clicking ‘Add Submission’ below.
- 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
Exercise #2: Family Environmental History
March 2, 2026 By: Sandra
My environmental history is closely tied to Cameroon, where my grandparents, parents, and I all grew up before I moved to Canada four years ago to pursue my bachelor’s degree. Looking back across three generations, it is clear that our relationship with the environment has shifted from direct dependence on land and animals to a more distant and managed interaction shaped by urban life, education, and migration. These changes reflect not only personal choices, but also broader historical forces such as colonial legacies, urbanization, and economic change. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents lived in rural areas of Cameroon and…
Exercise 2 Family Environmental History
February 28, 2026 By: Kaia Golab
Exercise #2: Family Environmental History Dr. Norman Fennema HIST 3991: Environmental History Kaia Golab Feb. 28th, 2026 Personal Environmental History When I think about my “family environmental history,” I don’t just think about landscapes. I think about how each generation related to the land through what they needed, what they feared, what they valued, and what felt possible at the time. My grandparents immigrated to Canada from the Philippines and Europe during the war, my parents grew up in Thunder Bay, Ontario, in the 1980s–1990s, and I am now living in Pitt Meadows, BC, near Katzie territory. The environments changed…
Personal Environmental History
February 23, 2026 By: Clay Roper-Daniels
Dr. Norman Fennema HIST 3991: Environmental History Clay Roper-Daniels Feb. 22, 2026 Exercise 2#: Family Environmental History Personal Environmental History I decided to start off my environmental history with my mother, who grew up in Osoyoos. It’s a small town in the southern Okanagan Valley known for its hot and dry climate. According to the Osoyoos Wikipedia, it is one of the warmest places in Canada, with long hot summers and little rainfall. Compared to the rest of British Columbia, it has a unique desert-like ecosystem that has dry hills filled with sagebrush. In addition, the town lies along Osoyoos…
Family Environmental History
February 21, 2026 By: JingYuan Zhu T00745320
My family’s environmental story centers on Nanjing and the lower Yangtze region. Even though my grandparents, parents, and I all lived in the same city, our surroundings were very different. My grandfather was born in 1929 in Yancheng, a small city near Nanjing. Back then, rice fields, ponds, and ditches were everywhere, and life was mostly agricultural. Their main foods were rice, vegetables, and fish from the ponds. For cooking, they used leftover crops and wood, and later switched to coal briquettes. My grandfather remembers that the land was what kept them alive. Between 1930 and 1945, during the…
Family Environmental History
February 18, 2026 By: T00736087
When I think about my family’s environmental history, I can clearly see a movement from a life that was centred on nature to an urban or much modernized life, and then to my own generation that is trying to reconnect with the environment in a more conscious way. Looking at my grandparents, my parents, and myself shows how different environments shape not only daily life but also values, habits, and our relationship with natural resources especially with a world that is continuously evolving. My grandparents grew up in Pangasinan, a province in the Philippines defined by its vast rice fields…