Exercise #4: Documentary Reflection
Instructions
For your fourth Exercise assignment, you will make connections between the environmental movement in the recent past and today by considering what you are challenged to learn from documentarians of that movement.
- Find a current or recent report in the mainstream or alternative media of an environmental topic or issue in your local or wider region. As you read/ hear about the issue, consider where you stand on it. Identify your position and your thoughts.
- Use the documentaries in this course unit to reflect on the role that civil disobedience has played in the history of environmentalism, researching one other recent example to defend your answer to the question of whether it works to bring positive change.
Use your research in the mainstream and alternative media from Activity 1 of this unit for this exercise Post the media links and your analysis. Aim for a minimum of 300 words.
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 #4: Documentary Reflection
April 21, 2026 By: AN CHEN
On March 27, 2026, CityNews reported that residents near Stoney Creek in Coquitlam saw a mysterious white foam spilling into the water. The City got a spill report on March 24, but nobody seemed sure what it was or if it was hurting fish. Honestly, this made me frustrated. It is 2026 and we still have mystery spills in salmon creeks. My position is that the city should have faster testing and public alerts so people know if their local creek is safe. The documentary Fairy Creek in 2024, showed me that civil disobedience is often what works when polite requests…
Exercise #4: Documentary Reflection
April 21, 2026 By: AN CHEN
On March 27, 2026, CityNews reported that residents near Stoney Creek in Coquitlam saw a mysterious white foam spilling into the water. The City got a spill report on March 24, but nobody seemed sure what it was or if it was hurting fish. Honestly, this made me frustrated. It is 2026 and we still have mystery spills in salmon creeks. My position is that the city should have faster testing and public alerts so people know if their local creek is safe. The documentary Fairy Creek in 2024, showed me that civil disobedience is often what works when polite requests…
Exercise #4: Documentary Reflection
April 17, 2026 By: Alexander Charlton
Documentary Reflection A recent environmental issue in British Columbia that has been consistently present in conversations and news is the continued development of large-scale energy infrastructure. The two that this reflection will focus on are the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion and the Site C Hydroelectric Dam. Both of these projects began and moved forward with provincial approval even amidst long-standing opposition from Indigenous Nations and other environmental activists. These cases raise important points concerning how environmental decision-making works in practice, and what role civil disobedience can play when communities feel excluded from the decision making. …
Caribou Closures
March 17, 2026 By: Daphnee Cairns
For this exercise, I looked at recent reporting on winter recreation closures in northeastern British Columbia aimed at protecting threatened caribou populations. When I first heard about these closures, which prohibit snowmobiles from entering large areas, I did not understand how limiting access would directly benefit caribou. However, after reading more, I learned that packed snow trails created by snowmobiles can make it easier for predators like wolves to access caribou habitat, increasing the risk to them. Additionally, snowmobiles and people in general may force the caribou to move to less ideal habitat, where they will have more difficulty…
Exercise #4: Documentary Reflection
March 15, 2026 By: Michelle Anderson
I believe that civil disobedience is an important, sometimes necessary strategy that works best when it is nonviolent, strategically targeted, persistent, and focused on Indigenous leadership and community objectives. A recent regional example is the Fairy Creek blockades and related actions on Vancouver Island, which used persistent civil disobedience to delay logging, generate public scrutiny, and pressure governments toward policy reviews and old‑growth protections (see coverage in The Narwhal: https://thenarwhal.ca/bc-old-growth-update-2024/). Similar to this, the Wet’suwet’en opposition to Coastal GasLink forced a nationwide debate about Indigenous title and pipeline approvals; although legal outcomes are still up for debate, the campaigns changed…