Family Environmental History

March 14, 2026 By: Michelle Anderson

Our lives and present environments are products of history. When I trace my family’s environmental story back through my grandparents, parents, and my own generation, what emerges is a thread of migration, adaptation, and changing relationships to land. From the coal‑lit cottages of postwar Scotland to suburban yards beside Burns Bog and, finally, the suburban‑agricultural edges of Clayton Heights.

My paternal grandparents and their six children lived in a small coastal town, Foress, in northeast Scotland. Life there was shaped by scarcity and the elemental rhythms of fuel, food, and weather. My grandfather ran a one‑man slating business and swept chimneys on the side; my granny stayed home and kept the household running. Their environment was very much a built‑by‑need environment: houses lit by coal gas, rooms warmed by individual fireplaces, cooking on a coal range. Nature was present and raw, the north sea wind, local stone for roofs, peat and coal for heat, but everyday life revolved around extracting energy and warmth from limited local resources. Post‑war Britain still had rationing and constrained consumer goods; getting steady, better‑paid work meant leaving the place altogether. The ways my grandparents used the environment were conservative and subsistence‑leaning, for example to save fuel, mend roofs, keep a coal supply and a few shillings for the gas meter. Their gender roles were traditional, with my granny doing domestic labour that kept the household functioning in a materially thin environment, while my grandfather ran his business to earn money for the family to survive.

The decision to emigrate to Canada after World War II, my grandfather had served four years as a tank driver for the British Army, opened access to a very different material world. Sponsored by my grandfather’s brother in New Westminster, B.C., they crossed the stormy seas of the North Atlantic on the RMS Franconia which took six days, arriving in Halifax Harbour. Then traveled across the country by train for another six days, arriving in New Westminster, B.C. on January 13, 1952. That move dramatically reframed what the environment meant to them. In Canada they found more abundant consumer goods, better wages, and easier access to shops. The little pleasures they remembered from childhood (candies, for one) that were scarce in Scotland felt plentiful in their new home. My grandfather found work as a roofer and later purchased a home on Hamilton Street in New Westminster. My granny maintained the household, now in a place with electricity and more modern conveniences. Their relationship to the environment moved from scarcity management to consumption and homeownership as a route to security and upward mobility.

My parents were the first generation in our family to grow up in Canada. They met in New Westminster and then purchased our family home in North Delta, B.C. in 1974, when it was a newly developed, quiet suburban area. Their home backed onto a very different landscape than my grandparents had known: Burns Bog. For me, Burns Bog was the natural playground of childhood, a vast, sphagnum‑rich wetland with its own ecology, smells, and sense of wildness right next to suburbia. My parents benefited from good postwar jobs, my dad worked locally as a food salesman for Quaker Oats and earlier had worked in the mills to save for a downpayment; my mom worked at the Bank of Montreal, and they were able to provide a suburban life that emphasized yard space, stability, and proximity to natural green spaces. Class here mattered: steady employment and the postwar housing economy allowed my parents to convert natural surroundings into a landscape of leisure, including weekend picnics or camping trips, walks in the bog, and kids’ play in backyards, rather than a place for fuel and household subsistence.

My childhood and adult life map another shift. I bought my first house in Clayton Heights in 2001, on acreage that still held horses, cows, and vegetable plots. Those early suburban/urban edges were hybrid landscapes: partly agricultural (small farms, pastures) and partly developing suburb. I remember backyard bonfires, extensive vegetable gardens, neighbours with farms, and the tiny farmhouse school. Over 25 years I’ve watched those acreages subdivide into townhouses, multiple large schools, and new transit infrastructure, most recently the SkyTrain extension, reshaping local hydrology, fragmenting habitats, and replacing mixed rural‑urban ecologies with denser urban fabric. Where once non‑native European crops and pasture grasses had already modified the original coastal plain ecology, development accelerated soil sealing, stormwater runoff, and loss of small wetland patches.

I’ve also learned that the land I live, work, and play on once belonged to the Katzie and other Coast Salish peoples, and recognizing their long‑standing stewardship has become central to how I think about place. Over the past ten years I’ve intentionally learned about their histories, cultural practices, and land‑based knowledge, and I try to honour those connections in my daily life, from how I care for soil and plants in my garden to my choices about invasive species and habitat protection to my own connection to the land, and more importantly in my classroom practice. As a Surrey elementary teacher, I weave local Indigenous perspectives and respect for the land into my pedagogy, teaching students about Coast Salish relationships with place, encouraging outdoor learning, and modelling stewardship that acknowledges and honours traditional custodianship of this territory.

Throughout these generational shifts, invasive and exotic species have been a quiet constant. My grandparents’ Scotland had non‑native agricultural species long established; here in the Lower Mainland, plants like Himalayan blackberry, Scotch broom, and reed‑canary grass have spread across disturbed edges and wetlands, transforming understories and crowding native flora. The bogs, creeks, and remnant wetlands that once supported abundant waterfowl and salmon have been channelized, diked, or replaced with detention ponds and engineered stormwater features. Yet stewardship responses, such as community gardens in my townhouse complex, municipal low‑impact development rules, and regional composting programs, all reflect an emerging ethic to patch ecological function back into the city.

Ethnicity, class, and gender have all shaped how my family related to environment. My grandparents’ working‑class Scottish background and traditional gender roles meant the environment was largely a site of labor and basic provision; emigration offered a route to middle‑class stability and consumption. My parents’ economic stability made suburban nature a source of leisure and child rearing. For me, suburban life has been a negotiation between valuing green spaces and living within an intensifying urban system: I garden, compost, and use a community plot, but I also live with increased density, more paved surfaces, and transit construction.

Looking forward, the relationships I wish to have are intentional and restorative: supporting green infrastructure that mimics natural hydrology, protecting remaining wetland fragments and urban forests, removing invasives, and using community gardens and composting to rebuild soil and biodiversity. My family’s environmental history moved from scarcity to abundance and now to a mediated stewardship where we must actively decide how much nature we retain in the places we call home. That arc, from coal gas and fireplaces to bogs to SkyTrain columns, shows how histories of migration, labor, gender, and class shape not only where we live, but how we care for and imagine the environments we inherit.