Family Environmental History Since the 1920s
July 30, 2023 By: Clarissa Wight
When considering the environments of my grandparents and parents compared to my own, there are many significant differences. With increasing urbanization, lifestyles in relation to the environment change drastically.
My grandma on my mom’s side grew up in Saskatchewan as the youngest of 10 children. She was born in 1921 so the world she grew up in was entirely different than my own. She always talked about how hard her mom worked raising children with no running water. The first things she learned to knit were mittens and socks because she needed them to stay warm. Food and clothing were not readily available to purchase at a store and her father farmed for their food rather than working for wages. To get to school, she had to walk three miles and up hill both ways. Sometimes her and her siblings would take a shortcut through a neighbour’s field but it depended on whether the bull was there or not because he would chase them. Houses were spread out and people worked for their food rather than money. Although she never spoke of it, she would have experienced the hardships of the dust bowl in the 1930s and the economic effects of World War II. As an adult, she worked for her board as a school teacher before quitting and moving to BC. Although teaching was a common career for women at that time, she hated it. In the more urban setting of Vancouver Island, she stacked lumber at a mill to earn a wage in the growing economy until she met her husband during the war. When my grandma moved to Terrace with my grandpa, my grandpa built their home and they had a large garden. My grandma cooked and baked from scratch while her husband worked for wages in the logging industry. Although society was becoming more commodity based, they maintained their connection to the environment through their garden.
Growing up in the 60s, my mom watched her parents garden and how much food they were able to produce to supplement the grocery bill. Although she was raised in a more urban environment, she learned how to garden from her parents. She had an arguably easier childhood than her mom because they lived only a block away from her school. Buying things from the store was a lot more common when it came to clothes and other goods. She worked at a fast-food establishment as a teenager to save up to buy a car. When her and my dad got married, she continued what she had been taught by her mom and established a large garden on their property. Although they both have wage earning jobs, my parents have established many different large berry patches along with fruit trees in their yard. In addition to growing produce, they raise chickens and turkeys for meat. The chicken feed must be purchased as they do not have enough space to allow them to roam free and fend for themselves, but they do they eat grass in the yard and provide a source of nutrients for the soil in addition to the regular compost pile. After butchering, the parts that can not be kept are composted in their yard as well providing nutrients to their gardens.
By watching my parents, I have learned to appreciate the importance of homegrown produce and meat. Not only does it provide a fresh alternative to grocery store produce that has to been transportation from southern BC, it saves a lot of money, especially when considering the price of berries. Knowing where your food comes from in terms of meat is also important when many sources of animal products are not ethically harvested commercially. With that being said, the amount of poultry feed that is required for raising animals makes the process a lot different from that of my grandmother’s childhood. In contrast, gardening in our area, other than it being on a smaller scale, due to the climate of the boreal rainforest, irrigation and water availability is rarely a concern. When the summers are hot, the city bans the use of sprinklers but the annual rainfall is around 1,000 mm. Further, the snowmelt of the surrounding mountains contributes to the rivers and groundwater. This is an important defense against forest fires that are so frequent in the drier parts of the province. We are very fortunate to have the amount of water that we do.