Connecting Past and Present
August 12, 2026 By: Rhys Parry
Media Item 1: Parks Movement
I found it interesting that Canada and B.C. are increasingly working with First Nations to create and manage protected areas. This seems very different from what Binnema and Niemi describe at Banff, where Indigenous peoples were excluded from the park partly because of conservation, tourism, sport hunting, and assimilation. It also connects to Cronon’s argument that what we think of as untouched “wilderness” is actually shaped by human ideas and history. To me, Indigenous-led protected areas challenge the older idea that protecting nature requires separating people from the land.
Media Item 2: Urbanization
A recent B.C. announcement about expanding housing and public transit made me think about how cities are constantly changing their relationship with the environment. The federal and provincial governments are planning major investments in housing, infrastructure, and transit, including $2.5 billion over ten years for public transit projects. Steinberg shows that earlier urban changes such as sewers and new transportation systems solved certain problems but also created new environmental consequences and separated cities from ecological systems that had previously supported them. It made me think that today’s push toward denser housing and public transit is another stage in that same history, where cities are trying to solve problems created partly by earlier patterns of urban growth.