For Exercise #3: Connecting Past and Present
December 28, 2025 By: Chelsea Brown
Article One:
Ostroff and MacLellan’s article “How We’re Helping Conserve Polar Bears, the Arctic’s Apex Predator” states that Canada, home to about two-thirds of the world’s polar bears, has a duty to protect them as Arctic ice melts due to climate change (Ostroff and MacLellan). WWF‑Canada conducts research, community monitoring, and conflict reduction, especially in northern towns where bears enter populated areas. They combine Inuit traditional knowledge with scientific research to enhance protection and understanding. The article shows how Canada’s conservation efforts have shifted from excluding Indigenous peoples to involving them. Historically, as Binnema and Niemi note, Indigenous peoples were often excluded from early conservation efforts, such as Banff National Park, which favoured wilderness and tourism over Indigenous stewardship (Binnema and Niemi 724).
Article Two:
The Ontario Nature article highlights Canada’s ongoing struggle to balance conservation with economic growth by showing that the government continues to make budget cuts to conservation funding and favours harmful subsidies, such as “critical-mineral mining, through subsidies, tax credits, and direct investments for private companies rather than funding conservation programs”. This reminded me of what Melosi notes, “Cities have always placed demands on their sites and their hinterlands. Thus, cities replaced the natural environment with something else. That ‘something else’ could be an alternative environmental order, or it could be downright destructive of the natural world (6).” This underscores how urbanization often conflicts with conservation goals, reflecting a historical pattern of prioritizing development over environmental protection.
Works Cited:
Binnema, Theodore (Ted), and Melanie Niemi. “‘Let the Line Be Drawn Now’: Wilderness, Conservation, and the Exclusion of Aboriginal People from Banff National Park in Canada.” Environmental History, 11, no. 4 (2006): 724–750. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3985800.
Melosi, Martin. “Humans, Cities, and Nature: How Do Cities Fit in the Material World?” Journal of Urban History, vol. 36, no. 1, 2009, pp. 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144209349876.
Ostroff, Joshua, and Missy MacLellan. “How We’re Helping Conserve Polar Bears, the Arctic’s Apex Predator.” WWF-Canada, 26 June 2025, https://wwf.ca/stories/how-were-helping-conserve-polar-bears-the-arctics-apex-predator/. Accessed 28 Dec. 2025.
Ontario Nature. “Canada Strong 2025 Budget: Conservation Promises Broken.” Ontario Nature, 2025, https://ontarionature.org/.
I think you made great points and a great argument in both articles!
Great job on the response Chelsea!
I enjoyed reading your example on polar bear conservation. In a different course, I wrote an essay on climate changes impact on polar bears in Canada. It is one of my favorite academic works of my degree so far. Indigenous knowledge alongside scientific research is very useful for the conservation of polar bears.
Hey Chelsea,
I thought your point about the change from excluding Indigenous peoples from conservation to actually including Indigenous knowledge was really interesting. The polar bear example shows how much conservation has changed from what Binnema and Niemi describe with Banff, where Indigenous peoples were removed even though they had lived with and managed those environments long before the park existed. I also liked your second point about the conflict between conservation and economic development because it seems like this is still one of the biggest problems with environmental protection today. Governments can make commitments to conservation, but those commitments become much more complicated when protecting the environment conflicts with mining, development, or other economic interests.
Please use this reply and not my first one!
Hey Chelsea,
I thought your comparison between the use of Inuit traditional knowledge in polar bear conservation today and the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from Banff in the past was really interesting. It shows how approaches to conservation have changed and how Indigenous knowledge is now being recognized as something that can contribute to protecting wildlife rather than being seen as conflicting with conservation. I think this also raises the question of who gets to decide what conservation should actually look like.
I also liked your second point about the conflict between conservation and economic development because it seems like this is still one of the biggest challenges with environmental protection today. Governments can make commitments to conservation, but those commitments become much more complicated when protecting the environment conflicts with mining, development, or other economic interests. Your two examples show that conservation is not just about protecting nature, but also involves political, economic, and social decisions.