Downstream: re-imagining water, a workshop organized by Rita Wong of the the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, opens later this month at Vancouver’s Roundhouse with an evening of performance.

This post was published simultaneously on the NiCHE Otter blog.

The River Isar drains north from Austria, cuts east through Bavaria and bisects Munich before entering the Danube near Straubing. Viewed from a bridge near the Deutsches Museum on a cold October morning, the post-Oktoberfest fall colours are in view, as well as the modest flow of a redesigned river. Over the twentieth century the Isar, like so many European urban rivers, was plumbed and canalized, made to divert sewage and turn hydro-electric turbines. In the last twenty years a portion of this hard-working flow has been returned from a linear canal to the original river bed studded with new gravels and seemingly natural islands. In Munich’s famous Englischer garden the river tumbles through a naturalistic landscape and cascades in a precise arc over a manicured falls. East of the city, the natural river tumbles past another kind of nature, the Isar nuclear plants near Landshut. Along its length, the Isar reminds us of the many designs on rivers, and of the many rivers made by design.

Recently I walked along the Isar in the early jet-lagged mornings while attending a conference on energy continuities and transitions, an event sponsored by the Peter Wall Institute at UBC, the Technical University of Munich, the Deutsches Museum and the Rachel Carson Centre, and organized by Richard Unger. The key question animating the workshop was how have societies reoriented around new energy carriers over time? What made European societies adopt coal, or hydro and abandon peat and wood? And why did patterns and processes of adoption vary over time and space? Given pressing contemporary concerns about how to foster a post-fossil fuel future, the problem of transitions and how they have occurred is of more than historical interest. Although none of the papers offered prescriptive assessments based on historical research, participants did collectively point to the significance of fuel prices, institutional and policy contexts, crises, transportation geography, regulation and consumer preferences as factors shaping transitions and continuities in energy regimes. A summary of the presentations will be published in the Perspectives journal of the Rachel Carson Center.

Having recently been immersed in a project with Stéphane Castonguay on urban rivers and currently conducting research on urban water history in Vancouver, I was struck by some of the commonalities between energy history and urban environmental history. At the heart of both fields is a core interest in large systems that interact over distance and combine a complex assemblage of human, technological and environmental actors. The literature on urbanization shares some broad parallels with the literature on energy transition; both search for drivers, elements of institutional lock-in and path dependence. The differences I identified could hardly be isolated to the two fields but nevertheless seemed significant: urban environmental history seems more connected to place-based inquiry, energy history to model building and quantitative analysis of production and consumption trends at the national scale. Urban environmental historians seek to relate political and social change to the environmental context of urbanization and vice versa, whereas energy historians are less explicitly environmental in their concerns or treat environmental outcomes in a more abstract, less place-specific sense. Some of my observations were no doubt conditioned by the range of participants– a mixture of economic and environmental historians, historians of technology, museum professionals as well as engineers and scientists.

The comparison nevertheless strikes me as evidence of the balkanization that has occurred in environmental history in the last decade. New subfields, water and energy history among them, with a range of networks, commitments and intellectual linkages outside of the field of environmental history, have recast our foundations and vantage points. Probably a good thing? A sign of maturation in the field and the expanding realm of inquiry? Or is the centre of environmental history too weak to hold the centripetal intellectual forces at play? Is the problem, as Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde put it a few years ago, that environmental history lacks a coherent problem at its core, beyond a general interest in human-environmental relationships?[1] Food for thought as I rambled along a re-invented river.

[1] Warde, Paul and Sverker Sörlin, (2007) “The Problem of the Problem of Environmental History: A Re-reading of the Field and its Purpose.” Environmental History, 12 (1). pp. 107-130.

Shannon Stunden Bower has provided a helpful statement on the historical context of the Assiniboine River flood on the NiCHE website.  For those of you who don’t know Shannon’s work, she has written on the historical geography of water in Manitoba.  She authored an interesting piece on the watershed idea in Manitoba in Environmental History in 2007.  Even more relevant to the current situation is her essay in the Journal of Historical Geography published in 2010, entitled “Natural and unnatural complexities: flood control along Manitoba’s Assiniboine River”.

Her new book, to be released in June with UBC Press, is called, Wet Prairie: People, Land and Water in Agricultural Manitoba.

Over the past term, I taught a senior undergraduate seminar on the historical geography of water in Vancouver.  We read widely, carried out  field trips and visited several archives.  The students exceeded my expectations with a series of interesting papers grounded in original research.  For example, Adrian Martynkiw analyzed the development and disappearance of a public drinking fountain in the heart of Gastown, which shed light on the role of water in the early city and of the changing function and politics of space.  He will be leading a tour of the site as part of the ThinkCity series on May 8.  Check it out! 

http://tctoursgassyjackpublicdrinkingfountain.eventbrite.com/

Readers of BC Studies will have seen the recent issue on the Okanagan which contained several essays on water and sustainability themes.  This led me to a virtual museum of Canada exhibit, developed by the Peachland Historical Society, dealing with “A Century of Life by Water”.  Comprised primarily of historical photographs, the exhibit invites visitors to examine how settlers in a relatively dry environment drew from, interacted with and traveled on water.  Some maps and narratives provide context.

Goldstream, located on Vancouver Island, ran neon green yesterday.  Someone added a flourescent dye to the water.  The popular salmon stream, running through a provincial park, became as a result the focus of a small media frenzy (with 75 news sources carrying the story online).  According to CTV a smiliar incident occurred last summer on the Salmo River in interior British Columbia.  Is the dye non-toxic?  What motivated this neon statement?  Is this performance art?  Compare the photo of Goldstream below to Edward Burtynsky’s Nickel Tailings #34.

EH+
Writing the Next Chapter of Canadian Environmental History

NiCHE and the Wilson Institute for Canadian History are hosting “EH+”,
a symposium to evaluate the field of Canadian environmental history
thus far, identify future directions with potential national and
international significance, and facilitate collaboration. The 29-30
April and 1 May 2011 event will consist of 50 participants: graduate
students, junior and senior scholars, as well as governmental and
public history partners.  The event is open to historians and
historical geographers studying Canadian environmental history and
those studying other regions in the world at Canadian Universities.
NiCHE and the Wilson Institute will pay travel and subsistence costs.
The symposium will also have a simultaneous online component, allowing
 those unable to attend to participate. For more information see the
event website: http://niche-canada.org/ehplus

The International Water History Association has recently circulated a call for papers for a meeting in South Africa to be held 5-7 July, 2011.  The conference will be held in Kruger National Park.

As the fall approaches, I thought I’d remind everyone that it isn’t too late for summer reading!  One book I’ve been enjoying is  Christina Palassio and Wayne Reeves’ edited collection, HTO: Toronto’s Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets published by Coach House Press.  Each of the chapters is short,  informative and interesting; the writing is clever and punchy and there are interesting illustrations.  The book bridges recent academic research and that by a host of local experts who have followed water issues in Toronto closely.  Maybe this book might serve as a model for other cities and other issues?

HTO

Banff Park Radio has posted a podcast of an interview I did with Allan Buckingham in the Alpine Author’s series on the River Returns.   Search through their site and you’ll discover a range of interesting material, including ten episodes on water, Streams of Thought.

Bow Falls, Banff National Park//Photo by Ken Thomas, wikimedia commons