This photograph of the central spill and fishway of the Rock Island dam in 1940 shows the first mainstem dam on the Columbia River. It is just one of a group of photographs recently released by the Oregon State University Archives on flickr. This release is the tip of the ice(water?)berg. Have a look at the Western Waters Digital Collection to see how one archives is making its unique collection available for public view.

On a smaller scale, Beau Freeman, a Senior Water Resources Engineer at California Polytechnic State University has created a website displaying his private collection of irrigation postcards, irrigation technik. I happened upon several that depicted the CPR projects in southern Alberta.

Environmental historians interested in the possibilities of new media for reaching public audiences might wish to visit Joy Parr’s megaprojects website, which contains several new folders of material, prepared by Jon Van der Veen on the Arrow Lakes. This work will accompany Parr’s forthcoming book, Sensing Changes: Technology, Environment and the Everyday, to be released by UBC Press in December. A different attempt to present the history of dams in the region may be found in a virtual museum of Canada exhibit, The Balance of Power: Hydroelectric Development in Southeastern British Columbia.

Columbia River near Revelstoke, 2005/ Photo by Alan Silvester on wikimedia commons

Waterlife, a new film about water in the Great Lakes will screen this Friday in Vancouver (details below).  The film has received a strong reception to date, and this screening will include a talk-back session led by Fin Donnelly of the Rivershed Society of BC.
**Recommended.

The film is produced by Primitive Entertainment (Kristina McLaughlin and
Michael McMahon) in co-production with the National Film Board of Canada
(Gerry Flahive). One of its executive producers is Mark Achbar (The
Corporation). Waterlife is being released in Canada by Mongrel Media.

Opens Friday, July 17 at Tinseltown
12:45PM 4:25PM 7:35PM 10:10PM daily

Special Event – July 18:
Join Fin Donnelly of the Rivershed Society of BC and a representative from
the Council of Canadians for a discussion of local water issues following
the 12:45PM screening on Saturday, July 18th at Tinseltown.

www.ourwaterlife.com

The future of BC energy policy turns to a considerable extent on the possibility of further hydro development on the Peace River at Site C.  For decades Site C has been a controversial flash point amongst Peace Valley residents, environmentalists and politicians.  In November 2008, the Canadian Water History Project organized a special workshop on the proposed dam, its history and its possible effects.  The meeting brought together representatives of First Nations communities and environmental organizations in the Peace region with academics from BC and elsewhere who study electricity, water history and public policy.  At the end of the meeting, participants were invited to submit op-eds for a special forum section of the journal, BC Studies.  That forum has just been published in the Spring 2009 issue.  Although only the paper version is available, electronic versions of the op-eds should soon be made available on the BC Studies website.

It’s difficult to teach students about water history, especially when they are unfamiliar with the rivers or lakes you discuss. One way to get over this problem is to bring the students and the rivers together. This past week I co-led a human geography field school on the environmental history of the Bow River with my colleague, Graeme Wynn. We were based in the Barrier Lake field station in the Kananaskis Valley and visited sites from Banff National Park through Canmore, Calgary and the lower basin. We examined river parks and irrigation canals, flood structures and hydro dams. There seems to be no better way to explain the cause and effect relationships of different water infrastructure than to visit them, and just as importantly, talk to people whose lives they touch. A field course takes a lot of work to organize but I recommend the model. I learned a great deal from my students’ questions and they gained a new appreciation of the difficulties of living with a river.

Here is a photo of the Bassano Dam taken by one of the students, Danny Wong.

Have you heard? A new journal on Water History will be published by Springer and co-edited by Maurits W. Ertsen, Department of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Heather J. Hoag, History, University of San Francisco, and Johann Tempelhoff, School of Basic Sciences Faculty, North West University, SOuth Africa.  The editors are now accepting submissions.  Let’s wish this venture well!

The programs have now been released for two upcoming conferences that will contain substantial water history contributions.  Our Living Rivers Conference in Ottawa, June 14-17, sponsored by Heritage Rivers Canada contains many papers bridging public history, academic work and government research.  The World Congress of Environmental History in Copenhagen, August 4-8, to which the International Water History Association, the Network in Canadian History and Environment and the American Society for Environmental History will all contribute as participating organizations, will contain a range of water history papers from around the world.

Humanistic scholars who usually work in silos might find interesting and challenging a new and wide-ranging collaborative research program, DEHI/Danube Environmental History Initiative.   Transnational in design, and drawing together research teams from across Europe, the project seeks to analyze the environmental history of a large and complex social and natural system.  The associated research team has already collaborated to design the research plan, generate funding from EU sources and begun to publish early results.  It will be interesting to see how the project develops.

The Danube at Bratislava, Slovakia  (Wikimedia Commons)

Sometimes the worlds of music, policy and water history collide. A week ago, a friend forwarded me the link to a new song/ video montage by the Kingston, Ontario-based band, The Gertrudes, entitled “Turn out the Lights aka the River Song”. Against three juxtaposed streaming videos showing historic footage of rivers, everyday scenes of ‘Citizen M’ and dam-building, the band’s lyrics provoke reflection about the connections between consumption, river development and memory. I watched and listened to this song/video montage on the same day as I read an interesting piece in the New York Times, “Utilities Turn Their Customers Green, With Envy” by Leslie Kaufman (Jan 30, 2009). Kaufman discussed the attempts by California utilities to inspire conservation initiatives amongst customers by presenting them with reports which explain how their consumption patterns compare with those of neighbours. High demand customers receive a frown on their bills. Low demand customers receive a happy face. Before you smirk, pilot studies suggest that this approach—pitting neighbour against neighbour in a conservation competition– works better to reduce demand than earnest requests to conserve for the environment’s sake, or to save on the family budget. I was reminded of the conservation programs of Ontario Hydro during the Second World War that played on the guilt of (primarily female) consumers to conserve for the sake of the country. In one such advertisement, a river and generation station appear in the far distance as the SOURCE while a female hand on a switch appears in the foreground as the consumer’s DEMAND. Wartime, of course, exerted a different kind of neighbourly peer-pressure and surveillance.

From Hydro News 30(5) 1943