Of all the potential topics in North American water history, a broadly conceived study of the Great Lakes is well overdue. Although there are now several books analyzing contemporary water policy and pollution in the region, few have ventured to consider the changing patterns of human-lake interaction over the long term. On January 22, 2009, Lynne Heasley, an associate professor of environmental studies and history at Western Michigan University, reported on an emerging research program on the environmental history of the Great Lakes region to the Nature/History/Society group at the University of British Columbia. Her study is ambitiously transnational in scope and design. Although she remains in the preliminary stages of this work, interested readers should seek out her article, “Recentering North American Environmental History” co-authored with James Feldman, published in Environmental History in 2007.

The view from a NASA satellite (2004)

[Provided by the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE, Wikimedia Commons]

Several people have asked me recently whether there are international organizations like the Canadian Water History Project.  I can recommend two.  First, the International Water History Association has operated for several years and sponsors annual or bi-annual meetings.  It is a big tent organization bringing together engineers, historians, geographers and biologists, amongst others.  I have attended two meetings of the association, one in Bergen, Norway in 2001, and another in Paris, hosted by UNESCO in 2005.  The association will be meeting as part of the World Congress of Environmental History in Copenhagen this August.  Another link to international scholars is provided by the H-Water, an email network that provides bulletins and news about water history.  If there are other national water history associations that I don’t know about, please contact me.

In the fall term, 2008, I conducted an experiment with my fourth-year seminar. We set out to develop, over one term, a class website on an important topic, bridging water history and contemporary energy policy: the proposed Site C dam on the Peace River. I was lucky that a lively group of students joined the class, that some of them were already skilled in web design and that they all put a lot of work into the task. The result, posted yesterday, is a website on Site C which seeks to place the proposal in historical perspective and offer insights and information for the general public. Well done Geog 411 students! Please visit the website at:
http://www.geog.ubc.ca/courses/projects/geog411/2008/sitec/