Frameworks for Teaching Environmental History
Claire Campbell
That brings me to the Americans! There’s another reason for not wanting to leave Canada for England. I’d hate to be so far away from the United States. You see, with us it’s second nature, part of our lives, to be near them. … we admire the Americans for the way they shovel up mountains and shift river-courses and throw the map all round the place.
Stephen Leacock, “I’ll Stay in Canada” (1936)
A little while ago, NiCHE editor Dan Macfarlane (evidently still respecting the 140-character limit) tweeted,
Dan was asking, I think, with a view to whether we needed North American environmental history texts; but the field is now robust and varied enough to ask: What (or how, or where) are we teaching? Does it work?
I’ve talked elsewhere about the experience of teaching to American students; it doesn’t make teaching about Canada any easier, but as Stephen Leacock suggests, the necessary continentalism is probably a better way of seeing environmental realities. Plus, there are institutional logistics to contend with. National narratives still predominate in departmental offerings and in student preference (drawn as they are by the familiar; more on that in a minute). In the U.S. (or elsewhere) you’ll probably have to, as other Canadianists in the U.S. have pointed out, “be prepared to place Canada in a wider context in your teaching.”
When I came to Bucknell, for example, I felt some pressure to include the nearby Susquehanna River, as well as some skepticism that any more than one class on Canada could attract students (I know). Meanwhile, an American Environmental History class already on the books was being taught by the much-more-capable Andrew Stuhl, newly hired into Environmental Studies. So I designed a class in North American Environmental History, themed to rivers, which I thought was a terribly wily strategy. I’d supply Canadian examples for each week’s theme (e.g. harvest: the Kaministiquia, the North Saskatchewan; settlement: the St. Lawrence; disaster: the Red River [of the north]); work comparative American content in through readings (in-class prep!); and assign the students American rivers for their research projects. Teach to your strengths, learn a bit as you go, and, you know, fake the rest.
That worked well enough from an operational point of view, except – my hydrological heart is elsewhere. I got much more excited about a seminar on islands and coastlines because I was just starting a new project on the Atlantic coast.
Institutional logistics, intellectual fickleness, and other vicissitudes aside, what are the best ways to organize undergraduate classes in environmental history? Our problem tends to be that there is an environmental read of almost anything. What have we been doing? What else what could we be doing? Do any of these resonate?
- National History Plus. The rise (or fall) of the nation-state through an environmental lens or expressed through environmental chan