Thinking Like A Microbe: Borders and Environmental History

7KLQNLQJOLNHD0LFUREH%RUGHUVDQG(QYLURQPHQWDO +LVWRU\ 1DQF\/DQJVWRQ The Canadian Historical Review, Volume 95, Number 4, December 2014, pp. 592-603 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI7RURQWR3UHVV For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/can/summary/v095/95.4.langston.html Access provided by Michigan Technological Universisty (2 Nov 2015 16:15 GMT) The Landscape of Canadian Environmental History: Canada and the United States Thinking like a Microbe: Borders and Environmental History NANCY LANGSTON Historian John McNeill notes that American environmental history ‘‘looks rather like some American TV weather maps, where everything, including advancing thunderstorms and high pressure cells, stops at the border.’’1 While American historians often ignore their northern political border, Canadian historians tend to pay close attention to the political importance of that same border. But what about other borders, particularly the boundaries between sexes, species, and ecosystems? In this exploration of the meanings of borders for Canadian and American environmental historians, I hope to complicate, without negating, the privileged role of national borders in historical studies by focusing on the ways that non-human life crosses boundaries. Environmental historians urge us to take nature seriously – not just as a source of resources for national development, but as a dynamic actor in the narrative. Yet, on both sides of the border, environmental historians typically focus on humans, giving much less agency to nonhumans. This is hardly surprising, because environmental history, both American and Canadian, has roots in political, administrative, and intellectual studies of resource development and environmental concern. As Alan MacEachern points out, long before American environmental history became fashionable, Canadian historians wrote about the ways natural resources influenced national development.2 In the United States, Frederick Jackson Turner influenced generations of resource historians. But, these histories rarely examined what Richard White calls the ‘‘reciprocal influences’’ between cultures and the natural world.3 1 2 3 J.R. McNeill, ‘‘Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,’’ History and Theory 42, no. 4 (2003): 19. Alan MacEachern, ‘‘Voices Crying in the Wilderness: Recent Works in Canadian Environmental History,’’ Acadiensis 31, no. 2 (2002): 215. Richard White, ‘‘Native Americans and the Environment,’’ in Scholars and the Indian Experience, ed. W.R. Swagerty (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 197. The Canadian Historical Review 95, 4, December 2014 6 University of Toronto Press doi: 10.3138/chr.95.4.hp06 The Landscape of Canadian Environmental History 593 In the 1980s, American environmental historians challenged a core assumption of history: that humans were necessarily at the centre of the story. In adopting what the American wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold had called an ‘‘ecological interpretation of history,’’ they followed Leopold’s suggestion to ‘‘think like a mountain.’’ In the 1940s, Leopold had criticized land managers who valued species and ecosystems only as resources for human use, believing that historians and managers alike needed to displace their gaze from the human and take a holistic, ecological perspective on history. ‘‘Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land,’’ Leopold wrote, concluding that ecological processes often ‘‘steered the course of history.’’4 American environmental historians of the 1980s and 1990s avoided the environmental determinism implicit in Leopold’s argument, but they agreed that biotic processes were important agents of change. Like many environmental historians who followed him, Leopold valued pre-European settlement landscapes over the agricultural and industrial landscapes that followed. Because post-contact ecosystems were often simplified, Leopold felt they violated the central tenet of his land ethic: ‘‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’’5 But, by the 1990s, ecologists and environmental historians agreed that the balance of nature was a myth, complex ecosystems were no more stable than simplified ecosystems, and, in the tumultuous course of ecological history, unruly change was common. As American environmental historians became more aware of what William Cronon termed in 1995 the ‘‘trouble with wilderness,’’ scholars began to shift their gaze away from an imagined pristine nature, focusing instead upon race, class, and culture in environmental history.6 These studies, however, often ignored Leopold’s core insight that the rest of nature matters. Instead of exploring what Arthur McEvoy called ‘‘the mutually constitutive nature of ecology, production, and cognition,’’ they focused on people alone.7 4 5 6 7 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 205 and 207. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 224. William Cronon, ‘‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,’’ in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1996), 69–90. Arthur McEvoy, ‘‘Toward an Interactive Theory of Nature and Culture: Ecology, Production, and Cognition in the California Fishing Industry,’’ Environmental 594 The Canadian Historical Review How do we take nature seriously, without making normative assumptions about pristine nature, and without ignoring social, political, and cultural complexity? Thinking like a microbe, not a mountain, might be one path. Why a microbe? While it is easy for people to project ideals of wilderness onto mountains, microbes do not lead us into the ‘‘pristine nature’’ trap. Few people have any illusion that microbes once enjoyed a balanced past that we can somehow recapture. A focus on microbes reminds us that non-human nature needs to be part of our histories. Even if what we care about is race, class, and gender, to understand those human stories, we need to pay attention to the nonhuman. Microbes also force us to attend to the nature of borders. Like people, microbes are happy to cross political borders. Yet borders matter, for they mediate human microbial encounters. A microbe that could kill an uninsured American citizen waiting for Obamacare might only land a Canadian in hospital. Microbes cross scales and they cross disciplines. History, geography, science studies, medicine, anthropology – each offers useful insights, but no single discipline can lay exclusive claim to the microbial truth. Impossible as it might be to think like a microbe, it is worth trying, lest we forget the key insight of environmental history: nature is not ‘‘merely the stage upon which human history has played out’’ but an active agent of history, ‘‘integral to the drama.’’8 health borders Following Alfred Crosby’s pivotal work on microbes, environmental histories of health and disease at the border are rich in insights. Across North America, epidemics devastated Native populations at contact. In Canada, Paul Hackett and Cole Harris have explored how diseases, environments, and Indigenous societies transformed each other. Harris points out that ‘‘epidemics threatened knowledge as well as bodies, particularly the stories that situated people in the world. Sudden high mortality rates reduced the store of knowledge 8 Review 11, no. 4 (1987): 289–305, 300–1. See, for example, Virginia Scharff ’s excellent edited volume, Seeing Nature through Gender (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003). Class and gender are carefully detailed, but in most of the analyses, the agency of non-humans vanishes. Libby Robin and Jane Carruthers, ‘‘Introduction: Environmental History and the History of Biology,’’ Journal of the History of Biology 44 (2011): 1–14. The Landscape of Canadian Environmental History 595 and, if the storytellers died, detached survivors from their pasts.’’9 Adam Hodge’s recent research considers how climate, and the movements of people and bison across national boundaries, influenced smallpox epidemics between 1780 and 1782. Smallpox surfaced on both sides of the national border, but the effects on Indigenous groups differed because political boundaries affected access to food, which affected survival.10 Liza Piper and John Sandlos situate medical epidemiology in a geographic context in ‘‘A Broken Frontier,’’ where they ask why acute diseases such as influenza had such different effects than chronic diseases such as tuberculosis and syphilis.11 Loss of land tenure rights led to malnutrition, which increased vulnerability to disease. Like microbes, many pollutants ignore national borders, yet the effects of exposure are still mediated by those borders. Unlike microbes, pollutants are not alive, and yet they still force us to look carefully at questions of human agency and power. Mercury contamination that devastates Canadians may come from local sources (such as the chemical plant that poisoned Grassy Narrows in Ontario), or they may come from much further afield, from sources such as industries in Chicago and Detroit. Michael Egan’s work considers mercury contamination and First Nations communities in an historical and transnational context.12 Arn Keeling and John Sandlos’s research on the history of abandoned mines offers innovative ways of considering indigenous health, toxicity, resource mobilization, and historical conceptions of justice. Keeling and Sandlos show that the sacrificial landscapes of modern mining and energy production are sited not just on chopped-off mountaintops, but also within the bodies of those exposed: caribou, birds, fish, and people.13 9 10 11 12 13 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900– 1900, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Paul Hackett, ‘‘Averting Disaster: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Smallpox in Western Canada during the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,’’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78 (2004): 575–609; Cole Harris, ‘‘Social Power and Cultural Change in Pre-colonial British Columbia,’’ BC Studies 115, no. 6 (1997): 68. Adam Hodge, ‘‘In Want of Nourishment for to Keep Them Alive: Climate Fluctuations, Bison Scarcity, and the Smallpox Epidemic of 1780–82 on the Northern Great Plains,’’ Environmental History 17, no. 2 (2012): 365–403. Liza Piper and John Sandlos, ‘‘A Broken Frontier: Ecological Imperialism in the Canadian North,’’ Environmental History 12, no. 4 (2007): 759–95. Michael Egan, ‘‘The Relevance of History to Environmental Justice,’’ Environmental Justice 2, no. 2 (2009): 59–61. Arn Keeling and John Sandlos, ‘‘Environmental Justice Goes Underground? Historical Notes from Canada’s Northern Mining Frontier,’’ Environmental Justice 2, no. 3 (2009): 117–25. 596 The Canadian Historical Review Rather than being passive victims, Indigenous communities have resisted pollution and its social consequences. Medical anthropologists can help environmental historians understand how people shaped their own health. The historian Mary-Ellen Kelm uses postcolonial theories to explore the ways that Canadian Indian policy pathologized Aboriginal bodies, showing that ‘‘Aboriginal people were able to resist and alter these forces in order to preserve their own cultural understanding of their bodies, disease, and medicine.’’14 Urban communities in Canada are too often overlooked in environmental health histories. Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes is an exception. She combines insights from cultural studies with a firm material grounding in urban exposures. Sensing Changes points the way toward a more culturally informed, yet materially grounded environmental history on both sides of the border.15 The legal sociologist Dayna Nadine Scott explores the ways that tensions between international and national laws have shaped Canadian responses to the historic contamination of the Aamjiwnaang band in the border town of Sarnia. Scott’s work crosses scales, exploring how specialized scientific expertise has claimed global standing, challenging ‘‘locally situated ways of knowing and modes of governing.’’16 borders and power Mining and energy developments offer opportunities to compare the roles of national identity, power, and resource development. While American and Canadian historians have been fascinated by the ways that resource exploitation served the interests of state power, Canadian environmental historians have used the insights of historical geography to ask how those processes transformed local places. In particular, Liza Piper’s The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada has shed new light on Innis’s ideas about staples. She examines fishing, transportation, mining, and energy development in the North, tracing how local places became ‘‘natural resources’’ to be managed and mined efficiently. She also takes nature seriously, examining how the particularities of a cold northern place disrupt the resource dreams of the 14 15 16 Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900–50 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1999). Joy Parr, Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953– 2003 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2009). Dayna Nadine Scott, ‘‘‘Gender-Benders’: Sex and Law in the Constitution of Polluted Bodies,’’ Feminist Legal Studies 18, no. 3 (2009): 241–65. The Landscape of Canadian Environmental History 597 state. In paying close attention to environmental, political, and social change, Piper complicates the standard histories of mining without losing sight of the importance of place.17 The United States and Canada have had different conceptions of their political roles on the global stage, so while both nations have mobilized natural resources in the name of national power, we might expect the outcomes to differ. Comparing how the two nations took different environmental paths in border ecosystems can help scholars untangle the reciprocal relations between political and natural processes. Tina Loo argues in her article ‘‘People in the Way’’ that Canada’s postSecond World War history was marked by high-modernist energy dreams shared by Americans. British Columbia’s W.A.C. Bennett and the American Floyd Dominy could have been twins.18 However, if hydropower development was partly about the development of national power, would we not expect Canada and the us, with their very different post-war international roles, to take different paths in hydro development? Loo shows that, for Canadians engaged in treaty-making processes with the us over shared water resources, frustrations over thwarted political power within the nation shaped Canadian responses to American policies. Similarly, in Fish versus Power, Matthew Evenden’s transnational perspectives help us understand the different hydropower histories of the Columbia and Fraser Rivers. Both rivers run through the Pacific Northwest; both were home to massive runs of anadromous salmon; both had vocal advocates for fish and for hydropower development. But the Fraser River, which lies mostly within Canada, was ultimately protected from dams on its mainstem, while the Columbia was not. The Fraser’s protection came about not because Canadians valued fish more than Americans did, but because the two nations had agreed to build hydropower dams on the Columbia, thus freeing Canada to pursue other national goals on a river that lay largely within its national borders.19 17 18 19 Liza Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2009). Tina Loo, ‘‘People in the Way: Modernity, Environment, and Society on the Arrow Lakes,’’ BC Studies 142, no. 3 (2004): 161–96. Matthew Evenden, Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 598 The Canadian Historical Review borders between sexes Environmental historians in both Canada and the United States have been slow to explore the borders between sexes.20 Jocelyn Thorpe’s Temagami’s Tangled Wild, however, calls upon a rich literature in gender and colonial studies to make its case that gender matters for environmental change. More environmental historians would benefit from paying attention to this literature. For example, decisions about who had historic usufruct rights – and therefore rights that continue into the future – are often blind to the ways that women’s work engaged with forests and wildlife. Because the work of women was rendered invisible, as Thorpe’s study argues, tribes lost their rights to future forests.21 In urban studies, Sherry Olson has shown in studies of infant survival in Montreal and Baltimore that ‘‘local environmental impacts were gendered, racialized, and class-structured.’’22 Decisions about the siting of certain industrial and toxic sites often depend on race and class, as we learn from environmental justice studies. Chemical plants, landfills, and incinerators tend to get put in sacrifice zones, such as Sarnia, Ontario, that often lie close to First Nations reserves. While the decisions themselves were probably not gendered, the impacts of these site decisions often differ by sex. Toxic chemicals are often hormonal in their actions, and those hormonal effects differ by sex. Gender matters in fisheries research as well. Barbara Neis shows that assumptions about gender structured modern policy decisions in the Newfoundland fishing industry, excluding women from access to fish.23 Similarly, Sean Cadigan notes, ‘‘While women’s and children’s labour was essential to the pre-industrial household fisheries, men controlled access to most resources, and the state supported male authority over the household. Although the development of industrial fishing in the 1950s provided new economic opportunities for women outside the household in fish processing plants, state policies ensured 20 21 22 23 Exceptions include the essays in Scharff, ed., Seeing Nature Through Gender, and Nancy Langston, Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Jocelyn Thorpe, Temagami’s Tangled Wild: Race, Gender, and the Making of Canadian Nature (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2012). Sherry Olson, ‘‘Downwind, Downstream, Downtown: The Environmental Legacy in Baltimore and Montreal,’’ Environmental History 12, no. 4 (2007): 44. Barbara Neis, ‘‘Familial and Social Patriarchy in the Newfoundland Fishing Industry,’’ in Fishing Places, Fishing People: Traditions and Issues in Canadian Small-scale Fisheries, ed. Dianne Newell and Rosemary E. Ommer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 32–54. The Landscape of Canadian Environmental History 599 that they would still be subordinate. . . . The net effect was that women served as a cheap labour supply for the processing industry under the assumption that their primary role was as household caregivers.’’24 Resource managers, like historical ecologists, increasingly agree that it is important to pay attention to local knowledge. But whose knowledge? Different kinds of work done by men and women led to different kinds of local knowledge. Women cannery workers had particular knowledge of changing fish size and conditions, which they gained from handling those fish. But, that ecological knowledge was invisible to historical ecologists, who rarely thought to ask women about their work. borders between species Environmental historians have much to offer in exploring the borders between species. What is wild and what is domesticated? What is human and what is non-human? The answers change with history, nation, and culture. Wildlife historians have rich opportunities to engage with environmental humanities and animal studies, and so to challenge our assumptions about the lines between wildlife and human, hunter and hunted. Tina Loo points the way in her interweaving of cultural and material histories of wildlife, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century.25 Like some us historians, Canadian historians once told heroic tales of brave bureaucrats saving threatened wildlife.26 More recently, historians of both nations have shown that wildlife management often served as the hegemonic tool of a state intent on dispossessing local peoples.27 In Hunters on the Margin, John Sandlos explores the ways that wildlife managers mobilized state power to restrict Aboriginal rights.28 But who defined the borders between wild and domestic? 24 25 26 27 28 Sean Cadigan, ‘‘Whose Fish? Science, Ecosystems and Ethics in Fisheries Management Literature Since 1992,’’ Acadiensis 31, no. 1 (2001): 171–95, 184–5. Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2006). Janet Foster, Working for Wildlife: The Beginning of Preservation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). Louis Warren, The Hunter’s Game (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); Loo, States of Nature. John Sandlos, Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2007). 600 The Canadian Historical Review Reindeer, for example, may be either wild or semi-domesticated, and efforts to contain the animals into one category or the other often failed. When reindeer and their Sámi herders were introduced into the Canadian north, in hopes of giving Inuit communities jobs in ranching, the semi-domestic reindeer crossed the borders into wildness, running off with migrating caribou herds. The Canadian experience with reindeer is quite different than the American, Russian, and Sámi experiences, but it is not clear why. Comparative work on state power and reindeer peoples across the Circumpolar North would be fruitful.29 Historical studies of fisheries have been particularly rich along the border. The American historian Margaret Bogue’s study Fishing the Great Lakes compares American and Canadian attempts to regulate overfishing.30 Effective regulation was elusive because a single corporation, Booth Fisheries Company, managed to persuade representatives of provinces and states that the company’s interests were the region’s interests. ‘‘The point,’’ Joseph Taylor notes of Bogue’s book, ‘‘is not that state power vanished but that corporate power created regulatory coherence.’’31 A number of Canadian fisheries scholars have asked how scientific understandings of fish have collided with local knowledge. Sean Cadigan’s research on the ‘‘moral economy of the commons’’ shows that fishers’ local knowledge in Newfoundland was affected by economic and social context, as well as by gender. Pre-industrial fishing was not a paradise of equity and access, but neither did settlers regard the landscape around them as little more than a collection of resources to be commodified.32 Dean Bavington’s Managed Annihilation describes what happens when fisheries models collide with local knowledge of cod. All too often, local fishers insisted that scientific models were overestimating fish populations and encouraging resource depletion, but modellers found it difficult to believe such anecdotal evidence.33 R. Davis and K. Kornseki take the story told in Bavington’s work a 29 30 31 32 33 Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006); Nancy Langston, ‘‘Mining the Boreal North,’’ American Scientist 101 (2013): 98–102. Margaret Beattie Bogue, Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783– 1933 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). Joseph E. Taylor, ‘‘Boundary Terminology,’’ Environmental History 13, no. 3 (2008): 454–81. Sean Cadigan, ‘‘The Moral Economy of the Commons: Ecology and Equity in the Newfoundland Cod Fishery, 1815–1855,’’ Labour/Le Travail 43 (1999): 9–42. Dean Bavington, Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2010). The Landscape of Canadian Environmental History 601 step further: what happens after the cod fishery is destroyed? Snow crab populations boomed when cod collapsed, which gave fisheries managers the opportunity to create what they ‘‘thought a modern fishery should be.’’ They note, ‘‘Government planners envisioned the snow crab fishery as a wholly ‘modern’ sector – one unencumbered by the bitter politics that long plagued the cod fishery and guided by scientific stock assessment techniques – that could bolster Canada’s growing fleet of longliners and make them competitive players in the international crab market.’’34 Historian of science Jennifer Hubbard examines how British, Canadian, and American fisheries scientists were quick to contest each other’s arguments, while ignoring the ecosystems themselves. ‘‘Through technology, ocean spaces had become extensions of the terrestrial spaces dominated by industrialized nation-states and their Cold War policies to feed the world and develop Third World client states. Yet scientists ignored the spaces fish lived in, or distances traveled by fishers, to reach fish stocks.’’35 Fisheries scientists did not always ignore local ecosystems or knowledge, however. Matthew Evenden’s ‘‘Locating Science, Locating Salmon’’ shows that Canadian scientists did collect local knowledge, leading scientists to reassess their core ideas and challenge management directives coming from the capital.36 Similarly, Arn Keeling’s study of oceanography on the West coast reveals scientists who attended to local conditions. Keeling calls for more attention to the sites of scientific knowledge construction in fisheries research, suggesting that environmental historians on both sides of the border would benefit from closer engagement with science studies and history of science.37 pathways for future research It is one thing to say that environmental historians believe nature and culture are mutually constitutive; it is another thing to do research 34 35 36 37 R. Davis and K. Korneski, ‘‘In a Pinch: Snow Crab and the Politics of Crisis in Newfoundland,’’ Labour/Le Travail 69 (2012): 119–46. Jennifer Hubbard, ‘‘Mediating the North Atlantic Environment: Fisheries Biologists, Technology, and Marine Spaces,’’ Environmental History 18, no. 1 (2013): 88–100, 96. Matthew Evenden, ‘‘Locating Science, Locating Salmon,’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 3 (2004): 355–72. Arn Keeling, ‘‘Charting Marine Pollution Science: Oceanography on Canada’s Pacific Coast, 1938–1970,’’ Journal of Historical Geography 33, no. 2 (2007): 403– 28. 602 The Canadian Historical Review that actually integrates the two. How do we think like a microbe – or a beaver, fish, caribou, or glacier? We can never step completely out of our own particular human, cultural perspective, but the effort is still worth making. Canada has a strong literary tradition of writers, from Ernest Thompson Seton to Margaret Atwood to Yann Martel, who have imagined themselves into the perspectives of other cultures and other creatures. Historians do not have the imaginative freedoms of fiction writers, but we can learn from novelists’ efforts to imagine other ways of seeing. More engagement with the environmental humanities, which try to gaze on the agency and interconnectivity of all things, will help. As American environmental historian Paul Sutter reminds us, environmental historians should pay attention to state power without assuming that national boundaries are the most important ones for our research.38 Canada and the us have many similarities, but the differences imposed by national borders and national priorities on a global stage need interrogating. In particular, environmental history is ripe for more studies on global corporate power and the ways it affects both political and environmental systems. What moves easily across borders? What gets stuck? The fact that fish swim through complicated political waters makes them a topic ripe for comparison, as Canadian historians such as Jennifer Hubbard and Dean Bavington have shown. Conversely, it is the fact that birds fly over borders that also makes them ripe for comparison, as American historian Robert Wilson’s work on migratory birds makes clear.39 Consider migrations across different spatial and temporal scales: migrations of microbes and migrations of workers; slow migrations of entire ecosystems and fast migrations of ideas. People complicate cross-border movements by transplanting species – intentionally or not – to new places, where they endlessly complicate law and policy. The history of attempts to control the movement of so-called alien and invasive species reveals as much about national anxieties about migratory people as it does about ecosystem health.40 The American Great Lakes scholars Lynne Heasley and James Feldman suggest that a focus on the Great Lakes ‘‘can unite Canadian and U.S. scholars in a 38 39 40 Paul Sutter, ‘‘When Environmental Traditions Collide: Ramachandra Guha’s The Unquiet Woods and U.S. Environmental History,’’ Environmental History 14, no. 3 (2009): 543–50. R.M. Wilson, Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010). Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011). The Landscape of Canadian Environmental History 603 shared transnational project.’’41 By looking closely at a single, interconnected ecosystem that crosses national borders, we can begin to understand the varied contributions of human and non-human processes to the making of a place. Environmental history on both sides of the border can remind us that there is nothing natural or inevitable about how we interact with nature. For example, much of Canadian and American environmental history has focused on resource development, but calling something a resource pulls it out of its intricate social and ecological relationships and isolates it in our gaze. Yet those isolations are illusions. We still live in intimate relationships with larger landscapes, even if we think technology isolates us from ecological constraints. When minerals are dug from the ground, when trees are cut in the forest, when flood waters are diverted, when rivers are dammed, when animals are changed from fellow creatures to livestock resources, and when urban planners isolate communities, we set into motion subtle processes of transformation that have legacies far into the future. These legacies have evolved differently across the us-Canada border, making the processes that created them easier to see. nancy langston is professor of environmental history in the Great Lakes Research Center and Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University. nancy langston est professeure d’histoire environnementale au Great Lakes Research Center et Department of Social Sciences à la Michigan Technological University. 41 Lynne Heasley and James Feldman, ‘‘Re-centering North American Environmental History: Pedagogy and Scholarship in the Great Lakes Region,’’ Environmental History 12 (2007): 949–56.