The Military and the Environment

I maintain an active research interest in the impacts of military activities on the natural and urban environments.

Matthew Farish (Geography, University of Toronto) and I have written an article entitled "The Cold War on Canadian Soil: An Environmental History" which appeared in Environmental History in late 2007. Other ongoing projects include the political and environmental effects of military base closures in Canada, and Cold War military geographies more generally.

This research area also intersects with a pilot project that I am pursuing with Dr. Farish on Modernization and Social Science in the Cold War Canadian North. This project will build a research program and develop new scholarly perspectives on statedriven modernization in the Canadian north during the Cold War period. While government interest in the Arctic region increased substantially during the Second World War, more permanent and farreaching attempts to alter and improve northern landscapes and lives were characteristic of the next two decades. From the construction of Inuvik and Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit), two new towns designed as centres of government in the western and eastern Arctic respectively, to the extraordinary Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line that stretched between and beyond these sites, ambitious modernization projects – all tied in some respect to the nascent Cold War – affected nearly every resident of Canada’s northern territories. The social and environmental consequences of such initiatives continue to resonate in many communities, and these consequences have been diagnosed by a number of scholars. But this work
largely ignores the crucial early role played by social scientists sent north to study the process by which an Arctic region was fully enrolled into the Canadian state. The relationships established between these social scientists and their northern contacts indicate the importance of local perspectives on the regional, national, and international ambitions of modernization and its advocates.

The aims of this research project are threefold:

1. To develop an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the history and impacts of state-driven
modernization in the Canadian north, drawing from historical geography, environmental
history, aboriginal studies, anthropology, political science, and urban planning.
2. To identify and survey the primary sources on this topic in Ottawa and three northern
communities (Inuvik, Iqaluit, and Cambridge Bay).
3. To initiate contacts with community organizations in each location, as well as with social
scientists assigned to the Arctic during the 1950s and 1960s, for the purposes of collecting and
combining site-specific oral histories.

New conceptual and methodological approaches are required to adequately fulfill these goals. As a collaboration between a geographer and a historian, with assistance from a public historian skilled in the techniques of oral history, our project is fundamentally interdisciplinary. The broad ambit of modernization will encourage and demand bridges to a number of additional fields not limited to geography and history. Our attention to the limits of modernization and to the contrasting relevance of local, situated knowledge will provide important insights for research into Canada’s northern landscapes.

A site-based study of northern modernization is necessarily dependent on the accounts of individuals and organizations caught up in the transformation of cultural and natural landscapes. We have received a 2009-10 SSHRC Research Development Initiative grant to develop the partnerships that are essential to sensitive and sustainable northern inquiry. Over the year-long term of the grant, we plan to combine archival reconnaissance, field visits, and the cultivation of community contacts to develop a more substantial grant proposal for a study on Arctic modernization and militarization from Alaska to Greenland.

A careful study of past attempts to ‘improve’ and shape northern Canadian landscapes, and the limits and consequences of these initiatives, is crucial to understanding contemporary priorities in the region. We plan to place a narrative, crafted from archival and published sources produced by southern Canadian public servants and academics, in contact with the oral histories and writings of northerners. This requires a process of constructive dialogue – the goal of this grant and our larger research project – which will not only result in a much richer account of modernization and its legacies, but also a set of meaningful and relevant resources for northern communities.

Our first article on this theme, entitled “High Modernism in the Arctic: Planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik,” appeared in the July 2009 issue of the Journal of Historical Geography.