Shaping the Upper Canadian Frontier: Environment, Society, and Culture in the Trent Valley

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal, Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality and Canadian History to
1967, and the co-author of The College o

If Israel suffers from too much history and too little geography,
Canada’s predicament is exactly the opposite. With a small population
stretched over a vast expanse, Canadians have long assumed that the land
would prevail despite human attempts to master it. Canada’s historians
have been as slow as its people generally in embracing the new
environmentalism. Canadians gorge themselves annually on more energy per
capita than any populace in the world, and environmental consciousness
is much lower than in Western European countries.

Historian Neil Forkey’s study of the Trent River Valley in southern
Ontario during the early 19th century is intended to further
environmental history in Canada. Assuming an approach that he
characterizes as “bioregional,” Forkey believes that it is possible
to see how humans coming from overseas adapted to a new environment and
the effect they had on land and water. Concentrating less on Aboriginal
inhabitants than on European (heavily Irish) settlers, Forkey examines
attempts to tame and commercialize a largely pristine setting through
the building of dams for saw and grist mills and roads for agricultural
colonization. A third major section of the book provides an analysis of
Catharine Parr Traill’s nature writings as an example of place-based
narrative within the book’s bioregional framework.

There is little in Forkey’s focus on dams, roads, and nature writings
to suggest that a regional approach to environmental history will be any
more satisfying than the failed attempt at a regional approach to urban
history. Both facets of the discipline of history need to find general
ideas that can be verified and extended through particular studies. At
most, this book is suggestive of work by rural historians and historical
geographers of settlement. Forkey’s conclusions in regard to human
aspirations to dominate the environment in the Trent River Valley clash
with the ideas about adaptability that he expresses at the beginning of
his book. The University of Calgary continues to produce the most
handsome historical books from any academic press in the country, but
this volume exemplifies some of the worst copy-editing.