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Part of a larger forum on the state of urban history in Canada, this article surveys recent literature in Canadian urban environmental history. The authors conclude that the city remains an important frame of analysis for Canadian historians. Recent work by Canadian environmental historians demonstrates that historians continue to address urban developments, but their contributions are less likely to appear under the umbrella of “urban history” and even less likely to be framed nationally as “Canadian urban history.” A preference for single-city studies over comparative works and a bias against recency has constrained examinations of rich histories of urbanization in Canada over the past 40 years.

Leaks and spills have been endemic on long-distance oil pipelines in Canada since the mid-twentieth century. Evidence from the National Energy Board (neb) pipeline incident reports reveals a track record of thousands of spills totalling millions of litres of oil across the country. What causes onshore oil spills? Why do they occur? Where have they occurred? What have been the environmental consequences of these incidents? This article explores the history of onshore oil spills on federally regulated long-distance pipelines since the mid-twentieth century. It argues that oil pipeline spills are an endemic characteristic of complex enviro-technical systems built primarily for economic efficiency rather than environmental protection. Based on the analysis of incident reports submitted to the neb, the article finds that, while frequent, onshore oil spills in Canada have been variable in scale and have had a wide range of potential adverse environmental effects, depending on location, product type, and volume. The causes of such spills have also been variable, conforming to no obvious pattern over time. Instead, oil pipeline spills have occurred most often in an unpredictable fashion, posing great challenges for policy development. These spills have also represented a proportionally small fraction of the total oil delivered on Canada’s long-distance pipelines, but, in absolute terms, this has meant the uncontrolled release of many millions of litres of oil into the environment.

In the nineteenth century, municipal authorities in Canadian cities faced a common set of environmental challenges associated with domestic livestock animals. This article examines the regulation of livestock in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg. As these cities each grew over the course of the nineteenth century, their urban environments became ecologically more alike and their responses to animal nuisances reflected these ecological similarities. Municipal authorities in each of these cities adopted broadly similar approaches to the regulation of livestock animals. Over the course of the nineteenth century, municipal governments developed extensive and increasingly restrictive bylaws, pound systems, and public health regulations to control the use of livestock. These approaches to livestock regulation were the results of emerging common ecological transformations in cities as humans attempted to live together with domestic animals in increasingly densely populated spaces., Au 19e siècle, les autorités municipales du Canada faisaient face à un ensemble de défis environnementaux liés au bétail. Cet article étudie la réglementation du bétail à Montréal, à Toronto et à Winnipeg. Pendant que ces villes augmentaient de taille au 19e siècle, leur environnement urbain se ressemblait de plus en plus et leurs réponses à la nuisance animale reflétaient ces similitudes écologiques. Les autorités municipales dans chacune de ces villes ont adopté des approches similaires à la réglementation du bétail. Au cours du 19e siècle, les gouvernements municipaux ont développé des règlements détaillés et de plus en plus restrictifs, des systèmes de fourrière et des règlements de santé publique pour contrôler l’usage du bétail. Ces approches à l’égard de la règlementation du bétail furent le résultat de transformations écologiques communes et émergentes dans les villes pendant que les humains essayaient d’y vivre avec des animaux domestiques, dans des espaces de plus en plus densément peuplés.

Since 1931, Canada has been a majority urban society with most of its population concentrated in a handful of southern cities. Given the urban character of Canadian society in the twentieth century, histories of large city parks, such as Stanley Park in Vancouver, BC, illustrate the changing relationship between people and wild animals in Canada because they represent local, regular encounters with a diverse range of animal species. The histories of local and regional parks in Canada reveal that human relations with wildlife were not limited to occasional, and sometimes fleeting, encounters in large national parks, distant from major population centres. As this article argues, the everyday interactions between people and animals within shared urban environments also influenced Canadian perceptions of wildlife and the management of park animals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Park animal management policies and attitudes toward the place of animals in parks were not always informed by imagined, idealised concepts about wildlife from a distance but were shaped and changed over time according to local concerns and regular interactions between people and animals living in a shared environment. Over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, human-animal relations on the Stanley Park peninsula shifted according to prevailing notions of 'improvement' and landscape modification current in the North American parks and later environmental movements. Prior to 1945, Park Board animal management policies embodied the perception that human modification of the animal composition of the park was a necessary improvement for the pleasure of tourists and other park visitors. After 1945, the Park Board moved away from such interventionist policies and began instead to foster habitat to establish sanctuaries for wildlife observation.

Through an analysis of the forest restoration policies of the Vancouver Park Board and public reactions to periodic extreme weather events in the Lower Mainland in the twentieth century, this article examines the complicated interrelationship between history, memory, and ecology in the production of the landscape of Stanley Park. Urban park history in North America tends to focus on political, social, and cultural forces that shaped park design in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but does not account for the role of non-human natural forces. Using an environmental history approach to the study of Stanley Park, this article attempts to demonstrate the role nature played in reshaping the landscape and Park Board policies for British Columbia's best-known urban park. Two major windstorm events in 1934 and 1962 compelled the Park Board to pursue an extensive forest restoration programme for the park in order to re-create a version of nature with the past in mind based on popular perceptions of a ‘virginal’ forest. The Park Board's restoration policies reshaped the public imagination of nature by eliminating evidence of natural disturbance and disguising human interventions on the landscape. This created a collective amnesia about natural disturbance in Stanley Park, which persists to the present in light of recent storm events in 2006 and 2007. Powerful non-human forces have always reshaped the landscape of Stanley Park, but the public's ideal park landscape relies on the image of an undisturbed wilderness. The article argues that there was a dialectical relationship between popular perceptions of nature in the park and Park Board forest restoration policies that reinforced the image of the forest as an untouched natural environment. Au travers d’une analyse des politiques de reboisement pratiquées par le Conseil des parcs de Vancouver et des réactions du public face aux événements météorologiques extrêmes qui ont périodiquement touché la région de Vancouver au cours du XXe siècle, cet article examine les liens complexes qui existent entre l’histoire, le souvenir et l’écologie qui ont façonné le paysage du parc Stanley. L’histoire des parcs urbains en Amérique du Nord traite généralement des forces politiques, sociales et culturelles qui ont influencé la conception des parcs aux XIX et XXe siècles, mais elle n’aborde pas la question de l’influence des forces naturelles. À partir de l’histoire de l’environnement du parc Stanley, cet article vise à illustrer le rôle que la nature a joué dans l’aménagement du parc Stanley et dans les politiques du Conseil concernant le parc urbain le plus réputé de Colombie-Britannique. Deux tempêtes accompagnées de vents très forts, en 1934 et 1962, ont contraint le Conseil des parcs à entreprendre un programme de reboisement intensif pour redonner au parc Stanley l’apparence de forêt « virginale » que lui prêtaient les perceptions populaires. En effaçant toute trace des dégâts naturels et tout indice d’intervention humaine dans le paysage du parc, les politiques de réaménagement et de reboisement du Conseil des parcs ont influencé les conceptions mêmes que les gens se faisaient de la nature dans le parc. Tout ceci a engendré une amnésie collective concernant les dégâts naturels qui surviennent au parc Stanley, amnésie qui perdure à ce jour, comme l’attestent les tempêtes de 2006 – 2007. De tous temps, de puissantes forces naturelles ont refaçonné le paysage du parc Stanley; toutefois, l’image que le public se fait du parc idéal repose sur celle d’une nature sauvage ordonnée et imperturbable. Cet article soutient qu’il y a une relation dialectique entre les perceptions populaires de la nature dans le parc et les politiques de réaménagement et de reboisement du Conseil des parcs, qui a contribué à perpétuer l’image d’une forêt qui serait épargnée par les événements naturels.

This article examines the outbreak of an unknown illness (later thought to be equine influenza) among the horses of Toronto and its subsequent spread as a continent-wide panzootic. Known as...