During the 2009-2010 academic year, I will be on leave to begin my next research project: 

Boreal Forests, Climate, and the Landscapes of Health:

(image of Lost Creek estuary on Lake Superior, from Bayfield County)

Just below the arctic lies two million square miles of the North American boreal forest, an expanse of conifers dotted with rivers and lakes that stretches across Canada, Alaska, and parts of the continental United States. Boreal forests make up one of the world’s largest terrestrial ecosystems, yet few scholars have explored their interconnected human and ecological histories. In Smithsonian Magazine (December 2006), the artist Robert Bateman calls the boreal forest the “completely forgotten” ecosystem. Neglected they may be, boreal forests are nonethless emerging as key sites of climate change concern in the 21st century.

Ecologically, boreal forests share certain important constraints. They exist in places with extremely cold winter climates and short growing seasons, and they tend to grow on nutrient-deprived, poorly drained soils. These are disturbance-prone ecosystems; wind, fire, and insect activity have historically played critical roles in shaping these forests. The intensity of these disturbances, however, is changing with global warming, as soils thaw, fire intensities increase, and insect epidemics spread.

During much of the 20th century, during the development of scientific forest management, boreal forests were often portrayed as naturally unhealthy forests, impoverished by their particular climates, soils, and disturbance regimes. Intensive management, foresters believed, might be able to rescue these forests from their own natural unhealthiness, bringing them into a more modern and vigorous condition. In the past two decades, ecologists and environmentalists have challenged these views of boreal forest health, while introducing new metaphors of health and vulnerability into the conversation. Ecologists now argue that boreal forests are worth protecting because they make up one of the world’s significant carbon reservoirs, storing carbon rather than immediately releasing it into the atmosphere. As fire intensities increase, much of this carbon may be released into the atmosphere, affecting the health of human and natural communities throughout the globe.

In its introduction to a proposed planning process for the boreal forest, the Ontario government writes: “Ontario’s Far North Boreal Forest is one of the last, great, undeveloped spaces on the planet and a vital carbon sink. …It is also one of the world’s largest intact ecosystems….The Far North Boreal Forest has remained virtually undisturbed by humans since the glaciers retreated. But as pressure for new resources and new places to live increases, that will likely change….Scientists have said that in order to preserve a healthy ecosystem in the Far North, a minimum of half of the land be protected.”[i] The modern rhetoric of conservation planning posits the forest’s natural condition as one healthy yet vulnerable to human activity. An “essentially untouched” landscape is about to be sickened by development, unless planners step in to protect it.

My proposed research will use an environmental history perspective to explore changing perceptions of health and boreal forest landscapes. One case study will examine conceptions of climate and health in the boreal forest. I will ask: when and why did the boreal forest change from a place of sickness, unhealthy cold, and dangerous airs, to the lungs of a world imperilled by global warming? How have our understandings of forest disturbances and climate changed over the past two centuries, and how have these changes affected the ways people now manage the boreal forest? How is modern rhetoric of crisis affecting communities and forests across the north? 

A second case study will examine Lake Superior, focusing on the links between forestry, fisheries, and human health in the region. In the 1990s, Canadian biologists were startled to find that levels of the pesticide toxaphene were increasing in the bodies of lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush), and also in the bodies of people who ate those fish. In the 1950s, lake trout in the Great Lakes had been driven to the verge of extinction by a combination of overfishing, invasions by the exotic sea lamprey, and dioxin contamination, but by the late 1980s, breeding populations had recovered in Lake Superior and other remote northern lakes in the boreal forest.

High toxaphene levels were puzzling because levels of other persistent organic pollutants had been steadily decreasing in Lake Superior since the 1980s, after bans on their use had been instituted in North America. Toxaphene had also been banned in Canada in the early 1980s, but levels of the chemical were still extraordinarily high, far higher than levels of better-known chemicals such as PCBs and DDT. Lake Superior is cold, vast, and isolated from industrial centers. Of all the Great Lakes, it is easily the cleanest, and in many ways it seems almost pristine. So why would toxaphene be highest in this particular lake, in a region where the chemical had never been produced and had hardly even been used?

Initial concern focused on pulp mills lining the Canadian shores of Lake Superior near Thunder Bay, where deforestation of regional boreal forests had intensified in the 1980s. The harvests supplied a growing paper industry, which dumped pulp mill wastes into Lake Superior. Those wastes contained chlorine and pine oils, which could combine under certain natural conditions to form toxaphene. But even after those waste products were regulated, contamination continued. Researchers soon suspected that the chemical was coming not from local, contemporary sources, but instead from sources much more distant in time and place. The remote boreal forest was not nearly as remote as researchers had perceived.

Researchers now suspect that the chemical continues to be volatized from old fields in the American South, and that global wind currents may also be transporting toxaphene still used in Africa into Lake Superior and other boreal lakes—where it finds its way into fish, and eventually into the people eating that fish. Among those most concerned are indigenous communities who live along the shores of Lake Superior. Fish is particularly important for the health of fetuses and young children, and eating fish is of great cultural significance. But its potential contamination forces communities to make trade-offs between their beliefs and possible harm to themselves. How much fish do you eat when it’s culturally important? How much do you eat when you’re pregnant? These are difficult dilemmas posed by changes in ecosystem health. Contaminants transform more than the health of lakes, fish, and forests; they also transform cultural identities as well.

A third case study will explore hydropower development and the health of the boreal forest. Concerns over global warming are increasing the pressure for hydropower development in the boreal forest, yet hydropower has a contentious history in the region. This case study may focus on conflicts over the James Bay Project in northern Quebec--one of the largest hydroelectric systems in the world. On April 30th, 1971, the Québec Premier Robert Bourassa announced that Hydro-Québec, a Crown Corporation, would develop the major river systems draining into James Bay, Canada. As planned, the James Bay Project would become the world’s larged hydroelectric project, providing cheap electricity for Quebec’s modernization plans. For planners, the boreal forest was an obvious place for hydropower development, for they saw it as largely empty and undeveloped, with forests of little timber value. Drowning this boreal landscape would lead to a more vigorous Quebec, able to enter the modern era. 

The Cree and Inuit who lived in the boreal forests saw their ecosystem in very different terms. Rather than a worthless land, they believed it to be a place of health and value. Opposition to the project was strong among the 5,000 Crees of James Bay and the 3,500 Inuit to the north, who believed that Bourassa was acting in violation of treaties by destroying traditional hunting and trapping territories. In spite of their resistence, initial construction of the first phase was completed on the La Grande River in 1985. 11,500 square kilometers of boreal forest were flooded, and rising waters submerged over 83,000 km of shoreline around James Bay, changing the flow of the rivers into the bay (and drowning ten thousand caribou trying to cross a dammed river in 1984). Flooding led to the release of mercury from decomposing vegetation in the reservoirs, and this created enormous concern over toxic contamination in fish. Because fish was the dietary staple of over 5,000 Cree and 3,500 Inuit in the area, mercury concerns led to a cascade of health issues in the tribes. 

The interpretative framework for this project will be environmental history, which pays attention to the links between nature, culture, and politics in understanding environmental and social change. This project builds on recent research in environmental history that explores the links between landscapes and health (Bolton Valencius 2002, Mitman, Murphy, and Sellars 2004, Mitman 2005 and 2008, Nash 2006, Sellars 1999). My recent book on the environmental history of endocrine disruptors (Langston in press) will give me an additional foundation for developing the health aspects of the proposed project.

This study will bring together the growing scientific material on boreal forest ecology and climate change (i.e., Krebs 2001, Bond-Lamberty et al 2007) with the historical material on climate, landscapes, and health (i.e., Brown 2001, Carey in press, Cruickshank 2005). My training as an ecologist will enable me to explore changing conceptions of ecological health, expanding on the analyses of forest health in my first book (Langston 2005).

Canadian environmental history has enjoyed a recent renaissance. The geographer Graeme Wynn’s Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History (ABC-CLIO, 2006) will provide a useful foundation for my project, while the essays in the 2007 special issue of Environmental History devoted to Canada will be helpful, particularly the work by Stephen Bocking on “Science and Spaces in the Northern Environment.”

 

Bibliography

Bocking, Stephen. “Science and Spaces in the Northern Environment.” Environmental History 2007 (12): 867-894.

Bolton Valencius, Conevery. 2002. The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land. NY: Basic Books.

Bond-Lamberty, Ben, Scott D. Peckham, Douglas E. Ahl, and Stith T. Gower, “Fire as the Dominant Driver of central Canadian Boreal Forest Carbon Balance,” Nature (2007): 89-92.

Brown, Neville. History and Climate Change: A Eurocentric Perspective. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

Carey, Mark. “Beyond Weather: The Culture and Politics of Culture,” in Andrew Isenberg, ed. Oxford Companion to Environmental History (New York, in press).

Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005)

Krebs, Charles J., ed. Ecosystem Dynamics of the Boreal Forest: The Kluane Project (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Langston, Nancy. Toxic Bodies: Endocrine Disruptors and the Lessons of History. New Haven: Yale University Press, in press.

Langston, Nancy. Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).

Mitman, Gregg, Michelle Murphy, and Christopher Sellars, eds., Landscapes of Exposure; Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments Osiris 19. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004

Mitman, Gregg, 2005. “In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History,” Environmental History 10: 184-210.

Mitman, Gregg, 2008. Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape our Lives and Landscapes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Nash, Linda. 2006. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. Berkeley: U. of California Press.

Sellers, Christopher. 1999. "Thoreau's Body: Towards an Embodied Environmental History." Environmental History 4: 486-514.

Wynn, Graeme. Canada and Arctic North America: An Environmental History ABC-CLIO, 2006.