We like to start each January with a look back at the year before. The Otter~la loutre continues to be one of the most active Canadian history blogs on the web, reaching a wide audience of readers interested in thoughtful, creative, and challenging views on nature, history, and society.
2018 was a big year for the The Otter and a big year in general for NiCHE. We published 99 blog posts on The Otter, reaching nearly 100,000 views. This included eleven book reviews in NiCHE Reviews. We published seven special blog series including, “Canada’s Anthropocene,” “Seeds 2: New Research in Environmental History,” “Rhizomes,” “Soundings,” “Environmental History and Early Modern History,” “#EnvHist Worth Reading,” and “CHESS 2018: Prairie Landscapes and Environmental Change.”
Nature’s Past, our audio podcast series, published four new episodes in 2018 for a total of 62 episodes in this now decade-long podcast. NiCHE also launched its new peer-reviewed occasional research paper series, Papers in Canadian History and Environment and published the first paper, “Magical Regionalism: Canadian Geography on Screen in the 1950s” by Matt Dyce and Jonathan Peyton. University of Saskatchewan hosted the 2018 Canadian History and Environment Summer Symposium on the theme of “Prairie Landscapes and Environmental Change in the Twentieth Century.” This was the first CHESS to include an extended writing workshop as part of this annual event. Finally, we launched a NiCHE Instagram channel!
2018 was a big year with a lot of NiCHE activities and a lot of publishing. Here are the five most-read blog posts on The Otter for 2018:
5. Sean Kheraj, “Offline Conferencing: My ASEH 2018”
4. Alan MacEachern, “The Alanthropocene”
3. Ashlee Cunsolo, “To Grieve or Not to Grieve?”
2. Caitlynn Beckett, “Rethinking Remediation at the Giant Mine, Yellowknife: Who Decides What is ‘Clean Enough’?”
1. Tina Loo, “The Bow Valley and ‘People’ Without a History”
We want to thank all of our contributors from 2018. We hope that you’ll all write for us again. And we want to encourage new contributors to make 2019 the year they publish their writing with NiCHE. Get started today with our contributors’ guide.
Happy New Year!

Latest posts by NiCHE Administrators (see all)
- Public Lecture: James Scott - February 23, 2021
- Call for Papers: The 2051 Munich Climate Conference - February 19, 2021
- Call for Papers: Environmental Crises in the Indian Ocean World since 1800 - February 15, 2021
- Transforming Brown to Green: Environmental Organizing in Toronto in the 1970s - January 11, 2021
- 2020 Year In Review - December 22, 2020
- The NiCHE Wikipedia Page Needs an Update! - November 20, 2020
- Subscribe to the New Monthly NiCHE Newsletter! - November 12, 2020
- 2021 NiCHE Prize Announcement - September 16, 2020
- CFP: Discard Studies Twitter Conference - September 10, 2020
- CFP – Environments of Exile: Refugees, Nature, and Representations - September 4, 2020