Every year on New Year’s Day, I pull up the site stats for niche-canada.org to take stock of what we accomplished over the past 365 days. It’s easy to lose track of all the amazing work that goes into making a website like this. That work is deeply collaborative, decentralized, and dispersed. Twelve editors work with our dozens of contributors each year to publish a range of media covering the environmental history research community in Canada. Here’s some of what we accomplished:
- 148 posts
- 188,245 words
- 4 new podcast episodes
- 1 e-book
- 2 new peer-reviewed research papers
- 6 book reviews
- 107 comments
Our contributors published work on everything from the Athabasca tar sands to The Handmaid’s Tale. It was an eclectic mix, as always. Here are the five most-read posts we published in 2019:
5. Nancy Langston, “Closing Nuclear Plants Will Increase Climate Risks”
4. John Sandlos, Arn Keeling, Caitlynn Beckett, and Rosanna Nicol, “There is a Monster Under the Ground: Commemorating the History of Arsenic Contamination at Giant Mine”
3. Daniel Macfarlane and Sean Kheraj, “How Do Handmaids Reach Ontario?”
2. Lindsay Marshall, “Hoofbeats in the Archive: Historical Animals’ Roles in Constructing Historical Narratives”
1. Hereward Longley, “What Caused the Environmental Impacts of the Oil Sands Industry?”
If you missed any of these great posts this year, go back and catch up on our most popular reads of 2019. Thank you to all our 2019 contributors. We hope you come back in 2020.
And if you are feeling inspired to write something this year, check out our contributors’ guide and send us something soon!

Sean Kheraj

Latest posts by Sean Kheraj (see all)
- Nature’s Past Episode 71: Water and Anishinaabe Territory - April 12, 2021
- James Scott: How to Write Like a River - February 28, 2021
- The First Post-War Oil Pipeline Hearings in Canada - February 9, 2021
- 2021 Melville-Nelles-Hoffmann Lecture in Environmental History: Brittany Luby and Chief Lorraine Cobiness - February 8, 2021
- Top 5 Posts of 2020 - January 5, 2021
- Nature’s Past Episode 70: Environmentalism and the Company of Young Canadians - September 2, 2020
- Interview Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times - August 12, 2020
- Nature’s Past Episode 69: Environmental Racism and Canadian History - July 29, 2020
- Whose Nature? Race and Canadian Environmental History - July 7, 2020
- Nature’s Past Episode 68: Home and Environment - May 11, 2020