There’s no doubt 2020 has been a challenging and unusual year. When thinking about how best to wrap up our year-in-review here at NiCHE, we wanted to do something a little different than our usual Holiday Reading post. We posed a series of questions to our editors reflecting on their pandemic year. We’d like to hear your responses to these questions in the comments!

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Sean Kheraj, York University

What was one good moment / assignment / etc. out of teaching in the pandemic that surprised you?

In my administrative role, I don’t get to do much teaching, but I continue to supervise students and I get to do some occasional team teaching in our graduate program.

My one good moment (among many) was getting to tell two students that they passed their comprehensive exams with distinction. It was a bit of an overwhelming moment. The students had been studying together throughout the pandemic in preparation for their PhD comprehensive exams. It’s already a stressful experience to begin with, but they had to manage the entire thing during a pandemic. There were restrictions on accessing library resources. We had to find a mess of e-books. Everything was done over Zoom. Not optimal conditions, to say the least. Nevertheless, they excelled. Their exams were some of the most impressive that I have seen. It was a glimmer of hope.

What was one thing you managed to do that showed you something new about environmental history?

This fall, I got a Century House plaque for my house from Heritage Toronto (in anticipation of its 100th anniversary in 2021). It’s not a formal designation or anything like that. It’s a way to celebrate old houses in Toronto and it doubles as a street address marker on your house. Staff from Heritage Toronto verify that your house was built more than 100 years ago and then you buy a nice enamel plaque to put up on your house. Voila!

What does this have to do with environmental history? Uh…, well, it got me thinking about the people who lived in this house and occupied this small space in the city over the past century. My trees have seen a few decades of that history. At some point in 1921, someone stood in my backyard and looked up at skies above in the same spot where I stood this summer trying to get some fresh air during lockdown. A few generations of families have called this place home, ate meals here, planted gardens, raised animals and children, played video games (mostly me), and slept. It was just a small reminder that part of environmental history is about the spaces we inhabit where life happens.

What’s the first thing you want to do/place you want to go when we can do things/go places again?

I want to go home to BC to see my family

What was one way of engaging with an environment or place, indoors or outdoors, that helped you feel better this year?

I got a standing desk. That made my body feel better this year. As many people have found, working from home has raised a lot of issues about ergonomics. I’ve always felt indignant about suffering physical injury from inactivity. But I suppose that’s my body’s way of saying, “Hey! You may think you call all the shots around here, but don’t forget that you live in me so try to treat this place a little nicer. And cut down on the potato chips, would ya?”

Do you have a photo that highlights some of your environmental interactions throughout the pandemic?

Since the pandemic started, my world has become very small. I don’t have a car and I no longer take public transit so I’m more or less living within a small radius from my house. I walk for about a hour or so a day to get some exercise and fresh air. That usually involves strolls throughout my neighbourhood.

When the weather was warmer, I was documenting neighbourhood cats. Below is a photo of two of my favourite cat pals getting into it with one another.

As an aside, I’ve given the black cat below the nickname, “Band-Aid Butt” because when I first met her she approached me to say hello and when she walked away, I saw that she had a Band-Aid stuck to her butt.

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Andrew Watson, University of Saskatchewan

What was one good moment / assignment / etc. out of teaching in the pandemic that surprised you?

Knowing that students were going to miss out on nearly all the social aspects of being on campus and in class together in person, I decided to assign students to research teams to work on group essays. Although there were some predictable problems related to sharing the workload fairly, most research teams did some solid research and wrote strong essays as a team.

What was one thing you managed to do that showed you something new about environmental history?

I’m not sure how new this is, but I’ve been co-teaching a course on Foundations of Sustainability for the past three years. Students come from a wide variety of programs around campus, but there has never been a History major in the course. Nevertheless, this year we assigned Brian Donahue’s Reclaiming the Commons as the main textbook for the course. Most students weren’t used to reading so much(!), but it seems that the book really resonated with many of them. And the highlight of the semester was hosting Professor Donahue for a Q&A session about his work.

What’s the first thing you want to do/place you want to go when we can do things/go places again?

Muskoka.. But I’ve also got some research I’m keen to get to. I’ve got some archives in Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, and Halifax to visit for my project on the history of coal in Canada. And my side project will hopefully take me to the Bancroft Library at Berkeley to consult the papers of George R. Stewart who wrote several novels with environmental protagonists during the 1940s.

What was one way of engaging with an environment or place, indoors or outdoors, that helped you feel better this year?

I drove for two days straight (2,800 kilometres; 14 hours of driving each day) on my own to visit my parents in Muskoka. Being at the cottage definitely helped me feel better.

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Claire Campbell, Bucknell University

What was one good moment / assignment / etc. out of teaching in the pandemic that surprised you?

Danny Samson at Brock University (@ruralcolonialNS) suggested our classes work together on a 1752 census of Isle Royale: a place my students had no idea existed, in an historical form they’d never studied, about a people they’d never heard about. Now they have at least some awareness of Acadians and the French Atlantic, in the fine-grain of a first-person census, with names and ages and occupations and possessions. They even managed to locate these small villages on 18th-century French maps – no small feat for American undergraduates. (None of this would have been possible with the templates arranged by our GIS specialist Janine Glanther.) Detail, Jacques-Nicholas Bellin (1744), after Jacques L’Hermite, Plan de L’Isle Royale, 1752.

Runner up: I offered students a bonus opportunity to make (and photograph) a recipe from Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery (1796), considered the first domestic “American” cookbook. Hilarity ensued. I think the apple pie that Troy Langton managed was the highlight of his year.

What was one thing you managed to do that showed you something new about environmental history?

I helped organize events for children at a nearby hiking trail run by the local nature conservancy and historical society. The first was about geology, so I got to learn about limestone – and fossils and soil minerals and agriculture – in central Pennsylvania’s ridges and valleys with my seven-year-old. (Santa then brought him his very own hand-lens for future fossil-hunting.)

What’s the first thing you want to do/place you want to go when we can do things/go places again?

My family won’t read this, so I can say Charlottetown (because I was supposed to be there last June), Halifax (because I miss it so much), and/or St. John’s (because I’ve never been).

If I get the vaccine and win the lottery, the answer would be the Aarhus waterfront.

What was one way of engaging with an environment or place, indoors or outdoors, that helped you feel better this year?

My pandemic resolution was to ride the Buffalo Valley rail-trail – which runs ten miles to neighbouring Mifflinburg – every week. It’s been fantastic. I listen to CBC Radio or podcasts like What On Earth (more likely, The Debaters), cycle past Amish farms, and feel gloriously en vélo.

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Heather Green, Saint Mary’s University

What was one good moment / assignment / etc. out of teaching in the pandemic that surprised you?

There were several positive teaching moments that emerged from pandemic-teaching for me. I was dreading remote teaching, but my students in the first semester greatly impressed me with their enthusiasm and creativity in my environmental history course. Giving them a nontraditional research project resulted in some wonderful art work and poetry.

What was one thing you managed to do that showed you something new about environmental history?

This isn’t necessarily new, but I took all my office plants home and bought/grew several more throughout the pandemic. It was especially nice to have so much green in the middle of winter when we went into lockdown and I became strangely fascinated by watching the spider plant rapidly grow, produce spider babies, and blossom. I also tried my hand at a home garden this year – when I bought a house last year, I bought with intentions of gardening, but with the pandemic I ended up unintentionally participating in the pandemic gardening phenomenon of 2020!

What’s the first thing you want to do/place you want to go when we can do things/go places again?

The Yukon, 100%. I have lots of research to catch up on once we can safely travel again and I’m greatly looking forward to visiting places and pals up there.

What was one way of engaging with an environment or place, indoors or outdoors, that helped you feel better this year?

Like Sean, I also invested in a standing desk. I’m lucky to have a big back deck where I spent lots of time reading in my hammock and working outdoors in the warmer months. We get several bird visitors and it was lovely to hear their chirps daily. Once trails and parks reopened here in Nova Scotia, hiking with the pup was my go-to activity to escape the constraints of being at home. I explored a lot of the coastal trails around the Halifax area, and a trail system begins at the end of my street, so I was able to take advantage of lots of long walks, fresh air, and the smell of forest through much of the year.

Do you have a photo that highlights some of your environmental interactions throughout the pandemic?

I’ve become an overzealous pandemic photographer, so it was a challenge to narrow down the photos I wanted to share!

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Blair Stein, Clarkson University

What was one good moment / assignment / etc. out of teaching in the pandemic that surprised you?

It’s not a moment so much as it is the willingness of my students to suspend their disbelief, participate whole-heartedly in less-than-ideal circumstances, and try new things in general. My university moved to emergency remote learning in the spring, but went back to (mostly) in-person in the fall, so it’s been a non-stop barrage of experimentation and trying new stuff. My students have been heroes!

What was one thing you managed to do that showed you something new about environmental history?

I live in a small town on the Raquette River, one of the most heavily dammed and hydro-electrically developed rivers in New York. In the spring and summer, I did some exploring up and down the Raquette, and on one of those trips, I got lost. I stumbled across some hydro infrastructure (I wish, in hindsight, I had done some research and learned more about it!) and followed it to make my way back to the road. There’s something about the physicality of energy infrastructure when you encounter it in the middle of the woods, you know?

What’s the first thing you want to do/place you want to go when we can do things/go places again?

I’d love to cross the border and see my family and friends in Ottawa again!

What was one way of engaging with an environment or place, indoors or outdoors, that helped you feel better this year?

I moved here in summer 2019, so I barely got a chance to get comfortable in place before the pandemic hit. There’s really only one park in town, and since March I’ve done my daily walks through that park, taken fitness classes in that park, socialized from a distance in that park, gone to farmers’ markets in that park, and attended Black Lives Matter events in that park. It’s gone a long way to helping me feel like I belong somewhere that still feels pretty new.

This picture is of my first pandemic-lifestyle-change walk along the Raquette, on 18 March. I had lofty goals of taking a picture of my walk each day, but like a lot of these sorts of plans, it didn’t pan out.

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Jessica DeWitt, Independent Scholar

What was one thing you managed to do that showed you something new about environmental history?

In November, I went on a brief excursion to the Saskatchewan portion of Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park. While hiking in the park, my partner and I learned about the unique ecology of the park’s landscape. In a year where I travelled very little, it was nice to still explore a new (to me) landscape in the province that I’ve now called home for 9.5 years.

What’s the first thing you want to do/place you want to go when we can do things/go places again?

Honestly, I just want to be able to navigate my city, go to events, and run errands at local shops in-person and anxiety-free! I’m not currently yearning for any major trips, but I haven’t been to my family cottage in Maine in seven years, so a nice long cross-continent road trip to Maine would be a dream.

What was one way of engaging with an environment or place, indoors or outdoors, that helped you feel better this year?

I took comfort outdoors in two major ways this year. Firstly, I spent MUCH more time in my garden this past year. I enjoyed my daily walk(s) around the yard, observing its minutiae. I’ve always been one to appreciate my immediate environment, but the privilege of observing the wondrous lives lived on my little piece of the earth was of particular comfort this year. 

Secondly, I began a new hobby: walking to Saskatoon parks. My eventual goal is to walk to every single park in Saskatoon; I started with the west side in the early summer, and I’ve walked to 35+ parks so far. It is amazing how many parks there are scattered throughout Saskatoon that one does not tend to pay attention to normally. I love walking, and by walking to new parks, I see parts of the city that I would not otherwise travel to. Exploring by foot also feels more intimate than car travel.  I’ve walked to neighbourhoods that I’ve never set foot in in nearly a decade of living here. This hobby provided a socially-distant activity that satisfied my desire for adventure while simultaneously strengthening my relationship to the place that I call home.