Collaboration, Community, and Careers: Reflecting on NiCHE at 20

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This post is part of our NiCHE at 20 series that reflects on the twentieth anniversary of the Network in Canadian History and Environment.

I would not be an environmental historian if it wasn’t for the Network in Canadian History and Environment.  

For that reason, and many more, NiCHE is my favorite academic association. So many collaborations, opportunities, and friendships came out of NiCHE.

I began a Ph.D. in History in 2007. Initially, my proposed topic had nothing to do with environmental history. But over the following year, my dissertation topic evolved in that direction (thanks to a fortuitous conversation with Greg Donaghy about the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project). 

I would not be an environmental historian if it wasn’t for the Network in Canadian History and Environment. 

I quickly became aware of NiCHE, which was still pretty new at the time. The first NiCHE event I attended was the 2009 CHESS – NiCHE has a thing for acronyms and this one stands for Canadian History and Environment Summer School – serendipitously held in Ottawa, the city where I was doing my Ph.D., an easy bike ride from where I lived.

2013 CHESS on Vancouver Island
2013 CHESS on Vancouver Island.

The Montreal CHESS was my second NiCHE event. I attended many more of these summer schools as a grad student, postdoc, and then professor: Vancouver Island; New Brunswick; Guelph; Toronto; London; Ottawa (a second time). I have fond memories of all of them. Riding in a bus down the coast from Nanaimo, serenaded by Graeme Wynn’s running commentary. An epic road trip from Ontario to New Brunswick with Andrew Watson, Jim Clifford, and David Zylberberg. Partying in university dorms in Guelph. The 2011 EH+ in Hamilton. NiCHE happy hours at ASEH. 

Seafood in New Brunswick (Pictured: Andrew Watson, Dan Macfarlane, David Zylberberg; Photo: Jim Clifford)
Seafood in New Brunswick (Pictured: Andrew Watson, Dan Macfarlane, David Zylberberg; Photo: Jim Clifford).

In 2010, I contributed my first blog posts to The Otter~La Loutre, the NiCHE blog site. I then began upping the frequency (according to The Otter site, I’ve done about seventy posts in total, though a number of them are announcements). This eventually led to my joining the blog’s editorial board and the NiCHE executive committee over a decade ago. 

Blog posts themselves are a unique forum. They are a way to get ideas out before the long peer review process, or try something out, or quickly provide historical context for contemporary events, or find a home for topics that may not work for traditional academic publishing. Not to mention that far more people probably read NiCHE blog posts than the academic publications we write about the same topics.

Often, The Otter was the first place where I published on a subject – I imagine no one wants to read another post by me about Niagara Falls! It provided opportunities to work with other scholars on blog series such as: Historians Confront the Climate Emergency; Environmental Historians Debate: Can Nuclear Power Solve Climate Change?; Dam Nation: Hydroelectric Developments in Canada. 

And sometimes the NiCHE blog was just fun, such as posts about the environmental history in Sharknado or the accuracy of transborder waters in The Handmaid’s Tale (with Sean Kheraj).

NiCHE has also been invaluable in terms of fostering formal academic works. Many academic publications and opportunities have resulted from NiCHE communities, events, and networks. Speaking for myself, here’s some examples:

-publishing my first two books in UBC Press’s Nature/History/Society series came out of conversations with the series editor, Graeme Wynne, at a CHESS field trip along the Lachine Canal and St. Lawrence River

  • I’ve co-edited two books in the NiCHE open-access book series, Canadian History and Environment, with the University of Calgary Press (editor Alan MacEachern), as well as chapters in several of the other edited books in the series.
  • journal articles such as the one Andrew Watson and I did on “hydro democracy.”
  • papers, panels, and roundtables proposed for ASEH, CHA, ICEHO, Arpents, etc.

Nature’s Past, the brainchild of Sean Kheraj and hosted by NiCHE, was one of the first academic podcasts. And who can forget EHTV? Well, most probably have. Nevertheless, in that transition era in the early 2010s when not everyone yet had video cameras on their phones, NiCHE sprung for a bunch of handheld digital recorders so that willing participants could make short environmental history videos. 

There can be little doubt that NiCHE had a major hand in making environmental history a vibrant part of the academic scene in Canada, a thriving subfield of Canadian history, and a force in North American and international environmental history. The majority of my NiCHE cohort (by which I mean the group of Canadian environmental historians who received their PhDs within roughly a five-year period) ended up getting permanent academic jobs, in large part I think because of the opportunities provided by NiCHE; I’m sure I wouldn’t have lucked into an academic career without this network. 

Many of those academic opportunities arose because NiCHE had money to provide travel funding and financial support. NiCHE started in 2004. But it really ramped up after the founding director, Alan MacEachern, along with other Canadian environmental historians, applied for and received a 2007 SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Clusters award. And Alan was the driving force behind NiCHE and its myriad activities in those SSHRC-funded years. 

Nowadays, The Otter is a model of academic blogging with a global readership (in large part because of the dedicated service and social media skills of Jessica DeWitt). But, without the financial backing it once had, NiCHE is more limited in the ways it can help grad students and early career scholars. 

NiCHE is still the nexus of community for Canadian environmental history and environmental humanities. But it would be great to see NiCHE able to do all the things it used to, as well as push in new directions.

NiCHE is still the nexus of community for Canadian environmental history and environmental humanities. But it would be great to see NiCHE able to do all the things it used to, as well as push in new directions. The NiCHE Executive is looking to apply for major SSHRC funding again, so fingers crossed on that front. But, short of that, donating to NiCHE is a way to help. If you, like me, have benefitted from NiCHE, maybe you’d consider making a donation to help keep the Network in Canadian History and Environment going strong for another two decades?

Even if you’re not in a position to give financially, why not get involved, or more involved, in NiCHE? After all, investing in NiCHE tends to pay back big dividends.

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Daniel Macfarlane

Daniel is an Associate Professor in the School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. He is an editor for The Otter-La loutre and is part of the NiCHE executive. A transnational environmental historian who focuses on Canadian-American border waters and energy issues, particularly in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin, Daniel is the author or co-editor of six books on topics such as the St. Lawrence Seaway, border waters, IJC, and Niagara Falls. His book "Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations" was published in summer 2023. His newest book is "The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History" (September 2024). He is now working on a book about Lake Michigan and hopes to eventually write a book on the environmental history of the Great Lakes. Website: https://danielmacfarlane.wordpress.com Twitter: @Danny__Mac__

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