This is the fourth post in a short series of reflections from participants of the 2025 Canadian History and Environment Summer Symposium on Contamination and Rebirth in Hamilton, Ontario, organized by Jessica van Horssen at McMaster University.
As an American historian, I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about ruin.
The ongoing Republican assault on the United States has been horrifying to watch. In the first six months of Donald Trump’s second term, the Republican party has slashed funding for research in American universities and government services, green-lit the continued terrorization of people of colour by ICE, as well as attacked the right of transgender people – especially children – to exist. While writing this piece, Trump bombed Iran, and the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could, in fact, legally disappear people to foreign prisons. Even beyond the American political train wreck, the climate crisis continues to build steam. And people keep insisting that, no, really, generative artificial intelligence is the future. And maybe it is! Maybe the future is just an endless barrage of horrific nonsense and nonsensical horror.
CHESS 2025 did not change any of that. It didn’t even really make me feel better about any of that. What it did was remind me of the limits of fixating on ruin. An unstoppable slide toward certain doom makes for a horribly magnetic story. But it is, ultimately, just a story: a stab at sense-making, an attempt to arrange chaos.
I was expecting CHESS to be depressing this year. Environmental history, while fascinating, can be a bit of a bummer! Contamination, habitat destruction, ecosystem degradation – none of these are particularly cheerful topics. Saturday, May 31 involved a field trip to the harbour and then an academic talk and a field trip both focusing on bees. So, I was expecting to hear about collapsing global markets and irreversible industrial pollution, then round the day out with discussions of the mass die-off of a vulnerable yet extremely important insect population.
But the stories at CHESS were not quite so simple. If you’ve never seen it, Hamilton Harbour is something of a study in contrasts. If you stand on the pier, facing the water, and then turn to your left, you’ll see dark, dense forest on the far shore. Turn to your right, and you’ll see factories clustered along the shoreline, emitting plumes of smoke and the occasional burst of flame.

Ken Cruickshank pointed out the contrast between the two shores as the two poles of environmental management. It’s easy to think of industrial production as destroying natural landscapes. But both the forest and the factories are human creations; they are two sides of the same coin. (Or, in this case, two sides of the same bay.) And there is even more complexity underneath the surface. When Hamilton rebuilt part of the harbour, it used discarded industrial materials to support the shoreline. Was that an example of industrial pursuits ruining a landscape? I didn’t think so, as I stood on the pier and looked out at the water.

Okay, so the harbour trip had not been quite as dire as I’d expected. Surely in the second half of the day, I would hear tales of all the terrible things humans have done to bees. But here, too, things were not quite so simple. The two bee-focused events were Jennifer Bonnell’s talk on her forthcoming book, an environmental history of beekeeping in the Great Lakes, and a visit to Humble Bee, an all-things-bee emporium in Hamilton, Ontario.
In her talk, Bonnell drew out connections between bees and the things she learned by examining them historically. North American urban beekeeping goes back over 150 years. Bees are a unique livestock animal, in that they cannot be caged and must be allowed to forage – like reindeer, Bonnell said. Bees, as a managed and carefully tracked species, can also provide insight about the conditions wild pollinators experienced, which can be difficult to see in the historical record. Bees have a typical range of two or three miles. So a beehive in an urban area might conceivably have only urban territory, with nary a grassy open field to be found. And bees not only live in such environments, but thrive.
Luc Peters, the founder of Humble Bee, explained that they sell honey produced from entirely urban hives, in addition to beekeeping equipment. He also echoed a point that Bonnell had made earlier in the day: perhaps counter-intuitively, urban areas can be safer and healthier for bees than rural ones, because of the lack of agricultural chemicals like pesticides. Peters allowed the CHESS attendees to sample a variety of his products, including thick, dark buckwheat honey, light clover honey, and crispy honeycomb. I tasted them all with relish, and marveled that everything in them had come from within three miles of where I was standing. I thought of Hamilton as a place with towering smokestacks and declining factories – and that was true. But it was also a place where flourishing bees made delicious honey.
I don’t mean to minimize the incredibly real risks of pollution and environmental contamination. Having industrial factories in an area can make any organism live sicker and die earlier than they would have otherwise. I also don’t mean to seek refuge from the United States’s enormous political problems in platitudes about how this, too, shall pass. But to call a place ruined is to give it up, to leave it for dead, to forestall all its possibilities. Not all of the damage that Trump and others like him are inflicting on the United States and the rest of the world will be fixable. But some of it will be. And some of it can be minimized, slowed, or stopped. CHESS reminded me that a city like Hamilton is an industrial space, one that still must navigate the challenges of pollution – but it is also a place where the bay is still beautiful, and the bees still forage.
