We are pleased to announce that NiCHE’s 2026 Best Book in Canadian Environmental History Prize has been awarded to Jack Bouchard, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Rutgers University. His book, Terra Nova: Food, Water, and Work in an Early Atlantic World, was published by Yale University Press in 2025.

Jack Bouchard’s Terra Nova is both an impressive and significant intervention in historiography of the Atlantic world which further develops the subfield of ocean environmental history, histories of labour and food, and histories of the commons. Used by fish workers to describe the “waters and coasts of the northwest Atlantic where they actively caught fish, a vast and malleable space that changed from year to year and season to season” (3), sixteenth-century Terra Nova was both a multi-species and a multi-ethnic space. Drawing parallels between Beothuk, Innu, and Mi’kmaq seasonal migrations and foodways with the migratory, seasonal work of European fishers, the book is at its base, a material environmental history that is attentive to the energy patterns, scales, and rhythms of coastal ecology and the nonhuman world. One of Bouchard’s most striking contentions is that “fishwork,” a non-capitalist form of production that used old methods and simple techniques to process marine life into a commodity for instant consumption, contributed to emergent capitalism.  

Bouchard engages with a remarkable diversity of sources – historical and historiographical – in multiple languages and forms (archaeological, climatological, artistic, cartographic). The result is a richly layered and engagingly written environmental history of the early modern world—a rarity in the field thus far—that centers Terra Nova as a highly significant space in the global environmental history of the sixteenth century. Bouchard’s writing and research enrich the reader and field impressively. 

The NiCHE Prize for Best Book in Canadian Environmental History is awarded every other year to a meritorious publication that makes important and innovative contributions to the field of Canadian environmental history, broadly conceived. It is generously sponsored by a donation from NiCHE’s founding director, Alan MacEachern.

NiCHE wishes to thank the members of this year’s prize jury (Ramya Swayamprakash, chair; Daniel Rück; and Jennifer Bonnell) for their service, and we wish to congratulate Andrew Watson on his award-winning work!