Knowledge and Science in Canada’s Great Acceleration

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This is the sixth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with Active History.

In The Great Acceleration, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke proposed four paired concepts as avenues into the global transformations they see as defining the period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s: energy and population, climate and biological diversity, cities and the economy, and Cold War and environmental culture.1 I’d like to propose science and knowledge as a pair of concepts with potential to shed light on important dimensions of Canada’s Great Acceleration. What follows are but some preliminary and scattershot thoughts on these matters; I’d welcome discussion and corrections in the comments to this post.

Science as tricky infrastructure

Increased interest in science and technology is a characteristic of Canada’s mid-twentieth century. The questions raised by World War II and, later, the Cold War were taken by some political leaders to demand answers that were at least partly scientific in character.  In this context, we see the operation of what Alex Souchen and Matthew S. Wiseman have identified as Canada’s military-industrial complex.2 Science served as a means through which the state consolidated authority and control over both human communities and non-human nature, with some social scientists and natural scientists exercising their expertise in service of what they conceived as the public interest, while others worked in private-sector contexts where profit was a prime motivator. As Blair Stein has proposed, mid-century scientific and technological advances like air travel affected people living in northern North America not just through the new possibilities these afforded but also through how these reshaped prevailing ideas of distance and environment – or, phrased more broadly, of human possibility in this time and place.3

A study of science in Canada’s Great Acceleration can take cues from recent scholarly examination of the relation between science and capitalism at transnational scales. Lukas Rieppel, Eugenia Lean, and William Deringer have proposed an analytic focus on the ways that science and capitalism have co-produced each other, arguing that the relation between these two is best understood in evidence-based analyses of particular historical contexts.4 From this perspective, we might consider how science and capital came together under the particular conditions prevailing in mid-twentieth century Canada, in the understanding that such studies might intersect in productive ways with efforts to probe interconnections between science and capital in different historical contexts or at different analytic scales, including the global or planetary. Studies of Canada’s Great Acceleration can help to illuminate the intersections between science and capitalism, on the one hand, and colonialism or imperialism, on the other – intersections that Rieppel, Lean, and Deringer identify as particularly in need of study.

Science might be understood as the tricky infrastructure underpinning Canada’s Great Acceleration. By the mid-1960s, a variety of ways of thinking about and with science were coming to the fore in Canada. Some federal leaders viewed science as a tool that had yet to be used to its full potential, looking to the prospect of a Canadian science policy as a way to improve matters.5 And science underpinned the amplification of this period’s environmentalist critiques, with activists (including some scientists) marshalling scientific insights in efforts to highlight what they saw as the alarming ecological changes associated with the Great Acceleration. While it facilitated the environmental transformations characteristic of this period, science also served as a lightning rod for anxiety on the part of political leaders and expert decision-makers, and it empowered emerging critiques of the accelerated environmental exploitation characteristic of the mid-twentieth century. 

The history of science is both an established field of study in its own right and an important sub-theme in many works of Canadian environmental history. And historical work engaging with science is supported in a Canadian context by a number of important institutions, including the journal Scientia Canadensis, the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association (CSTHA), and Ingenium, a crown corporation that involves three museums focused on the history of science and technology in Canada.  Expanded engagements with science in mid-twentieth century Canada are needed not only to generate insights on Canada’s Great Acceleration, but also to amplify and enrich important work already underway on the histories of science and technology in a Canadian context.

A qualitative perspective on the Great Acceleration

The history of knowledge, which has recently emerged as an important scholarly field, offers a framework through which to engage Canada’s Great Acceleration without implicitly confirming scientific chauvinism through an exclusive focus on the work of so-called experts. A powerful illustration of the explanatory potential of the history of knowledge in a Canadian context is Elsbeth Heaman’s award-winning work on taxation, which Heaman describes as “a social history of politics grounded on a social history of knowledge.”6 Heaman’s approach to studying a period antecedent to the Great Acceleration offers an important methodological example to guide research on what Heaman terms “the construction of objectivities” – or intersubjective consensus – in Canada’s post 1945 period.7

Scholars interested in considering Canada’s Great Acceleration from a perspective informed by the history of knowledge can take cues from scholars like John Sandlos, Arn Keeling, Caitlynn Beckett, and Rosanna Nicol, who have grappled with the sharing of information about industrial pollution across generations within the Yellowknives Dene First Nation.8 Also useful will be the work of Joy Parr, who proposed an analytical focus on embodied knowledge in her study of Ontario communities coping with radical landscape change.9 Scholars might also orient themselves around key principles defining the international field of the history of knowledge, which include a focus on practices through which knowledge is generated, on the avenues through which knowledge is circulated, and on the ways in which disparate knowledges are entangled.

Studies of Canada’s Great Acceleration that are defined by principles in the history of knowledge will locate insightful points of encounter, even conflict, between different genres of knowledge. This perspective might inflect ongoing examination of high modernist state undertakings – an area of strength within Canadian historical scholarship – by further underlining how both these undertakings and the often-fervent opposition to them amounted to material expressions of distinct types of knowledges. This perspective might also position us to recognize anew the importance of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (MVPI), also known as the Berger Inquiry after commissioner Thomas Berger, as a signal moment of Canada’s Great Acceleration – an instance where state processes ran up against Indigenous peoples’ knowledges and were obliged, at least for a time, to change course.  A recent NiCHE series on the MVPI included a number of posts that turn on ideas of knowledge, including Crystal Gail Fraser’s piece on her grandmother, Julienne The’dahcha, and Dinjii Zhuh “sovereignty, knowledge, and love for the Land.”

To date, the Great Acceleration has typically been defined in terms of key biophysical or ecological indicators like rates of species extinction or degree of freshwater eutrophication. A focus on knowledge broadens prospects for the qualitative study of the Great Acceleration, an emphasis that might make it even more productive to integrate histories of northern North America with scholarship on the Great Acceleration. Works by historians of Canada have positioned us to appreciate many dimensions of the social and labour history of the mid-twentieth century. Engagements with Canada’s Great Acceleration will benefit from this substantial body of work while more closely coupling histories of consumerism or manufacturing to the attendant environmental costs. At the same time, an important focus in such works will be the transfer of wealth and power away from communities – which included shoppers and workers, of course – and the concentration of these in the hands of the few.

From this perspective, in coming to terms with the Great Acceleration, we could track flows of money as well as rate of species decline or concentration of nutrients, considering whether wealth transfer or profit accumulation might amount to a definitive characteristic of this historical period. We could investigate the history of algae blooms in Lake Winnipeg, for instance, in ways that consider the profit-seeking behavior of multinational corporations that produce agricultural inputs, the decision-making of upstream farmers who apply the inputs that help grow the food and also drive the blooms, the water monitoring activities of both locals and experts, the advocacy efforts by those affected whether directly or indirectly, and any regulatory activities by state agents. We might consider the slow violence of eutrophication in ways that centre not just ecological but also cultural and social causes and effects. Among effects, particular attention is due to disruptions to traditional lifeways and harvesting practices within nearby Indigenous communities, recognizing that mid-twentieth century accelerations are related to ongoing colonial processes. Additionally, we might track shifts to longstanding patterns on the part of some Manitobans of spending summers at the lake, a history that intersects thoroughly with questions of race, gender, and class.10

A satellite image of Lake Winnipeg - a greenish image of land and water-bodies taken from above. Also includes some white cloud cover.
Fig. 1 – a satellite image of Lake Winnipeg. The lake is strikingly green, which suggests extensive eutrophication. Image credit: NASA, via Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

In Canada as in many other nations around the world, from roughly the 1980s, the public funding of science was rendered increasingly suspect by ascendant neoliberal ideas.11 In the decades since, principles of individualism have become established in many quarters as something like a commonsense – what Elsbeth Heaman might term an objectivity. Over recent decades, historians have participated in efforts to raise alarm about inadequate state support for institutions fundamental to the generation and preservation of knowledge, such as archives and access to information programs. And historians have struggled with the deficiencies that have resulted from state underfunding. In 2026, historians are involved in the latest of these battles. Environmental historians like Tina Loo have been particularly involved in pushback against cuts affecting agencies of particular interest to them, like Parks Canada. What some have called the war on science is clearly a war of attrition.12 Understanding the Great Acceleration as a particular interval in the history of science and knowledge leaves us better positioned to recognize the distinctive dimensions of the knowledge regime that now prevails, a regime that is in some ways hostile to the needs and concerns of many historians.

Particularly considering the tensions and complications around expertise in a contemporary era characterized by misinformation, disinformation, and generative AI, it is an opportune moment to consider anew the historically- and geographically-specific dimensions of science and expertise in Canada, as well as the roles of all sorts of knowledges and knowledge-holders in driving forward, variously navigating, and raising concerns about the social and ecological changes characterizing Canada’s Great Acceleration.

Notes

1. J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Belknap Press, 2016).

2. Alex Souchen and Matthew S. Wiseman, Silent Partners: The Origins and Influence of Canada’s Military-Industrial Complex (UBC Press, 2024).

3. Blair Stein, “‘One-Day-Wide’ Canada: History, Geography, and Aerial Views at Trans Canada Air Lines, 1945-1955,” Scientia Canadensis 40, no. 1 (2018): 19–43.

4. Lukas Rieppel, Eugenia Lean, and William Deringer, “Introduction: Science and Capitalism: Entangled Histories,” Osiris vol. 1, no. 33 (2018): 1–24.

5. Science Council of Canada, First Annual Report, 1966-67 (Queen’s Printer, 1967), 1, 22.

6. Elsbeth A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917. (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 15.

7. Heaman, 15.  

8. 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,” Papers in Canadian History and Environment, no. 3 (October 2019): 1–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.25071/10315/36516

9. Joy Parr, Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 (UBC Press, 2010).

10. Dale Barbour, Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town (University of Manitoba Press, 2011).

11. Janet Atkinson-Grosjean, Public Science, Private Interests: Culture and Commerce in Canada’s Networks of Centres of Excellence (University of Toronto Press, 2006), 5.

12. Chris Turner, The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper’s Canada (Greystone Books Ltd, 2013).

Feature image: Satellite image of a portion of Lake Winnipeg showing an intense algae bloom. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data [2017], processed by Sentinel Hub, CC BY 2.0.
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Shannon Stunden Bower

Shannon Stunden Bower is a Professor of History in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on the Canadian Prairies, and addresses questions related to water management (with particular concern for the extremes of flood or drought) and government institutions (whether at national, provincial, or local scales).

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