Speed CHESS 2026: A First-Timer’s Account

Scroll this

This is the first of two reflections on our Canadian History of the Environment Summer School (CHESS) 2026 held on Prince Edward Island.

It was my first time meeting Canadian environmental historians, and “first times” can be intimidating. As an environmental historian based in Germany, the journey to the Maritimes was long and languorous, but an opportunity to nestle the CHESS meeting between an archival visit in Alberta and the Canadian Philosophical Association conference taking place a few days later in Halifax seemed too good to refuse. The long flight over the Atlantic (correction: the great circle that was our flight path saw us pass over Greenland and Baffin Bay!) gave me plenty of time to build those feelings of intimidation up in my head. But of course they were all ill-founded! 

The wind-driven rain came as a shock when I arrived in Charlottetown. I whiled away the day visiting the city’s numerous bookstores and the quaint downtown area before joining some other CHESS early-birders for a lively dinner in the heart of the city. This was a wonderful opportunity to meet up informally ahead of the following day’s impressive schedule. 

Sunday morning saw us boarding the bus fresh-faced around 9:00 am. Sonorous chatter resounded as old friends reacquainted, and newcomers like me were warmly welcomed into the fold. The rain and wind seemed to be holding off, and we arrived at the first of the day’s destinations: the Canadian Centre for Climate Change. This was a remarkable place. The Centre hosts four artists-in-residence and a community garden that is free to all. It is run almost entirely by renewable energy, and talks to return surplus power to the grid are ongoing. It is government funded. How?! 

a room with drones, maps, and computers
The impressive drone collection at the Canadian Centre for Climate Change. Author’s photo.

The answer, our tour guide at the centre, Ross Dwyer, informed the many of us who disbelieved its impressive scope, is a sobering one. PEI is regarded as the “canary in the coalmine” of anthropogenic climate change in Canada. What is likely to affect Turtle Island at large is already affecting the quaint Maritime island in myriad unsettling ways. Hurricane Fiona, a tropical cyclone, caused massive coastal erosion in September 2022, and the Centre’s drones have been documenting the scale of the changes to the iconic red soil, and measuring the successes of the subsequent response efforts. Likewise, changes in climate include changes in soil temperature and acidity, rainfall patterns, and so on, all resulting in changes to the efficacy of the growing of PEI’s potato crops. The Centre works closely with many stakeholders across the island on these and other response and monitoring initiatives. Two fantastic talks — including one on the environmental history of PEI’s Greenwich Peninsula, the site of our next visit — were followed by a hearty lunch. 

I was delighted to get to talk more with Jo Mrozewski during the lunch break. A PhD candidate in environmental history, Jo lives on a distant island hundreds of kilometres north of Vancouver Island. She’d spent days traveling by ferry, car, and plane to get here. More than this, she had a trip planned for the end of the conference to meet the Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie River/Rivière Magpie), Canada’s first river to be granted legal personhood in 2021. Having read much about that river, and having just written my PhD dissertation on an Australian river also afforded personhood in eurowestern law, I was enchanted by her ambitious travel plans. 

Later, our bus moved us to Greenwich Beach. We alighted a little inland of the blustery coastline to be greeted by Rilla Marshall, an interpreter for Parks Canada. A gorgeous trail led us to a shaky floating boardwalk, whereupon we arrived at the beach and beheld some of North America’s only parabolic sand dunes. The dunes are formed when powerful winds whip up the sand, and they are always on the move. They are not red, like so much of PEI’s soil is, because, as Rilla explained, the powerful ocean energies scour the heavy reddish iron particulates from the much lighter (of colour and weight) sand. With the heavy and red iron removed, the lightened sand is pulled up by the wind and laid onto the mountainous dunes downwind of the beach. 

a crowd of people gathered around an interpreter in a park
Listening to Rilla Marshall’s interpretation at the trailhead leading to the parabolic sand dunes. Author’s photo.

With the afternoon well underway, the bus deposited us back at UPEI where climate historian extraordinaire, Dagomar Degroot was preparing the slides for his talk. Some technical difficulties in the proposed lecture hall meant that we instead moved to a much more intimate seminar room, where the lack of grandeur on the part of the location was easily made up for by the speaker’s wonderful performance. Dagomar’s expertise is in climate history, and he opened with a scintillating review of dendrochronology, changes in global wind speeds and directions, the underlying emotionality in so much of the climate history scholarship, and his important work on the Little Ice Age. Resilience — a theme at the core of all of this and a mood much lacking in climate change discourse — was shown in Dagomar’s talk to be sorely lacking equally in historical research. I found this to be a really captivating and convincing talk, and a tidy conclusion to the day’s earlier activities. 

The lecture on climate history resilience was the perfect compliment to the rest of the day’s activities. At the Canadian Centre for Climate Change I gained an appreciation of the islanders’ resilience in the wake of climate emergencies such as Fiona. And the visit to the sand dunes taught me of the resilience of a coastline under constant barrage. This mood is, says Dagomar, mostly missing from climate histories, yet it is readily apparent and much needed across the island. A perfunctory advance glance at the day’s schedule suggested that the theme of climate change would unite the field trip’s various parts. That resilience also featured as a lens through which to consider climate change was an uplifting surprise. 

The evening was drawn to a close with a nearby dinner. As before, an animated conversation filled the room, as delegates swapped contact details and smiled on the day’s memories, between bites of seafood and PEI potatoes. For my part, I was motivated to pick up a few volumes on PEI’s environmental history, as well as a copy of Anne of Green Gables. Would any trip to the island be complete without it? My visit to the Maritimes also prompted great discussions on oysters and lobsters with some food historians on my return to Germany the following week. And whichever form CHESS 2027 end up taking, I look forward to seeing you all again in Winnipeg!

Cover image: Greenwich Beach’s parabolic sand dune and the floating boardwalk. Author’s photo.

The following two tabs change content below.

Harrison Croft

Harrison Croft is a Humboldt research fellow in global environmental history and environmental humanities at Universität Augsburg, Germany. He writes on rivers, more-than-human histories, and climate change.

NiCHE encourages comments and constructive discussion of our articles. We reserve the right to delete comments that fail to meet our guidelines including comments under aliases, or that contain spam, harassment, or attacks on an individual.