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Over the past two decades, environmental history as an approach to the understanding and explanation of historical processes has become gradually fashionable amongst academics; empirical data collected over the North Atlantic proposed new trends with regards to economic patterns during the Viking Age. The increasing number of Viking Age sites exposed in Iceland, the amount of zooarchaeological collections highlighting an abundant presence of fish bones in the overall archaeofauna, together with one’s expertise in environmental history as well as a strong interest in socio-economic development during the Viking Age and medieval periods were many factors which help identify strengths and weaknesses with regards to the understanding of the emergence of commercial fish trade in Iceland, and to a lesser extent, the Faeroe Islands. The thesis proposes a new theory with regards to human adaptation to new environments, and subsequent economic developments based on the commercial exploitation of fish. The interdisciplinary aspect of this project using cultural sediment analysis and zooarchaeology, as well as concepts from anthropology and economic anthropology, allows for the theory to be tested by empirical data.

This interdisciplinary project offers new insights into the reclamation history of two of the most controversial and contaminated sites in Canadian history: the Sydney tar ponds and coke ovens and the Athabasca oil sands. It argues that Canada’s natural resource-dependent economy, combined with jurisdictional uncertainty, created a hesitant, fragmentary site cleanup regime, one that left room for different ideas about landscapes to shape and even distort reclamation’s goals and processes. In the absence of substantive reclamation standards and legislation, researchers struggled to accommodate the unique challenges of the oil sands during the 1960s and 1970s. Ambitious goals for reclamation faltered, and even the most successful examples of oil sands reclamation differed significantly from the pre-extraction environment; reclamation was not restoration. Planners envisioned transforming northeastern Alberta into a managed wilderness and recreation nirvana, but few of these plans were realised. The Sydney tar ponds experience suggests that truly successful reclamation cannot exist unless past injustices are fully acknowledged, reparations made, and a more complete narrative of contamination and reclamation constructed through open deliberation. Reclamation, after all, does not repair history; nor can it erase the past. Effective oil sands reclamation, then, requires a reconsideration of the site’s past and an acknowledgement of the perpetuated vulnerabilities and injustices wrought by development and reclamation.

American agriculture in the twentieth century underwent immense transformations. The triumphs in agriculture are emblematic of post-war American progress and expansion but do not accurately depict the evolution of American agriculture throughout an entire century of agricultural depression and economic failure. Some characteristics of this evolution are unprecedented efficiency in terms of output per capita, rapid industrialization and mechanization, the gradual slip of agriculture's portion of GNP, and an exodus of millions of farmers from agriculture leading to fewer and larger farms. The purpose of this thesis is to provide an environmental history and political ecology of overproduction, which has lead to constant surpluses, federal price and subsidy intervention, and environmental concerns about sustainability and food safety. This project explores the political economy of output maximization during these years, roughly from WWI through the present, studying various environmental, economic, and social effects of overproduction and output maximization. The complex eco system of modern agriculture is heavily impacted by the political and economic systems in which it is intrinsically embedded, obfuscating hopes of food and agricultural reforms on many different levels. Overproduction and surplus are central to modern agriculture and to the food that has fueled American bodies for decades. Studying overproduction, or operating at rapidly expanding levels of output maximization, will provide a unique lens through which to look at the profound impact that the previous century of technological advance and farm legislation has had on agriculture in America.

Australia is a suburban nation. Today, with increasing concern regarding the sustainability of cities, an appreciation of the complexities of Australian suburbia is critical to the debate about urban futures. As a built environment and a cultural phenomenon, the Australian suburbs have inspired considerable scholarly literature. Yet to date, such scholarly work has largely overlooked the changing environmental values and visions of those shaping and residing within suburban landscapes, and the practices through which such values and visions are materialised in the processes of suburban development. Focusing on the post-war suburban landscapes of Canberra and Perth, this thesis centralises the environmental, political and economic forces that have shaped human action to construct suburban spaces, paying particular attention to the extent to which individual understandings and visions of 'environment' have determined the shape and nature of suburban development. Specifically, it examines how those operating within Australia’s suburbs, including planners, developers, builders, landscape designers and residents have imagined the 'environment', and how such imaginaries have shifted in response to varying spatial, temporal and ideological contexts. Tracing the shifting nature of environmental concern throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century, it argues that despite the somewhat unsustainable nature of Australia's suburban landscapes, the planning and development of such landscapes has long been influenced by and has responded to differing understandings of 'environment', which themselves are the product of changing social, political and economic concerns. In doing so, this thesis challenges a number of perceptions concerning Australian suburbs, environmental awareness and sustainability. In particular, it contests the assumption that environmental concern for Australia's suburban development emerged with the urban consolidation debates of the 1980s and 1990s, and analyses a range of environmental sensibilities not often acknowledged in current histories of Australian environmentalism. By examining, for example, how the deterministic and economic concerns of differing planning bodies, along with the aesthetic and ecological concerns of various planners, are intertwined with the housing and domestic lifestyle preferences of suburban homeowners, this history brings to the fore the often conflicting environmental ideas and practices that arise in the course of suburban development, and provides a more nuanced history of the diversity of environmental sensibilities. In sum, this thesis enhances our understandings of the changing nature of environmental concern and illuminates the complex, still largely misunderstood, environmental ideas and practices that arise in the processes of suburban development.

Canadians have developed a vocabulary of regionalism, a cultural shorthand that divides Canada into easily-described spaces: the Arctic, the Prairies, the Maritimes, and Central Canada, for example. But these artificial divisions obscure the history of edge places whose identity is drawn from more than one region. The region north of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, is a place on the edge of the boreal forest whose self-representations, local history, and memorials draw heavily on a non-prairie identity. There, the past is associated with the forest in contrast to most Canadians' understanding of Saskatchewan as flat, treeless prairie. This dissertation presents the history of the north Prince Albert region within a framework that challenges common Saskatchewan and Canadian stereotypes. Through deep-time place history, layers of historical occupation in the study region can be compared and contrasted to show both change and continuity. Historical interpretations have consistently separated the history of Saskatchewans boreal north and prairie south, as if the two have no history of interchange and connection. Using edge theory, this dissertation argues that historical human occupation in the western interior found success in the combination of prairie and boreal lifeways.<p> First Nations groups from both boreal forest and open plain used the forest edge as a refuge, and to enhance resilience through access to resources from the other ecosystem. Newcomer use of the prairie landscape rebranded the boreal north as a place of natural resources to serve the burgeoning prairie market. The prairies could not be settled if there was not also a nearby and extensive source for what the prairies lacked: timber and fuel. Extensive timber harvesting led to deforestation and the rise of agriculture built on the rhetoric of mixed farming, not King Wheat. The mixed farming movement tied to landscape underscored the massive internal migrations from the open prairies to the parkland and forest edge.<p> Soldier settlement, long viewed as a failure, experienced success in the north Prince Albert region and gave a model for future extensive government-supported land settlement schemes. South-to-north migration during the 1920s was based on a combination of push and pull factors: drought in the Palliser Triangle; and a strengthening northern economy built on cordwood, commercial fishing, freighting, prospecting and fur harvesting, as well as mixed farming. The economy at the forest edge supported occupational pluralism, drawing subsistence from both farm and forest, reflecting the First Nations model. As tourism grew to prominence, the Saskatchewan dual identity of prairie/forest led to the re-creation of the north Prince Albert region as a new vacationland, the Playground of the Prairies. The northern forest edge drew thousands of migrants during the Great Depression. Historical analysis has consistently interpreted this movement as frantic, a reactionary idea without precedent. Through a deep-time analysis, the Depression migrations are viewed through a new lens. The forest edge was a historic place of both economic and cultural refuge and resilience predicated on the Saskatchewan contrast of north and south.