mining

Natural Resources

Natural Resources

Apart from a diverse and previously unknown fauna, explorations and receding ice caps have uncovered a sought-after abundance of natural resources in the Arctic region. Historian Elena Baldassarri argues that the exploitation of these resources not only constitutes a threat to the non-human world, but also to the Inuit people. This is a chapter of the virtual exhibition “The Northwest Passage: Myth, Environment, and Resources.”

Visions of Australia: Environments in History

About this issue

The contributions in this volume explore the way that Australasian environments have been envisioned, worked, and changed in the past, and how ideas about places inform the present and future of the continent.

Content

Histories of Transitions

Histories of Transitions

In this chapter of the virtual exhibition “Energy Transitions,” historian Nuno Luís Madureira argues that the study of such transitions itself has gone through changes over the course of history.

Bitumen Exploration and the Southern Re-Inscription of Northeastern Alberta: 1875–1967

Longley traces how geographic and cartographic knowledge of the Athabasca region, Alberta, Canada, colonized the region in the southern imagination long before the oil sands industry began extraction there. The practices of exploration, surveying, and documentation mapped the Athabasca region in terms of its rich bitumen deposits, obscuring the histories of Indigenous people. The south gained political and economic control of the region, although this process is incomplete and contested.