The latest number of Scientia Canadensis (40, 1) is now available — a special issue on environment and technology co-edited by Daniel Macfarlane and William Knight. Contributors include Daniel Macfarlane and Andrew Watson; Blair Stein; Shannon Stunden Bower; and Jennifer Hubbard. David Theodore contributed a book-review essay and we have our regular roster of reviews of recent literature in the history of science, technology, and medicine.
https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/scientia/
- In “Hydro Democracy: Water Power and Political Power in Ontario”
Macfarlane and coauthor Andrew Watson explore how Timothy Mitchell’s notion of carbon democracy can be transposed into hydrological terms, specifically how the emergence of a hydroelectricity infrastructure in Canada has reshaped political governance. - Blair Stein’s “‘One-Day-Wide’ Canada: History, Geography, and Aerial Views at Trans Canada Air Lines, 1945-1955” takes an envirotech approach to the construction and deconstruction of an aerial imaginary through the publicity of Trans Canada Air Lines (TCA). Stein considers how TCA’s public-relation efforts attempted to attract travellers to flying by using a discourse that compressed Canada’s vast spaces and long history.
- Shannon Stunden Bower’s “Tools for Rational Development: The Canada Land Inventory and the Canada Geographic Information System in Mid-twentieth century Canada” further explores how technology can skew the axes of time and space in her study of the Canada Land Inventory and the Canada Geographic Information System.
- Jennifer Hubbard sheds new light on a historical debate in fisheries in “The Global Repercussions of the 1947 Symposium on Fish Populations in Toronto: Scientific Networks and the Over-fishing Question” showing how Canadian biologist A.G. Huntsman—a man with a passion for neologisms—gave new momentum to the persistent view that it was impossible to over-fish a fish population.
We hope you enjoy this issue and if you have any ideas for articles or special issues, please drop managing editor Will Knight a line at wknight@techno-science.ca.