The following excerpt is from Nick Ward’s article, “Sharing Complex Histories of Conservation” where Stephen Osei-Owusu gives us more details on the recently wrapped up Spring 2022 edition of the Shannon Lecture Series. (The next Shannon Lecture Series will take place this fall.) The full article can be found online.
Running from May through July, the Shannon Lecture Series for Spring 2022 explores the many ways in which natural resources and the environment in Canada have been managed throughout history.
According to Shannon Series convenor and History Ph.D. candidate Stephen Osei-Owusu, there’s no time like the present to discuss the connections between Earth’s human and non-human inhabitants, and how these relationships have historically been governed, conserved and contested.
“I am excited about this year’s Shannons because, as a keen enthusiast of researching the environment and learning how it has been central to humankind’s relations with each other since antiquity, I believe audiences will leave with a better understanding that our historical experiences in the use and management of the environment are steeped in pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial socio-political relic,” Osei-Owusu says.
According to Osei-Owusu, this has in turn “shaped present local and globalized frameworks in managing environments.”
The 2022 edition of the Shannon Series, titled “The Management of Natural Resources and the Environment in Canada: Historical and Transnational Perspectives”, brings together three seasoned historians and an expert in fishery conservation to unpack the transnational nature of global historical experiences relative to people’s use – and misuse – of the environment.
The Shannons are a series of thematically linked public lectures held annually since 2010 by the Department of History and made possible through the Shannon Donation, a major gift from a long-time friend of the Department of History at Carleton. Previous topics include Human Rights in the History of Canada (2020), Rebooting Biography (2019), and Bad Archaeology (2018).
The theme of this year’s Series relates to Osei-Owusu’s own research on the history of environmental protection regulations in Ghana’s gold mining industry (formerly called the Gold Coast) between 1874 and 1957.