CBC Radio interview on Reclaiming the Don
The following interview with Karen Gordon, guest host of CBC Toronto’s afternoon program, Here and Now, aired on CBC Radio 1 on October 8, 2014. Karen and I discuss the historical relationship between the Don River Valley and the evolving…
How the Don River Defined Toronto
By Mark Brosens. Originally published on The Inside Agenda Blog, 14 August 2014 The Don River is easy to dismiss as a muddy stream surrounded by some of Toronto’s busiest roads. But a new book is coming out that argues…
From the Archives to the Bee Yard
One of the reasons I chose to locate my postdoctoral research on the environmental history of beekeeping at the University of Guelph was the presence of reknown honeybee researchers Ernesto Guzman and Gard Otis, and the existence of the Honey…
Thinking with Bees
Bees have received a lot of attention over the last five years. You could say they’ve become media darlings, of sorts. The “disappearance” of 30 billion honeybees—one quarter of the population in the northern hemisphere—from hives in North America and…
Writing the Environmental History of Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway
When I first began to explore the history of Toronto’s Don River Valley five years ago, the story of the major highway that runs through the valley failed to capture my imagination. I was interested in the effects of highway…
History from the Urban Fringe
Toronto’s Lower Don River slides unceremoniously along the eastern limits of the old city core, its muddied, placid channel host to the scattered wreckage of twenty-first-century urban living: plastic bags snagged at intervals along its length; a rusting shopping cart…
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