Episode Details

The Gravity Well project as an effort to use dialogue to address environmental and social dilemmas, with a particular focus on water crises in Southern Alberta and the Eastern slopes as “taps” that are being degraded by logging, coal mining, oil and gas, and roads, as referred to in my conversation with Harley Bastien. This episode, released in August of 2024, features environmental historian, Shannon Stunden Bower, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, a white settler scholar working in environmental history and historical geography, and a leader in the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE), which aims to bring historical perspectives on human and non‑human nature to researchers, the public, and policymakers through blogs, books, and other publications. Bruce Smedley, a professional engineer with 50 years’ experience in environmental projects worldwide, adds that water has been central to industries from pulp and paper to mining and fisheries, and that his long engagement with climate change and environmental impact assessments has made him attentive to how industry, governments, and Indigenous communities intersect around water issues.

Shannon then situates the famous “Dust Bowl” drought of the 1930s in a longer climate and economic context, explaining that settlers arrived during an unusually wet 15‑year period and mistook those conditions for normal, whereas tree‑ring records show that multi‑year droughts are part of the Prairie West’s long‑term climate. The 1930s crisis was intensified by three factors: lower‑than‑expected precipitation, collapsing wheat prices during the global depression, and accumulating damage from unsustainable agricultural practices such as black summer fallow, which degraded soils. We connect this to colonial policy, noting how agricultural colonization and the creation of Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905 were intertwined with the Department of Indian Affairs under Duncan Campbell Scott, reserve segregation, and legal mechanisms that dispossessed Indigenous peoples and blocked their emerging agricultural success, such as among the Blackfoot in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Shannon elaborates that agricultural settlement was “tightly coupled” with Indigenous dispossession, genocidal policies, and measures like the Peasant Farming policy that forced Indigenous farmers to use outdated technology while neighbouring settlers used modern machinery, all within a broader “clearing the plains” project described by James Daschuk.

Our discussion turns to the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA), created in 1935 as part of Canada’s “New Deal” response to the 1930s emergency, and operating until its elimination in 2009 under Stephen Harper’s government in what some have called a “war on science.” Shannon describes PFRA’s early soil‑conservation strategy of strip farming—alternating cropped and fallowed strips to anchor topsoil—which produced unintended consequences by creating more field edges that favoured wheat stem sawflies, leading to severe pest outbreaks that caused some farmers to abandon strip farming despite ongoing soil loss. PFRA’s small‑scale water development projects, such as dugouts and stock‑watering ponds, are presented as relatively successful in providing reliable water for households, gardens, and livestock without large‑scale irrigation, whereas later large irrigation schemes were more complex. Shannon also recounts PFRA’s role in international development in northern Ghana, where Canadian expertise was exported to build water infrastructure; the project had mixed technical success but led to serious unintended health impacts due to increased water‑related diseases carried by snails and mo