Weather Markets: A Business Case for Environmental History

Originally posted on The Otter ~ La loutre, May 17, 2017

When Monsanto spent $1 billion in 2013 to purchase Climate Corporation, its climate data, and its algorithms for using machine learning to predict weather, everyone from farmers and insurance companies to technologists and The New Yorker concluded that agri-business believed the climate science consensus: climate change is real and its introduces real risks to business. One century earlier, another major Western agri-business (Archer-Daniels-Midland or ADM) produced their own cutting-edge weather and crop forecasts, mainly in an effort to reduce the risk of what it called “weather markets.” By investing in environmental knowledge production, these companies revealed how they understood both local environments and international climate sciences.

Figure 1: Image: Weather factory? ADM Mill in Minneapolis, c1920. Photo: Minnesota Historical Society, MH5.9 MP3.1A
Figure 1: Image: Weather factory? ADM Mill in Minneapolis, c1920. Photo: Minnesota Historical Society, MH5.9 MP3.1A

Business signals its knowledge about the environment at many scales, from local family farms to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. When Reagan-era Secretary of State, George P. Shultz, and Climate Leadership Council president, Ted Halstead, recently advanced what they call The Business Case for the Paris Climate Accord, their message was simple. Since top US businesses support the Paris climate agreement, Donald Trump should reject any claims that climate change is a hoax and he should remain at the table in Paris. They argued that he should use it to advance his global diplomatic priorities, dismantle the Obama administration’s climate regulations, and “help reduce future business risks associated with the changing climate.” Conspicuously absent from this agenda are any of the ethical and other traditional reasons for stopping runaway climate change and mitigating the harmful effects it will have on humans and the non-human environment.

And that is, of course, the point. This New York Times op-ed is part of the journal’s pivot toward legitimizing climate change perspectives from outside the broad consensus of climate scientists. The editorial board now favors conservative voices on climate like the Climate Leadership Council precisely because “it is not made up of the usual environmentalists.” Clearly, progressives support a fair consideration of multiple perspectives, and this should include different political leanings, but one troubling new approach to truth in 2017 seems to argue that scientists and other expert voices should get no more attention than anyone else’s. Unless, that is, they have popular appeal. The Times defended hiring Bret Stephens, a pariah among climatologists, partly because “millions of people … agree with him on a range of issues.”

When a group presents a “business case for [insert environmental issue here],” they are arguing that if business approves of said environmental position then the market approves, and if the market approves then the consumer approves. And the customer is always right, amiright? Joking aside, this remains one of the great questions of our time. What is the role and responsibility of business in sustainability? Some put it in the back seat, and others argue that when the interests of capitalism and environmentalism align there could be no greater consensus. This appears to be the position of the New York Times, which isn’t exactly a populist rag. The chief exception to the anti-expert policy is the chief herself – the CEO. In November 2016, US voters made a CEO the Chief-in-Chief, and now they wait to see what business will do with the Paris accord.[1]

One group that tends to avoid the business case is our own tribe of environmental historians. As a field that cares very much about the environment we are good at talking to business, but we must also learn from organization and contribute meaningful analysis of it. This is essential considering we spend so much of our time describing how human organizations (usually private enterprise) interact with the non-human environment. Conversely, business historians are often guilty of ignoring the non-human environment and human attitudes toward it. However, interdisciplinary bridges (ecotones?) have been developing between these fields, beginning with an article by Christine Meisner Rosen twenty years ago. In 1999, Rosen and Christopher Sellers edited a special issue on the environment in the Business History Review, a journal whose stated interest now includes exploring “the relation of businesses to political regimes and to the environment.”

I think this leaves us with exciting opportunities and with our work cut out for us. Environmental historians seem increasingly interested in the relationships between business and the environment in articles in Environmental History, Environment and History, and other journals. For example, Rosen reiterated her call in Environmental History in 2005, and Sam White’s 2011 excellent study of “Capitalist Pigs” argued that “we need to study the history of pigs themselves as well as the history of capitalism.”[2] Recent books and edited collections have also set out to examine the issue, including the new Histories of Capitalism and the Environment Series, edited by Bart Elmore. In his own monograph, Citizen Coke, Elmore shows how business interacted with natural resources, or in the case of Coca-Cola how they pioneered the outsourcing of those interactions to other companies. In Green Capitalism? Hartmut Berghoff and Adam Rome bring together thirteen essays on twentieth-century business that attempt to answer the question: can capitalism be green – or at least greener?

Canadians will note that most of these explicit connections between business and nature have been made in the context of urban environmental history, although some examples in northern forestry, mining, and hydroelectricity bring the business approach beyond the metropolis and into the farm and resource frontiers.[3] Recent pioneering work on mining includes Liza Piper’s work on hard rock mining in Canada’s Northwestern lakes and Jessica van Horssen’s work on Asbestos, Quebec.[4] More non-urban approaches are appearing in a new special issue of Business History edited by Andrew Smith and Kirsten Greer.[5] Canadian historians will be interested in the recently published articles on environmental knowledge in the Hudson’s Bay Company records, the Ontario cheese industry, and Alcan in Greenland. All of these studies consider ways that organizations tried to understand and manage the natural world.

The business case for environmental history argues that nature looks differently when we examine it with company records and within the context of the firm. My study of the economy of knowledge in agri-business, focuses on Archer-Daniels-Midland Linseed Company (ADM), a notoriously secretive company that started in Minneapolis and has since become one of the big five multinational firms in the agrifood sector.

The history of ADM’s response to price volatility, supply chain problems, and trade policies tells us about the way businesses understand climatology and develop environmental knowledge. Like Monsanto and the Climate Leadership Council, they were predominantly concerned with risk mitigation. But where there was risk there was profit, and the linseed oil business included some of the leading names in the chemical sector, including Lyman Brothers in Montreal, the Rockefellars’ American Linseed Oil, Sherwin Williams, and Spencer Kellogg and Sons.

As a relative newcomer, ADM found a niche by providing crop and other environmental information to the trade (Figure 2). Linseed oil companies bought flax seed and flax seed futures in a massive grassland frontier (the Northern Great Plains, the Canadian Prairies, and the Argentine Pampas) with limited knowledge of those regions’ agroecosystems and even less about their climates. Crop knowledge was extensive and growing in the late nineteenth century, but climate knowledge was limited and retreating, because of underfunding and spurious theories about solar radiation. Meteorological forecasts were only good for 48 hours, and although Farmer’s Almanacs were very popular, their forecasting methods were secretive and studies have shown that they were really no more accurate than a coin toss.

Figure 2: Archer-Daniels-Midland circulars presenting crop data (percent of extant circulars)
Figure 2: Archer-Daniels-Midland circulars presenting crop data (percent of extant circulars)

ADM realized that in the period between sowing and harvesting, the price of flax was “a weather market.” But their records show that businesses in the grain and oilseed sector created extensive knowledge networks to gather crop and some climate information in almost real time. Unlike the meteorological offices or the almanacs, ADM, was aiming for the respect of a much smaller business circle, and they therefore maximized data and minimized predictions. They mentioned US weather in about half of their circulars (less for other countries) and they predicted weather in very few of those cases (Figure 3). They were more bullish with crop forecasts, but the circulars show that they rarely reported weather forecasts. The weather that they did report was current conditions, and it was mainly in regards to the Northern Great Plains crop during the critical maturing and harvest months (June–September).

Figure 3: Archer-Daniels-Midland circulars presenting climate data (percent of extant circulars)
Figure 3: Archer-Daniels-Midland circulars presenting climate data (percent of extant circulars)

As my longer article on ADM’s response to “weather markets” outlines, the company was deeply invested in place and its business decisions were shaped in part by its longer commitment to the Northern Great Plains. Its larger role in the knowledge economy was influenced by its position on crop and climate science; the company distrusted government crop forecasts and disregarded meteorological forecasts. ADM’s respectability depended on accuracy, but as the almanacs (and recent politicians) show, you don’t need to be accurate to be popular.

[1] At the time of writing, some important signs from the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggest that US intends to support the Paris agreement. Mike Blanchfield, “Freeland praises Tillerson’s work on Arctic Council climate change statement,” CBC News, May 12, 2017 <accessed May 16, 2017>

[2] Christine Meisner Rosen, “The Business-Environment Connection,” Environmental History 10 no. 1 (2005): 77-79; Sam White, “From globalized pig breeds to capitalist pigs: a study in animal cultures and evolutionary history,” Environmental History 16, no. 1 (2011): 94-120, 112.

[3] Magnus Lindmark and Ann Kristin Bergquist, “Expansion for Pollution Reduction? Environmental Adaptation of a Swedish and a Canadian Metal Smelter, 1960–2005,” Business History 50 no. 4 (2008): 530-546; Christopher Armstrong, Matthew Evenden, and Henry Vivian Nelles, The River Returns: An Environmental History of the Bow (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2009). Business History Review’s 2016 special issue on agribusiness also contains many significant rural contributions.

[4] Liza Piper, “Subterranean Bodies: Mining the Large Lakes of North-west Canada, 1921-1960,” Environment and History (2007): 155-186; Jessica van Horssen, A Town Called Asbestos: Environmental Contamination, Health, and Resilience in a Resource Community (UBC Press, 2016).

[5] The special issue stemmed out of a 2014 meeting that enjoyed support from NiCHE and some very helpful commentary by Christine Meisner Rosen and others.

Webinar: The Security and Sustainability Forum

Historical presentation for the SSF Webinar on Integrated Land Use, June 2016
Historical presentation for the SSF Webinar on Integrated Land Use, June 2016

In June I had the pleasure of presenting a talk on “Historical Transitions in Agriculture” in a webinar at The Security and Sustainability Forum (SSF). The webinar was titled Integrated Land Use: What do individuals and societies need from landscapes, and it was organized by Dr Arianne Cease from the School of Sustainability at ASU. It featured Dr Cease, Dr. Brian Robinson of McGill University, and myself. We presented to several hundred food system and sustainability professionals with a broad range of interests and backgrounds.

The webinar was designed to address some of the main challenges in balancing food production and ecosystem services, both from historical and contemporary perspectives. We framed the problem as follows:

The ongoing extensification of agriculture is leading to historically unprecedented tradeoffs between food production and other ecosystem services such as biodiversity, non-timber forest products, landscapes aesthetics, culture, and many others. These tradeoffs are global, and sustainability scientists examine the telecoupled effects of globalization on traditional land management and societies.

This webinar discusses the difficult balance we face in feeding upwards of 9 billion while maintaining other ecosystem services, and between individual and societal benefits. Case studies include grasslands and forests in northern and southern China, farm-forest-estuary interfaces in Maritime Canada, and crop-grassland agriculture in western North America and eastern Australia.

My presentation introduced the concept of the Anthropocene as a new period in geological time, and it discussed agriculture’s role in producing that historical transition. My talk argues that human agriculture could be broadly conceived as a series of cycles between extensification and intensification within the larger trend of a transition from organic to mineral (fossil-fuel based) periods in history.

I then focus on an example from the agricultural history of Prince Edward Island from my new book Time and a Place. This province experienced settlement and the intensification of livestock husbandry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, much of the intensification occurred within the organic regime, or without the help of fossil fuels or mechanization. Farmers like Leo Farrell describe the exploitation of organic fertilizers like mussel mud, which became one way to increase production even before the transition to fossil-fuel based agriculture.

SSF webinar Integrated Land Use - Leo Farrell

The video of the webinar is available here.

It was exciting to discuss these major themes and contemporary challenges in our food systems, and I’m grateful to Ed Saltzberg and the SSF for hosting, and to Arianne and Brian for sharing the stage.

 

 

Cold Cases: Hypothermia before, and after, Stonechild

This post originally appeared on The Otter ~ La Loutre.

The 2013 ice storm left hundreds of thousands of Canadians out in the cold and made some people pause to consider the fragility of urban energy systems in a changing climate. The idea of so many people spending Christmas in the cold made me reflect on some of the better-known cases of Canadians freezing to death in the past. Frankly – and aside from Sir Franklin – most of us likely couldn’t name a single person who died in this way. But one name we should all know is Neil Stonechild. His story, and the stories of other victims of hypothermia, should shape how we think about systemic racism and other social injustice.

Neil Stonechild (1973-1990), Saskatoon, SK undated photo
Neil Stonechild (1973-1990), Saskatoon, SK undated photo

This month marked the 10th anniversary of the inquiry that brought a police force, an entire city, and many parts of Canada to consider some of these problems. The body of 17-year-old Neil Stonechild was found in an industrial area at the northern edge of Saskatoon in November 1990. He had frozen to death in that position five days earlier, wearing light clothing and only one shoe. His face was bruised his blood alcohol content had been high, and some of his friends and family suspected foul play. They were told that a full investigation had been conducted and that the teen had wandered to this remote location under his own volition. A cold case if ever there was one.

Still, some wondered if Neil had been the victim of a “starlight tour,” or the un-authorized police practice of leaving drunk or rowdy people on the outskirts of the city to dry out. Some could survive the walk, but in the case of Stonechild and several other Cree men, drying out in a Saskatchewan winter meant freezing to death. Prairie winters are unforgiving, to put it mildly. Saskatoon’s average January temperature (from 1977 to 2012) consists of daily lows “around -20°C, falling below -33°C or exceeding -8°C only one day in ten.” On the night Stonechild went missing, the temperature fell to -28°C.

Ten years later Darryl Night told a police officer that he had been left in a field one January evening, and he only survived the -20°C temperatures because he found his way to a power station and called a taxi. Night did not expect anyone to believe him. But days later the frozen bodies of two other Aboriginal men were found in a similar location and the police officer consulted Night and asked him for a full report. This began a long process of investigation and reconciliation that reopened the Stonechild case and culminated in a Commission of Inquiry and a report revealing what really happened to Neil Stonechild. The police officers were charged with a minor offence and relieved from their duties. The police chief was replaced, and a series of recommendations were advanced to build better accountability and begin repairing the trust between First Nations communities and the police.

The stories have been told extensively in the report, books, articles, and the Two Worlds Colliding NFB documentary below. It includes interviews with captivating characters, and the haunting line from one of the mothers of the men who froze in 2000:

“I never forget my son when it’s cold out.”

 

Two Worlds Colliding

Two Worlds Colliding by Tasha Hubbard, National Film Board of Canada

But in many ways Stonechild’s story continues. Some challenge the evidence and testimonies used to charge the two officers. Others claim that starlight tours are continuing under other police forces and lives are at risk. The Saskatoon Star Phoenix ran several excellent features on the Stonechild Effect over the weekend. The actions taken by the Saskatoon Police force have been impressive, considering the profoundly strained relations between First Nations and police forces across Canada.

Still, simple changes in technology and even policy will not eliminate racism. We need to ask why officers would employ a risky, illegal, and reprehensible practice with seemingly little to gain? It was not official police policy, and it was not carried out by most or even many officers. The investigation suggests that it may have occurred in periods when the pressures of policing were building and resources were low. Starlight tours were not mentioned in the Stonechild report, but it suggested that this was an unfortunate, and deadly, way to circumvent safe and legal detention.

Historians will note that the police chief at the time of the Inquiry apologized to the victims and their families with a confession. He claimed that although he was initially unaware of any cases of starlight tours, when he began to investigate he found recorded examples as early as 1976. Theirs was not an isolated case.

We are learning all too frequently of course that the first Aboriginals to perish in the care of the state died long before 1976. The roots of these problems run deep. My own research is in Canadians’ experience with the cold. Even there we see that many of the Aboriginal men who were left in dangerous conditions belonged to a group most likely to suffer hypothermia and neglect. Neil Stonechild was a young man with a face that captured the media, but if had been part of the usual demographic of older victims, his story may never have caught the attention of the public, and thus the police.

Accidental deaths by drowning and freezing in Canada, by age. Source: Canadian Vital Statistics, Death Database
Accidental deaths by drowning and freezing in Canada, by age. Source: Canadian Vital Statistics, Death Database

My article on the ice storm noted that most victims of hypothermia in the twenty-first century are the elderly. When compared to the age range of people who die by drowning, for example, people at risk of exposure to the cold are usually older and poorer. Heat and shelter are in the base layer of Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, and people without access to these basic physiological needs often struggle with poverty and addictions. Like the Aboriginal men and women abandoned on starlight tours, Canadians at risk of hypothermia are very much overlooked and marginalized by large parts of society.

But did people actually freeze in an energy rich country like Canada, and if so under what circumstances? The trend seen in Saskatoon dates back to at least the nineteenth century in Canada. The most commonly reported cases of hypothermia in the age of temperance were also related to poverty and addictions.

Not only did alcohol impair the judgment of someone caught in the cold, but we now know that it expedites some of the heat loss processes that cause death by freezing.[1] Nineteenth century temperance magazines were replete with apocryphal accounts of incorrigible drunkards dying or losing limbs from hypothermia.

The slightly more balanced Globe would occasionally print stories of hypothermia such as the case of Murdoch Martin, a resident of Huron County who “addicted to intemperate habits” was found “lying on the ice, half a mile out on the lake.” The results of autopsy confirmed that “Martin came to his death by taking too much intoxicating liquor, and by exposing himself to the inclemency of the cold weather on the night of February 6th 1868.” The mention of his widow and six children suggest Martin was middle-aged or older.[2]

Not all victims were lost in the rural wilderness, and not all were older. During the particularly cold winter of 1866, the Globe complained that Toronto’s “streets are filled with vagrants during the day, and at night the police stations are besieged with numberless applicants for shelter.” In the middle of this context a 21-year-old woman named Margaret Armstrong was found frozen to death in the yard of Trinity College on Strachan Avenue. She had been recently released from the gaol, where she was “an habitual inmate” and she died through the night, presumably intoxicated.[3]

Official statistics recorded hypothermia with some regularity, but finding the cause of death in the census in the nineteenth century is hardly straightforward. Some may have been included under “alcoholism” or other causes. In 1891 hypothermia was not reported as a cause of death at all, and in 1871 and 1881 it was divided between two ailments: “cold” (Refroidissement in French) and the much smaller category of “frostbite.”

Even when the proper language is identified the veracity of the data remains suspect. Babies were suspiciously prone to death by “cold.” Why would that be? George Emery’s Facts of Life identifies several other problems with early vital statistics, including the inability to self-report one’s own death! James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains shows the fine line between freezing and starving to death on the Plains, and of course the large numbers of each who were omitted by the Census in the 1870s and 1880s Canadian Territories.

In general terms, however, the census data shows that seniors were at high risk of hypothermia in the late nineteenth century. Those who froze to death in the 61-81 age range made up a higher proportion of deaths than any other age group. People in their 60s and 70s were about as likely to die from freezing to death as drowning, and people above 80 were over twice as likely to die from the cold.

Percentage of Deaths by Hypothermia and Drowning 1871-1881. Source: Censuses of Canada, 1871 and 1881, Vol II Population.
Percentage of Deaths by Hypothermia and Drowning 1871-1881. Source: Censuses of Canada, 1871 and 1881, Vol II Population.

While hardly the last word on hypothermia, these data aggregate two trends from census data in two years (1871-1881) where cold and frostbite were recorded as causes of death. It shows that freezing to death was most common among the senior and middle-aged population, but people of all age groups were at risk. The threat of hypothermia was much more evenly distributed across the stages of life than it is today.

To follow the comparison between freezing and drowning in the twenty-first century, the threat of drowning was much more prevalent in the nineteenth century (659 people drowned each year in the 19th century, compared to 93 people per year in the 21st) likely because of safety and navigational changes in the fisheries. Those who drowned were typically working age males, between the ages of 11 and 41. Still, when plotted on a secondary axis the age trends between these two causes of death in the late nineteenth century and the early twenty first century are demonstrably similar.

Writing about this racially and socially unequal affliction from the “front lines” in Saskatoon, as it were, one hardly knows where to begin. Perhaps the simplest way is to acknowledge that we live and work on First Nations land. We have deep rooted systemic problems. We have a history of injustices which come to light with exhausting frequency.

By 2014 we couldn’t ignore what happened to Neil Stonechild. And we can’t ignore the Canadians who are most at risk of hypothermia today. I hope as winter approaches we warm up to the idea of becoming communities who refuse to leave anyone out in the cold.

 

[1] L. McCullough, S. Arora, “Diagnosis and treatment of hypothermia,” American Family Physician 70 (2004): 2325-32; John Valiant’s account of the one of the toughest timber cruisers in BC demonstrated the protagonist’s hardiness by his ability to pass out drunk in a snowbank and wake up the next day breathing. John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed (Random House LLC, 2009).

[2] “An Inebriate Frozen to Death,” Globe 13 March, 1868, p2.

[3] “Frozen to Death,” Globe 5 February, 1866, p2.

Cold Comfort: Firewood, Ice Storms, and Hypothermia in Canada

by Josh MacFadyen, originally posted on The Otter ~ La Loutre

Many Canadians had a brush with homelessness, or at least heat-lessness, over the holidays. Over half a million customers across Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick spent Christmas in the cold and dark, and ten days after the 2013 ice storm homes were still coming online. With the region currently experiencing snow storms and extreme cold temperature warnings, Canadians may be thinking about the fragility of urban energy systems and our level of preparedness for extreme weather events. (At least we seem to be intrigued by travel delays, frost quakes, ice mayors, historic frozen negatives, boiling squirt gun experiments, and of course Frozen, as well as more serious local relief efforts such as Coldest night of the year and “In from the Cold” campaigns.)

The ice storm was deemed the largest in Toronto history, but since it follows only fifteen years after a similar ice storm in Quebec and Eastern Ontario these may not be isolated 100-year events. Extreme weather events appear to be on the increase, and 2013 was a banner year. Debates over the Toronto’s preparedness and resilience are ongoing. Anthony Haines, CEO of Toronto Hydro, promised there will be discussions regarding future improvements and “there is no doubt, learning is to be had.” Winter storms can be especially risky when cold weather and power outages overlap, and historically, extreme cold has been far more lethal than floods and heat waves.

I suggest that the kind of learning “to be had” includes a broad understanding of our historical relationships with extreme weather and urban energy supplies, including food and heat. Climatologists will be working to identify the frequency of these weather events, but historical climate data also allow historians to create detailed risk-maps of extreme cold weather events in Canada over time. Historical research in energy, transportation, and urban planning may then show us how Canadians adapted to these challenges over time.

Nineteenth-century Canadians were well aware of the risks of extreme cold weather, which ranged from the ancient belief that you could “catch your death of cold” to the fate that befell most of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Remarking on the latter’s winter march from Moscow, Armand de Caulaincourt said “Bad luck to those who fell asleep by a campfire. … Sleep comes inevitably, and to sleep is to die.”[1]

"Frozen to Death," Montreal 1872. Source: McCord Museum
“Frozen to Death,” Montreal 1872. Source: McCord Museum

That final slumber came to many poor and homeless in Canada when fuel prices were high and temperatures very low. In January 1872, several people, including children, were found frozen to death in poor districts of Montreal, and social reformers jumped on the opportunity to illustrate the effects of urban poverty and alcoholism. The Canadian Illustrated News featured a graphic sketch of one scene discovered by the police; the officers likened the frozen babies to “lumps of marble” and a poet left the following summary:

Only two babies, mere waifs of humanity,

Huddled together, half covered with rags;

A father and mother, half plunged in insanity

By the drink from the bottle they had drained to the dregs.

What of it? Their dwelling was merely a ‘den;’

Broken windows; no firewood; not even a bed.

Can we wonder, if, with the cold atmosphere when

The frost should have numbered these babes with the dead?[2]

Railway companies jumped on other opportunities. The Grand Trunk Railway responded to the Montreal “Wood Famine” by calling foul on the city’s fuel suppliers. For decades these regulated merchants imported fuel on the St. Lawrence River, and naturally raised prices as the supplies dwindled.[3] An early freeze in the winter of 1872, meant that the price of fuel in January was about $12 per cord, or about twice what it cost in July.

The Illustrated News felt this was unfair-market value, and another image shows the city’s poor freezing to death while icy-fuel suppliers charged exorbitant amounts for firewood. As with many problems of this era, railways came to the rescue, circumventing the seasonality of river-based fuel supply, and it helped to have a disaster like the “Wood Famine” to promote new lines to wood markets.

The railway magnate Asa B. Foster gave away 100 cords of firewood, and the GTR subsidized carloads of cordwood at an eighth of its market value. These trains arrived in the ice-locked city with banners flying overhead titled “wood for the poor.” Impoverished families then warmed themselves and cooked their food over the fuel, and the paper called this firewood “more precious than gold to them.”

Like those in the 2013 ice storm, 19th century Canadians found that the right fuel at the right time is priceless. "The Wood Famine," Montreal 1872. Source: McCord Museum
Like those in the 2013 ice storm, 19th century Canadians found that the right fuel at the right time is priceless. “The Wood Famine,” Montreal 1872. Source: McCord Museum

I am exploring these urban energy chains in my research, and in a recent chapter on wood energy in Canada, I have found a significant discrepancy in the data historians have used to explain energy consumption in Canada. I offer new estimates for biomass energy consumption, and I argue that Canadians remained predominantly hewers of wood (or at least burners of wood) long after the supposed “transition to fossil fuels.” One excerpt and image from that chapter seems pertinent in the aftermath of the ice storm. It shows that even in Ontario’s small mill-towns (which historians claim were among the first to abandon wood energy), a variety of fuel supplies existed cheek-by-jowl.

Part of the urban and small-town fuel footprint is visible in late nineteenth century Fire Insurance Plans. Piles of cordwood ranging in height from 6 to 12 feet were common sights in many mill yards. Certain industries were attracted to cordwood over coal, especially if cleanliness was important to the mill product. The William Hay & Company flour mill in Ailsa Craig, Middlesex County, contained three woodpiles, and the largest held over 400 cords, possibly for multiple businesses. The Crediton Flour Mill, owned by H. Switzer, was also flanked by three piles of cordwood, ranging from 4’ to 8’ high. Blacksmiths and foundries needed a wider variety of fuels, and H. C. Baird’s Eagle Foundry in Parkhill had a large cordwood pile, a small 1-storey coal shed, and a 1-storey “Coke & Sand” building. Large wood and metal fabrication companies like the Ontario Car Company in London powered their kilns, smithies, and machine shops with “wood & shavings” stored in a massive cordwood pile located beside the company’s rail siding in the 1880s. Even in urban and small-town industry, the Canadian energy landscape was very much mixed.

(for a draft copy of the entire chapter contact joshmacfadyen@gmail.com)

Figure 4:6: Cordwood in Ailsa Craig, Fire Insurance Plan (detail) 1903
Cordwood in Ailsa Craig, Fire Insurance Plan (detail) 1903

Canadian homes and businesses burned large quantities of firewood that went unrecorded, and they relied on the biomass equivalent of modern utility companies. Bringing energy to urban areas has always required elaborate supply chains. Everyone needed a relationship with a supplier, billing and payment systems, transportation grids and storage depots, burning technologies and people to service them. Almost every town had “coal & wood” dealers, and in the 1870s, as Canada began its second wave of railway expansion, some lines were built, and partly subsidized, for the purpose of bringing rural firewood to urban markets.

The fragility of urban energy systems

Torontonians had a small taste of everyday life in the past this Christmas. Today we are used to controlling our energy with a switch, and never having to worry about leaving it unattended, but this is a fairly recent development in cold climates. Solid burning stoves and furnaces were the primary heating source for the majority of Canadians until the post-war period. Most of these technologies worked without electricity. Before oil and natural gas heat sources were more widely adopted and supplied by a grid, furnaces required constant supervision, and all homes with running water had to be closely monitored in the winter months.

The power outages remind us of the major problems that occur when our relatively fragile urban energy supply systems are interrupted. In the middle of a heatwave, the loss of power can lead to spoilage, dehydration, and in extreme cases, death. In an ice storm, Canadians endure property damage from fallen trees and frozen pipes, but they also face more extreme risks such as food shortages, car accidents, and exposure sometimes leading to hypothermia and death. Others try to stay warm with barbeques, generators and even coal, and instead put themselves at risk of house fires and carbon monoxide poisoning. Most public institutions and many larger businesses have generators, but demand soon outstrips supply. Restaurants but can only serve so many people when their suppliers are without power or unable to transport goods.

Twice as many people die from these cold conditions than from extreme heat in the United States.[4] The ratio is much higher in the northern states and in climates like Canada’s.

Frozen (to Death)

Most Canadians are familiar with famous cases of hypothermia such as the victims of the Franklin Expedition, the Scott Expedition, the Titanic (whose passengers technically succumbed to “cold shock” not hypothermia), or perhaps even the Saskatoon freezing deaths, but probably none of us personally knows of anyone who has frozen to death. There are several reasons for this.

First, the Canadian Vital Statistics, Death Database shows that an exceedingly small proportion of Canadians die by “Exposure to Forces of Nature.” This is one reason why it seems so shocking to hear of someone who was lost in a blizzard or frozen to death, often within a stone’s throw of safety. Yet in northern climates it is still a very real concern. Of all the accidental deaths since 2000 the overwhelming majority (78 percent) died from “Exposure to Excessive Natural Cold.” Most freezing deaths are men, but some particularly disturbing recent cases have included abused women and children.

However, roughly the same number of victims perish from the cold each year as those who die by drowning, and yet we are much more aware of deaths by drowning. (Oddly, drownings are not included in the “forces of nature” category.) Most of us are willing to risk a swim in the ocean, but not many try sleeping outside in January.

The second reason you’ve probably never personally heard of someone who has died in this way is because of the demography of cold weather victims. A breakdown of the data shows that the largest group of drowning victims are teens and twenty-somethings, but victims of cold weather are older. Most are over the age of 50. And whereas drownings happen at the resorts and beaches of the middle class, cold weather deaths are probably more likely to occur in alleys, abandoned buildings, and other residences of the poor and homeless.

Accidental deaths by drowning and freezing in Canada, by age (the reason you’ve probably never heard of someone freezing to death.) Source: Canadian Vital Statistics, Death Database
Accidental deaths by drowning and freezing in Canada, by age (the reason you’ve probably never heard of someone freezing to death.) Source: Canadian Vital Statistics, Death Database

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford noticed similar demographics at the city’s warming stations during the outage. “For some reason or another it seems like it’s seniors are the ones that don’t want to go. They just want to tough it out.”

It’s possible that some older residents were made of tougher mettle, but it’s more likely that they are less mobile and less able to “sleep over” at places like warming centres. For those without family the challenges can be threatening. One 76-year old Cancer patient opted to stay put in his freezing basement over the holidays, because his diagnosis (not to mention a fallen electrical wire in his driveway) made leaving riskier than staying. Still, this Austrian survivor of the Second World War claims it was only “the fourth or fifth worst Christmas of my life.” He had a small stove and his son brought some firewood from Waterloo, but still the basement hovered around 10 degrees.

Where do you go for fuel?

For all of their conveniences, we forget how much we rely on hydroelectricity and carbon supply chains (both biomass and fossil fuels) for staying warm and fed in the twenty-first century. Ice storms are a poignant reminder, and when they cause outages for more than a few hours, people start looking for things to burn.

Most gas and oil furnaces are useless without electricity to power the burners and circulate the heat, and most new gas and even wood pellet fireplaces require electricity for the same. Homeowners with open hearths and solid-fuel burning stoves are in luck (apartment dwellers are not), but only if they have a supply of dry firewood and kindling at hand.

People quickly discover that firewood is not a simple commodity. Burning furniture and fabrics is an expensive way to keep warm. They disappear in minutes and do not give off much heat. Firewood requires processing, and there is a surprising range of quality and price depending on whether it is hardwood or softwood, dry or “green,” blocked or split. People offering “free” firewood in the middle of an ice storm may seem like heroes, but if it consists of large, green, ice-covered trees and tree limbs like the wood in this picture it is more yard waste than fuel.

“Free firewood from trees damaged by the ice storm was offered in Oakville, Ont., on Christmas Day 2013.” Photo: RICHARD BUCHAN / THE CANADIAN PRESS

Others, like the Toronto-area businesses who advertised “Mennonite Firewood” in response to the ice storm (and every weather report since), show that the commodities – and the marketing techniques – of the nineteenth century energy chains live on 141 years later.

Kijiji ad for "Mennonite Firewood" January 5, 2013
Kijiji ad for “Mennonite Firewood” January 5, 2013

[1] Armand-Augustin-Louis Caulaincourt, With Napoleon in Russia translated by Jean Hanoteau (New York, Morrow 1935).

[2] Alpha, “Frozen to Death,” Canadian Illustrated News, January 27, 1872, p. 50.

[3] Robert Sweeny and Goupe de recherche sur l’histoire des milieux d’affaires de Montreal. Les Relations Ville/Campagne: Le Cas du Bois de Chauffage (Montreal: Montreal Business History Group, 1988), cv.

[4] Christopher R. Adams, “Impacts of Temperature Extremes,” Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere < http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/socasp/weather1/adams.html>, accessed 1 January, 2014; Edwin M. Kilbourne, “Heat Waves and Hot Environments” in Noji, Eric K., editor, The Public Health Consequences of Disasters, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997: 245-269, 270-286.

 

Real Time Climate Change: Farm Diaries and Phenology in Prince Edward Island

(A guest article posted by Joshua MacFadyen on www.activehistory.ca)

It is 24 April, and although some Canadians have been mowing grass for weeks the spring plants on Prince Edward Island are only beginning to overcome the cold nights and occasional flurries that visit this island in April. Still, this is an early spring by historical accounts. On this day in 1879, John MacEachern recorded the following diary entry in Rice Point:

“Ice drifting out of Harbour and Nine Mile Creek, boats can get to Town now, a Ltr [boat] from East Point [arrived] back at Governors Island Tuesday.”

The day before he had recorded a similar view from the farm:

“pulverizing lea land today & yesterday, ice still unbroken outside harbour & inside St Peters Island.”

Thirteen years earlier the ice was more fluid, moving along the South Shore of the Island on 18-19 April until there was finally “no ice in sight” on the 23rd.  This did not mean winter had passed; MacEachern noted “frosty ground, hard all day,” on 24 April, and frost deep enough to prevent stumping and ploughing all that week.  Usually we think of historical weather reports and almanacs as about as exciting as reading the phone book, but diary entries like these reveal dramatic changes in our environment and our climate when we read them in real time.[click to continue…]

Prince Edward Island Beaches and Bain’s “Old Friends” Released from Winter’s Ice, 1866

Image
Francis Bain sketch of PEI shells, Nov 3, 1878.
Source: PARO, Image No. 4.2353.92

On this day in nineteenth century Prince Edward Island, the farm landscape is only just beginning to emerge from beneath the ice and snow. The shores of York Point, at the confluence of the North and West (Eliot) Rivers at visible for the first time this spring, and the ice sheets break away from the shore and move seaward with great flair — or so it appears in the journals of farmer-naturalist Francis Bain. Bain takes a walk along the shore and is reunited with his “old friends the shell-fish and sea-weeds.”  He frequently sketches fauna such as these pliactula, perri-winkle, natica, turris, and calyptra drawn in 1878.

In Rice Point, farmers like John MacEachern observe simply that the “Ice [is] off, and a boat crossed the ferry yesterday.” The movement of the ice began on 2 April with “ice drifting off again,” but rather than watching at the shore, this farmer was cutting poles for his spring fencing, following the ferry passage to Charlottetown, and celebrating the life of a neighbour, “old Mrs Bell, Nine Mile Creek” who “died aged about 90.”

These two accounts from 1866, show two different perspectives of rural society and environment. Bain ignores all but the natural world even though he had been at work on the ice days before, and MacEachern focuses on work, community, and transportation.  Yet they are connected, physically and emotionally, by the same seam of ice.  They respect its power and study its movements together, knowing that it will soon uncover a warmer world of natural beauty and resources.

York Point, Prince Edward Island, 1866

“April 3,  The body of ice in the harbour, agitated by the heavy north wind and full tide, broke loose from its mooring and swung down to the entrance.  The broad reach of amethyste-blue water, gleaming with brilliant coruscations of light, and streaked with white lines of fome, look peculiarly striking and refreshing as an earnest of the onward march of approaching summer.  Flocks of wild geese dot the chrystal borders of these beautiful lakes and repose quietly in the genial sunlight or dapple for their weedy meal in the clear bosom of the newly awakened waves.

This afternoon the ice broke off from our shore of the Elliot and drifted into the channel which was previously thawed open. In the evening I went down to the sandy beech [sic] thus suddenly exposed, to enjoy a walk among my old friends the shell-fish and sea-weeds.  As I passed over the sive like patches of fine sand perforated by the pholades, but a very rare, faint squirt of water arose from the animals beneath where a shower of energetic spouts would have hailed me in the summer. I dug in the sand for some of the fish; they seemed near the surface. I sought in vain for whelks on the broad band of fine rippled sand, and also for the sandy mound of the buried natica. Here periwinkles were also very rare, and these very sluggish. Far out in the long sea-weed they were more abundant.”