History from the Ground Up: Historical Ecology and Temporality in Colonial British Columbia

Academic historiography generally emphasizes the diachronic processes of colonial landscape change in the New World; much less has been written about how such transformations were interpreted on the ground, at the time. This chapter examines the history of 19th-century forest clearance in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, from the perspective of colonists actively engaged in improving the land. It argues that people experienced change in very different ways, ways which do not always corroborate the dominant view of history as progressive. This is because notions of temporality were forged in synchronic moments – the product of human actions entangled with a changing landscape that conditioned and enabled different ways of seeing.