Rethinking the Land: A Round Table

Robert C. H. Sweeny, Université du Québec à Montreal & Memorial University of Newfoundland

Land has been central to Canadian imaginaries for centuries and, as befits the country whose government first developed GIS, geography occupies a very prominent place in our social sciences. For a century, the dominant explanation for the very existence of the country, the staple theory, accorded a centrality to land unique among advanced capitalist countries. It was, however, a conceptualisation of land as a fixed, inanimate, object of study. In recent years, this has begun to change. Foremost among the forces transforming our thinking has been the struggles of Indigenous peoples, whose multiple and complex relationships to the land have always challenged European presumptions of human singularity. Meanwhile, the scale and rapidity of the evolving climate crisis has fueled a critical environmental awareness that challenges the human hubris of our long-established histories. The result has been a profound rethinking of the land. No longer simply a given, to be dealt with in the opening chapter of our monographs, the land in all its complexity has emerged as an historical actor, marked by the specificities of time and place. This long overdue rethinking arrives dangerously late, as our response to the Anthropocene heralds an unprecedented expansion of highly destructive extractive activities of all sorts. It is most appropriate, therefore, that it is here in Toronto, home to the world’s leading capital market for mining, that we meet to discuss realistically what our responsibilities are.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 195. Rethinking the Land: A Round Table