Social Ecological Metabolism and Population in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 1850-2025

Josh MacFadyen, University of Prince Edward Island

This paper attempts to answer two historical questions about the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the 236,000 square-kilometer estuary at the mouth of the River of Canada. The first is seemingly simple: how many people lived on the shores of the Gulf at various points in its long history of European settlement? The second is more complex: why did that population grow so slowly at almost every point in these five centuries? For instance, in the six decades between 1851-1911, Upper Canada’s population grew four times faster than the Gulf’s. Rising tides did not lift all boats equally. The answers are surprisingly difficult given the fragmented nature of this multi-jurisdictional, predominantly rural, and fundamentally coastal space. However, it is essential to define these terms in order to understand the Gulf’s social and ecological metabolism, a critical approach to addressing sustainability problems in the region. This is one of the goals of a new SSHRC Partnership Development project: Ecologies, Knowledge, and Power in the Gulf of St. Lawrence Region, c.1500-Present. This interdisciplinary team considers the Gulf as littoral space, where internal flows of energy, materials, and knowledge across land and sea were often as significant as resource extraction. The paper draws on a wide variety of detailed historical records to offer a more precise accounting of social, economic, and environmental changes in the region. Using historical Geographic Information Systems the paper considers population growth as well as the historical acquisition and distribution of food and energy across the Gulf, particularly in the last 175 years.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 49. HGIS at Scale