Landscapes - People - Global change

Tag: infrastructure (Page 1 of 2)

Moncton treasures

Wetlands and a cloudy sky to show the Riverside trail at Moncton

Wetland meadows hide the river view on the riverside trail along the Petitcodiac at Dieppe, near Moncton, NB.

I had a forced stay in Moncton last week. I do hate to say it that way, but for some reason I’ve never spent any real time in Moncton despite growing up in NB, beyond volleyball tournaments back in high school. This time it was for the hospital, not for me but for a family member, for whom I was also isolating so avoiding indoor locations. I made two notable discoveries. First, the delightful extended trails along the Petitcodiac River. The tidal river that divides Moncton and Riverview winds amidst extensive wetlands that were covered with a tapestry of plants, and a riverside trail allows you to walk or bike quite far along it.

A section of the derelict rink lingering in backyards in Sunny Brae, NB

Second, and more surprising, was the derelict building I found. I’ve been to an engine roundhouse before, at Junee: it is basically a big circular building to store and switch out train engines. So when I peered between two residential buildings and saw a massive curved wall, roundhouse was the first thing I thought. But it seemed impossible that such a place would persist in suburban backyards. Google Maps confirmed the shape (see below): a perfect circle, with a few big doors, perhaps to allow the engines in and out. The final hint was the adjacent railway and CN Pensioner’s Center. Yet if you click on it in Google Maps, it is labelled as the “Sunny Brae Rink (temporarily closed)”, which is remarkably the case. As you can see to the right, the closure is anything but temporary, however. I am achingly jealous of the kids who get to grow up with this crumbling Coliseum in their backyards. I had to make do with playing in the foundations of old potato barns along the Mactaquac headpond when I was a kid, though this is likely the best way to visit the rink. Thanks to the burghers of Moncton for letting this fall apart in situ since its 1922-1928 period of activity.

A snapshot from Google Maps

The derelict roundhouse is clearly visible on Google Maps, adjacent the railway and the CN Pensioner’s Center.

 

High Marsh Road

A little cellphone photo tour of a detour down High Marsh Road on my return from New Brunswick last weekend.

The 1916 Wheaton Covered Bridge near Sackville, NB, over the Tantramar River near Sackville, NB, April 2022. Behind it, transmission lines head toward Amherst, NS.

Those transmission lines are visible below across a wet spring dykeland, heading toward the Sprott wind farm near Amherst, just visible on the horizon.

Looking back toward Sackville, past haybales on dykeland, we can see a new piece of utilitarian infrastructure, the 14-storey berry freezer that I hear is locally called ‘the cube’.

Finally leaving High Marsh Road and climbing up to Point de Bute there is an amazing look-off down toward dykelands and an old hay barn, one of many that once dotted this landscape when horsepower was king.

The Tantramar/Chignecto landscape is clearly a practical, working landscape, where new uses are layered when needed. But it is also a beautiful one.

ESRI Canada ‘App of the Month’

McNally's Ferry - erstwhile town and transportation infrastructure on the Saint John River, pre-Mactaquac Dam and today.

McNally’s Ferry – erstwhile town and transportation infrastructure on the Saint John River, pre-Mactaquac Dam and today.

Congratulations to MREM alum Larissa Holman, for news that our Before the Mactaquac Dam storymap was selected as ESRI Canada’s App of the Month for October (French version here).  Larissa worked with me back in 2015 supported by Energy Transitions (Parkins PI) SSHRC funding.  Larissa is now working with Ottawa Riverkeepers, and reports that her job:

… is a nice mix of keeping on top of projects, investigation work when someone reports pollution or odd activity on the river, working with some really wonderful and knowledgeable volunteers and the occasional canoe trip or boat ride out on the river.

A great alum story for a lovely fall day.

Everything Now!

A balm to my sketchy mood on this unsettled Friday is Arcade Fire’s new anthem of consumerism, Everything Now. Besides its irresistible groove, the video is a showcase of energy landscapes and other used up utilitarian infrastructure, and the lyrics skewer the attitudes that propagate our footprint:

Every inch of sky’s got a star
Every inch of skin’s got a scar
I guess that you’ve got everything now

The only way it could be more perfect for my research program would be if there were some livestock trundling through that rangeland. Happy weekend, everyone.

Dam houseboat tour paper out

The Mactaquac houseboat flow-cus (floatus?) group team in August 2013: Beckley, Sherren, Keilty, Demerchant, Mittelholtz, Gutierrez Hermelo and Marmura (clockwise from top left).

The Mactaquac houseboat group team in August 2013 (clockwise from top left): Beckley, Sherren, Keilty (researchers), Demerchant (boat pilot), Mittelholtz, Gutierrez Hermelo and Marmura (videographers).

Back in August 2013, we ran three houseboat tours of the Mactaquac headpond, to elicit locals’ perspectives on the landscape and what they would like to see for its future. A paper about that work, Learning (or living) to love the landscapes of hydroelectricity in Canada: Eliciting local perspectives on the Mactaquac Dam via headpond boat tours, is now out in Energy Research and Social Science (free for 50 days at this link). This was a novel research approach that presented undeniable technical challenges, but generated rich stories of the place and their connection to it, some of which were produced into a short documentary, Mactaquac Revisited.

Despite the trauma that accompanied the construction of the dam in the late 1960s, the local population has demonstrably adapted and come to cherish the new landscape: the need to rebuild the dam, with power or not, was almost unanimously expressed in the focus group elements. In the landscape elicitation, however, done alone or in smaller groups, many people expressed a nostalgia for the old river, and even occasionally an openness to seeing it returned to that state. In fact, it was the misinformation and fear we heard on the boats about what the removal option entailed that inspired our storymap, Before the Mactaquac Dam. This paper shows (again) the adaptability of people to drastic landscape change such as caused by hydroelectricity, where some amenity can be found. The implications of this for proponents of hydroelectricity (and other large-scale energy) schemes is more fraught: “You’ll get used to it” is clearly an inadequate response to stakeholder concerns, yet clearly it is sometimes true.

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