L'étude des milieux de vie et de leurs populations : les chantiers d'une géographie historique environnementale au Québec

Abstract

Environmental history contributes to historical geography in Quebec through the attention it pays to the spatial and material dimensions of the relationship between society and the environment. This contribution, which can be characterized by the term “environmental historical geography,” can be seen in a series of works that enrich our understanding of the relationships between populations and their different milieux de vie, exemplified as forest, rural, and urban environments in this article. The use of digital tools, such as geohistorical information systems, and digitized sources, such as historical maps and survey archives, makes it possible to recast our understanding of the relationships between Quebec societies and their territories and to offer a geographical and ecological reinterpretation of historical problems. By jointly rethinking time and space with novel questions, methods, and theories, as well as sources recently revealed or digitized, environmental historical geography projects new intellectual niches to grasp the relationships between populations and their living environments.