York history grad Liza Piper has won the 2006 Rachel Carson Prize for Best Dissertation in Environmental History. Piper’s winning dissertation was “Harnessing the Wet West: Environment and Industrial Order on the Large Lakes of Sub-arctic Canada, 1921-1960”.
“This is a tremendous honour,” said Marcel Martel, Graduate Studies director and holder of the Avie Bennett Historica Chair in Canadian History.
Piper earned an MA in 2001 and a PhD in 2005 in history from York. She earned a BA in history from Memorial University in Newfoundland in 1999. She is currently a post-doc at the University of British Columbia. In 2004, she published “Backward Seasons and Remarkable Cold: the Weather over Long Reach, New Brunswick, 1812-1821” in the Atlantic history journal Acadiensis.
The late Rachel Carson was a biologist, ecologist and writer best known for her book Silent Spring, which challenged the profligate use of synthetic chemical pesticides in agriculture and called for a change in the way we view the natural world.
The Rachel Carson Prize was established in 1993 by the American Society for Environmental History. The society fosters cross-disciplinary research in humanistic scholarship and environmental science. It welcomes members who share its interest in past environments and the roles human beings have played in them.