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New Hildebrand Fellow Eliza Breder Studies How Canada’s History of Settlement Shapes Environmental Inequality
The Canadian Studies Program is pleased to announce that Eliza Breder has been awarded an Edward E. Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship.
Eliza is a PhD candidate in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. Her interdisciplinary background spans water resource management, historical ecology, climate adaptation, and environmental planning. Before and during her doctoral studies, she has worked across research and applied resilience initiatives. She has worked at UC Berkeley’s Just Environments Lab since 2023, contributing to research on flood risk, environmental injustice, and equitable recovery, including a project focused on the aftermath of the 2023 Pájaro Valley floods.
Her dissertation, The Drainage Archive: An Atlas of Wetland Transformation and the Production of Contemporary Vulnerability, examines how hydraulic engineering and land settlement have transformed wetland and deltaic landscapes while producing uneven patterns of contemporary climate vulnerability. By comparing the Saskatchewan River Delta with the Florida Everglades, Eliza hopes to understand how these historical decisions have contributed to present-day environmental inequalities that make some marginalized communities more vulnerable to flooding and climate-related threats.
Following Confederation, the Canadian government encouraged settlers to convert prairie land for agricultural use. The construction of dams, irrigation systems, and other water infrastructure fundamentally altered natural landscapes and access to natural resources, which devastated local ecosystems and disrupted Indigenous communities’ traditional relationships with the land. She seeks to make these histories visible, and asks us to reconsider climate adaptation through questions of environmental justice and historical accountability.
Eliza’s Hildebrand Fellowship will support research at Library and Archives Canada, where she plans to examine historical documents such as survey maps, engineering documentation, land grants and official correspondence, and petitions or testimony from Indigenous and other affected communities. These materials will help reveal how the landscape changed over time, and better understand the lasting consequences of those changes for present environmental resilience projects.
Eliza holds a BS, an MS, and Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the University of Florida. Prior to joining Berkeley, Eliza worked for three years at the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER). |
