P.E.I. from above: What a new book tells us about the Island's past and future

From shades of grey to vibrant colour, a new book by a UPEI professor gives a bird's eye view of Prince Edward Island's journey to the modern day through aerial photography.

Joshua MacFadyen's Time Flies provides an overview — literally — of P.E.I.'s changing urban, rural and coastal areas between 1935 and 2020. 

The book's four chapters blend the aerial photos with historical analysis to show how the Island's communities and ecosystems have changed in those 85 years. 

What emerged through the research was a tale of the transportation revolution's affect on our landscape, MacFadyen said. 

"From rivers and railways to racetracks and roundabouts, the book is a study of how we get around on P.E.I.," he said. "As we moved pretty quickly to automobile transportation, the rest of the Island's shape pretty quickly followed." 

MacFadyen is an associate professor in the applied communication, leadership and culture program at UPEI. He also holds a Canada research chair in geospatial humanities. 

Time Flies has been in the works for the past 10 years. Alan MacEachern, a colleague of MacFadyen's at Western University in Ontario, planted the seed of the idea while the two were studying aerial photos for a project involving Prince Edward Island National Park. 

The book that sprouted from that seed includes between 40 and 45 photos of sites across the Island as it charts often-surprising changes to the landscape. 

"Each one of them looks slightly different, but some of them — even the iconic ones — look very different," MacFadyen said. "Bonshaw Provincial Park and Robinsons Island in P.E.I. National Park, they're almost unrecognizable 85 years later, either from forest regrowth over old farms or from dramatic changes in Robinsons Island when they built the dike on the east end of it." 

MacFadyen moved back to Prince Edward Island in 2018, and several of his students at UPEI helped him finish the book. 

The final draft was submitted for peer review in 2020, just weeks before post-tropical storm Fiona hit the province. The devastation further highlighted the research MacFadyen had been doing. 

"It was really poignant," he said. "I was thinking quite a bit about, 'Are we ready for more events like that?' And I think you'd have to say no." 

Another major theme to emerge from the photographs was an agricultural transition.

While the province is almost evenly split between urban and rural areas today, MacFadyen said the early photos show about 14,000 smaller farms spread across P.E.I. Now there are less than 1,200, mostly larger ones.