It’s been one hell of a year. I ran a 350 person conference, graduated from McGill, started a new job, saw my first academic article published, and flew enough to have circled the globe three times. I spent a lot of time in December answering the question “What have you been up to up there in Canada,” and often, there just isn’t enough time to explain it all. So, this: a somewhat categorial explanation of what i’ve been up to, where i’m at now, and where things are headed.

I finished school!

In May, McGill gave me a big red and white envelope with a degree in it. I am now a Bachelor of Arts and Science in Environment (Interfaculty Program), with a minor in Political Science. While my program was incredibly open and self-directed, I tried to focus my study around a few major themes:

• The human dimensions of climate change (particularly its effects on human health).
• Global environmental policy and politics (with a focus on national and international responses to environmental changes, particularly adaptation).
• Location based (or spatial) analysis, focusing on innovative uses of GIS and location-based technologies and services, and a bit of critical GIS theory.

As well, I dabbled in courses on (er, spent months reading about and writing papers on) International Relations theory and practice, Political theory, and the interface of Media, Science, and Politics.

Work

After graduating, I took up a full time research job in the Climate Change Adaptation Research Group here at McGill (with James Ford, the professor who i’ve worked with for two years as a student). Our group works with communities that are currently experiencing the effects of climate change and tries to help them reduce their vulnerability to and (in some cases) take advantage of these effects. Most of our work is with indigenous communities because they are particularly vulnerable; we’re currently partnered with groups across the Canadian arctic (& Greenland), the Peruvian amazon, and western Uganda. I’ve only worked in the Arctic communities thus far, but opportunities for building linkages between the communities we study are certainly on the horizon.

Day to day work in the lab is pretty diverse. My primary focus at the moment is leading a systematic review of the way that Climate Change Adaptation is characterized in the North American print media (and contrasting that with the peer-reviewed academic literature). Our hypothesis is that the media talks about (and by extension, the public and private sectors think about) adaptation in “hard,” physical terms – building seawalls, increasing crop capacity, and raising bridges; in contrast, the academic literature presents a much more nuanced view of adaptation that includes many options that cost much less than these physical changes and have significantly improved potential for positive human impacts – now and in ten years – under the effects of climate change. In preliminary analysis, our hypothesis is holding up.

That said, work on my main project is often interrupted by other interesting, short term projects, many of which invoke my web and print design skills. I desperately need to devote some time to building a portfolio of these projects, but I’ll highlight a few:

• I wrote and designed a short booklet highlighting the aims, results, and recommendations arising from fieldwork that I participated in in Iqaluit, Nunavut.
• I developed and designed an interactive online oral history database for the community of Ulukhaktok, NWT, in a partnership with ArcticNorth consulting. The database allows any community member with access to upload stories and photos of their elders (email me for access).
• I worked closely with the Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change project to develop multi-lingual branding guidelines that were recently rolled out to our partners in Peru, Uganda, and the Arctic.
• I reviewed the publication history of all 309 IPCC Working Group 2 CLAs, LA, and REs to asses their expertise on Indigenous Populations and Climate Change. This analysis was used in an essay that was recently published in the journal Climatic Change.

My desk is in a poorly-climate-controlled shared office in Burnside Hall, on McGill University’s downtown campus in Montreal. Atop it sits a nice, new iMac, and a printer that can churn out 13” x 19” borderless proofs.

I’ve committed to working with the group on my current set of projects until May or so, and am considering (and applying for) employment and graduate study opportunities in the Bay Area, Montreal, and elsewhere beginning shortly thereafter.

So, you still live in Canada?

It’s awesome here! In early September, I went into an incredibly efficient government office, handed over 8 bucks, and received a health insurance card valid for the next three years! While I disagree ideologically with the currently-in-power conservative party, our government is able to get basic things done without constant threats of shutdowns, and the like. Our money is colorful! They’re really good at kind of mundane tasks like snow clearing (er, despite collusion and price fixing). Oh, and I get to play ice hockey from time to time! If I had the will, I could take 20 hours of intensive french class a week for $10 a month. People use the remarkably sensible metric system for just about everything. And our 3G coverage, fundamental social services, and airport lounges don’t suck!

For more on why montreal is awesome, read this somewhat tongue-in-cheek explanation of how much fun it is to live here.

Travel

I’ve put a way-above-average amount of carbon into the atmosphere this year, courtesy of trips all over the world. In february, I visited London to spend some time with my friends Kathryn and Adam. June brought me home to San Francisco, and then on to Japan with my mom, who gave a keynote address at the International Family Nursing Conference in Kyoto. August involved a trip to Europe – at first with my brother Andy on an incredibly intense 8 day northern europe blitz, parlayed into a much slower, 10 day adventure up the coast of Croatia. I was home in October for my roommate Julia’s sister’s wedding, and again for American Thanksgiving. If that wasn’t enough, I spent the first two weeks of December in Durban, South Africa at the United Nations’ annual Climate Change conference representing my research group. By years end, I’ll have been suspended thousands of feet in the air in metal tubes for about 80,000 miles. Luckily, I’m good at sleeping just about anywhere. If it’s any consolation, I don’t own a car and bike to work every day.[1]

What’s next?

I’m not sure where I’ll be or who I’ll be working for in May. And that’s a wonderful feeling. That said, I have a few ideas about the things I want to be doing, and the scale that I want to be doing those things at.

If my work over the past few years serves as any indication, I am most fulfilled by and most effective when working on large short to medium term projects that:

• Challenge me to learn a lot about something very complicated in short timeframe.
• Require me to communicate with other people about those things intelligently, and take advantage of my ability to write for and speak to multiple audiences with varied backgrounds all over the world.
• Invoke my design skills, in print, interactive, or process applications.
• Make me uncomfortable. In the beginning, at least. [2]

My most recent work project – presenting our group’s research in Durban – was an excellent combination of these qualities. I had to learn an entirely new vocabulary of UNFCCC acronyms and then talk about our team’s activities with scientists, policymakers, and the NGO community in the context of the negotiations taking place. I also designed our booth, and helped produce a series of videos that showcase other team members’ work. All of this took place, of course, at a 20,000 person conference on a continent that I’d never been to in my life.

Projects like this, let alone jobs that provide a steady stream of them, don’t come along often. But if you hear of one that’s looking for someone like me, you can always let me know.

While graduate school is definitely on the horizon at some point in the next few years, I’m pretty seriously considering putting it off for at least another year. At the moment, there seem to be too many opportunities to work on awesome projects that can have immediate impacts. Taking two more years of courses and focusing on one project for that entire time in order to put two more letters after my name doesn’t stack up. That said, I’m leaving all of my options open, so don’t be surprised if I have a change of heart before September.

That’s it! You can always send me an email if you want to know more! Or visit me in Montreal! It’s really nice here (but a little snowy until April or so).

–

1. But actually, I’m always on the lookout for legitimate ways to offset the emissions of my travel that don’t involve giving a bunch of money to a company that promises to plant trees somewhere.

2. I can’t pin this advice on any single blog post or presentation or person, but for the last few years, it has served as a reasonable-enough mechanism for forcing me to try new things, work at broader scales, and not get pigeon-holed into any single project.