Post 52: Charlottetown, Climate Change, and the East Coast!

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Climate Change in Culture Conference put on by the fantastic group at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPI). What a phenomenal conference!! And three cheers to Dr. John McIntyre and his co-star Jordan McIntyre -- it was a delight to be greeted in person, by name, at the conference registration table, and while I didn't see John's presentation, I was immensely intrigued by Jordan's, which covered "The 'Scandal' of Climate Science." 

Bit of background (just in case this is new news for some): since September of last year I've been working part time as a research assistant for a climate change and adaptation project led by Dr. Johanna Wolf. Partly for experience, definitely for interest and concern, and partly for helping to keep me in Victoria while I finish up my mountain pine beetle thesis. 

Our project budget allows for sending us to a couple of conferences, and Charlottetown was the first that we went to to present some of our preliminary findings!! SO MUCH FUN! I really loved and appreciated the collaborative building of the presentation with Johanna as we prepared for the conference, even if it had us making edits after 9PM when we should be getting ready for bed after a long day of travel! :) But such is the nature of the work sometimes. 

One thing I did not expect: the challenge of the timezone difference! PEI is 4 hours ahead of BC. So when it's 10 PM in Charlottetown, it's 6PM in Kaslo. And my body was not able to adjust to a reasonable bedtime because my internal clock was not having it! So I had several nights of 2AM because I couldn't fall asleep. I ended up getting a chest cold after the conference that's still clearing up, and between the hours of sitting, perhaps not eating as much or as well as I usually do, and the stress and excitement of the conference, my immune system was down for a bit. Whammo: enter the chest cold! Ah well. It is definitely easier going west with the timezones than it is going east. 

The Parliamentary buildings in Charlottetown!

And for the first time I met an academic that I was super excited to meet -- Dr. Andrew Light! He was one of three keynote speakers. I had read some of his older work, and he was an author in the Novel Ecosystems textbook that I've had my nose in for about 2 years now.  A philosopher by trade, he's on leave to serve as a Senior Adviser to the Special Envoy on Climate Change in the US Department of State. The talk he gave really put into perspective for me what we can expect of the climate negotiations later this year in Paris later this year. I feel slightly less pessimistic about the prospect of countries getting their act together to address climate change (both mitigation and adaptation) in light of the heavy-weight institutional infrastructures that need moving in order to get that action going, before we're really committed to serious warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius. 

So much love for the colourful houses in PEI! 

The presentations were fantastic, the topics wide-ranging and interesting, and I definitely feel like my brain got stretch in a really pleasant way. What really struck me after listening to presentations for several days, was how different the presentation formats were. I'm not saying one was necessarily better than the other, but I was surprised by how many people read out their papers, as opposed to focused on standing-up-with-a-slideshow-and-presenting-their-material-that-way that I've come to expect. While all the presentations were quite good, I found the read-aloud presentations were more difficult to engage with, and lacked slides for some of the basic things such as the names of the people they were talking about. I suppose that is feedback that I'd give some of the presenters, especially because this was a multi-disciplinary conference, and as some with social science training, I found this to be a barrier to fully enjoying and maximizing my understanding and engagement with some of the presentations outside of my discipline. As well, I feel it would only be fair to acknowledge that I am a visual learner, too, and so am definitely someone who benefits from both seeing content and hearing it. 

Conference Field Trip!! 

We had one, and it was fantastic, and it really brought home for me how different climate change is affecting both the east and west coasts of Canada, and how much warmer the Atlantic ocean is than the Pacific. 

PEI is an island made mostly of softer materials: sand and limestone. It's already experience a fairly significant amount of shoreline erosion; one local and well-known story that Erin Taylor ( Department of Environment, Labour and Justice, Government of PEI) mentioned during her talk (fantastic panel on Climate Change, Land Use, and Planning on PEI) was of a resident who still pays about a dollar a year in property tax on the 99% flooded lot that he still owns, which has been in his family for a while. But it is gone! It's underwater! Only a corner of it remains. 

PEI and Charlottetown apparently had a significant scare with Hurricane Sandy a few years ago; early projections for the path of the hurricane had it set right for the middle of PEI, and the storm surges would have been massive! Hope Parnham (Dv8 Consulting), another presenter, shared that this is when the city really woke up to realizing how under-prepared it was to deal with some of the extreme events that Charlottetown can expect in a climate changed world. [[Sidenote: It's not that the numbers of hurricanes are increasing, but that their paths of travel are changing: they're heading further poleward, as seen with Sandy, and their intensity is increasing (thanks for the science brief PCIC!!). Sandy fortunately changed it's trajectory a bit, and was downscaled to a tropical storm by the time it hit Charlottetown.]] It was fortunate that Hope was able to pull together some of the recent work she and other had been doing to get some really quick progress done with the municipalities and government to think about and through what it meant to prepare for climate change. 

So with all of that in mind, we headed for a beach walk, led by the local climatologist Dr. Adam Fenech. We boarded the bus to Greenwich, and half an hour later, ended up at the North Shore of PEI! The beach looked like this, and it was spectacular: 

Warm winds, talks of bees and farmers with a fellow conference-goer on this red-sand beach; deee-lightful! 

The winds were warm, the company was excellent, and I really fell in love with the Island. I bumped into Dr. Roger Wheate from the University of Northern British Columbia who I'd met at the Thinking Mountains Conference in Jasper only 3 weeks earlier (so heartwarming! Many hugs!). I also bonded with Dr. Laurie Brinklow during that walk as well,  who kindly shared her book of poetry with me (I'm currently reading and enjoying it!). Hers was the first story I'd heard of someone from out west and in British Columbia that went east, stepped onto PEI, and said "This is home." I'm used to hearing stories happen the other way around! 

Charlottetown is a wonderful small city. I stayed in a hotel right on the harbour-front, could walk up the downtown main streets that there were, and in retrospect I'm amazed that it's a city of about 35,000! It didn't feel like it at all. And everyone was friendly and kind and helpful when I needed a hand with directions. The buildings are similar to what they are on the UVic campus: few tower about tree height, so everything feels nicely on an engaging human scale. 

The Charlottetown waterfront, though my view was slightly different, and sans the cruise ships. 

I definitely wish I'd had more time to explore and take in the city. Many thanks for the meals shared, conversations talked, and thoughtful engagement with a number of others at the conference. I almost got to meet everyone, and it was very, very rewarding to do so.

Short note: unfortunately my phone battery died, and as it was my main source of photo-taking, I will need to post some of the few photos I snapped later when I get the new battery mailed to me. The photos I used on this page are sourced thanks to the Internet! 

Post 50: Thinking Mountains Conference Recap

The Thinking Mountains conference held in Jasper, Alberta from May 5th - May 8th was one of the most fun conferences I've been to.

The size (around a hundred?) was perfect for getting to know almost everyone I'd wanted to (at times the conversations among other delegates were so engaged that I missed talking to two people I'd wanted to say hello to!), the venue and food were fantastic, and the mountains surrounding Jasper made for more than a fitting locale for the conference. The weather held up, too! It was great for the majority of the conference, and we delivered a successful Mountain Legacy field trip and managed almost all of the photos at the Old Fort Hill station as part of a Morrison P. Bridgland survey.

A photo that the talented Mary Sanseverino took of us at the field trip with our group! It can be found on her Flikr here.

What a great bunch, and what a fun afternoon! In the image above, Mary transposed the historical survey photo (in black and white) onto the modern with us in front.

So this was also my first conference with almost my whole lab group, and that made it really special. How lovely to wring hands and sip water nervously in the company of my colleagues while waiting for my turn during our panel. My supervisor did a great job of setting us up with the intro of the panel (about 20 minutes), then each of us had about 15 minutes to speak, each. And everyone did so darn good!! I was really humbled by how good the presentations were! 

I felt really great (though still a bit terrified) after completing my own presentation, but boy was I glad that our presentations were right on the first day of the conference. I would have had a difficult time of enjoying it otherwise, I think, though now I know more of what to expect in the future. Not only did I feel really good afterwards, and I am so grateful for all the TAing experience, because holding lectures/facilitating discussions for an hour at a time made me several degrees more comfortable during the talk, but it did feel like an accomplishment. 

Lovely spring lilac! 

On top of that, what I couldn't have expected was the delight and surprise that I experienced when several people came up to me afterwards to say, "Great presentation!" That felt very good, too. 

I was very sad after the conference was over, and it was very bittersweet to part ways with my colleagues right away. They were taking on a long road trip back to Victoria, and I was on my way back home to Kaslo, BC, where I spent the next 2.5 weeks, covering my parents' first big joint vacation in 27 years! 

Gaining the experience from the conference was so valuable. I highly recommend the experience for all grad students. There are different conferences for different stages of where you're at in your degree, too; a conference such as CONFORWest (finished for this year) is specifically for graduate students, and would be an awesome place to get that first conference experience.

Post 1: The Good Stuff

I just concluded one of the final committee meetings of CONFORWest 2014. As the Logistics Coordinator responsible for everything from special event insurance to venue and transportation booking, I feel like for the first time in weeks I can almost relax. My to-do list is shorter than three fingers put together, and the mental weight of organizing is lifting. I feel a guilty sense of pleasure at looking forward to the conference and feeling like there's not a whole lot left for me to do; I know it's not quite the same for some of my compatriots.

So, now it's time to dive back into Interview Transcribing!

Interview transcription is part of the process that sets me up to analyze the data I collected (the answers to the questions I asked for my research). These are my three research questions:

1. How have the mountain pine beetle and the rapid ecological and environmental changes seen in BC’s most recent MPB outbreak shaped scientific practice?

2. In what ways do scientists understand the relationship between their scientific practices and the formation of policy and action, and do they see this role changing (in light of the MPB outbreak)?

3. If scientists are aware of concepts or terms related to novel ecosystems or ecological novelty, what do these terms or concepts offer them? (Conceptually? Practically?)

As copied and pasted from my thesis proposal... way back in September. 

Over the summer I was travelling to Edmonton, Prince George, and around in Victoria, and setting up Skype telephone calls with researchers in Vancouver to complete my interviews. I had 18 questions I asked interviewees, and the qualitative, empirical (read, exploratory) data I got from those interviews is what I'm finishing writing up from the audio recordings. I will theme and code the data, so that I can strive for validity -- this means that I will be able to say with (at least some) certainty: These are the themes/ideas/observations from my data.

                       Me with my visitor's pass at the Pacific Forestry Centre, where Natural Resources
                       Canada displays a huge model of Dendroctonus ponderosae. 

This is to help me avoid making loosey-goosey interpretations that have no foundation. The structure is there for an important reason. Validity is extremely important for qualitative data. It's what helps you from lapsing into pseudo-science, as well as simply shoddy research whose findings aren't supported by the data they're based on. Now, of course there's still the possibility that you will over- or mis-state some of your findings; at your master's, that's what you're learning to do, still, and that's why there's a whole lot of revision and feedback from your supervisor and committee. And the first time of diving into a big project in depth like this will be the hardest, G— reminded me, during a post-meeting discussion started with two colleagues after the conclusion of the meeting. Doing a master's is meant to feel difficult, and there's supposed to be a lot of room for making mistakes and learning; otherwise, you'd already be a professional, an expert, a published author, right? Those mistakes and errors get edited out as you complete your thesis, though. That revision process is also a big part of the learning.

My colleagues and I talked a little bit more about working on thesis, too. M— and I agreed that we came to places where we felt like we had no idea what we were doing. How easy it is to forget, or to get lost, or to just feel like you don't have a carpet to stand on. My partner has been really good at reminding me that every grad student goes through this process, of feeling the uncertainty and insecurity, and it just is damn tough! M— recommended two books for me to read, one being Joan Bolker's "Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes A Day". Some parts of it are supposedly a bit outdated (there's a section on deciding whether or not to use a computer), but otherwise, it's supposed to be really helpful for working through some of the difficulties with tackling your thesis, and understanding/contextualizing that other part: your supervisor and where they're coming from, and how to understand their comments/feedback/advice on your work. I look forward to borrowing the book from the library. M—'s also recommended another book that she owns, and will lend it to me soon.

So, to transcribing, the whole happy go of it!
My next post will be about ergonomics and the latest research on that that I'm still trying to incorporate into my healthy work lifestyle.