Post 72: Northwest Climate Conference 2015 -- An Overdue Review

This past November I attended the Northwest Climate Conference 2015 (formerly the Pacific Northwest Climate Conference), held in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, a very cute little town that I hadn't visited since childhood on a trip with my grandparents. I attended in my capacity as a research assistant at Royal Roads under Dr. Johanna Wolf, a contract I've had for the past year. Excitingly, she was invited to speak as one of the closing keynote panelists, and I think her talk went really well! A significant number of the talks from the conference are available with this link here.

Beautiful clouds on the flight down.

Overall, the conference was great. I heard Bill Geer, the recently retired Climate Change Initiative Manager for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, deliver a talk on his travels through the Pacific Northwest to engage with hunting groups and associations—folks who can be a bit more politically conservative—to look at the observations they had already made about population shifts and range changes for many of the species they regularly engage with during the hunting season. This led to making some connections about the impacts of climate change where they hadn't, perhaps, before been made, and this is fantastic!

Overall, a nice component of the project was that it did connect practitioners and scientists, and I was really happy to see a group of high school students in attendance from the local school because of a really intrepid teacher. In retrospect, I have also been amazed by the seeming united front that some of the state governments and the federal government presence showed at the conference. We have nothing like that here in Canada, and the variability of the federal, provincial, and municipal governments' approaches and progress on adaptation is apparent very quickly. In the research project that we took to the conference, for example, I recall one local decision-maker highlight that at a recent meeting (Fall 2015), one of the mayors of a municipality with a significant amount of coastline had leaned in to ask this person if they had been thinking about sea level rise for their municipality, implying that he never had. This decision-maker was shocked that this municipality's main man hadn't thought about this issue before! 

Loved this little sand spit in I saw somewhere in the Puget Sound area as we got
near Seattle! It looks like a dinosaur to me!

While I skipped the Tools Cafe and opted for a short break from the conference instead, I did attend the Adaptation Speed-Dating event that took place at lunch time on the second day, offering a recommendation for how like-minded groups can communicate (not a new email or list-serve or newsletter, please, but tap into existing communications networks, and make connections among them). The crammed full schedule of the conference was certainly something to note: it was go go go, and after two and a half days I was exhausted! Definitely way to go on cramming a lot of stuff into a few days, because my brain was certainly filled to the brim with the new people I'd met, and the research I was hearing about, but sometimes I wonder if there isn't a better way to take in information at a conference.... 

In many ways, the logistics were fantastic: the size of the conference (no more than ~320 participants a day) made it fairly easy to find colleagues and speakers that really made me sit up straight and pay attention during their talks. And/or find people I recognized from the conference when I attended two or three years ago. On the note of colleagues, however: myself, Dr. Wolf, and Stephen Sobie, the Regional Climate Impacts Analyst at the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (UVic) were the only Canadians in attendance! I spoke with a few of the organizers about this, and realized that there was a very big opportunity to extend invitations to a much wider group of my Canadian peers and colleagues who would be interested in attending, and an invitation to help do so for the next conference. Take note: those of you interested in climate change, mitigation, and adaptation issues: they don't stop at the 49th Parallel, and look for the 2016 Northwest Climate Conference held in either Seattle, Washington.

I took this as a friendly reminder that yes, my country (The North Pole) is not that far away. :)

There were certainly a number of themes that resonated from when I attended the conference 3 years ago. This year, as in the past, there was much discussion about precipitation and responses to climate. The running hypothesis and projections seem to point to there not being significant differences in precipitation amounts in a warmed climate for the Pacific Northwest, though the form of the precipitation will likely change, and this will have significant downstream impacts. On a few different occasions: "Rain is good, but snow is better!" was stated, and it began to sound a bit like a conference slogan.

Unlike rain, snow extends the seasonality of moisture because of the length of time that snow can last into the year from when it first falls. Rain falls and needs to go somewhere, or be used at once. It has an immediate effect on local hydrologic cycles, while snow has a more prolonged effect. Snow takes longer to melt, and lasts into the spring and early summer, which has directly relationships to timing of peak and low stream flows, and the availability of water for cities, animals, and ecosystems. Snow is a central component of the water cycles in the northwestern states (and British Columbia, too!), and its worrisome that we are seeing snowpack decline, as Phil Mote and colleagues first presented in their 2005 paper "Declining mountain snowpack in western North America."

My first real frost of the year! It came decorating these leaves with beautiful sparkles!

Probably one of the best talks I went to wasn't actually a talk: it was a hands on, adaptation mini-workshop that was hosted by the Climate Impacts Group (CIG), which led us through four key stages of an adaptation planning process for projects that we had on the go. It is the same one that they use with clients to think through various aspects of adaptation. It was very very good.

We were encouraged to tweet (#nwclimate2015) about the conference and while we were there—which was a fantastic idea, and made me think of the positive attention that Canadian researcher Catherine Scott received around Halloween this past year, live-tweeting with grace and humour about the spider sex she was gathering data of in her lab—but to avoid major roaming fees on my cell, I'd left it at home. That made me brainstorm about how to make something like that more accessible for international attendees like me. Maybe guidelines ahead of time about tweeting abroad (using the wireless network) or having a cell-phone share or something like that from a general account for the conference? (My sincere apologies if I am revealing my lack of technological understanding here.) :) But I really appreciated the encouragement to extend the impact of the conference and interest in it through social media while I was there.

Mudgy the Moose; Millie the Mouse is, unfortunately, not easy to see in the dark!

Aside from the intellectual party that the conference was (I really enjoy learning about what research is currently being done and really on the edge of pushing our boundaries of knowledge), it was also a great way to explore a different city in the Pacific Northwest. I went for a lovely two midnight walks along the World's Longest Boardwalk, which extended as a floating boardwalk around their main boat dock area, and met the a few of the local Mudgy the Moose (shown above) and Millie the Mouse statues in town, which mark their walking trails. Overall, it was a great trip, and I hope I can attend next year's conference again.

Post 54: Smithers, Weddings, Refocusing and Goal-Setting Again

I had the better part of last week trying to settle back down in Victoria and organizing myself before taking off for a wedding in Smithers. In part I succeeded: I found a rhythm in the bird calls outside my office on campus, caught smiles in my conversation with colleagues I haven't seen or been in touch with (it's nice to be missed!), and got lost for a couple of hours of writing in my fourth chapter again.

That feeling: losing sense of time as the focus requires ignoring everything else around, is addictive. I remember it well from undergrad paper and short-story writing. It's always the first 10 or 15 minutes of fidgety, uneasy mental calming that needs to happen in order to sink into the writing that's the hardest.

So I left last week on a high note, even as I was readying myself for a short trip—my first—to Smithers, BC, for a long-time friend's wedding.

Leaving Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands; sunrise, approximately 5:35AM. 

A lot of the flight up was catching the views of the Coast Mountains and their melting glaciers. See the edges,
the height this long-tongued glacier used to have?

Smithers was incredible!!! I truly fell in love with this little northern city. It's a little bit sprawl-y, but with the wide open Bulkley Valley to inhabit, I can understand why development patterns took shape as they did. There is no pressure to condense, unlike in the steep mountain valleys of the Kootenays, where there is little flat space to build. My friend Rory and his parents Marj and John were fantastic hosts, showing me around town, and just generally making me feel very welcome. Staying with someone who really loves and knows their own city is probably the best way to quickly get a decent sense of it in such a short amount of time. I think this is why I don't make a good tourist-traveller in places I've never been to. I long for that sense of connection that's hard to find otherwise! I always feel like I'm on the outside of a museum, looking in at the colours and images and attractions, but there's a window in the way.

I went on a lovely half-day hike with a new friend, Lisa, who I'd met years ago through the bride, and it was really great to hike with someone whose pace was compatible with mine. We pushed ourselves really hard to get up into the alpine of the Babine Provincial Park, and we just made it before we had to turn around to try to meet the time constraint we were under. We snapped a few photos of alpine plants at the top, too! I was enchanted by the variety of colour and species of the Indian paintbrush (Castilleja sp.) all the way up.

Heading to the trail parking lot, we bumped into this mottled little fox that had been playing on the dirt road. Here it is scampering off as we neared it. 

I also learned about the blue alpine geranium (Geranium sp.); the friend I stayed with lent me a field guide and we pulled it out a few times to find new plants.

The Geranium (L) and a yellow aster (Aster sp.)(R) with a little fly!

I love the crinkly white flowers of the Thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus), the fruit of which is one of my favourite berries.

View from the alpine we'd broken into. 

   
 One of the pale yellow Indian paintbrushes.                                             My hiking buddy, Lisa! 

And then the wedding took place at Camp Caledonia, right on Tyhee Lake. What a gorgeous spot! It was perfectly suited for the wedding, the weather cooperated, and I made several new friends. This will not be the first-and-last time that I will have visited.

Lake Tyhee! 

Lisa and I at the wedding. 

Academically, I also got some work done between the hike and playing cribbage and the wedding; I'd committed to writing a peer-review for an undergraduate paper that was submitted to The Arbutus Review. It felt great to sink into that for a few hours, reflect on what's working well, and where the paper could be improved. It was a very well-written paper, and a pleasure to read because of that, which made my job easier. Bonne chance! to the student; publishing is very fun!

Now it's back to breaking down the different chapter sections, laying out headings, and organizing themes, and ultimately, finishing a draft of this chapter in the next few weeks!

Post 51: Being home in the Kootenays!

Home is a magical place.

Kaslo, my tiny hometown, population around 1000 (it fluctuates during the year with the quietest point in the winter, and the bustle returning for summer), is—surprise!—the largest community on the main body of Kootenay Lake (Destination BC).

Being home for me means working in the bakery that my parents have been running for the last 23+ years and waking up to the smell of fresh, baking bread filling the house, as the bakery is attached to it; it means regular visits and card games and spending time in the our massive garden with my grandparents, because we share a backyard with them and the garden is my grandpa's main project right now; it means taking the dog for walks along the Kaslo River Trail, a visionary project that my dad set in motion; it means winks out at star-filled skies before climbing under sheets, and relatedly, quiet nights with amazing sleeps; it means spending time with my family and my siblings and their significant others.

My awesome grandparents celebrating my grandma's 80th birthday! 

And sometimes it means spending an afternoon filling the table with apple peels and flour because we know that my mom loves apple pie:

My sister Heidi (R) with her fiancee Peter (L), and our mess on the table. :) 

Being home means a lot of things to me, including mountain adventures, a general sense of things are all right in the world.

It also frequently means a lot of work, haha, so my sister and I spent a lot of time organizing things, and dusting and taking care of the chickens and the dog, and weeding, and other such fun things which I've really been enjoying these past few weeks.

View from the Public Beach, North. We're in the Selkirk Mountains; the Purcells are across the lake to the right.

While I brought home my StandStand, I've found it more fruitful for now just to stand and do some of the research work that I brought home with me at the kitchen's island counter, but all of the running up and down stairs and garden work and walking with the dog have reinforced for me that I feel much better when I'm switching things up as opposed to hunkering down in a chair for 7+ hours a day. So I will definitely need to remember that when I get back to Victoria!!

Here are a couple other pictures of home so far:

Pebble Beach, one of my favourite little corners.  

Giant tulip in the garden. 

The garden slowly taking shape!

 And then of course there is the fun and wild madness of the Kaslo May Days: a long-standing tradition. Every kid who's a kid in Kaslo needs to participate in the maypole dance (which I wasn't able to attend because we were baking.) But I did catch some of the fun of the choker race:

And here's an action shot of the women's log rolling competition!

Home is a good many things, but many things aren't as good as home. 

And now off to the Climate Change in Culture Conference in Charlottetown!