Landscapes - People - Global change

Category: Islands (Page 2 of 5)

Wes off to SMU

Wes Tourangeau's last day, with a pile of library books to return.

Wes Tourangeau’s last day, with a pile of library books to return.

The HM project is winding up, now in its extension year with SSHRC, and that means staffing is starting to contract. Really sad to see postdoc Wes Tourangeau heading out the door this week after 22 months, but happy that he is starting an important new stage of his career as a limited term appointment at Saint Mary’s University. As he leaves he has one paper out and five papers in first or second review–five of those six he led–across a wide range of topics and methods. That pile of library books includes works on the Falklands and its wool economy, statistics, environmental ethics, environmental history and more. I feel very lucky to have had such a rigorous and adaptable scholar work with me for such a duration. Best of luck, Wes!

Coastal Zone Canada 2018

Typical St. John's streetscape with a cheering paintpot effect.

Typical St. John’s streetscape with its cheering paintpot effect.

Thanks to the organizers of Coastal Zone Canada 2018 last week in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where our NRCan project Making Room for Movement was launched. We ran a back-to-back special sessions to introduce the project and explore its conceptual and practical foundations, with presentations from SMU PI Danika van Proosdij, MPlan student Matt Conlin, Dal Planning prof Patricia Manuel and I. Postdoc Tuihedur Rahman and I put together a presentation on social aspects of nature-based coastal adaptation, as well as some of the conceptual foundations of this concept, proposing climax thinking as our experimental frame for the work to come. Despite an incredibly hot room, thanks to unseasonably warm conditions for Newfoundland, attendance was strong, in the presentations (below) as well as the subsequent workshop session.   It was wonderful to be among practitioners, consultants and public servants as well as academics for a few days to explore the challenges along coasts.

Hot ticket: question period at the Making Room for Movement special session.

Hot ticket: question period at the Making Room for Movement special session.

Unsettled

Unsettled

It was also special to have the opportunity to explore The Rooms at the Tuesday dinner event, including the wonderful Newfoundland Gallery and Museum. I rounded a corner in the gallery and was faced with a great portrait of my grandmother’s uncle, Captain Bob Bartlett by Margaret Fitzhugh Browne, and was also moved by the map of the taking of Demasduit, drawn by the last Beothuk, Shanawdithit (her niece), images of resettled island outports (right) and struggling livyers, and the brave young members of the Newfoundland Regiment in WWI.

Falklands reflections online

“The place where Margaret Thatcher is most warmly remembered”: Flanked by the Falklands flag and the 1982 Liberation Memorial, a bust of Margaret Thatcher watches over Stanley Harbour at sunset.

Today is the 36th anniversary of the start of the Falklands War, which I think of as “my first war” because it was the first to penetrate my childhood consciousness, otherwise occupied with all things me. It feels therefore fitting that today my short article reflecting on my month in the Falklands, called The New Battle for the Falklands, appeared online at Canadian Notes and Queries. It also appeared in the Winter issue 101 of the print version (p. 15-18). Emotions lingered from my time in the Falklands that were making it difficult to write up the work for a scholarly audience, so I challenged myself to write about it in a venue and with language more accessible to the public. Now CNQ is a literary journal– hardly plebian–but it is also quite funny and well-designed thanks to graphics by Seth. It also has a strong cultural storytelling angle and an ‘abroad’ column available to those who want to write about travel so it was a good fit.

Falklands PPGIS paper out

Congratulations to Denise Blake for her paper, out today in Ocean and Coastal Management, Participatory mapping to elicit cultural coastal values for Marine Spatial Planning in a remote archipelago (free for 50 days). The paper is based on map-elicited cultural values mapping of the Falkland Islands coasts. This work was undertaken to inform the Marine Spatial Planning process underway in the Falklands, led by Amelie Auge, I really enjoyed advising on this project. The geographical and connectivity issues in the Falklands made a more typical web-based PPGIS (public participation GIS) process impossible, and so it called for careful design to elicit values from citizens.  The analysis revealed particular hotspots of local value, but also that people were not particularly attached to areas near them.

Sightlines (2012)

My softcover edition of Sightlines (2012) looks like this.

While my first Kathleen Jamie experience, Findings (2005), came serendipitously while browsing the Halifax Central Library, my second was bought for me for Christmas by someone who knows me well. Dedicated “for the Island-goers” this spoke directly to me, fresh from the Falklands. Jamie is also a poet, and it is with such carefully chosen yet spare and modest language that she tackles these essays that work the vein between human and nature. Several concern remote islands and outcrops like St. Kilda and Rona, with historic human occupation that speaks of human ingenuity and fortitude, and where novel landscapes persist as a result. A favourite one conveys the zen experience of the Hvalsalen, the ‘whale hall’ in the Bergen Museum, its history and its renovation, which is recalled later in a meditation on the use of whalebone as memorial and in craft. One called ‘pathologies’ explores the human body as a habitat, for bacteria among other challenging organisms, inspired by our tendency to be selective about what we consider nature worth saving, or worthy of our awe. Yet another talks about Jamie’s experiences as a young archaeologist, excavating to ‘save’ history from development while erasing it. These are some of my favourites essays in this collection, which also have others focusing on natural phenomena like orca, aurora and seabirds. My preferences are not surprising given my interest in things social: after all, when presented with colonies of rockhopper penguins and black-browed albatrosses on West Falkland, I asked, “Can we go back and watch the shearing?”.  Jamie needs to go next to the Falklands, given her fascination for remote islands, wind, and the  history of human industry including whaling and agriculture. I think I’ll write and tell her.

Black-browed albatrosses patrol the rockhopper penguins, guarding their eggs, on a cliff at Dunbar, West Falkland.

A black-browed albatross patrols the rockhopper penguins, who are guarding their eggs, on a cliff at Dunbar, West Falkland.

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