Season 1, Episode 24: When There is Opportunity (Part 1)
with the Alberta Council of Environmental Education contributors
This week, The Gravity Well welcomes members of the Alberta Council for Environmental Education (ACEE). Hosted by Alex, a self-taught jack of all trades, the podcast features guests like Nicole, an environmental education coordinator, and me, a former geophysicist turned environmental advocate. The conversation highlights the importance of environmental education, the role of social work in addressing climate disasters, and the need for a hopeful, solution-focused narrative to combat eco-anxiety among youth. The guests share their personal journeys and professional insights, emphasizing the power of community action, indigenous knowledge, and the need for systemic change to create a sustainable future. The episode concludes with a call to action for individuals to find their unique contributions to environmental stewardship and to foster meaningful connections with nature.
Welcome & Alberta Council for Environmental Education (ACEE) Introduction
Alex:
Welcome to The Gravity Well where you, and we, break down heavy ideas into small buckets, you, and we, can handle your mission. Our mission is simple. Help us work through our dilemmas and your dilemmas through conversation and processes. Together you, we, and your community will face dilemmas and make the world a better place for all. In the spirit of truth, I acknowledge I’m a settler on stolen Blackfoot Treaty Seven Territory and Metis District Five and Six lands. I take Reconciliaction by seeking the wisdom of elders and individuals who aim to restore water, air, land, life, or community, a healthy living relationship with the earth and each other as our guide.
Jenny:
Great. And you’re going to do an introduction of yourself?
Alex:
My name is Alex. I’m a jack of all trades, master of none, autodidact by nature, self-taught. I have an arts background, a background of 21 years in private security, special events, and crowd control as well as construction. I like to be the dumb guy and learn from the experts out there and ask questions when I find them to be poignant. With that, I open it to Nicole.
Nicole:
Hello, my name is Nicole. I am an environmental education and engagement coordinator with the Alberta Council for Environmental Education. I have a background in environmental sciences as well as in formal education, and I’ve had the opportunity to really pull those two fields together in what I’m doing today.
Jenny:
Excellent. I’ll hop in next. I’m just going to give a hat tip to Kip. Kip, thank you for bringing us all together today, and when you get to your introduction, you can expand on what I mean by that. We’re here with a group that is all committed to ACEE — the Alberta Council for Environmental Education. I met all of these wonderful people helping Kip pull this great wealth of knowledge and people committed to environmental work forward. It’s been a really great experience for me. The thing that I really appreciated about it, Kip, is that simple questions really provoke these big thoughts. I’m going to go back to what brought me in and why I want to speak about green jobs.
I have always had a strong sense of justice as a toddler. I think my parents would say, I was talking about fairness a lot. “That’s not fair” was a big thing for me as a toddler. I’ve always been rooted in that social justice. I always felt the need to stand up for the little guy, if you will. And I also was really tied in with the environment, reflecting on it. I went to summer camp. I loved going camping and ended up becoming a camp counsellor. I was part of student council, I was in public school sports and I was in public theatre. So I did a lot of things that were community-based and environment-based, and that sort of just carried through my life. My husband’s also an environmental scientist, so I’ve had that in my corner as well, but I became a geophysicist.
I did that just out of luck. Meaning that I just took it because it seemed interesting, not that I thought it was going to lead to a career, but it brought me to Calgary and brought me into the oil and gas industry for 22 years. My conclusion from that work was that I wanted to help people understand the big challenge that we have ahead of us and be able to have these difficult conversations so that we can solve big problems quickly. How we do it is when we take a lot of differences of opinion and come together to solve things that are quite simple when you break it down to what we need in our basic life.
That’s a lot for me. Thank you very much. Nicole, can I flip back to you just for a second, just to give you a little bit more colour about what you’re doing in environmental work. Thank you.
Nicole:
Absolutely. What brought me into it, I’ll jump into that one as well, is actually growing up in the north in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, I was very actively outdoors all the time. That sparked my passion for nature in the outdoors. And when I grew older and had to figure out what I wanted to do, that passion was still there and I decided to follow it. Because when we’re spending so much of our time in our careers, it should be something that we genuinely enjoy.
I thought I would try that out and it took me on a few twists and turns. Along the way I really got or gained a passion for environmental education working with organizations like Parks Canada or [Alberta] Environment and Parks. I work with the public a lot and really see either the lack of education available, possibly a lack of understanding because it’s not being delivered in a way that is understandable or easy to understand for the general public.
I think something that I really became passionate about was being able to provide that education. I actually ended up getting a degree in education to be able to firsthand get into schools and help students. We are bound by the curriculum and formal education. I decided to make the jump to ACEE just almost two years ago now and work really more deeply in that environmental education field. Now what I get to do is actually work with teachers who are in those formal classrooms and support them in their journey to incorporate more environmental climate sustainability education into the curriculum. It’s giving them the supports that they don’t generally have and providing resources and professional development and access to knowledge and experts in the field so that they can now disseminate that information to the students and then the students can help or start to make informed and educated decisions as well. Being in the education field, it’s been amazing. It’s been frustrating. It’s been something that I’ve really enjoyed and hope to continue to do. And working with ACEE has really allowed me to do that within the environmental field as well.
Jenny:
Awesome. Kip, do you want to follow up with that? Maybe that’s fluid.
Kip:
Sure. “Hi” everyone. My name is Kip. I am Nicole’s coworker at the Alberta Council for Environmental Education. I’ve been lucky enough this year to take on our new Green Careers program. So that’s actually how we’ve all got connected together, meeting these wonderful speakers here. Everybody, except for Alex is a new person to us here, or has been involved in the program going into schools and talking to high school and junior high students and letting them know what they can do, letting them know what career possibilities are out there and what the future could hold for them and how they can work, being a green professional into whatever they decide to do.
I feel very lucky to be doing this. I think just letting students or the general public have a little bit of clarity as to what is possible, what we could be doing is really important. I feel like when I was in high school there, there wasn’t really anything like this to let me know what was a possibility. It’s been really great. I’ve been really lucky to connect to all the different people that I have so far, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about other people’s jobs and what the future has for this program. Thank you so much for having us.
Jenny:
Awesome. Andrea, do you mind going next?
Andrea:
Hi, I’m Andrea Murphy. I’m a registered social worker with the Town of Canmore. And what led me to this project or this team is I was doing some research with the Transformative Learning Education Project with the University of Calgary, and it was a research project on sustainability, resilience with communities when it comes to environmental disaster. And through that research I did a few symposiums, presented research in different areas, and Kip saw one of my presentations and we chatted. I was connected with the education that he was providing to some of the schools. I got to speak to my research and speak to how a social worker ends up in an environmental career, which is not two things that people normally connect, and just learning from other people and seeing their perspectives, as well.
What problem are you trying to solve in your environmental work?
Kip:
How about Lise, maybe we’ll start with you, Jenny, as the host of the podcast here. What is the problem that you are looking to solve with what you’re working on?
Jenny:
Okay, this is it. That’s what’s interesting about this conversation in particular is you guys are helping me do my work right now. As I was saying, I was in the oil and gas industry. I started as a geophysicist. I was working in development, and then I started to look at liability. I worked for a private company that we sold, and when we were selling, I started to look at how we were handing off more, potentially more cost going forward in terms of liability than what the production would offer.
We can definitely hear you now, Lise. So I’ll just finish my comment and then we’ll flip it back to you.
I was in the industry, started looking at liability, realized that this problem was getting bigger, and so I kept gravitating towards that work. And so I ended up having 10 years of my career that were highly focused on liability. And so in 2022, I could feel that I wasn’t, the alignment that I was having with the group I was working with, the company I was working with was not there potentially, I was concerned about the environmental and social issues, concerns that I had. I ended up taking a course, a complex decision making course, and one of the questions that they asked, and it first of all was what is the problem you’re trying to solve? What’s your problem space? I thought, okay, it’s an interdepartmental problem. No, it’s an industry-wide problem. No, it includes the regulator. No, it includes the government. Oh my God, this is an everybody problem.
That was the first time, this was 2022 for me, that I had the epiphany that this isn’t an energy transition. This is a social, environmental, and economic transition. I presented for my peers at the GeoConvention in 2022, and my presentation was about land use. If we focus on land use and if we make sure that we’re looking at places that are highly contaminated, highly emitting close to potential important water sources, if we focus on those things at scale, we can make a big difference quickly to get ourselves back on track. This all came from the land use laws that have been working through the system for the last decade.
That was my conclusion then, and it’s still my conclusion now, and what I am doing in this work, in these conversations is we’re trying to help people think differently in the sense that we’re asking these questions in a systematic way. We’re asking not the who, what, where, when, why, how, but the why, who, where, when, what, and how. It’s very deliberate that we’re talking about things in that order and each of these conversations we’re trying to get clearer and clearer for us and for the people watching to be able to have these conversations in a way that seems it becomes second nature when we’re talking about big issues. How do we work through a big issue together? That’s the work I’m trying to do. I hope that answered your question, Kip.
Kip:
That was great. Let’s go on to [Lise]. What do you see as the problem you are trying to solve through your work?
Lise:
I’m a retired principal. I’m a former school principal at elementary and junior high. I have a 32-year career in education also. Throughout that time, I was very concerned about the environment always, and I just have always loved nature. I was a farm kid growing up, and I just love looking after animals and caring about the world. Of course, being in education, you’re concerned about the next generation. I am just more and more concerned that our environment is deteriorating to the point where we’re at the closure of this epoch. And I’m old, I’m 67 years old, and I’m very concerned for my children and my child and my grandchildren and all of the next generation in the future. That’s why I’m really trying to do something that is small, but it’s something that I can feel like I’m making a difference because otherwise I feel like so many of us, we just feel so overwhelmed.
There’s so little that we can do. I do a lot of litter walking and collecting in my community. I’ve written to dozens and dozens and dozens of legislators and letters to the editor, et cetera, about environmental degradation, and it’s a grave concern to me. When I see those little bluebirds that come out of their box and they fly off into the future, I get a real feeling that we’re actually able to do something to preserve a creature that would have been extinct because of man’s unconcern about habitat loss for animals. That’s my background story, and I put that together with the problem that I’m trying to solve so that puts together two things.
Kip:
Nice. That was great. All right. Back to you, Nicole. Same question. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve with your work?
Nicole:
Absolutely. With ACEE, and my own personal journey, as well, is just this absence of quality environmental education in our schools as well as the absence of supports for educators to be able to confidently cover these topics in schools. Growing up in the north, as well as in Alberta, I experienced the Alberta curriculum, and I never experienced environmental or climate or sustainability education. It was not utilized in the curriculum. Teachers were not sure how to talk about it. And as an adult, taking teacher training and going to the U of A for education, it wasn’t talked about there, as well. The only reason I have an understanding is because I took a degree in environmental sciences or I educated myself and I did the work to be able to understand the current issues that we face in this world.
I see in schools that students aren’t given that opportunity and to tell them to wait until they’re old enough to figure it out isn’t acceptable anymore. We have to provide them with those opportunities in school from K to 12 through university and allow them to make those informed decisions themselves about what they might want to do to take action. And I think working in environmental education in Alberta, it’s crucial because it really does empower people to understand and address those challenges that we do face from things like climate change to conservation.
It also fosters environmental literacy and stewardship in schools, which is something that ACEE is really driven by so that we can help the next generation gain the knowledge and the skills needed to protect the diverse ecosystems that we have to create a sustainable future because they are the future. The youth want to have a world that they can be proud of and live in and enjoy. So we need to provide them with access to that information.
Kip:
Very nice. All right, Andrea, same question to you. What do you see as the problem that we’re trying to solve here?
Andrea:
From a social worker perspective, I’m always looking at what is the oppressive angle when it comes to climate disaster and climate change and the things that are happening to our environment. I say to people, the reason why a social worker has such a significant connection to this is because all of these things, the environment, the climate are not a problem until it affects people. If people weren’t affected, it would just be mother nature doing her thing, changing, adapting, moving forward. But the minute it starts affecting the food that we eat, our climate, how our land is constantly evolving and changing and all the other things that come into connection with it, we need to make sure that people are treating the environment with respect because the environment is not going to change for them. Also when environmental disasters do happen, there is a certain level of resilience and sustainability that people need to exercise to be able to survive it.
The social work angle comes in because the environment is a human problem, and if we kind of look at it in that way, it just really allows us to all take that accountability hat and put it on and do our part to do it. So in regards to your question, I think what I’m going to do is just speak to the research that I did. As the more environmental related emergencies in communities happen, the call for climate action becomes more imperative. Climate-related emergencies have significant impacts on our socioeconomic dimensions, our mental health, and the trauma that individuals and communities experience also affects their mental health and social services at the same time. A community’s ability to recover from an environmental emergency really is dependent on its ability to adapt to the disaster.
And where the anti-oppressive lens comes in is where marginalized communities are the most impacted because often they don’t have the resources or the funding or the knowledge or understanding to react in an appropriate way and then also sustain the emergency, recover from it, and then build back again.
We see here as examples the 2013 flood in High River, where a lot of the residents had to leave the area because they just couldn’t afford the rebuild and insurance wasn’t going to pay them what they needed or even pay them at all. There was a lot of controversy, a lot of red tape, a lot of bureaucracy that happened with the funding there. So they had to leave, they had to go somewhere else just because they couldn’t afford it.
Meanwhile, we see other communities like Cougar Creek in Canmore, Alberta where there’s significantly more money, more funding, and a lot of people were able to bounce back from that without an issue. Just because someone does not have a certain level of socioeconomic status doesn’t mean they have to be victims to all of this. The aim of our research was to explore how social work practitioners can respond to environmental emergencies, how a community-based approach can strengthen a community’s resilience, how social workers can strengthen their practice to be able to support their clients when they’re in need.
In this research, I explored community members’ experiences during the 2013 Southern Alberta flood specifically, as my sample. Then I also took the concept of green social work, which was developed by Dr. Lena Dominelli, and understood its relationship with social justice and how it can transform power structures. I also investigated disaster response and recovery and preparedness from other communities around the world.
What was really interesting is I also took an Indigenous social work approach to it as well. There’s so many ways that we can learn from the Indigenous social work community of how they respond to disaster, how they adapt with their land, and there’s so many practices that they’ve been doing for hundreds of years that the colonial approach has been using, but we don’t give them credit. One example of that is doing prescribed burns. Prescribed burns is something that the Indigenous community has been doing for ages, and it’s something that they practice specifically in the Rocky Mountains or in other forest areas in Alberta and bc, and they just simply took it from the indigenous practice and then implemented it.
And it works fantastic. It keeps our forest under control. It keeps the pine beetle under control and it does it with no chemicals and in a much healthier way. And I think we need to listen more to the Indigenous community on other things that they do because they have been on this land much longer than the residents have been, and it’s obviously worked for them for so long. Being open-minded to their practices is super important.
The focus that I’ve been taking is more of a social angle and also working with a transdisciplinary approach. Social workers won’t do it all. It’s checking our egos at the door and listening to geologists, listening to environmentalists, and listening to doctors and nurses and politicians, people from all different angles and coming together and sharing knowledge and understanding that there’s information we can gain. There’s also a lot of information we can learn because in the end, that’s how we do best practice by our clients is by giving them a holistic approach versus a narrow-minded approach. That’s the focus that I took with that research, and hopefully one day all those questions will be answered, but I think there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Alex:
How do you feel about morale, like cultural morale overall?
Andrea: Of course, no problem.
Alex:
What are some of the practices that you may see being beneficial? But we’ll go to question three and then we’ll go around everybody and we’ll get those answers.
How did you get here? What led you to environmental work?
Jenny:
Okay. I can lead us off if you’d like Alex. Yeah. Okay, sure. In this one, let’s talk about how we got here. It’s little pieces of your stories that you think are really important that you want to share. One of them for me, I really like from your questions, Kip, is what did I want to do in grade school and where did it go right or wrong? As I mentioned, fairness was always sort of innate in me. In grade school, I was also labelled as a disruptor. I was somebody who finished my work early and distracted others. I was just trying to have fun, I don’t know. And then in high school, I thought I wanted to be a physiotherapist and ended up hurting myself and went to a physiotherapist. My doctor suggested I ask about working as a physiotherapist and they hired me.
In grade 11, I worked in a physiotherapist office and discovered I have no desire to be a physiotherapist. That was out. And as I mentioned, I was in theatre. I had a friend offer if he was going to LA, asked if I wanted to join him in LA to give that a go as an actress but I decided that I wanted to get a degree and see what that looked like for me. I thought I had something important to learn, quite honestly. That is when I became a geophysicist. If you can imagine, I was somebody who liked to talk to people. I wasn’t a geophysicist that was interested in doing geophysics really well. That wasn’t my interest to write all these theories and ideas in terms of geophysical practice.
I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to know what other people thought about it and what are we actually trying to do and why is it important? As a geophysicist, you’re an explorer, right? When I look at my career, I worked at a seismic processing company when I started in my career in 2000. I accidentally ended up being the second in command at the company. I had been bouncing around all of the areas wanting to understand how the business worked and what we were all working on and was in business development. They let go of the area manager and the business development manager left. I was in charge in a weird way with a couple other people. When I had that opportunity to lead like that, it was really hard for me, when I was told, well, you can’t keep this role.
We’re going to replace you with somebody else with more experience. So I left and I started at Apache Canada. There I worked on the two CO2 floods. We now call that carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS). I saw it not work back in 2008. Very clearly saw CO2 cycling and not really getting the production upticks that it promises. Then the last thing I did at Apache was I drilled the first horizontal well into shale gas, which we would now call an LNG resource play. Again, didn’t really understand that I was contributing to so much leakage and natural gas waste in our atmosphere.
I guess the main thing I think you could hear is that I’ve always been somebody who’s been dabbling when I’ve gone, when I was at Apache, I worked BC all the way through Alberta and into Saskatchewan and that carried me forward.
Then my curiosity for things that people weren’t curious about. I think that was the opportunity I found for myself in my career is that I could find things that people didn’t really think were interesting. Then if it became interesting, it was gone, but at least I had a chance to have a piece of it. I think that’s a big part of why I am where I am now, is realizing that there are still places to explore. Now I’m trying to stitch together people outside of the industry to help understand the problems that we’re facing. Still the same work, and I think it’s interesting, Kip, I love this question for this reason.
Lise:
Okay. I was fascinated, Andrea, by what you said because I lost my home in the High River Flood. My husband and I are in Nanton because of the High River flood. I could certainly relate to what you’re speaking of, I guess from my perspective.
As I said, I was always really interested in animals. I love birds, and when we were living in Calgary, still when I was doing my career, my husband used to take me out on Mother’s Day to see the bluebirds. In Turner Valley and Black Diamond, there were so many birds. I think about now what we see is hardly any. And when we were early married, so that’s like 35, well, we had our daughter, so like 35 years ago, it’s my 49th wedding anniversary today. We’ve been together a long time. We used to drive on Mother’s Day.
That was my gift to go and see the bluebirds, drive to Longview to see … the most beautiful view that you can imagine on this earth is at Longview. If you haven’t done it, you’ve got to see it. I have travelled a lot, really, generally in my life, and we just celebrated our anniversary at Longview. The Eastern Slopes are precious to our hearts. I don’t know why I wasn’t born and raised there. We came to that later on and I just can’t get enough of those views and those slopes.
To me, it’s just critical that we protect those Eastern Slopes. It’s one of the most beautiful places I believe that’s left on this earth. When you’re standing there and looking, you’ve got to realize that that has been there looking like that for 15,000 years, and for us to think that we’re going to put a mine there and ruin everything, the water and everything, is just devastating to me.
And we already are suffering in terms of habitat loss for the bluebirds and other animals that live in that area. It’s the open range ranching that has preserved that area. I’m really committed to all of those aspects of preservation. The grasslands also are big as a carbon sink. That is also critical to looking after our environment. I think that if we do, as you have said so well, Jenny, we have to take a very, very big picture approach. It has to be from every single angle because that is what Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson says. If it was just one thing that was going wrong, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in. But it’s a cascade of every single thing that’s hitting us all at once from every direction, and that’s how we are going to solve it by hitting it from every direction, as well. Came to this from a young child with that passion and still have it today.
Jenny:
Why don’t you go next, Nicole? Is that okay?
Nicole:
Of course, my story starts, I think, with where I grew up, because living in the north, it was such an incredible experience. If you haven’t been to the north before, I highly recommend it. I think it’s one of the most underrated places to visit in Canada. But having touched on that already, Growing up there, being outside in nature was basically my entire childhood. It was outside almost 24/7, even when it was minus 40 with a wind chill up to minus 50, we still tried our best to get outside. So I really do think that’s what sparked my interest in working in this field. And I didn’t know it at the time because when I was young like you, Lise, I loved animals. I thought I was going to be a vet.
And then I realized, oh, no, I can’t handle that. That’s too much. Then I thought I would be an architect, and I realized it wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be, and it wasn’t until I took high school biology that it really kind of clicked for me taking those units on environmental sciences. Learning about ecosystems and populations, and it’s a very small unit. Having taught it myself, I realized a lot of teachers teach it in a very short amount of time. But that’s all it took for me to really realize, I think this is what I want to do. Making that connection to my experiences of really growing up outside and in nature and wanting to, yes, like you, Lise, protect our ecosystems and protect our wildlife. After I figured that out, I applied to the U of A to take a degree in Environmental and Conservation Sciences.
I put all my eggs in one basket, and that’s literally the only thing I applied to, and I’m like, this is what’s happening. I was lucky that I was able to get in, and it was honestly one of the best decisions I ever made because it’s really what has led me to where I am today. Now over 10 years later, the coursework was really new and exciting for me because it’s again, not something I learned in school. It wasn’t touched on in K to 12. There were a lot of opportunities in different fields within the environmental sector that I didn’t know about. A lot of people, you hear about environmental sciences and you really think like, oh, biologist or land reclamation and that’s it. Or maybe you work with water, air. It’s just very specifically those topics, but really there’s so much diversity within it.
And after exploring a lot of these options, through working in the field with Parks Canada, I worked in a lab with [Alberta] Environment and Parks. I worked as an educator with River Watch. I really realized that education was my passion within that field. Although I thoroughly enjoyed being outside for most of my job with Parks, it was one of the best jobs I ever worked. I realized that education was really where I belonged. I worked really well with people, and I realized that in order to make the difference that I felt like I wanted to make, I think education was the way to go. Because every time I talked to a person through my jobs and I saw that excitement and that passion in them to learn more, it really made me excited about it. So I pursued my next degree in secondary education, which of course is more formal education.
I was the first person to take a major in natural resources at the U of A, which also shows how little it is touched on in our education system right now. Once I did that, I ended up becoming a formal teacher, which is not at all what I saw from my life when I was 18 and applying to my first degree. I never once said, I’m going to be a teacher. That was not on my radar, but I absolutely loved it. Working with students directly, working with other passionate educators was really an incredible experience for me, and I miss it all the time. Although I’m very happy where I am right now because now, like I said earlier, I have the chance to really bring my experience in the environmental field and in formal education together to pursue something I’m really passionate about, which is environmental education.
My journey took some unexpected turns, but it ultimately led me to where I am. I always joke when people ask me, I’ve changed careers three times by the time I was 30, and that’s okay. All I can say is I trusted my gut and followed my interest to find something that I am passionate about. It’s okay to change careers or take alternative education at whatever age. There’s really no one, right way to go about a green career. Anything can be a green career. Anything can be turned into a green career if that’s what you’re passionate about. I think I’ve been really lucky in that I’ve had a lot of things go right for me along my journey.
Some people might look at it and say, “Oh, you were only here for this many years and then this many years’, but ultimately, I think you said Jenny, just trying to get a little taste and experience everything. I think it’s led me to where I am now, and I know this isn’t the end of the road for me either. I’m not going to end here where I am. I think there’s still so much more out there to do and experience. I’m excited to see where my current career will take me.
Jenny:
Perfect. Yeah, Andrea, go ahead and finish this round off.
Andrea:
Well, my career in my education journey did not end up where I was thinking it was going to from the start. When I left high school, I was in chemical engineering and quickly after being, I loved the in-class coursework, but being out in the field, I saw so much unethical practice and unhealthy standards, and it scared me. It really did because I had a lot of family members who were living in the same city as me and people being diagnosed in passing of cancer, and it just wasn’t something that I felt that it was a good idea to move forward with.
I was quite devastated because I had my whole plan of being a chemical engineer, and then I was thinking to myself, what else is there to do? I realized I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what I wanted. And after speaking to a university counsellor, putting me through a few questions and figuring out, then I went over to the path of occupational therapy, physiotherapy assistant, and I started working in that field, and I quickly realized that human services was definitely an area that I wanted to do.
I really enjoyed working with people of all ages and being an advocate for them and helping them towards some type of recovery, whether it was physical or cognitive or mental. But I knew that that wasn’t it for me. That wasn’t the end. I still was along my path. Since then, I got my degree in community rehabilitation disability studies and worked in that field doing a lot of more human services, helping people recover and getting back into society and achieving their goals and sustaining their life. It led me again to doing my Bachelor of Social Work, which now I’m working as a registered social worker. So how I started really didn’t predict how I was going to end up, and I’m still on the journey, like Nicole said.
I totally agree with you when you mentioned just about changing and evolving and how realizing that maybe you’re not in the right place or something is not who you are and needing to change, that is not a bad thing.
It’s a good thing. It means that you’re constantly wanting to evolve. It means that you’re challenging yourself, you’re taking risks, and that’s how we generally grow as people. And in my field, if I’m growing and evolving, I can be of better assistance to my clients and a better advocate for them in that way. Now, if I was to speak to someone younger than me, I would just say simply do some self-reflection and determine what kind of impact you want to have on this earth? And it could be anything. It can be you want to have a political impact, you want to have a medical impact, an artistic impact, any type of impact, it doesn’t matter. But what kind of impact do you want to have on this world? And that will lead you into what career direction is going to be right for you.
The money will always be there. The money will always come. Fulfillment really is what’s number one. And if you spoke to me at 20, I would’ve probably said something opposite, but now I realize that the fulfillment is what’s meaningful, and it could be any type of fulfillment. You don’t have to be a social worker or dealing with people in disasters. It could be anything.
My husband works in hospitality, and that’s the kind of impact that he wants to make. He wants to make people’s time off and leisure and well-being even better. I’m really happy that my path led in the direction it has. I still have a lot of growing and learning to do, and I’m hoping I can pass it on to my clients and help them make the best choices. But sometimes the bad choices are even better. They teach you what you don’t want and what’s not right for you, and not to take shame in that, but take more pride in it.
Jenny:
Please lead us into the next one, and feel free to add your own 2 cents too.
What recommendations for environmental work do you want to offer?
Kip:
Sure. Let’s start back with you again, Jenny. What recommendations are you making in your work to people who are listening to you speak or listening to your podcast?
Jenny:
Alex and I have had this conversation recently that I called myself a Karen. And what is yours, Alex? Are you a Carl or I can’t remember which name yours is.
Alex:
Well, I think the discriminatory statements are Karen and Chad.
Jenny:
Okay, right. So you’re Chad. That’s right.
Alex:
White people. Yeah.
Jenny:
This has been a regular theme of mine. I grew up in Castle Downs, Edmonton. If anybody knows that, that’s the low end, people make fun of people coming from Castle Downs. I’ve always had this kind of “with the people” mentality and attitude, but that often is a stumbling block for me when I’m trying to get through to people that are in a position of power, for example, because I don’t honour that necessarily. I’m more focused on data and information. This process that we’re trying to do is for the Karen and for the Chad. I’ll just say our six steps. We’re refining this process, and again, it’s just based on the six Ws, including hoW. We want to help people define their problem space. What are your shared dreams with what are you trying to accomplish in the thing that you’re trying to do? We want to get the issue.
Who’s involved in this issue, and what does success look like for us in that issue? Education. Who do we bring into this? Who’s missing from this conversation? And where are we headed together? If we do bring people in asking the question, what are we trying to decide on and what action do we want to take? And then do a backstep.
I’m really excited about the next round, where we’re going to talk about what are the zero alternatives? What can we stop doing today and what are the barriers to that? What might go wrong when we try to do things differently as well, or stop doing something, for example. Then lastly, we want to build those next steps. How are we going to make sure now that we know that, now that we know what we’re trying to do, where we’re trying to go, and what it looks like, how are we doing this?
What is our plan together so that we have this sense of accountability together? Again, it’s not rocket science, what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to come to a place where anybody can take on this process so that when you’re having these difficult conversations, taking in heavy stuff, like Lise hearing about you being displaced from your home, it’s hard for people to hear these things. But we have to talk about it because we’re all facing it. It could happen to me tomorrow. I think that’s why it’s so important for us to be able to have these conversations in a way that isn’t so foreign to us. That’s my hope for this work. Thank you, Kip.
Kip:
Let’s go down the line here. And Nicole, what suggestions are you making through your work?
Nicole:
Yeah, I think the recommendations that I’m making through my work with the Alberta Council for Environmental Education really just reflects my deep passion for empowering people and communities through environmental literacy and environmental education. I really truly believe that by integrating environmental education into every aspect of the curriculum, not just where it is obviously included in subjects like science or social, but really across the board in things like fine art, in things like physed and math. Across the curriculum, we can equip our students with the knowledge and the skills needed to address the pressing environmental challenges of our time. Climate anxiety is at an all time high with our youth right now. And adults, with everyone, really, but we’re really seeing it in schools and with youth. There is a standstill a lot of the time where they want to make a change and they want to make a difference, but they don’t know how.
They’re so overwhelmed with information, they’re so overwhelmed with what’s going on in this world, and they’re not given the opportunity to just take a minute and learn about it, really learn about what’s happening and get all of the facts and get the information and then reflect a little bit, but instead, we’re just kind of throwing it at them without giving them this time to explore it across different lenses. I think that’s something we’re really trying to focus on, as well, and really just helping this next generation understand the importance of having environmental literacy and partaking in environmental education, but also hoping to motivate them to take environmental action.
We have an amazing youth group within our organization that is doing just this, and they’re overcoming these barriers and these challenges to take action, and they’re completing action projects within their school, and it’s really, really cool to see youth taking charge and taking the lead. And all it took from us was really just gathering them and giving them a space to feel comfortable to talk about it and have these difficult conversations, like you said, Jenny, and feel confident to be able to move forward with the information that they’re given. So through my work, we’re really just hoping to inspire educators and students to become stewards of our natural world and encourage them to engage with environmental issues in ways that resonate with them and their individual interests and career paths as well.
Kip:
Nice. Lise, how about the same question for you? What recommendations are you making through your work?
Lise:
Maybe I’ll just also share a little bit that what our group does is at the end of the season, every monitor who wishes to include their data. So you can sort of just have a glance at a data page and we all fill out a data sheet so it can be, not everyone participates, but we get information on about 5,000 boxes in our area. So then all of that data then is aggregated by a brilliant woman who used to work for the University of Calgary, and she’s come up with a spreadsheet and all of the math, and this is all new to us because our organization was started 45 years ago by a father and his son. This is what I tell the kids about, when I had the opportunity to speak with ACEE. This was two people, two people, a father and his son, and the dad said, “There are no bluebirds.”
There used to be a lot more bluebirds. And the son said, “Well, what can we do about it?” That’s how it got started. And the founder of our group, he monitored bluebirds until he was 94 years old. He only passed away a couple years ago, but all of this data now has been aggregated for 40 years, and it’s going to Cornell University, it’s going to the Ellis Bird Farm, it’s going to Alberta Environment. This information is really important for citizen science, and I think it’s really great for kids to know that they could participate in citizen science that way. You get involved in something and you start working, even just a few people together, and you never know where it’s going to end up. That is what I think is really important, critical for my job. What I love to do is to tell people about the work of this organization.
There’s more than one of them in Alberta that are protecting these birds. In the winter, they go down to California and there are more people protecting these birds down in California. And of course, it’s not just birds, it’s habitat protection, as well, because if you don’t have the habitat, the birds can’t live. It’s really important for my role and our group’s role to communicate what we’re doing and the importance of this, and we’re getting better at that kind of thing. We’ve just got a website up now. Our website is mountainbluebird.org, and it’s amazing that name wasn’t used, and our group’s name is the Calgary Alberta Nest Monitor Society, and it’s C-A-N-M-S for short. If you just look that up, you go to the website there’s lots of information and things to see, and I contribute to that with photographs and stories, as well. Communication, I really believe is key, and I’m thrilled that I came across ACEE because I think it got through my ATA newsletter. That’s how I found about it. I put my name in to be a volunteer. It’s a wonderful opportunity. Thank you.
Kip:
Great. Nice. Yeah, we were very happy to be partnered with you and everybody else to let students know about your projects and about everything that you’re doing. Yeah, what I am hoping to do through this program, through our Green Careers program, is really get as much succinct and clear information out to students and youth about just what’s going on and just get the gears going in their minds as to what they can do. I mean, things like climate change are going to be huge, I think, in students’ futures. They’re going to need tools to move forward and combat that. I think this is a great place to start the inspiration to hear what people are doing and really get a chance to connect with people you otherwise wouldn’t be able to hear about, or you’d have to seek out that information yourself or find it some other way.
Hoping to make this a program where students can connect with professionals, professionals can connect with each other, and network, and find out what the other is up to. It’s a work in progress. Hopefully in the next week or so, website, is going to be a hub where people can go and find resources about each other and about the speakers that they saw. I’m hoping to connect in more of a hopeful way about the environment. Nicole spoke about, I forget the exact term, eco-anxiety or climate anxiety. I’m hoping to find through connecting with different people and talking to have more of a hopeful voice for youth and students. It can be quite bleak.
I find to hear about all that’s wrong with the environment. That sometimes the information leads off on the negative, I find it’s, “This is what’s wrong, and okay, bye.” No, what can be done or what can we do? Hopefully this is something that can inspire some really bright youth and students, and in the meantime, we as professionals can be inspired by each other, as well. That’s what I’m really hoping to recommend to everybody out there who’s listening to our presentations. Andrea, do you want to answer that one last as well here?
Andrea:
Of course. Obviously, a lot of my research speaks to social work specifically, but of course, social workers and their practice can actually be extended out to everyone because the concept of social work is so umbrellaed, it incorporates so many different things that it’s not just a one topic kind of profession. The recommendations I can offer are things that everyone can practice. The first one is aligning with this whole conversation and the team that’s here today is just by raising awareness, not using ignorance as an excuse.
There’s so many ways to gain information out there. Having those difficult conversations, like someone had mentioned earlier is super important. I totally agree with that. Not being able to be slightly controversial, pushing buttons, seeing how other people feel about things. If we play it safe all the time with what we speak to and what we talk about, we don’t see change happen.
Change only happens because someone has disrupted the system, and I think it’s time that we see some disruption happening so that way we can change as people, we can become more resilient. We can fight against the oppression, how certain marginalized communities are just being left to the wayside, and just really speaking for each other as a community, really trying to help promote those healthier living conditions. And then assisting the professionals when social workers, when nurses, when other emergency responders are out there trying to help with situations, helping them, asking them what they need, learning from them, taking their delegation and trying to make the situation as good as possible. I think another thing I learned from a lot of the Indigenous social work and a lot of the rural communities was also enhancing those outdoor spaces. Those outdoor spaces do so much more than just offer green spaces just to enjoy.
They impact our mental health, they impact our physical health and social workers and other professionals need to advocate more for those creation and the maintenance of these parks, community gardens, recreation, scenic areas, just natural areas as well. And seeing if we can possibly even collaborate with urban planners, local government, just being that advocate for the earth, treating the earth as our client like we would with a human being, as well. The two interchange together, and we are a steward to all of those people and the earth.
We need to also have more of these kinds of discussions that we’re having today, creating connections with the environment and really pushing that social transformation. That it only happens by having these discussions with each other because we all come from different areas. When we leave this conversation now, we’re all going to take these things we’ve learned and then we’re going to put it out in the world to our friends, our family members, and it’s going to just start spreading.
I think that there’s a lot of power to that. And if we are taking researched education, researched information, things that are not just soapbox Facebook articles, but something that has meaning behind it that people have actually collected data on, and we spread that information, I think that people just in general become more educated. And the more I’m really a proponent of knowledge is power and the more empowered we can make our community, the more positive change that we can see. And then finally, I’m going to go back to the Indigenous social work, the Indigenous climate action.
Indigenous people have so much knowledge that they can offer and really being open-minded and listening to them and listening to what their needs are as well. They are the experts of their situation, and we just need to be open-minded and listen to them because a lot of the Indigenous climate action that’s out there aligns with an anti-oppressive principle that social work is supposed to stand by.
Andrea:
They challenge the system, they challenge systemic exclusion and the marginalization of their people, and they really look at more of an environmental decision-making process, the ways things that they need to sustain will also affect the environment. And they really see that collaboration. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking that into consideration. I think that there’s so much things that they can teach us and just being more open-minded and giving them credit for how much history their people have, because I also think that the more credit and platform we can give them, the more we can reconcile and connect with them, and they can offer us so much information and what we can do better. Because really that’s what it is. It’s what can we do better? How can we be better? So it’s a lot, but taking little bits of that, and especially putting that into our schools as young people and making it part of how they learn and how they express themselves. I think we can start seeing a systemic change happen. Thank you.
Jenny:
Incredible. So I see we’ve gone a little long, Alex, so maybe we can turn this last question into takeaways for everyone. Does that work?
What you heard and what are you taking away from this conversation?
Alex:
Sure. I’ll just give a brief takeaway now, Nicole and Andrea, you’re both working within curriculums, and I think one of the things that I’ve noticed in terms of what we programmed Gen Z with is that there’s no future. It’s just doom and gloom. The world’s going to end in five years. The world’s going to end in 10 years. So we’ve ended up creating this circumstance with our youth where they just say, “Why bother?” We’ve disillusioned them. We inadvertently, because we care about the environment, we’ve ended up creating this crisis of purpose, this crisis of meaning.
Interestingly, when I was looking into history a little bit, it was like after the Industrial Revolution when we started creating these conveniences, and it really accelerated after the beginning of the nuclear age. You could just go down to the store and get Doritos. You didn’t need to make them out of your own flour or out of the wheat that you grew out of anything.
Alex:
For time immemorial, at least in recorded history, human beings’ purpose and meaning was survival. But at the beginning of the nuclear age, the industrial technological revolutions that followed, all of a sudden survival wasn’t the purpose. And progress happens when people are challenged, just like you were saying, Andrea. When people aren’t challenged anymore, and when survival is not the name of the game, and they can have everything out of convenience, left, right, and center, the challenge then becomes meaning and purpose. I think in a strange way, ironically, covering our kids in bubble wrap, and then providing doom and gloom scenarios simultaneously, has prevented them from discovering any sort of meaning or any sort of purpose or direction. They’re seeking a revolution. They’re seeking out any cause that they can just grasp onto because they need that meaning. At the same time, it starts at home.
Alex:
It starts by making your bed. It starts by developing a purpose for your survival so that you can be healthy and free and open and then extend that to other people, for example. My theory is, based on your contributions so far, it would be to inject meaning back into people’s lives and emphasize just how important that actually is. Because if people feel like there’s no point, the world’s going to end anyways. Well, they’re not going to do anything. They’re just going to get depressed. They’re going to become addicts, they’re going to, and I don’t blame them.
Andrea:
Can I speak to that quickly with my takeaway just because it relates exactly. What that reminds me of is the language we use around these things when we speak to the youth. We call something a hundred year flood, right? Well, if the next flood’s not happening for another a hundred years, I’m not going to be alive, so why should I care? But the reality is, is that a hundred year floods are not happening. They’re more like 20 year floods. They’re 15 year floods, and yes, you will be around for that. The question is not will I be here, you will, and we need to stop calling things “the flood of the century” or “this is record breaking for the last hundred years”. Like you said, Alex. It doesn’t connect, meaning people say, “That’s so far in the future, I don’t care.”
Andrea:
First of all, I think the decision makers and the people who are in power need to stop using this language, stop being inaccurate with the timelines and actually call it what it is. Because the hundred year flood in 2013 was not a hundred year flood in the nineties they had the same flood. It just wasn’t at the same level. What they’re seeing now is every 15 to 20 years, these disasters are happening again. They’re just getting worse. They might not be exactly the same, but they’re getting worse.
I think they just need to be honest with, “Okay, listen, Mother Nature is going to still be here when we’re all gone. If we want to be here with her, then we need to change our relationship with Mother Nature” and change our language with it and create ways that people can reinvest themselves into this. That starts with our schools. It starts with how we educate people at a young age and like you said, just make it more meaningful. And that’s what I would say.
The takeaway from this that I would love people to do is to find ways of reconnecting where it’s meaningful for you. Because you will be here in 15 years and you will be dealing with a disaster of your own. Prevention is prehab is always better than rehab, and we need to be focusing more on prevention, education and the language we put with it.
Nicole:
Mine actually kind of goes right off of yours as well, Andrea. I feel like there’s a bit of a theme developing here. What I was going to say is very similar to you and Alex is that we really need to change the narrative from doom and gloom to hopefulness and solution focus. And that’s kind of one of the things we’re trying to do at ACEE through education. Doom and gloom language was used so heavily to scare people into caring, but it doesn’t work. That’s not the way people care about the environment.
[They care] when they feel connected to it, when they feel like they have a sense of belonging to nature, that’s when they care, that’s when they want to help and make a difference. We need to foster that for those people who maybe aren’t getting it on their own. Through education and not just informal education, but formal education in the curriculum, we need to provide access to everyone to outdoor spaces.
Nicole:
There are a lot of studies on equal access to the outdoors as well as different emotions and feelings to the outdoors because of history. We need to provide safe and equal access to outdoor spaces and to outdoor learning. Like you said, Andrea, it’s starting it at a young age and having outdoor classrooms in our schools so that students have a safe place to do this through the curriculum. It’s addressing everything and then having open and honest conversations with everyone, whether they’re a sixth grader, a 12th grader, or someone who is in their thirties or forties and maybe never had that education.
Being able to be open and honest and have these conversations and show that it’s okay to talk about this, but we’re going to have a hopeful and solution-focused conversation instead. Providing that space for everyone is such an important thing that we need to move forward to combat the crisis that we’re in right now.
Jenny:
Brilliant. Lise, why don’t you go next and then we’ll do Kip and I’ll finish off. How about that?
Lise:
Sure. I love everything that everyone has said and I very much agree with it. When I think about what my group and myself are doing and my husband are helping with this bluebird project, and also helping tree swallows at the same time, is it shows that people can do something. It seems like it’s very small, but it is your little initiative. I’m going 53 kilometers down highway 533 and watching these bluebirds caring for their nests and making sure that they have a home, that’s one little person. But when you multiply it out by all the people across North America, they’re actually doing this same work. If kids only knew what the help can be, because it’s one little thing and it’s fun. It’s great fun to go out into the environment and see these little babies hatch out of their eggs and watch them crawl around.
Lise:
They look like something out of Dr. Seuss when they’re born. And then you watch the feathers come in and then you learn about how they fledge and you learn all these things just from being involved. And our group, actually, we just went out to Millarville and did a big promotion out at the Millarville market to show people what is actually happening in their environment. No one knows, all they see is these boxes. They have no idea what’s going on. The communication has to happen because that is really hopeful work and it’s work that’s being done. And there are multiple things that are happening all around in all aspects, but we are not getting enough information about it. Everything in the media is like let’s trash everything and say that the world is going to hell.
Well, I totally agree. If we have that as an attitude, we’re finished. We have to have an attitude that we can do things, we can make a difference and we can leave a good legacy for our children. And that is what we can each do in our own little way, even if it’s just picking up garbage in your community. So that’s my takeaway from the conversation. Thanks.
Alex:
If you mailed a seed to 41 million people in Canada and asked them on the same day to plant that seed, you could plant 41 million trees in the space of 30 minutes. So when I see a politician, I won’t mention his name, say that he wants to plant 2 billion trees in eight years. I say mail a seed out to everybody in Canada for six, and there’s your 2 billion trees. And it doesn’t take a ludicrously expensive government program to actually do it. It just takes 30 seconds out of each individual’s day to do one thing. That’s it. That’s volumetrics and that’s low tech solutions. The more that we realize that, okay, there’s 8 billion people on the planet, we can plant 8 billion trees in a day if we just take the initiative. It’s low tech and it only takes 30 seconds, right? It’s a shift in thinking as opposed to a technological reliance.
Kip:
Yeah, I agree with everything that has been said for sure. I think we’re all on the same page, but that has been a thing that’s come up a lot in doing these Green Careers presentations is that if you add that environmental aspect or that green aspect to your career that can give you that boost in meaning, I guess, or give you something that elevates your job in that way. I think everything I want to say has been said probably better than I could put it.
I think there is a lot to be said to inspire someone to find their own little place and be able to do their own thing rather than putting the onus of like, you must save the environment on an individual that’s way too large of a concept to even comprehend. So find your own little thing that you can do and band together with people and make a change that way, I think is more the message we’re trying to inspire people to do with my program and our company. So that’s great. I’m glad to hear that from all of you.
Jenny:
Awesome. I’ll close this off by first saying thank you everybody. This has been incredible. I really appreciate all of your time, all of your knowledge. It’s just been phenomenal. I love, Andrea, you’re talking about giving voices to people that aren’t getting their voice heard, especially people that know the problems. I can say the same from the oil and gas industry. I was involved in the $1.7 billion that was injected to do the cleanup work, Indigenous led, all the way. This is, to me, it’s the obvious no brainer thing that I would love to foster, and I’m trying to foster in this conversation with Alex. And the youth as well as Alex said, my boys have said to me just last week, “We don’t learn any of this in school.” It’s bananas, and this is not right.
Jenny:
We’re having those conversations though, as Alex said, we’re taking and we’re having those conversations and we’re talking about a positive future. I love that we talked about this is a crisis of leadership. Lise, I love your example. You went from being a 30-year teacher to doing something extremely simple and tangible that people can get behind, and it brings the community together and it helps bluebirds and it helps other birds. It does all of those and things. I did want to mention, we are also doing in real life what we’re trying to do in conversation. We want to help restore the environment and restore that social stability. We have a Save Our Slopes campaign that we’re sponsoring. The Gravity Well, along with another group called Land Lovers. Please look up saveourslopes.ca.
When I hear you guys speak, I see you all having a role in this work. Lise, from an on-the-ground effort. Andrea, I hear a lot of social reform opportunity, Kip, getting the message out, getting kids excited about this stuff. Same with you Nicole, and Alex is helping from a local level. He really is inspired by Big Hill Springs. He wants to start that initiative right there with that community.
Alex:
Bighill Creek Provincial Park. Also, just in closing, I want to make one request of all of you in the follow-up email chain where people can find you. I might even be interested in taking a course with ACEE. That would be really cool so that we could put the links in the description below when we publish on Wednesday. Much appreciated for all you guys being with us, and hopefully you’ll be with us again and we never know. Maybe I’ll see you in that course.
Kip:
Thank you for having us.
Jenny:
The one last thing I want to say. I think it’s another theme that came out, especially from you, Nicole, is I’ve been seeing an acupuncturist and she was talking about Chinese medicine. She will recommend that people go out in nature. A lot of times she’ll just see [a person] needs to be in nature. This is what you were saying, Lise, so many people have lost that connection. I’ve learned that if you go for a walk on unlevel ground, it actually helps your mental wellbeing because it forces you to think dynamically rather than linearly, I guess. Anyway, that’s lots. This has been amazing. As Alex said, hopefully we can do another one of these in the future. Thank you very much, everyone. Have a great rest of your day.