Stewardship conference to explore species at risk

SPECIES AT RISK. The Massasauga rattlesnake is just one of the 34 species at risk found in Muskoka that participants will learn about at the 2012 Muskoka Stewardship Conference on April 28. Photo by Jan McDonnell

BRACEBRIDGE - Parry Sound-Muskoka is home to 34 species at risk, some of which, while plentiful here, are found nowhere else in the world. That is why stewardship of these imperilled species is critical to their survival.

Would you know if one of these species was on your property? Do you know what to do if you find one?

Species at risk will feature prominently at the 2012 Muskoka Stewardship Conference in April with a number of speakers scheduled to provide information about many of the turtles, snakes, and birds found in our area.

Species at Risk was one of four stewardship guides developed by the Muskoka Watershed Council (MWC) and Muskoka Heritage Foundation (MHF) over the past year and a half. All four stewardship guides provide the inspiration for presentations at the 2012 conference, also including living with beavers, building a trail in your woodlands and restoring your shoreline.

The Muskoka Stewardship Conference is organized by Muskoka Watershed Council, Muskoka Heritage Foundation and the District Municipality of Muskoka as a way to bring together local land and water stewards to learn and network.

In addition to the stewardship guide topics, the conference will feature keynote speaker Andrew Watson, a York University PhD candidate from the department of history and the Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability.

Watson will be discussing the ways in which the human footprint along the shoreline has changed over the last 100 years by focussing on what the pressures and concerns were a century ago. His presentation will illustrate the importance of the past in making responsible choices for the present and future.

The 2012 Muskoka Stewardship Conference will take place from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, April 28 at Nipissing University, Muskoka Campus, 125 Wellington Street in Bracebridge. The cost is $30.

To register visit muskokaheritage.org/mwc.

Labrador Institute post-doctoral research fellow Dr. Rachel Hirsch, prepares some Arctic char for Nain's community freezer.

Rachel Hirsch, the 2012 post-doctoral research fellow at the Labrador Institute, is learning something new every day from her co-workers in Nain.

“I try to approach new situations with my "eyes wide open" and to expect the unexpected … as I learn and meet new people I feel more connected to a place,” she said. “Everyone I have met – both in Goose Bay and Nain – has been more than somewhat extraordinary. My co-workers at the Nain Research Centre are some of the most dedicated, hard-working people I have ever met. I feel very blessed.”

Dr. Hirsch is focusing her efforts on helping to develop and evaluate a pilot youth outreach program in Nain through the Nain Research Centre and Community Freezer Program (CFP).

Established in March 2011 and led by the Environment Division of the Nunatsiavut Government and the Nain Inuit Community Government, and administered at the Nain Research Centre, the CFP program provides the community with anonymous and free access to country foods such as caribou, seal, Arctic hare, Arctic char and even polar bear. Country foods are received either as donations or by covering the cost of fuel for local harvesters who hunt for country foods for the community freezer.

“Aullak, sangilivallianginnatuk” (going off, growing strong in Labrador Inuttitut) is the first project of its kind in Canada focused on bringing together community youth and harvesters to enhance a community freezer program. Thirteen youth have been selected to participate alongside 15 harvester volunteers.

Dr. Hirsch explains that the project will be designed for youth by youth with guidance from community members including the senior harvesters. There will be a focus on intergenerational skills, knowledge and values exchange through activities such as visits with elders, going off on to the land in both large and small groups, cooking classes, documentary film making and Inuit games. She is a partner in the project and will be helping throughout but especially in program evaluation.

Dr. Hirsch’s research interests include human security in the Arctic, health and environmental governance, community resiliency and policy framing including innovative techniques in the evaluation of knowledge exchange.

She applies the principles of participatory action research in her work and explains that this refers to research that is “applied, action-oriented and collaborative.” The pilot project in Nain includes community members, government employees and researchers working together to build and share solutions to human security issues such as food security, inter-generational learning and mental health.

“Although I have only been living in Nain for a little longer than a month – it is already clear that even though the cost of shipping many foods is subsidized, many households are still food insecure,” said Dr. Hirsch. “Additionally, country foods continue to be an important -- and healthy -- source of dietary protein. Recent studies also indicate that country foods are an essential component of a healthy northern diet being high in omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D.”

Dr. Hirsch explains that many people are helping to guide and administer the program, including Tom Sheldon, Katie Winter and Carla Pamak of the Environment Division of the Nunatsiavut Government. She acknowledges the support of local harvesters, parents, the Jens Haven Memorial School and the Nain Community Freezer and Youth Outreach Program Steering Committee as important steps in preparing to launch the program.

“This is truly a community-led project and it has been extremely exciting to work with many different community stakeholders who are involved in youth well-being and engagement,” she said.

Originally from Edmonton, Alta., Dr. Hirsch grew up spending time in nature and toward the end of her undergraduate degree in psychology, she began to connect her love of nature with her scholarly interests in promoting a sense of well-being.

“At that point, I also became very interested in understanding how people interact with their natural/built environments and what this relationship might mean for healthy behaviours and general well-being.”

Dr. Hirsch went on to graduate studies in geography at the University of Western Ontario. Funding for her post-doctoral fellowship is from the Labrador Institute, the Faculty of Arts (Department of Geography) and ArcticNet (www.arcticnet.ulaval.ca). She is being co-supervised by Dr. Trevor Bell of Memorial’s geography department and Dr. Chris Furgal, Indigenous environmental studies, Trent University. She will be based in Nain until December 2012.

The following appeared on March 8, 2012 in YFile.

Is peace-building through environmental cooperation possible in the Middle East? Panellists will discuss this next week at an Institute for Research & Innovation in Sustainability (IRIS) Speakers’ Series event.

The Environmental Cooperation and Israel-Palestinian Peace event will take place March 15 at 1pm at 280A York Lanes, Keele campus.

Environmental cooperation has been much-lauded as a force of peace in the Middle East and has been leveraged in support of Track I peacemaking processes between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. It has been pursued as a practice of peace-building, valued for its ability to foster partnership-building, cooperation, identity change and sustainability. Still, the Israel-Palestinian conflict persists, even manifesting through cooperative environmental relations.

Panellists Eric Abitbol (right), an international development, peace-building and dialogue researcher-practitioner, and Stuart Schoenfeld (left), chair of the Department of Sociology at York’s Glendon College, will present and discuss the issue. Drawing on their direct experience of working with practitioners, governments and stakeholders in the Middle East, they will critically examine assumptions and practices of environmental cooperation between Israel and the Palestinians.

Abitbol and Schoenfeld co-chaired the AVOW initiative (Adaptive Visions of Water in the Middle East), hosted at IRIS from 2007-2009.

Abitbol specializes in hydropolitical issues, with a particular interest in Israeli-Palestinian relations. A Chevening Scholar and associate Fellow at IRIS, he is pursuing a PhD in peace studies at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom, while teaching university courses at the nexus of environment and peace. As a consultant, he recently conducted the Conflict and Peace Effects Study of the Israel-Palestinian Authority-Jordan-World Bank “Red Sea Dead Sea Conveyance” initiative.

Schoenfeld’s research on regional environmentalism in the Middle East began in the late 1990s. A network of Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians began to work towards a common understanding of issues of water, energy, waste, transportation, consumption, biodiversity and sustainable development, and to fashion a way of turning that common understanding into one of the elements for peace and human security in the region.

The project continues to investigate this network and other regional frameworks. The project has produced publications on transboundary environmental networks, environmental peace building, approaches to regional environmental governance and the role of empathy in environmental peace-building.

For more information, visit the IRIS website.

The following originally appeared in YFile, on Wednesday March 7, 2012.

Difficult issues, such as climate change and poverty, are highly complex and defy traditional problem-solving approaches. York’s Institute for Research & Innovation in Sustainability (IRIS) will tackle how to transcend the typical interdisciplinary research barriers to find solutions to these problems at its upcoming research showcase.

Transcending Interdisciplinary Research Barriers: Best Practices for Mobilizing Knowledge will take place Thursday, March 8, from 10:30am to 12:30pm, at 1002 Osgoode Hall Law School, Keele campus. Anyone who can’t attend the event in person can join electronically here.

Several speakers from the natural and social sciences, who have sought to move out of their comfort zones – their labs, field sites and libraries – will examine the issue of overcoming interdisciplinary barriers, as well as the power of interdisciplinary approaches. These approaches are widely touted by all universities and colleges today, although they have seldom been critically examined. Speakers will also look at whether electronic communications are key to providing solutions to some of the problems by building a global knowledge society and generating new kinds of knowledge.

A common experience today is that even with current communication technologies there are barriers of language and culture among academics. Transcending these barriers remains an ongoing challenge for effective team science because of the high transaction costs of interdisciplinary interactions compared with discipline-centric research in a familiar setting.

The speakers will discuss identifying best practices for interdisciplinary team science and how global communication technologies have been used in mobilizing science into sound policy solutions. Andrew Tanentzap (BSc Spec. Hons. ’05, MSc ’07), a Banting postdoctoral Fellow in biology at York, will moderate the discussions.

York political science Professor Gabrielle Slowey (right) will look at “Oil and Gas Development: Dealing with a Necessary Evil”. She will discuss results from the International Polar Year GAPS Project (Gas, Arctic Peoples & Security), comparing research from Canada, Norway and Russia with that from the United States, about the local impacts of oil and gas development.

York biology Professor Dawn Bazely (left) will deliver the talk, “Managing Northward-Bound Species: Which Will Become Invasive?” Along with habitat loss and fragmentation, invasive species are recognized as a major threat to biodiversity. Research examining the ecological impacts of invasive non-indigenous species has increased hugely; yet managing invasive species remains problematic due to conflicting societal values. Additionally, determining the impacts of invasives under climate warming scenarios is even more complex.

Nina Hewitt (right), a postdoctoral Fellow and lecturer in York’s Department of Geography and a senior Fellow and postdoctoral researcher with IRIS, will discuss “The Various Dilemmas of Assisted Migration for Slow-Moving Species”. Ecologists recognize that many species will not migrate rapidly enough to keep up with shifting ecosystem conditions due to climate change. Assisted migration was proposed several decades ago as a strategy to help maintain populations of slow-moving species. However, many scientists see assisted migration as problematic, largely because its potential to preserve species stands in direct tension with its potential to produce invasion by the focal species, thereby threatening the recipient ecosystem. Scholarly debate on this topic has intensified during the last three years and threatens to produce a stalemate in policy and action on the issue. Hewitt will tease apart the arguments and present a conceptual framework to help scientists and policy-makers find common ground and work towards case- and context-specific solutions.

Steve Tufts (left), a York geography professor, will examine the question, “What Will Work in a Warming World Look Like?” Adapting to and mitigating climate change requires major societal shifts, but what will everyday jobs look like?

These talks were originally presented during this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting held in Vancouver in February.

For more information, visit the IRIS website.