In this episode, we are speaking with Dolf DeJong, Chief Executive Officer of the Toronto Zoo. Dolf has had an exciting career at the intersection of conservation, public spaces and education. Dolf joined the Toronto Zoo in 2018 after acting as Vice President and General Manager of the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre. At the Toronto Zoo, Dolf has focused on strengthening the zoo’s relationship with the surrounding community, and finding new and creative ways to connect the public with animals and conservation science to help raise awareness and fight extinction.
Chatting with Dolf, he reflected on his personal journey into conservation and how it relates to the scientific and strategic work happening at the Toronto Zoo. We explore how the Zoo's location within Rouge National Urban Park informs its partnerships with Parks Canada, and the exciting plans for the Zoo’s upcoming Conservation Campus, which is being built in collaboration with the University of Toronto Scarborough. We also talked about the emergence of so-called “de-extinction” technologies and their implication for both wildlife conservation and zoos. We then reflect on a recent trip to East Africa that Dolf and I took part in with some colleagues and unpack some of the ethical and ecological complexities of ecotourism in developing nations. In the wildlife conservation world, Zoos are sometimes portrayed as relics of an outdated conservation ethos. But we hope our conversation with Dolf works to dispel that view, highlighting the vibrant science happening at the zoo, and the deep connection to applied conservation biology.
Today we are speaking with Joseph Romm, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. Joe holds a PhD in physics from MIT and has authored numerous articles and 10 books on climate change, clean energy, and communications. In the 1990s, he worked on climate solutions at the US Department of Energy, and helped to run the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. He then became very active in climate change communications, founding the influential blog, Climate Progress, and was recognized by the AAAS and Rolling Stone and Time Magazines for his efforts.
One of Joe’s signature books is his 2003 book entitled: “The Hype about Hydrogen: False Promises and Real Solutions in the Race to Save the Climate”, which he has recently revised and updated. In the book, Joe made the case that hydrogen did not live up to the hype at the time - it was not going to be an economically viable alternative to fossil fuels. We chatted with Joe about whether anything has changed in the 20+ years since the book first came out and about his thoughts on the renewed investment in hydrogen. We also spoke to Joe about his work as a science communicator and his new endeavours to share what he has learned about how to connect with an audience.
Buy the new revised edition of Joe's book here: https://www.amazon.ca/Hype-About-Hydrogen-Revised-Solutions/dp/1642834025
In this episode we are speaking with Adam Sobel, Professor of Applied Physics, Mathematics and Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. Adam is an atmospheric and climate scientist and his research focuses on tropical meteorology and extreme weather events, particularly hurricanes. Adam is also actively engaged in public outreach through media interviews, op-eds, podcasting and his popular science book about Hurricane Sandy that made landfall in New York in 2012.
In light of the current and proposed US funding cuts to science and climate science specifically, Adam and others have been raising awareness about the potential harm to American science and society more broadly. In our conversation with Adam, we talked about his own research program, his journey to becoming a more public-facing scientist, and the scale of the funding cuts facing US federal agencies and academic institutions. America is a leader in science and innovation and Adam stressed that this is not by chance; it is the result of a curiosity-driven, highly productive and government-funded science ecosystem established in the US post-World War II. It was a difficult conversation, but an important one. So, with that, here’s our conversation with Adam Sobel.
In this episode we are chatting with plant community ecologist, Professor Jenny McCune of the University of Lethbridge. The goal of Jenny's research is to determine what factors drive the patterns and long-term dynamics of plant community diversity and composition within landscapes dominated by humans. Her research group uses field surveys of forests, grasslands, or savannahs to identify which plant species are present and compare this data to data from past surveys, or from paleoecological data. These comparisons allow her group to assess how plant communities have changed, and how those changes are related to human activities or natural disturbances like storms and fires. Jenny’s research also focuses on the conservation of plant species at risk.
With Jenny we talked about where her passion for plants comes from and why plants seem to be underrepresented in conservation teaching and practice. We also revisit the concept of ecological integrity in the context of Jenny’s work, which involves the relationship between conservation translocation and the integrity of local ecosystems. A lot of Jenny’s recent research is focused on post-fire ecological recovery, and she shared some findings from her work on this in Western Canada. We wrapped up our chat with some reflections on how we teach conservation, and what strategies can be effective for conveying the complexity of environmental management in Canada.
Jenny's website: https://jlmccune.weebly.com/
Today we’re releasing a special episode in response to recent changes to environmental policy in Ontario. To understand these changes and their implications we had a conversation with Dr. Connie O’Connor, the Director of the Ontario Northern Boreal Program with Wildlife Conservation Society-Canada.
Before joining WCS-Canada, Connie completed her PhD at Carleton University under the supervision of Dr. Steven Cooke, and also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at McMaster University, where she was recognized with the Alice Wilson Medal from the Royal Society of Canada for outstanding academic qualifications in Science!
Connie has been with WCS-Canada for 10 years now, working on fish ecophysiology and conservation prioritization. She is also a past member of the Freshwater Fish Specialist Subcommittee of the committee on the status of endangered wildlife in Canada (or COSEWIC), and is an Adjunct Professor at Lakehead and Laurentian Universities.
With Connie, we discussed the new Ontario Provincial Omnibus Bill 5, also known as the “Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act”. For this discussion we’re hoping to raise awareness about the Bill, which if passed, will work to weaken environmental governance, and even democratic process in Ontario. We want to encourage listeners to familiarize themselves with the Bill and consider submitting their comments while the bill is still undergoing legislative process. After two readings in parliament, the Bill has now been referred to Ontario’s Standing Committee on the Interior which will review the Bill, and this may include public consultations, expert testimonies, and proposed amendments. After the committee's review, the Bill will return to the Legislative Assembly for a third reading. So there are a few ways for the public to engage with the Bill’s review (links below)- You can submit comments on the different aspects of the Bill through Ontario’s Environmental Registry until May 17th, and The Standing Committee on the Interior is accepting oral presentations on May 22 and May 26 in Toronto and Written submissions until May 26. You can also add your name to a petition that’s being assembled by Ecojustice.
Overall, Bill 5 represents a continuation of environmental deregulation that we’ve seen from this Provincial government, and will implement changes that effectively nullify the efforts that conservation advocates have been advancing for decades in Ontario. So we hope our chat with Connie conveys the implications of these changes, and can spur those listening to make their opinion heard.
Bill details: https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-44/session-1/bill-5
Submit comments to the Environmental Registry: https://ero.ontario.ca/notice/025-0380
and
https://ero.ontario.ca/index.php/notice/025-0391
Submit comments for the Standing Committee: https://www.ola.org/en/apply-committees
Ecojustice Petition: https://ecojustice.ca/take-action/tell-doug-ford-ontarios-wildlife-isnt-for-sale/
Today, we are chatting with Dr. Nicholas Rivers, Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on the economics of Canadian environmental policy, particularly decarbonization policies. Nicholas actively engages in the public discourse on climate change mitigation in Canada and contributes his expertise to the policy research organization, the Canadian Climate Institute, as a member of the Expert Panel on Mitigation.
We had a wide-ranging conversation with Nicholas, covering the basics of carbon accounting, how carbon pricing has been implemented in Canada and other policy options aimed at reducing GHG emissions. We also talked about the opportunities and challenges of electrification, a key element of decarbonization.
Nicholas' website: https://sites.google.com/site/nicholasjrivers/
In this first episode of season 5, we are speaking with Dr. Sarah Finkelstein, professor and Chair of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto. Sarah’s research group seeks to better understand climates of the past and the drivers of climate and ecological change over the past 12,000 years. Studying paleoclimate involves collecting and analyzing geologic records and Sarah’s group specializes in analyzing the composition of lake and wetland sediment records from locations across the world, including the high Arctic, the Hudson Bay Lowlands, Panama and Southern Africa.
We spoke to Sarah about her academic journey thus far, which has spanned several disciplines and a number of different geographical and environmental contexts. We talked about the controversy surrounding the designation of the so-called anthropocene epoch, which has not been accepted by the International Union of Geological Sciences. We also explored Sarah’s work on the connection between biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration in Ontario’s north and how those topics intersect with Indigenous rights and appropriate engagement with Indigenous communities. Sarah is a research powerhouse and her passion for her work is contagious. We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did!
Sarah's website: https://utpaleolab.wordpress.com/dr-sarah-finkelstein/
Today we’re speaking with Dr. Peter Stoett. Peter is Dean of the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at Ontario Tech University. His main research interests include international relations and law, global environmental politics, and human rights, and all of the nuanced intersections between these themes. Prior to joining Ontario Tech University, Peter was Director of the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre, and Chair of the Department of Political Science, at Concordia University in Montreal, Québec. Our primary reason for connecting with Peter was to discuss his recent role as co-chair of the Global assessment of invasive alien species, which was conducted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
With Peter, we explored several aspects of the new IPBES global assessment. We spoke about how community-engaged environmental action is really the best approach for navigating the ethical debates surrounding invasive species management, including the importance of engaging with Indigenous communities and Indigenous knowledge. We also talked about the necessity of national leadership in developing governance solutions for invasive species, including coordination across levels of government and efforts to gather widespread public buy-in on the problem. Peter is a strong proponent of science communication and encourages scientists to access the media to get their work into public discourse, where it can have the greatest probability of affecting policy change. It was a pleasure to speak to Peter about his leadership of this truly global-scale science-policy synthesis.
In today's episode we’re speaking with Dr. Jessica Lee. Jessica is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author and environmental historian, and winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Prize. She completed her doctorate at York University in environmental history and aesthetics, focusing on the history of Hampstead Heath, an urban park in London England. During her doctorate, she was a visiting scholar at the Royal College of Art in London. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and the University of King’s College.
We connected with Jessica to talk about her new book Dispersals - on plants, borders, and belonging. In Dispersals, Jessica brings together her personal story and her wealth of knowledge on how humans interact with plants around the world. We reflected on several sections of her book, examining how early exploration and global trade have reshaped local plant ecologies, critical perspectives on the conceptualization of nature, conservation and biological invasions, and how our daily interactions with plants, either in the environment or in our diets, provide opportunities for mindful reflection and critical examination. We recommend you pick up Jessica’s book, Dispersals, for an immersive summer read and one that will conjure some of your own memories of how you’ve interacted with plants in your own life, and greater insights on how we are all deeply connected to plants.
Welcome back to another episode of Emerging Environments. Today we are chatting with Jason Clark, the National Director of Climate Change Advocacy at the Insurance Bureau of Canada and the Chair of Climate Proof Canada, a national coalition of insurers, municipalities and not-for-profits that advocates for climate change adaptation measures to protect Canadians and their property from extreme weather, flood and wildfire.
The insurance and reinsurance industries have been at the forefront of climate change risk assessment. What happens within the insurance industry has ripple effects throughout the economy - property values of houses that become uninsurable due to climate change-related risks like flood or wildfire plummet. This translates into economic hardship for individual homeowners and also into regional economic impacts due to reduced municipal property tax revenue - revenue that is used to pay for infrastructure and a variety of municipal services.
We spoke with Jason about some of the exciting work he has been doing to ensure that Canadians and the insurance industry are resilient to climate change. We hope you enjoy our conversation!
Today on the podcast, we speak to Dr. Gwynne Dyer. Gwynne is a British-Canadian military historian, author, professor, journalist, broadcaster, and retired naval officer. Gwynne received his PhD in 1973 from King’s College London, and went on to create several popular television documentaries, including the miniseries “War”, which received an Academy Award nomination. Gwynne is now a syndicated columnist, writing about Middle Eastern affairs and global politics, including environmental issues. In 2008, he published “Climate Wars: the fight for survival as the world overheats”, and has recently come back to this topic in his writing with the publishing of his new book “Intervention Earth: life-saving ideas from the world’s climate engineers”. We spoke to Gynne about his research into climate geo-engineering for his new book, focusing on emerging technologies and the uncertainty surrounding them.
Intervention Earth emphasizes the urgency of addressing the climate crisis by discussing potential tipping points in the climate system. In the early part of the interview, Gwynne refers to these as feedbacks and states that we cannot simulate these in climate models. Here, I want to distinguish between feedbacks that we can simulate and feedbacks that are not well represented or missing in models. Climate models include many important feedbacks and would not credibly simulate historical climate change if they did not. However, longer-time scale carbon cycle processes, such as permafrost thaw and the associated methane release, are not well-simulated and processes associated with ice sheets are not included in most global climate models. With respect to these under-represented or missing processes in models, uncertainties are large.
As hosts of this podcast, we are not endorsing or dismissing solar radiation management, but awareness of this topic is extremely important as both research and private sector investment in solar radiation management grow.
The bottom line is that more needs to be done faster to mitigate climate change. The Earth has just experienced the 12th-consecutive hottest month on record and based on current international greenhouse gas emissions, the global average temperature will likely surpass the Paris Agreement target of 2C within 10-30 years.
In this episode, we connect with Dr. Natalie Ban and PhD student, Jade Steel. Natalie Ban is a professor in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. Natalie’s research encompasses the broad field of marine ethnoecology. Specifically, her group focuses on coastal and marine conservation and fisheries and the social-ecological systems that connect them. Her group’s work integrates natural and social sciences, and bridges western and traditional ecological knowledge. Jade Steel is a doctoral candidate in Natalie’s research group. Her research focuses on Indigenous-led salmon monitoring along the Central Coast of BC.
We had a great conversation with Natalie and Jade, exploring the range of research projects happening in Natalie’s lab. We spoke about their work on fisheries reconciliation in British Columbia, including the centering of Indigenous perspectives in marine protected area network planning, and also supporting fisheries monitoring efforts by First Nations, which is the focus of Jade’s PhD. Jade and Natalie talked about the importance of the local scale expertise held by First Nations, which is highlighting some gaps in climate change modeling for marine environments. We also talked about the interactions between Indigenous rights, justice and fisheries management, where declining fish populations resulting from commercial overharvesting is now being rightly characterized as an infringement on the rights of Indigenous communities. We closed out our conversation with some thoughts on how to find positivity as individuals working within, and thinking deeply about, the environmental crisis.
Today we are chatting with Dr. Hansi Singh, climate scientist and co-founder and CEO of Planette, a climate tech start-up. Hansi was formerly an Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria. During the pandemic she began working on a research project that evolved into Planette and she recently decided to leave academia and dedicate her time to growing her business.
In our conversation with Hansi, we talked about her past research program at the University of Victoria and her transition to the private sector. Planette’s aim is to provide decision-ready probabilistic seasonal to decadal climate forecasts for business, so we also spent some time talking about the evolution and growing academic and societal interest in decadal climate prediction in recent years. Hansi encouraged more climate scientists to consider entrepreneurship to help ensure that the private sector makes use of the best science for adaptation and transitional planning and action. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Hansi Singh.
We are thrilled to have Dr. Faisal Moola as the first guest for our 4th season of the podcast. Faisal is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph in the Department of Geography, Environment & Geomatics. As a professor, his research focuses on forest conservation and management, Ecology and ethnoecology of plants, environmental policy and Indigenous-led conservation, and he has been publishing extensively in academic journals on these topics. Prior to his arrival at the University of Guelph, he spent 16 years at the David Suzuki Foundation, first as a forest ecologist and eventually in the positions of Director of Science and then Director General. Faisal is also the lead for the Biological Outcomes and Indicators Research Stream of the Conservation Through Reconciliation Partnership, which is a Canada-wide initiative that aims to support and promote Indigenous-led conservation.
We talked about his path from the non-governmental world to academia, where he now has a vibrant interdisciplinary research program. He shared how his lab has moved towards a rights-based approach to conservation, exploring the connections between the health of Indigenous communities and their access to traditional lands and resources, with recent focus on urban environments. We also spoke about his work as a conservation educator where he is adamant about the importance of policy literacy in emerging conservation scientists, as well as the necessity of building meaningful connections with Indigenous communities. It was a pleasure to speak with Faisal and we’re excited to have this conversation kick off our 4th season of Emerging Environments!
Welcome back to the final episode of Season 3 of Emerging Environments.
In this episode we continue exploring the power of story-telling with award-winning film producer and director, Caitlin Starowicz. Caitlin has over 10 years of experience in television and film, from comedy to drama to documentary. Her extensive documentary work spans broad environmental themes including conservation and climate change. In our conversation, we chat about three of Caitlin’s recent projects.
Her 2018 film She Walks with Apes follows the work of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas, sometimes known as the “Trimates”, who studied great apes in the wild. The film also introduces the next generation of young women scientists who were inspired by them and discusses the current state of great ape conservation. It premiered on BBC America on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.
Recently, Caitlin has worked on two climate change documentaries. Her 2020 documentary about Greta Thunberg and the youth climate justice movement, entitled Rebellion, was the season premiere of the 60th anniversary CBC’s The Nature of Things, and, most recently, her 2023 documentary, entitled Apocalypse Plan B investigates the potential perils of climate geoengineering to mitigate global warming.
Documentary film-making is such an integral vehicle for science communication and it was so inspiring to have Caitlin share her insights with us. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Caitlin Starowicz and we look forward to reconnecting with you for Season 4!
Joining us on the podcast today is Dr. Kane Stone, a research scientist in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kane completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne on the impacts of stratospheric ozone depletion on climate. He then moved to MIT as a post-doc in Susan Solomon’s Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Change group and has stayed on as a research scientist.
Kane was a co-lead author on a recent paper in Nature exploring chemical pathways for wildfire smoke particles to facilitate stratospheric ozone depletion. This study was motivated by the devastating 2019/2020 Australian bushfires, in which smoke extended all the way into the stratosphere. This study is a great example of how new insights into the Earth system can be gained by blending theory, lab experiments, observations and climate modeling. In our conversation, we also chatted about some of the other phenomena that have been perturbing the stratosphere in recent years, including the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai undersea volcano.
https://www.ssolomongroup.mit.edu/kanestone
We are delighted to share our interview with Dr. Steve Easterbrook, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the School for the Environment at the University of Toronto. Before coming to U of T, Steve was a faculty member at the University of Sussex and then a lead scientist at the NASA Independent Verification and Validation Facility. Karen first met Steve when I was a visiting graduate student at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, where one of the world’s leading climate models is developed. Steve studies climate modelling from a computer science perspective and, as you will hear, Steve visited several of these climate modelling institutions, exploring how climate models are developed and how scientists use them. His research in this area has evolved into a new book entitled, Computing the Climate: How we know what we know about climate change, appearing on bookshelves this summer.
In our conversation with Steve, he shared his motivation for writing the book and what he hopes readers will get out of it. We also talked about where the field of climate modelling is headed and how AI has the potential to improve the representation of complex processes within climate models. As Director of the School for the Environment, Steve has a keen interest in student learning and transdisciplinary research and education, and we talked about approaches to embedding sustainability literacy into post-secondary education across the board. It was great to chat with Steve and don’t forget to keep an eye out for his book, Computing the Climate, which arrives this summer.
https://www.environment.utoronto.ca/people/directories/all-faculty/steve-easterbrook
https://www.cambridge.org/ca/academic/subjects/computer-science/computing-and-society/computing-climate-how-we-know-what-we-know-about-climate-change?format=PB&isbn=9781107589926#
Today we welcome Dr. Hanna Morris. Hanna is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto with research interests in climate change media and communication, culture and politics, and transnational climate movements. Previously, Hanna was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also completed her MA and PhD. Hanna completed her BSc. at the University of California-Berkely, an her MSc at the London School of Economics and political Science. Hanna’s research and writing have been published in academic journals and popular media outlets including Environmental Communication and Media Theory. Her scholarship has been recognized by the IAMCR Stuart Hall Award, New Directions for Climate Communication Research Fellowship, and Top Paper Awards from the International Communication Association and Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences.
In our conversation with Hanna we explored many of the topics that will be in her upcoming book which is titled Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media and Power. We spoke about the history of climate change journalism, the various media channels through which the topic of climate change is communicated, and the inadequate coverage of the disproportionate impacts of climate change. We talked in depth about the balance of power in environmental media, with Hanna reflecting on the implications of that for the future of climate change journalism. We also spoke about the challenge of disentangling the relationship between public opinion of climate change and climate change activism and how those topics are covered in the media. We ended with some thoughts on how to have those tough conversations about climate change with an emphasis on trying to find shared values, and common concerns.
It was a pleasure to dig into this challenging topic with Hanna, and we hope you enjoy our conversation!
Hanna's website: https://hannamorris.com/
Hanna on twitter: @sustaintheconvo
