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magazine / jf09
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January/February 2009 issue |
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In Eastern Greenland,
students on the Cape Farewell expedition imitate the movement of a
glacier by passing rocks and depositing them at the end of the line
to create a moraine.
(Photo: Robert Vanwaarden) |
EXPEDITIONS
Show and tell
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Nicole Sanscartier of Rothesay,
N.B., measures temperature and conductivity at different ocean depths
in the waters of Denmark Strait, between Greenland and Iceland.
(Photo: Robert Vanwaarden) |
Listen up, class. Today’s lesson is on retreating glaciers. Your assignment:
motor away from a Russian research vessel in a Zodiac, land on the coast
of Greenland, toss a few leaves into a stream of glacial runoff, measure
their speed and the water depth, perform some calculations, and tell the
world how quickly the ice is melting.
Just a typical day for 28 high school students aboard the sixth annual
Cape Farewell expedition, a two-week voyage from Iceland to Iqaluit that
took place last September. The trip, which was funded by the British Council
and supported by The Royal
Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS), brought together students from
every Canadian province and territory and from six other countries, plus
a team of scientists and artists. In addition to fieldwork and art projects
(and fighting two-metre swells), the students were encouraged to think
creatively and collaboratively about the spectre of climate change.
“It’s as if I was walking in one of my textbooks,” says
17-year-old Lily Jackson, a grade 12 student at Belmont Secondary School
in Victoria, who has been sharing videos, photos and stories from the trip
with her classmates since returning home. “I wasn’t just reading
or looking at pictures — I was there. And I saw how what we do in the South
is affecting people in the North. It’s not about the future. It’s
about now.”
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Luisa Lizoain of Toronto (at
left) and Victor Curi of Brazil make music out of rusted refuse at
the site of an abandoned weather station on Padloping Island, Nunavut.
(Photo: Robert Vanwaarden) |
Jackson, who is planning an exhibit of images and music inspired by the Arctic
landscape, wasn’t convinced before setting sail that science and art
could coexist. But at Padloping Island, off the coast of Baffin Island, amid
the detritus of an abandoned Cold War-era weather station, Carleton University
geography professor Chris Burn gave an impromptu lecture about the elements
that come together on that island: people and wilderness, land and water,
ice and bare ground. Then students lined up discarded oil drums, pieces of
pipe and rusting tractor parts and banged out a song as a junk orchestra. “A
beautiful sound,” says Jackson, “out of something so ugly.”
Burn, a permafrost researcher and a vice-president of the RCGS, had never
worked alongside collaborators such as Colette Laliberté, an Ontario visual
artist and professor. But their left-brain counsel — asking students, for
instance, to study the texture of rocks — added richness to the scientific
observations. “In the beginning,” says Burn, “the students
were gobsmacked by an environment unlike anything they had seen before.
But as the voyage went on, they were able to pick up threads that connected
one place to another. If you see things in a different way, your mind looks
for new interpretations.”
— Dan Rubinstein
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GEO-LITERACY
The missing links
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| Photo courtesy of Linda Gollick |
Drawing together disciplines as diverse as economics and ecology, geography
is an extraordinarily broad subject. So broad, in fact, that some students
find it overwhelming. But not on Linda Gollick’s watch.
An Ontario high school teacher and the winner of the Canadian
Council for Geographic Education’s 2008 Geographic
Literacy Award, Gollick (right) believes
in stressing the interconnectedness of physical, economic and social systems,
both in the classroom and when developing new materials for the Ontario
curriculum. When students see the relationship between, say, the clothing
they’re wearing and the manufacturing process used to make it, their
critical thinking skills sharpen.
“It’s important to identify global issues,” says Gollick,
head of the Canadian and world studies department at Toronto’s Loretto
College School and Ontario coordinator for The Great Canadian Geography
Challenge for the past 15 years. “But we also need to relate these
issues to a local level.” This helps students understand geography
and perhaps find a place within it.
— Dan Rubinstein
AWARDS
Winners’ circle
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Camsell Medal recipients Carman
Joynt (at left) and Kenneth Boland with RCGS President Gisèle
Jacob. The medal is named after Society founder Charles Camsell.
(Photo: David Barbour) |
The Royal Canadian Geographical
Society’s long-time lawyer and auditor both received the Camsell
Medal in November for outstanding service. Kenneth Boland and Carman Joynt
have served the RCGS for decades, professionally and as volunteers. Boland,
an expert in non-profit corporations, was its legal counsel from 1990 until
his retirement last summer. Joynt started auditing the Society as a newly
minted chartered accountant in 1974 and did so for 31 years.
Boland served on the Board of Governors and now sits on the Finance and
Audit committees, while Joynt is a member of the Canadian Geographic Enterprises
Management Board and the Board of Trustees of the RCGS Endowment Fund.
WEB
Virtual make-over
Want to know what daring expeditions The Royal Canadian Geographical Society
is funding, how to apply for a research grant or what guest speaker might
be coming to a city near you? Look no further than the Society’s
newly spiffed-up website. “It’s the best reference centre
for everything the Society does,” says Executive Director Louise Maffett
of the site, which includes an archive of Canadian Geographic articles
on Society activities.
In Royal company
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip were among the 7,500 visitors who attended
an exhibit of photographs published in Canadian Geographic’s
special issue on climate change (October 2008).
Launched at Canada House (RIGHT) in London, England, in September, the exhibit
will travel to Edinburgh, Paris and The Hague, among other European cities,
and end its tour at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in
Copenhagen.
EVENTS
Weather mania
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Newly elected Fellows include
(from left): Paul Taillon, Maurice Richard, André Préfontaine, Bruce
Mitchell, Helaine Oleski, Anne Smith- Mansfield, Daniel MacKay, Carman
Joynt, Dale Gregory, Al Friesen, Michèle Fréchet, Brad Faught, Paul
Cosulich and Wayne Andrew.
(Photo: David Barbour) |
Nearly 80 years after The Royal Canadian
Geographical Society hosted
its first Annual General Meeting at Ottawa’s Château Laurier,
the RCGS returned to the historic hotel for its College
of Fellows dinner in November. Environment Canada’s senior climatologist David Phillips
entertained more than 200 guests with stories about our national obsession
with weather, concluding wryly that “the Brits have the Royals, the
Americans have Hollywood, and we have the weather.”
Massey and Camsell medallists were honoured at the event.
See more photo at The
Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s website.
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