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magazine / jf99
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January/February 1999 issue |
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When opportunity knocks
The RCGS’s role is more crucial than
ever as interest in geography grows, says new president.
Arthur Collin, sitting in a comfortable, old armchair,
points across his large, white living room. "The bear was
there. Sniffing at the door of the other tent." His voice
is even, but his thick eyebrows twitch. "He stood on his
hind feet, his head up where the ceiling is." The bear leapt;
Collin reluctantly shot and killed it. "He landed about
the middle of the rug." Collin looks at the pink, floral-patterned
rug; it is easy to imagine instead a thick sheet of ice, a famished
polar bear lunging across it.
Collin thus ushers the arctic summer of 1960 into his Ottawa
living room. It is plain to see how connected this 69-year-old
geographer and marine scientist — recently elected president
of the RCGS — remains to the isolated land and sea he explored
early in his career. As a research scientist for the Fisheries
Research Board in Ottawa and for the Bedford Institute of Oceanography
in Dartmouth, N.S., in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Collin
roamed distant parts of the Arctic. He studied the physical oceanography
of the polar basin and the Arctic Archipelago. "The opportunity
was extraordinary," he says, still enraptured.
Collin, whose fascination with the ocean began in his teens
while a navy cadet in London, Ont., has never lacked opportunity.
He has worked as a scientific advisor in the Department of National
Defence, Dominion Hydrographer, assistant deputy minister of
the Atmospheric Environment Service and chief science advisor
to the federal government. Since 1988, Collin has held prominent
private-sector positions, including as a director with the accounting
firm Coopers & Lybrand. He pins his rich career on good
timing. "My training happened to coincide with a time of
intense international interest in the ocean."
Collin joined the Society's Board of Governors 13 years ago,
serving six as senior vice-president. He has chaired the Awards
and Policy and Planning committees, as well as the board of Canadian
Geographic Enterprises. He assumes the Society leadership at
a time when general awareness of the role geography plays in
everything from health to economics is on the upswing. Collin
rhymes off the catalysts: "Climate change, industrial impact
on our freshwater basin, natural disasters like the ice storm,
the Saguenay flood, the recent hurricane in Central America.
These have tested the capacity of the modern economy to cope
with the natural environment." In a sense, he stresses,
the more technologically advanced society becomes, the more vulnerable
it can be to the whims of nature.
In this light, the role of the RCGS becomes more vital than
ever in Collin's eyes. "The mandate of the Society,"
he says, "lies in understanding the importance of getting
more information to more Canadians about the geography of this
country."
— Anita Lahey
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