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May/June 2005 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Bioprospecting In-depth: Bioprospecting The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

Standing amid an Antarctic penguin colony three years ago, Alysia Garmulewicz says she came to realize how humans are relatively “ insignificant in the big picture.” Then 15, she had travelled to the frozen continent as a winner of Canadian Geographic’s Polar Bound contest. The trip had a profound impact on her.

"The penguins were just going about their business, treating us like another piece of nature," she says. "Antarctica just swept me away."

A resident of New Denver, B.C., Garmulewicz turned what she learned on her trip into a passion. Upon her return, she toured schools and community groups to talk about Antarctica and climate change. "I had fantastic feedback from most of the adult organizations I spoke with, but I was incredibly frustrated by the lack of response from my peers."

Photo: Students on Ice

So far, Garmulewicz has lined up an impressive roster of speakers, including Elizabeth May, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, environmentalist and television host Severn Cullis-Suzuki and former federal environment minister David Anderson, whom Garmulewicz and a few fellow students had phoned from Antarctica to talk about Canada’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol (see "The Inside story," CG Mar/Apr 2003).

With workshop leaders, participants will develop ways to help tackle the global problem in their own communities or even at the national level. "Climate change is an issue that requires unprecedented intergenerational connections," says Garmulewicz. "Youth can’t be reinventing the wheel and ignoring what everyone else is saying." She also hopes to set up a mentorship program to enable young people to consult with experts long after the conference is over.

The two winners of this year’s Polar Bound contest will be awarded a trip to the conference, followed by a two-week expedition to the Arctic in late July.

For more information about the conference, visit www.yc3.net, and for the Polar Bound contest, visit www.canadiangeographic.ca/polarbound2005.

Monique Roy-Sole

Savvy gift

HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS in New Brunswick will soon be a little more geographically savvy about their country thanks to a recent donation by the province’s branch of the Canadian Institute of Geomatics (CIG).

CIG aims to advance the development of geomatics, including the fields of surveying, mapping, remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS), so the New Brunswick branch recently decided to distribute 70 copies of The Canadian Atlas: Our Nation, Environment and People, one to each high school in the province. Released last September, the atlas was a joint project between Canadian Geographic and Reader’s Digest.

"We want to encourage kids to learn," says Mark Doucette, chair of the New Brunswick CIG. The group, which also sponsors conferences and offers university scholarships, decided that high school students would have more opportunity to use the atlas than would lower grades.

Doucette hopes young New Brunswickers will now be inspired to consider his field. "Geomatics involves mapping," he says. "We thought this donation could put the idea in kids’ minds that mapmaking might be something they could go into."

Elizabeth Shilts

Getting physical

Stephen jeans has discovered a disturbing geographical gap in what’s being taught in Western Canadian classrooms.

Jeans is a doctoral student and research assistant in the education faculty at the University of Calgary. Using a $5,000 research scholarship from the Canadian Council for Geographic Education (CCGE), the first of its kind, he studied geography curricula in the four Western provinces. His conclusion: elementary and secondary school curricula are lacking when it comes to teaching physical geography, which includes the study of oceans, landforms, climate and weather. "Students can enter university without seeing or learning about physical geography," he says.

Given the scope of the oil sands and mineral deposits in Alberta, the health of Saskatchewan food crops and the mudslides in British Columbia (North Vancouver, Jan. 2005), Jeans says, educating Western students on these subjects is vitally important. He will offer his findings to major universities and to education ministries in the four Western provinces, with the hope that geography classes become a little more physical.

Tim Lai

Homework helper

Researching a school project on global warming? Helping your child build a science-fair project? Concerned about your local environment? Looking for a science-related career? You could search the web for one good resource, or you could simply browse the new web-enabled CD that will be included with the July/ August issue of Canadian Geographic.

Produced with the help of Canadian scientists, the bilingual CD will link you to the best science-related sites on the web. It will also be distributed in the French-language magazine Québec Science. Look for it in our next issue.

Challenging the world

THE END of this year’s Great Canadian Geography Challenge on May 14 marks the beginning of another journey for the winner: a spot on the Canadian team at the National Geographic World Championship in Budapest, Hungary, in July.

Finalists from provincial and territorial challenges will not only compete for the national team but also vie for $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000 scholarships from HSBC Bank Canada.

This year’s winner will join the 2004 Challenge champion, Toronto’s John Yao, on Team Canada, while the second-place finalists from 2004 and 2005 will face off to round out the three-member team.

Visit www.geochallenge.ca for more details.

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