A Full Brain

North Carolina is a long way from Alaska. I know you may be thinking "you're a Geographer - didn't you realize that?" To which I would reply, "Yes, but it feels really far away, and I didn't necessarily expect that." Perhaps it was the fact that I was wearing shorts on Tuesday (it was 90+ degrees in Chapel Hill), and when I got to Fairbanks on Wednesday evening there was snow on the ground! Oh, and there are large snow-capped mountains, reindeer, a large oil pipeline, and fascinating people who have chosen to live in this frontier environment (although some of them challenge the notion that they live in a frontier).

But the snow and wildlife are just a fun benefit of my real reason for this trip. A colleague and I are here to talk with graduate students and faculty from across the country who are working on interdisciplinary projects related to sustainability. The idea is that this is a meeting of minds to talk about what sustainability is, what types of things should be sustained (elements of the environment, cultures, languages, etc.), how scientists can inform and drive studies of sustainability, and how to train graduate students to work in interdisciplinary teams around sustainability. Everyone at the conference is part of an NSF IGERT (National Science Foundation, Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) program (at a particular university) that in some way has a project that is relevant to sustainability - but the commonalities really stop there. There are people from the natural sciences and social sciences who study everything under the sun - from atmospheric chemistry and engineering of sustainable energy systems, to policy and population-environment interactions.

After the first day of talks and group discussions, my brain is full.