Denali

Denali National Park is beautiful - and I got to see it! I work in some interesting places, but this was the kind of place that makes you want to return (soon). Here are some photos from that trip:

Tim & I on the stampede trail.

Snow-capped mountains in the background.

I love the clouds in this photo.

My attempt at a close-up shot.

Lots of layers there.

Group Work

Although I have been to several different coferences during my short graduate career, today we did something different at the sustainability conference - we split into small discussion groups to tackle issues and topics that we (as a participant group) posed to one another. The morning sessions concentrated on graduate training in sustainability (focusing on interdisciplinarity) and the afternoon on sustainability science. I am seriously beginning to believe that there's no room left for any other information in my brain - so this is my way of trying to empty a few thoughts from those discussions.

I think one of the more thought-provoking discussion groups I was in today talked about the disconnect that often exists between scientists in their 'ivory tower' and people who have to work in the 'real world' on sustainability issues. We had a fantastic discussion about why that divide exists and how we can better communicate our findings (as scientists) to decision-makers and people who have to implement policies on the ground, without compromising our research and our desire to do objective work. In another session we talk about interdisciplinary graduate education and whether students working on sustainability issues should be trained as interdisciplinary scientists or to work in interdisciplinary teams. And perhaps one of the most interesting, but mentally exhausting discussions was on mapping epistemologies - in other words, how we view the world and which aspects of the environment (or cultures) we choose to value shapes sustainability science. From the discussion many of us agreed that we often don't talk explicitly about our viewpoints within interdisciplinary teams, but that communication between scientists is important when working on interdisciplinary issues.

Phew - still a few more days to go here in Fairbanks. Tomorrow is going to be a wrap-up day to discuss how all of these themes on sustainability science fit together and where we'd like to take what we've done in this conference.

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.

Blog Shuffle

Looking for my Galapagos Adventures blog? I've been doing a bit of re-organizing and decided to move the Galapagos blog to a new address: http://www.enchantedislands.blogspot.com .

Someone recently suggested that I could get more mileage out of my blog by including information about my other travels (beyond the Galapagos Islands) and my research as a PhD student. What a great idea - so I've done just that.

In the coming weeks I'll start getting everyone up to speed with what I'm working on, and where I'm going. I've got an upcoming trip to Fairbanks, Alaska for a conference on sustainability (read: fantastic photos and exciting trip notes to come), so stay tuned!