Winter 2014

Newsletter Archive

Staff Profile: Guy Greenaway's Pick3

Beginning with this edition, we are pleased to share the next iteration of our staff profiles. With the intent of sharing more about ourselves with our readers, we created a bank of potential staff profile questions. Each staff member gets to pick three of these questions to craft their staff profile. We are open to any feedback you have to offer on our new approach, and we hope you enjoy getting to know us better!

A Picture Says a Thousand Words

Kids. Nature. Recreation. Resiliency. Climate. Flood.

There are at least a thousand words in this picture for me.

If you are astute, you may notice that this picture has shown up in some previous Miistakis materials. I always offer it up because these are my kids and I'm stupidly proud of them.

I like that Molly and Annalisa are so engrossed by what they are looking at. This is a special place for us. There are a dozen places where we watch birds, but this place is the only one we call "The Bird Watching Place." It is a special place, but very ecologically un-unique. There is nothing particularly rare here. We watch such non-Life-List birds as mallards, chickadees, gulls, LBB's and the occasional pelicans that float down the river like a formation of silent 747's.

This June, the place disappeared.

It is on the banks of the Bow River in Fish Creek Park near our home. The top rail was at least 5m under water. For many days, we waited, and then there were many days of trying to get near to see what was left as the flood waters receded.

Watching a favourite place disappear in an unprecedented flood makes "climate change" something more than political. And looking into your kid's eyes makes "future generations" something less than a trite phrase.

This is a picture of resilience, too. Most of the rails are still there. There is debris and silt everywhere, but the trees and the banks and the grasses - nature's infrastructure - are pretty much intact. This time. But this picture makes me think about our responsibility to address climate change for future generations... and makes me really THINK about what those words mean.

What are you learning right now? What do you want to learn?

I'm learning about the "TEEB for Business" transition into the "Natural Capital Coalition." I'm trying to learn more about how ecosystem services is used in the context of sustainability reporting, in a never-ending to understand the full potential for the ES paradigm to applied to decision-making in Alberta. Wish me luck..!

The song that I have stuck in my head right now is...

"Simple As This" by Jake Bugg.