To be a Geographer

Last Thursday, it was Open House at the Centre of Geographic Sciences (COGS). I dropped into the college briefly to catch up with a couple of the faculty. Open House is an annual NSCC event with emphasis on showcasing the unique programs at each campus.

I was successful on two accounts. I had a chance to chat with Ed Symons about municipal planning, GIS technology and the community. It seems only yesterday that MapAnnapolis was founded and there was a collaboration between the Community Planning program at COGS, the Community and the Municipality. In fact, it is likely closer to twenty years.

Ed and I discussed the new potential for combining the mandate of CORAH (Centre of Rural Aging and Health) with the mapping technology at COGS (also see my blog post, Applied Geomatics/CORAH presentation).

Second, John Wightman dropped by COGS to loan me a copy of Farley Mowat’s The Desperate People. John had a request.

‘Given your unique perspective in living in so many geographic areas of Canada, perhaps your thoughts on the changes since 1980 to the 2024 status of the impact of environmental change. In particular to those in our Arctic regions’.

This request coincided with a call from Andrew Ronay, a schoolboy friend from England. He had been asked to mentor a recent graduate in Geography from Oxford University. Could I be a Canadian resource?

To satisfy these two requests I need to look back on the period , 1980-2024. I found a copy of my ‘retired’ curriculum vitae.

1980-88 Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia
1988-89 Jakarta, Indonesia
1989-1990 Redlands, California
1990-1998. Peterborough, Ontario
1999 Victoria, British Columbia
1999-2011 Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia
Also Haida Gwaii, British Columbia. Iqaluit, Nunavut.
2011-Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia (retired)

Before 1980, graduate work included time in the Rockies, Newfoundland and Labrador. My first visit to Canada (from England) was in 1964 at the McGill Subarctic Research Lab, Schefferville, Quebec.

One approach:

I have been writing weekly blogs since 2013. This includes the period when Heather was working for National Parks in Churchill, Iqaluit and Haida Gwaii. Could I summarize over ten years of blogs, and thereby answer the question:

“To be a Geographer? “

A quick look at the ten volumes of blogs – What a daunting task!

Let me think about that challenge.

First, certainly, PLACE is important to me. Second, in the words of David Suzuki from The Sacred Balance, “We need to rediscover our ‘Place in Nature’”.

Geographers must play their part.