The Right to a Healthy Environment in Canada. It sounds good, but what does it mean? We consulted a legal scholar to find out.

By Kai Chan and Paige Olmsted

David Suzuki Foundation and Ecojustice have teamed up to
campaign for a Canadian 'Right to a Healthy Environment'.

A major new movement is hitting Canada, causing municipalities across Canada to formally support a Canadian 'Right to a Healthy Environment'. But what would such a right achieve, and how do the municipal declarations contribute to the campaign? We took the opportunity to ask an expert questions on our minds, and hopefully on yours too.

David Boyd pictured with his daughter. (c) David Boyd.

David Boyd graduated from IRES in 2010. His thesis examined the experiences of 92 countries with the right to a healthy environment. His work has not only led to contributions towards drafting new constitutional provisions related to environmental protection in other countries (from Tunisia to Grenada), it helped inspire the David Suzuki Foundation’s Blue Dot Movement, which is a campaign for Canada to include the right to a healthy environment in our Constitution. As part of the campaign municipalities are signing individual commitments, and we had an opportunity to ask David a few questions about the implications of the right for a healthy environment at both the municipal and national scale, and how such a movement could help change both the legal and natural landscape in Canada. Thanks, David, for your time and insights!

Q: Environmental laws seem to get most attention at the provincial and national scales, so what’s the role of the municipal declarations? Do they have any teeth of their own, or are they merely symbolic?
Municipal declarations do not have direct legal effect but are proving to be more than symbolic. They highlight the importance of the right to a healthy environment and reflect the overwhelming support of Canadians for recognition of this right. The 45+ municipalities that have passed declarations are reviewing their environmental bylaws, policies and programs and looking actively for ways to improve. Among our next challenges (besides making progress at the federal and provincial levels) is helping local governments identify and adopt best practices in protecting the health of their citizens and ecosystems. Municipalities are already seeking advice about how best to do this.

Q: I’m no constitutional lawyer, but my basic understanding is that it is a very high-level legal document—the highest. That would make it the ultimate authority, but perhaps also not prescriptive in any detail, so perhaps it’s good and bad as an enabler of change. What level (constitutional, national, provincial, etc.) of legal changes are you aiming for in R2HE, and why?
The protection of human rights in constitutions is necessarily vague—think of the right to freedom of expression as a classic example. Legislatures then have the primary responsibility of respecting, protecting, and fulfilling those rights that enjoy constitutional recognition. Respecting the right to a healthy environment means government actions cannot directly threaten or violate it. Protecting the right means passing and enforcing laws to ensure that third parties like corporations don’t violate the right. Fulfilling the right means taking positive actions to guarantee clean air, safe drinking water, fertile soil, and healthy ecosystems, such as cleaning up contaminated sites, implementing recovery plans for endangered species, etc.
Recognition of the constitutional right to a healthy environment would have a domino effect on all levels of government in Canada, pushing us to catch up with other wealthy nations in terms of the strength of our environmental laws and standards. My forthcoming book Cleaner, Greener, Healthier: A Prescription for Stronger Canadian Environmental Laws and Policies (UBC Press) demonstrates how far Canada lags behind the legal rules in other wealthy industrialized countries.
Constitutional recognition of the right to a healthy environment would also have non-legal effects on Canadian values and attitudes. For example, look at the way the inclusion of the right to equality in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has contributed to widespread support for same-sex marriage.

Q: And once there’s a change in the law, then what? Who has to do what in order for the Right to a Healthy Environment movement to be successful? Does someone have to sue someone else, or will change happen without that? And who would be likely to be suing? NGOs? Or also private citizens, municipalities, First Nations, etc.?
Once environmental laws, policies, and standards are strengthened, then implementation begins, with governments doing their job. Imagine that recognition of the right to a healthy environment led to a Canada Clean Air Act, national standards for ambient air quality, and fees for emissions of air pollutants such as particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, benzene, etc. Emissions of these pollutants would be reduced, preventing premature deaths, reducing respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, avoiding unnecessary health care expenditures, and improving the health of ecosystems. Lawsuits would only be needed in cases where the law was being violated or the right to a healthy environment would be violated. Lawsuits could come from any of the above individuals or organizations.

Q: I’m starting to sound like my daughter Tiva when I tell a story, but “Then what happens?” Once we’ve got new laws, and it’s clear how the courts are interpreting them, then what might we expect in terms of real change on the ground? Who might do what differently? What kinds of loopholes might we expect to be constructed for whom to sneak through?
I think I answered the first part of this question in my previous response. The evidence from other countries experiences are that the ultimate outcome of constitutional protection of the right to a healthy environment is improved environmental performance—faster reductions in emissions of air pollutants, faster reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and better protection for endangered species.

Here are a couple of tangible examples. Norway, like Canada, is a major oil and gas exporter. Unlike Canada, Norway added the right to a healthy environment to its constitution in 1992. Several years later Norway passed a law requiring the petroleum industry to achieve zero discharge of toxic, persistent, and bioaccumulative chemicals into the ocean. At the time discharges measured millions of kilograms annually. After a transition period of some years, the industry has now achieved the legislated target of zero.

Over the past decade two similar oil spills happened in coastal waters in Newfoundland and Brazil. In the Canadian case, PetroCanada was fined a paltry $350,000 and in the Brazilian case, Chevron was fined $170,000,000. To put these numbers in context, the Chevron fine is larger than the total of all environmental fines in the history of environmental law in Canada. The difference is because the Brazilian right to a healthy environment led to stronger laws and policies such as the Environmental Crimes Act and a dramatic increase in the stringent enforcement of environmental laws.

I have not looked at whether the right to a healthy environment can act as a shield, but loopholes are always a possibility!

However, the constitutional right to a healthy environment has led to the emergence of a new principle of environmental law called "non-regression" which prevents governments from weakening existing environmental laws, regulations, and standards. Under this principle, recent changes by the Harper government that weakened the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, Fisheries Act, Species at Risk Act and other environmental laws would have been rejoiced as unconstitutional. The right to a healthy environment is an idea whose time is now.

Happiness Is … When Someone 'Gets It'

By Edward Gregr and Kai Chan

Too often, the fruits of years of research effort yield peer-reviewed publications that are greeted by the resounding echo of … silence.

We were therefore extremely pleased to find our recent article was not only read, but genuinely understood and actively supported by the most exacting of all readers, the Editor in Chief of the highly respected journal BioScience. The article in question was our recent review article entitled Leaps of Faith: How implicit assumptions compromise the utility of ecosystem models, wherein we examined how assumptions and uncertainty were treated by the 60 most popular articles describing ecosystem models that were intended to inform management.

In his editorial Models are Not Toys, Dr. Timothy Beardsley focused squarely on our article, (re)articulating our main points with such eloquence that it was clear he fully and completely "got it". Rather than confuse his message by paraphrasing, we simply reproduce the bulk of that editorial directly.

"Mathematical modeling has become central to much of biology and related sciences, to the extent that ecosystem studies that omit to describe a model of their phenomena of interest might even seem underdeveloped. The power of well-constructed models hardly needs defending—their ability to provide a vivid sense of what is going on in a complex situation is felt intuitively. Yet the fascination of modeling can easily lead the unwary into a fantasy of neatly interacting parameters that cease to meaningfully represent the messy, hard-to-measure real word. The temptation is to test just the most interesting model predictions and assumptions—the ones that yield the results we hope to find—and to forget possibly unwelcome complications at the interpretation stage.

For sure, there may be good reasons to ... develop a model that captures some important features of the world even when the model is incomplete in significant ways. Science has made vast strides by employing this reductionist strategy, as Gregr and Chan acknowledge in their important article ... Yet when attempts are made to draw management conclusions from models that are described without a full account of the assumptions and uncertainties that went into them, danger lurks.

Gregr and Chan's survey of articles purportedly relevant to ocean ecosystem management yielded results that can fairly be called “shocking.” “Ecosystem” articles left all assumptions implicit 39 percent of the time, and “social–economic” articles articulated no assumptions 68 percent of the time. The problems may be linked to the increasing fragmentation of modelers into specialized communities that are familiar with their own assumptions—but fail to explain them to outsiders. Gregr and Chan also remark on the “widespread faith in data quality and suitability.” Understandable, given the difficulty of gathering custom environmental data, but faith should have no place in science.

The authors provide a valuable typology of assumptions and uncertainties that all ecosystem modelers would do well to use as a checklist when planning and reporting their research. Unstated assumptions and uncertainties, besides causing unwise management actions, could bring this vital field into disrepute. And there is no reason to think the ocean scientists are more at fault than those who study other ecosystems."

We could not have said it better ourselves. But we are thrilled we articulated it clearly enough, and that this topic was seen as critical enough, for at least one senior Editor to find the work compelling enough to recognize the importance and contribution of our review. It is that sort of validation that keeps scientists motivated, and makes us feel that our work, however slowly, is making its way into the fabric of scientific understanding.

The complete editorial is accessible online at BioScience. The article is available on request from EG.

Beardsley, T. M. (2015). "Models Are Not Toys." BioScience 65(1): 3.

Gregr, E. J. and K. M. A. Chan (2015). "Leaps of faith: How implicit assumptions compromise the utility of ecosystem models for decision-making." BioScience 65(1): 43-54.

EG/KC

Depolarizing the Supermarket: Taking Responsibility (and Feeling Good about Yourself) on a Sliding Scale

by Maayan Kreitzman

This blog originally appeared on the UBC blog site for the course Global Food Security and Sustainability taught by Dr. Navin Ramankutty

It's a familiar scene: I stand in front of the garlic at the supermarket, motionless, my mind a complete blank: organic garlic, 17.50/pound, “normal” garlic, 9.00/pound. I have about as much agency in the situation as the pile of bulbs staring me back – it seems like my choice is totally random, depending on how generous or maybe how guilty I'm feeling that day. Actually, I know a lot about garlic. I've grown it in two different countries, in three gardens and two farms; I've picked garlic scapes, I know what the flowers smell like (garlic, actually). I know how a bulb looks when it's fresh, and how to braid the leaves and hang them so that they cure properly. I put garlic in just about everything I cook, as well as raw in salads. But this wealth of garlic-love still leaves me empty when confronted with those two price signs. If I choose the organic, have I chosen something more wholesome, more likely to be local, grown by a farmer I would be happy to support, who is a good steward of wildlife and minimized pollution on her farm? If I choose the conventional garlic, will it be laced with unregulated chemicals that apparently run rampant in the far east? Was it grown by a sinister multinational agribusiness corporation that uses energy-intensive farming practices that pollute and destroy biodiversity?

These are the natural associations conjured up. Yet I now know that many of these dichotomies are false ones. That organic farming doesn't necessarily imply sustainability, that for greenhouse gas emissions, the way food is produced usually trumps the distance it travels to market, that chemical-free food isn't more nutritious, and that intensive farming can use less land, sparing other land for nature. The many trade-offs I've learned about engage and fascinate me, yet at the supermarket, I'm still faced with one choice (or at most two): organic or conventional. China or California. Only two tradeoffs in a matrix of other factors.

So I would need more data. I would need someone to reliably report on the social-climate-ecosystem impacts of food production (or any production for that matter). I'm not talking about yet another do-gooder certification scheme which appeals to a niche market and justifies premium pricing. So what am I talking about?

It's an information-supply scheme. An across-the-board mechanism for scoring products from regions on a sliding scale with a full range of values. These scores would then be summed up into a single social-climate-ecosystem impact score, to be displayed on the sign above the bin. This score would apply to organic and conventional products alike. The advantage of information-supply is that it does not imply a separation of physical supply chains and thus higher prices, as certification would. In fact it can be seen as a market integrator or leveler: regardless of which niche a product belongs in, it would be subject to the same evaluation. In this way, blanket decisions like “organic is better” would be unnecessary – we could make mixed choices based on our priorities.

Of course, this doesn't come free, or easy. First, while engineers and food systems scholars have made strides in estimating greenhouse gas emissions from the full life-cycle of food products, these studies are time consuming, very specific, and typically do not include ecosystem impacts or social dimensions of production. We need faster, better estimation methods that include all three of these axes.

Second, gathering data costs money. For some reason, active monitoring is not something we associate with the agricultural sector – yet in other industries (fishing, finance, airlines, government) independent observers/auditors/safety inspectors are an accepted part of doing business. Transparency requires both expertise and money. I would argue it's worth it.

My assertion that “it's worth it”, of course, assumes that consumer-choice driven changes are the path towards change. Some might argue that using the data to tax producers for their impacts is more efficient; others would favor command-and-control style regulations that mandate stricter management practices and limits. Maybe those measures can yet come about. But in a political climate which is inimical to taxes and suspicious of direct regulation and enforcement, the consumer approach is the best place to start.

This scheme allows people to act in accordance with their existing goodwill and sense of responsibility. A simple act which is connected to real wants and specific values is not to be underestimated – it stands out from the arbitrary choices that result from pervasive cognitive dissonance. Such acts are the seeds of cultural change that may eventually grow into more formal avenues of decision making in our society. Right now, all of my time in the garden and on farms, all the courses I've taken in university, and all the articles I've read on Grist, all the petitions I've signed on SumOfUs, and all the farmer's markets I've frequented, still sum up to a blank stare into the abyss of the garlic display every month or two. That should change.

Conservation Social Sciences: What, Why, and How?

Publication News: CHANS lab post-doc Nathan Bennett co-led the production of new report, Conservation Social Sciences: What, Why, and How? 

The report aims to stimulate dialogue among conservation organizations, foundations, agencies, practitioners and researchers about the role of the conservation social sciences. It is intended to build capacity, promote knowledge and foster engagement with conservation social sciences in order to improve conservation practice and outcomes.

A detailed overview of the report can be found on his website, and the report itself can be downloaded here. 

Citation: Citation: Bennett, N. J. & Roth, R. (eds.) (2015). The Conservation Social Sciences: What?, How? and Why? Vancouver, BC: Canadian Wildlife Federation and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia. DOI: 10.13140/2.1.2664.3529

Harder than Rocket Science? Fumbling with Mental Health in Grad School. Part 2

by Sarah Klain, Ally Thompson, Karina Benessaiah and Verena Seufert

This follow-up to a previous blog entry reflects the collective reminiscing of experiences that one or more of the contributors have had during the duration of their graduate student journey.

Does this graduate school process have to be so destructive (see cheese grater in previous posting)? After watching the easily digestible documentary film Happy, which oversimplifies topics but is still worth watching, it became painfully clear to me (author SK) that my dissertation process and the culture of academia often does not provide me with much of the following well-documented sources of life satisfaction:

• Connection and Community. Long days in academic rabbit holes chasing after intangible concepts can get in the way of feeling like our research connects to what matters to people. In contrast to working as part of a team, much of the dissertation process tends not to be conducive to strengthening connections to people on a day-to-day basis.
• Exercise. We remain uncertain if a treadmill desk is worth the investment!
• Compassion. Weeks and months of research and writing can make us feel disconnected from the concerns of others. Sometimes compassion is modeled in grad school, often in times of crisis. I (author SK) have struggled to be compassionate with myself since I’ve felt behind in my dissertation progress for years.
• Cooperation. The majority of our thesis or dissertation time is spent conducting independent research rather than working with others towards a shared goal.
• Mindfulness. Non-judgmental focus is essential to mindfulness. We spend considerable time honing our abilities to be critical of our own thinking and writing and that of others. I (SK) have run into trouble in knowing when to turn off or tone down my critical thinking so I can be more caring rather than a critical, skeptical, judging scientist.
• Gratitude. Expressions of gratitude for academic research tend not to be common. Sure, seeing that our work is cited via Google scholar is a little ego boost, but it’s not that common to get in-person feedback on the end products of all this work, specifically publications. On the darker days, it’s hard to feel gratitude for a process that can feel so isolating.  
• Self-improvement. As grad students, we tend to invest effort in academic self-improvement at the cost of not putting time into other dimensions of personal growth.
• Flow is associated with achieving the right balance of competence and challenge. We have tended to feel incompetent the majority of the time because we’re constantly trying to learn, which means we often don’t know what we’re doing.
• Living according to intrinsic values, which are linked to concern for others and the environment, kindness, understanding, appreciation, tolerance and protection of people and nature. Ideally, our research can be framed with these values, but the day-to-day work often feels disconnected from these values.

Often staring down a list of all the things we need to do for balance can end up like this (from this site)…. 

… or this!

So how can we include more of these basic things into our everyday lives? How can we avoid collapse and reduce anxiety and suffering? How can we make this endurance contest feel less like an ego cheese grater and more like a quest for something important? How can we ensure that this PhD (or MSc or MA) feels more fun, provides us with more satisfaction and more of those basic ingredients of happiness?

How can we re-think and redesign the day-to-day experience of this educational process and other dimensions of our lifestyles to experience more of these sources of satisfaction? Below is a compilation of what has helped us and others in our lab group feel better about how we’re spending our time.

Collaborations

Graduate school too often feels like a solo mission. Some of us frequently feel like we’re too extroverted to be good academics. Days on end of dissertation writing make us lonely, especially when we feel like we’re not very good at it. Working with RAs and doing lab projects helps increase our feelings of connectedness and confidence that someone else besides our advisers and committees care about the work we do. We feel more connected when collaborating with non-academic partners, even though these collaborations are not always recognized in an academic setting.

Conferences

Conferences remind us there a lot of people who care about the issues that interest us. They’re good for networking and learning even though they can also feel tangential if dissertation/thesis deadlines are tight.

Basic biology

It’s easy to forget that sleeping, eating well and regular exercise can work wonders. These basics help moderate cortisol and stress hormones, which, if elevated for prolonged periods, make us feel cruddy and age faster.

Affirm the achievements, however small

I (author SK) keep a file with emails from people who have expressed interest in and gratitude for past work that I’ve done.

Most of us have a to-do list. When we check something off, we cut and paste it to the bottom section to remind ourselves that we have been productive.

The longer we’re in grad school, the more we realize we don’t know. We have to remind ourselves that we know way more than we did when we started this process.

Practicing Mindfulness
Buddhists are onto something profound. We dabble in meditation and read books on the topic. Practicing mindfulness can help us let go of negative thoughts, reduce feelings of being overwhelmed and focus on the task at hand.

and perhaps chocolate....
(source of this insight) 

Spending time on other things that matter: fun, friends and family

We can be more productive when we plan on doing something fun with people we enjoy after we accomplish a task. Also, knowing that we will need to stop working at a certain time can help us focus.

Dedicating some time to something entirely different – i.e. gardening, athletics, a pet, ceramics, reading books for fun, anything else – allows us to relativize the graduate school process: while important, it is NOT the only thing that matters nor the only thing that defines us.

Productive procrastination, within reason

If we really need to delay a task, we try to make that time productive (while recognizing that some unproductive time is also important). Collaborating on another research paper is a good option since it will likely get a paper out and it might be more fun than our own thesis work (the novelty factor). We like to read books that have nothing to do with our work since they might give us new ideas nonetheless. There can be benefits to collaborating with people because we find them interesting rather than because it aligns with our research. These ‘productive’ procrastination tactics might deter from your own work but might pave the way for new pathways post PhD. Also, it beats staring at a blank computer screen, facebooking, making and drinking tons of coffee and tea and watching TV compulsively.

Time Outside and preferably surround by nature

Time in nature is good and restorative for us in so many ways, see this review on why and how.

Think about Plan B

There’s a world of options outside of the ivory tower and grad school’s one of many paths. We’re privileged to be in grad school, even if it doesn’t always feel like a privilege. It’s healthy to remember that this path isn’t for everyone and we’re free to leave if we’re not sufficiently satisfied.

Check out

We take regular breaks and sometimes, we take a big break. We recommend baths and saunas. Time far away, physically and mentally, can help.

During our check out times, we really check out. We don’t take our work with us but rather leave behind the academic books, laptops and the To-Do lists. Bringing work to the beach, a week-end retreat and countless other places makes the time away less restorative and we tend not to get much work done anyways. It can be hard to let go of constant thoughts of “I should be writing” but that low-level self-imposed anxiety wears us down. We’re more efficient when we take the time to fully check out of work.

PhD comics: reminding us we’re not alone since 1997.

If you need just a wee break, check out PhD comics to remind yourself that you’re not alone in the ups and downs of grad school!

Remembering why we started doing this in the first place

Gratitude

All things considered, the grad student lifestyle has a lot of perks (as long as you’re okay with being rich in ideas and relatively poor compared to peers who landed professional jobs). Turning academic guilt into feelings of gratefulness for the flexible lifestyle and ability to spend our days learning can help.

Living according to one’s intrinsic values - the extra challenge of building a sustainable world

Doing a PhD in an interdisciplinary field that aims to solve problems (i.e. sustainability, development etc.) can be extra challenging because 1) People that entered such fields usually want to help the world in some way and a PhD can, at times, seem like a highly ineffective way of contributing towards solutions; and 2) We need to understand and integrate several fields of thought, without having well-defined disciplinary standards, which can increase feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy. On the bright side, it gives us the opportunity to be exposed to new ideas and new ways of seeing the world, which can be empowering.

Embrace the Game

Grad school, like much of life, is a bit of a game. It’s been harder than we anticipated to feel competent and have fun at this game, but it’s taught us about our strengths, limitations and what we need to thrive.

Naomi Klein wrote “building a livable world isn't rocket science; it's far more complex than that." Part of embracing this complexity and creating a satisfying graduate school process is realizing that we can’t do everything at the same time. Becoming a more informed, engaged and compassionate scientist, person, and citizen is part of the solution.

How I feel after writing that last part.

We circle back with a cheesy space metaphor: rocket ships work because they carry everything they need with them. They don’t rely on external forces. But if one of their essential parts breaks down, the mission is compromised. Long term balance is just like this. We pursue graduate degrees so that we can make lasting and tangible contributions. You know where this is going… we won’t make it to the long term if we don’t attend to all our rocket ships’ needs.

Harder than Rocket Science? Fumbling with Mental Health in Grad School. Part 1

by Sarah Klain, Ally Thompson, Karina Benessaiah and Verena Seufert

This blog entry reflects the collective reminiscing of experiences that one or more of the contributors have had during the duration of their graduate student journey.

When we reach the end of this graduate school expedition, we want to look back on it as time well spent. Even though it will not be a giant leap for humanity—
a realization most students reach a few years into a PhD program—we want it to be a personal leap of success, a source of pride based on working hard to contribute to making the world a little better. 

Chris Hadfield rocks the space science

We want our grad school journeys to avoid the disastrous fate of the Apollo 13 expedition and be more like Chris Hadfield’s stint at the International Space Station which we see as a mix of cool science, amazing people (come-on, who else but Hadfield can pull off that moustache with so much style?!) and brain expanding experiences, spiced with some nerd-fun and good tunes (e.g., Space Oddity). Such a mix would make the requisite hard work feel worthwhile. 

Making our graduate school experiences emulate the most rad Canadian astronaut’s experience in space is much easier said than done. This educational process has required substantially more endurance, courage, tenacity and pain tolerance than we ever anticipated. You think running a marathon is tough? Well, try doing a PhD. It’s kind of like a marathon that tends to last for, let’s be honest, 6 years or more. A PhD tests your emotional stability, sanity, sense of purpose and self-worth. A PhD inevitably becomes extremely personal. Doing it gets at the very core of who you are and what motivates (and de-motivates) you.

Running up and down mountains has proven far more straightforward 
and often more satisfying than working on our dissertations

The grad student lifestyle can be awesome because we have a remarkable amount of autonomy, freedom and flexibility to pursue answers to the questions we choose. We basically live the intellectual’s dream, get (under)paid to pursue topics we care about, have no real boss to tell us what to do, operate mostly on our own terms and on our own time, while surrounded by other similarly nerdy people.

But there are darker dimensions to this PhD experience. Nearly all graduate students flounder and suffer to varying extents and lengths of time. Sooner or later the grad student life gets to most of us. We’ve been startled when we have conversations with other graduate students whom we perceive as extremely competent. These brilliant students, however, often struggle with self-doubt, anxiety, loneliness and depression. This rather prevalent dark underbelly of graduate school is too often not openly discussed.

Grad student life is more of a roller coaster than we imagined. Most of us have a few shining moments of glory when we feel smarter than we’ve ever been before. But this is tempered with stretches of feeling like we know nothing or at least we are overwhelmed with all that we now realize we don’t know.

If you’re lucky and strategic, you might feel like you are changing the world with your work. More frequently, you will likely feel like your dissertation will never end, like filling a bucket that has a hole at the bottom with water. Sometimes you feel connected to many inspiring people who care and think about the same things as you do. Then there are the days when you’re convinced you’re alone in this world of your little PhD rabbit hole.

What makes a graduate school fun is also what makes it so challenging. The fact that we can work on whatever we want means that our identities gets wrapped up in our work. We perceive our dissertations as a signifier of our value. It’s too easy to think that if my research is not good, then I'm not good.

The freedom and flexibility we have also means that our productivity is our own responsibility. If we procrastinate, we have to take personal responsibility for it. Our academic supervisors tend not to breathe down our necks. They train us, their students, to be independent. Our advisers tend to be exceptionally academically intelligent, insightful and sometimes harsh with their critique and feedback. They are always busy, usually really busy (there’s intense selection processes relevant to who gets hired as tenure track and tenured profs these days. See this story with the following excerpt:"Peter Higgs, who won the Nobel prize for his work on the Higgs boson, recently said that the imperative to publish all the time would disqualify him from contemporary academe.")

Wishing that our intellectual rabbit holes were wormholes
transporting us directly to scientific insight

In contrast to most work environments, professors tend not to demand greater output and faster deliverables. Motivation to complete a graduate degree must generally come from largely within ourselves. We have to motivate ourselves to do work that can be boring and repetitive, like data cleaning or transcribing. Add to this the fact that much of what we do is like searching for a needle in a haystack often without even knowing what we're looking for. We've gone down intellectual rabbit holes (wormholes would be way cooler) involving weeks and perhaps months of reading up on theories and topics that end up not being part of our theses or dissertations. These tangents tend to leave us with little to show for large blocks of time and a feeling that we're not useful.

Going down academic rabbit holes feels kind of like this…

The result of this is that many people come out of grad school (particularly PhDs) with their egos grated down, dragging themselves over the finish line on their last legs.

In our time as grad students, we have not seen a single person go through the PhD process without moments of close-to or total-break-down.

Does this graduate school process have to be so destructive? See our next post for navigational tips on this master's or PhD journey, which tends to be through at least a few existential crises.

Setting Sail for conservation on the BC coast

Former CHANS lab post-doc Russ Markel now owns and operates Outer Shores Expeditions, which leads marine excursions along the BC coast aboard his 70 foot schooner, Passing Cloud.

Check out his post on the Beaty Biodiversity Museum's blog, which explains more about his organization, his expeditions -- including destinations like the Great Bear Rainforest and Haidi Gwaii -- and how this role merges his passion for research, natural history, and education as part of a larger mission to raise awareness and protect marine ecosystems.