At the uncanny edge of the scientific frontier, Gaia’s Web explores the promise and pitfalls the Digital Age holds for the future of our planet. A new generation of innovators is deploying digital and biological technologies to come to the aid of the planet, but will they end up doing more harm than good? Combining insights from computer science, ecology, engineering, environmental science, and environmental law, Gaia’s Web introduces profoundly novel ways of addressing our most pressing environmental challenges—mitigating climate change, protecting endangered species—and creating new possibilities for ecological justice by empowering nonhumans to participate in environmental regulation.
Author Karen Bakker passed away in August 2023, shortly after finishing this book. Gaia’s Web is part of what Karen conceived as a trilogy exploring how biological and digital technologies could bring more empathy with nature, help regenerate our damaged planet, and give greater agency to our fellow earthlings. In the award-winning first volume, The Sounds of Life, Karen beautifully narrates the hidden realm of nature’s sounds and the transformative power of digital technologies to connect us with other species. In this second book, Gaia’s Web, insightfully engages with the promises and conundrums of emerging bio-digital technologies. Sadly, Karen did not get a chance to write her final volume on a new political future, in which humans co-govern rather than dominate Earth, but she leaves behind an extensive and insightful legacy of works, and a message of love and hope.
Co-authored by Michele Koppes, Nina Hewitt and others, The Canadian Mountain Assessment provides a first-of-its-kind look at what we know, do not know, and need to know about mountain systems in Canada. The assessment is based on insights from First Nations, Métis, and Inuit knowledges of mountains, as well as findings from an extensive assessment of pertinent academic literature. Its inclusive knowledge co-creation approach brings these multiple forms of evidence together in ways that enhance our collective understanding of mountains in Canada, while also respecting and maintaining the integrity of different knowledge systems.
The Canadian Mountain Assessment is a text-based document, but also includes a variety of visual materials as well as access to video recordings of oral knowledges shared by Indigenous individuals from mountain areas in Canada. The assessment is the result of over three years of work, during which time the initiative played an important role in connecting and cultivating relationships between mountain knowledge holders from across Canada. It is the outcome of contributions from more than 80 Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals and contains six chapters.
The book aims to enhance appreciation for the diversity and significance of mountains in Canada, to clarify challenges and opportunities for mountain systems in the country, and to motivate and inform new research, relationships, and actions that support the realization of desirable mountain futures. More broadly, the publication provides insights into applied reconciliation efforts in a knowledge assessment context and seeks to inspire similar knowledge co-creation efforts in and beyond Canada.
What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against?
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?
Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us—and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.
The culmination of more than two decades of work on the spatiality of economic forms, worlds, and lives, Variegated Economies tackles the question of how to approach, conceptualize, and analyze economies as geographically differentiated phenomena. Staged from the field of economic geography, the book seeks to build bridges to complementary developments in critical political economy and heterodox economic studies by way of a substantive theoretical and methodological program. Jamie Peck advances a series of arguments concerning the inherent-and highly consequential-spatiality of economic forms, worlds, and lives, engaging a range of issues from the diversity of capitalism(s) to the dynamics of late-stage neoliberalization, and from the problematic uneven geographical development to the challenges-cum-opportunities of conjunctural methodologies.
Gentrification is a global process that the United Nations now sees as a human rights issue. This new Planetary Gentrification Reader follows on from the editors’ 2010 volume, The Gentrification Reader, and provides a more longitudinal (backward and forward in time) and broader (turning away from Anglo-/Euro-American hegemony) sense of developments in gentrification studies over time and space, drawing on key readings that reflect the development of cutting-edge debates.
Revisiting new debates over the histories of gentrification, thinking through comparative urbanism on gentrification, considering new waves and types of gentrification, and giving much more focus to resistance to gentrification, this is a stellar collection of writings on this critical issue.
Like in their 2010 Reader, the editors, who are internationally renowned experts in the field, include insightful commentary and suggested further reading. The book is essential reading for students and researchers in urban studies, urban planning, human geography, sociology, and housing studies and for those seeking to fight this socially unjust process.
“Thoughtful and rigorous…meticulously researched and colorfully presented…in a way that is accessible to non-experts. A wonderful mix of animal ecology, narratives of science-doing, futurism, and accounts of Indigenous knowledge that is as interdisciplinary as the field itself.” – Science
The natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. Groundbreaking scientists are using novel digital technologies to uncover these astonishing sounds, revealing vibrant communication among our fellow creatures across the Tree of Life.
At once meditative and scientific, The Sounds of Life shares fascinating and surprising stories of nonhuman sound, interweaving insights from technological innovation and traditional knowledge. We meet scientists using sound to protect and regenerate endangered species from the Great Barrier Reef to the Arctic and the Amazon. We discover the shocking impacts of noise pollution on both animals and plants. We learn how artificial intelligence can decode nonhuman sounds, and meet the researchers building dictionaries in East African Elephant and Sperm Whalish. At the frontiers of innovation, we explore digitally mediated dialogues with bats and honeybees. Technology often distracts us from nature, but what if it could reconnect us instead?
The Sounds of Life offers hope for environmental conservation and affirms humanity’s relationship with nature in the digital age after learning about the unsuspected wonders of nature’s sounds.
His research focuses on Canada’s transition to a low-carbon future, and how that relates to water governance.
Can you tell us a little about your research?
My research broadly explores the intersection of landscape architecture and human geography. Currently, my PhD focuses on the political ecology of decarbonization in Canada through an analysis of landscapes of hydropower and hydraulic fracturing in northeastern British Columbia, specifically the areas impacted by the Site C Dam.
How does your research relate to climate change, and why is that connection important?
The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted Canadians to re-evaluate fundamental aspects of everyday life. We are increasingly told that our current historical moment offers an unprecedented opportunity to “build back better”; in other words, to envision a more just and sustainable society centred on decarbonization and climate justice. These goals are important, urgent, and necessary, and I believe that we can observe their convergence most vividly in contemporary debates surrounding the future of energy in Canada.
Why does working on climate change feel important to you?
All Canadians are implicated in debates over the future of energy, from landscape-scale infrastructure projects to the digital devices that increasingly mediate how we learn, work, and socialize. As a landscape architect and a geographer, I believe these debates present a valuable opportunity to re-evaluate the political, cultural, and social processes that underpin our relationships to energy resources, and to consider more just and sustainable pathways forward.
The Peace River at the Site C Dam. Courtesy of Douglas Robb.
What’s one thing you wish more people knew about your area of research?
Northeastern British Columbia is often considered “peripheral” by southern Canadians; I have met very few people who have had the opportunity to travel up to the Peace River country. And yet Canada’s northern landscapes are being transformed—some would say sacrificed—in pursuit of large-scale energy and resource projects. I wish more people knew how beautiful, fertile, and ecologically unique the Peace River region is. Perhaps that might prompt people to pause and reconsider—or work to reverse! —the drastic changes that have taken place there.
How do you hope your research will effect change?
My research is very closely connected to my teaching practice in landscape architecture. My goal is to introduce my students to nuanced natural resource debates, expand their energy and climate literacy, and help train a new generation of activist designers who are able to imagine, design, and construct more just and sustainable pathways to decarbonization.
Conversations about climate change always feel urgent, and sometimes the scale and nature of the crisis seem overwhelming. What have you learned or seen in your work that makes you feel hopeful about tackling climate change?
I think there is a tremendous amount of work to be done at multiple scales, from our everyday patterns and behaviours up to the highest levels of government and industry. At the individual level, I think it’s important to organize and apply political pressure. But it’s also important to recognize that tackling climate change is a complex and collective effort. When I feel overwhelmed, I’m encouraged by the excellent research and advocacy by students and faculty in the Geography Department and across many other faculties at UBC.
She completed her BA Environment and Sustainability in 2022, and is now pursuing an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at the University of Oxford
While at UBC, her research focused on how natural ecosystems can help to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Can you tell us a little about your research?
I worked on a Directed Studies project to study and quantify a select suite of ecosystem services provided by urban trees on the UBC Vancouver campus. These services are specifically aimed at mitigating climate change effects, and include carbon sequestration and storage, air pollution removal, and building energy reduction. I conducted fieldwork in the summer of 2020 and used a benefit assessment model to produce an estimation of the amount of carbon stored, air pollutants removed, and energy saved by buildings. I then used GIS to visualize the carbon storage potential geospatially and provide advice for future campus planning initiatives.
How does your research relate to climate change, and why is that connection important?
I studied ecosystem services particularly targeted at mitigating climate change effects because I think it is important for the university to invest more resources in the natural pathways of carbon removal to offset current emissions.
Why does working on climate change feel important to you?
The effect of climate change on urban centres, and its disproportionate impacts on vulnerable communities is a growing concern. Cities are predicted to continue increasing in population density, and conditions will continue to escalate if no pivotal action takes place. We need to provide communities with resilience-building tools and resources to protect the health and livelihoods of citizens. Ecosystem services provided by urban forests and urban biodiversity are a critical nature-based solution. I believe they are an important asset that city developers should invest in to create sustainable and healthy urban environments.
What’s one thing you wish more people knew about your area of research?
Everybody is familiar with the carbon storage potential of trees, which definitely provide an incredibly important terrestrial carbon sink; however, the other ecosystem services provided by urban forests are often undermined. Even my research only touches on a small selection of urban tree ecosystem services, and other properties such as stormwater filtration and their ability to improve mental well-being are not widely known.
How do you hope your research will effect change?
My research was a client-oriented study written for SEEDS and Campus + Community Planning at UBC, so the results will help inform UBC’s future urban forestry initiatives. I do hope to pursue my interests in graduate studies and eventually contribute knowledge to this field.
Are you involved in any climate advocacy?
I am currently an assistant policy analyst with the British Columbia Council for International Collaboration working on a briefing paper to inform key decision-makers within cities such as municipal councillors about ways to integrate climate justice into their climate action plans. I am also a research assistant for several faculty members in the Department of Geography to study different species responses to climate change.
Conversations about climate change always feel urgent, and sometimes the scale and nature of the crisis seem overwhelming. What have you learned or seen in your work that makes you feel hopeful about tackling climate change?
I feel fortunate and quite privileged that I have so many resources and baseline studies to reference when constructing my research proposal and methodologies – which is indicative of the increasing awareness around issues such as urban ecosystem services and their climate change mitigation potential. I hope that alarmism doesn’t veil the positive steps forward by cities in their climate change responses and distort the complex literature behind climate change.
By Stuart MacKinnon, Katie Burles, Terence Day, Fes de Scally, Nina Hewitt, Crystal Huscroft, Gillian Krezoski, Allison Lutz, Craig Nichol, Andrew Perkins, Todd Redding, Ian Saunders, Leonard Tang, and Chani Welch
This lab manual is a cross-institutional project from British Columbia (BC), Canada that provides 22 labs to be implemented within first year post-secondary physical geography courses.
The labs have been developed to be easily adapted for various course structures, durations, and differing laboratory learning objectives set out by instructors.
Instructor notes are provided for each lab that outline the instructional intent of the lab author, along with some suggestions for modification.
The lab manual is licenced under creative commons (refer to licensing information) so that the lab modules can be modified as needed.
