Globe-trotting local returns for UNBC dream job
Uniting tiny, remote communities in the frigid western Arctic and the sultry tropics of Queensland is climate change and how human populations are coping with it.
Tristan Pearce has traversed both extremes and points between to better understand what those people are experiencing and how they’re responding. He can thank a former premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, he says, for getting the journey started.
“The moment I go back to, I was at UNBC as a young 18-year-old kind of figuring out what I wanted to study and I remember very clearly being infuriated at this proposal for developing offshore oil off the B.C. coast,” he said. “I rode down on my bike to a Chamber of Commerce meeting and there was a speaker, a guy named Brian Peckford.”
Peckford had been instrumental in developing the Hibernia oil field 300 kilometres off Newfoundland and was now chairing meetings on doing the same off the West Coast.
“He was very charismatic. I put my hand up at that meeting and asked him the question we see in the media today: ‘What if? If there’s an accident, what’s going to happen to everything else?’ He goes, ‘Who are you?’ I said I’m a student, and he said, ‘The day you start paying taxes is when you can start having an opinion.’
“That motivated me, that gave me that push to dig deeper into these issues, I told myself I’m going to get the credibility and the experience so I can address them with a more balanced, educated, informed opinion.”
Leap ahead to this July 1 and the 39-yearold Pearce begins a new job as Canada research chair and associate professor of cumulative impacts of environmental change at the University of Northern British Columbia.
It brings him home from global sojourns in Australia (sustainability research centre at the University of the Sunshine Coast) and the University of Guelph in Ontario (master’s and doctorate degrees in geography) to Prince George, where he grew up and attained his bachelor’s degree in international studies.
The research chair, awarded to exceptional emerging researchers who are acknowledged by their peers as having the potential to lead their field, is worth $500,000 over five years.
“Growing up in Prince George was really the stimuli that started my interest in human relationships with the environment, in conservation, in resource management,” Pearce said over the phone from Queensland, where he’s packing for the return home.
“You can’t wake up in the morning and not be faced with either a resource-development issue or some sort of decision or intersection between two differing groups with two visions for the environment.”
Pearce has worked with Aboriginals in Queensland and has 16 years experience with the Inuvialuit in the western Arctic. He gets excited talking about “long knowledge,” the cumulative, ancient body of environmental wisdom passed down over thousands of years.
His goal in Prince George is to come up with more sustainable environmental and social policies that better meet the needs of remote communities in the north and around the globe.
UNBC has a student population of about 3,500 and is well-respected for its research and strong graduate and undergrad programs for a university that size.
“It’s a phenomenal, phenomenal institution for Canada, for British Columbia and for northern B.C.,” Pearce said. “And what’s really, really great about the University of Northern B.C. is you have a university that was well thought out.
“I remember when it was being built (in the early 1990s), I remember my parents being part of the $5 campaign… I say it’s well thought out because here’s a university built on pillars unique to the region.”
Environmental science. Northern medical. Sustainability studies. Forest management. Fungi and lichen.
“All these different niches and as a result it’s positioned extraordinarily well geographically to make a huge impact on important issues,” he said.
“I’m so lucky to be in a position to think about these issues and come up with solutions. It’s a dream, just a real thrill to come home and work with people from where I’m from and contribute to issues that are there.”