In the run up to the event, Karen Taylor, Sustainability Scholars Program Manager, sat down with keynote speaker, Andrea Reimer, Adjunct Professor and a strong public voice in Vancouver for almost two decades, to talk about her hopes and fears for the future of sustainability in our region.
Q. What keeps you motivated and hopeful in your work on sustainability?
A. Oh, that's such a great question. I teach a class about power now at UBC. One of the things that I decided when I first started teaching is that I wouldn't disconnect power from purpose – that I would only teach power in a way that deeply connects it to purpose.
“Alicia Garza says that hope is not the absence of despair, it's the presence of purpose.
I think that is just a perfect summary of my life.”
I have so much despair for a great many things going on in our world right now, including a lack of meaningful action at the level that we would need to see on climate. We are also facing a number of environmental challenges and the health of our democracy is really bad. But the reality that I get to impact it and have a clear sense of purpose around how I'm going to do that – that is what gives me hope.
Q. What sustainability problem keeps you awake at night, and how are you trying to solve it?
A. The things that drive me to work so hard – that would be the climate, which is this omnipresent issue, right? But it's the oldest mistake in the book to assume that because people know something, they will then act on it.
Since leaving public office, I do all this work on power – and part of that is looking at cognitive biases. I spent a lot of my time, both in advocacy and political office, working against innate human hardwiring. We have a lot of cognitive biases, and one of them definitely disconnects knowledge from action. It's an optimism bias that the best possible outcome will always ensue.
Interestingly, we also have a bias towards retaining negative information, probably to help counter-balance the optimism bias.
"If we wait to find out that what we're doing isn't working to sustain life on Earth, we’re all gone. It's a race against our innate cognitive wiring to try to figure out: how do we take the cognitive capacity we've got and make it work to spur action before we see the consequences of inaction?"
We are not well designed to deal with this kind of crisis. We're really good at the fires and the floods and the pandemics, at least for the first period of time – but we're not able to sustain that kind of response cognitively. So then how are we going to do it? That’s what keeps me up. And it's really the main focus of my work these days, both in academia, and in my work out in the community.
Q. What do you foresee as the next big thing in the climate action space; and where can students insert themselves in some way to make a difference or contribute?
A. We’ve spent many years looking at climate as though it’s a technical problem – greenhouse gasses accumulating in the atmosphere – that primarily needs technical solutions. While it is that, it is also a problem of outdated structures, political institutions and worldviews. Until we start finding solutions for those things we are not going to see effective climate action.
In addition to people who bring technical solutions, students looking to impact change on climate action need to build knowledge, skills and abilities that help them tackle these deeper levels fueling the crisis.
Q. You played a key role in establishing the Greenest City Scholars program back in 2010. How has it influenced the City of Vancouver's approach to sustainability?
A. When I look back at the partnerships the City had in the earliest days of Greenest City, this was a big turning point in terms of the idea of partnership from the city’s standpoint. We had this tiny little fiscal capacity and even smaller legislative capacity, and we wanted to change everything about the way the city was impacting the environment. So the only way to do that was through partnerships.
One of the key figures was UBC President Steven Toope. The idea that a university would actively seek meaningful partnerships with something as impure and unacademically rigorous as a political entity [was something new] – he saw the future. Within a few short years, the concept of the engaged university became a huge thing across the world.
The Greenest City Scholars program was modest, with ten scholars in the first few years. That initial phase of hockey stick growth forced both organizations to figure out how to work effectively outside of their culture. How do you help students understand what could be a good impact? How do you help city staff figure out how to fit a student into the plan? We didn't have that [infrastructure] before the Scholars Program, so the program really was a flagship on that front.
Q. This is our 15th year of what we now call the Sustainability Scholars program (formerly the Greenest City Scholars Program). How can the work of student researchers continue to be relevant in the future?
A. There were so many impacts that Scholars had. They did phenomenal, rigorous work – academic work is inherently rigorous in ways that it surprisingly isn’t in business or government.
And the other thing is that there are inherent challenges in a city. It's very easy, as time goes by, to be like, “well, that can't work.” “We can't do that, that's impossible.” But the Scholars would bring these incredibly novel approaches. Just having that new, fresh and different but rigorous perspective makes a huge difference and has a huge impact on the city.
Also, students are able to land theory in a practical space where there is a good chance it might have a real tangible impact. The program changed the trajectory of some folks’ careers – that means a bunch of people who might have been thinking of staying on in academia or going and working in research – suddenly have instead moved into policy or government positions that governments have really benefited from.
"The students also are very innovative. They’ll ferret out the leading-edge practices, which is amazing, and then also hypothesize potential mash-ups that nobody's ever thought about."
One example is to do with greening the Vancouver police department, which initially seemed impossible. But a simple option a Scholar came up with was incredible. The VPD dry-cleaned their uniforms every week, and they came back in plastic bags. Something like 650 plastic bags a week were being used. The solution was to replace the plastic bags with cloth ones, and now zero plastic bags are being used.
How crazy is it that no one who was working there could see that? But a student could walk in and figure it out relatively quickly?
- End.