What makes you passionate about planning?

I was initially drawn to planning because of the powerful mix of theory and practice about how and where we live, how our economies function, and how we treat Nature in the process. More recently, I've focused on an approach to planning we (with colleagues Cam Brewer and Herb Hammond) have called Nature Directed Stewardship - which is really seeking to move beyond "green planning" to centre Nature in all of our planning approaches, decisions - but again, because it's planning, in very practical and scientifically proven ways.

Tell us about a project you are working on and why it excites you.

I'm working with colleagues Andréanne Doyon and Alison Shaw at SFU and Sarah Breen at Selkirk college - and with an amazing group of students - on a project to better understand the opportunities and barrier to nature-based solutions in rural and Indigenous communities. Our community partners have been amazing (City of Nelson, Prince Rupert, Squamish Nation) and I am excited to learn how NbS may be used in these settings to off-set the costs associated with hard infrastructure renewal (that is often overwhelming for smaller communities due to changes in senior government commitments to rural re-investment) while simultaneously enhancing local and regional quality of life (and associated economic benefits) via protecting and enhancing Nature.

What do you think the most important challenge will be for planners in the future?

The most important task for (specifically) community planners will be to continue to implement the known solutions to pressing challenges (climate change, energy systems, infrastructure planning, housing, biodiversity, and on and on) within the broader setting of weak local government revenue jurisdiction and generation. Planners face increasing issue and area complexity – that requires new and innovative ways to resource the work appropriately.

What are you most excited about at your planning school?

I am constantly inspired by our amazing planning students who are brilliant and passionate about making a difference in the world. My REM colleagues are all exceptional scholars, teachers, and people. Our focus on interdisciplinary environmental planning also provides an important contribution, niche to the broader planning community. 

Please tell us about a place or plan that has been influential to you.

I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to communities and Nations throughout Northern British Columbia who have informed my thoughts, research, scholarship, and writing for over 25 years in the area of rural development planning (community development, community and regional planning, economic development, economic transition, sustainability planning). All of that work done in partnership with my friends and colleagues Greg Halseth and Laura Murphy at UNBC.

My recent work with Dr. Dana Lepofsky (SFU Archaeology) looking at the intersection of planning with Indigenous Archaeological Heritage (IAH) has also been fascinating and deeply inspiring (XLAP). The work has been focused on Xwe’etay (Indigenous name for Lasqueti Island) and informed by, directed by local residents and surrounding Nations to identify pathways to better protect IAH within planning and land use processes.

What makes you passionate about planning?

Planning gives you license to think about basically everything—history, engineering, aesthetics, sustainability, culture, ecology—and how all of those things layered on top of each other influence people’s daily lives. It’s practical and creative at the same time. I’ve always been a generalist, and I think that’s a large part of the appeal of planning for me.

Tell us about a project you are working on and why it excites you.

I'm currently doing my capstone project on the use of nature-based climate solutions to improve wildfire protection among municipalities in the Okanagan. I worked as a wildfire firefighter for a number of years during and after my undergraduate degree, and it’s been really enjoyable to take what I learned from that experience and apply it in a different way.

Nature-based solutions are all about leveraging measures with ecological and human co-benefits to address climate-related problems. There are NbS for wildfire that exist, and I'm looking at if and how and where they could be (or already are) used in the Okanagan, and on a regional scale.

Another great thing about NbS is how they can help enhance place attachment and cultural landscape values. One of the best parts of studying NbS for me is actually seeing how excited other people get about it. Almost everyone understands, on one level or another, how managing forests and landscapes in ways that allow for the coexistence of the natural fire cycle, healthy habitat, and people creates a better place to live, and they’re stoked about that no matter what other values or priorities they have.

What do you think the most important challenge will be for planners in the future?

I feel like planners are facing a tough road ahead for the next little while. We’re seeing accelerating climate impacts at the same time as a cratering of ambition to address environmental issues as governments walk away from goals and principles that many of us took for granted for a long time.

Climate changes are happening so fast that it will be challenging to not allow ourselves and the larger field to get caught up in thinking about climate adaptation to the point of letting that displace thinking about mitigation. (The SFU Action on Climate Team, where I'm a research assistant, does neat work on low-carbon resilience, a concept which addresses this problem). As planners, we’re going to really have to keep our eye on the ball.

What are you most excited about at your planning school?

It sounds really corny but the best thing about REM at SFU has been all my classmates. They blow me away with how smart they all are every day. I look forward to getting to campus every day and hearing what everyone’s been up to and been thinking about.

Please tell us about a place or plan that has been influential to you.

This summer a couple of us from planning at SFU got to join an SFU Urban Studies field school in Helsinki, Finland. The field school was great and we learned a lot (such as how the City has successfully implemented a Housing First model, provides civil defense shelter spaces for every citizen, and more). One thing that stood out to me especially was learning about Finland’s system of “national urban parks”. These are extensive   areas that contain a combination of pastoral nature, urban nature, and built cultural environment features, managed all together as an integrated entity. We got to explore the national urban park in the town of Porvoo outside Helsinki, and it was one of my favourite days of the trip—the park in Porvoo manages maintains structures from multiple different eras of the town’s history, the natural area around and within it, including different plants of historical importance, and keep it all intact alongside the goings-on of the contemporary town. I’ve been thinking a lot about these since we came back—I just think they’re so cool as a way of managing *through* the false dichotomy of natural and cultural landscapes.