This week, Mikaela, Theresa, and I took a step back from active data collection to reflect on the climate movement as a whole. Coincidentally, this was the perfect week to do so with the global climate strike.
Mikaela and Theresa both attended the climate strike at UBC that ended at Vancouver City Hall. While the turnout at UBC was amazing, with classes of children shouting climate action chants with homemade signs, Vancouver City Hall easily had tens of thousands of people marching.
An overarching theme in our journals was the feeling of hopefulness and an appreciation for the power of community. Seeing as all three of us study environmentally-related topics, it can often be difficult to see past the negative impact humans are having on the environment. That being said, the amazing energy of the climate strike showed us that we live among a community of people who are aware of the situation and are advocating for meaningful change. With the Canadian federal election around the corner, we can’t help but feel hopeful that government officials will see this momentum and institute policy changes.
In my journal, I talked about how this project offers a way to communicate our climate issues (and celebrate our Earth’s beauty) in a familiar manner, music. Music as a form of communication is a well-documented and much-studied topic. It is undeniable that at some point, we have all listened to a piece that has moved us in a way that words or numbers simply could not have. In this project, the musicians are somewhat bringing the data sets we collected and otherwise (may) be inaccessible to the general public, to life through sonification.
Theresa also mentioned that she is exploring krill and salp interactions in the Antarctic region in a different class. Normally, salps live in higher temperature waters, while krill live in lower temperature waters, thereby limiting their competition. Lately, salps are expanding further south into krill territory. Data sets that look into krill and salp abundance would be interesting, but no one has continuously spent the past 50 years in the Antarctic making it difficult to find long-term data.