This week, our Human Nature series continues with stories of hope — something that can sometimes be hard to find when it comes to our relationship with the planet.
Part 1: A U.S. customs agent asks Canadian climate scientist Simon Donner an unexpected question.
Simon Donner is an interdisciplinary climate scientist and professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches and conducts research at the intersection of climate change science and policy. He is also the director of the UBC Ocean Leaders program, and holds appointments in UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and UBC's Atmospheric Sciences Program. He is currently a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report and a member of Canadian government's Net-Zero Advisory Body.
Part 2: As a child, Victoria Gee becomes determined to rescue the wildlife in her neighborhood.
As a nature enthusiast, Victoria studied Environmental Biology for her undergraduate degree at the University of Guelph. For the past 7 years Victoria has worked at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto where she fosters curiosity within visitors and develops her science communication skills. As a digital education producer, Victoria recently worked for The Land Between charity creating online curriculum for students about Ontario turtles and the importance of their habitats. Victoria will be going back to school this year to complete a post-graduate program in Environmental Visual Communication to continue her passion for sharing nature through media with others.
Story Transcripts
Story 1: Simon Donner
It’s before the pandemic. I’m at the airport on my way to a science meeting. Despite the friendly relations between the two countries, for Canadians, going through U.S. customs is stressful, especially if you're like me. You have curly, messy hair and you're scarred by years of being randomly (clears throat) searched, questioned, followed and even sniffed by police dogs.
Simon Donner is an interdisciplinary climate scientist and professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia.
So gripping my passport and my smartphone, I walk up to the agent. He has that intense, uncompromising look that is really unique to customs officials. You know, it’s like they're all printed out of a mold at the same factory.
“So be clear, be transparent and do not mess around,” I tell myself.
“Hi. I’m Canadian. I’m a climate scientist and a professor at the local university and I’m traveling to present at a meeting.”
“Oh. So you're a climate scientist,” he responds.
I look at the agent and behind him at the photo of the U.S. president and I think, “Oh, what have I done?”
The agent continues, “The president says climate change is a hoax.”
My immediate reaction is just panic. Do I disagree? What will happen? Will they let me call my wife before I’m sent to the CIA black site? What’s going to happen?
And then I notice something. It’s barely perceptible, just like a little curve on the agent’s lips. It’s like there was a flaw in the mold at the factory. I feel like I’m at a poker table and the player across me just showed their tell.
With that very microscopic beginning of a smile the agent is kind of signaling that it was a throwaway line, almost a bit of a joke. The agent’s just checking to see if I was really a scientist. Everything is okay.
But then I get the next question and this one is sincere. It’s like he's been waiting to ask someone and finally has the chance.
“Do you really think we can change?” He's gesturing to the surroundings, the line of busy travelers, the airplanes out on the tarmac, the refueling vehicles driving past. There's a hint of cynicism in his voice too.
I hear some version of that question all the time, by my family, by my students, by my students’ family sometimes, by political figures, by persons sitting next to me on the bus, people in line for a fix at the coffee shop, and even by my chiropractor while he's working on my sore shoulder.
What happens is people read about climate change and they often do believe the scientists, not the U.S. president at the time. But then they look at the world around us, the way we live and think it’s just going to be too hard to transform how vehicles work, how we get our energy, how we heat our homes. We can’t change all this, can we?
So I certainly should be ready with an answer, but instead I just freeze. Something about hearing that question at the airport, of all places, flashes me back to my childhood. And I see that little Simon, that geeky kid with the funny curls who is into astronomy and who saw the movie E.T. three times at the old highland theater. I picture him standing at the airport holding his asthma inhaler, worrying about where we would be sitting on the plane.
When I was a child, my parents would go out of their way to make sure I would not be near people who were smoking. And that challenge can be hard to appreciate today. Smoking was allowed virtually everywhere, in restaurants, buses, offices, doctor’s offices. Today we have smoking section but back then, being permitted to smoke was like the baseline condition.
And honestly, I do think my parents just hated smoking and used me as an excuse to avoid smoking.
“Oh, I’m sorry. We can’t seat near the smoking section because our son is asthmatic.”
Thanks, Mom, for sharing that with all the strangers. Because really, if they were that concerned about my asthma, we would not have traveled from Toronto to Winnipeg to visit my grandparents every winter. And that’s why I would be at the airport as a little kid.
Now, when I say we traveled, by ‘we’ I mean my sister and I. You see, my parents, they didn’t actually come, which is notable because when I say we were kids, I really mean we were kids. I was maybe eight years old, my sister was maybe 11 when my parents stopped joining these trips. And this was the early 1980’s before they had any laws about the treatment of children, apparently.
So if you're not familiar with Winnipeg, it is a wonderful place. It’s got a ton of spirit and it’s got a lot of great family memories. It is also among the coldest major cities in the world, depending of course on how you define coldest and also how you define major. You know Fargo, North Dakota? It’s depicted on TV like it’s the ice planet Hoth from Star Wars. When you get to Winnipeg, you go to Fargo and you just travel north, just to give you a sense of how cold it is there.
And as a kid, there were really only three things to do on Winnipeg in the winter, all of them which were torturous for my asthmatic lungs. One was to play outside. It is invariably negative 35 Celsius and it feels like you have to keep moving just to stay alive.
Simon’s grandfather’s fur shop.
Simon’s grandfather.
I vividly remember walking out of the airport once and a local relative saying, “Get in the car, quick. Your skin can freeze in 30 seconds.”
The second option is to play in my grandfather’s shop downtown. My grandfather was a furrier. He cut and made fur coats. That’s right. This kind, Yiddish immigrant with no money and an unpronounceable name, fell into the most Canadian-sounding profession imaginable, albeit one not well suited to his allergenic grandson.
My sister and I loved his shop. We’d run around behind the stacks of fur, until invariably I start wheezing and we’d have to quit.
The third option was to play in the house with my grandmother Bobbie who smoked continuously for roughly 85 years until we finally pried the cigarettes from her hands. Bobbie would kiss my forehead and it was like getting a contact high.
So it’s crazy, I’m standing in front of this customs agent flooded with flashbacks to Winnipeg, but especially to the trip to Winnipeg. The plane would have those ugly brown-and-orange checkered seats. There'd just be this little sign above the seat marking the start of the nonsmoking section. And I remember sitting in my seat with my pencil and my math puzzles looking at that little four-by-four inch plastic sign wondering how it could possibly stop all the smoke from billowing back towards my seat.
The flight attendant would come and check on us and I would get those little wings to put on my shirt. I loved those little wings. In my mind, it was the first step to becoming an astronaut. I'd watch the flight attendant then walk a few rows ahead and light somebody’s cigarette.
This is all I could think about as the customs agent is staring at me. He's waiting for an answer to his big question. I’m thinking about these things that were so normal to me as a kid: the cigarettes, man, the cigars. Yes, cigars. You could be in the nonsmoking section one seat behind a guy puffing away on a Cuban stogie. Forget even back then our collective ignorance, the harm of secondhand smoke.
You know, those cigarettes and those cigars, they didn’t light themselves. We let people light matches on airplanes. The flight attendant would actually help you. Today, you can’t even bring a small container of water on the plane.
I was once stopped for carrying a bottle of maple syrup, a bottle I bought at the shop located 30 feet from the security line. And maple syrup! I may as well have been carrying the copy of the Canadian constitution.
Yet back when I was a kid, we used to let airplane passengers hold open flames in their hands. And then decades later, this custom agent is gesturing to the front and he's asking if we can change, and just want to tell him, “Dude, look around again.”
It’s true. Banning smoking on airplanes is small potatoes compared to the sprawling Idaho spud fields of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, but I’m also standing there holding my smartphone. I don't have a ticket. Instead of a ticket I have an electronic message on this futuristic tricorder device, a device that functions as a telephone, a video camera, a stereo, a movie player, a homing beacon, a map of the planet, the largest library in history, can track your health. And because I happen to belong to a car coop, it also works as the key to 400 vehicles.
Compare that to all these trips to Winnipeg. We would have to use the telephone in my grandparents’ kitchen to talk to my parents. And that only worked because there was literally a sequence of wires connecting all the telephones in the country. And even with those wires, we couldn’t talk for long because it cost so much money to operate the system.
So I look at the agent and I say to him, “Yes, I think we can. I think we can change our systems. I think we can change the way we live. I actually think it’s easier than people realize.”
He waves me through.
I walk to the gate, the sun shining through the windows and all the busy people in the airport, and they're all staring into their phones, not paying attention to the world around them. In that moment, I just see that they're all like that little boy, used to the way things are right now. The world of my childhood that felt so normal to little me, the fur coats in zeyde’s shop, the rotary phones, the smoky airplanes and restaurants. And I see that we’re really all on the same big, smoky ship, sharing the polluted atmosphere, slowly coming to realize that there's a healthier and happier way for us all to live. Thank you.
Story 2: Victoria Gee
My love of nature began as a young child. I was that kid who collected rocks. And if I'm being honest, I still collect them. They're pretty cool.
But I was fascinated by how living and non-living things interacted, although as a kid I didn't really understand that all too well and I wanted to learn more. My opportunity to learn more came in grade seven when we were tasked with creating science fairs for our science class.
For the past 7 years, Victoria Gee has worked at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto.
Now, when it came to choosing a project, I didn't want to choose something generic, like a baking soda volcano. No. I wanted to choose something that I was passionate about and I was passionate about the environment. Thankfully, a little bit before we were choosing our science fair topics, my parents brought me to an artificial wetland that was just around the corner from our house. So naturally, I chose to study this wetland for my project.
Victoria’s life-changing science fair project!
And what I wanted to do was observe how the landscape and the wildlife changed over the course of the six months of the project. That's what I had my heart set on and that's what I went with.
Now, this wetland is not too big, not too small. It's a good size. On one side there is a row of houses that are lucky enough to look at this beautiful natural area. On the other side there's a cemetery.
Now, this wetland is full of diverse life. There's tons of trees and other plants and, quite frankly, too many Canadian geese to count. I wanted to study this and I was happy to get the chance to create a deeper connection with nature because, when I visit this wetland, it was the first time in my life that I really experienced calmness and a connection with nature.
When I stand at the edge of the water, it's just me. I don't hear the sounds of the city. I'm just me at peace, and I loved that so I wanted to create a deeper connection with this wetland. And at 12 years old, I was given the chance with my science fair.
Victoria, age 12.
Now, in addition to the geese at this wetland there are also beavers. The beavers slowly became the center of my project. Over the first couple months of observations, I noticed less and less trees in the wetland area. Naturally, beavers need trees in order to make their dams and lodges.
I journeyed over to the wetland once a week with my dad to make our observations and one of these weeks I noticed that there were some like weird metal wire cages around the trees. Not all of them but a good chunk of them that it was really confusing to me. So I asked my dad.
“What are these? Why are they here? I've never seen them before. Aren't trees who grow bark not good enough to protect the trees? Like I don't get why we need a man-made non-living object to protect them.”
So my dad took some time. He explained to me why the city would put wire cages around the tree, because that's what they were for. The city put cages on the trees to protect them from the beavers.
Well, I thought this was kind of ridiculous. Nature sort of just does its own thing. Why can't the beavers have access to trees? They need trees. Growing up I knew, you think of a beaver, you think of a tree. Naturally. So I was pretty appalled thinking that the city wanted to control nature. Just doesn't happen.
Victoria’s dad checks out a beaver stump.
So I continued thinking about the beavers throughout the course of my science fair project and how this wasn't right. I needed to help the beavers, but I didn't know how to help them. So I started thinking of a couple ideas to get rid of those wire cages, or at least to stop more wire cages being put on.
A couple ideas I came up with would be strapping myself to a tree. Great idea, but really not that great considering I'm just one person and there's a whole forest of trees right there. So wouldn't make that much of a difference.
Okay. Well, I thought, what if I hold a protest? I've watched movies and TV shows where people are advocating for nature, even though I didn't really know what advocating was. So I'll hold my own protest, prove to the community why the beavers need these trees, even though really shouldn't prove it. Again, beavers need trees. Just goes hand in hand.
Hmm, but holding a protest as one person probably wouldn't make that much of a difference so I kept thinking of ideas. So with thinking of ideas I eventually came up with the idea of, well, if the wire cages are the problem why can't I just cut off the wire cages? I'm capable of doing that. My dad's a carpenter. He has plenty of tools in his workshop. I should be able to find something and cut off those wire cages. And this is the idea I went with.
Now, a problem, though. At 12 years old, I had no idea what the right tool for the job was. All I knew is that this is what I was going with and nothing was going to stop me.
I've never done anything where I had to steal something or go behind anyone's back and I was pretty sure that if I were to ask my parents’ permission to use my dad's tools on these wire cages, they'd say no. So I decided to complete this task alone. I didn't even tell any of my friends about it out of fear that they would tell their parents and, slowly but surely, my parents would find out.
So before my daring task of going out alone with tools to cut the wire, I visited the wetland a couple more times with my dad during my weekly observations for my science fair. Now, to him it was just to collect observations, but for me it was to stake out the area with my plan in mind. Although something new I noticed was that just above the wire cages on the trees there were some bite marks from the beavers.
I called my dad over to ask what is this? What's going on? And he told me that the beavers can reach above the wire cages but they can't chew completely through the tree, so it's kind of stopping them but kind of not. Still, problem persists. Beavers can't get to trees so my planning continued. Time for operation ‘Free the Trees’.
I was at school and I knew today was the day that I was going to cut those cages free. My stomach was in knots all day because, like I said, I've never done anything like this before so I was really, really nervous. But at the same time I was going to do something really cool that was going to help nature, so I was filled with adrenaline and excitement all day as well. It was a crazy, emotionally-filled day.
Once the school bell rang I ran home. I didn't really socialize after school with friends so it wasn't suspicious for me to just dart home right away. People probably assumed I was going home to watch cartoons. I knew that I'd only have an hour to do all of my crazy operation, to get the tools, to cut the wires and get home, because it takes about an hour between school ending and my parents getting home, so I knew I had to act fast.
As soon as I got home, I ditched my backpack and I began opening all of the cupboards in my dad's workshop trying to find any tool that resembled the ones I had seen in the movies and on TV to cut through wire. I stood there intimidated, looking at all the tools. I kept thinking to myself, “Oh, Victoria, you should have paid more attention to dad's endless explanations about what each tool is and what it does.” Hindsight for the future.
I picked up a couple tools that I thought would do the job, one of them really long handles, kind of looked like scissors. And scissors cut through stuff so I figured that would do the job. I picked up another set of tools that looked just like this first set but a lot smaller. I thought a little bit more manageable.
I checked the time, saw that I was running out of time. “Oh, my goodness, 40 minutes until my parents get home. I got to go super fast now.”
So I left my backpack at home, no time to bring it. Just me and the tools.
I made my way to the wetland and scouted out the area where I was going to cut the wire cages off the trees. It was winter so spring was just around the corner and the trees were pretty bare so I needed to pick a spot where I knew the houses that lined one side of the wetland wouldn't see me. Again, fear of getting caught was so real in my mind this whole time, but again I'm not going to stop helping these beavers. I have to.
So I figured the best I can do is make a difference. If I can't cut through all the cages, I can at least cut through some and see what happens. So that's what I set myself out for.
I picked a good spot, got my tools ready, tried to cut through the wire but it didn't really work. Both tools just sort of slid off the wire, one of them I couldn't even close properly with my hands. It was too hard and I'm not a strong kid.
So I decided, “Okay, maybe it's just this one tree. I'll move on to the next one.”
So I went to a different tree with a different cage and tried again. And tried again and tried again, but the problems continued. For some reason, my tools were not the right ones and they would not cut through the wire. In fact, I was doing more damage to the tools than the wire.
I was slowly running out of time so I realized I had to leave without my parents getting suspicious of why I wasn't home. So I picked up my tools feeling utterly defeated that I couldn't help the beavers and free their trees and I made my way home, put everything back the way I remember taking them and went into the house as if nothing had happened.
A month had passed and I was still trying to think of new ways to help the beavers but at this point in the school year I had to start finishing up my science fair and collecting all my observations and all my data, so I had to take some time to focus on that.
There was one day, though, that my parents came into my room and they started asking me questions about my science fair, questions like what sort of things did you observe? What was your favorite part of the project? Did you leave the project wondering anything new? Well, of course. I wanted to help the beavers, and I still wanted to help them but, no, I couldn't tell my parents that.
And I figured all these questions were normal. Nothing was going wrong. But then they continued with their questions. They asked me about some gardening tools that they noticed had become damaged, gardening tools like the shears which look like scissors, and of course I confessed to everything, fearing that I am in the worst trouble of my life.
I explained to them why I did this and why I couldn't tell them and, thankfully, I have some pretty understanding parents and they found the whole thing to be quite amusing and sincere.
They reminded me that the city was in charge of the land and so that I should leave the cages alone. Easy-peasy right? They figured that was the end of my beaver activism. They were wrong, though. That only reminded me that the city's in charge so I should talk to the city.
Luckily, I had a friend whose uncle was mayor of our city. My friend and I met in girl guides and we became quite close. One day before our weekly activities, I pulled her to the side and told her about all my problems with the beavers and the cages and why those cages needed to be removed. Thankfully, she understood all my problems and completely saw everything that I saw. She promised me that at the next family gathering she would try to talk to her uncle and see what could be done.
Yes! Finally I'm helping the beavers. This will do good. Unfortunately at this time, though, the school year was coming to an end and our time at girl guides was also ending so I never heard back from my friend on if she ever talked to her uncle and anything was done.
Over ten years later and I still personally continue to visit the wetland and monitor for the beavers. I can confidently say that the beavers are still living in the area and although some trees still have wire cages around them, which still frustrates me, at least no new cages have been added. Perhaps my friend did talk to her uncle and the cages were removed, some of them were removed or they just stopped production all together. I'll never know for sure. Maybe it was just good timing and they just decided not to add any more wire cages. Who knows?
I'm okay, though, because I know that the beavers are still thriving and safe. Who knew that a Grade 7 science fair that started out as a simple observation project made me into a nature activist, but here we are. My childhood dream of protecting that wetland and the beavers that call it home still lives within me. And just like the beavers, I too am biting around the wire trying to help wildlife one garden shear at a time. Thank you.