A Duluth-based researcher is spending six months in northwestern Ontario investigating how climate change is impacting people who live close to the land.
Kelsey Jones-Casey obtained a Fulbright grant to conduct her research under the sponsorship of Lakehead University. She has degrees in international relations and public administration focusing on research, and is currently on leave from a U.S. non-profit organization.
Jones-Casey says she's embarking on the project because she has concerns about climate change around Lake Superior. "I have witnessed changes in our environment that have kind of elicited some of my own anxieties about the future and what our lives and lifestyle are going to look like with the expected changes," she told tbnewswatch.com.
She referred to phenomena already being observed in this part of North America including "big weather events," warming winters, and changing lakewater temperatures.
Jones-Casey wants to hear directly from area residents as part of her data collection process. She's planning individual interviews with people such as anglers, hunters, farmers and herbalists. "I'll spend time connecting with them to hear more about, one, their connection to place and, two, any observed changes they're seeing in their own environment as they live their lives and go about their activities." The third topic she'll question participants about is the impact of those changes on them personally and on their community.
Jones-Casey plans to set up focus groups in towns along the north shore including Nipigon, Terrace Bay and perhaps Marathon, to discuss what climate change looks like in their areas.
She said residents between Thunder Bay and Marathon can also participate by submitting photos of places that are important to them, and which can help answer some questions. "What are places that are really important to people of this region, a place that someone feels personally very connected to...What kind of weather pattern changes have they witnessed in that place?" and the kind of responses the changes have evoked in them, she explained.
The photos will be solicited through social media, and Jones-Casey will assemble and display them in on-line galleries.
Once the data is analyzed and her report is completed, Jones-Casey plans to submit it for publication.
She also hopes to share what she has learned in an easily-accessible way, by summarizing some of the interviews on her web-site "to make them more publicly available and easier to digest, so that people can see stories from their own communities" about what others are experiencing with regard to climate change.
More information is available at http://www.borealheartbeat.org/about-1/
