I first met Aman in January 2018 when I was a Visiting Professor at Siksha Bhavana's Environmental Studies, Visva Bharati University in West Bengal, India, on the other side of the Digital Divide. Aman was in the second year of his M.Sc. in Environmental Studies, which at Visva Bharati, places more of an emphasis on environmental...

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My favourite plant family is the grasses. So, I was delighted when Jenna Leblanc contacted me about doing a PhD at York, for which the field work in restoration ecology of prairie plant communities would be done in Alberta at Glenbow Ranch Provincial Park in Calgary, where Jenna had been a member of the park...

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In 2015, I received an email from a newly arrived doctoral student in the Faculty of Environmental Students (now the Faculty of Environment and Urban Change), Ms. Nyssa van Vierssen Trip. Nyssa invited me to join her PhD supervisory committee, explaining that her two previous degrees were straight up Biology, but that she wanted to...

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I have a great health benefits package that I have used during the pandemic more than I ever have over thirty years, except when I got a back injury in 2015. Caring for my own mental and physical health has been essential in maintaining my capacity for supporting the more vulnerable members of the YorkU […]

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Post one of twelve, Covering My Final Chair's Remarks at Faculty of Graduate Studies Council in June 2021 Come January 2022, I will be teaching, in-person, BIOL 4095: Applied Plant Ecology. It's the same course I was teaching in Winter Term 2020, when the global Covid-19 pandemic hit. From mid-January 2020 I covered the emerging […]

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  Back in January 2020, before in-person undergraduate classes were cancelled in March 2020, at one 8:30 am Winter Semester Applied Plant Ecology lecture, we discussed how science communication happens on social media platforms. I'm pretty sure it was Julia Bava (who recently completed a virtual Fall Semester research practicum in my lab.) who asked […]

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One of the silver linings among the many clouds of 2020 was the large number of newspapers and magazines who made their pandemic-related content freely available to readers. This includes the Toronto Star (Canada), the Financial Times (UK), and the Atlantic Magazine (USA), all of which usually require a paid subscription in order to access […]

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It's a year since scientists sounded the alarm was sounded about a novel, rapidly spreading coronavirus centred in Wuhan, China. Today, the New York Times published a review of the early events, in which politics over-rode the science and doctors who encountered what we now call Sars-cov-2 virus died. One year ago, the first alarm […]

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I've been touting the benefits of blogging for developing student writing skills, ever since 2006, when I learned how to write posts for the Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability website, after I became its director. On my return to full-time teaching in 2014, I immediately added Blog writing assignments to all my Biology […]

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My favourite book by Charles Darwin is the one about worms (The formation of vegetable mould, through the action of worms: with observations on their habits: 1881). Today, Darwin is still a larger than life iconic figure, but thanks to his habit of writing in books, known as marginalia, we have insights into him as […]

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