Features
Landing at Guelph
Balancing human needs and environmental conservation key for well-travelled prof
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| Tropical coastal locations aren’t a bad place to work, says geography professor Noella Gray, shown here in Belize, where she did research for her PhD. PHOTO COURTESY OF NOELLA GRAY |
BY TERESA PITMAN
After 17 moves in the past 14 years, newly arrived geography professor Noella Gray is looking forward to “being in one place for more than a year.” Her frequent moves have been in pursuit of both educational and research opportunities and have taken her to Australia, Panama, Costa Rica and Belize, among other places.
Those warm, sunny destinations aren’t an accident, says Gray. “Tropical coastal locations are not a bad place to work.”
Location has been a factor in many of Gray’s educational and career choices. After growing up in St. Catharines, she moved to Montreal to do an undergraduate degree at McGill University.
“It was Montreal that attracted me as much as the university,” she says. “I loved it there.”
As part of her McGill studies, Gray spent a semester in Panama and discovered she also loved the tropical environment.
“I knew I wanted to go back to the tropics, and I knew I needed more education to be able to do the kind of research and work I wanted to do, focused on balancing human needs with environmental conservation.”
First, however, she took a position working with the Quebec-Labrador Foundation, a non-profit organization with a focus on community-based environmental projects. It started in Quebec and Labrador but now covers New England and some international locations as well.
Gray worked out of a Harvard University office, looking at new ways to use the Internet to promote conservation, protection of the environment and networking among environmental groups.
When it came time to attend graduate school, she was looking for opportunities to study social aspects of tropical conservation. She finally chose the University of Western Ontario, in part because her adviser had a research project under way in Costa Rica.
There, Gray helped study the outcomes for a small rural community that had established a conservation project for sea turtles.
“There were two objectives — to help more turtles survive and to bring in money for the community,” she says. “The idea was to have volunteer eco-tourists come to help with the turtles and live with local families. Our research aimed to see if these goals were met and what concerns or problems were encountered.”
Her next move took her to Duke University in North Carolina for her PhD studies, which included spending a year in Belize doing research for her dissertation.
“I’m interested in marine protected areas (MPAs), which are parks, except they’re on water instead of land,” she says. There are about 6,000 MPAs around the world, and 14 of them are in Belize.
The level of protection provided to marine life and the rules for people who use the MPAs vary widely, says Gray.
“In some areas, the MPA means no fishing at all. In Belize, many of the MPAs are protecting coral reefs, and the country allows limited fishing and promotes them as tourist destinations for snorkelling and scuba diving.”
Decisions about where these MPAs should be located and the rules and levels of access are complex political processes, she says.
“They can be quite controversial. There’s scientific information to support protection of certain areas, but how that research is used becomes a whole new question. The social relationships among the scientists, the tour guides, the fishers and the politicians all affect what happens and how people react to the MPA in their community.”
While in Belize, Gray did some work for Conservation International, a Washington, D.C.-based charity. She’s also collaborating with a group of Canadian and U.S. researchers looking at the evolution of international conservation policy.
“I did comparisons of MPAs in general on a global level. I looked at what’s driving international priorities and strategies and how local groups in places like Belize respond to this.”
Despite this busy schedule, she managed to squeeze in a side project: teaching a field course in Australia. She also taught classes while at Duke.
“I found I really like teaching, although there’s some adjustment going from classes of about 20 students to classes of 250 here,” she says. “The students at Guelph are really engaged and ask good questions, even in the first few weeks of class.”
Gray says one of the things that drew her to U of G is its environmental governance program, which is a joint effort between the Department of Geography and the Department of Political Science.
“I’m really looking forward to teaching and participating in this exciting new program, which is unique to Guelph,” she says.