Giving Tuesday in Fine Arts: Climate Disaster Project

by | Nov 28, 2023 | Alumni, climate, donor, Writing

November 28 is Giving Tuesday, a day when the entire UVic community will unite around a common cause — supporting the students and programs that make this university the very special place it is.

This year, UVic’s Faculty of Fine Arts is raising funds to help create the world’s largest living library of climate disaster experiences, which will help connect climate disaster survivors around the word, and spark urgent action on climate change.

We hope you’ll join together with our entire Fine Arts community and make a donation to the Climate Disaster Project. Your gift will support UVic journalism students in their field work and interviews as they collect these climate disaster stories for an anthology that will be published in Fall 2025 by Purich Books (UBC Press). 

Climate disaster survivors Patsy Gessey & Owen Collins look towards Lytton, where they lost their home
during the 2021 Lytton Creek Fire. The next year, they faced fires again. (CDP/Jen Osborne)

 

Hope through community

Climate disasters — like forest fires, floods and extreme drought — are becoming more and more common. In the coming decades, these disasters could divide us, as walls are built around the world to protect those with the most and keep out those with the least.

But these disasters could also unite us if we see the commonalities in one another’s experiences.

With your support, the Climate Disaster Project, which is based in UVic’s Department of Writing, is creating a massive archive of eyewitness climate disaster accounts. The Climate Disaster Project trains students to work on the frontlines of climate change — a skill that will only become more necessary as time goes on.

To date, 194 students have been trained in trauma-informed interviewing skills, and students have interviewed 128 survivors of climate disasters about their experience. The Climate Disaster Project has already published 44 testimonies in The Tyee, the Fraser Valley Current, Asparagus and Megaphone magazines, partnered with APTN Investigates and the Royal BC Museum’s Community Gallery, had two students interviewed on CBC Radio’s national climate-change show What On Earth, and is about to be featured in the December/January issue of Reader’s Digest — Canada’s most-read magazine.

Donor created, donor supported

The Climate Disaster Project’s work covering the humanitarian crisis of climate change was founded in 2021 thanks to a generous donation from philanthropist and businessman Wayne Crookes. Our work is inspired by his deep concern for preserving our planet.

Your gift today will help create the world’s largest living library of climate disaster experiences, and will support UVic journalism students in their field work and interviews.

We hope you’ll consider joining the Giving Tuesday movement with a gift to the Climate Disaster Project.

A climate of change marks Writing grad Aldyn Chwelos’ academic journey

by | Nov 14, 2023 | Alumni, climate, Writing

Writing grad Aldyn Chwelos finds hope with UVic’s Climate Disaster Project (photo: Sean Holman)

Given the deluge of headlines about fires, floods, droughts and heat domes, it’s easy to feel a sense of despair around our continuing climate crises. The challenge, therefore, is to find hope amidst the chaos. Yet that’s exactly what graduating Department of Writing student Aldyn Chwelos has done while working with UVic’s Climate Disaster Project.

“I’ve heard from people who have lost their home, their community and their entire town, and they’re still somewhat hopeful,” says Chwelos. “Sometimes it’s a skeptical or a heartbroken hope, but it’s still there. As someone who hasn’t experienced that much personal damage from climate change, how could I possibly not be hopeful and ready to fight when they still are?”

Sharing survivor stories

Using the model of an international teaching newsroom to train students in trauma-informed journalism techniques, the Climate Disaster Project (CDP) has already made a significant impact in the past two years by sharing eyewitness accounts of climate survivors and building an international community based on hope, trust and empowerment.

Funded by an initial $1.875 million donor investment and led by veteran journalist Sean Holman—now Writing’s Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental and Climate Journalism—the CDP works with partner institutions across Canada and around the world to collect, compile and share survivor stories with local and national media outlets like The Tyee, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), CBC Radio’s What On Earth, The Fraser Valley Current and the International Network of Street Papers.

“We listen to everyone’s story, without question of who they are or where they come from or what they’re going to say,” says Chwelos. “When a flood or a fire comes through your town, it arbitrarily destroys everything. By focusing on these disasters and highlighting the different ways people are affected, you can show that universality, which is key to seeing ourselves reflected in their experience and wanting to help.”

 

Aldyn Chwelos and Sean Holman in Lytton BC, 2022 (photo: Philip McLachlan)

A journey of discovery

It’s no exaggeration to say that Chwelos’ work with the CDP has changed the way they see the world — especially since writing and journalism isn’t where they started their UVic journey.

Originally enrolled in computer science and then “dabbling” with courses in environmental and gender studies, Chwelos switched to working in the local tech industry but soon realized they wanted to be doing something of more closely aligned with their values. “I’m an incredibly pragmatic human and felt like computer science made more economic sense, but I soon became disillusioned and knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do,” they say. “But I’d always wanted to be a writer, so I came back and enrolled in Writing.”

After discovering creative nonfiction as a genre and profile writing as a passion during their introductory Writing 100 course, Chwelos was ideally positioned to enroll in Holman’s class when the Climate Disaster Project launched in September 2021.

“From day one, it was all about realizing that climate change has a huge stamp on everything,” they recall. “The whole point of the project and Sean’s class was to not minimize those experiences — we students may not have lost our homes to wildfires or flooding, but we’re all part of the situation that caused those disasters and so we can see ourselves in the project.”

Media that really matters

Currently the CDP’s managing editor, Chwelos is planning on doing their graduate degree in creative nonfiction at UVic in 2024, and very much sees their time with the CDP as the culmination of their time here—including a harrowing journey to Lytton a year after the small BC town was destroyed by fire. (“It was like driving through the belly of the beast,” they recall. “You really felt for the community and what they’d lost, to see the entire town basically reduced to rubble.”)

While Chwelos has published non-climate disaster articles with the likes of Canadian Geographic and Hakai, they feel their work with the CDP gives them the opportunity to use everything they’ve learned. “It combines my interests in social justice and environmentalism and also aligns with my background in software development,” they say. “As far as the sheer amount of experience and personal challenge it represented, work with the CDP has definitely been the highlight of my degree.”

Aldyn Chwelos participating in the Royal BC Museum’s Climate Hope exhibit (photo: Philip McLachlan)

The power of positive change

Ultimately, Chwelos has discovered the power of positive change through their work collecting survivor stories, sharing them with the media and engaging with new students in the Climate Disaster Project.

“There’s a lot of criticism around media coverage of the climate crisis, but our work has been held up as an example of how disaster survivors want to see these disasters covered. That’s where this work has power: it’s not just in the stories we’re sharing with the world, but in the experience we’re creating for the people who go through it,” says Chwelos.

“It’s been a powerful experience for the storytellers…the communities we write about feel seen and their stories are being shared as they want them to be told. If more people in different communities do this and share their experiences, if they start talking about climate change and solutions and potentially taking political action and making policy changes, then there is hope.”

Southam Lecture: Erica Gies

by | Sep 25, 2023 | climate, donor, Events, Writing

“Nearly every human endeavor on the planet was conceived and constructed with a relatively stable climate in mind. But as new climate disasters remind us every day, our world is not stable — and it is changing in ways that expose the deep dysfunction of our relationship with water. Increasingly severe and frequent floods and droughts inevitably spur calls for higher levees, bigger drains, and longer aqueducts. But as we grapple with extreme weather, a hard truth is emerging: our development, including concrete infrastructure designed to control water, is actually exacerbating our problems. Because sooner or later, water always wins.”

So writes acclaimed science journalist Erica Gies in her “quietly radical” book, Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge (University of Chicago Press), where she introduces us to innovators in what she calls the “Slow Water” movement who start by asking a revolutionary question: What does water want?

Appearing live on campus

Find out more when this National Geographic Explorer and independent journalist appears on campus as the 2023 Southam Lecturer in the Department of Writing, offering the free public talk “Water Always Wins: Working with Nature in an Age of Drought, Fire & Flood”.

While Gies spoke on campus on Oct 3, her talk is now live for viewing here: 

Slow water

As Dept of Writing Lansdowne Professor Deborah Campbell notes in this recent Tyee interview with Erica Gies, she also coined the term “Slow Water” to describe working with water’s natural processes.

“Like ‘Slow Food’, ‘Slow Water’ works with local geology, ecology and culture to figure out how to make space for that place’s natural slow phases of water, respecting its agency and relationships,” explains Gies. “Slow Water means systems thinking rather than single-focus solutions. Projects are distributed across the landscape rather than centralized. Slow Water solutions are also local and environmentally just.” 

Journalism with impact

With Water Always Wins recently published in the US, UK and China, Gies’ reporting on water, climate change, plants and critters continues to appear in Scientific American, Hakai, The New York Times, The Narwhal, The Guardian and other publications.

She has received the Sierra Club’s Rachel Carson Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism, Friends of the River’s California River Award, the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation’s Excellence in Journalism Award and was a finalist for the Berlin-based Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year Award.

She has given keynote talks at the United Nations 2023 Water Conference, scientific and water industry conferences, and to government agencies, community organizations, NGOs and classrooms. Media appearances include CBC, CNN International and public radio in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England and the United States.

A legacy of excellence

Gies is only the latest journalist to be named a Southam Lecturer, joining the recent likes of Tyee founder David Beers, climate journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, photojournalist Farah Nosh and many others. Since 2007, we have been bringing some of Canada’s leading print and broadcast journalists to campus to speak, teach and mentor our Writing students.  

The annual Harvey Stevenson Southam Lectureship — named after UVic alumnus Harvey Southam — is made possible by a gift from one of the country’s leading publishing families.

Awi’nakola as a way of being

by | Aug 21, 2023 | Alumni, climate, Graduate, indigenous, Visual Arts

Paul Walde, Rande Cook & Kelly Richardson on stage at the Rifflandia Festival in Sept ’22

It would be difficult to imagine two more different audiences than those at Montreal’s COP 15 UN Biodiversity Conference and Victoria’s Rifflandia Music Festival, but both were on the schedule for the Awi’nakola: Tree of Life Foundation in 2022.

Founded by a group of Indigenous knowledge keepers, scientists and artists with a common commitment to create tangible solutions for the current climate crisis—and educate others through the process—Awi’nakola seeks to share cross-disciplinary research practices and develop ways to heal the planet, heal the people and change culture.

Led by Makwala Rande Cook—former UVic Audain Professor, Visual Arts MFA and hereditary chief of the Ma’amtagila First Nation—and Ernest Alfred, hereditary chief of the Tlowit’sis Nation, Awi’nakola (pronounced “A-weet-nah-kyoh-lah”) takes its name from a Kwak’wala word which loosely translates to being one with the land, ocean, air and all living forms. “When elders say this, it’s the embodiment of respect and relationship to all living things,” Cook explains.

But what began with five people in 2019 has now grown into an international group of more than 40, including Visual Arts professors Kelly Richardson, Paul Walde and Lindsay Delaronde.

In July 2022, Awi’nakola members spent a week in Kwakwaka’wakw territories documenting the loss of old-growth ecosystems—some of the last primary forests on the planet—and coming up with ways to communicate the severity of the loss to BC’s coastal rainforests. While there, the scientists conducted research that could one day help regenerate damaged forests, while the artists gathered imagery for future projects.

And in December 22, Cook and David Mungo Knox | Walas Namugwis (shown here) presented to the UN biodiversity summit COP 15. “We need radical change and that needs to come now,” Cook said in this Narwhal article following the summit. “We’re in a place right now where it literally is about the planet and we’re putting a timeline on the existence of humanity. For the health of all of us we need to make some real radical changes.”

The Awi’nakola Project is also working to secure exhibitions in locations where the BC government is known to purchase by-products of old-growth trees. Together, they are working collectively to build a better future for generations to come.

You can read more about their efforts in this story from The Ecologyst.

Climate Disaster Project a finalist in global journalism awards

by | Jun 23, 2023 | Alumni, Award, climate, indigenous, Undergraduate, Writing

CDP founder Sean Holman with student Sandra Ibrahim (UVic Photo Services)

We’re thrilled that the Climate Disaster Project (CDP) has been announced as a finalist in the global Covering Climate Now 2023 Journalism Awards, which honour the best coverage of the climate emergency and its solutions.

The CDP has been selected for bringing “the compelling and authentic stories of people in climate disaster–affected communities to the foreground.”

As one of four finalists in the “engagement journalism” category, the CDP’s trauma-informed work with climate disaster-affected communities has been recognized for their recent media partnerships with APTN Investigates, Megaphone and Asparagus magazines, and the Fraser Valley Current newspaper, which include climate survivor stories taken by UVic students Tosh Sherkat, Aldyn Chwelos, Paul Voll and Gage Smith.

Tosh and Aldyn were recently profiled in this article following their appearance on CBC Radio’s What On Earth.

“There are so many people that contributed to this honour,” says Sean Holman, CDP creator and the Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental and Climate Journalism with the Department of Writing. “Our newsroom is supported by leading journalists, psychologists, social workers, climate scientists and public policy scholars who are working humanize climate coverage . . . . But none of this be possible without the hundreds of students and climate disaster survivors we collaborate with to share and investigate stories of climate disaster. More than anything, this honour from belongs to them.”

Even being named a finalist is a significant honour for the CDP, as other 2023 CCNJA nominees include the likes of the BBC, the Guardian, PBS, Le Monde, Al Jazeera, the Narwhal, CBS, ABC, AP, NY Times Magazine (etc).

Winners will be announced in September at Climate Week NYC (Sept 17-24).

An international teaching newsroom

Working with partner institutions across Canada and around the world, the Climate Disaster Project (CDP) uses the model of an international teaching newsroom in order to train students in trauma-informed journalism techniques to collect, compile and share survivor stories.

The CDP has already had a significant impact since launching in September 2021. To date, Holman and his CDP team of students and recent grads have produced more than 120 stories in collaboration with disaster survivors worldwide.

In the past academic year alone, 136 students were enrolled in CDP-related classes in nine different institutions (including UVic, First Nations University, Mount Royal University and Toronto Metropolitan University), learning about the human impacts of climate change, working to share those experiences with the news media, and investigating common problems and solutions identified by climate disaster survivors.

New partnerships have recently been secured that will soon see the project expanded to Brazil, Hong Kong, Norway, Nepal, Pakistan, and South Africa and the United States.

Climate Disaster Project inspires students to help build community of survivors

by | Jun 12, 2023 | climate, News, Undergraduate, Writing

A Climate Disaster Project participant visits Lytton BC after the town was devastated by wildfires in 2021 

Fires rage, storms blow, floodwaters surge, temperatures climb: as headlines about the latest environmental catastrophes appear with alarming regularity, it’s easy to feel like there’s little the average person can do. But UVic’s Climate Disaster Project is working to make a difference by using eyewitness accounts of climate survivors to create change and build an international community based on hope, trust and empowerment.

Working with partner institutions across Canada and around the world, the Climate Disaster Project (CDP) uses the model of an international teaching newsroom in order to train students in trauma-informed journalism techniques to collect, compile and share survivor stories.

“Speaking with people who have been affected by disasters — and hearing how they were able to move through that and counteract it — showed me just how much resistance is already happening on an individual and community level,” says fourth-year Department of Writing student and CDP participant Tosh Sherkat. “It gives me a lot of hope to realize that we have the resistance within us to come together and help each other to survive.”

CDP participants Tosh Sherkat (left) and Aldyn Chwelos

Having an impact

Funded by an initial $1.875 million donor investment and led by Sean Holman, a veteran journalist and the Department of Writing’s Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental and Climate Journalism, the project has already had a significant impact since launching in September 2021.

In the past academic year alone, 136 students were enrolled in CDP-related classes in nine different institutions (including UVic, First Nations University, Mount Royal University and Toronto Metropolitan University), learning about the human impacts of climate change, working to share those experiences with the news media, and investigating common problems and solutions identified by climate disaster survivors. New partnerships have recently been secured that will soon see the project expanded to Brazil, Hong Kong, Norway, Nepal, Pakistan, and South Africa and the United States.

To date, Holman and his CDP team of students and recent grads have produced more than 120 stories in collaboration with disaster survivors worldwide, as noted in this overview of the Climate Disaster Project that ran in The Tyee.  

As well as sharing survivor stories through local and national media partnerships with the likes of The Tyee, Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), the Fraser Valley Current and both Asparagus and Megaphone magazines, CDP students also launched a verbatim theatre production, participated in Bournemouth University’s Global Media Education Summit, and collected stories as part of the Royal BC Museum’s Climate Hope exhibit.

“So often we talk about climate change as this existential thing we have to stop, that we have to prevent . . . but we’ve been saying that for decades and we’re in a worse position than ever,” says Writing student Aldyn Chwelos, a senior research associate and editor with the CDP.  “I feel so much less climate anxiety now because I’m actually working on this. Whether it makes a difference or not remains to be seen, but at least I’m doing something — talking to people, exploring solutions, figuring out how to get through this together — which feels different than just hoping it will all stop.”

Holman & Sherkat taking the survivor story of Suzanne Kilroy/Huculak

Making a change 

Both Chwelos and Sherkat were interviewed on the June 11 edition of What On Earth, CBC Radio’s award-winning national climate-solutions show (skip ahead to the 34:00 mark). 

“I think one of the biggest things I learned was to be bold with my empathy,” Chwelos told What On Earth host Laura Lynch in the interview. “This course is giving students the power to do that.”   

Sherkat told Lynch that the experience has had a profound affect on him. “It’s changed the way I feel about the future,” he says. “It’s renewed a sense of commitment in me to develop a sense of community strength and resilience in a meaningful way.”

A former competitive climber with Canada’s national youth team, Sherkat resigned after an experience protesting at Vancouver Island’s Fairy Creek old-growth logging blockade left him questioning the climate ethics of the international climbing world.

“It was a pretty difficult decision for me,” he admits, listing reasons including international travel requirements and the climbing community’s “rhetoric of being environmental stewards” compared to the actual toll outdoor rock climbing has on the environment. “Representing Canada and high-performance sports in general requires an attitude that’s hard to reconcile with climate-change action movements.”

Sherkat then enrolled in one of Holman’s CDP-related UVic classes in the hopes of making a positive difference, rather than having a negative impact. He says he’s still haunted by the experience of taking the testimony of Pacific Northwest wildfire survivor Suzanne Kilroy/Huculak. (“I couldn’t breathe,” she recalls in Megaphone. “I was coughing up blood . . . . There’s flames 100 feet high on one side of the highway and 50 feet high on the other side. We could feel the heat inside the car.”)

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget that,” he says. “She was such a fantastic storyteller and had so much drama from that, but also had so much love and light and hope for the future. When you bear witness to that kind of story, you also feel responsible for holding the love and hope.”

Chwelos at the RBCM’s Climate Hope exhibit

Witnessing a disaster

For their part, Chwelos was originally studying computer science and working in the tech industry when they realized they wanted to be doing something of more value. “I was working for a company that just wanted to make money,” they say. “I started rethinking how I wanted to fill my life and the work I wanted to do.”

Switching gears to an earlier love of writing, Chwelos enrolled in one of Holman’s CDP classes, where the entire class had to introduce themselves by saying how climate change had affected them.

“I’ve had asthma since I was a kid, and normally the summer months are great . . . but over the past few years the increasing wildfire smoke and pollen levels have meant I’m having more trouble breathing. Making that connection for myself was really interesting, realizing that a large portion of my life has been influenced by this problem,” Chwelos recalls. “Day one, it was all about reframing and realizing that climate change has a huge stamp on everything. And the whole point of the project and Sean’s class was to not minimize those experiences—we may not have lost our homes to wildfires or flooding, but we’re all part of the situation and we can see ourselves in the project.”

Chwelos also accompanied Holman to Lytton, where CDP helped create a time capsule to commemorate the 2021 fire that destroyed 90 percent of the small BC town’s buildings in just 20 minutes and made international headlines.

“Going to Lytton brought up a whole range of emotions. We got to go into the townsite, which was terrifying in so many ways,” they recall. “I was in a car with Sean and it was like driving through the belly of the beast: my heart just sunk and we stopped talking as we took it all in. You could see where the fire had gone through, black carcasses of trees, rusted-out vehicles, steps leading to burned-out houses . . . you could still identify lots of items of humanity in all the rubble. There were signs warning us to close our car windows and not turn on the air circulation because there were potentially toxins of asbestos and lead floating around. You really felt for the community and what they’d lost, to see the entire town basically reduced to rubble. It was scary to think that this was probably the first of many towns that will face this.”

Holman with Writing student & CDP participant Sandra Ibrahim

A future of our own making

While both Chwelos and Sherkat are graduating from UVic in June, the work of the Climate Disaster Project will continue as more students in more institutions around the world get involved with the project and collectively contribute to the ever-increasing “memory vault” of survivor stories.

It’s no exaggeration to say that learning about journalism practices, trauma-informed interview techniques, and climate experiences and solutions has changed the way Chwelos sees the world, as they have now had CDP work published in the likes of the Fraser Valley Current and The Tyee, as well as by the International Network of Street Papers.

As Chwelos said to CBC’s Laura Lynch, “It’s shown that when we can come together, there is a lot we can do. We do have the power as we move through these disasters . . . to create new ways of living and create new communities — and build and sustain existing ones — that will allow us to live in more equitable ways and be able to survive climate change together.”

For his part, Sherkat is buoyed by the feeling that he is indeed making a difference with the Climate Disaster Project.

“I think most people just feel overwhelmed when it comes to the climate crisis. On top of policy change, we need a revolution in thinking — everything needs to change,” he concludes. “People my age grew up with the spectre of climate change in our futures: it’s impacted me, and I know it’s impacted the people I’ve worked with, my peers. I feel proud about the work I’ve been doing with the project. That’s enough for me.”