Odd Jobs
07/04/08 14:23
The hard rains of the past few days have kept me locked inside except for an almost aborted trail run along a muddy, hilly trail. I came back soaked from the rain and sweat, my tights brown on black from the mud, and hands numb from the cold. But I could hear and see lots of birds moving through, even a few varied thrush that aren't normally at lower altitudes. I also heard my first hermit thrush this morning -- another lovely song. To keep from going stir crazy form being stuck inside, I've turned to work and this blog. And a conference call this afternoon -- including North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe -- brought what has become a familiar issue back to the front.
I've visited probably over a dozen cities and several national WWF offices in my role as a "freshwater climate adaptation specialist." You're probably thinking, What does any of that mean? Truly, a most excellent question. A definition of "climate adaptation" and "freshwater climate adaptation" will have to wait for another entry. Instead, I'd rather talk about the confusion itself as a phenomenon.
I've visited probably over a dozen cities and several national WWF offices in my role as a "freshwater climate adaptation specialist." You're probably thinking, What does any of that mean? Truly, a most excellent question. A definition of "climate adaptation" and "freshwater climate adaptation" will have to wait for another entry. Instead, I'd rather talk about the confusion itself as a phenomenon.
This is not my first strange job. I was in the publishing industry for about 12 years and for much of that time my parents, sister, and my extended family kept asking me, What is it that you do? Before that, in college I was an anthropology major, focusing particularly on ethnomusicology. That really baffled a lot of people, at least until they were distracted by the publishing work. But never in those fields of endeavor did I run into confusion among my colleagues about my title, tasks, or worldview. I could say to someone in publishing that I was a developmental editor and they would know what that meant. No longer. Now, I work with people worldwide who are told to implement climate adaptation projects (often with me) but they don't know what that means.
Climate adaptation is extremely new even if the term is not; no one had ever been hired to do climate adaptation work until quite recently, so the term has remained fairly theoretical. In practical terms for my daily tasks, that also means that I spend a lot of time telling people around the world what climate adaptation is. Even harder is telling them what climate adaptation looks like -- and if it's different than what they already do.
The freshwater label makes things both easier and harder. The label is easier in the sense that the scope of work is narrowed to a single biome, but describing what freshwater climate adaptation looks like gets harder once you begin to really drill down into the concept because -- despite more than a century of freshwater conservation work and over 4,000 years of intensive human modification of freshwater ecosystems -- there have been almost no examples of work that have been explicitly and purposely described as freshwater climate adaptation. There are now some attempts to say that particular projects in the past were (in effect) types of climate adaptation, but this is very post hoc and not particularly satisfying.
Perhaps the strangest part of this odd job is that almost everyone that I meet in and out of the organization pointedly states that climate adaptation is very critical and important work -- a set of approaches that will only grow in importance for our NGO and others. Thus, given that there are (almost) no examples of climate adaptation and no clear sense of what the term means, we can at least know be clear that it's important.
Clear as mud.
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