Yesterday was World Fisheries Day! In that spirit, Celeste Digiovanni, a PhD student in Environmental Geography studying marine governance in Canada wrote a post inspired from the point of view of an iconic species, the sockeye. My eyes opened. There were thousands of others like me. I saw some emerging from their little jelly-like sacks amongst the gravel. I felt the cold, tasteless water on my scales for the first time. I gasped for my first breath and found it- was I alive? We started flapping our bits around and found rhythm, some of us more coordinated than others. I started to navigate this new underwater world beyond the sack that once confined me; slowly leaving, back to the gravel. New life. We swam around the river as light turned into dark. We fed on the zooplankton that we could find. We outgrew our river, and as those before us, ventured into a much saltier and colder world. We encountered others that resembled us throughout our journey. Some were trapped in nets, but a ...

It’s hard to decide where to begin, but I think the best way to start is by saying that this whole project began on Instagram (I bet you don’t hear that very often!)… About a year ago I was scrolling through my page, liking posts left and right as we all do, when I came across an advertisement about a new program that the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) had put out for university/post-secondary students. It caught my eye and I decided “Why not check it out?”, I had some spare time on my hands and what harm could it do? The ad looked a little something like this (see below) and I thought it might be a great addition to my growing resume; allowing me to get further involved in my university community. I looked through the contents, decided “Hey, I can do this!” and signed up right away. When my friends heard about this new initiative, they asked questions like “Why would you do this, it has nothing to do with your program or future career?”, and to that I say: why the heck not? The Living Pla...

It appears most are aware that the fashion industry is wasteful, but consumers and corporations are not doing everything they can to help correct this. The entire concept of fashion has been used as a symbol of status for many years. The significance that the fashion industry puts on materiality is toxic to the environment. A 2019 Business Insider article says this industry “produces 10% of all humanity's carbon emissions, is the second-largest consumer of the world's water supply, and pollutes the oceans with microplastics”.  In addition, “85% of all textiles go to the dump each year. And washing some types of clothes sends thousands of bits of plastic into the ocean”.  We cannot put all the blame on the corporations producing the clothing, because we the consumers often look for quantity over quality. With everchanging fashion trends, consumers move towards fast and cheap fashion to keep up. There are many ways we can reduce our environmental footprint as consumers. We can ...