Women Advancing River Research: Michèle Koppes

The recording for this seminar is now available.

Abstract: The quantitative revolution in geomorphology of the twentieth century promoted deterministic approaches to understanding landscape change, which was necessary to find engineering solutions to the major societal challenges of an expanding global resource economy. The human and environmental costs of this expanding economy, however, are now clear and unequally distributed.  The Anthropocene requires more holistic, critical and systems understanding of our relationship to and with the earth surface. We now live in an era of shifting baselines, where all components of the Earth surface are responding to the cascading effects of anthropogenic climate change. We are also now more aware than ever that every landscape is a complex concept with a complex history, that requires both global and local frameworks of inquiry. In order to address the complexities of this age of uncertainty and to reorient the geosciences towards more societally-relevant roles, the discipline of geomorphology needs to reflect upon our reliance on deterministic approaches and to embrace interdisciplinarity, reflexivity, and more holistic ways of knowing, especially indigenous and place-based knowledges of the land and our role in shaping it. We need to revisit how we are privileging western science over other ways of seeing and being, particularly as many of the communities that are most impacted by the changing landscapes of the Anthropocene are currently the least involved in guiding the scientific effort. We need to consider shifting some resources away from data-gathering efforts and towards interdisciplinary collaborations, seeking to integrate perspectives from local, place-based and indigenous understandings of the landscapes we are working in.

Biography: Michèle Koppes is an associate professor of geography at the University of British Columbia, a Canada research chair in landscapes of climate change, the director of the UBC Climate and Cryosphere Lab, and a senior TED fellow. Her passion is forensic geomorphology: the art of reading landscapes to decipher their stories and the forces that shaped them. Her particular focus is on understanding how glaciers respond to climate change, and how glacier changes impact landscapes, waterscapes, and people. She believes deeply that in order to address the ongoing climate emergency, there is a dire need for more place-based, integrated and embodied understandings of how the lives of the ice, the mountains, the rivers, and the people who dwell among them are intertwined. Her research approach is two-fold: to determine the efficacy of glaciers as agents of erosion and landscape evolution and to determine the climatic, oceanici, and human drivers of, and responses to, glacier and landscape change in high mountains and polar regions. She has current field projects in in remote places all over the world, from the mountains of the Pacific Northwest to the Patagonian Andes, the Himalayas, the Tien Shan, the margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and Antarctica, where she and her team combine detailed field observations with local perspectives, oral histories, acoustic mapping and conceptual modeling of ice-ocean-landscape-human interactions.