Within my last blog post I wrote about closing the knowledge-action gap, both on a personal level as well as within the context of my 501 group work. I reflected on the shift I’d made in moving from asking, “when will I know enough”, to instead asking “what can I do now, with what I know now?” and the impact this shift had on my understanding of how to engage individuals in taking up climate action work. Similarly my group came to the realization that we needed to support community members in taking up climate action with the individuals in their communities through nature-based solutions. As I move through the CALS 503 Climate Risk Assessment course, I have started to unpack the importance of understanding the worldviews of those you engage, and the importance of critically considering how an individual’s positionality will influence the ways in which they will engage in climate work,...

New Waters: Utilizing Path Dependency to Interrogate Settler-Colonial Systems As I enter into my education in Climate Action Leadership what is at the top of my mind are the systems we exist inside of and how we can dismantle them, shift them and transform them. If we know that settler colonialism is, “not a thing, but rather ‘the sum effect of the diversity of interlocking oppressive social relations that constitute it” (Coulthard 2014, p. 15 as cited in Gram‑Hanssen et al, 2020, p.4), we can come to grapple with the way in which it is imbedded into every system which we work within. Moving into our work this week I was surprised and relieved to begin learning about new ways in which to interrogate this within Introduction to Complex Systems. The concept of Path Dependence, that the  “past trajectory of a system constrains its future possibilities trajectory” (Cascade Institute)...