As I review my blog posts from the past year, I can see my thinking expanding outwards. At the beginning of the course I was asking questions about my own positionality and closing the \u2018knowledge-action gap\u2019 in regards to climate action leadership. More recently I was questioning who is at the table, and the importance of understanding the individuals you are engaging with in climate action work. As CALS 501 comes to a close, I feel I have been able to zoom out even farther and appreciate the entire, interconnected system. Transdisciplinarity is a space where we can work \u201cbetween, across, and beyond disciplines\u201d (Reynolds, 2019, as cited in Corman & Cox, 2020, p. 2 ), and the process of working through the MCAL program has taken me through this, taking a deep dive into each subject while simultaneously making new connections and understanding the interconnectedness of climate action work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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In CALS 503 we really were able to witness this in action through the creation of risk and vulnerability assessments. One of the most powerful learnings I took away from this course was the importance of planning for everyone <\/em>and identifying the gaps you may have in your own knowledge\/lived experience. As highlighted by Osborne, \u201c\u2018the people that the system directly benefits are unaware of how the world is being shaped by their dominance, for their continued dominance\u2019 (…) planning scholarship and practice is not only embedded in the individual privilege of the planner\/researcher, but in the same systems that have created the problems these planners may be seeking to address\u201d (2015, p.142). CALS 503 demonstrated this in practice, and through the examination of municipal risk assessments I began to see how systems of oppression continue to perpetuate themselves if left unchecked. In CALS 504 this was only reiterated as we had the opportunity to craft a business case for a municipality. The existing biases within the community made it challenging to suggest an adaptation solution which was transformative. As explained by Lonsdale et al,\u00a0 \u201cIf there is a poor understanding of the dynamics of the current system, any interventions to improve the situation are not only likely to fail but may even make it worse\u201d (p.8, 2015). The lack of motivation within the municipality to respond to the challenge at hand from a systems perspective meant that, despite our best efforts, our class was restricted to producing incremental adaptation solutions.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n