Students on Ice Blog

One of Britain’s greatest explorers passed away yesterday. Sir Wally Herbert was the first man to walk to the North Geographic Pole, the first man to cross the Arctic Ocean on foot, and the first (and only) man to map the North Pole Ice Cap – feats which eventually earned him the British honorary title “Sir”.

Students on Ice has several connections to the famous explorer. When the first SOI Antarctic expedition was launched in 2000, Sir Wally sent a personal note of encouragement and congratulations to the expedition team. SOI expedition leader and founder Geoff Green recalls that day. “To receive a personal letter of encouragement from the world’s greatest living explorer was hugely important. It inspired us to no end. We read it aloud to the whole team before we sailed. Sir Wally will always hold a special place in Students on Ice history.”

Another Sir Wally-SOI connection concerns Dr. Fritz Koerner – a two-time Polar Medal winner and polar educator on numerous SOI expeditions – Fritz participated in the famous 1968/69 expedition across the Arctic Ocean.

The extraordinary expedition took 16 months, including 3 months over-wintering on the ice cap. The team started out from Point Barrow, Alaska. After the pole, they turned the dogs towards Svalbard, covering a total distance of 3100 kilometres and making Sir Wally and his expedition team the first to do a crossing of the Arctic ice in 1969.

Last October, Sir Wally, Fritz and team mate Ken Hedges were feted at a gala event hosted by the Royal Geographical Society in London.

Rita Gardner, director of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, said that Sir Wally’s legacy would not be forgotten. “As well as his superhuman physical achievements, his expeditions laid the foundations for modern polar science and our understanding of the thinning Arctic ice from climate change,” she said.

Ken Hedges, Sir Wally & Fritz Koerner

Here is an article from the Daily Mail this morning:

After a lifetime of adventure, world-famous polar explorer dies

A man hailed as one of Britain’s greatest polar explorers has died aged 72.

Sir Wally Herbert, who in 1969 became the first person to reach the North Pole on foot without motorised transport, died yesterday in a hospital near his home in the Highlands. He had been suffering from diabetes and heart trouble.

In a career spanning almost 50 years, the Yorkshireman travelled across well over 23,000 miles of the polar world – more than half of which had never been set foot upon before. His spirit of adventure began after completing three years military service with the Royal Engineers in 1954.

Sir Wally went on to work as a surveyor with the Falklands Islands Dependencies Survey, based at Hope Bay in Antarctica.

His first major expedition was the first crossing of the Antarctic Peninsula in 1957. The by-then-committed explorer went on to map a large part of the frozen continent’s Queen Maud Range of mountains.

During the mid 1960s he began planning his mammoth journey across the Arctic Ocean, taking in the North Pole. It was widely considered as the “last great journey on earth”.

He reached the top of the world on April 6 1969 during what became an epic 16-month trek across the frozen Arctic Ocean. Sir Wally, three companions and a pack of 40 dogs covered 3,800-miles from Alaska to Spitsbergen in Norway.

His achievement was immediately hailed by the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson as a “feat of endurance and courage which ranks with any in polar history” and “among the greatest triumphs of human skill and endurance” by the Duke of Edinburgh.

Through his explorations Sir Wally contributed heavily to the mapping of Antarctica and to people’s knowledge of the native Inuit of north-west Greenland.

They led to him having a mountain range and plateau named after him in the Antarctic, and the most northerly mountain in Svalbard named after him in the high Arctic.

He was awarded the Polar Medal twice – once for his Antarctic research (1960/62) and again for his crossing of the Arctic Ocean (1968/69).

A prize-winning author of nine books, Sir Wally was also an accomplished artist and two of his paintings are owned by members of the Royal Family.

Knighted in 2000, last year saw friends and colleagues gather in London at an event to celebrate his remarkable achievements.

Sir Wally was admitted to Raigmore hospital in Inverness last week, and he died there early yesterday morning.

He leaves wife Marie, who lives in Laggan near Aviemore, and a daughter Kari.

Today’s Globe and Mail has an exciting article about the growing number of environmental programs at universities across Canada and the United States. SOI alumna Deeva Green is featured prominently in the story! Graduates of these new and exciting programs represent the new generation of Canadian development planners, policy makers and environmental scientists!

Welcome to Green U

SIRI AGRELL

From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail

June 6, 2007

When Deeva Green starts university in September, she plans to major in saving the world.

The 18-year-old is one of an unprecedented number of high-school students who have applied to environmental programs at Canadian universities this year, seeing green not just as a cause, but a calling.

“We don’t want to screw ourselves over any more,” Ms. Green said. “We need to be prescient thinkers right now, whether it’s to have a good job or to really think about the future.”

Applications to environmental programs – including science and engineering as well as programs in sustainability, resource management, environmental policy and even green tourism – have jumped dramatically for the 2007-2008 term, even doubling at some schools.

At the University of British Columbia, inquiries about the environmental science program are running at twice what they were last year, while applications to the natural resource conservation program are up 33 per cent.

At Dalhousie University in Halifax, the environmental engineering program has gone from 18 students in 2004 to 66 enrolled this year. The school’s environmental science program has almost doubled in two years, to 68 students from 38.

The increased interest is the product of greater awareness of issues such as global warming, but also due to a growing contingent of role models for environmentally inclined teenagers who idolize people such as David Suzuki, Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore.

Nineteen-year-old Jessica McNally of Calgary was studying general science at Stanford University in California until she saw Mr. Gore speak.

“He came to campus during the first semester of her first year, and she was hooked,” said her stepfather, Tom Couture.

Ms. McNally had previously planned on becoming an astronaut, but instead of heading into space she is now spending her summer break at sea, participating in a six-week research project off the coast of Honolulu that is organized by Stanford’s environmental science program.

From there, she heads to a high-altitude station in Colorado, where she will run an experiment on butterfly migration, and next semester she will be in Australia, studying at the Great Barrier Reef.

This is the kind of course work that Peter Clark, an 18-year-old student at Upper Canada College in Toronto, is eager to pursue.

He is trying to decide between enrolling in a sustainable-development program at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a business program at Dalhousie with a focus on sustainability.

“It’s a hot topic right now, but it’s going to be a huge issue in the years to come – resource management, sustainability, climate change,” he said. “I just really want to make a difference.”

Universities in Canada are marketing themselves to teens such as Mr. Clark by promoting their role in environmental advances. The universities of Guelph and Ottawa helped standardize a DNA barcode to assist in cataloguing all living things on the planet and to monitor whether a species is at risk. The University of New Brunswick has harnessed wind to create electricity by transforming the fluctuating power caused by changes in wind direction and force into a steady current.

The public-affairs office at Dalhousie notes that student Zoë Caron was recently pictured in Vanity Fair’s spring “green issue” along with other young environmental activists.

But even as environmental programs begin to produce star alumni, some parents worry that there is no guarantee you’ll get rich while fixing the planet.

“There’s no regard for what the income will be. I always say, ‘Hang on a second here, what about law school? What about medicine?’ ” Mr. Couture said of his stepdaughter, Ms. McNally. “But it’s only thinking about what she can do for mankind.”

He and his wife Kristine Eidsvik, an Alberta judge, say they will most likely have to work until they are 80 to pay for Ms. McNally’s education, and joke that they are giving her as their “contribution to the global warming problem.”

But even though he at times worries about Ms. McNally entering a field that has no real income model, Mr. Couture said her passion gives him confidence about the future.

“If we have young talented people wanting to do this, maybe the problem is not so insurmountable,” he said. “Their optimism at 19 is through the roof – anything is possible for them and solving this problem is very real.”

Ms. Green’s motivation came from a trip to the Arctic last June with an international program called Students on Ice.

She recalls arriving on the edge of the ice floe and seeing a pod of beluga whales swim by, something the group thought was incredible until the expedition leaders explained that the creatures should not be seen that far north. “So right away, it clicked that things were really changing,” she said.

Even with real-world experiences to back up her activism, Ms. Green says some kids her age jump on the environmental bandwagon not out of concern but as a route to sure-fire employment.

“There’s a girl at school who’s not into [environmentalism] at all; she’s going to Queen’s [University] for business,” Ms. Green said. “But her mom wants her to take environmental studies because she said it will be a big sector.”

Although she applied to several Canadian universities, Ms. Green plans to attend the London School of Economics next year, where she will major in policy and environmental studies. She hopes to work in government or with a non-governmental organization.

“I think our generation will have to fix it,” she said of the environment. “And hopefully we’ll become something cool.”

Non-carbon credits

It may be difficult to fit the words “renewable energy technology” on the back of a sweatshirt or print “musical theatre with a minor in environmental tourism” on the side of a mug, but universities across Canada are expanding their course offerings to fit the taste of green-minded students.

At Dalhousie University in Halifax, students in any faculty may now take environmental science as their minor, an option spokeswoman Marla Cranston says has been exercised by young people studying everything from neuroscience to theatre.

Last fall, Brock University in St. Catharine’s, Ont., launched a new program called tourism and environment with 41 students enrolled, a number that grew to 61 by the end of the year.

Next year, McMaster University in Hamilton will launch an energy technologies program focusing on renewable energy technology.

“It’s an important program because as … Canada searches for new green energy sources, the sector will need a large number of qualified people to meet demand,” spokeswoman Jane Christmas said.

The faculty of civil engineering at Queen’s University in Kingston has added a mandatory first-year course called humanitarian engineering.

Brian Cumming, head of Queen’s environmental science department, said the school has broadened its focus to accommodate the new realities of climate research, hiring professors to teach economics and philosophy courses with an environmental bent, and recently adding urban and regional planning courses.

“There is an awful big awareness on campus that things have to change,” he said.

Queen’s is beginning to track where students who graduate with environmental degrees end up after graduation. Mr. Cumming said many go into the business world or start environmental companies, while others go into education, government or non-governmental organizations.

“A lot of our students are taking jobs before they’re actually finished,” he said. “They’re highly in demand.”