A week on the land

Tim Lougheed

The sheer scale and diversity of Canada towers over that of most nations, yet few of us give much thought to how this vast landscape affects our lives.

“Relatively speaking, Canadians have more geography and know less about it than people in any other country in the world,” says Barry Wellar, professor emeritus in the Department of Geography.

His long career has featured many different attempts to cultivate a broader appreciation of this subject, such as establishing standards for assessing the safety of pedestrian crosswalks. A CBC interviewer subsequently dubbed him “Canada’s commissioner of intersections,” a description that Wellar happily accepts as evidence that he has been able to bring an important geographic issue into public consciousness.

Eager to do even more, he is directing the Geography Awareness Week Program for the Canadian Association of Geographers. Running from November 12 to 16, each day is devoted to a specific theme: weather and climate, water, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), transportation, and food and health.

Wellar wants to showcase the role of geography across a wide range of business and government activities. Weather, for example, affects most Canadians in some fashion particular to a region’s geographical features.

If meteorologists and oceanographers team up with geographers to portray their work in common sense terms, Wellar insists we will all gain valuable insights into how weather affects economic performance, transportation systems, public safety, emergency services, energy usage, garbage disposal and even the quality of our water and air.

Likewise, International Geographic Information Systems Day, Wednesday, November 14, falls during Geography Awareness Week. This day will feature talks and exhibits presented by the Department of Geography and the University library’s Geographic, Statistical and Government Information Centre.

“This is our seventh annual event,” says Mike Sawada, one of Wellar’s departmental colleagues and manager of the Laboratory for Applied Geomatics and GIS Science, who noted that last year’s event hosted some 400 high-school students. “We offered workshops to these students in GIS software, which were very successful and well received.”

Raising the public appreciation of such research facilities is exactly what Wellar wants to achieve during Geography Awareness Week.

“What you’re doing is trying to encourage or persuade organizations to explicitly discuss how geography affects what they do,” says Wellar, adding that it can be easy for individuals to overlook this part of their work. “It turned out that I was engaged in a very strategic educational exercise — don’t just take geography for granted, but talk about it.”