Welcome to Novel Futures

Following a  fruitful and busy year in the College of Commerce in 1986-87 with an eye on the accounting profession, and while playing volleyball for the University of Saskatchewan Huskies, the provincial Canada Games Team and the Canadian Junior National Team, I plotted my early career shift into engineering. 

I completed my Bachelors and Masters in Civil and Geo-environmental Engineering by 1995, punctuated by a year backpacking around the world - a year that would prove formative for my later focus on sustainable development (more on this later). I would spend the next five years as a soil-atmosphere and hydrologic computer modeller, doing research with the Unsaturated Soils Group in Saskatoon and then working with multi-disciplinary consulting firms in Colorado, USA. Then in 1999, I had my first experience with the United Nations system, taking part in a mine reclamation tour and knowledge exchange in Portugal. 

This chapter would not be complete without mentioning two persons who provided timely and sage guidance to me as a young professional. Maurice Strong and Jim MacNeill, each in their own way, helped me shift the trajectory of my professional career towards sustainable development. This is a very interesting story in and of itself, and so I encourage you to read my blog below, "A Tribute to the Prairie Fathers of Sustainable Development".

After more than a decade learning and working as a civil engineer in Canada and the U.S., the intellectual tug toward systems thinking and sustainable development took hold. I was accepted into the Harvard Kennedy School and completed its new master's degree program in public administration and international development in 2002, during which time I learned alongside 60 other students from around the world. 

They say you can take the boy out of the Prairie, but you can't take the Prairie out of the boy. So, in 2002, I  joined the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development on a temporary three-month contract, with thanks to a fortuitous meeting with Dr. Laszlo Pinter, IISD's then Director of Measurement & Assessment, who just happened to be completing a post-Doc at Harvard. 

Three months turned into an amazing decade of learning and doing all things sustainable development in Manitoba, across Canada, and around the world. I had the pleasure of working on a diverse array of projects with IISD's Climate Change, Resilience, Water, and Tracking Progress programs, as well as providing innovation, ESG, and corporate reporting support to IISD's then Chief Operating Office, Dr. William Glanville.