My name is Cob Staines. I am an environmental researcher, data manager, and educator. Let's collaborate!
You and I come together from different paths, perspectives, and communities. We share a concern for evolving instabilities in our socio-ecological system -- for our collective probing of the nebulous boundaries between local attractors of coexistence and coextinction. We recognize the destabilizing challenges which uncertainty brings to our communities. We acknowledge our emotional and cultural draws to turn our attention inward and away from other perspectives, cultures, species, and communities when uncertainty looms large. Yet we also see how our inward-turning erodes our capacity to respond to systemic instability with informed, mutualistic, stabilizing acts. In light of such uncertainty we choose to collaborate, to nurture ecocultural seeds of outward-turning, relational complicity in our coexistence, to nourish the restorative feedbacks which emerge as resilience in our greater community. Honoring where we each find ourselves today, we choose to walk the path of collaboration into tomorrow.
Our mutual stability is rooted in observation. Bear cubs watch their mamas closely to learn the art of how to eat what and when, with locally tuned reciprocity echoing across generations, communities and climates. Our work as researchers is to listen closely, to respectfully foster a collective understanding of the experiences and relationships within our communities, to empower a mutualistic coexistence. Our path toward understanding is guided by our observations, a self-awareness of our own experiences and relationships, and an open-mindedness to consider the wider realm of experiences and relationships which blossom in our communities. This may look like sitting by a stream to allow an aquatic community to enlighten us to its local wisdom. This could mean holding space for misunderstandings between one another -- those natural perturbations of living ideas which thrive in diverse communities -- to expand the thought horizons informing our actions. This might be listening intentionally to the stories of our elders, to expand the time horizons of our knowledge. Stability in dynamic systems requires feedbacks, and all feedbacks require listening.
Our long-term stability is nourished by long-term system memory. Elderly spruce trees epigenetically pass down knowledge of historic conditions to their seedlings, so that they may be more prepared when prolonged drought or extreme cold come to visit again. Our work as data managers is to nurture our collective memory. The hard-earned observations of our communities cannot inform our relational complicity once they have been washed downstream. And yet we cannot archive the vast flow of the river of knowledge in its entirety. Empowering data management selectively recirculates that which can nurture mutualistic, stabilizing acts into the future, in ways that are accessible, parsable, interpretable and hopefully relevant. We can recall that scribes need not always speak the language to preserve its message. Our collective memory should represent a diversity of sources and perspectives, and through preservation be made available to a diversity of listeners and storytellers. Stability in adaptive systems requires memory, and our collective memory is enhanced by empowering data management.
But a knowledge unshared leaves no ripples. The stories that find us through observation and collective memory come with the responsibility to be shared. Willows maintain viable, distributed genomes across isolated and disparate wetland populations through widespread dispersal of pollen and seeds. Our work as educators is to distribute empowering stories as seeds of future knowledge, to nurture compassionate curiosity and diversifying identity exploration in others. Distributed systems are more resilient to local perturbations. Educating for resilience means letting go of centralized knowledge control, instead empowering collaborative engagement with, and co-management of, a dynamic knowledge commons. A culture of education which celebrates diverse values and perspectives sows seeds for dynamic interpretations of knowledge to come, empowering restorative feedbacks in our future socio-ecological systems. Diversity provides stability in complex systems, and knowledge is diversified through sharing.
MS in Geography
Coldwater Lab
University of Saskatchewan, 2022
BS in Physics
College of Creative Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014