Arts & Science Program

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TOP 40 Under 40

Karen Bakker, 39: sounds the alarm on dwindling water

Each year, Caldwell Partners International chooses 40 Canadians who were under 40 in the past year to honour for their outstanding achievements. Click here to learn more about the program, and find more winners in the list below.
Canadians have taken water for granted for too long, warns Karen Bakker, geography professor at the University of British Columbia and one of the country’s foremost experts on water governance.

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“Canadians are just waking up to the fact that we do not have unlimited access to water,” Dr. Bakker says. In some parts of the country, including the prairies and B.C.’s Okanagan Valley, “the squeeze is already being felt,” she adds. Water quantity and quality are serious issues on many First Nations reserves and, as a resource, water remains greatly under-regulated in Canada, she argues.
Dr. Bakker was born in Montreal and raised in Ottawa. She completed her undergraduate studies at McMaster University in Hamilton. She was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1995 to study at the University of Oxford in England.
It was there that she turned her attention to the study of water management. “I felt that it was likely that some of the most pressing challenges we would face politically and environmentally in Canada over the next few decades would be related to water,” she says. At the same time, the water crisis in many developing countries was also becoming apparent, she adds.
After completing her doctorate in 1999 and then a postdoctoral fellowship, also at Oxford, Dr. Bakker took up her post as a geography professor at the University of British Columbia in 2002. Three years later, she founded the university’s Program on Water Governance, an interdisciplinary research centre that conducts research on water sustainability, security and management. She remains the centre’s director.
The Vancouver resident also holds a Canada Research Chair in Political Ecology and is an associate of UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, which focuses on environmental research. She sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals and has written extensively about water governance and security, including three books. Her most recent, Privatizing Water: Governance Failure and the World’s Urban Water Crisis, was published in 2010 and deals with the growing water crisis in developing countries. She has served as an adviser to numerous national and international agencies, including the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Conference Board of Canada, the United Nations Development Program, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and several government departments.
Research into water management helped spur a broader interest in environmental issues, which Dr. Bakker incorporates in both her professional and personal life.
She is married and has two young daughters, both budding environmentalists. “They are very good at reminding me to turn off the tap while I’m brushing my teeth,” says Dr. Bakker. Her hobbies include swimming and yoga and most days she cycles to work with her youngest daughter in tow. She also volunteers for various community groups.

Wade Hemsworth

THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR, Feb 21 2011

McMaster student speaks at prestigious science conference

Kate Mulligan is still working on her PhD, but she already knows how it feels to be a high-profile international scientist.
The McMaster researcher, who specializes in water and health, represented Canada at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. over the weekend.
She sat as the emerging researcher on a panel of senior Canadian scientists, all speaking on the subject of water and promoting Canada’s climate for research and innovation.
The AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society, and its five-day annual meeting of 10,000 delegates is one of the highest-profile science events anywhere.
“It was a huge vote of confidence in the work I’m doing. I was really honored to have been invited,” Mulligan said after Sunday’s panel. “To be included in that group was amazing for me.”
Mulligan, who has already achieved national recognition as a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar, was speaking on the subject of dengue fever. In her research, she raises questions about longstanding associations between the tropical illness and poverty.
The incidence of dengue fever is rising, and now the severe flu-like illness threatens as much as one third of the world’s population. Still, it receives only a tiny fraction of the funding allotted to similar threats such as malaria.
Mulligan has studied the modern Malaysian city of Putrajaya, planned and built as a model of advancement. Despite its high-quality water and public services, the city still has a major problem with the mosquito-borne Dengue virus, drawing the poverty connection into doubt.
Mulligan said the chance to present and discuss her research with international scientists and journalists at the prestigious conference has given her confidence in her work.

THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2011

An outsider looks in and really gets us. Tings Chak’s beautiful book pays homage to ‘the first real home I ever had’

We’re all on loan to each other, for what time we have together. The world gave us Tings Chak, on a five-year lease (2005-2010) as it were. We got her. She got us. She still gets us. Tings made something out of that getting. A beautiful, strange and illuminating book that has more light-and-shadow understanding of Hamilton tamped into its few dozen pages than many less perceptive students of the city might have produced in a lifetime here. Tings got us in another way, too. She got us under her skin. So while she is now studying architecture at the University of Toronto and doesn’t think she will ever settle here, in a way she has never left. “At first Hamilton put me off,” says Tings, 23. “But once I got out, outside the bubble (of McMaster University), Hamilton felt like the first real home I ever had.” And out she got. Every week she went to the North End to teach children in need to draw, and made meals for the Food Not Bombs organization. She also blocked roads in protests. “Look at your hair! So long,” says Veronica at the Mex-I-Can Restaurant on James North, as she gives Tings a hug. “It was this short last time I saw you. Next time it’ll be down to your waist.” Tings was back in Hamilton last week. To visit friends, of whom she collected many when she lived here, studying arts and science at Mac. And to deliver more books. She just got the new printing (selfpublished). “I’ve got an ISBN number!” Tings tells Dave Kuruc at Mixed Media, with mock excitement. His store sells the book. He ran out of the last batch. It’s called Where the Concrete Desert Blooms. Tings calls it a graphic novella but there’s not much fiction. It is more like urban- ography, the city’s life story, kissed awake by a young woman’s own search for a way to “place” herself in the world. If you learn about the lagoon at the bottom of lower Chedoke Falls, it’s because Tings has actually swum in it. There’s a drawing of her lying on her back in the water, arms spread out. In her extensive travels and research through Hamilton, Tings felt magnets pulling. The city’s people. Some are recurring figures in the book, such as bookseller Bryan Prince, poet Bernadette Rule and activist Randy Kay. Others pop up in bright one-off flashes that, however brief, leave sparks in your eyes. There’s Jeff Seffinga, who for years went to the movie screenings in the garden at Whitehern with his wife, whom he moved to Hamilton to be with. When she died, Seffinga spread her ashes in the garden. Tings depicts him rolling up his sleeves. I asked Tings, when she was here Thursday, to take me to some of her favourite places in Hamilton. We went to Gore Park. “A great place to people-watch.” We ate at Mex-I-Can’s. “I used to hang out here,” she says, smiling over a vegetarian burrito, “and listen to the anarchists fighting.” We went to the harbour, where she and her father, who came in from Thornhill, took sailing lessons one summer and yelled at each other as the boat pitched. Tings was born in Hong Kong. Her family moved to Canada in 1990. Tiananmen Square was what decided it. Tings was three. They settled in Thornhill. But, she says, it never gave her the sense of deep belonging Hamilton did. I misled you at the start. Tings lived in the city from 2005 to 2009, four years. For most of 2010 she lived in Paris. She waited tables at an American restaurant. “I couldn’t get over it. The French eat hamburgers with knife and fork.” But the rest of the time, surrounded by her sketches, she wrote Where the Concrete Desert Blooms. In her chambre de bonne in the City of Light, she was thinking about Hamilton. And how she understands us, our psychology, both visually and in words. “A friend once described his relationship with Hamilton as one of hiding,” writes Tings. I’m not even sure I fully get what she means, but somehow it resonates. I think Tings will make a fine architect. Her life is her building and we will always be a room in it, maybe the one she comes to when she needs to feel home. Of all her gifts to the city, that is her greatest. The knowledge that someone like her could fall in love with us.

Tings Chak, 23, was born in Hong Kong and came to Canada as an infant. She was accepted at McMaster University, the Arts and Science Program, fell in love with Hamilton and has created a graphic novel about the city and some of its characters.

THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR WEDNESDAY, March 5, 2011

.. And then the rains came

A McMaster grad in devastated Sri Lanka sees how little some people have – and why we should care

Eight months and 12 days ago I was still in Canada — at Hamilton Place, to be specific. I received my undergraduate degree from McMaster University that day, along with hundreds of other excited and terrified young students. I left Canada a few months later to start a job with a relief and development organization in Sri Lanka.

At the time I knew very little about Sri Lanka, and would have required a few moments to find it on a map. (It almost touches the southern tip of India). I knew that the Tamil Tigers were fighting for a separate state, and that as a result of that civil war, hundreds of thousands of Tamils — the ethnic minority in Sri Lanka — now live abroad, many of them in Toronto.
Rick Mercer spoke at my graduation, and asked his audience to be strong Canadian citizens. He suggested voting and travelling throughout Canada as ways of exercising that citizenship. Living and working abroad means the former is difficult and the latter impossible. Nonetheless I often reflect on Mercer’s words, and feel that there might still be something deeply Canadian about my present experience.
After all, isn’t the humanitarian work I’m doing part of that proud Canadian self-image, which sees peacekeeping and diplomacy as a responsible, considerate alternative to the callous real-politiking of our American friends? As our narrative of multilateralism goes, we care about the suffering of strangers, which is reflected in foreign policy and domestic politics.
We are a deluded nation, more today than yesterday, and more tomorrow still. Afghanistan is a violent and sustained contradiction to our wholesome Canadian self-image. Do any of us actually know how many Canadian soldiers are currently involved in peacekeeping missions? (According to the United Nations, there are 126.)
While Canada-as-peacemaker obviously requires revision, I write this with the assumption that Canadians care, and that Canadians assume their government cares as well. To care, we should also try to understand our suffering neighbours’ situations.
One such neighbour is Rajan Putulingam, whose story is painfully similar to many others’ in the north and east of Sri Lanka. He is 41 years old, his wife 39, and they live with their five children in the Eastern District of Batticaloa. Rajan works as a daily labourer on wealthier farmers’ rice paddy lands, and Delaney, his wife, runs a small shop. This year they used their savings — from Delaney’s jewellery — to purchase seed and plant one and a half acres of rice paddy. Delaney’s shop generates an income when her neighbours have enough work and extra rupees to spend.
Heavy rains started two days after Christmas, which is not unusual in this part of the world. As days of constant rain stretched into weeks, the family was displaced to a shared community building. More than 300,000 people, the Putulingams included, sought refuge in common shelters. As hundreds of families squeezed into buildings built for dozens, toilets filled up and food simply ran out. Rajan and his family stayed for five days in the office of the local farmers’ society.
For others, the situation was worse. According to John Thevatas, a senior NGO worker in the North, in certain places there was no dry land, and many “did not even have a tarpaulin to cover their head. The living conditions are not acceptable, but what to do? There is water everywhere.”
This was the Putulingam’s third displacement. War had chased them from their home twice before. Delaney’s mud-walled shop is basically destroyed, as is the family’s mud-walled home. Glass bottles of soda, muddied by the high water, are all that remain in her shop. Their contents are a luxury none can presently afford.
High water destroyed over 80 per cent of the paddy fields in the East. In Sri Lanka, rice is a staple food in more than one sense: for hundreds of thousands no harvest also means no labour in the paddy fields and therefore no income. Thevatas describes the two harvest seasons (October to January and April to August) as “lone opportunities for a good income for 90 per cent of these flood-affected peoples.” According to the United Nations, there were more than a million people affected.
The Putulingams have few prospects. They were not a part of that lucky group whose crop survived. The children’s school supplies are gone, drowned along with hundreds of thousands of chickens, goats and cows. In Rajan’s words, “every time we start to earn something again it is destroyed by war or displacement.”
He said that days before a second equally massive flood arrived. Most families lost all that remained of their homes and livelihoods.
Bob Dylan should have followed “when you got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose” with, when you have next to nothing, you have everything to lose. The Putulingams and countless families like them will require support long after the flood waters finally recede, first to survive, and then to rebuild.
So what do the Putulingams, or any desperate family in poor country X, have to do with Canadian citizenship? Maybe nothing, but maybe by listening to these stories we start to appreciate a little bit of what it means to be “displaced,” to be one of one million flood-affected peoples. As a result, we can exercise that supposedly Canadian capacity to care, and in a more substantial and responsible way. Statistics take on a much deeper meaning when faces are paired with figures.
Finally, with that little bit of knowledge we can see this country in at least a few more shades of grey. A boat full of Tamils seeking asylum is not simply a terrorist threat to national security (no matter what Vic Toews tells us) and the Tamil Tigers are not the one true voice of the Tamil people.
Those shades of grey also reveal the dignity and extreme perseverance of many Sri Lankans, who don’t choose to be Sri Lankan any more than I choose to be Canadian.

Jesse Bauman is McMaster University graduate now working as a “management trainee” at ZOA Refugee Care (www.zoa.nl). E-mail him for more information at jesse@zoasrilanka.org. You can best support ZOA through its Canadian partner, the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (www.foodgrainsbank.ca).