Listen—I’m not from around here.

I’ve been in the Prince George area for about 1.5 months, and as it stands this town is the only representative of the Pacific Northwest region that I’ve personally experienced. And while this campus is beautiful and inclusive, and Prince George colloquially appealing, Dr. Curtis Bjork’s quiet enthusiasm for the environment of the Robson Valley was the most charming introduction to British Columbia that I could have hoped for.

If I tried to lay out all of the information that was unfamiliar to me, I’d spend the next few hundred words repeating Dr. Bjork’s presentation verbatim; his talk was saturated with habitat factoids about which I had no idea, and he introduced them in the classic logical approach of broad to specific. Beginning with Canada as a whole—British Columbia has the largest array of flora in all three categories of terrestrial vegetation? Fabulous! Within British Columbia, the Robson Valley is the wettest portion of the Rocky Mountain trench? Wonderful! Dr. Bjork laid out his study area like a vast and living scroll, sequentially describing each stage of his process in such a way as to include the audience with every step. Even with limited previous study of the area and of lichens and vegetation in general, I was able to follow his enthusiasm into the bush.

Unfortunately, while I very much like the idea of incorporating a “controlled intuitive wander” into my own Master’s research project, my organism of focus is comparatively limited in its geographic and temporal distribution—I have a chance to collect spawning Kokanee only when and where they’re spawning. However, whatever my findings may eventually be, I hope to take a similarly broad look to the effects of my species’ allocation; as Dr. Bjork pointed out, the presence of certain species in certain areas may act as indicators of the health of the habitat. And though his main focus was trained on terrestrial flora, his view was not so narrow as to disregard the role of rock type, local animal populations, and the layout of the landscape as interconnected hyphae of the environment. That is a characteristic that can, and likely should, be applied to any study of natural systems.

In answering questions, I respected Dr. Bjork’s acknowledgement of his lack of expertise when an aspect of the question was outside his main professional area—the question may have been of interest to him and related to his work, but he did not speak out of turn, which is admirable. Personally, after seeing his obvious delight in finding limestone in the Robson Valley, I would be curious to hear his opinion on the biodiversity of the limestone and karst regions of Kentucky, about which I’m more familiar than British Columbia. Most likely the moss and lichens aren’t up to snuff (there’s a bit of a coal burning problem that isn’t exactly conducive for species sensitive to air pollution), but I agree with Dr. Bjork that caves are always exciting.