Dr. Sinead introduced the Shutagot’ine Trail Remediation Project last Friday by giving the speech of “Resource Geographies in the Canadian North: The Canol Pipeline and the Shutagot’ine Trail Remediation Project”. For me, it’s amazing to know that people would like to devote time and energy plus financing measurement (of course) into this project, to remediate fault that’s been made in the past, and to create a better environment for our future. To be honest, I feel mostly pity and sad for the pipeline when I was informed that the pipeline never served well, where pipeline burst and leakage occasionally happed, and only survived a short period of time, only 14 months in fact. Consider this pipeline was constructed by US Army Corps during the WWII period within an extreme working condition. If this pipeline could be designed properly with sustainability, the three pillar of social-environment-economy, considered, it could lead to a way much better result, serving its purpose better with a much smaller environmental impact. Unfortunately this was not the case, and it’s up to people living generations later to deal with this mess. Not need to mention that this pipeline was never maintained well and eventually abandoned after convoying not too many barrels. It seems that the pathetic pipeline’s creator master didn’t even bother to put any effort to clean up the mess due to whatever reason. Maybe they were busying building fighters and warships to battle IJN on Pacific, or maybe because they think Canada, as one of their alliance, should take care of this problem.

Back to the presentation itself, Dr. Sinead was enthusiastic and energetic about her speech, although I have to admit that it was little hard to follow without hints, I mean text, on her actual slides. The whole presentation flowed smoothly with a steady pace and balanced amount of information and humor. I personally like the way she introduced the short video clip at the last session. The audio quality of this clip definitely needs more work on it, but as she mentioned, this is only an unpolished version, and I saw it more about the functionality of bringing people back to the presentation than its actual content here. While during the Q&A section, Dr. Sinead showed extremely well known of her topic by giving detailed response regarding questions within different fields. For that one question she’s not quite sure about, she still made an educational assumption based on the current available information, and offered the questioner a possible source for better answer.

There was not any particular component that is applicable for my future research, but a time-lapse style video clip of one whole experiment run could be useful and interesting.