Local and Global Engagement

In some ways, Professor Tina Loo wants to be the Al Gore of the history department.

“He’s a masterful teacher,” says Loo, who saw the former U.S. vice-president deliver his history-making slideshow in Calgary in 2007. “It’s not everybody who can speak for two-and-a-half hours about a bunch of really boring atmospheric science and make it seem interesting and be full of passion,” she adds.

Loo was impressed by how Gore handled a tough crowd: an auditorium filled with oil barons and top politicians in a province quickly becoming Canada’s biggest carbon producer.

Both Al Gore and his award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) figure in a first-year course on global warming that Loo, an environmental history expert, will teach this fall from the Dept. of History. Called “History 105: The Global Environment,” the course explores, among other things, why Gore received a standing ovation at the end of his Calgary presentation — a surprising finale for many. “Environmental issues are really shaping political engagement,” says Loo, who believes the current climate change debate is politicizing people beyond the existing categories of left and right.

By exploring that shift with students, Loo hopes to “get beyond the paralysis of that all of us seem to feel on the issue” of global warming.

That approach to a troubling topic echoes her work on other themes. As the Canada Research Chair in Environmental History, Loo studies how government policies and social discourses impacted the environment in 19 and 20th century Canada.

Loo specializes in uncovering how past rationales have led to modern environmental dilemmas. Her research has focused the era of mega-projects and hydroelectric dams in BC, as well as Canada’s history of wildlife management, both subjects on which she has authored numerous books and articles. In her work on state power projects, for example, she explored how governments banked on public optimism and confidence in the state in the 1950s through 1970s. The belief that damming rivers for electricity could result in a better society for everyone helped shape the provincial landscape we know today, she says.

“That was a very particular historical moment that to a certain extent has passed,” she explains, adding that she thinks people now are quite cynical of the ability of government and suspicious of the notion of experts. “Partly because expertise has got us into a lot of trouble,” she says. “Science has not necessarily resulted in the better world that people hoped for.”

Loo’s work with First Nations has tried to show how emotional and anecdotal experiences of environmental change are just as important as the official research carried out by government scientists.

If there’s one thing she’s gleaned from her work digging through archives — which she likens to “an Indiana Jones experience” — it’s that individuals and local groups can impact outcomes, including global warming.

“I think that history tells you that things aren’t inevitable, and they could have been different,” she says.

By Bryan Zandberg (BA ’06), former editor with The Ubyssey.

Professor Ashok Kotwal’s career in economics has focused on the problems of absolute poverty and the inequality of incomes. His most current research has centred on the impacts of the recent economic reforms in India.

Professor Kotwal still remembers what induced him to become a development economist, even though that journey started three decades ago. Like many of his friends, Kotwal had recently emigrated from India to the United States working as an electrical engineer in the computer industry around Boston. Five years into his new life in Boston, however, he says he was still thinking of life back in Bombay. “There were people [in India] far smarter than I was, and just because I happened to be in the US, I had a much better standard of living and far fewer constraints on my freedom than they did.”

Kotwal’s Journey: Ethics and Economics

Casting about for what he could do about the disparity, Kotwal says his mind kept turning to his politically engaged family, and especially to his brother-in-law, who taught economics at a college, but spent most of the time working in the slums of Bombay. He decided to study economics to understand better what kept some countries poor. A doctoral degree from Boston University and nearly 30 years at UBC later, Kotwal has a distinguished career in development economics. Though applicable across borders and cultures, much of his research has focused on the problems of development within the Indian experience.

The West, he notes, is well aware that the world’s two most populous nations — China and India — are rising. However, fewer people know the story of the effect of the massive economic changes for the poor in these countries. “They’re both growing fast over the last 20 years, but what’s happening in China is much different than what’s happening in India,” Kotwal says. While absolute poverty has fallen dramatically in China, it has been much less so in India. Twenty-five per cent of the population, or approximately 250 million people — that is, about eight times the population of Canada — still live on less than one dollar a day, Kotwal explains.

Unearthing the causes of that dynamic — why wealth in India fails to trickle down — is the subject of his recent study conducted jointly with colleague Mukesh Eswaran and two scholars from India. Organizational structures and institutions, labour and credit markets, social capital, and the interaction between agriculture and industry are some of the topics he researched. His book Why Poverty Persists in India, published in 1994, and a significant part of his research in development economics was done jointly with Mukesh Eswaran.

Tied to his academic inquiries is a deep desire for his work to be applicable. In fact, some of the research questions he studies are generated from NGOs working in India. “They want something concrete, and not just academic abracadabra,” Kotwal says.

Teaching About Poverty

But when you’re dealing with a problem as pervasive as the causes of a sub-continent’s poverty, questions can be more forthcoming than answers, he admits. “Sometimes it’s frustrating to students,” Kotwal says. “They say, ‘If you don’t know, nobody knows. Then why should we study it?’”

Perplexing as poverty may be sometimes, the journey of economic development around the world means the work never gets dull. Neither do Kotwal’s first-hand stories. To teach, he draws from his frontline research in India to talk to students about economic development, international development and other world issues. He also teaches a second-year course called “Understanding Globalization.”

“I came into economics quite late,” he says.

“Basically I ended up doing research on the real questions that motivated me.”

By Bryan Zandberg (BA, 2006, in French and Spanish). Bryan is a former editor with The Ubyssey.

As an undergraduate at Concordia University Chicago, Dr. Arlene Sindelar studied math. She even taught math as a student teacher before graduating. But it was while student teaching that she made an interesting observation—she enjoyed studying math, she liked teaching math, but she didn’t really think much about math once she left the classroom. Instead, she thought about history. History had always captured her imagination and it was history that drew her back.