Episode 152: Vancouver Podcast Festival: Podcasting Climate Change

About Our Guests

Currently she is a PhD student at UBC’s School of Community & Regional Planning (SCARP) with the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) Living With Water project, where she is exploring how complex climate governance networks incorporate Indigenous Laws on the South Coast of BC. She is also the Special Projects Lead with Montreal-based arts company; Lo Fi Dance Theory - and a Climate Communications Specialist with West Coast Environmental Law.

He is committed to human rights, social justice and environmental justice and has been working to stop the Kinder Morgan TransMountain expansion project.

Eugene was born and raised in Burnaby BC, holds a BA from UBC (2001) and JD from Dalhousie (2006) and was called to the BC Bar in 2008. Prior to joining WCEL, Eugene was a staff lawyer with the BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre (BCPIAC) where he had a social justice law practice in the areas of Constitutional, Human Rights, Administrative, Anti-Poverty and Regulatory law. He has represented low and fixed-income ratepayers before the BC Utilities Commission (BCUC); low-income tenants of slumlords; Treeplanters and Temporary Foreign Workers before the BC Human Rights Tribunal; and families of deceased farmworkers at a coroner’s inquest.

In 2010, Eugene worked with the Legal Resources Centre in Durban, South Africa on Constitutional law cases involving access to housing, water, education and a healthy environment.

Chief Patrick was recently honored with a Clean50 Lifetime Achievement Award and Kanaka’s Community Resilience Plan (2021) was also recognized as the Clean50 2022 Top project.

Site specific climate change impacts have been observed for some time at Kanaka and in response – the community completely changed its planning, investment, and implementation processes to ensure stability and resilience in core physiological areas to ensure that Kanaka’s future generations will have the same as – if not more, opportunity than we do today. On June 30, 2021, a fire completely devastated over 90% of the nearby Village of Lytton, directly and indirectly impacted surrounding Indian reserve lands and the regional districts fee simple residents. Chief Patrick and his community are engaged and are assisting the Lytton people in short term recovery and medium- and long-term rebuild.

Grace has published several academic articles on law and narrative; is the author of a hopeful young adult climate fantasy series, the Ava of the Gaia trilogy; and is the host of a climate storytelling podcast, Planet Potluck. She’s given dozens of talks on climate narratives and storytelling, and writes and speaks about the topic whenever she can. She is also the Executive Producer of Climate Comeback, a short film harnessing the power of sports to bring people together around tangible climate action. 

Grace is currently pursuing her PhD in law at the University of British Columbia, studying how to use law to protect climate change science from manufactured doubt. She is fascinated by the intersection of law and story, and focuses her research on how law can tell better stories in the pursuit of environmental and social justice. She holds a B.A. from Rice University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and an LL.M from the University of British Columbia. Grace’s research has been supported by a Fulbright Canada fellowship, a Harvard Knox Memorial Traveling Fellowship, and a British Columbia Law Foundation fellowship, among others.