Preliminary Thoughts

In a week from Monday, I'll be travelling to Borneo to participate in an ethno-ecological field study. The field-study, organized through Ethical Expeditions, and accredited through Quest University, based in Squamish, B.C., is at once two-pronged and a blended ethnological/ecological study, as the adjective suggests. It is two-pronged because the group of students, led by instructors Sheryl Gruber (Quest), Brent Loken (Simon Fraser University), and Janelle Baker, of Athabasca University - through which I am also a part-time student - will diverge into two groups of which one group of eight or so will venture into the Wehea forest reserve and document the diversity of life they encounter, while the other eight or so, and me included, will venture into Dayak villages to document their cultural, governance and economic systems; it is a blended study because the approach is systems-based, premised upon examining the mutual influences these systems undergo.  The research question, as I understand it, is therefore: how do the human and ecological systems and their subsystems interact, what is their mutual impact, and how resilient are they in the face of impending forest clear-cutting, corporate and local and foreign disturbances that potentially may damage both these systems. How sensitive are they, and how may their resliience, to the extent that they are resilient, be sustained?

The study is of great interest to me because it takes a systems-based, complexity theory approach.  Of course it will be an amazing experience for so many reasons, but I find myself with particular interest in this approach because my own research into the dynamics of pelotons, which is an example of a complex adaptive system - or so I have sought to demonstrate, having made a number of presentations on the subject at conferences - has led me to understand aspects of complexity theory.  Broadly, complexity theory is interdisciplinarian and encompasses physics, evolutionary biology, ecology, economics, and any field of study in which there are many interacting components which exhibit behaviours and aggregate patterns not predicted from an examination of the components in isolation from each other. But I will delve further into this as we go along.

It is worth mentioning too that the Borneo study has much relevance to the degree I am finishing, which is what Athabasca University terms a Bachelor of Professional Arts, in Governance, Law, and Management, through their Centre for State and Legal Studies. Throughout my studies, I have taken a particular interest in economics and international relations.  So, it is highly relevant to me that we will be studying the governance/economic systems of the Dyak peoples.  

At the age of 42, one may understandably ask how it is that I come to be finishing an undergraduate degree at this time in my life.  I currently hold a full-time position as an adjudicator with Office of the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles, and I have also been employed as a paralegal in different capacities with the Province of British Columbia and with private practitioners for many years now.  When I chose to attend Capilano College (now a university) to complete a two-year diploma program with a six-month practicum as a paralegal, the decision was made largely on the basis that I wanted some sort of reasonable/respectable career that required a relatively mimimal education so that I could pursue dreams I had at the time to be a competitive cyclist at an elite level.  What I needed was a good sit-down job that paid half-decently and that allowed me to recover well from training and to race frequently.

Generally that was fulfilled, although I ended up putting cycling itself on hiatus for a few years while I trained as a runner and duathlete, and ultimately achieved only modest success as a cyclist, with my best season resulting in a 4th place in the B.C. Cup standings in 1999, if I recall the year correctly.  Granted, I did garner a few top-10 marathon results, and compete for Canada at the World Championships in the sport of duathlon, but the sport is small in Canada, and not as competitive as other sports like triathlon, cycling or running events, and the standards for achieving national team status were within the reach of those like myself with only mid-level talent.

So, with that and the passage of time, in 2007 I applied for and received a government scholarship to finish a degree, and have been working at it on a part-time basis since then.  Now, with only a few courses remaining, while transferable for a total of 6 credits toward my degree, it appears I will receive only 3 such credits.  But the value of the experience itself will be immeasurable, and there is also much that I will be able to apply to my peloton studies and to increase my understanding of complex systems generally.

And while I am a scientist at heart, with the odd artistic bent, a journey such as this must ultimately be viewed through a philosophical lens more than anything, it seems to me.  For it was T.S. Eliot who said that it is at the end of all our travels, when we return to the place where we started, we will know that place for the first time.  I am not certain yet what I will return to and see for the first time, or ultimately when that will happen, where the beginning of the journey really begins, and when it really ends.  But I do know that when I am in Borneo, there is much that I will see for the first time, and that when I return, there is much that I will see very differently. 



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