Culturally grounded forest conservation and action research, with Drs. Catherine Potvin and Joseph Levitan

In this episode, Adam and Cory co-host while Joe joins as our guest alongside Dr. Catherine Potvin. We learn about Catherine’s career as a biologist working on climate issues in solidarity with Indigenous communities. Together, Catherine and Joe explore their collaboration doing action research in both culturally grounded health care and education. 

First, [2:50] Catherine and Joe center relationship-building with the Emberá community at the heart of their collaborations in Panama: it’s about persistence and long time presence. [5:02] Catherine shares an overview of her history working with Indigenous communities along with the deep shifts and re-orientations in her career: [6:24] “I realized I had everything wrong, like completely everything wrong. [...] I understood that if you want to keep the forest, you need to care for the people.”

Adam and Cory ask [7:50] about the contexts that inform the focus on reforestation and community empowerment and [11:27] the role of social scientists in working alongside biologists in these collaborations.  [12:02] Dr. Potvin talks about the notion of reflexivity as “a total social science thing” and the importance of researchers positioning themselves in the work they do. She also talks about how important it has been to look at reforestation from an economics and training perspective, what Joe calls “learning for capacity building”. Their collaboration also helped support [16:20] a community-based collective decision-making process, and Joe names a few examples of its outcomes. 

At this point, Joe [19:56] spends some time walking us through an understanding of culturally-grounded education and healthcare: It’s a “phenomenological pragmatist perspective” that asks [20:53] “How do we start from who we are and our experience, and then identify what matters to us?” Potvin [23:02] shares a few anecdotes from her experiences over the years of learning to approach climate science from a more culturally grounded approach, and some of the colonial systemic barriers that students and community members face. 

Adam’s last big question [29:45] asks our guests: “To what extent are you identifying or acknowledging economic empowerment for the communities that you're working with in Panama as a way to conserve and preserve the community's Indigenous lifestyles and knowledge?” Potvin discusses [33:37] the need to “find a number of different economical pathways for women, for men, for youth, for elders that will allow them to live a decent life.” Joe brings the reality of “using resources from outside of the community, but also thinking about how to do that in a way that's circular and self-directed.” They both offer examples of projects from recent years.  

Wrapping up, Cory and Adam share some takeaways and use the final moments to congratulate (and challenge) Potvin’s upcoming retirement. To which she responds, and we wanted to quote at length…

“You know, in ecology, when a tree falls, that's where the diversity of a forest gets recreated, right? Because there's all these new trees that will take the space of the old big tree, because the old big tree sucks up a lot of resources. And when it disappears, it creates opportunity for new trees, more adapted to the new reality to grow. So I think I see retirement that way, it's supporting and creating opportunities to go further than where I've been.”

 Thank you both for sharing your work with us, and congratulations Dr. Potvin on your retirement!.

You can subscribe to our podcast on most major podcast distribution platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Action Research Podcast, created by Adam Stieglitz, Joe Levitan, Shikha Diwakar, Cory Legassic, and Vanessa Gold. 

How have you found yourself in the world of action research? Want to be interviewed or share one of your projects? Get in touch with us. 

Biographies

Dr. Catherine Potvin is a tropical forest ecologist and professor at McGill University in the Department of Biology. Her scientific research studies climate change, carbon cycling, and biodiversity in tropical rainforests with an additional focus on community empowerment and climate change policy. She was the first woman to receive the Miroslaw Romanowski Medal from the Royal Society of Canada, in recognition of her "significant contributions to the resolution of scientific aspects of environmental problems". In addition to her scientific research, she works on sustainable development with indigenous communities in Panama and on policy as a former UN climate change negotiator for Panama and leads climate change initiatives in Canada.

Dr. Joseph Levitan is an associate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. His work focuses on community-based participatory methodologies to address community-defined challenges in education and development. Sitting at the intersection of policy and leadership studies, his work focuses on developing processes and evaluating impacts of collaborative work with youth, adults, and community leaders. Dr. Levitan works with communities throughout the Americas to identify context-specific challenges, culturally grounded methods to address those challenges, and processes to put those methods into action. Through this work he has co-developed methods such as the Student Voice Research Framework, Culturally Grounded Curriculum Development, and Accidental Ethnography.  He currently holds multiple grants to engage in this work in Peru, Canada, Panama and the United States.