ArtsPositive

Interview: Alejandro Frid, Conservationist

Alejandro Frid is a Science Coordinator/Ecologist at Central Coast Indigenous Resource Alliance. He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria, School of Environmental Studies in Canada. In this interview with artist Debasmita Dasgupta, executive director of ArtsPositive, Alejandro tells us about his journey as a conservationist and shares details from his existing and upcoming books.

What inspired you to become a conservationist? Was there a turning point or an interesting back story?

I was inspired to become a conservationist by being in direct contact with the beauty of the natural world. After experiencing with all my senses the atmosphere of an old-growth forest, rainforest, a fish school, caribou on the open tundra, there was no turning back.

Tell us a bit about your book "A World For My Daughter". How did you come up with that idea?

The book came to be because I had been dwelling in all the damage humans have inflicted on our planet, and I was feeling rather negative about the future. When my daughter was born, I realized that negativity and pessimism (nihilism, really) was no way to raise a child. So I gave myself a dual task: to be scientifically realistic about all the difficult changes that are here to stay, while staying humanly optimistic about the better things that we still have. A World For My Daughter" documents that process through personal experience, scientific research and much love.

Is there any other exciting project / book that you are currently working on? Is there a way our readers can support your work / campaign?

My next book, "Changing Tides: An Ecologist's Journey to Make Peace with the Anthropocene", will be published by New Society Publishers in the fall of 2019. In that book, through a blend of personal experience (including my own scientific research) and the voices of the Indigenous peoples that I work with, I argue that a merger of scientific perspectives and Indigenous knowledge might just help us change the story we tell ourselves of who we are and who we can be, and steer us towards a more benign Anthropocene.


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