university of alberta

Paleontology and Wildness as Heritage Performance in the Burgess Shale

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips
Hikers walking up to the Mount Stephen Trilobite Beds in Yoho (illustration by Chris Chang-Yen Phillips).

This is an academic presentation about my masters research, delivered at the AMPS Prague – Heritages conference on June 29, 2023.

High in the Rocky Mountains of Canada’s Yoho National Park, the Burgess Shale fossil beds demonstrate dilemmas presented by fossil-rich World Heritage Sites. Designated in 1980, the Burgess Shale bears remains of 500-million-year-old marine organisms that science writer Stephen Jay Gould (1990) once called “the world’s most important animal fossils.” While it was later absorbed into the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks site, the designation continues to reverberate. It increased the importance of the Burgess Shale’s “discovery” in 1909 as part of regional identity and mythmaking in the Rocky Mountain parks. It also increased fossil theft and led to tighter Parks Canada access restrictions.

If, as Phillip and April Vannini (2021) argue, wildness is not an innate property but “an emergent outcome of activity, of performance, of inhabitation,” then wildness here seems to be a performance of scientific research, and tightly regulated interpretive hikes.

In this paper I will show that like other “natural” heritage sites in Canada (such as Joggins and Dinosaur Provincial Park), the Burgess Shale’s heritage value equally springs from past research conducted at the site, and ongoing reverence by those who hike up to seek physical contact with the deep past. As Patrick Boylan (2008) has noted, few sites have been designated for their geological importance alone, and fewer still for the richness of their fossils. I will argue that World Heritage designation can expose the relative power of interest groups making claims on fossil sites.

This presentation includes elements from my thesis research, being conducted at the University of Alberta under the supervision of Dr. Liza Piper.

To the end, my dear

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips

Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee stands in front of a white board with her hands raised like she's trying to push the crowd into action.
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Leymah Gbowee confided that Archbishop Desmond Tutu warned her to watch her words carefully after winning, since they’d instantly be published on the internet (Photo by Alissa Everett)

Last night, my friend Evan and I had the pleasure of seeing Nobel Peace Prize winners Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman speak at the University of Alberta’s Festival of Ideas. Gbowee is famous for her work leading a women’s movement that helped end the civil war in Liberia, but she’s based in Ghana these days. The first thing she said on stage was that she was thankful to the organizers for coordinating a trip that was as long and complicated “as going to space.”

Karman is renowned now for her work rallying Yemenis out on the streets to fight for their right to free expression, free speech, and to eventually to end the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. As a journalist, activist, and mother of three she’s taken extraordinary risks to fight for civil rights in Yemen. She said even after the lives of her children were threatened, she took courage knowing that millions more youths would take to the streets if they were harmed. Incredible change is possible, she said, if you are willing to take on a cause and pursue it to the very end. Have a goal in mind, and make a path towards it.

Moreover, she said women need to take on the responsibility for finding a just place for themselves in Yemeni society.

“Women must be the leaders, not ask for leadership from anyone,” she said. “We don’t want gifts from anyone. We want what we deserve.”

Similarly, Gbowee’s life seems to be a story of recognizing a responsibility to step up to the plate when no one else can. After 2000, ten years after the Liberian civil war began, a movement of Christian and Muslim women was building around the country to call for peace. She had convinced many of them that this was their fight, and they wanted her to lead them. Gbowee said she must have quit fifty times, and each time she’d find 200 hundred women waiting outside her house, telling her it was time to go back to work.

It makes me wonder — how seriously do most of us take the idea that we’re the ones who need to step up to the plate to solve our big crises, and we must follow our work to the very end? That, as the Hopi poem (or maybe prophecy) goes, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”?

I have an uncomfortable sense that many of us engaged in environmental and social justice work find our milestones more in our efforts than our accomplishments.

Orbinski: Refuse government funding being used to quell dissent

| Chris Chang-Yen Phillips

James Orbinski looks into the camera at a conference table in the Jubilee Auditorium
Dr James Orbinski spoke at the Jubilee Auditorium on June 13, 2012.

Last week, I had a chance to interview Dr James Orbinski for The CJSR Edition, our freshly-minted local news show. The former international head of Médecins Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Borders was at the University of Alberta to accept an honourary degree. I met a few folks who saw his convocation speech, and they seemed kind of shell-shocked at how persuasively he had convinced them to do the hard thing and take some responsibility to make things better.

What struck me when we spoke was this comment about whether vocal civil society groups should risk taking federal funding or charitable status these days:

“The most important and powerful tool that any citizen has is his or her voice. The free and public expression using that voice is very much in my view a duty and a responsibility of citizenship. And if government — in this particular case, the Harper government — chooses to use tools of government, funding for example, in an effort to quell expression, and voice, and public engagement and public criticism, then citizens and citizen organizations should just simply refuse that funding.”

You can listen to the full interview below.