Jacob Power
Student Fellow
Jacob Power is an environmental politics student in the Global Resource Systems program at the University of British Columbia. He is interested in using journalism and photography as a development tool, a way to promote self-determination in rural and Indigenous communities, and as way to combat narratives that simplify perceptions of place and culture across colonial boundaries. He spent his summer of 2022 in the Chocó Andino Bioregion of rural Ecuador conducting community-based research on conservation and its impact on rural identity. With Maquipucuna, an Ecuadorian conservation NGO, he also helped design a business model using NFTs as images of local endemic and endangered species to raise funds for conservation and aid in post-pandemic financial recovery. In addition to being a student, he is continuing his conservation work from Vancouver with Maquipucuna by assisting in the design of financial and community outreach tools to aid in forest protection. Through the Climate and Nature Emergency fellowship, he hopes to gain more experience in community-centered climate storytelling.
Primary Recipient Awards
The Wall Catalyst Student Fellow cohort will first come together to engage in the online, interdisciplinary Facing Human Wrongs course and subsequently work together on a number of public-facing projects.
The course content touches upon systemic, historical and ongoing violence, unsustainability, our complicities in social and ecological harm, and our tendency to address complex problems, such as biodiversity loss, food insecurity, economic and political crises, and the potential for social and environmental collapse, with simplistic solutions. The course requires students to be willing to be uncomfortable and to have their perspective challenged.
