This blog began with a sabbatical year I spent in France with my family in 2019-2020. My partner, our two teenagers and I spent that year in the town of Sète, near Montpellier (see My transition town for more). For me, it was an opportunity to take my foot off the accelerator of intense, action-focused work and hectic urban life and smell the flowers, deepening connections to the natural world, to family, to new friends in a new place. A year of resourcing, discovery, learning and reflection. It was a parenthesis to regular life — but in italics and bold.
Never intended as a travel blog, Vu d’ici (‘seen from here’) was created as more of a learning log to ground and share reflections on issues that I’m passionate about. These include personal and societal transformation, ecology and climate change, narratives and polarization.
Back in Montreal, I decided to continue the blog, on the understanding that learning is lifelong. The view that I see from now is centred around the brick triplexes and spiral staircases of the Plateau, in an island-city that sits on the traditional and unceded territory of the Kanien’keha:ka (Mohawk), a place which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst nations.
As Chomsky says, language structures reality, and the languages we communicate in are integral to their message. Thanks to the magic of Linguee, DeepL, with serious editing support from Malek, I am trying the site bilingual in French and English. I believe that truly seeing a place means speaking, thinking, even dreaming the languages of its people. The views expressed here are my own and don’t necessarily represent the positions of any organization I’m affiliated with.
I was born in Michigan, grew up in southwestern Ontario, and have spent most of my adult life in Montreal. I’m a co-founder of Equiterre, now an influential environmental organization in Quebec. I previously coordinated Greenpeace Canada’s oceans campaign, and have also worked for a range of public interest organizations and initiatives in Québec, Brazil and Bénin. I studied liberal arts (BA) and rural economics (MSc) with research focusing on dietary diversity and food security in Lebanon, where I lived for five years. I have been program director at the McConnell Foundation in Montreal for the past nine years, leading work on nourishing and sustainable food systems, energy and climate change. I serve on the board of directors of the Academy for Systems Change and the Maple Leaf Centre for Action on Food Security.