Ocean Futures Lab w/Global Shapers Edmonton Hub
What Does a Landlocked City Owe the Water?
On June 30th, ECHOFORM partnered with the Global Shapers Edmonton Hub to host Ocean Futures Lab, a free community paint night at Edmonton Public Library’s Stanley Milner, held as part of Ocean Week Canada. Edmonton is about as far from an ocean as a Canadian city can get, close to a thousand kilometres from the nearest coastline in any direction, so the first question the event had to answer for people walking in the door was a fair one: why does an inland city need an ocean event at all.
Before we got anywhere near that question, though, we opened, as ECHOFORM tries to do with everything, by naming the land.
Global Shapers Edmonton acknowledged that the hub operates in Treaty 6 territory, home to the Nêhiyaw, Dené, Anishinaabe, Nakota Isga, and Niitsitapi peoples, the Métis, and one of the largest Inuit communities south of the 60th parallel.
ECHOFORM’s own acknowledgment sits alongside that, a reminder that even our digital spaces rest on land with a history we are accountable to, not just the room we happened to be standing in that night.
With that grounding in place, the panel took on the actual question of the evening.
Titled “Water, Climate and Connection”, it made the Edmonton-to-ocean link concrete. Jenet Dooley, a wetland ecologist with more than 15 years of experience and seven of those years at the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute, talked about the quiet complexity of Alberta’s wetlands and how much of ocean health actually starts inland, in the biotic and abiotic relationships most people never think to look for, the kind of ecosystem drama that unfolds in total silence a few feet under a marsh.
Alongside her, Amy Charles, a Métis Indigenous Knowledge and Relations Specialist at Ocean Wise, brought a relational lens grounded in reciprocity and story, work she also carries through her nonprofit leadership with the Calgary Queer Arts Society and the Canadian Network for Ocean Education.
Rounding out the panel, Nicholas Menon, Supervisor of Cost Estimating at Enbridge and a P.Eng. with over a decade in infrastructure and energy transition work, connected the dots between large-scale industrial decisions and ecological risk, drawing on his volunteer work installing solar grids in Peru and his current role helping guide the Homestead Investment Co-operative’s purchase of the Alberta Block downtown.
Three very different careers, all circling the same fact: oceans absorb roughly 90 percent of the planet’s excess heat and about a quarter of human CO2 emissions, and Edmonton’s river valley and watersheds connect this landlocked city to the Arctic and the Atlantic whether we think about it day to day or not.
Somewhere in that room, a wetland ecologist, a Métis knowledge keeper, and an engineer in energy transition all agreed on the same math, which is not something you see every day <3
Before the panel opened up into conversation, we set a community learning agreement, the kind of thing that sounds like formality until you watch it actually do its job:
Passing or listening only was always fine.
Speak from your own experience, not assumptions about someone else’s.
Leave room for different relationships to water.
Step forward when you have something to contribute, step back so someone else can.
Respond to other people’s creative work with curiosity, not critique.
Keep personal stories in the room unless you have permission to carry them further, and
Ask before photographing anyone’s art.
With that agreement in place, we moved into the part people actually came for: paint, write, or reflect, whichever medium felt right, following your own relationship to water.
We called it Love Letters to Water, and the room genuinely did turn quiet in that focused, brush-in-hand way, punctuated only by the occasional laugh at someone’s very confident, very abstract lake. People left their pieces at a collection table, and from there the project has a real afterlife. Selected work is being published digitally, some of it will be part of a community zine for World Ocean Day and Week, and everything gets folded into ECHOFORM’s October showcase. Everyone who participated left with a virtual certificate that night too.
And, none of it would have come together without the people behind the scenes. Thank you.
Food came from UNIQ Pizza and Dil E Punjab Sweets and Restaurant, which meant the room smelled like two entirely different continents at once, and honestly it worked.
Stay tuned! Photo credits and link to event pictures coming soon.
This whole event was made possible through the generous support of ECOP Canada, the UN Ocean Decade and the SOI Foundation, with support from the Howl Experience, Righting Relations, Women and Gender Equality Canada and Ocean Week Canada.