He’s been a whitewater kayak guide, a forestry firefighter, and has scaled glaciers.
PhD student Jeremy Schmidt has been awarded a 2009 Trudeau Scholarship to assist in his research into water policy, in particular surrounding his home province of Alberta.
Jeremy Schmidt has an affinity with water.
As a PhD student (Geography), Schmidt is continuing his attraction to everything water, seeking to inspire an appreciation of, and obligation to, water and the many values and world views concerning our shared, mutual dependence on it.
Ironically, raised on the dry prairies of Alberta, Schmidt’s current research on ethical enigmas in modern water policy has been buoyed by a Trudeau Scholarship, valued at $60,000 per year for three years – with an opportunity for a fourth year.
Only 15 such scholarships are awarded each year so Schmidt is well aware of the significance of being recognized as an “emerging talent” in his field.
“It’s an awesome feeling,” say Schmidt, whose doctoral work responds to the recent calls of global experts who argue the growing water crisis is rooted in a failure to connect water policy and management to ethics.
“We’ve inherited a lot of policies that were designed for different times,” he says, noting in Western Canada, the water policy that prevails was inherited from an era when the main goal was to settle the west.
“The goal was to get people out there and to do that you wanted to guarantee they had water. Now there’s a lot more people and a lot more demand. It’s another matter now to reform the policies while respecting the types of obligations you now created.
To this end, he conceptualizes a new ethic for water by uniting three domains: political economy, environmental management and ethics. His research represents some of the first empirical work on ethics and water policy in Alberta.
The more theoretical parts of his work are trying to reconnect ethics to policy in general, which is best done through shared decision-making, he says.
“When you have communities making the decisions, they tend to find shared values and things that will work for them,” says Schmidt, national chair of the Canadian Water Resources Association’s Student and Young Professionals organization.
“They may not be ideal for one particular person, but most people will make concessions so that the overall community is better off. And one of the real promises in Alberta is that they’re moving towards community-based decision making for water, as opposed to provincial or carry over from federal decision making.
“While this opens up a lot of opportunities, it also opens more opportunity for conflict over the values, because not everyone agrees with the values that are in the policies we have.”
At present, Schmidt is involved with Canadian water experts and emerging leaders in projects assessing Canadian water education and in developing a national water strategy.
Under the direction of an international advisory board, he is also co-editing a new book on water and ethics, comparing key ethical traditions in water policy, their expression in different area of the globe and their positions on issues such as religion, human rights, common property, privatization, and ethics.
Schmidt feels now is the opportunity to readdress water policies.
“In the policies we have now there are ethical claims embedded in them, so we are already doing ethics in a lot of respects,” he says. “Making that explicit and then connecting what’s already there to where we want to go next is what is a key.”
Financial support from the Trudeau Foundation will give Schmidt the freedom to actively engage himself in his studies, but he admits it goes beyond dollars and cents.
“That whole community (Trudeau Foundation) is absolutely stimulating; very open, very critical, but also very supportive,” he says. “It’s the type of forum that, for young scholars especially I think, you couldn’t ask for much more. It’s an intellectual windfall. There are a lot of shared ideas back and forth. The opportunities for collaboration are many.”