Q and A with Euan Gray

Growing up, Euan Gray dreamt of being a marine biologist, today, Gray is a second-year student enrolled in the Environmental Science program at the University of Calgary. Gray aims to keep his options open for the many opportunities his program creates. Gray sat down with the press to discuss the daily impact Canadians have on the environment, his career goals, and the horrors of climate change.

Press: In a world full of business, communication and finance majors, environmental

science really sticks out. What led you to this major?

Ever since I was a kid, I was interested in animals and nature and stuff like that. My first interest was marine biology, so more focused, more related to animals. I decided to do environmental science, because it's more broad, helping the environment in general. It's a growing industry, especially moving forward.

Press: What type of career opportunities come from an environmental science degree?

Oil and gas companies in places like Alberta need environmental scientists to analyze the impact they're having on the environment. If there's a construction project, they need environmental scientists to analyze how they're gonna affect the environment.

Press: Who has inspired you to pursue this career?

Growing up watching different earth documentaries, BBCs, things like that, I've grown to admire some of those people. People like Steve Irwin, who wasn't an environmental scientist, but just interested in the natural world.

Press: How does the want to preserve the world you were able to experience for future generations have an impact on your career choice?

It's not quite as high paying as some other jobs, but it's certainly something that I want to do. I'm so passionate about it, I want to work towards protecting nature for future generations.

Press: What can the average Canadian do daily to reduce our carbon footprint?

The Calgarian transit system is run mostly off of wind turbine kind of power, so that's definitely a sustainable way of getting to work or getting to school. If you can afford it, getting solar panels, Alberta is not always the most friendly towards that, but the City of Calgary is doing rebates, so you can get solar panels and then sell off some of your energy to the grid.

Press: Most news outlets highlight the negative effects of climate change, and some
even dedicate themselves to proving it doesn't exist. Among all this outside noise how
do you keep hope that humans will be able to reverse the effects of climate change?

In 2009 a meeting was held in Copenhagen to try and come up with a global solution for climate change. It was a complete failure, they weren't able to do anything. In 2016 a similar conference, The Paris Agreement, was held. Every country agreed to the agreement. After that, the United States had three straight years where the economy was growing by about 1.8% annually and their emissions were actually dropping. In general, people are getting more educated and starting to realize how big of an issue it is.

Forest fires have been a major news topic throughout the 2020s so far. Why are we
seeing the spike in fires in Western Canada?

Climate change is definitely a big thing, it doesn't just mean that the overall temperature is
getting hotter, It also means that there's a lot of irregular weather patterns. We have drier
summers and less snowfall in the winter. It's going to be easier for the fires to grow, because there's not as much of a barricade without that moisture in the soil.

Companies like Amazon, Shein and Temu sell and deliver very low priced items. How has
this ability to have a plethora of goods delivered right to your doorstep impacted
Canadian landfills?

It’s often cheap products that you're not using, and you end up throwing them out, leading to increased amounts in landfills. Shein, H & M, companies like that, sell stuff for cheap because they have such cheap, outsourced labor from other countries. Cheaper clothing contain higher amounts of microplastics. They're not able to remove those from clothing. 

Edited for clarity and length