One-On-One With Lia Nicholson

ST. JOHN’S, Antigua, Dec. 07, 2014 – Lia Nicholson, is a Project Coordinator at the Environment Division, Antigua & Barbuda. She has always been interested in the environment, and started at an early age with outdoor adventures along the coasts of Antigua. After starting college in the biology track, Lia soon transitioned from research to an environmental policy major with a focus on applied studies. Environmental management is, after all, about managing people and behaviors. In 2012, Lia enrolled in a Masters programme at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, where she studied the effects of climate change, focusing on impacts to coastal zones, with a view to applying this knowledge in the Caribbean. After graduating in May 2014, Lia returned to Antigua & Barbuda as a Gruber Fellow in Global Justice and Women’s Rights, to put theory to practice. Partnering with the Environment Division, the objective of the collaboration is to restore the ecological functioning of ghut (seasonal watercourse) drainage, to reduce the risks of severe flooding in low-income communities – where many people do not have funds to build proper housing, buy insurance, or recover from repeated destruction.

1. What do you love most about the Caribbean? I love the ocean. Learning to free dive brought this love affair to a new level; I can spend all day exploring the coral reefs and deep waters. I was given an underwater camera, which has pushed me to go further, trying to get the perfect shot of a flamingo tongue snail or a banded coral shrimp. I try to teach young kids to swim as much as possible, as I regret that many Antiguans & Barbudans do not venture into our waters, for which people travel to from all over the world. After all, we do have about 90 times more ocean territory than we have land, so there is a lot to explore.

2. What brings you the greatest joy? When I meet enthusiastic young people, I get excited about the future. The environment can be a tough field, because you are trained to look at the negative impacts of our actions, and then convince people why and how we should change. In November, I took the Potters Youth Group up Middle Ground trail in the Nelson’s Dockyard National Park, to demonstrate coastal erosion. I was worried that it would be hard to keep the group interested, but the teenagers were asking great questions, like why the soil was darker on top, which showed they were inquisitive and observing the land.

3. What is the best advice you’ve been given? “Learn to love to learn”, which is a philosophy that my mother raised me with and has helped me follow my passion.

4. What is on your bookshelf? My bookshelf is eclectic. I have language-learning books in Spanish, French and Swahili – I love languages. I also see Caribbean history as a very important subject, and I’m reading Eric William’s “From Colombus to Castro”. As for novels, I like magical realism, having recently finished “1Q84” by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

5. What charity do you support? The St. Paul’s Crisis Intervention Group, which is a local charity that helps people in trouble in the community – members whose houses burn down, families with health challenges, and in storm recovery efforts.

6. What is on your bucket list? One day I would like to write a social media post that goes ‘viral’, such as on twitter, but it has to have social/environmental content. My most popular to date has just 53 retweets, and features the September 2014 Climate March in New York, so I have a way to go yet. I see great potential in social media for attracting attention, especially among the youth, to the environment, but I am amazed at some of the content that ends up at the top of the ranks. This is true for technology in general – there is great potential, but it depends on how we use it to achieve our ends, so this is a bucket-list challenge.

7. What is on your perennial to-do list? Raise funds for the Environmental Awareness Group (EAG), a local non-profit that was founded over 25 years ago. The EAG was my first real job out of college in 2009, when I was hired as executive director. I learned many skills during my year in this position – financial audits, how to tag racer snakes with microchips, grant writing. I want to support the organisation’s growth so it can provide opportunities to young, aspiring environmentalists, and also to be more effective in the work it does. Fundraising a significant sum is easier said than done, however, so it’s still on my perennial to-do list.

9. Who are your Caribbean heroes? I’m proud of our contemporary Caribbean literary stars, Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott and V. S. Naipaul, who shed light with honest portrayals on Caribbean culture in all its dimensions. Their works have captured the imaginations of the international community, who may otherwise think of these islands as simply sun, sea and sand. Mr. Biswas’ challenges in post-colonial Trinidad and Kincaid’s insider-outsider narrative of Antiguan family life are just some examples of their many rich insights.

10. Who is on the guest list for your ideal dinner party? Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s Prime Minister and ‘founding father’, would be one dinner guest. I’d like to hear his view on how he raised Singapore’s GDP per capita from 2,500 USD in 1960 to an astonishing 55,000 USD in 2013. The island is small, just 277 square miles, and is still considered a small island developing state by the United Nations, even though its GDP per capita is higher than the United States, which shows how quickly this transition occurred. There are lessons to be learned from Singapore’s development for other small islands, especially with respect to urban planning, transportation, pollution control, waste management, and so on.

11. What quote do you live by? “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” a quote by Ghandi. I also like this quote by Marilyn Monroe, “Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together,” for challenging days that may not go as planned.

12. What is one thing people would be surprised to know about you? People would be surprised to know that I briefly worked on the set of the Hobbit in New Zealand’s film studios. I left the studios to get my Master’s degree, but if I had stayed a little longer, I would have tried out to be an extra for the Elves of Middle Earth. Given this, it may also surprise people that neither my family nor I have owned a TV. Although I miss out on many pop-culture references, I am grateful to my parents for making this decision, because now I don’t know how I would find the time in a day to watch TV.

13. What is one thing you wish you knew when you were younger? I wish I knew to learn from my elders at a younger age. My grandfather passed away when I was 17, and starting to really appreciate his wealth of knowledge. Desmond Nicholson was a well-regarded archeologist and educator. When I was a kid and he called me over to his computer, I would plan my exit strategy before he even started lecturing me on the databases he was creating or the artifacts he had found. Now I find myself living vicariously through the stories that other people recount, reading his books, and wondering what he would know about a particular question I am trying to answer.

14. What would you want to say to the Caribbean about any one of these: Agriculture, Arts & Culture, Climate Change, HIV/AIDS, Tourism? Climate change is an interesting and complex challenge. Although a long-term problem, climate change makes it urgent that we adapt our short-term actions to address the major environmental and social issues of today, and in this way is an opportunity to improve lives, here and now. ‘Mitigation’ looks at how we can address the source of the problem, in this case carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases. Burning cleaner fuels, for example, can improve air quality and health. About half of our emissions in Antigua & Barbuda come from the transport sector, mostly single-person vehicles, so we need to look at why we are spending so much time driving. Studies also show that in car-dependent cultures, health problems like obesity and respiratory illnesses are more probable. Solving this problem, the national zoning plan restricts sub-divisions to designated ‘settlement’ areas, to encourage people to live in communities where basic needs are more accessible via walking distance or a short drive. Designated development areas also make services like electricity and water cheaper and more reliable for the government to provide. This is an example of win-win climate solutions, where we benefit in the short and long term.

15. Any final words? Since we are talking to a regional audience, I would like to close by underscoring the need to strengthen regional connections, and to continue expanding and integrating our interests, especially when it comes to resource management. And by ‘region’, I mean the entire Caribbean, irrelevant of whether we are talking about a member of CARICOM, OECS, what language is spoken, and so on. As independent/English/French/Dutch/Spanish-speaking islands – some of which aren’t even islands (Belize, Guyana, Suriname) – we are facing the same problems, with limited financial resources, scare land, growing populations, high debt, high import costs, food and energy insecurity, and changing weather patterns. I won’t go into the problems that we are all familiar with. However, at the same time, Caribbean people and ecosystems are very resilient and we are creative when it comes to finding solutions under tough conditions. There are great success stories in each country, and sharing these examples will help us learn faster and adapt quicker as unexpected – or expected – challenges crop up.