Interview with Dr. Maria Guttierez, 11/20/14

Dr. Maria Guttierez.

Today we met with climate change expert Maria Guttierez. Unfortunately, one member of our group, Kiyomi, could not attend this interview. Dr. Guttierez had a lot of insight into the topics she was asked about, and was also very friendly. Kai and I walked to her house, just a few blocks from our school, and arrived twenty minutes early. Luckily, she was home and welcomed us into her kitchen, where we sat down for the interview. She had kindly prepared some websites beforehand that she emailed to us later on. These websites were of different organizations we might be able to collaborate with, and groups that conducted valuable research relating to our issues. We will be sure to look into these opportunities as our next step towards global change. After she had showed us the many websites, we asked her some pre-prepared questions about her experiences of working with climate change, and about her thoughts about the world issues of overfishing, water pollution, and coral reef bleaching and destruction.

One point that she thoughtfully illustrated was how these issues are humanitarian issues in that the issues have harsher effects on poorer people than on richer people. One thing that she described was that a poorer person can’t build as strong of a protection, such as a house, as a richer person can, so they are more prone and exposed to the effects of the issue. Also, some people have more access to clean water than others in their daily lives. These are human rights issues because, although these issues do affect everyone, they affect some groups of people and places much more than others.

I learned that, in order to resolve the crisis in our ocean, we need to approach the issues from many different angles. Dr. Guttierez described our ocean as being in a total crisis of many different interconnected issues that form a kind of intricately jumbled puzzle. She taught us that one of the reasons that our ocean’s crisis is so complex is because each individual issue is not present because of one singular cause. Each issue exists because of many different factors, and there is not a simple “cause and effect”. Instead, there are many issues that are closely linked and are present because of each other and because of many other factors. In order to resolve these many issues, we need to recognize and eliminate the even more numerous factors, and from all different angles.

Thank you, Dr. Maria Guttierez, for all of your help, your friendliness and interesting analysis.