Eco-talker’s Featured Communicator is Dr. Mark Terry.
Ecotalkers’ featured speaker, Mark Terry, Ph.D., is a member of the Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He teaches at York University, Glendon College in Toronto, Ryerson University in Toronto as well as Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. He also is an Associate Chair at UNESCO in Reinoriented Education for Sustainability in 2020.
He is comfortable in front of both academics and children, world leaders, and environmentalists. He has presented talks at dozens of conferences all over the world. He has been addressing world leaders and delegates in conjunction with the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Congress since 2008 when at COP 15 he screened his film The Antarctica Challenge – A Global Warning followed by The Polar Explorer at COP 16 in 2010. That year he was able to sit down with policymakers to draft new policies on subjects such as rising sea levels.
Continuing his work with UNEP, Dr. Terry created a GIS map pinning juried videos created by students 19 to 30 years old that focus on environmental issues in their part of the world. This ongoing project is known as The Youth Climate Report. Using the project and using video and GIS to communicate with policymakers as the basis for his doctorial thesis, Dr. Terry went on to author the critically-acclaimed book called The Geo-Doc: Geomedia, Documentary Film, and Social Change, published by Palgrave Macmillan in February 2020.
He is an experienced communicator on many subjects (climate change, polar regions, documentary film theory, commercial theatre, exploration, and Hollywood musicals), speaking at many conferences on a variety of topics. Having worked in the entertainment industry before returning to school in 2014 to get his Master’s and Ph.D. Dr. Terry has had the opportunity to write and narrate several projects for film and television.
Students love his way of communicating and have recently nominated him for Professor of the Year at York University. He combines a facility with academic terms mixed with language that best reaches his targeted audience and makes complex thoughts easy to comprehend.
Dr. Terry lectures on climate change, the polar regions, his experiences with the United Nations developing International environmental policy as well as a variety of academic subjects such as documentary film and theory, eco-cinema, and even the Hollywood Musical.