2009 Trudeau Scholar

jeremy.schmidt@trudeaufoundation.net

Profile

Raised on the dry prairies of Alberta, Jeremy Schmidt seeks to inspire an appreciation of, and obligation to, water in civil society. He enjoys the charged discussions that arise as the plurality of values and worldviews affecting water coalesce around our shared, mutual dependence on it.

Jeremy’s doctoral work responds to the recent calls of global experts who argue that the growing water crisis is rooted in a systematic failure to connect water policy and management to ethics. To this end, he conceptualizes, and makes operational, a new ethic for water by uniting three domains: political economy, environmental management and ethics. Drawing on the pragmatist ideas of Jürgen Habermas and Aldo Leopold, his research represents some of the first empirical work on ethics and water policy in Alberta; a land-locked province where climate change, evolving social values and policy reforms all affect limited water resources.

A former whitewater kayak guide and forestry firefighter, Jeremy’s personal experiences with water inform his work as the national chair of the Canadian Water Resources Association’s Student and Young Professionals organization. At present, he 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, Jeremy is co-editing a new book on water and ethics. The volume compares the main ethical traditions in water policy, their expression in different global locales and their positions on issues such as legal pluralism, religion, human rights, common property, privatization, and ethics in complex systems. It seeks to foster the type of deliberation Jeremy thinks critical: that which connects our ethical heritage to our personal choices regarding water.