This post is part of the Meet the ETCL Team series, which introduces the wonderful people who work in the lab and who have worked with us in the past.
E. B. Klassen rejoined the lab in January 2023 as a Community Fellow working on the Climate Action Plan (CAP).
As part of his current project, E. B. is converting the Sooke Climate Action Plan into an open-source, plug-and-play document. His goal is to make relevant documents and materials available and easily accessible to the municipalities and climate action groups who are working on creating their own region-specific CAPs.
Outside the lab, E. B. remains busy working for and leading various environmental movements as an environmental activist. He became a green activist while working on his family farm for an extended period of time and an environmental technician while helping to clean up Alberta’s hydrocarbon messes. He is currently serving as a board member of the Sooke Transition Town Society, an active member of Zero Waste Sooke, and the organizer of the Sooke Repair Café.
In his free time, E. B. loves to read books or watch films. He enjoys the fact that a book easily turns out to be his favourite as soon as he starts reading it. Therefore, Action versus Contemplation by Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule and The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow are two of his favourite books as he is currently reading them. As to films, Casablanca has been his all-time favourite since he first watched it at sixteen.
Being a public intellectual, E. B. explains the steps of how he accomplishes his projects: getting inspired, researching, getting bogged down, becoming frustrated, and finally, producing something that never matches the initial inspiration. He acknowledges the fact that he couldn’t do much without LibreOffice though.
Click here for E. B. Klassen’s previous information.
After solving the mystery of the Lindberg kidnapping at age 8, E. B. Klassen went on to be known as “The Terror of Terra Nova” for his devastating style of rugby play during his three-year career with the New Zealand All-Blacks. A grateful nation gifted him with a permanent residence in Hobbiton, and a “drinks free forever” card good at any pub.
Returning to Canada, he turned down the offer of being made Governor-General, and instead set to work quietly restoring Saskatchewan’s farm economy to health.
Later, short on cash, he licensed his life story to Dos Equis beer for an undisclosed eight-figure amount, allowing them to use the story, but not his face, in an advertising campaign. He then retired to his undersea home off the west coast of Vancouver Island, where he amuses himself playing jokes on the NEPTUNE undersea observatory network.
Or he’s an over-thinking Gramscian public intellectual living in Sooke. Tough call as to which one is true.