It doesn’t matter whether it's collecting monkey poop in the Belizean rainforests or hitch-hiking rides on the back of trucks in Peru, Caillie wants to do it all. Born in Scotland to parents prone to wanderlust, she immigrated to Canada at a young age where she was given free rein to pursue everything and go anywhere to do it. Having had a healthy dose of millennial guilt instilled since the age she could read “save the whales”, she became increasingly interested in animal rights, conservation and environmental justice. Under this weight of climate change, extinction, and deforestation, she found herself becoming more and more despondent about the state of the world. Discouraged by the negative messaging, she opted to move away from the conservation sector to the sustainability sector where, luckily, she found innovative people from all disciplines and backgrounds coming together to solve the world’s crises in a positive, progressive way. The search for solutions has taken Caillie from Canada to the United States, Central and South America, and Europe, and she’s nowhere near finished. Having recently graduated, her greatest interests are around food security and sustainable food production. She can easily be won over with a cheese platter.
She works and researches at the University of Calgary, where she spends most of her time in her dream office (inside of a library!). She currently holds her BSc. (H) in Anthropology, with a concentration in Primatology, and is looking to enter graduate studies focusing on sustainability and environments. Her current research is with the Department of Communications and Culture looking at the validity of “green certification” claims and developing case studies for efficient, credible sustainability reporting frameworks.
When she doesn’t have her nose to the grindstone at the day job, she is normally volunteering, traipsing around the city, gardening in the community, penning poems of the teenage angst variety, or frolicking with her three cats. True to her Scottish roots, she also plays tenor drum with the Rocky Mountain Pipe Band. While she wishes she was a sloth, she was kindly told that she does not look like a sloth.