Peter Meincke

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Slide - 50 Years, 50 Voices - Peter Meincke - 00:00
Hi, I'm Peter Meincke. I am the second, or was, the second president of the
University of Prince Edward Island, from 1978 to 1985, and I stayed on to
teach there ’til I retired in 2001. 


Slide - Prince Edward Island and the Energy Crisis - 00:20 
Prince Edward Island at the time was very much in the leadership, I had
travelled right around the world during the last energy crisis looking up
various what countries and jurisdictions were doing and interestingly
enough at that time, Prince Edward Island was very much in the leadership
at least conceptually, in dealing with these problems, so when they were,
when I was offered the presidency, I left the University of Toronto and
moved down to Prince Edward Island to help them out in all of that.


Slide - Atlantic Veterinary College & The institute of Island Studies -
01:00 
At the time when we were trying to get the Veterinary College started, and
there was a lot of opposition from Nova Scotia in particular, and Reg
Thomson came to help with the planning of the Veterinary College and he and
I went around to all of the governments, we briefed seven changes in
government, about the need for the Veterinary College and its location in
Prince Edward Island. It was a major, major effort and eventually, after
many years, Nova Scotia decided to support it and I also feel very much
associated with the Institute of Island Studies, which there was a
committee that made a recommendation, and one of the very last things that
I was able to do was to start this Institute in UPEI. It was interesting
because UPEI had no Institutes at that time, and so this was a new thing,
and very, very different from most Institutes, so that was a major, major
thing that with which I was associated with or feel very proud that I was
able to help.


Slide - Strong views for UPEI - 02:29 
Interestingly enough was trying to reconcile the very different views of
what UPEI should be. There were many faculty who felt very strongly that it
should simply be a small, undergraduate institution and there was
opposition to many of the developments that led to the graduate school, and
so on that came in after but it was what UPEI should be, that was one of
the greatest challenges.


Slide - Climate change and existing technologies - 03:25 
At that time, climate change wasn't a big issue, but it's become a big
issue and I'm delighted to hear of all of the initiatives that are taking
place and trying to deal with that and show how things are going. One of
the things I've been doing lately is developing a, I've given this paper
several times now describing a small island, which I've called Walden
2...Walden 4, sorry Walden 4, which has used existing technologies not
technologies that are on the drawing boards, but they're technologies that
are operating somewhere, and are actually still in development and so on
and some of these are, for example the business of using coastal defenses
to use, to achieve, to get power out of wave motion or tidal motion; and
also the whole idea of using 3D printing to, you have, you can cut to a
stage where the small islands or small nations or whatever you want to call
them, trade in information and know how and are able to produce things
locally and what’s going on in 3D printing is flexible manufacturing but
it allows a move to a circular economy where rather than using goods,
mining the resource, transforming it into goods, and then throwing it away;
we’re finally discovering we can’t do that we’ve got to be able to
take the stuff as [unknown] at the end and recycle it’s just a much, much
larger effort to convert this back into useful goods, it’s not just the
recycling that we have now but a major evolution of that.


Slide - What is a Small Island - 05:53  
The United Nations spent many, many dollars and lots and lots of time and
experts trying to define, what is meant by, what is a small island and one
of the very, very first conferences I attended on small islands developing
states, who should attend by video Castro from Cuba, which is a relatively
large island and then there was an interesting group called the North
Islands Small Islands Program and Newfoudland wanted the word ‘small’
removed and it became the North Atlantic Islands Program. So after looking
at all of this, I came to the conclusion that an island is small if it
thinks it is and one of the things I learned about is the psychology of
Islanders, it can be very, very influential on where the Island goes and
how it develops etc. If I may just refer to a current thing on the CBC
that’s called, it’s a program where this young man is visiting small
towns all over Canada and it’s absolutely fantastic how he draws out what
is going on in that small town, what is driving it, what, and the
determination of the citizens to continue and exist there. The question is
how, what is the best way? And I think that’s where the greatest
challenge is, is getting people to work together to make that path the best
one possible, and that’s what I saw, I mean the examples are really the
key way to do that, I think, I think people are willing to learn, small
islands are willing to learn from one another, that’s what the whole
program we started at UPEI called The Small Islands Information Network,
which was to share information electronically about what worked and if you
can get that sharing of the information, hopefully that will be a way of
finding these paths.


Slide - Final Thoughts - 09:11
In general growth the increase in the number of students because one always
looks at, I became very interested in this question of how, what is the
right size, in fact I wrote a major paper on that before I went to UPEI and
trying to find, keep the sense of community in the University as it grows,
at Arendale College I saw that and it changes dramatically as soon as you
go passed certain numbers and I think at UPEI, I was able to keep that
sense of community and then the addition of so many different buildings
etc, facilities, it was good to see it grow but lately too, and not just
lately but over the years, the increase number of forgein students, every
university in Canada is competing for forgein students and UPEI is doing
extremely well in that, which I think is a wonderful thing but it all, I
guess, it all comes down to my belief, very strong belief still, that small
island like Prince Edward Island has an enormous amount to teach the rest
of the world and how to live sustainably and deal with climate change and
the developments of UPEI and dealing with climate change and the
Sustainable Engineering Faculty, I think have been tremendous additions.