Off today to Sackville, New Brunswick (on the Bay of Fundy!) to participate in this year’s Mansbridge Summit. Chaired by CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge, who is also the chancellor of Mt. Allison University, the summit helps students develop skills for tackling complex policy issues. At the end of the exercise they produce panel briefings.

This year’s topic is freshwater, ethics and Canada’s response to water crises. The scenario the students will respond to is fictional, though I’m sure that line will be blurred as the great students at Mt. Allison students do their research. Tony Maas, Bonita Croft and I will work with the students during the day before sitting on a panel discussion tomorrow night.

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs): Water has published its first issue. Here is the table of contents. There are some interesting articles by several well known folks in the water world.

Here are the “aims and scope” of the journal.

“The scope of WIREs Water is at the interfaces between five very different intellectual themes: the basic science of water, its physics and chemistry, flux, and things that it transfers and transforms; life in water, and the dependence of ecosystems and organisms on water to survive and to thrive; the engineering of water to furnish services and to protect society; the people who live with, experience and manage the water environment; and those interpretations that we, as a society, have brought to water through art, religion, history and which in turn shapes how we come to understand it. These interfaces are not simply designed to be ways of looking at water through what necessarily must be interdisciplinary perspectives. They are also designed to be outward facing in terms of how water can help to understand wider questions concerning our environment and human-environment interactions.”