There’s something quite special about opening a new season of Coffee & Geography with a guest who shifts the way you think about a topic you thought you understood. My conversation with Gadfly Stratton, an environmental researcher based in Ontario, did exactly that. I expected to talk about invasive species, and we certainly did; but what I wasn’t expecting was how effortlessly this would unfold into a deeper reflection on community, identity, belonging, and who gets to participate in science in the first place.
That, in many ways, is what I love most about this podcast: you begin thinking you’re talking about ecology, and suddenly you’re knee‑deep in human geography — power, culture, place, inequality — without ever having consciously changed direction. The chat with Gadfly was exactly that kind of meander.
Where the water carries the stories
What struck me early on was the ease with which Gadfly moved between talking about species like sea lamprey or the round goby, and talking about the people who live along the Great Lakes. To them, the two are inseparable. Invasive species don’t simply “appear”; neither do their impacts. Someone brings a fish in a ballast tank. Someone dumps a goldfish in a river (yes, I confessed to that childhood sin). Someone unintentionally moves hydrilla stuck on a boat trailer tyre. Someone drops a crayfish into a new body of water without realising that one little act can ripple outward for decades. And, crucially, someone has to care enough to help put it right again.
As Gadfly talked about the scale of the Great Lakes — far too vast for scientists alone to monitor — I found myself imagining the water not just as an ecological system but as a kind of social bloodstream. Information flows through it. Responsibility flows through it. Stories flow through it. Communities, not datasets, notice the early signs that something is amiss. And if invasive species management depends on people reporting what they see, then those people need to feel that the work belongs to them.
This is where our conversation naturally flowed into their work on equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility (or EDI+A, as they use the term in Canada).
….you have to be able to engage with people, to meet with them where they’re at, they need to look at who’s involved with that and see themselves. People who see that it’s just a bunch of ‘old white men’ might not necessarily feel like you’re representing them and their community. If they’re like, well, we have a lot of people of colour in our community; we have a lot of queer people in our community; we have various groups in our community...
Who is allowed to ‘know things’?
One of the threads I keep returning to in my own work, both as an educator and as someone involved in climate communication, is this question of whose knowledge counts. It is astonishing how often Western science treats community observations as “anecdotal,” Indigenous knowledge as “folklore,” or lived experience as something to be politely acknowledged but not seriously integrated. Yet talk to someone who has spent their whole life beside a lake, or on a particular hillside, or in a neighbourhood that floods whenever a system clogs, and they can tell you things no instrument has picked up yet.
Gadfly reminded me that invasive species research has always relied on these everyday scientists — the dog walkers who notice odd snails, the anglers who recognise when something “isn’t quite right,” the people who know their stretch of shoreline intimately. If those people feel excluded, unheard, or unseen, a vital part of the system simply collapses.
And when Gadfly described themselves — queer, trans, non‑binary, disabled — and how their identity shapes the way they see community engagement, it was one of those moments where you can feel the geography of a conversation broaden. They aren’t merely adding representation to a field. They’re asking different questions. They’re widening the lens. They’re noticing the margins. And from the margins, you usually get a clearer view of the whole.
Lampreys, gobies, and unwanted goldfish
We did, of course, talk about the creatures themselves. Gadfly’s description of the sea lamprey’s mouth — if you’ve not seen one, imagine the lovechild of a hoover and a circular saw — was both horrifying and strangely affectionate. They talked about the waves of ecosystem shock when a species arrives in a system unprepared for it, and how sometimes a fish looks unassuming until you learn what it displaces.
But what really stood out wasn’t the biology; it was the humanity threaded through it. The lamprey arrived because people dug canals without considering consequences. Hydrilla spread because of ornamental gardening trends. Goldfish proliferate because kindness, mixed with misunderstanding, can be ecologically disastrous. (I admitted that as a child, I too though I was doing the ‘kind’ thing by releasing my pet goldfish into a stream because I didn’t want to look after it anymore!).
In every case, the problem is created by humans — and the solution requires humans too. Which brings us back to EDI+A again: good scientific practice requires good relationships. It requires trust and welcoming people into the process and not merely instructing them from above.
Stories as tools, not decorations
One of the things I’ve always believed as a geographer is that the world makes more sense when we understand it as a web of relationships rather than a list of facts. My conversation with Gadfly only reinforced that. Yes, they do meticulous biological work. Yes, they understand the species, the chemistry, the data. But woven through all of it is a deep care for stories — the stories we tell communities, the stories communities tell each other, and the stories that scientific institutions perpetuate without noticing.
We ended the conversation talking about science denialism — not just in climate, but specifically in their own field. There are people, they told me, who reject the concept of invasive species entirely because they believe acknowledging human responsibility would force difficult conversations about colonialism and environmental justice.
Which left me wondering whether, perhaps, the way forward is not to shout facts louder, but to write better stories. Stories where communities recognise themselves, scientists recognise their responsibilities and where learning isn’t a gate to pass through, but a circle to join.
A quiet beginning for a new season
As first episodes go, this one felt like a gentle but firm nudge to widen the way we see geography this year. Not simply as a study of landforms or spatial patterns (though those things matter too), but as a study of relationships — between people, organisms, places, and ideas. Gadfly reminded me that sometimes the most important ecosystems aren’t ecological at all. They’re social. And if we want to protect the places we care about, the most powerful work we can do is to help people feel that they belong in the story of that place.
And really, that feels like the perfect way to open Season 6.
Check out Gadfly’s website over at https://inclusivescience.ca/
Geogramblings 