This is transcript of an interview of Michael (Mike) Church [M], Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia, conducted on the 23rd of January, 2020. The interview was conducted and transcribed by Leonora King [L]. Mike would welcome discussion and elaboration on matters of mutual interest at
[email protected]. Leonora can be reached at
[email protected]. Attribution information: This interview is dedicated to the Public Domain. Square brackets [] are editorial insertions. L: This is an interview with Michael Church by Leonora King and we are talking about his career. The questions, the three broad themes, are: your early life, and then maturation of your career, and retirement. So thinking about your early life and how you got into geography and geomorphology, what were the personal, disciplinary, and institutional forces that guided you towards geomorphology and brought you all the way through your PhD in that subject? M: Okay. Well, the first thing to understand is that I didn't make a conscious decision to do anything at any stage. Random events simply impinged on me, and I took the path of least resistance each time. So when I was growing up, my father worked in the aircraft industry in Canada, which after the second world war was a fairly important industry for about 25 or 30 years. And I had thought that I was going to study to be an aeronautical engineer. My father took part in the building of an aircraft called the CF-105, which, at its time in the mid 50's, was by far the most advanced military aircraft in the world.