Marvin Sundstrom died in Dec 1994 after a long battle with cancer. Sundstrom's life, career and achievements are profiled.
Marvin Sundstrom was the first honours graduate from the Geography Department, University of Calgary, receiving a degree cum laude in 1964. During his undergraduate work, he developed interests in the geography of agriculture and settlement, water resources and physical geography, land use and environmental change, and the history of the Canadian West. He pursued these fields of interest to various degrees of intensity throughout his life. Marvin made significant contributions to several of these fields but his potential work will remain unfulfilled as he passed away in December 1994 after a long struggle with cancer.
Marvin Sundstrom was born and raised in the Western Plains, and much of his research effort was related to themes arising from the geography of that country. His agricultural research interests and efforts extended to comparative studies in eastern North America as well as Japan and New Zealand. His research on Western settlement and exploration arose from an early interest in the travels and work of the Palliser expedition in the early 1860s. He was especially intrigued by the work of one of the leading members of the expedition, James Hector. When Hector completed his work with Palliser, he went to settle in New Zealand, where he pursued a long and distinguished career in geology. Marvin did research on Hector in Canada as well as New Zealand, although much of his effort remains incomplete and unpublished at the time of his death.
Marvin also did some very useful work on resources issues. One of his last, if not the last paper, was an assessment of the controversy over the construction of the Oldman Dam in southern Alberta, which was completed while he was fighting for his life. Incredibly enough, he wrote to me as one of the editors of the volume for which the paper was being prepared and he apologized for not doing a better job sooner. The paper is one of the best available assessments of a very complex resource management issue.(f.1)
Marvin Sundstrom was respected as a teacher and a university colleague. He was an effective administrator and served in some important positions, such as assistant dean (finance) for the Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Lethbridge, where he spent the greater part of his career, after earning the Ph.D. at McMaster University in 1975. Marvin worked for a short period at the Ontario Milk Marketing Board, and as anagricultural research planner with Phillips Planning and Engineering before taking up a full-time teaching position at Lethbridge. He completed his M.A. at the University of Maryland and spent a short time in the Ph.D. program at Buffalo before going to McMaster. He was also a visiting professor at the Hokkai Gakuen University, Sapporo, Japan, the University of Auckland, and Victoria University, New Zealand, and the University of Melbourne, Australia, at various times in the 1980s and 1990s. He was promoted to full professor at Lethbridge in 1988.
In his years at Lethbridge, Marvin Sundstrom was quite active academically and frequently gave papers and took part in professional, scholarly, and other meetings. He made many contributions and had many friends and colleagues who are all the poorer for his passing. He leaves his wife, Elke Sundstrom, who supported him strongly throughout much of his career and is making efforts to arrange for completion of some of his unfinished work on James Hector. Aside from the high level of his qualifications as a geographer, Marvin Sundstrom was a fine, reliable, friendly person who was always there when needed, steady at the helm, and a man who will be greatly missed.
Footnote f.1 SUNDSTROM, MARVIN 1993 'Oldman River Dam' in Public Issues: A Geographical Perspective, Geography and Public Issues series no 2, Department of Geography publication series no 41, ed Jean Andrey and J. Gordon Nelson, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, 221-37
This obituary originally appeared in the Canadian Geographer
Nelson, Gordon: "Obituary: Marvin Sundstrom (1940-1994)". Canadian Geographer 1995, 39(4), 372-373. Toronto: Blackwell. Reproduced with permission.