Alastair Jarvis
Vice President of External Affairs, pHathom Technologies
Bachelor of Arts (Hons), 1999
There’s a growing sense that the defining skills of the next era will be agency, empathy, judgement and taste.
While Alastair Jarvis, BA(Hons)’99, was studying at King’s, a fellow student handed him a brochure for the Canadian Film Centre’s New Media program, thinking it might interest him. “It was a turning point,” says Alastair from his home in Lunenburg, N.S. “Once I was at the CFC, I began to understand the role the internet would play in overcoming geographic barriers to organization, and I was made aware of my own capacity for leadership.”
Today, Alastair is Vice President of External Affairs at pHathom Technologies, a climate technology start-up accelerating one of nature’s weathering processes that transforms atmospheric carbon dioxide into stable bicarbonates and safely stores them in the ocean as part of its natural chemistry. Still in its nascent stage, pHathom partners with biomass energy companies to capture and store the concentrated carbon dioxide released from burning wood chips, with the forest industry to pay for evidence that those chips come from sustainable forest management and with research partners to demonstrate the safety and durability of ocean carbon storage.
Here, Alastair reveals how he came to climate tech long after his career as a video game producer, how King’s influenced his trajectory, and what he finds fulfilling about the impact he’s making on Canadian communities.
You spent several years at HB Studios leading production and development teams with video games for rugby, football and soccer fans. How did you shift from a career in gaming to forestry and technology aimed at improving carbon dioxide levels?
With my wife (Shannon Sponagle, BA’91), we moved to a property just outside of Lunenburg that had a forest attached to it. In becoming a forest landowner, I’d begun educating myself on silviculture, as well as the economics and the politics of forested land management.
We were building those games on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, a community facing an approaching crisis.
In 2012, a large papermill in Liverpool N.S., owned by the Washington Post, announced it was closing. The irony wasn’t lost on me that I had been making video games for devices that were putting newsprint out of business.
My friends and I wanted to develop an innovation response to this crisis in the forestry industry, so we created WoodsCamp, a platform to help private woodlot owners understand what trees are on their lands and harvest them responsibly. We were eventually acquired by the American Forest Foundation, and WoodsCamp would become one of the technologies behind the most important improved forest management carbon program in the United States.
How has King’s impacted your life?
I wish everyone could begin their career with a year of theatre and the Foundation Year Program. King’s offers a grounding in how humans have wrestled with the same questions for millennia, questions about truth, beauty, justice and how to live a good life. I learned the reason these questions remain open is not because they’ve never been asked, but because they’re so difficult to answer during our brief and limited lives.
That awareness stays with you. It teaches humility before the vastness of what we don’t know, but also courage and a sense that learning new things and working to make the world better are worthy ways to spend our time while we’re here.
There’s a growing sense that the defining skills of the next era will be agency, empathy, judgement and taste. These are qualities King’s has always cultivated, and they feel more necessary now than ever.
How has your work impacted other communities?
For a time, especially before the pandemic, my peers and I were intent on showing that innovation could thrive in rural communities. You don’t have to be in San Francisco or London to build something impactful at scale. Some of the world’s most important problems are invisible from those cities.
We built companies and teams from places surrounded by natural beauty, proving it is possible to contribute to global innovation while living in communities where you can greet everyone you meet in a day with a kind word and a smile, and still have time to get things done. I think we helped shift perceptions, demonstrating that ambitious builders can succeed from rural Canada, making it a little more possible for others to envision themselves taking similar risks.
By David Silverberg
Published Nov. 2025
Are you interested in launching or advancing a career in climate technology? Through our Ask an Alum program, we can connect you with Alastair and other alumni who can answer questions and provide advice to assist you in your career path.
