A website is often the first impression of an organization, especially in our increasingly digital (and virtual) world.
Along with the College of the Environment marketing and communications team, EarthLab works with our member organizations to develop websites that will convey their mission and brand. We’re thrilled to present three new websites for Future Rivers, Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center & Washington Ocean Acidification Center (WOAC).
Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, faculty advisor for EarthLab member organization Future Rivers and assistant professor in the School of Marine & Environmental Affairs, is part of a team of academics that was recently awarded $5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund an interdisciplinary, multi-year project to advance anti-racist practices and pedagogy in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM).
The Humanities Education for Anti-Racism Literacy (HEAL) in the Sciences and Medicine was awarded to a collaborative team that will be based out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The principle investigators are: Cheryl Bauer-Armstrong (Native Education); Christy Clark-Pujara (Higher Education); Elizabeth Hennessy (Coordinator and Higher Education); R. Justin Hougham (Environmental Education & Equity); Erika Marín-Spiotta (STEM Higher Education); Maxine McKinney de Royston (Learning While Black); Todd Michelson-Ambelang (Libraries); Monica White (Community Engagement); and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine (Native Education). The project team also includes community and Tribal partners in Madison, Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Woelfle-Erskine credits funding and support from the EarthLab Innovation Grants program for his project, Píkyav on the Mid-Klamath River: Peeshkêesh Yáv Umúsaheesh “The River Will Look Good,” as a factor in receiving this new funding.
“Thanks to you all for your early support of this project through the Innovation Grants Program,” said Woelfle-Erskine. “The funding and mentorship you have provided allowed us to make crucial progress this summer and has deepened the collaboration between my lab and Karuk Tribe collaborators, which has resulted in a funding proposal through the Mellon Just Futures Initiative.”
The student competition platforms may be virtual this year, but the new prizes are very much real. The Foster School’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship will offer additional $5,000 and $2,500 special awards for both the upcoming Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge and the Alaska Airlines Environmental Innovation Challenge at the University of Washington. The new prizes reflect an innovative approach to topics and industries that are relevant in 2021 including the pandemic, health access and disparities, and carbon footprints.
“These unprecedented times should be a call to action for student entrepreneurs,” said Buerk Center director Amy Sallin. “And we believe these awards will allow their ideas and innovations the space for even more focused growth that can make an impact for years to come. On top of that, they represent a dedication to innovating with equity top of mind.”
Here are the Best Idea Prizes for the all-virtual 2021 Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge (HIC):
$2,500 Best Idea for Pandemic Preparedness Prize
Recognizes an innovation that seeks to improve the ability of the healthcare system to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as future infectious disease outbreaks.
$2,500 Best Idea for Addressing Health Access and Disparities Prize
Recognizes a student innovation or intervention that seeks to close the gap in health disparities for low-income and disadvantaged groups by increasing access to point-of-care healthcare services and/or addressing systemic biases within the current healthcare system.
Those new prizes will be awarded alongside the following Best Idea Prizes returning this year:
$2,500 Best Idea for a Medical Device
Recognizes the medical device concept (for a physical product) with the most promising opportunity to significantly improve the lives of patients or providers.
$2,500 Best Idea in Digital Health Prize
Recognizes an innovative digital health application that has a high likelihood of being implemented in practical healthcare situations and is expected to have a meaningful impact.
Including the Grand, Second Place, and Third Place Prizes—the HIC will award more than $40,000 this year to student entrepreneurs in the virtual competition on Wednesday, March 3. Awards will be announced in a video the following day after the competition.
The all-virtual 2021 Alaska Airlines Environmental Innovation Challenge (EIC) takes place a month later on Thursday, April 1. Here are the Big Picture Prizes that will be awarded this year:
$5,000 Climate Challenge Prize sponsored by Eric Carlson, Board Member of E8
Rewards a team that has thoughtfully incorporated and quantified carbon footprint into the development and communication of their innovation.
Returning this year after making its debut in 2019:
$5,000 Community Impact Prize sponsored by UW EarthLab
Recognizes innovation in developing a product, solution, or demonstrated business model that mitigates or makes communities more resilient in the face of climate change while prioritizing equity and justice.
As well as the incredible:
$5,000 Clean Energy Prize sponsored by the UW Clean Energy Institute
Rewards student innovations that can reduce carbon emissions through solar energy production, electrical energy storage, conversion and distribution, and energy efficiency. This can include software and/or hardware.
Including the Grand, Second Place, and Third Place Prizes—the EIC will award more than $45,000 this year to student entrepreneurs. Awards will be announced in a video the following day after the competition.
Building on Success
In recent years, student teams that participated in the HIC and EIC have presented a broad array of ideas that go beyond mere technical prototypes. Sustainable and health-focused consumer products, food innovations, and mobile and software applications have all made splashes with judges. In some cases, they took home prizes while others built on the feedback they received and launched with the help of the Jones + Foster Accelerator.
For example, from the HIC:
Respiratory disease screening mobile app Spira (2020)
Universal eyedropper adaptor maker Nanodropper (2019)
Web and mobile fitness company FitTraction (2016)
And the following examples from the EIC:
Sustainable smoothie maker The 2050 Company (2020)
Sustainable candle company Paca Y Paca (2019)
No-bean coffee company Atomo Coffee (2019)
“We expect that this year we will see the most diverse set of business and innovation ideas yet,” said Erin Nieuwenhuis, interim manager of the Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge. “It’s about how students want to solve health and/or environmental problems, “It’s about how students want to solve health and/or environmental problems, not just creating a highly technical device or prototype.”
The competitions are open to undergrads and grad students in good standing at accredited colleges and universities across the Cascadia Corridor – Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia, as well as Alaska. This year marks the first time the HIC will be held virtually. The EIC will be virtual for the second year in a row.
“We are tailoring the Zoom experience to match up with feedback we received from student participants during our virtual competition events last year,” said Alaska Airlines Environmental Innovation Challenge manager Lauren Brohawn. “This year’s competitions won’t be like any conference call or virtual class our judges and competitors have recently logged into.”
Competition season continues with an all-virtual Dempsey Startup Competition (formerly the UW Business Plan Competition). Following the application deadline and Online Screening Round, the Dempsey Startup Investment Round will be held on Wednesday, May 5. The multi-stage event culminates with the Sweet 16 on May 26 and Final Round on Thursday, May 27. A video awards presentation will follow the next day on the Buerk Center’s YouTube page.
For more details on these competitions and other programs and classes offered by the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, please visit startup.uw.edu.
This article was originally published in the Everett Herald.
TULALIP — When Terry Williams grew interested in climate change in the 1970s, he found information about human-caused global warming to be conflicting and confusing.
“It didn’t make sense until the early ’80s, when we saw a difference in the timing of the floods,” the Tulalip Tribes elder recalled. Later studies bore out what was happening in the tribes’ traditional lands. “The glaciers were melting two to three months early. We got floods in November and December instead of March and April. Rainfall had increased 6%.”
The 5,000 enrolled Tulalip citizens are primarily from the Snohomish, Stillaguamish and Skykomish tribes. In three river systems with the same names, ever-bigger and earlier floods wash away salmon eggs or bury them in river sediment. Higher water temperatures may kill fish that do manage to hatch. They never make it to Puget Sound.
If salmon can’t survive, what will happen to a Native culture based on a plentiful supply?
That question is one that drives the Tulalip Tribes’ intense interest in adapting to and slowing climate change. Williams, 72, helped lead the fight for four decades until his retirement in July as head of the Tulalips’ Treaty Rights Office, which he founded. He passed the torch to Ryan Miller, 33.
“If we lose these species that are so intrinsically connected to who we are, we lose part of ourselves,” said Miller, who as a teenager worked at the tribal fish hatchery where his father, Richard, ran the water quality lab. “It’s already difficult to pass on these traditions in modern societies. As these resources get more scarce, it becomes more and more difficult.”
Miller is director of treaty rights and governmental affairs. The new job title reflects the sovereign nation’s engagement with the world well beyond its 35-square-mile reservation and its more than 9,000 square miles of ancestral lands.
Long active in climate-related efforts at the county, state, national and even international level, the Tulalips have ramped up activities in the past four years. The tribes formed a Climate Adaptation Team in 2016. Two Natural Resources Department staff members, Phil North and Aaron Jones, devote full time to climate issues. More hires are planned.
North is climate adaptation coordinator and conservation scientist. A non-tribal member, he previously worked 28 years for the Environmental Protection Agency, mostly in Alaska. Jones, of Snoqualmie descent, was raised in Tulalip and earned a master’s degree in public administration in 2016. As a treaty rights protection specialist, his responsibilities include maintaining online information at nr.tulaliptribes.com/Topics/ClimateChange.
The Tulalip Tribes’ treaty lands include the Snohomish and Stillaguamish river basins, outlined here. University of Washington scientists estimate that by the end of the century the average daily temperature in the region will be 5.2 to 8.8 degrees higher than it was in 1990, depending on the severity of climate change. (UW Climate Impacts Group)
The website is key to the tribes’ climate strategy. It serves in lieu of a formal planning document that quickly would be outdated, North explained. “We decided instead to accumulate our activities online and change that as we go.”
The strategy focuses on five geographic areas: the reservation coast, on-reservation forests, off-reservation forests, the Quil Ceda Creek watershed and the Snohomish River estuary.
On the reservation coast north of Everett, sea level rise and increased storm intensity threaten homes, infrastructure and habitat. The tribes have already torn down houses that were sliding down eroding hillsides to Mission Beach. Facilities at Tulalip Bay, including a sewage treatment plant, could be at risk. One study estimated that Puget Sound has risen nine inches in the past 100 years, North said. Ongoing research aims to predict future storm intensity; results are due in late 2021.
On-reservation forests face increased risk from fire, which could destroy foods, medicine and craft materials that are basic to tribal culture. Fire is among the threats covered in an updated hazard mitigation plan, which the tribes will send to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in January for approval. Like so many Washington residents, people on the reservation live near or in the woods, complicating firefighting and forest management.
In writing the hazard mitigation plan, tribal staff relied on climate history provided by the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group. While there is evidence of rare catastrophic fires in the region, there is little information about historic tribal management of the forests, North said. Human-ignited, low-intensity fires may well have reduced larger conflagrations.
Off-reservation forests include millions of acres of wildlife habitat, salmon-bearing streams and plant resources that are at risk from a changing global environment. This is where tribal rights afforded under the 1855 Treaty of Port Elliott come into play.
“Most people don’t realize that the tribes didn’t really give up those ceded lands — they basically agreed to share them. So, the future of that territory is of great concern to them,” North said. “The land has been very mismanaged for the last 170 years. The tribes are active stewards.”
Molly Alves (left) and Dylan Collins relocate a beaver to the entrance of a temporary man-made den in 2019 near Sultan. Wildlife biologists worked with the Tulalip Tribes to move nuisance beavers to new homes. (Olivia Vanni / Herald file)
Stewardship includes rebuilding landscapes so they will bounce back from fires and floods. Resiliency is a goal of many Tulalip projects. The tribes work with farmers to keep manure out of waterways, creating clean energy in the process. Staff have relocated nuisance beavers that would build salmon-friendly, water-storing forest ponds. Last summer they helped remove a Pilchuck River diversion dam that has blocked salmon migration for 118 years.
The Quil Ceda watershed, which includes Marysville, will see more floods thanks to changing storm patterns and continued development. The Tulalips’ climate strategy highlights this part of Snohomish County because its reservation is at the downstream end of Quil Ceda Creek, where flooding intensifies. The Tulalips are about to open a second casino near the confluence of the meandering creek and the Snohomish River’s wide Ebey Slough.
The Snohomish River Estuary, where saltwater and freshwater mingle, is critical to salmon. The tribes’ climate change strategy acknowledges that sea level rise will change wildlife habitat and raise groundwater levels on the reservation. It potentially could expose hazardous materials at a former riverside landfill, which was capped as part of a federal Superfund cleanup.
The Tulalips will investigate climate change impacts beyond the landscape, such as community health. The World Health Organization has identified risks from wildfires, extreme heat, air pollution and infectious diseases. Indigenous populations face increased risks, according to the EPA.
The Tulalips are also studying water sustainability, which Miller said would be an increasing issue in the next two decades.
“We have complicated Western water law, and we’re seeing the drought season get longer and longer,” he said. “The population is growing. How are we going to sustain that development with a reduction in water? We already don’t have enough water in the rivers, enough water for salmon.”
A 2019 survey of tribal members showed overwhelming concern about the impacts of climate change on animals and plants like salmon, orcas and huckleberries. That’s important information for Jones. His job, which is funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, is to educate people about climate change and what the tribes are doing about it. He knows it can be a polarizing topic.
“We want to introduce the science around it, so people can frame their own opinion,” he said. “We want to make people feel they like they can do something about it.”
School lesson plans about climate change will be created by staff at the Hibulb Cultural Center, where the education curator happens to be Jones’s mother.
“We hope to help students understand and continue efforts to protect our salmon, cedar and other natural and cultural resources from the risks and effects of climate change,” said Lena Jones. She noted that the cultural center already has relevant exhibits such as Cedar, Environment, and Protecting Our Traditional Knowledge.
Meade Krosby, a senior scientist with the UW Climate Impacts Group, is working with the Tulalips to determine the impacts on tribally important plants. The Tulalips have been leaders in organizing meetings, conferences and workshops around climate change, she said.
“They appear to be doing the hard and necessary work of mainstreaming climate change across a range of activities,” she said.
With the Pilchuck Dam flowing behind her, Katie Seguin, with the United States Geological Survey, holds a prism pole while standing in the Pilchuck River on June 30 in Granite Falls. Crews were mapping the riverbed in order to track how sediment moves, once the dam is removed. The Tulalip Tribes took a lead role in removal of the outdated diversion dam. (Andy Bronson / Herald file)
The Tulalips’ work is part of a national groundswell of tribal climate change efforts. A Bureau of Indian Affairs climate assessment map highlights hundreds of them; the University of Oregon’s Tribal Climate Change Project also keeps track.
The Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians launched its own climate change project in 2014. With Northwest tribal input, UW researchers created an online tool that regional tribes use to assess their vulnerability to climate change. Krosby, who led the project, appreciates the leadership that Native Americans are bringing to climate change.
“The tribes are on it,” she said. “And they’ve been on it — not just adaptation, but mitigation, too.”
Mitigation means reducing the greenhouse gases that are driving climate change. There is only so much that tribes can do about that, said Miller, the treaty rights director.
“The reality is, we have to come together as a country, as a species, to reduce carbon emissions,” Miller said. “Without that, nothing else we do will preserve our culture as it is today — whether it’s tribal culture, or the larger culture of human society.”
Northwest tribes threw their weight behind Washington’s Initiative 1631, which would have increased gasoline taxes and spent part of that revenue on landscape restoration. Voters defeated the measure in 2018.
“That was a difficult pill to swallow for me personally, because I worked hard on it,” Miller said. “And now we’re running out of time.”
That urgency is echoed by Terry Williams. He bemoans the Trump administration’s antagonism to climate change efforts over the past four years.
“We’re wasting time, critical time. We have to be ready to hit the ground running” when president-elect Joe Biden takes office, said Williams, who, despite his official retirement, is still hard at work. A member of the Pacific Salmon Commission, he is starting a salmon migration and ocean habitat mapping project.
Tulalip Tribal Chairwoman Teri Gobin, now 63, recalls 50-pound king chinook being hauled onto the beach in seine nets. As late as the 1990s, it was possible for fishermen like her father, late tribal leader Stan Jones, to make a living from the sea. Back then, Puget Sound orcas had more chinook to eat, too. Those resident killer whales are in danger of starvation.
Tulalip Tribes Chairwoman Teri Gobin. (Andy Bronson / Herald file)
Despite devastation of the fishery, Gobin finds reason for optimism. Even about climate change. She is excited about the potential for solar energy on the reservation.
“There are lots of programs out there to help us,” she said. “We could retrofit government buildings, possibly tribal housing. We’re talking about having a solar field.”
Gobin finds cause for hope in the resiliency of nature. She cited the Pilchuck Dam removal, which gave salmon access to 37 miles of spawning habitat. Within a couple of months, coho and chinook were spotted upstream of the former dam site.
Gobin is also buoyed by the trust that non-Indians are putting in the Tulalips.
“We’ve had people donating land back to tribe because they know we will fix it. They know we’ll clean up streams and restore shoreline,” she said. “We are the ones they come to, to help get stuff get done.”
This article was originally published in Crosscut.
Bennett Rahn learns to ski at the Summit at Snoqualmie (Bennett Rahn).
With each passing month, more and more Washingtonians are suffering under the physical, emotional and financial damages of enduring a lengthy pandemic. And as we find ourselves in the coldest, darkest days of the year during the worst-case surge yet, it can feel like a herculean task just to take a daily walk around the block.
But to break those repetitive days, with some creative thinking many are still finding varied opportunities to play outside with friends — something experts say is essential for well-being.
“One of the big motivating factors for me is knowing how important getting outside is for my mental health,” says Dr. Josh Lawler, an ecologist and professor at the University of Washington who runs the university’s Nature and Health program. “Many studies have linked time spent in nature with improved mood, reduced stress and anxiety, and even reduced rates of depression.”
Some studies found that even little five-minute outdoor excursions can benefit our health — but 20 to 60 minutes is even better.
“Longer experiences can generate more durable and even memorable benefits, but if we think of what is the most basic experience in terms of time in bad weather or darkness, then a half-hour outside seems doable,” says Lawler’s colleague, Dr. Kathleen Wolf. “Nature experiences are fundamental to our well-being. People may be time constrained, yes, but making the effort to go outside isn’t a luxury.”
Seattle Parks and Recreation employees had been working to create socially distanced activities throughout all of COVID-19, says recreation division director Justin Cutler. But as winter approached, they realized they needed to do more. “I think we’re all struggling with social isolation,” says Cutler.
Across the summer and even through the winter, Parks and Recreation has seen a “dramatic increase” in park usage and park program participation, says Cutler’s colleague Lakema Bell, a program coordinator. “We thought that it would die down in the winter, but that’s not been the case,” she says.
Demand for space led the department to launch a new drop-in program for small pandemic pods on city ball fields. “This isn’t for organized games or practices,” Cutler says. “Oftentimes people are precluded from being able to participate in our great ball fields because of organized sports. A drop-in experience where you don’t have to have it on your schedule might make you just say, ‘Hey, I want to go play soccer or Frisbee or lacrosse down at the field today. And let’s go do that.’”
Even beyond Seattle’s parks and green spaces, plenty of people are devising ways to get outside in ways that both meet baseline health needs and replicate some of the wild magic missing from a season without big group activities or trips to faraway mountain towns.
Creature comforts
“By mid-summer we knew this would not be your average winter,” says Phil Torres, a Seattle-based scientist and science communicator who was looking forward to big ski trips and rented cabins with friends. “That reality is really hitting during these darker, rainier days, but we realize the responsibility put onto us of keeping our family and community safe. So we have had to find ways to work around it!”
Torres and his wife, Silja Danielsen, relocated from New York to Seattle during the pandemic to be closer to family and nature. As a wildlife biologist, Torres was used to searching for insects around the world. But with travel limited, he started looking for diverse plants and animals while gardening, visiting his bird feeders and walking in his neighborhood.
The couple started learning native species of plants and mushrooms — “especially the edible ones,” he says, “so we would take the same paths watching the trailing blackberries grow until we could finally pick them! I can walk the same safe walk over and over and always be entertained.”
Torres uses iNaturalist, a crowdsourced species identification app that feeds millions of photo uploads into artificial intelligence software, to take vicarious trips to look up plant and animal species he might encounter in parks on future visits. He uses it to explore his backyard, too.
“As a relatively new transplant to this area, it is still really exciting to know that people are finding owls right near my new home, flocks of snow geese only 30 minutes away,” he says.
“Studies have shown positive effects of indoor plants, window views, videos of natural scenes and photos,” Wolf says. However, UW research shows that those effects aren’t likely to be as pronounced as the real thing.
She brings home cedar, Oregon grape, chanterelles and Douglas fir in the winter — the latter producing tea with a “bright citrusy pine flavor.” Some of her finds make their way into perfumes. She concocts them with a chemistry distillation kit she bought last spring “because I’m afraid of anosmia and losing my sense of smell to COVID,” she says. She often photographs specimens before collecting them.
“I feel starved for human interaction in a way that I never have felt before, so while I still enjoy many of the same outdoor winter activities as I have before, when I meet another photographer at the same place that I’m photographing, I tend to start a conversation about the wildlife that I saw there last week,” she says. “People in Seattle seem more friendly and connected than ever before this year.”
Snowbound
For snow-averse Bennett Rahn, winter is usually the time to play inside at climbing gyms. But with gyms limited, the tech worker realized she needed a plan to “keep my mental health in shape over the winter,” she said.
She decided to learn how to ski — for real this time, after trying three winters in a row. Rahn bought gear and researched how to ski safely. She decided to focus primarily on backcountry skiing because it’s easier to social distance than at a resort, and the uphill component appealed to her desire for physical challenge.
She usually skis before work and often pursues night runs afterward. She bought a nighttime weekday ski pass for the nearby Summit at Snoqualmie. “I could conceivably see myself doing some lift time on weekdays, but on weekends, I’ve just been doing as much uphill travel as possible,” she says. When the Summit was closed, she was able to do uphill travel at the resort itself. She’s been going to Paradise at Mount Rainier a lot, too, but says it gets crowded.
Despite her success on the slopes, she says it is unlikely to replace her first love: climbing.
“I’m getting better at [skiing]. And I’m liking it more and more. And I’m so grateful for it as an activity that I can channel some of this manic energy into,“ she says. “But would I rather be climbing? 130%. Would I rather be at the climbing gym even? Yes. There’s a sauna there.”
Finding the easy moments
For Kindra Ramos, director of communications at the Washington Trails Association, 2020 has taught her that you don’t need to travel great distances to get to nature, or even dedicate significant time to reap its benefits. “Figuring out new ways to appreciate what’s right in front of me has been very special, and kind of a gift in its own way,” she says.
Ramos has ways to make even nearby hikes special: She rises early to avoid crowds, packs a thermos of her favorite warm holiday beverage and takes extra time to watch a waterfall or listen to the rain.
Ramos has taken to exploring her neighborhood on foot, adding novelty by picking a direction at night and walking to find holiday lights. “I keep pushing myself a little bit further, and every time I see a light display, I’ll change my course,” she says. “It helps mix up the neighborhood walk you’ve now been doing for nine months, with my directions set by, ‘Oh, that’s pretty!’ and figuring out what I like.”
Even on cold, wet days when she dreads going outside, Ramos finds it helps to commit to just five minutes outside, and blocking it off on a daily calendar around lunchtime. “‘You will stand there for five minutes, you will walk somewhere, I don’t care, stare at the darn tree for five minutes,’” she tells herself. On hard days, she centers herself by visiting a big oak tree in her neighborhood to watch the squirrels and listen to the leaves: “It’s not just a walk in the park: It’s a breath of air that you might not have gotten any other way.
“The world is really hard right now. … Find as many easy moments as possible, [give yourself] permission to feel good about that, and let that be enough.”
Break the cycle
When Meghan Young, founder of the Pacific Northwest Outdoor Women group, started hearing estimates about a second spike in COVID cases, she knew she’d have to change her winter plans.
Indoor cycling, which she picked up in May, has helped her stay connected to the greater world without leaving the house. Young had never enjoyed spin class, but when friends raved about the Peloton Bike and the associated fitness app with virtual map features, she gave it a shot — and this time it stuck. “As much as I identify as a ‘weather be damned’ outdoorsy person, the thought of riding so many miles in the freezing rain is entirely unappealing to me!” she says.
On Sept. 13, she began working toward a goal of virtually riding across the country from San Diego to Jacksonville, Florida — a lofty goal expansive enough to carry her through the start of winter. “It also gave me a sense of agency in a world that’s been very challenging — the feeling that I could choose at least one of my ‘hardships.’ Elective suffering is a privilege that I’m lucky to take on,” she says.
Four-season cyclist Cory Potts has always preferred recreating in the city in the winter, riding to meet friends at restaurants or their homes instead of going into nature. “Riding for me is about how I engage with the city and with other people,” says Potts, who runs the Center for Bicycle Repair.
While winter riding is old hat for Potts, the way he’s riding is novel. Potts has been riding one roughly 8.5-mile route around Lake Union daily since March. He knew, physically and mentally, that he could tackle it and make an odd habit out of his approach: He only rides counterclockwise.
“Part of me, I think, wanted to have a meaningless fixed route to ride because even though it is meaningless, it is something I can control,” he says.
The ride seems monotonous on its surface, but his relationship with it has deepened to reveal Seattle’s complexity. Riding between Capitol Hill, Fremont/Wallingford, and South Lake Union — watching businesses open and close, unsanctioned encampments grow and disperse, barricades rise up around police precincts and businesses, whole convention centers transform from pit to building — has made him appreciate how distinguishable Amazon’s campus is from the rest of the city.
“This part of Seattle feels anesthetized or like it’s embalmed,” he says. The sidewalks are pressure washed every three days; there’s no debris and no unhoused people. “It’s clean, in an ugly way.”
Pursuing small wonders
Seattle author David Williams, whose writing explores how Seattle’s built environment is part of and influenced by the natural environment, has been leading walking tours of the city for close to 20 years (now virtually, for Airbnb). He has a history of finding new ways to experience old things close to home —a hugely valuable skill for people walking the same routes on repeat.
For Williams, a self-described “aficionado of small wonders,” those walks might be physically in the same place — but they have different qualities, different weather, different animals every day. You might notice new things, depending on where you look.
“I’m not encouraging people to pry, but particularly in urban and downtown environments, there are these amazing details you wouldn’t see if you didn’t have binoculars or didn’t look down at your feet,” Williams says.
Sometimes, forcing himself to be more observant involves Seattle-themed bingo cards and scavenger hunts. Williams and his wife recently “traveled to Kenya” by cooking Kenyan recipes, listening to a Nairobi bookstore’s podcast and calling an old friend who lived in Nairobi for two decades. They completed their adventure by taking a pseudo-safari downtown in search of lion accents on buildings. They found 283 lion heads, big and small, from a few feet off the ground to 30 stories up.
“We found [lions] I had never seen before … and how many times have I walked through downtown Seattle? Dozens and dozens. There’s so much out there to discover,” he says.
And even in the dead of winter, during a pandemic that narrows our world, it doesn’t have to limit its depth, he says. Winter urban hikes offer their own sort of beauty and thrill, especially for people craving signs of human life. “The other thing about an urban environment that you don’t get in a wild environment is, people just do nutty shit. Particularly nowadays, with the holidays.”
“I [just] saw an inflatable Zamboni. Who knew you could get an inflatable Zamboni?”
Ocean Nexus science director Edward H. Allison has published a new paper in Nature about river conservation by an Indigenous community.
Populations of river fish are threatened by pressures on land and water resources. Networks of reserves managed by Indigenous people at community level offer a way to conserve fish diversity and enhance yields of nearby fisheries.
Rivers are a major source of renewable water, and provide food, jobs and a sense of place and cultural identity for people living in the vicinity. For many Indigenous peoples, rivers are central to how they understand themselves, their origins and their relationships to the rest of nature. As a citizen of the Penobscot Nation in Maine put it1, “The river is us: the river is in our veins.” Writing in Nature, Koning et al.2 report ecological surveys that demonstrate how local Indigenous people in the Salween River basin on the border between Thailand and Myanmar have successfully managed the river for conservation purposes and to protect livelihoods.
Both biodiversity and the people in river-associated communities are under severe stress the world over. Across the globe, 30% of freshwater fish are classified as being at risk (in either the critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable categories) in the 2020 Red List of threatened species compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Furthermore, it is projected3 that half the human population will live in water-insecure areas by 2050. Principal among the threats to rivers are pollution, climate change, invasive species, changes in surrounding land use, and the construction of dams and infrastructure that affect river flow. These issues need to be addressed on scales ranging from local to global, and solutions should draw on the knowledge, practices and aspirations of those whose lives are most closely entwined with river health.
Koning et al. assessed the outcome of a network of small fishery no-take reserves (areas where fishing is not allowed), and found that there was an average 27% rise in species richness, 124% higher fish density and 2,247% higher fish biomass in the reserve-associated waters compared with the corresponding values for nearby areas open to fishing. The presence of larger species and more individuals in the reserves is what drives the much higher biomass there. The authors suggest that such networks of locally managed, small, protected river areas could be used in other river systems to enhance fisheries and to conserve biodiversity.
The authors’ work highlights the importance of inland waters to food and livelihood systems, demonstrates the value of community-led conservation, and points out commonalities between protected-area conservation strategies in marine and freshwater ecosystems. Marine-protected areas, which are usually created by governments, are used widely in ocean conservation and fisheries, but much less commonly in fresh waters4. The authors characterize the reserves studied as being created by the S’gaw Karen (also known as Pwak’nyaw) Indigenous people who live in the river catchment areas. The paper thus also supports the growing recognition5 among scientists and conservationists of the effectiveness of Indigenous resource-management practices.
Koning and colleagues’ study draws on natural sciences — limnology (the freshwater equivalent of oceanography) and fish ecology — but also discusses how river management operates at a community level. Their natural-sciences disciplinary lens allows them to rigorously evaluate the benefits that protected areas confer on fish conservation and on the sustainability of local fish catches. In the area studied, Indigenous communities had planned and implemented local no-take reserves that complement other community-based conservation initiatives, including the management of adjacent land.
However, the context in which this management system evolved, the knowledge and politics involved in its creation, and how local forms of knowledge and practice can be supported and valued are less in focus in Koning and colleagues’ study. Pwak’nyaw communities have been profoundly transformed as a result of colonization in Myanmar, the arrival of foreign missionaries in Myanmar and Thailand, and state modernization projects in both countries. Supporting river conservation here and elsewhere at locations where other Indigenous peoples live will require a reckoning with such legacies and a willingness to make space for local and Indigenous voices to be heard, alongside those of scientists, in river-basin planning.
One of us (V.C.) is a Pwak’nyaw person, born in Hpa’an, Myanmar, on the banks of the Salween River, and believes that it is crucial that science conducted in Indigenous territory incorporates Indigenous systems of knowledge and beliefs, and for Indigenous people to have ownership over data that involve them. Although, during a period of 8 years of research, Koning et al. worked with local people for more than 18 months when living in the study area, there is scope for furthering these relationships so that Indigenous perspectives have increased visibility. An absence of Indigenous agency and control in the production of knowledge is a key issue, leading to calls for Indigenous data sovereignty and the decolonization of science6.
Koning and colleagues’ study positively recognizes Pwak’nyaw involvement in conservation, and includes some cultural context, although Pwak’nyaw perspectives are lacking. One consequence of this might be the study’s focus on what the Pwak’nyaw would regard as only part of their integrated system of land and water management. For example, Pwak’nyaw don’t commonly identify themselves by categories that are familiar to those in Western culture, such as being a farmer or a fisher. Rather, rotational farming, growing rice, gardening, hunting, gathering and fishing are integrated parts of a Pwak’nyaw livelihood.
Community-based research on Pwak’nyaw livelihoods in northern Thailand has found that fish conservation is also integrated into rotational farming practices. For instance, the concept nya pla htau, meaning fish surface, prohibits the clearing of a field on adjacent sides of a river bank in successive years to conserve fish-breeding grounds, and knowledge about fish is a factor in the selection of farmland7. In this sense, farming cannot be separated from fishing, which cannot be separated from conservation, because they are all part of a whole — and it is beneficial for them to be studied as such.
Future studies, which should involve collaboration with Indigenous researchers, could adopt approaches to integrate Indigenous and scientific knowledge and Indigenous and Western legal and management approaches in ways that recognize and draw on both8. This would help to address some of the unanswered questions in Koning and colleagues’ valuable study on the origins, sustainability and future of this successful network of reserves.
Conflict can arise in Thailand and elsewhere when there is confrontation between Indigenous people and the state, or other groups, regarding competing conservation models. Indigenous lives are in danger — around the world in 2019, more than 200 environmental activists died, 40% of whom were Indigenous people (see go.nature.com/36w68di). In the past decade, the deaths of prominent Pwak’nyaw environmental activists in Myanmar (see go.nature.com/2vspujn) and in Thailand (see go.nature.com/3mwjqm1) have hit the headlines.
Figure 1 | The Salween Peace Park. Pwak’nyaw (also known as S’gaw Karen) people living at this site in Myanmar, located on a tributary of the Salween River, use their Indigenous knowledge to obtain food. For example, the basket-style nets in this image are a traditional way to catch fish and shellfish in shallow waters. Koning et al.2 report that conservation efforts by the Pwak’nyaw community in the Salween River basin area have substantially boosted fish diversity and might increase the yields of fishing catches.Credit: Paul Sein Twa/KESAN
Indigenous resource-management systems can persist despite difficult circumstances. On the Myanmar side of the Salween River, Pwak’nyaw communities, whose livelihoods are affected by ongoing civil war, displacement and militarized development, have created a large-scale conservation project named the Salween Peace Park (Fig. 1), based on kaw (country), a holistic concept that encompasses the localized practice of social and environmental governance, based on Indigenous sovereignty. Pwak’nyaw living there conserve the environment using Indigenous knowledge (see go.nature.com/36tigxg), and are working to revive Indigenous practices lost through decades of conflict.
Without such contextual cultural and political knowledge, it is difficult to say how easily the successes in the Salween River basin, convincingly enumerated by Koning and colleagues’ study, can be achieved elsewhere by trying to transfer this approach. The key insight here may be that the small reserves are potentially useful conservation measures that need to be understood from the perspectives of those who created them. Such reserves should be supported and legitimized where they exist, revived where they existed previously, and perhaps tried out where they haven’t been used before, as part of efforts to meet global river-conservation challenges. This would support a growing movement led by Indigenous peoples to focus on putting rivers at the centre of conservation efforts — including by assigning legal personhood to rivers, as part of a ‘rights of nature’ approach to environmental governance9.
This year, the Washington Ocean Acidification Center was selected to be included in the AGU Thought Leadership Series, which profiles the work and research of urgent environmental issues. WOAC was selected due to the desire to spotlight centers that are “working against the clock” to alleviate ocean acidification.
UTS researchers and the Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center at the University of Washington EarthLab have collaborated in the creation of a resource for doctoral and postdoctoral researchers employing qualitative or mixed methods, whose work is being affected by the current measures in place worldwide restricting mobility, gatherings of people, and face-to-face meetings for interviews.
This second edition of “Adapting research methodologies in the COVID-19 pandemic” includes new insights from interviews with researchers who have had to change their methods – includes discussion of ethics implications when using enumerators, and the potential for decolonizing research. The first edition was published in July 2020.
For the third year in a row, EarthLab has partnered with the UW Population Health Initiative to offer a pilot research grant of up to $50,000.
The grant is intended to encourage the development of new interdisciplinary collaborations between investigators and community partners for projects that address critical challenges to population health and the disproportionate impact of climate change on health in vulnerable communities. Applications for are due on January 29, 2021.
Timeline for the winter 2021 application period was as follows.
Application Period Opens: January 4, 2021 Application Deadline: January 29, 2021 (11:59 p.m. Pacific) Awardees Notified: mid March, 2021 Period of Performance: May 1, 2021 – April 30, 2022
Although the Washington Ocean Acidification Center (WOAC) is based in EarthLab at the University of Washington, it serves the entire state. Since its creation in 2013, WOAC has been charged by the State Legislature to lead the state in priority areas of ocean acidification research.
Thank you to the College of the Environment web team for design and development of this new site. Check back often for news and updates regarding ocean acidification and its impact on our region.
The student competition platforms may be virtual this year, but the new prizes are very much real. The Foster School’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship will offer additional $5,000 and $2,500 special awards for both the upcoming Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge and the Alaska Airlines Environmental Innovation Challenge at the University of Washington. The new prizes reflect an innovative approach to topics and industries that are relevant in 2021 including the pandemic, health access and disparities, and carbon footprints.
