SMEA Professor Patrick Christie, Co-PI Brad Warren of Global Ocean Health, and second year SMEA Student Haley Kennard, co-hosted a workshop with the Tulalip Tribes this past Monday, December 12th at the Tulalip Tribes Headquarters. The workshop, entitled “Navigating Coastal Squeeze: Identifying Needs and Priorities to Scale Up Estuarine Restoration in Puget Sound” was generously funded by Washington Sea Grant and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 

SMEA Professor Nives Dolsak and UW Professor and Director of the Center for Environmental Politics Aseem Prakash published a new piece in The Conversation entitled “The US environmental movement needs a new message.” The piece highlights that most Americans care about the environment, but didn’t vote that way this year. In the article, Professor Dolsak and Prakash state “In our view, the [environmental] movement needs a new agenda and communications strategy to reach beyond its roots and connect with working-class voters and immigrants.” The article can be accessed at https://theconversation.com/the-us-environmental-movement-needs-a-new-message-70247. 

Professor Ryan Kelly was recently interviewed on KNKX regarding his work with environmental DNA (eDNA). In the interview, Professor Kelly discusses the potential uses of eDNA, such as getting baseline information from bodies of water that may be at risk of suffering an oil spill disaster, such as the 2010 Deep Water Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Professor Kelly was a lead author on a paper published in the fall that utilized eDNA and found urban Puget Sound shorelines support a denser array of animals than in remote areas. 

A paper recently published by Research Associate Nathan Bennett, and co-authored by Professor Patrick Christie and researchers from universities and organizations around the world concludes that in order to increase local support and the effectiveness of conservation, people must be considered. Authors found that oftentimes conservation organizations and activities don’t fully consider the human dimensions of conservation. “When people are ignored and conservation measures are put in, we see opposition, conflict and often failure,” Bennett stated in a UW Today article.  

SMEA Professor and Director Terrie Klinger co-authored a paper recently published in Nature Climate Change titled “Ocean acidification can mediate biodiversity shifts by changing biogenic habitat.” Biodiversity researchers from the University of British Columbia, the University of Washington and colleagues in the U.S., Europe, Australia, Japan and China, combined dozens of existing studies to paint a more nuanced picture of the impact of ocean acidification. 

SMEA Professor Nives Dolšak and Political Science Professor Aseem Prakash recently co-authored an article for Slate titled “Trump Can’t Abolish the EPA.” The article acknowledges that environmentalist will face challenges under the new administration, but they must remain open to working with and when needed be willing to stand up to the president-elect. They should also pay more attention to state and city level politics because this is where a lot of the real action is taking place. 

SMEA Professor Nives Dolšak and co-author and UW Professor Aseem Prakash recently published an article on Slate titled; The Dakota Pipeline Protests Should Think Big. The piece discusses the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and how protesters should turn the momentum into something larger. The article goes on to say “For Native American groups, DAPL protests provide the platform to initiate a social movement that asks basic questions about environmental justice and the rights of native communities in resource-hungry systems. 

Congratulations to Professor Nives Dolšak and her co-authors on their latest article Corporate Environmentalism: Motivations and Mechanisms. The article, published in Annual Review of Environment and Resources, reviews two broad categories of corporate environmentalism (CE); direct CE and indirect CE. As the article goes on to explain, three key lessons emerge. First, firm-level characteristics, particularly size and economic performance, encourage CE. 

Assistant Professor Ryan Kelly and SMEA second year graduate student James Kralj were recently interviewed by The Daily about their research involving eDNA and ocean ecosystems. Professor Kelly shared his excitement that this was the first time eDNA has been used to look at the interaction between humans and the ecosystem. Microbiologists have been using eDNA for a decade to take microbial surveys of the ocean, but only recently have scientists started to consider the technique for taking broader surveys of animal biodiversity. 

SMEA Professor Nives Dolšak, along with UW Professor Aseem Prakash, and SMEA alum Maggie Allen wrote a piece recently featured in The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog about the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The posting discusses how the the federal government’s decision to  temporarily block construction of the DAPL, the pipeline that was supposed to carry 570,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the Dakotas to Illinois, is the result of a new kind of environmental activism that treats energy pipelines as a chokepoint for activities that contribute to global warming, and builds alliances with other groups to stop them.