Editor’s Note: The Currents editorial board has been thinking a lot about the ways in which issues of race, gender, white supremacy, public health, and environmental justice are an integral part of marine and environmental affairs. We’ve been discussing ways to improve Currents’ content by incorporating equitable, anti-racist, and anti-colonial thinking in the way we choose topics and interview subjects, and in the way we write about them.

We believe the previous editorial board has been quite supportive of such work over the past year. However, we feel it’s important to explicitly name the adoption of these modes of thinking as a guide to shape our content and practice for the coming academic year.

We are beginning this work with a short series of pieces published between now and the beginning of the fall quarter. In this summer series, we are focusing nearly all of our attention on the work and the voices of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), as well as of LGBTQ+ people, in the world of marine and environmental affairs. We hope you enjoy our summer series and that it makes you excited for what Currents will bring in the coming months.

One of the things keeping my boyfriend and I grounded during our continuing public health crisis has been near-daily walks around our neighborhood in North Seattle. These outings have provided me moments of calm and a respite from hours spent staring at my monitor.

At the beginning of this month, that calm was disrupted when a car came up to my boyfriend and I during our walk, and I heard voices mocking me from the rolled-down windows, asking me repeatedly: “Hey, do you eat teriyaki? Do you like teriyaki?”

They weren’t looking for restaurant recommendations. They were targeting a stranger for being Asian. Luckily, I had my phone on me, and I started recording. Their bravado quickly vanished and they sped off.

I posted the video on social media and garnered a number of sympathetic responses, but while I appreciated the solidarity, I’m still conflicted about publicizing the incident. I’ve been thinking about what it means to perform one’s traumas, especially for the consumption of mostly white, academic audiences, and it’s something I want to keep to a minimum. Also, while what I experienced was racist, it was an interaction that lasted a couple minutes and was nowhere close to what Black, Brown, and Indigenous people face regularly. I don’t speak for other Asian-Americans, but it feels self-indulgent to talk about what was essentially a microaggression at a time when police and politicians nationwide are endangering Black lives, both through physical violence and through the slow violence of policies and institutions. I had felt safe enough to confront my hecklers and hold them accountable thanks to my positionality.

Since that incident, however, I’ve been thinking even more about how marine and environmental researchers of color have to prepare and think about safety when we go out in the field, whether we’re laying down a transect tape or performing interviews with community members.

In June, on my first day resuming (socially distanced) field work, I was on the Duwamish River monitoring a floating wetland installation with a Black community scientist. As we were leaving and locking up the gate to a facility we had permission to enter, a white security guard in a large pickup truck drove up to us and started shouting something at us, questioning why we were there. Later I realized that he might have just needed directions, but my first, immediate thought was that this person in a uniform was seeing two men of color wearing masks and fiddling with a padlock on the gate of a large, deserted business. How did that look to him? As someone who’s had negative experiences with law enforcement throughout my childhood, it was hard not to be alarmed, though I kept my demeanor calm.

The community scientist also seemed calm, and once the guard drove off he said he would wait alone for his ride to pick him up, but I was still shaken. Just to be safe, I drove away a short distance and stayed put until his ride showed up, pretending I had stopped to clean up the inside of my car. I didn’t disclose the real reason I’d pulled over since I didn’t want to make my colleague worry.

Two summers ago, I was on Whidbey Island helping a doctoral student survey eelgrass beds. As I walked along a beach with her and two other volunteers, a white homeowner with a shorefront view started yelling at us from his balcony to stay back because we were about to cross an invisible line onto what was his property. Even after we promised to stay off the beach and to wade well out into the water, which we thought was public, he threatened to call the police on us.

Later, I learned that not just beaches but even subtidal lands in Washington are sometimes held in private ownership. Coming from California, where I’ve seen state agencies mostly working to protect the public’s right to beaches and submerged lands, this was new to me. Dr. Dave Fluharty at the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs tells me that for over eighty years, Washington State would sell subtidal lands to adjacent property owners as a means of raising revenue: “Depending on the area, the amount of privately held subtidal land can be very high. It has complicated many things, including the implementation of Tribal rights to harvest shellfish.”

Privatization of the commons is part of the United States’ settler-colonial project. It gives white property owners license to threaten those who encroach on “their” lands, enabling the policing of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. For the four of us surveying eelgrass that day, only one of us was white-passing, and none of us felt safe, so we decided to survey in a different location that was not optimal. I recently brought up this incident to one of the other volunteers from that day; she’s now a good friend and research collaborator of mine. She told me: “I thought that man was going to go into his house and come back out with a shotgun or something.”

When researchers of color are sent out into the field, are protocols in place to ensure their safety? Many labs and research groups have had to drastically adjust their safety protocols in response to the COVID-19 public health crisis this year, including my own team. But what about the public health crisis that is racism, and the violence that comes with it? How do attitudes about who belongs in or has a rightful claim to outdoor spaces affect researchers of color doing field work?

The story of Christian Cooper, the Black birder whose video of a white woman threatening to call the police on him in Central Park went viral, illustrates how law enforcement, or even just the mere threat of it, is weaponized against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people in nature. Our country has been founded on the premise that the outdoors, whether it’s in urban or undeveloped spaces, belongs to white people, and particularly straight, able-bodied, and cisgender white men. It’s this premise that motivated a liberal, white woman who was asked to adhere to park guidelines to threaten Christian’s life. It’s this premise that made my friend wonder if a man on Whidbey Island might actually pull out a shotgun on us for trying to measure and collect a few shoots of eelgrass.

Thanks to the grassroots pressure that has been building nationwide since the resurgence of the Movement for Black Lives this year, the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, like many other schools and departments within the College of the Environment and other colleges across the University of Washington, has been having overdue conversations about diversity and representation. But besides recruiting more students, postdocs, and faculty who are BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and/or disabled, decision makers within all schools and departments must think of ways to ensure that everyone who becomes a part of the university has the institutional support needed to thrive and feel safe:

This support could and should come in the form of securing additional funding for minority students. It could and should mean instituting full tuition waivers for a broad range of Indigenous students, particularly at all land-grant universities that have benefited greatly from the theft of Native lands.

This support could also look like regular anti-racism trainings and assessments of each school or department’s efforts to address diversity, equity and inclusion issues, all of which should be conducted by independent consultants. It could mean creating and implementing protocols that address the safety, access, and inclusion concerns of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disabled researchers in the field and in labs. It could also mean having faculty step up to protect and advocate for their students who are being targeted for aspects of their identity, and for universities to institute real consequences for tenured faculty who target junior women scientists and compare communities of color to pigs. It could also mean overhauling curricula so that students are receiving a deeper grounding in the issues of justice that have shaped all academic subjects, including marine and environmental affairs.

The work to transform the outdoors into a space where all groups of people can belong and feel safe is unfinished and ongoing. Corina Newsome, one of the organizers of Black Birders’ Week and Georgia Audubon’s new community engagement manager, is an example of one of the many Black students, scientists, and organizations at the forefront of this change. But decision makers in universities must act to match the efforts of these community leaders, and to create safe spaces within our institutions, so that we can feel that we belong, whether we’re on campus, taking measurements in a tidal marsh, or walking in the evening with our loved ones.