news & events

Join us on Zoom to find out more about which neighborhoods in Tacoma are the hottest, how that relates to tree canopy coverage, and what Tacoma Tree Foundation is doing about it Only $10!

Dr. Vivek Shandas is a professor at Portland State University who supervised the first mapping project of Tacoma's urban heat islands (and former treehugger guest).

Dr. Lowell Wyse is the Executive Director of Tacoma Tree Foundation and will present some key information about the state of Tacoma's forests.

Sign up at: tinyurl.com/tacomasurbanforest

Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk (series facilitated by past treehugger guest, Dolly Jørgensen)

Laura J. Martin, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College, will discuss her book Wild By Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration (Harvard University Press, 2022) on Monday, 30 May 2022, at 16:00 Central European time (10am Eastern). Zoom link: https://stavanger.zoom.us/j/61615063428?pwd=M1pkTks4a0pYRS9naTJnQ0tPa0N0dz09

"It’s no secret to those living in Lakewood that the city is seeking to beef up its business sector..... The city’s south side — near I-5 and Joint Base Lewis-McChord — has seen the announcement of a new Amazon warehouse, a possible occupation by Tesla and planned relocation of Aero Precision. There’s more to come....."

in Tacoma News Tribune from June 22, 2021

To show that the forest gardens were the result of human activity, Simon Fraser University historical ecologist Chelsey Geralda Armstrong first identified village sites near the city of Vancouver, Canada, and two closer to Alaska that local tribes were forced to abandon in the late 1800s.... Meanwhile, nearby patches of land logged decades ago and left to regrow on their own were covered with just a few species of conifers and didn’t have the same colorful, edible catalog of species. “The forest gardens bucked the trend,” Armstrong says.

in Science by Andrew Curry | April 22, 2021

What does inclusion in ecological restoration look like for us? How would it feel to truly welcome, celebrate, and protect marginalized members of our communities and ecosystems? We are embarking on the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic while struggling to navigate a civil rights reckoning after last summer's uprisings for racial justice. In this ecosystem of social change, we must initiate and continue timely conversations surrounding race, gender, class, ability, ageism, and violence in the science and practice of ecological restoration. To disentangle restoration from social injustices, we are obligated to openly reflect on the racist lineage of conservation, uncover mutual interests in solidarity efforts, explore our own racial development, commit to training about implicit bias and interrogate how our institutions collude with BIPOC erasure, heteropatriarchy and extractive capitalism. Implications for Practice include decolonizing our media consumption/presentation, shifting language, mapping our roles in social change, evaluating people's access to restoration benefits, considering opportunities for cultural resurgence, and elevating untold stories.

in the SER Webinar Library from February 26, 2021

CLEAR is a feminist and anti-colonial laboratory. Join CLEAR lab members and filmmakers from Couple3 as they launch episodes in a three-part series called “Lab Life” that takes people behind the scenes in CLEAR lab with film, short discussion and longer Q&A.

"We open the black box of what seem like mundane laboratory practices: choosing author order on papers (episode 1), choosing the values that guide the lab (episode 2), and how we run lab meetings (episode 3). The films show that these activities are far from mundane, but are the main vehicles for equity, humility, accountability, and the creation of a lab collective. Our goal: to do science differently, in ways that do not replicate existing power dynamics."