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A Social Ecology of Whale-Watching Ecotourism in El Vizcaíno

ben — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 13:33:08 +0000

Friday, April 22, 2022

The Baja California Peninsula is one of the most naturally stunning parts of our globe, split from the mainland of Mexico by the San Andreas Fault. Yet for decades, outsiders saw the area as an isolated and unproductive land with minimal economic value. Especially following the decline of the local whaling industry in the early 1900s, regional economic opportunities were limited to fishing, irrigated agriculture and ranching outside of the rise of the saltworks industry in 1954 (more on that later). However, the ‘secret’ of Baja California’s natural beauty was destined to get out. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the arid landscape was reimagined by locals and officials as a tourist’s paradise complete with beaches, surfing and—at least for a few months a year—the opportunity to get up close to Pacific gray whales.

Figure 1: A Pacific gray whale calf approaches a whale-watching boat. Photo by Michael R. Perry licensed under CC BY 2.0.

As an environmental anthropologist in training, understanding the ways in which humans relate to their broader socioecological community is of the utmost importance to me. In ecotourism projects like those that have developed in Baja, these relationships are multifaceted amongst human beings, non-human beings, and the natural landscape. My research focuses on these relationships in the small community of Ejido Luis Echeverría Álvarez (ELEA), located roughly 70 kilometers from Highway Route 1 and the town of San Ignacio on the West coast of Baja California Sur. It is also within the southernmost confines of El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve, the largest wildlife refuge in Mexico, and home to exquisite populations of sea turtles, Baja California
pronghorn, and unique flora across a rich landscape.

Figure 2: Close-up map of Laguna San Ignacio and the ELEA ejido. Map by WiLDCOAST.

And remember those Pacific gray whales I mentioned earlier? Well, it just so happens that ELEA is on the coast of one of the last breeding grounds unmarred by human activity at the end of their migration from the Arctic: Laguna San Ignacio. Unfortunately, at the turn of the 21st century, industry was mounting a threat to the local ecosystem. Within a few hours drive to the North, a joint venture of the Mexican government and Mitsubishi known as Exportadora de Sal, S.A. (ESSA) already operates the world’s largest sea salt facility. This facility also lies on the coast of a whale breeding lagoon known as Laguna Ojo Liebre, and ESSA saw Laguna San Ignacio as a logical location to expand their operation.

Environmental NGOs, celebrities, and conservationists mobilized over fears that the new facility and the massive ships that would come with it would disrupt Laguna San Ignacio like the original ESSA plant had done at Ojo Liebre. The pressure eventually convinced former President Ernesto Zedillo to cancel the plan in 2000. Due to concessions by the Mexican government to ESSA just a year later, and other ecological threats including exploratory fossil fuel drilling in the lagoon, groups like Pronatura and WiLDCOAST went the extra step to place conservation easements and non-development agreements into effect with local ejidos in exchange for community funding—the first of which took effect in 2005 across 120,000 acres in ELEA. However, regulations on whale conservation and growing interest in the lagoon threatened to restrict access to the local fishery that many locals had historically relied upon.

Figure 3: A vehicle carries sea salt at the ESSA facility in Guerrero Negro. Image by WHALE MAGIC Tours licensed under Creative Commons.

What resulted was a complex web of relations between fishermen, ecotourism workers, government actors, and the whales themselves. But this relational web doesn’t stop there. It extends to the larger system of ecological relationships the whales inhabit across the thousands of miles they travel to give birth, including the productivity of the benthic ecosystem they rely on in the Arctic for food.

As one of many tourists who had traveled to enjoy the Baja shores (including a visit to Laguna Ojo Liebre in late 2016), I grew interested in how ecotourism, industrial and conservation efforts had impacted local communities. How had my presence contributed to the complex issues facing communities in El Vizcaíno? And when I think of communities, I don’t just imagine families, neighborhoods, and local restaurants filled with patrons. Communities extend to non-human beings too. To understand environmental issues in the social sciences, it is critical to center the roles and agency of plants, animals, and microbes that inhabit space alongside us humans. Other living things aren’t just there to provide value for people, and as we work to address the environmental realities of the contemporary age, we can’t forget that.

Working to supplement the excellent ecological research produced by the Laguna San Ignacio Ecosystem Science Program, my research seeks to understand the socioecological and economic impact of this conservation development deal on the multi-species community of ELEA. During my time in ELEA, I seek to understand the relationships, connections, and outcomes of this project by employing multi-species ethnography and participant observation. Multi-species ethnography works to understand the ‘contact zones’ where the existences of humans and non-human beings collide. To accomplish this, it is critical to frame animals, plants and microbes as central actors in my research. This project centers grey whales, benthic organisms, fish populations, human community members, and the relationship of these beings to the entire biosphere reserve. With insight from these diverse groups, I hope to provide further nuance to our understanding of the dynamic realities of ecotourism in El Vizcaíno—and whether the industry provides the economic and ecological benefits it has promised.

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Our cities are what we eat - 2022 CLIMAS E&S Fellows Introductions

ben — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 13:23:55 +0000

Friday, April 22, 2022

It’s late afternoon and I am sitting on the veranda at my parent’s house in the small mountain town of Montagu in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. In front of me lies a fishpond, inhabited mostly by Koi, and beyond that stretches a green lawn scattered with a variety of fruit trees. Some overripe apples have fallen to the ground, enticing several of the plump hens who have free range in the garden. To my left is a large vegetable patch and the chicken coop where my mother collects fresh eggs every morning. Grapevines creep up and over the latticework above my head, creating a dappled shade, and hummingbirds flit around the birdfeeders that have been hung from the pillars. I wave at Charles, the Malawian man who comes around every week to help tend the garden and do odd jobs around the house. He is whistling a tune while picking some spinach and green peppers for our evening meal – usually, he will take some produce home with him too.

Figure 1: Green peppers growing in my parent’s vegetable garden in Montagu, South Africa. Image credit: Julia Davies

Although I am enjoying the peaceful life in Montagu for a few days, the main reason that I have travelled to South Africa from Arizona is to collect data for my PhD dissertation. As a student in geography, I am researching the drivers of food insecurity among low-income urban households in southern Africa. By studying how people living in cities produce, access, and utilize food (and what challenges they face in this regard), I aim to identify opportunities for developing more sustainable and resilient urban food systems in the region. Such food systems would need to have the capacity over time to provide sufficient, safe, and accessible food to all urban residents, even in the face of shocks and pressures like those caused by climate change.

As I write this, with the autumn sun warming my back, I realize how climate change has been the key thread in my journey. My favorite subject in high school was geography, in which the stern Mr. Lance taught the class about climate systems and the problem of global warming. I went on to complete an undergraduate degree in environmental and geographical science at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and although I wasn’t immune to the social elements of the university experience, I worked hard on my Honors capstone project, which considered how low-income social housing developments could be made more climate resilient.

After a gap year, I returned to UCT to begin my master’s degree with the African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI). I immersed myself in my studies during this time, taking courses in atmospheric science, climate change mitigation, vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation, and managing complex human-ecological systems. My MSc thesis looked at the co-production of municipal climate change adaptation plans in the Western Cape Province. It gave me my first taste of “real” empirical research and inspired me to stay on at the ACDI as a research assistant for the next 18 months. I worked specifically on a collaborative, multi-country research project called “Adaptation at Scale in Semi-Arid Regions” (ASSAR). I had the opportunity to travel to countries like Namibia, Botswana, and Ghana to learn about climate change impacts and adaptation opportunities in agricultural communities, and to participate in stakeholder engagement activities such as participatory workshops. ASSAR also introduced me to the world of science communication, which is a skill that I am continuously working on and which I hope to develop further during my time as a CLIMAS fellow.

Figure 2: Woman farmer collecting marula fruits in northern Namibia. Image credit: Sophie Lashford, ASSAR project.

In 2018, I met a professor from the University of Arizona at the Adaptation Futures conference in Cape Town, where I was presenting a poster of my research on the cultural dimensions of climate smart agriculture in Namibia [1]. This meeting ultimately led me to Arizona, where I began my PhD journey in 2019 under the supervision of Prof. Tom Evans. I am now part of a collaborative research group that investigates how urban population growth and climate change create food security challenges across rural-urban continuums in Zambia, Kenya, and South Africa. Within this project, I have a particular interest in the role of urban agriculture—the practice of growing crops and raising animals within urban area boundaries. My work on urban agricultureii will form the basis of a webinar and policy brief that I plan to develop and share with stakeholders in Zambia later this year. Through these media I aim to engage stakeholders who are responsible for various functions related to food security in Zambia, including local and district councilors, urban planners, the national Ministry of Agriculture, and representatives from the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), both of which have local offices in Zambia.

Figure 3: Low-income urban households in Zambia growing vegetables to supplement their food needs. Image credit: Julia Davies

The garden that I am sitting in at my parent’s house in Montagu is a good example of how urban residents can become more self-sufficient by producing their own food. However, very few lower-income households in southern Africa have the space, labor, knowledge, or resources that they would need to do this, especially at a scale large enough to alleviate food insecurity [2]. As I found in my recent study of urban agriculture in small cities in Zambia and Kenya [3], only 33% of households were producing food, with many households facing barriers such as settlement informality and a lack of property rights. Rather than producing food, most people living in urban areas depend on food purchases from various retailers such as supermarkets, small shops, public markets, and street vendors [4]. Restaurants and fast-food outlets such as KFC and Hungry Lion are also becoming more common in cities across the region.

Figure 4: A Hungry Lion fast food outlet in an African city. Image credit: Masixole Feni, Consuming Urban Poverty project.

The amount and type of food that people buy, and the type of retailer that they purchase their food from, is very closely tied to their income and to their ability to access affordable retailers, for example by using public transport or buying food from mobile street vendors, which are illegal in many southern African cities [5]. Urban planning and governance are therefore critical for achieving sustainable and resilient urban food systems [6]. I will emphasize this connection through my engagements with stakeholders in Zambia, for instance by highlighting how governments can integrate food systems planning into city planning through land use and zoning regulations that support urban agriculture and the development of traditional public markets in proximity to low-income residential areas. As our recent study on urban food systems in Zambia and Kenya showsiv, these markets are critical to the food sourcing strategies of urban households across the region. My current research (forthcoming) further examines the challenge of urban food governance through the lens of traditional public markets in Zambia.

During my CLIMAS fellowship year, I will develop a second policy brief and webinar that focuses on the topic of public market governance. Like the first webinar and brief on urban agriculture, I plan to share and discuss these findings with government stakeholders from local to national scales and across various departments in Zambia, including market officers, public health officials, and non-government stakeholders such as representatives from the WFP and FAO. In these stakeholder engagements I will highlight the implications of my findings for policy and practice and create a space for rich conversations and new connections.

Figure 5: A traditional public market in Nanyuki, Kenya. Image credit: Corrie Hannah

It feels a bit bizarre that I had to leave my home country and pursue a PhD in Arizona to realize the close connections between food and cities in southern Africa, which I seem to have taken for granted in the past. I think Wayne Roberts (2001) [7] illustrates this connection most compellingly in his statement that “more than with any other of our biological needs, the choices we make about food affect the shape, style, pulse, smell, look, feel, health, economy, street life and infrastructure of our city.” The choices that are made today about food in southern Africa’s cities will therefore play a significant role in how these cities evolve in the coming decades. On the other hand, urban governance and planning decisions will profoundly affect how urban food systems function in future.

It's getting late here in Montagu, and the sun will be setting soon. I can hear my mother in the kitchen preparing dinner, and as I get up to help her, I feel grateful that we have access to fresh and healthy food right on our doorstep.

Davies, J., Spear, D., Chappel, A., Joshi, N., Togarepi, C., & Kunamwene, I. (2019). Considering religion and tradition in climate smart agriculture: insights from Namibia. The Climate-Smart Agriculture Papers, 187-197.
Frayne, B., McCordic, C., Shilomboleni, H., 2014. Growing out of poverty: does urban agriculture contribute to household food security in Southern African Cities? Urban Forum 25 (2), 177–189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12132-014-9219-3.
Davies, J., Hannah, C., Guido, Z., Zimmer, A., McCann, L., Battersby, J., & Evans, T. (2020). Barriers to urban agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa. Food Policy, 101999. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2020.101999
Hannah, C., Davies, J., Green, R., Zimmer, A., Anderson, P., Battersby, J., ... & Evans, T. P. (2022). Persistence of open-air markets in the food systems of Africa's secondary cities. Cities, 124, 103608.
Battersby, J., & Watson, V. (2019). Urban food systems governance and poverty in African cities. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315191195
Haysom, G. (2021). Integrating Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design into Urban Governance Actions. In Urban Forum (Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 289-310). Springer Netherlands.
Roberts, W. (2001). The way to a city’s heart is through its stomach. Toronto: Published by the Toronto Food Policy Council.

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Reflections on 2021 as a CLIMAS Environment & Society Fellow

ben — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 17:53:47 +0000

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

In late August of 2021, I called Rebecca Jim holding back tears. I had met Jim around 2013 when I was working with a coalition to raise awareness about tar sands extraction and to oppose the construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. Jim is the director of Local Environmental Action Demanded (LEAD), and she has devoted much of her life to bringing attention to the Tar Creek Superfund Site and other environmental justice issues in Ottawa County, Oklahoma. Jim’s work was inspiring and exciting to me, and from 2013 to the present, we maintained a relationship centered around our shared concern for environmental justice issues in Oklahoma. As I began my PhD program and envisioning my dissertation research project, I contacted Jim and asked her if there was some way my research could be useful to her and LEAD. She was excited about the possibility, and over time, we developed a collaborative research project focused on residents’ stories and experiences of water and work throughout processes of industrial development, environmental remediation, and ongoing environmental concerns around the Tar Creek Superfund Site.

Superfund sites are designated areas in need of clean-up due to their toxic effects. Among these sites, the EPA has referred to the Tar Creek Superfund Site, as one of the “most challenging” and “most complex” environmental remediation projects in the United States. Named for Tar Creek, which runs through the county and connects with multiple waterways, the site has no clearly defined boundaries but is broadly made up of areas in Ottawa County affected by the legacy of lead and zinc mining and other industrial practices. The area is dotted with large mounds of mining waste known locally as “chat piles.” They are made up of lead, zinc, cadmium, and other metals discarded and abandoned through mining processes. These metals seep into the soil and pollute groundwater. The overflowing toxic waters of flooded mine shafts have led to deeply entangled forms of water and soil pollution at and around the site. Importantly, Ottawa County is made up of the territories of the Quapaw, Seneca-Cayuga, Miami, Modoc, Wyandotte, Ottawa, Peoria, Shawnee, Eastern Shawnee, and Cherokee tribal nations, and the site embodies the ongoing and entangled processes of industrial development, environmental injustice, and settler colonialism in Oklahoma/Indian Territory.

Our project was initially designed to focus on peoples’ experiences with water and work throughout environmental remediation and was planned to be my dissertation research focus. But when I called Rebecca this past summer, I stumbled over words and struggled to speak as I told her that I was leaving my PhD program. She knew that I had been considering this for some time, but I had waivered, dug my heels in, tried desperately to stay, and tough it through. At this point, I was navigating numerous personal and mental health challenges and felt as though I had reached my limits. I still felt committed to our project, and I was unsure how to proceed. I felt like the only reason I remained in my program was a feeling of guilt. I felt guilty towards my advisor, fellow graduate students, my committee members, faculty who had mentored me, but most of all, I felt guilty towards Rebecca Jim. I had admired her for years before I even considered doing a PhD, and we had spent months (maybe years) building and dreaming up this project. Our IRB had just been approved. We were finally ready to begin, but I had reached a breaking point in my program and could not move forward.

As the words came tumbling out of my mouth, Jim listened calmy. She responded encouragingly and assured me that her desire to work with me had nothing to do with a PhD As our phone call came to an end, Rebecca said that she wanted me to “find the joy that every day can bring.” After I got off the phone with her, I sobbed, and I felt tremendously grateful for her and the relationship that we had built. Our relationship and our commitments to illuminating peoples' stories in Ottawa County were not reliant on my career or my PhD trajectory, and I wanted to see the project carry on and be realized. I hoped to continue as part of the research team in some way, but I wanted to do whatever was best for the project even if it meant the research carrying on without me. I knew that I would likely navigate and be forced to confront feelings of possessiveness or ownership about the project, and I had to instead embrace the collaborative potential of the project to exist and thrive regardless of my involvement.

Throughout meetings and conversations, I began investigating ways for the project to carry on with or without me. I spoke with the IRB about potential options to continue the research project, and I was notified that the best way to ensure the efficient continuation of the project was to identify a new principal investigator. With thoughtfulness and care, Dr. Laurel Smith, Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma, stepped in as the principal investigator and became a new mentor for me and collaborator on the project. Smith brought together a new team of graduate students to carry on and revise the project. The team now consists of Dr. Laurel Smith, Rebecca Jim, Jenna Randall, Valerie Doornbos, and me. Smith has graciously allowed me to remain part of the research team, and she has added valuable insights and points of concern to the project and expanded the scope of the project to include a broader focus that encompasses the collaborative interests and skills of the team.

While the project has shifted significantly and been delayed by personal hardships and life shifts, the project has benefited from the strong relationships, care for one another, and open communication that underpinned the initial imagining of the project. Additionally, these hardships and changes have led to a stronger and more varied research team and focus that will benefit the project in the long term. The year has demonstrated for me the value of relationship building and networking beyond the execution of a particular research project, and the importance of honest, open, and clear communication rooted in care for one another’s well-being, not simply for the efficient completion of an individual research project. Research projects’ success should not be solely measured by their overt outputs, but in the relationship-building and dialogue that collaboration can foster. Collaborative research can shape communities in long-lasting and unexpected ways through dialogue, connections, care for one another, and the emergence of new conversations and lines of inquiry. The fellowship year and these relationships helped me to realize and prioritize how the project could carry on even as my academic career came to an end (or perhaps a pause and redirection).

Some thoughts on leaving my PhD program and writing this blog post:

Broadly, I began studying anthropology because I was searching for a way to direct and explore my concerns and frustrations with aspects of U.S. society and culture, and I was craving deeper connections with human beings through peoples’ stories and experiences. However, something about my PhD program, my own personal experiences, and the practice of doing, reading, and thinking about anthropology made me feel more disconnected from people than I ever had. I still held intellectual curiosity, deep concern for environmental justice issues, and a commitment to exploring connections and aspiring towards more caring environmental and social relationships. But aspects of the anthropological lens and the academic experience left me feeling alienated and disconnected, alone. I am still grappling with why and how I had to leave anthropology and my PhD program. I do not have concrete or definite answers, but I simply know that I could not move forward. I also know that many of the issues I faced resulted from my own mental and emotional struggles, and I want to be clear that I am not trying to criticize anthropology as a discipline in this reflection. Lots of valid and fair criticisms exist, and at the same time, I know that for many people anthropology is a valuable and meaningful tool for critical inquiry and engagement. There were things I valued about it, or I would not have entered a PhD program in anthropology. There were things I questioned, or I would not have left. I am also tremendously grateful to the faculty members who mentored me and the fellow graduate students who pushed my thinking in new and exciting ways at the University of Arizona, and I do not intend to criticize my department in this piece of writing. I was honestly hesitant to write this blog post because I am still navigating complex feelings about all of this, but I decided to share these reflections because I hope other graduate students who hold similar feelings might feel less alone if they stumble upon it. I also hope that as people engaging in research, we find ways to foster relationships, inspire curiosity, and aspire towards more caring collaborations that can thrive within, without, and beyond our individual research projects and academic pursuits. Leaving an academic career track does not have to mean leaving the curiosities that excite me, the relationships that developed, or my engagement with environmental justice issues.

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Reflections: Exploring Karst Groundwater Vulnerability and Risks in Arizona in 2021

ben — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:22:48 +0000

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Groundwater is among the world’s most important natural resources. It provides drinking water to rural and urban communities, supports agriculture and industry, sustains wetland and riparian ecosystems, and maintains the flow of rivers and streams. In many places, groundwater resources are susceptible to risks of overuse and contamination. Its sustainable management is increasingly critical; especially in climate-sensitive geographic areas such as islands and arid lands.

My main interest is in researching karst groundwater sustainability because aquifers storing groundwater in karst systems are commonly found throughout my home country, Jamaica, and other islands in the Caribbean. Karst aquifers are formed mainly by water dissolving and forming characteristic features such as sinkholes, caves, and cracks in the bedrock. Figure 1 shows the typical features of karst aquifers.

Figure 1: Features of karst groundwater systems.

Source: https://web.northeastern.edu/protect/2017-check-in-protect-develops-deep...

In Arizona, the major karst aquifer system is found in the north in the Coconino Plateau area; which includes the city of Flagstaff, and the Grand Canyon region. The physical characteristics of karst groundwater systems make them highly susceptible to pollution and climatic influences. As shown in Figure 2, physical features of karst landscapes, such as sinkholes, act as quick pathways for pollutants to be transported to the aquifer, given that there are little or no soil layers to filter pollutants en route to the aquifer.

Figure 2: Illustration of karst groundwater aquifer contamination

Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/487022147187166036/

Ensuring sustainable water supplies requires an understanding of underlying hydrologic and geologic processes, but also socioeconomic factors that drive impacts on water resources, including land use, demand management, and the population involved. It is important to know and understand how characteristics of the natural system and population priorities interplay with resource availability, demand, land use, and other socioeconomic characteristics of the area to influence the sustainability of water. Because ground-water systems typically respond slowly to human actions, a long-term perspective is needed to manage this valuable resource. This is especially so given forecasted impacts of climate change and variability impacts on water resources.

Water is the main medium through which climate change will impact ecosystems, economies, and people. Climate variability and change affect all aspects of water. The general impacts on freshwater quantity and quality are expected to be negative. While the influences of climate variability and change on water show general consistency across countries, there are important regional and local differences. Some of these differences remain undetermined. The impact of climate change on water resources depends not only on the climate itself but also on the characteristics of the groundwater system, changing pressures on the system, how the management of the system evolves, and what measures to adapt to climate variability and change are implemented. Therefore, the degree and extent of the projected impacts of climate change on water resources across time and space serve as a strong incentive to ensure appropriate adaptation to minimize the negative effects.

Stakeholders

In Arizona, water management is influenced by a complex mix of geographic, hydrologic, climatic, and regulatory factors. Also, information about water resources is not homogenous and tends to be more available for highly populated Active Management Areas (AMAs [1]) in the alluvial groundwater basins, than rural, karst groundwater systems. Water sector actors in rural, karst areas are hampered by a lack of information to inform sustainable management of the resource. Therefore, my research objective for the fellowship year was to conduct exploratory research to become familiar with the interplay among various factors, and a karst groundwater system, to inform the design of an empirical study for my dissertation. Basically, I seek to learn from the example of Arizona’s karst groundwater systems. During the past year, I proposed to collaborate with stakeholders tackling groundwater sustainability issues to gain some understanding of the local groundwater system and factors driving its vulnerability and contamination risk. I collaborated with the Coconino Plateau Watershed Advisory Council (CPWAC) and Coconino Plateau Watershed Partnership (CPWP), which together involves 34 local, state, tribal, federal and civil society organizations that represent varied stakeholders interested in preserving regional water resources.

Research design and methods

A mixed-method, use-inspired approach was applied to facilitate understanding of local water stakeholders’ needs and issues. Such understanding is important for designing empirical research that yields outputs and outcomes that will be readily useable by stakeholders. The mixed-methods employed included: 1) review of existing literature and information databases; 2) data mining pertaining to factors that are relevant for identifying groundwater vulnerability, and risk; 3) conducting key informant interviews; and, 4) field observation to characterize the regional groundwater management context. The approach to the study was highly consultative; with stakeholders engaged at all stages. During the design phase, the project was discussed with the primary stakeholder and the terms of engagement and collaboration during project implementation were agreed upon with the stakeholder. The methodology also considered exigencies of the unique period we are all trying to navigate with the enduring COVID-19 pandemic.

Figure 3: Map of Karst Groundwater Aquifers in Coconino Plateau Region (Adapted from BLM (2015)

The study targeted the groundwater in the Coconino Plateau region of Arizona. The study area has a high physical water scarcity[2] or socioeconomic water scarcity [3]. The roughly 5,000 mi2 Coconino Plateau falls within the Upper Colorado River Basin and contains a complex regional groundwater aquifer system. The aquifer system is an increasingly important source of water supply for domestic, municipal, and in-stream uses owing to rapid population growth and development. The karst groundwater resources are shown in Figure 3 and consist of several perched water-bearing zones [4], a regionally extensive sandstone aquifer, and a limestone aquifer. The characteristics of groundwater flow within the regional aquifer are poorly understood because the aquifer is deeply buried; which limits exploratory drilling and testing to study system properties. Also, the geologic structure, that controls the occurrence and movement of groundwater, is complex. The underlying structure and hydrogeological behavior of these karst aquifers make them highly susceptible to pollution. Water can move rapidly through karst conduits and the overlying soil is very thin, or absent; making the protection of karst groundwater systems a high priority.

Local stakeholders have raised concerns about the effects of development on the availability and sustainability of groundwater water supplies. They agree that an improved understanding of the regional socioeconomic and hydrogeologic system is needed to address the concerns of water supply and groundwater sustainability. Such an understanding requires a comprehensive baseline of information that adequately describes the system. However, this baseline information is incomplete at best for the Coconino Plateau region. I am especially interested in understanding how land use combined with natural karst system characteristics are driving contamination of the groundwater, and how water pollution is behaving across time and space under changing climatic conditions. For instance, there is a higher presence of private wells being used as the primary source of domestic water supply in rural areas of the basin; unlike the more technologically advanced water supply systems in urban areas. As illustrated in Figure 2, because of the physical features of karst systems, high levels of private well used for domestic water supply may pose a risk of groundwater contamination along with negative human health impacts due to exposure to contaminated groundwater. This is particularly so when combined with low-technology household wastewater treatment systems and other improper waste disposal practices.

Stakeholders also identified mining activities and inadequate regulations of such land use as potential sources of groundwater contamination risks. While regulators were poised to grant a permit for mineral mining, I learned from stakeholders that their review of a mine operator’s voluntary monitoring data suggests that contaminated water from the mining operation may be adversely affecting groundwater quality via transport to the karst aquifer through subsurface rock fissures. This may point to disparities in the level of regulatory protections and outcomes available for alluvial versus karst aquifers, and rural versus urban groundwater resources. While the literature highlights the pioneering work and example of Arizona’s groundwater regulations, stakeholders in this predominantly rural, karst region are actively advocating for regulatory change to better protect their local groundwater resources. This example illustrates that gaining an understanding of these issues within the regional context will provide critical information to address system-wide sustainable management of karst groundwater. It gives an indication of potential areas for targeted preventive or remedial action; especially given the reliance on private well sources of potable water in rural karst areas. Such knowledge can also inform different approaches that may be necessary to improve karst groundwater management versus applying the same approach to all aquifers statewide.

Some outputs and outcomes

Beginning in October 2020, I participated in several stakeholder meetings to develop familiarity with the different stakeholders, their water issues, and engagement processes. This included a subcommittee meeting focused on public education and outreach, which became a key point of engagement for the collaborative research. Because of the pandemic, stakeholder meetings were fully virtual. This made my participation more feasible, given the significant distance between Tucson in the south and Flagstaff in the north where stakeholder meetings were convened. Stakeholders prioritized the development of a story map to sensitize the public on existing initiatives implemented or being pursued by CPWAC partners. They shared existing data and information. I also conducted some key informant interviews with some stakeholders to gain insight into individual stakeholder priorities, processes, factors affecting water resources, and competing stakeholder priorities.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic limited in-person contact, towards the end of the year I was able to go into the field briefly to get a sense of the landscape, resources, and general characteristics of the Coconino Plateau region. This was an important introduction to arid region karst; given I am well aware that not all karst is the same. Familiar, tropical island karst will likely display nuanced differences from karst in arid lands. I collected and collated material for a water sustainability story map, designed a geodatabase, and commenced populating the database with secondary data relating to regional karst groundwater vulnerability. This work assists with building local water stakeholders’ capacity by supporting the development of information products and tools to enhance advocacy, public awareness, and understanding of karst groundwater management issues in the Coconino Plateau region.

A major outcome of this use-inspired research process has been the knowledge I acquired from direct engagement in stakeholder activities and interaction with individual stakeholders in the Coconino Plateau region. I learned about the water sustainability priorities of more rural stakeholders; priorities that varied from those of stakeholders in relatively urban AMAs designated by Arizona’s main groundwater regulation. For instance, I benefited from consultation with a farmer who was very concerned that farming is viewed as being unsustainably practiced due to excessive amounts of groundwater being used. As a result, I became aware of agricultural stakeholders’ priorities for sustaining water supplies. In the AMAs, larger cities and agricultural operations can get through dry spells by accessing groundwater reserves or bringing water from other locations such as the Colorado River. But, rural, non-AMAs areas in karst regions are less prepared. Instead, there is heavy reliance on wells that can easily malfunction or run dry. As long-term drought conditions continue to affect the region, rural communities are eager to find solutions. While they have no way to immediately stop the unusual dryness, they are taking action through sustainable on-farm practices that can function as a buffer. So, from my interaction with this farmer, I learned about some on-farm water management practices being utilized to reduce groundwater depletion in the region. This includes rainwater harvesting, using recycled material in farm water management, and restoring vegetation (see Figure 4) which has the ability to absorb water in the soil, and to hold deeper, longer-lasting reserves of water, while providing shade to protect animals from heat stress. The direct engagement produced an understanding of locally important issues that until then I had not identified.

Figure 4: On-farm water management practices: L-R - rainwater harvesting, recycled tires as water troughs, and reforestation.

The research provided multiple opportunities for cross-learning between karst aquifers in arid regions and island states in the Caribbean. Importantly, collaborative stakeholder engagement enabled a comparison of karst groundwater management issues, institutional arrangements, and stakeholder dynamics in this arid region with that of tropical island karst groundwater problems. It provided knowledge and learning about potential stakeholder dynamics and competing priorities at play in multi-stakeholder efforts to protect groundwater resources. I gained insight into the informal networks/connections and stakeholder dynamics that is very important for researchers to know and navigate when doing use-inspired research. It is also an important point of understanding when interpreting research findings, or when making recommendations for future research, policy design, and management actions.

I noted that having a diverse range of participants in a stakeholder group that is seeking to address water resource issues is helpful in advancing action. It also aids a researcher in getting multiple views of issues and priorities in a short period of time. For instance, there are several native nations within the region. Noticeably, having indigenous people represented within the larger stakeholder group enabled a two-way dialogue on issues that affect indigenous people, who are often overlooked in water governance decision-making. Inclusion also provided an opportunity for non-indigenous stakeholders to incorporated these considerations into their operations. For one, there was an initiative for the council/partnership (and individual stakeholders) to adopt a statement acknowledging the contribution of native nations and people to sustaining the benefits of regional water resources. Often such statements lay a foundation for subsequent actions and partnerships to tackle issues that disproportionately affect indigenous people. Another observation made is that having politicians from multiple municipalities directly participating in local stakeholder group dialogue improved the progress made on targeted water sustainability actions, since, we often find that having political buy-in can determine whether targeted actions succeed or fail.

Lessons learned about the process of use-inspired research

When I started the fellowship year, I planned to get into the field with stakeholders to observe different aspects of local geography, hydrogeology, and socioeconomic dynamics of Arizona’s principal karst region. Very early in the process, I recognized that dealing with above normal change and major uncertainties would be key variables I would grapple with. Now, as I reflect on 2021, my experience has certainly reinforced the value of doing use-inspired research; especially through the various lessons I learned. Among them is that building relationships with stakeholders to facilitate useable research takes time and compromise but can be most fulfilling. Plus, it improves the quality of research. For instance, while local stakeholders agreed to the research methodology during the design phase, by the start of the fellowship year, they prioritized a different design due to changes in their immediate needs and activities. Therefore, as a researcher, maintaining a degree of flexibility to ensure a win-win for all parties was a key point of learning during the past year.

Not long ago, I was a stakeholder working to develop or implement water regulations and plan actions to address sustainable management and use of karst groundwater resources in Jamaica. Then, I was often frustrated by the lack of robust data and information to support the work I was doing. My experience with research not fitting the needs on the ground was part of my motivation to pursue a doctoral degree. So, one key point of understanding for any researcher seeking to do use-inspired research is that initial plans may change quickly. Stakeholder priorities and timelines may sometimes diverge from academic research timelines and priorities. It is important for researchers to remain flexible, while working within the constraints of academic targets to ensure all parties benefit. Early in my fellowship journey, in order to respond to the change in stakeholders’ priorities, I adjusted my contribution to stakeholders’ processes from being academic research objective-driven to being driven by use-inspired objectives. I developed separate academic targets and timelines from that of stakeholders’ objectives and timelines. I worked on both simultaneously to ensure stakeholders got something from the collaboration while I worked towards longer-term academic objectives. This benefited my research by putting me in contact with individual stakeholders and provided opportunities for one-on-one communication. As a result, I got a better appreciation of the priorities and issues of individual, karst groundwater stakeholders. The collaboration also provided data that will shorten my research timeline and efforts to create similar datasets.

Despite the challenges of doing research in a pandemic, the CLIMAS fellowship was successful and rewarding for me as a researcher who was new to arid/semi-arid regions. It facilitated a dedicated space, and tools to focus attention on developing the skills necessary to navigate use-inspired research. Recognizably, it is easy to be in an academic silo, focused on achieving scientific rigor in your research and scholarship, without paying attention to who will use your research outputs; or how it will be used. So, the fellowship engagement provided a place to consider research that is relevant and useable versus only being an academic exercise. It has kept me accountable to myself for ensuring I consider stakeholders’ needs for science and information as I navigate meeting my academic targets.

Next steps in my use-inspired research journey

Although 2021 manifested in unexpected ways, I was grounded in my desire to conduct relevant research that responds to stakeholder needs. Ultimately, collaborating with stakeholders in the Coconino Plateau region to conduct use-inspired research, has provided knowledge and information to inform the design of my dissertation research. My dissertation will target modeling and assessing the vulnerability and contamination risks of groundwater stored in karst and alluvial aquifers to pollution and climate change. I will seek to advance understanding of differences in the dynamics of contamination risks and aquifer vulnerability in these two different aquifer systems, how climate variability and change will impact them, and how we can adapt to ensure the sustainability of groundwater resources. Based on the knowledge I gained of this arid karst region, I will now work to adapt my dissertation research design to consider the comparison of arid karst and alluvial systems in Arizona. This includes continuing to work on developing the geodatabase; which when complete will be shared with the stakeholders for their own use.

Footnotes

Active Management Areas are designated under the Groundwater Management Act.
Physical water scarcity occurs where water demand exceeds supply.
Socioeconomic water scarcity occurs when there is an insufficient investment, skills or political will to increase access to the resource.
Groundwater occurring in a saturated zone that is separated from the main underlying body of groundwater by unsaturated rock. It may be temporary or permanent depending on the amount and duration of recharge.

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Lessons Learned as a CLIMAS Environment & Society Fellow

ben — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 18:30:42 +0000

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

In my year as an Environment & Society Fellow with CLIMAS, I learned just as much about the research process and collaborative research as I did about my actual research topic. I learned that things almost never go as planned or according to schedule, and whatever your original vision for your research was will probably change and evolve into something different – and probably better.

Figure 1. Image of the Chiricahua Mountains in southeast Arizona, recovering after a wildfire. The Chiricahua Mountains are one of the sky islands managed by the Coronado National Forest.

I partnered with the Coronado National Forest to get a better idea of the challenges that face staff when planning and executing landscape-scale fire restoration plans. We spent somewhere between 6 and 9 months in discussions with Coronado National Forest staff and University of Arizona faculty, working to find the nexus between what various staff on the Coronado needed, my own research interests, the perspectives and expertise of my advisors, and what was feasible given the timeline of a master’s thesis.

Collaborative research takes time – a lot of time – and involves striking a balance between all of the various participants. There is a lot of give and take, a few steps forwards and a few steps back. And that balancing act doesn’t end with the research question. As I dove into designing the research plan, who I was going to interview, how the survey was going to be structured, and what questions I would ask, our goals morphed and changed from a focus on the National Environmental Policy Act and stakeholder engagement strategies to fire restoration challenges in both planning and implementation and staff and stakeholder views on the Coronado National Forest’s role in managing these ecosystems during a time of climate change and unknowns.

Figure 2. A screenshot from one of the 17 zoom interviews conducted virtually with Coronado National Forest staff.

I conducted 17 semi-structured interviews with Coronado National Forest Staff and collected survey responses from 182 stakeholders over the course of a few months in Spring 2021. Due to the pandemic, interviews were conducted virtually. Because we had all spent the better part of the last year on Zoom and Microsoft Teams, we were all pretty comfortable with connecting virtually, although it would have been nice to also see, in person, some of the areas and strategies that my interviewees were discussing.

Figure 3. After transcribing the interviews, the transcriptions were coded by broad themes in RQDA (Qualitative Data Analysis in R) for further analysis.

After doing qualitative data analysis on the interview transcriptions and the open-ended responses to the survey, as well as preliminary quantitative analysis on the survey questions, I began to wrestle with the deeper data analysis process. As a student, doing a master’s thesis tends to feel like you’re learning as you go. Every step of the way you learn new things and realize how you could have done things differently if you were to do it over again. And particularly with my research, I felt overwhelmed by the task of narrowing down everything that I was discovering in my data to a few useful and meaningful takeaways for the Coronado National Forest staff and their stakeholders.

It meant a lot to have the support and understanding of the CLIMAS mentors as I struggled through this. The benefits of collaborative research are clear and often talked about, but the challenges and struggles aren’t always quite as transparent. It was invaluable to be able to discuss data analysis strategies with people who had done similar research to me, particularly in a collaborative research setting. It made a huge difference to have my experiences and struggles acknowledged and validated by other researchers, even people who have been doing this kind of work a lot longer than I have.

A few key takeaways stood out to me in my research. Interestingly, there were very few ways in which stakeholder and staff views diverged in relation to fire restoration practices, perspectives on ecosystem change, and CNF’s role in managing the resources. The public is highly supportive of prescribed burning and mechanical treatments and believes that the long-term benefits of fire restoration are worth the short-term impacts. Herbicide use and prescribed grazing remain, unsurprisingly, the two controversial practices. If CNF is interested in using any of these strategies in future plans, it would be worth dedicating time and resources to lay the groundwork with appropriate public outreach, education, and collaboration.

Given how surprisingly aligned the majority of stakeholders and staff seem to be based on the data in the surveys and interviews, there seems to be a breakdown when it comes to communicating across those boundaries. Stakeholders don’t feel particularly heard nor do they feel CNF adequately explains what they’re doing and why, outside of active incidents like the Bighorn Fire. It takes a lot of staff time to communicate, educate, collaborate, and dialogue well. Almost all study participants recognized the lack of time, money, and resources the CNF has, but it may be worth identifying ways to improve that won’t require significantly more time or money.

I really enjoyed the learning process and working with both my partner organization and CLIMAS. As I move towards wrapping up a report for the Coronado National Forest, I’m thankful to have had the support and understanding of such a great team behind me.

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Searching for Water Solutions: from a “Land of Wood and Water” to the Sonoran Desert - CLIMAS E&S Grad Fellow

ben — Tue, 11 May 2021 15:10:43 +0000

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

An abundance of water or the lack of it has always featured heavily in my life. I grew up in the tropical island of Jamaica which is known as the “Land of Wood and Water”. Although surrounded by the Caribbean Sea, as you traverse the island you will be hard pressed to travel 5 miles without encountering a stream or water feature. Water is intertwined into every aspect of social, economic and cultural life. As children, we regularly went to the beach and played in a stream adjacent to our family farm, oblivious of the connections to exposure to agrochemical runoff from the farm that provided my family’s livelihood. Religious groups perform rituals such as baptisms in water bodies across the island. Tourism, the main contributor to the national economy, is built around water resources as a key natural asset.

Fig.1 Beach bungalows on Jamaica’s south coast; Fig. 2 Waterfall in interior uplands

It may not be readily evident why someone from a tropical island, with a presumed abundance of water resources, found her way to the desert to study water. I certainly did not see the connection between these disparate worlds on my first trip to the desert, visiting the Hoover Dam as a tourist several years ago. My untrained mind was captivated by the ability to create such a man-made wonder to harness water in the desert. I was simultaneously shocked by the surrounding barren landscape – absent of green vegetation. Since then, I obtained a Master’s in Earth and Environmental Resources Management at the University of South Carolina and achieved PhD (ABD) status at University of Iowa in Geographical and Sustainability Sciences. I have worked to design and implement water quality monitoring programs in Iowa streams and South Carolina wetlands. I gained valuable experience and multiple perspectives while working as a Natural Resource Manager in civil society, government and private sector organizations in Jamaica and acting to address water resource conservation issues and development of local sustainable development policy.

Fig. 3 Monitoring water level in Jamaican stream

Fig. 4 Wetland water quality monitoring in South Carolina

Karst landscape diagram

Karst in Cockpit Country, Jamaica

In my professional work I grappled with many water challenges. Access to potable water remains a challenge for many in the Jamaican population. Surface water features are less evident in rain shadow areas and karst landscapes with characteristic features such as sinkholes, gullies and underground rivers. Lack of access to water drives land use and waste management practices that may increase contamination of water resources. Given that the island is heavily dependent on groundwater as its primary source of potable water, there is inadequate infrastructure investment to deliver water to people where needed.

Groundwater is unsustainably managed and is increasingly vulnerable to long-term degradation due to over-abstraction, saline intrusion and contamination of karst aquifers and climate change impacts. Despite being tropical and small, Jamaica’s water landscape is heterogenous and has arid zones. Plus, more frequent droughts, wildfires and annual threats of hydrologic storms signal impacts from a changing climate. Already, Jamaica is seeing strong evidence of adverse impacts from climate change that will exacerbate its water challenges. This includes declining and changing rainfall patterns, higher ambient temperature, and more severe storms and droughts.

My various experiences have led me to the conclusion that similarities in water resource management issues transcend culture and geographic boundaries. This understanding also led me to join the PhD in Arid Land Resource Sciences program in fall 2020. I aim to learn from Arizona as an example of what Jamaica’s future water trajectory could be without action to stem loss of our water resources. I am eager to explore Arizona’s complex and innovative water landscape to gain insight into managing limited resources and designing appropriate policies and actions.

Stream in Grand Canyon Karst Landscape in Arizona

During my Environment & Society Fellowship, I aim to develop a decision support tool to aid in evaluating karst groundwater contamination risk in arid regions and islands in the context of climate change impacts. This work has commenced via a collaboration with the Coconino Plateau Watershed Advisory Council and Coconino Plateau Watershed Partnership to develop a geodatabase and story map focused on examination of water resources issues in the region. Through the geodatabase water resource relevant spatial and temporal data will be compiled in one database enabling quick query and analysis to inform water decision-making. Thematic maps will be developed and incorporated into a story map that will aid stakeholders in their public outreach and education programs that target improving knowledge about water resources and potential contamination from surrounding land use and human activities.

References

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Exploring FireScape - CLIMAS E&S Grad Fellow

ben — Tue, 11 May 2021 15:00:59 +0000

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

“How many liters of water do you use a day?” I asked the dozen students sitting around me. A couple of students threw out some guesses, positing that they used somewhere between 20 to 30 liters per day. That aligned with my own estimations: ten liters for bathing, two to three liters for drinking, ten for dishes and cleaning, maybe five for cooking. We were talking about water conservation in their small rural village in Central Zambia. One student raised his hand. “Madam, how much water do people use every day in America?” I had the number ready because I had looked it up the night before. “A family in the US uses about 300 gallons per day.” Shouts erupted around me. “300 gallons! But what are they using that for?” I remember laughing and thinking to myself, I'm teaching environmental conservation to the wrong people.

At the time, I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. After my experience in Zambia, I moved back to the United States with the singular goal of working as an environmental educator. I landed a job with Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve in New Orleans, Louisiana, as their Citizen Science Program Coordinator. I designed and directed their citizen science program from scratch through engaging students and community members in local, regional, and national research projects. I taught them how to use specific protocols to contribute data for national and local research projects focused on biocontrol agents, phenology, invasive species, amphibian monitoring, water quality testing, and bird monitoring.

In addition to teaching data collection, an essential part of my job was facilitating positive and interactive experiences with nature. The swamps around New Orleans are home to disease-carrying mosquitoes, suffocating humidity, giant alligators, venomous snakes, and spiders and are not typically considered a friendly place. One day, a bus full of 5th graders pulled into the park. One girl eyed me warily. “Where are we?” she asked. “The woods!” I answered cheerfully. She immediately burst into tears. However, after a couple of hours of learning about how to identify native trees by their various fruits and seed pods, she was playing and laughing with her classmates, with a newfound comfort in her physical surroundings.

Photo 1: The New Orleans swamps

My experiences in New Orleans with environmental education helped me discover my passion: engaging members of the public in environmental conservation projects on their public lands. And so, I decided to pursue my master’s degree in the hot, dry desert of southern Arizona. After I complete my master’s degree, my goal is to become an environmental planner for a federal land management agency, facilitating the environmental impact assessments and environmental review process for projects on public land. An environmental planner communicates monitoring and evaluation data and the rationale behind land management decisions in a way that is accessible to all stakeholders, regardless of their background.

Here in Arizona, I am working with the Coronado National Forest on assessing their planning process for landscape scale fire restoration projects. Prior to Euro-American settlement, wildfire was one of the most important ecological processes that shaped western North American forests. Over the past hundred years, land management agencies have worked to remove natural fire from our landscapes without understanding the importance of fire for these ecosystems. This fire exclusion, along with changing climates, has put our national forests at increased risk of disaster from severe wildfire, insect and disease outbreaks, and severe drought.

Photo 2: The Coronado National Forest

For over 10 years, the Coronado National Forest (CNF) has been developing fire restoration plans. Through the CLIMAS Environment and Society Fellowship, I have partnered with CNF in order to better understand how their staff make management decisions and how the public, through the National Environmental Policy Act process, feel heard and involved. A critical aspect of this study is analyzing how CNF staff and the public view ecosystem resilience in the face of changing conditions and how each party feels the short-term and long-term goals should be prioritized.The results of this study will be shared with CNF staff to help navigate future fire restoration decisions. It is also my goal to communicate our findings with stakeholders and the general public, with the hope that this transparency will lead to better understanding between CNF and their stakeholders and provide an opportunity for stronger relationships and dialogue around these management challenges.

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Lea Schram von Haupt

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Responding to Flooding in Ottawa County, OK - CLIMAS E&S Grad Fellow

ben — Tue, 11 May 2021 14:30:03 +0000

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

As a child, my first pull to northeastern Oklahoma was water – specifically, the promise of clear water and large lakes. In my father’s hometown, I played in creeks and swam in the same farm ponds that provided drinking water to cattle. There were nearby lakes that I found magical, but my father promised me that I just didn’t know good lakes. The ones near us were murky and muddy, he said, nothing like the large and clear lakes in northeastern Oklahoma. One summer, my siblings and I all piled in his truck and drove for what felt like hours and hours. When we finally arrived, my father pulled over on top of a hill overlooking the lake. Something was wrong. As far as we could see, dead fish scarred the water’s surface. My father told us we couldn’t swim. He suspected that chicken waste, dumped in the river that fed the lake, had killed the fish. But it could’ve been anything… We drove away disappointed. This is my first memory of both water in northeastern Oklahoma and consciously seeing the ill-effects of human industrial activity.

Figure 1 A creek in Logan County, OK where Stephenson played as a child. A recently built pipeline warning sign stands beside the creek and a new drilling site looms in the distance.

From 2012-2013, I saw oil and gas infrastructure increasingly cross paths with the magical creeks and farm ponds from my childhood, and I became actively involved in organizing efforts to stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, raise awareness about the potential harms of fracking, and bring attention to environmental racism and injustice in Oklahoma. As an adult, my first pull to Ottawa County in the far northeastern corner of Oklahoma, was an appreciation for the work of Local Environmental Action Demanded (LEAD), an environmental justice organization, and their work to raise awareness about the Keystone XL pipeline. In 2013, I attended the Tar Creek Conference organized by LEAD and learned more about environmental justice issues facing Ottawa County.

In 1980, the United States Congress established the Comprehensive Response, Compensation and Liability Act, also known as Superfund. Superfund sites are designated areas in need of clean-up due to their toxic effects. Among these sites, the Environmental Protection Agency has referred to the Tar Creek Superfund Site in Ottawa County as one of the “most challenging” and “most complex” environmental remediation projects in the United States.

Figure 2 A large chat pile towers behind Tar Creek.

Photo by Clifton Adcock, taken from: https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/on-a-tour-of-tar-creek/

Named for Tar Creek, which runs through the county and connects with multiple waterways, the site has no clearly defined boundaries. It is broadly made up of areas in Ottawa County affected by the legacy of lead and zinc mining and other industrial practices. At first glance, the county appears dotted with large sand dunes standing hundreds of feet high, but if you ask a local resident, they will explain that these are not dunes. They are mounds of mining waste known locally as “chat piles.” They are made up of lead, zinc, cadmium, and other metals discarded and abandoned through mining processes. These metals seep into the soil and pollute groundwater. The overflowing toxic waters of flooded lead and zinc mine shafts have led to deeply entangled forms of water and soil pollution at and around the site.

Figure 3 Miami, OK underwater during a large flood in 2019, photo taken from https://nexusmedianews.com/miami-oklahoma-floods-lead-inhofe/

Outside the purview of Superfund, flooding has been a persistent problem since the construction of the Pensacola Dam and the Grand Lake o’ the Cherokees reservoir in 1941. During thunder and tornado season, heavy rains cause water to pool upstream of the reservoir creating a backwater effect, flooding homes, further dispersing toxins, and threatening communities in Ottawa County.

The National Defense Authorization Act for the year 2020, authored by Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, includes policies related to the Pensacola Dam and Grand Lake o’ the Cherokees. These policies give the federal government exclusive jurisdiction over lake water-levels of Grand Lake o’ the Cherokees and the authority to raise water levels. Raising water-levels will undoubtedly result in the flooding of significantly more homes in Ottawa County, OK and the further dispersal of heavy metals and chemicals through flooded waterways. Predominantly Indigenous, low-income, and rural communities in Ottawa County most greatly suffer the consequences of this decision. What might seem like a mundane and innocent provision, directly violates the sovereignty of local tribal nations, erases the input of local environmental justice organizations, and threatens to exacerbate already dangerous flooding for nearby communities.

In collaboration with LEAD, I plan to use qualitative research methods to explore how residents have responded to flooding in the past, and how residents can share their experiential knowledge with residents who are facing new flooding risks. Additionally, the project will explore the effects of the National Defense Authorization Act for the year 2020, as it puts areas that have never been impacted by flooding at heightened risk. The project will result in digital and print resources for residents who are at heightened risk for flooding. These resources will assist residents in knowing how other people have dealt with and responded to flooding risks in the past and help residents prepare for flooding risks in the future.

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Bailey Stephenson

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Unrelated to SW Monsoon

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Caring in Crisis: Challenges and Lessons in Practicing Collaborative Research in 2020

ben — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 16:41:04 +0000

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Regenerate Hub

My CLIMAS fellowship project was geared towards building a web platform called “Regenerate Hub” that provides data visualization and collaborative tools to enable diverse stakeholders to take action on interconnected social, environmental, and infrastructural problems. I am a doctoral candidate in anthropology and I met my community partners for this project, Recycle Lebanon, through my preliminary dissertation research. This research was investigating how people were intervening in Lebanon’s greatest challenges through altering and repairing infrastructural systems such as waste management. Recycle Lebanon is a small Lebanese nonprofit organization that emerged in response to the garbage crisis in Lebanon that peaked in 2015. They began by designing campaigns to clean garbage from coastlines, waterways, and forests, a movement which grew to include establishing the first zero waste shop in the Middle East (the EcoSouk) and innovating ways to reuse waste such as cigarettes through creating the first cigarette recycling initiative in the country.

Photo 1: Planning meeting for Regenerate Hub, Summer 2019 (Credit: Rachel Rosenbaum)

I began volunteering with the organization specifically to work on their ongoing data collection efforts to build “Regenerate Hub” under their program called “Regenerate Lebanon”. Regenerate Hub is an online platform aiding in conscious system change with a mission to strengthen the circular economy and promote sustainable development solutions. The site tackles interconnected social, economic, and environmental issues by promoting access to information, integrating opportunities for action, visualizing data, and incentivizing users to scale game-changing solutions by means of interconnectivity across sectors and encouraging nature-based solutions. The platform will guide multiple stakeholders to engage, visualize, and interact with service providers and disparate datasets and publications retrieved from researchers and institutions. The various features will include robust data filtration, data mapping and visualization, a library of publications and resources, and the ability for users to contribute data, validate data, and download data. There will also be robust user capabilities such as the ability for users to connect on topics in forums, save their data searches and pins, and tools for users to collaborate on new projects.

Photo 2: Field visit to local NGO who collects and sorts recyclables (Credit: Rachel Rosenbaum)

The main goals of the site are:

To aggregate and enable access to data regarding up-to-date socio-environmental problems and local solutions
To provide tools to directly connect sectors with beneficiaries to innovate solutions to socio-economic issues while building connections between stakeholders that will allow people to collaboratively develop solutions online and offline.
Provide the data and technical information to aid in industrial transitions towards regenerative systems and a circular economy (i.e. reducing single use plastic use and disposal, designing non-recyclable materials out of production)
To promote and facilitate actions for people to invest resources, knowledge, and action to slow climate change and regenerate natural resources.

Using methods in qualitative and quantitative data collection, we’ve focused on aggregating data with various partners in the sectors of waste, energy, agro-business, and sustainable production and manufacturing. As the project evolved, I took on a product management role, deploying methods in ethnography and human-centered design to create the data visualization schema and in collaborating on the user experience design for the website. When I left Beirut in August 2019, I was planning to return in May 2020. We had agreed that I would remotely continue efforts to raise funds for web development costs and continue data collection efforts until I returned for my long-term fieldwork in Lebanon. However, this plan was soon interrupted and we have battled to continue this collaborative project through a political revolution, a global pandemic, a horrific explosion in Beirut, infrastructural challenges, and an economic crisis.

Photos 3: Solar panels and water tanks set up by Regenerate Lebanon and partners (Credit: Recycle Lebanon)

Facing the Unique Challenges of 2019 - 2020

Starting in October 2019, a political revolution in Lebanon (or thawra in Arabic) called for the resignation of the government and the dismantling of the governing elite. This was catalyzed by impending austerity measures which combined with decades of frustration over sectarian-based resource distribution practices, corruption, and chronic failure to provide for basic public needs and develop working infrastructures. While there have been political revolutions in Lebanon before, this was the first post-civil war movement that has not conformed to a sectarian status quo. Grassroots, decentralized, and nonsectarian co-occurring movements across the country were successful in overthrowing the Prime Minister and the formation of a new government (Chehayeb and Sewell 2019). It was within this revolution that I was awarded the CLIMAS fellowship for the “Regenerate Hub” project with Recycle Lebanon in December 2019.

During the thawra, the Regenerate Lebanon initiative took on new life as many people were collaborating within daily protests to reclaim public spaces and create community spaces. Regenerate Lebanon set up a pilot physical infrastructure that mirrored the goals of the “Regenerate Hub” online platform. In Martyr’s Square in downtown Beirut, Regenerate Lebanon set up a tented village with waste collection and recycling services, solar energy, composting, potable water, a zero-waste kitchen to provide free meals, a donation collection station to redistribute goods, and collaboration/co-working spaces where people hosted events and created new projects.

Photo 4: The site of a zero-waste holiday thawra dinner thrown by Regenerate Lebanon and partners (Credit: Recycle Lebanon)

However, within the middle of this national uprising, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In March 2020, as coronavirus spread across the globe, the Lebanese government initiated a lockdown of the country with strict curfews. The pandemic gave the government an opportunity to re-entrench power along sectarian lines and undercut the political gains of the thawra. For my research collaborators, this represented a considerable loss. At the beginning of the lockdown, military and police forces destroyed the public spaces and infrastructures in the thawra village and labelled remaining anti-government protesters as bioterrorists (Perry 2020). The army and police raided downtown public squares where they destroyed tents, food trucks, and confiscated other public infrastructures while detaining and fining protestors who remained in public spaces. Recycle Lebanon had to try to salvage the materials from the Regenerate village and shut down operations of this space.

The first two months of quarantine became an essential space of rest from the demands of activism for many in Lebanon and a time to process what politics may look like in the aftermath of the lockdown and the loss of the physical spaces they built. With the quarantine in full force, the first version of “Regenerate Hub” was launched online, building on the momentum of the thawra. I continued to work remotely and was able to regularly participate in meetings online as our world continued to shift.

Photo 5: Rendering of the Zero-waste kitchen in thawra (Credit: Recycle Lebanon)

With deteriorating economic conditions around the world and a currency crisis in Lebanon, we faced significant challenges in continuing to create Regenerate Hub alongside our other personal and professional pursuits. As Recycle Lebanon is a very small organization, they have relied on volunteer labor or partnership collaboration to carry out their projects. The latest economic challenges led to personnel changes as people around the country were economically displaced within and from Beirut. Much of the team disintegrated and we had to rebuild the team. Our previous small budget for web development no longer became feasible nor did we feel volunteer labor from those experiencing such financial harm was ethical. We spent Summer 2020 fundraising to be able to carry on. Thankfully, we were awarded a grant from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) funded by the Japanese Embassy in Lebanon to fund the web development of Regenerate Hub with a Beirut-based group and with GIS mapping support from Arizona Institutes for Resilience (AIR) at the University of Arizona.

Yet, we soon faced another setback. On August 4th, 2020, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history decimated Beirut (Amos and Rincon 2020). Over 190 people died, 6,500 were critically injured, and over 300,000 displaced overnight. Investigations reveal that the explosion was a human-produced disaster resulting from the combustion of nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate improperly stored in the Beirut port for nearly a decade (Forensic Architecture 2020). As I was beginning my comprehensive exams in Arizona, my friends and colleagues were sending me photos and stories of the impacts. The pictures of the apartment I live in when in Beirut are unsettling: bed sheets blasted across the room, shattered glass everywhere, pictures on the floor strewn from their frames, my roommate’s full coffee cup from the morning somehow intact. Other homes look as if their faces have been ripped off, providing a rare glimpse of the life behind the façade. Each uncanny scene of the rubble, the debris of dreams and lifeworlds, appeared haunted; haunted by the state, by colonization and neoliberal technocrats, by wars and greed and environmental destruction.

The effects of this traumatic event will be felt for decades to come and pervades any experience of trying to return to normalcy for both my colleagues in Lebanon and for me, living over 11,800km away. Existing economic challenges and infrastructures have further deteriorated, with frequent electricity outages, food shortages, difficulty accessing bank funds, and skyrocketing prices for basic goods. Our new normal in building Regenerate Hub looks like many things: Zoom meetings conducted in darkness, across time zones; creative solutions to persist through Wi-Fi outages; laughing at one another’s quarantine wardrobe choices; listening to one another’s challenges; learning to trust in the wake of trauma; communicating our needs; appreciating the small wins; building friendships.

Photo 6: Post-explosion damage in Beirut (Credit: Jo Kassis via Pexels)

Lessons Learned

This year, more than most, has underscored the importance of fostering networks of care and trust and cultivating reflexivity in collaborative research. This year I have been privileged to maintain a paying job and the ability to work remotely to keep myself and my loved ones safe, an advantage that many are not afforded. All the while, I have witnessed the acute challenges and trauma in the lives of my friends and colleagues in Lebanon as they watched their government continue to fail them, their homes disappear, and the city they love crumble to the ground from the government’s negligence and corruption. I too have grieved the beloved places in Beirut I will never get to visit again and the futures myself and my colleagues will no longer have. I too have grieved my own government’s negligence in battling a pandemic that disproportionately impacts people based on race and class and the demonization of struggles for racial justice. The disparate reality of experiencing 2020 is representative of violent colonial histories between the global north and south, a relationship that I believe researchers have a responsibility to redress.

Reflecting more deeply on this has made me change how I approach research in general. Rather than focusing on research outputs, I believe collaborative research necessitates a focus on process and power. As a result, I have intentionally leveraged my institutional resources and knowledge for this project, given my labor freely, and held space for my colleagues who are impacted differently than me in these times. I have also found that the shared challenges we all face in just trying to continue to live and work in these times have created more understanding of the need to displace the focus on “productivity” in work. In our work, we need more time to grieve, time to take care of our (mental) health, to rest, and to connect in times of isolation.

What Comes Next

Since September 2020, the team has rebuilt and been able to focus on designing Regenerate Hub to be as impactful as possible. We are on track to finalize the first phase of development and re-launch the site by the end of February 2021 with the full site functionality to be up and running by June 2021. I hope to return to Lebanon in Summer 2021 to conduct dissertation fieldwork on the politics of infrastructure in Lebanon and will continue to work on the development of Regenerate Hub.

Despite all the challenges of this past year, I am immensely encouraged by the resilience and growth of this project and the people who have built it. One of the main successes of this collaboration has been a renewed sense of care and strengthening of not just partnerships, but friendships.

Photo 7: Wireframe mock-up of Regenerate Hub filtration page overlayed onto the main map (Credit: Recycle Lebanon)

Photo 8: Wireframe mock-up of Regenerate Hub – detailing sectors, “calls to action” functions, and material inputs and outputs which will allow researchers and producers to track material flows (Credit: Recycle Lebanon)

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Community Cookbook - Reflections on the CLIMAS E&S Fellowship

ben — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 16:18:39 +0000

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Introduction

For the last twelve months, I have been on a rollercoaster of emotions; but, as my friends tell me, I am pretty much always on that rollercoaster of emotions, pandemic or not. So, as we near the one-year marker of social distancing in the U.S., I am reflecting on my turbulent feelings and experiences. I spent the majority of the pandemic 3,000 miles away from my family, oscillating between missing them, being scared for them living so close to New York City, and grateful I wasn’t cooped up alongside everyone in our small New Jersey apartment. In Tucson, I was able to keep working, keep getting paid, keep spending time outside, and keep my basic needs met. This came with a lot of guilt as I heard from friends and acquaintances all the struggles they faced with unemployment, food insecurity, immigration, being an essential worker, getting sick with COVID-19, and more.

I think I am still sitting in that guilt, but I also know I have a responsibility to fighting the systems that cause and exacerbate the hardships we are facing. Capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism undercut almost every choice we make, and we have to be vigilantly anti-racist, anti-capitalist, decolonial, etc. if we ever hope to see a brighter future. This year I learned and engaged with organizing and direct action in a significant way for the first time since undergrad. I was a part of powerful gatherings for Black lives, rallied against police brutality, saw local progressive candidates for office I helped campaign for win their elections, redistributed some of my wealth via mutual aid, and tried to give myself emotional space to process instead of running away from my thoughts. I know it was not enough and that I could always do more, but I think it is important to recognize the small triumphs in the fight for liberation.

In this spirit, food has grounded me. Even though my grand and luscious raised garden bed dreams never came to fruition (not for lack of trying…), I took solace and rejuvenation in the form of cooking, sharing photos of meals in WhatsApp chats, calling distant family members for recipes, and using the kitchen as a space to slow down and intentionally reflect on the world. With all of this in mind, I present a summary of my work with the CLIMAS fellowship program.

Background

While the pandemic not only caused new problems, but exacerbated old ones, the last year also highlighted that in times of peril, scarcity, and harm, people often turn to the land. I noticed people sharing recipes on social media, trying to learn how to make sourdough bread, supporting their neighbors who could not afford groceries, and even starting container gardens.

My CLIMAS project was to develop a community cookbook with Mission Garden, highlighting how food, culture, and sense of place contribute to community resilience, especially in response to pollution, climate change, and injustice. I worked with co-created citizen science project, Project Harvest (PH) and Mission Garden to explore these concepts and start to create the cookbook. My big, queer, earth-centered, and South Asian families teach me that it is important to celebrate joy, which we usually do via food. With this cookbook, I aimed to celebrate how frontline and marginalized communities use food as a defense against harm and as a seed for resilience.

PH participants have also been asking for more deliverables and this cookbook is a welcome material. In addition, the Mission Garden has wanted to expand and develop their culinary offerings. To create the cookbook, I am gathering recipes shared by PH participants and Mission Garden community members then clarifying, recipe testing, photographing, and stylizing them.

Stakeholders

PH is a co-created citizen science environmental monitoring study assessing contaminants in harvested rainwater, garden soils, and garden plants in four Arizonan communities: Tucson, Dewey-Humboldt, Globe/Miami, and Hayden/Winkelman. PH also focuses on participant learning, individual/community action, and systems change. There are over 150 participants who collect samples from their homes and send them to the University of Arizona for analyses. Samples are assessed for inorganic, organic, and microbial contaminants with resulting data shared to participants in a variety of ways (website, personalized booklets, phone calls, art installations, written reports, data-sharing events, and more). Participants primarily use their harvested rainwater for irrigating home gardens and want to know how safe their soil, water, and plants are for various uses, including consumption.

Figure 1. Photograph of Project Harvest promotoras and principal investigators passing out sampling materials.

Mission Garden is a four-acre garden at the base of Tumamoc Hill in Tucson, AZ. The goal of Mission Garden is to honor the over 4,000 years of agriculture in southern Arizona through gardens representing the many cultures and traditions that have called this area home. There are Hohokam, Yoeme and Yaqui, Tohono O’odham, Akimel O’odham, Mexican, Chinese, and Spanish gardens with more on the way representing African and Black culture and history in the Tucson area.

Figure 2. Photo of several plots at Mission Garden with A mountain in the background.

Outputs

While research plans changed drastically over the course of the last year, I was excited to start the cookbook and put together several recipes to give a taste of what the book will look like. Here are a three:

Figure 3. Dear ol’ Dad’s Sour Orange Marmalade recipe.

Figure 4. Fire cider recipe with Desi and Thai variations.

Figure 5. Tepary bean hummus recipe.

I also worked with researcher and artist, Dorsey Kaufmann, to create an activity based around documenting family recipes. As the worksheet indicates, “Recipes are heirlooms. Not only do they pass on ingredients and ways of preparing foods, but they also contain memories, personalities, and cultures.” When I recently visited home for the first time in a year, through this activity, I was able to spend time with my family talking about a dish that we had never written down before, Pav Bhaji. It is a delicious Desi meal with tomatoes, potatoes, and a specific spice blend, usually eaten with bread. We wrote our recipe down and had a great time talking about all the ways various Aunties and Grandmas in our family make the dish their own.

Figure 6. Family recipe activity created by Dorsey Kaufmann and Kunal Palawat.

Next steps

Future work with this cookbook experience is to finish gathering and adapting seven more recipes, creating three YouTube cooking videos, finalizing three Spotify playlists to listen to while cooking, and designing the rest of the cookbook. I also hope to include gardening tips for the Southwest US and community reflections on COVID-19.

As I reconnect with Mission Garden, I will accomplish what I set out to do last year and help expand Mission Garden’s culinary offerings by hosting cooking classes. If those are well received, I will also offer online cooking classes for PH community members. During these classes, I will facilitate space to dialogue about food, pollution, and ecosystem/human health.

Figure 7. The Ramírez-Andreotta lab collecting soil samples at Mission Garden circa 2015.

Lastly, as summer 2021 comes to a close, I hope to continue environmental monitoring of Mission Garden that started in 2015 with a focus on understanding the human health risks and benefits associated with the plants, soils, and waters in the area.

2020 Reflections

This year, amidst the struggle for Black lives and a more just society, COVID-19 pandemic, and personal hardship, I found myself wildly ill-equipped to fully engage and commit to research. For the majority of the year, I felt lost, insecure, and isolated. I felt like I was failing at every turn and my mental health suffered even more than normal. I started the fall 2019 semester going to Mission Garden every Thursday morning to work, pick beans, weed garden beds, and talk with other volunteers and visitors. But at the beginning of the pandemic, I stopped going to the gardens and all but paused work on the cookbook and other projects to focus on my health and community organizing. I aim to restart relationship building once COVID-19 vaccines have been well distributed around Pima county and finish out the cookbook by the end of summer 2021.

I learned a lot about the importance and need for rest; while, at the same time I feel like I never actually stopped working, organizing, or doing. I have also learned a lot about flexibility, growth, and the need to listen to calls for change. Especially in community-based and co-created science, researchers must be dynamic in their approach and respond to the needs of their community and themselves. Some of those responses have looked like quickly transitioning to Zoom in lieu of in-person meetings, wearing masks, pausing field work, having virtual cooking classes, changing research questions, or sending money to people in need through mutual aid. But there is always more that could have and should have been done. I hope we all take time to reflect on 2020 and the systems of oppression and liberation that came to the public surface so that we may make informed and decisive change for a better future.

In the vein of use-inspired, community-based, and democratized science, this CLIMAS fellowship gave a dedicated space for fellows to regroup and consider the role of the pandemic and social unrest in research. In no other research setting, was I ever asked how COVID-19 impacted me and my capacity to live. In most other meetings, we did not spend a substantial amount of time sharing about power and privilege and their impacts on our communities, stakeholders, research, and more. Is research important if it does not respond to the needs of the most marginalized/impacted? What is the point of work that is disconnected from the public, ignorant of the political arena, and/or miscommunicated to relevant stakeholders? How do we cherish the humanity and needs of researchers, co-researchers, community members, and the Earth all at once?

For any future work I do, I will ask myself these questions and if my responses are not substantial enough, then the study should not happen unless it changes to be more liberatory. I urge everyone reading this article to similarly create a set of guiding questions to ground your research so that it can have a meaningful impact and limit how much harm the work perpetuates.

Blog Category:

All Posts

Front Page Feature?:

Yes - Front Page

ENSOHUB:

Not part of ENSO Hub

MONSOONHUB:

Unrelated to SW Monsoon

DROUGHTHUB:

Non-Drought Hub Related

ben's blog

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Some thoughts on leaving my PhD program and writing this blog post:

Reflections: Exploring Karst Groundwater Vulnerability and Risks in Arizona in 2021

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Stakeholders

Research design and methods

Some outputs and outcomes

Lessons learned about the process of use-inspired research

Next steps in my use-inspired research journey

Footnotes

Lessons Learned as a CLIMAS Environment & Society Fellow

Fellow, Climate Assessment for the Southwest

Searching for Water Solutions: from a “Land of Wood and Water” to the Sonoran Desert - CLIMAS E&S Grad Fellow

Fellow, Climate Assessment for the Southwest

References

Exploring FireScape - CLIMAS E&S Grad Fellow

Fellow, Climate Assessment for the Southwest

Responding to Flooding in Ottawa County, OK - CLIMAS E&S Grad Fellow

Fellow, Climate Assessment for the Southwest

Caring in Crisis: Challenges and Lessons in Practicing Collaborative Research in 2020

Fellow, Climate Assessment for the Southwest

Community Cookbook - Reflections on the CLIMAS E&S Fellowship

Fellow, Climate Assessment for the Southwest