Program on the Environment

Information grants agency. Everyone has a right to holistically understand the threats facing the ecological structure of the region they call home. Successfully combating the climate crisis requires solutions that encapsulate the unique insights and needs of our heterogenous world. The current sector of environmental communications is failing. Scientific authors fail to make their findings accessible, while journalists refuse to sacrifice intrigue for the comprehensive translation of complex environmental information. Therefore, multi-prong methods of environmental communications must be utilized to reach diverse stakeholders. I spent the summer researching environmental issues in the Chehalis watershed under the Chehalis Basin Partnership and designing unique methods of communication for engaging three diverse audiences: scientific, local non-scientific, and neither scientific nor local stakeholders. For scientific audiences, I created a database for the Black River, which enhanced accessibility and coordination through the consolidation of otherwise-scattered information. For the local non-scientific community, I conducted interviews in order to glean public sentiment towards proposed modifications of the Skookumchuck River Dam, which revealed diverse and newfound perspectives on water management. For non-scientific individuals outside the Chehalis, I created two editorial publications on topics that sparked the most personal interest and opinion in me, with writing that prioritized balancing complex environmentalism with digestible language. All projects rallied stakeholder engagement in watershed health, supporting my belief that effective communication can directly correlate with interdisciplinary involvement to prevent the climate crisis.