Saturday began in misty rain (my favorite kind!). Strange on a late June morning, but so far, the weather seems to plan for rain every other time I'm out in the field.
I met the day's two community scientists at our Waste Management monitoring site in South Park, where we keep our field equipment. After a rundown through safety protocols and equipment, we loaded our invertebrate fall trap gear—bungee cords, plastic boxes, a bottle of soap, and a sieve—into our cars and drove the 10 minutes to our field site in what was becoming a downpour.
One of the GFL's partners is a generous community member who's sharing his private dock and river access as a monitoring site. Today, the two community scientists and I were there to set up invertebrate fall traps. After they left, I would work on plant monitoring with a GFL team member for the first time.
Explaining scientific protocols often feels like translation, a process that highlights the precise, formalized nature of Western scientific practice. I've seen jokes about how phrases like "specimen was removed from the study pool" can mean "I dropped the frog and lost it." Today, "setting up invertebrate fall traps" meant precariously bungee cording five plastic bins of soapy water to the floating metal cages anchored to our BioBarges. Even though the rain was letting up, the BioBarges' narrow wooden walkways were slippery, and balancing on them to lean over the water and suspend unwieldy plastic bins via bungee cords...no easy task. But we did it!
After setting up the five BioBarge bins, the remaining ten bins, which served as control and reference points—set up on land—were easy. We finished our work quickly and were chatting on the deck when one of the community scientists said, "So...are both of you also half white, half Asian?" With masks on, my mixed radar's been weak, so I hadn't even thought to ask. But as it turned out, we were all biracial—and just like that, so many walls came down. We spent the next half hour chatting by our parked cars, sharing our stories and recent experiences in the pandemic.
Before last year, I had never met a single person in ecology / any environmentally adjacent field who identified as AAPI, let alone a biracial woman with a similar ethnic background to mine. So during my first summer with DDCSP, when I was introduced to so! many! female, AAPI, multiracial environmentalists, my heart was opened to a feeling of community that finally felt right.
Meeting environmentalists who share stories similar to mine continues to be incredibly affirming and reenergizing, and I'm seeing such a huge shift in the ways our environmental communities are bringing race, identity, and belonging into our conversations. But I also can't help but recognize that the racial identities I hold are not the ones that have historically faced—and continue to face—the most deadly environmental injustice and racism. It's challenging but necessary to hold the joys of seeing my identities represented with the much bigger question of: but why aren't more Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks in the room—or in this case, on the BioBarge?
This summer, I'm centering this question as I explore the stories—and histories—of the Duwamish Valley, which continue to deeply shape who steps forward to claim the title of conservationist.
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