1/28/2021

FIRST ETAL/FHC READING GROUP MEETING OF 2021: SHOULD WE BE USING WATERSHEDS AS MORE THAN A SCIENTIFIC UNIT?

Hello all,

Happy New Year! We (Lauren Herbine and Shelby Sawyer) are two new graduate students formally joining the lab this semester. We have been working remotely since various points this past fall. Although we have not met all of you in person, we have enjoyed working with you remotely and look forward to getting to know you all better.

We have been tasked with getting the ET-AL reading group up and running again. We're excited to take this on and hopefully provide a way for the lab to get together bi-weekly for discussion and community. We want these meetings to be a relaxed and enjoyable way for us to talk through important publications together as a group. Until we are well clear of the pandemic, these will be remote meetings. 

Right now, we have the following laid out, but we are open to feedback and modifications as we go:

ETAL Reading Group 2021

Frequency: Bi-weekly meetings. 2nd & 4th Thursday of each month. 2nd without faculty, 4th with faculty.
Themes: Possibly monthly themes. We are still undecided!
Time: 4:00 - 5:00 PM MST over Zoom.
Length: 1 hour. Our goal is to make it an engaging, time-efficient meeting that doesn't run over time. If folks want to stay on the line and socialize after the initial one hour window, that is fine, but it is not expected.
Audience: First two (Jan 7th and 28th) will be lab-only so we can get comfortable with how the meetings will work and adjust as needed before we open it up to others.* We are thinking about creating a digital flyer to circulate to faculty and students in late January before classes pick up again and host our first "public" meeting on Feb 11th.
Structure: We are still deciding on the details for this, but our initial thoughts are to have one scientific article and one popular science article. We will likely spend 2-5 minutes summarizing the readings before opening it up for discussion, beginning with some questions that we have prepared. We will welcome other comments and questions from those joining us prior to the meetings as well. Article figures will be shown on a powerpoint in Zoom. 

Feel free to enjoy your beverage of choice during the meeting.

Second(ish)* meeting, January 28th:

To kick off, we will be reading 

1. The environment and environmental justice: Linking the biophysical and the social using watershed boundaries by D.T. Hill, M.B. Collins, and E.S. Vidon. It can be accessed here by clicking "Access through your institution" at the top. Let us know if you have trouble accessing the article. (7 pages)

Highlights
• Watersheds are important units of management for socio-environmental problems.
• Race is an effective predictor variable of water quality.
• Industrial pollution occurs in already impaired waterways.
• Watershed remediation should consider issues of social inequality.

2. Decentring Watersheds and Decolonising Watershed Governance:
Towards an Ecocultural Politics of Scale in the Klamath Basin by D. Sarna-Wojcicki et al. Access here. (19 pages)

"The watershed has long captured political and scientific imaginations and served as a primary sociospatial unit of water governance and ecosystem restoration. However, uncritically deploying watersheds for collaborative environmental governance in indigenous territories may inappropriately frame sociocultural, political-economic, and ecological processes, and overlook questions related to power and scale. We analyse how members of the Karuk Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources have leveraged and critiqued collaborative watershed governance initiatives to push for 'ecocultural revitalisation' – the linked processes of ecosystem repair and cultural revitalisation – in Karuk Aboriginal Territory in the Klamath River Basin"

We will send out a zoom link on Thursday for a 4pm MST call. As a reminder, the first two meetings will be just for lab folks. If you have any questions or suggestions, please reach out to us through this email. One of us will get back to you as soon as we can.

Cheers and Happy Reading!

*We attempted a student- and tech-only reading group before classes started, but unfortunately scheduled it when only one person could attend (thanks Tyler!). Even though it wasn't held, we did learn a couple of things, and have made a couple of changes to dates and content. Therefore, though this was originally supposed to be the second meeting, we have not actually held a discussion yet! Patience and feedback will be appreciated :)