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Climate Action, Fisheries, and The Island School

Hi Redfishies – I am planning a unique experience to visit an incredible teaching and learning environment, and my former employer in The Bahamas.  This course will explore sustainable fisheries, education, and travel all set in The Bahamas at the Island School.  Come snorkel, boat and learn with about the culture of The Bahamas.

Redfish School of Change and The Island School have teamed up to offer an unusual learning experience focusing on climate action leadership, fisheries, and sustainability education at The Island School (TIS) on Eleuthera Island. Learn from local fishers, energy experts, fisheries researchers, and educators at TIS and the Cape Eleuthera Institute, a model place-based educational institution in The Bahamas.  This all-inclusive experience (room, board, and on-island travel are all included) will have you eating fresh seafood, diving and snorkeling with sharks and patch reefs, boating in the cerulean waters above a 4000 ft deep “tongue of the ocean”, all while learning about climate leadership and conducting research in the Caribbean.

Course: ENVS 437 The Bahamas: Climate Action, Fisheries, and the Island School

Credits: 8

Summer Course Dates: June 20, 2022 – August 15, 2022

Time in The Bahamas: July 18, 2022 – July 30, 2022 (with extendable stay at The Island School

Cost: $5500 including room, board, travel on island, and tuition

Click here to apply by March 11th, 2022 – you must register with WWU summer programs

The Bahamas Information Zoom Session:

Thursday March 3rd
430pm
Zoom link
Meeting ID: 917 5211 1039
Passcode: 540120

if you have any questions – please email me stangen@wwu.edu and come to the information zoom session.

dr. nick

This fall, join Dr. Elin Kelsey, renowned Hope ecologist, with Positive Psychology coach, Joy Beauchamp, in this cross-border partnership between the University of Victoria and Western Washington University. Designed as an intensive course, with coaching throughout the quarter, you will get to partner with University of Victoria and Western Washington University students in a Salish Sea collaboration.

Grounded in Positive Psychology and Constructivism, this course explores ways to foster hope, personal agency and community resilience during this time of heightened uncertainty associated with climate change and the global COVID-19 pandemic. The class will use a solutions-orientation to frame the current situation we are living in, and will support students in amplifying evidence-based positive trends. The one-week intensive course (Wednesday-Sunday) will have a different focus for each day: 1) Maintaining personal well-being during rapidly changing conditions; 2) The importance of hope and ‘outlaw emotions’ in engaging with and communicating about climate change or other global issues; 3) environmental intersectionality, climate justice and multi-species agency; 4) Social ecological and community resilience in the Salish Sea;  and 5) Allyship, social care, self-kindness and solutions incubators

The course will bring students outside (even through the virtual environment) and help them explore how a focus not only on the very real problems we face but also on solutions and gratitude can help amplify their ability to nurture personal, community, global sustainability and transformation in response to critical issues like climate change.

• Class meets Wednesday September 22, 2021 for initial orientation and pre-course assignment.
• Coaching sessions offered September 29 through Sunday November 14 (1 hour per student). 
• Intensive online synchronous course Wednesday November 10 through Sunday November 14, 2021, 9:00 am-3:00 pm per day over five days. 

Please note: the course requires a major pre-course assignment to be completed the week before class begins and after course homework with checkins through Sunday November 28. 

Professors: Dr. Elin Kelsey (WWU) and Joy Beauchamp MA (UVic)

e-mail: elinkelsey@gmail.com and joy@schoolofchange.ca 

After months in the making, we finally have the printed copies of our Redfish School of Change 10 Year Anniversary Journal! Reading through all of the submissions, songs, stories, and updates, I was reminded about what a totally incredible program this is. I have been lucky enough to have been part of it, in one way or another, since 2016, along with my sidekick and accomplice, wee Otis. I am thrilled to be continuing on this year in a slightly different capacity, both as Communications Coordinator and a co-instructor with Nick Stanger. Here’s to another 10 incredible years of joining hands across the Salish Sea and making positive change in this wonderful place.

If you’d like to have a look at the journal online, you can view it by clicking here. To order a copy, please send me an email at joy@schoolofchange.ca, and make a suggested donation of approximately $12.00 to cover the cost of printing and shipping. You can make a donation by clicking the “Donate” button on the side bar.

We are still accepting applications for the 2019 Field school. If you are thinking of applying, now is your chance! Click here to submit an application and become part of a trans-border group of change makers in the Salish Sea.

EXPERIENCE THE SALISH SEA WITHOUT BORDERS! Travel both sides of the international border with a cohort of Canadian and US students interested in creating positive social and environmental change.  Become a part of a network of leaders in this unique region. Gain leadership skills, practice reciprocity, explore reconciliation and develop environmental hope while being immersed in the Salish Sea bioregion.

Click here to apply today.

 

In celebration of our 10 year anniversary, Redfish now has a new website! Stay tuned over the next couple of months as we add details and information about our upcoming events and our summer field school. If you have any questions, feel free to contact the new communications coordinator, Joy Beauchamp: joy@schoolofchange.ca.

If you are feeling despair regarding the environment and need some inspiration and reasons for maintaining hope, join world renowned author and researcher, Dr. Elin Kelsey at Western Washington University on January 24th and 25th, 2019. Elin’s work is a welcome break from current environmental narratives which use language and examples to evoke despair and terror. A gifted storyteller and infectious agent for spreading hope, Elin artfully weaves together her wealth of examples from the natural world  to show how the resiliency of other species can help not only restore but also spread hope to those around us. Whether your interests are social justice or environmental education, Elin’s workshops will inspire discussion and help shift our focus away from problems and towards the miraculous solutions that abound in our world.

For more information about these events, click here.

by Dana Cook

One July evening, all the men of redfish wore dresses.

This was not done as a joke. It was a lovely thing to do on a summer’s evening. It was a celebration of two birthdays and a culmination of events. It was a celebration of not only inclusivity but femininity. A new way to try out being in the world.

If you were there that evening, what you would have seen was simple: Jaime in vintage floral; Bryce in knee length tie-die; Joe in a short, striped number; Alexei in a brown velvet skirt; Chris in a paisley skirt, and Riley resembling a mermaid. In short, men in dresses.

From childhood, boys are raised to be men. When masculinity means to always be strong and in control, there is little room for feeling and expressing vulnerable emotion. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Ted Talk We Should All be Feminists, she speaks to the harm of gender roles in our society. How in order to build a more equitable world, we must look at the way gender is constructed in both men and women.

“We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability.” (pg 26, Adichie)

Rebecca Solnit expands on this in her 2017 essay A Short History of Silence. In it, she unpacks how boys and men are socialized to deaden aspects of their inner life. This has ramifications that reverberate throughout a man’s life. Toxic masculinity is one result with impacts felt on a personal and global level.

Being a cis-gendered female, I cannot say how the men of Redfish felt. I can only say that that evening changed something for me. It made femininity in men more visible, more desirable, more possible. Imagine if we lived in a society where that which we define as feminine was supported in boys and men. Where men were encouraged to cry, to be tender, to talk about and express their innermost hopes and fears. To wear floral dresses with reckless abandon. I know I would feel safer in that world.

I watched throughout the program as the men of redfish made themselves vulnerable and expressed uncomfortable emotions. I hope we made space for them to do so. I hope they continue to do so.

The night ended for me sitting on the grass, watching Jaime and Alexei perform a duet of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. I thought of how beautiful they were adorned in women’s clothing. How wonderful it would be if two cis-gendered heterosexual men toured the country in floral dresses, playing tender songs and moving our hearts towards what is possible.

 

References:

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2014. We Should All Be Feminists. Harper Collins UK. http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780008115272/we-should-all-be-feminists. (Also featured in the Beyoncé song ***Flawless)

Solnit, Rebecca. 2017. “A Short History of Silence.” In The Mother of All Questions, 176. Haymarket Books.

by Danielle Sherrill

When I first applied for the Redfish School of Change last winter, I yearned to better understand how to more effectively mitigate some of the complex social and ecological challenges plaguing my home in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas. Among these problems are extensive habitat loss and fragmentation, water and air pollution, rapid gentrification and unsustainable urban sprawl, police brutality, and the rising unaffordability of the costs of living. Connecting with concerned citizens, passionate students and learned activists about the various ways to catalyze and sustain change appealed to me for this reason, particularly as I approached the tail end of my time at the University of Victoria and the encroaching and daunting prospect of returning home.

Yet, soon into embarking on our journey, a different, equally pertinent goal began to take precedence in my mind, one of a far more internal nature. At the beginning of Redfish we were introduced to the term “personal ecology,” which can be understood as one’s own individual health and wellbeing and ability to practice self-care. Deriving from the notion that one cannot possibly contribute to the world in a positive and sustainable way without taking care of one’s self first, personal ecology emphasizes the importance for activists to recognize their own unique responsibilities and capacities, without carrying the immense weight of the world’s problems on their own shoulders.

During our time in Redfish, many of us have experienced grief over the scale of ecological and cultural loss and devastation that besets our planet. Even as we’ve encountered inspiring leaders and participated in tangible change such as environmental restoration projects, I have found myself emotionally overwhelmed by the extensive array of challenges that face my generation and those yet to come. Many of us have felt a culmination of motivation, inspiration and anxiety throughout this month, all the while questioning what unique niches we might occupy in order to meaningfully contribute to positive change.

Several of the leaders we have met have planted seeds in my mind about how it is that one can be an activist while avoiding feeling disheartened, inadequate and burnt out. One particularly inspiring conservationist named Misty McDuffey spoke about her experience conducting field work and writing educational pieces about the threats to salmon populations and the endangered Southern Resident orcas. Fueled by veneration for these species and distraught over the devastation their communities are experiencing, she highlighted some of the impacts of fisheries, dykes, dams and the aquarium trade. When a student finally asked her about how she studies such a heavy topic without burning out, she emphasized the importance of cultivating gratitude in our day-to-day lives. She encouraged us to appreciate the awe-inspiring beauty of our world that still remains, and to try to leave behind our narratives of loss and despair in these moments in order to be fully present and reverent. In other words, Misty stressed that we must continually appreciate and love the planet wholeheartedly, without letting our understanding of its destruction hinder our ability to be grateful.

On top of this, Redfish has affirmed to me how truly communal sustainable change is. There is no lone mythological superhero that can lead us into the progressive sunset. Instead there are networks of people, diverse and unique, with different skill sets and capacities, strengths and weaknesses. We collectively change the world. We cannot independently create the world we want.

 

In the same vein, we should hold each other gently while recognizing that change is not always straightforward or immediate, mistakes will be made, our goals will need to be re-evaluated and adapted. In the midst of realizing this, I am learning to hold myself gently, to take care of my own “personal ecology” as if I were my own teeming, complex universe, but also to humbly accept that I am one mere piece in this infinitely complicated planetary puzzle.

While immersed in our Redfish community, I have been reminded, time and time again, of the power of solidarity. I have been reminded of the pivotal need to practice self-love and self-care, to know what I can do and what I simply cannot do, and to recognize that what I cannot do, another might be destined to do. I have been reminded to hold myself and those around me gently as we create the kind of world that can nourish and sustain us into the indefinite future.