Resources

Pedagogy Resources

Lesson Plan Ideas

Recommended Reading List

Scientists of Color

Lesson Plan Ideas

Environmental Racism, Justice, and Public Health Inequities

Topics: regressions vs correlations, environmental racism, environmental justice, pollution, public health inequities as legacies of redlining, respiratory pathology

Environmental Racism, Environmental Justice, Respiratory Pathology, Inequities in Pollution Burdens, correlations vs regressions. Use CalEnviroScreen 4.0 online database to test and analyze relationships and correlations among race/ethnicity, income, education level with exposure to air pollutants, water contamination, toxic releases as well as public health statistics across census tracts in California. CalEnviroScreen 4.0 is used by the California Attorney General's Office to focus investigations into environmental racism, and the U.S. Justice Department is currently setting a similar database up for the entire United States.

How racial and ethnic inequities intersect with urban ecology and evolution

Topics: addressing public health inequities, urban ecology/evolution, the Luxury Effect, human pathogen vectors, genetic drift, selection, habitat filters, wildlife corridors & metapopulations, population genetics, inbreeding depression, invasive species & invasion biology, landuse change & extinction, tree inequity and urban heat islands, niche space, and more.

Class discussion on this thought provoking and pertinent review from Science: The ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments (Schell et al. 2020). Analyzes the current state of the scientific literature, where it fails, and future directions on how systemic racism affects the ecology and evolution of urban wildlife with reciprocal impacts on inequities in public health. Covers several elements of ecological and evolutionary theory, including but not limited to genetic drift, selection, source-sink dynamics, wildlife corridors and metapopulations, habitat filters, human pathogen vectors, the Luxury Effect. A suggested direction toward the end of the discussion is having the class discuss how gentrification/urban renewal might affect urban wildlife and public health.

Dry lab idea: Test the Luxury Effect Hypothesis: Haves students contribute data from various urban habitat types or neighborhoods to the citizen scientist mapping of urban wildlife database iNaturalist.org. Then analyze species richness across different urban habitat types with iNaturalist.org and cross-reference with U.S. Census demographics on CalEnviroScreen4.0.

Indigenous Scientific Knowledge and Forest Fire Management

Topics: Indigenous knowledge as scientific knowledge; fire ecology; fuel loads; forest management; predator/herbivore mediated coexistence; demographics; climate change-exacerbated droughts; history of suppression of indigenous forest management; forest surveying methodologies

Multiple resources and readings are available on pilot projects applying traditional forest fire management techniques of indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, including this article and video from Vox. The 2022 Infrastructure Bill includes billions of dollars to scale up these techniques. This lesson recognizes cultural imperialism and land theft of indigenous lands by white "pioneers." You can continue the history/fire ecology lesson to World War II and today. For example, during World War II, the Defense Department needed the national forests to make M-1 rifle stocks for the war effort. The Japanese military set fire to a national forest with incendiary devices attached to weather balloons. The US NFS produced posters with racist charactertures of Japanese soldiers to ask patriots to report forest fires. Then see later fire suppression of US NFS of small fires that allowed the understory fuel load to build up while allowing timber companies to clearcut older, fire-resistant trees and replant at higher densities. Include this peer-reviewed study, Historic structure and composition of ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests in south-central Oregon (Hagmann et al. 2013), on how a century of poorly management timber harvests have changed the demographics of forests in the Pacific Northwest, making them more vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires. Unlike many studies that source indigenous knowledge and don't give credit, Hagmann et al. (2013) specifically state that sought historic accounts from elders in the nearby tribes.

Damming a river: How dams affect river ecology and river ecologies connection to culturals both indigenous and non-indigenous.

Topics: cultural diversity as an element of biodiversity; conservation biology; river ecology; dam removal; nutrient cycling; socioecology; chinook salmon ecology; Endangered Species Act; evolutionarily significant units; salmon moving nutrients from the ocean to inland forests; other aspects of lymnology; dam removal

Cultural Diversity as Biodiversity and Indigenous Knowledge as Science

Cracked Mirror & Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech by Wangari Maathai, founder of Greenbelt Movement, which has planted over 1 million trees across Africa.

Article, Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge, (Cámara-Leret et al. 2021) in PNAS, on traditional medicines being lost with languages going extinct.

History of how empires took knowledge of quinine and used it to keep their colonial armies from getting sick with malaria. Tie into the life cycle of the pathogenic protist Plasmodium falciparum and the evolution of drug resistance.