Gottuso, Saskia. Community Plans. Climate Change Adaptation Policy, Autumn, 2021.

Multiple tasks were listed in the instructions for this academic duty in my climate change adaptation policy class. The first of which was to research how at-risk for flooding my residential area was. I lived in West Seattle at the time, and acted accordingly. By the end of my research I had a variety of statistics about the environment around my home. For this, I am grateful I have the privilege of learning in the structured and productive institution that is UWB.

I obtained a lot of numbers, however, for the purpose of these short paragraphs, I will not include them. I will only expound on the categories that were measured, because revealing it all would also defeat the purpose of my longer report. My research was cross-relational. I studied intersectionality between people in correlation to the physical environment, which is a piece of the huge umbrella of systemic racism. I found out just exactly how many homes in West Seattle are very vulnerable to flooding, and chance of extreme rain events. I included some brief personal anecdotes, one of which was an account of a home-grown vegetable stand outside of someone’s house in my neighborhood. It was a small shack with some bins of home-grown produce and a sign that read, “always free”. In my grading rubric, my professor told us to elaborate on something positively contributing to environmental justice in our neighborhood. With the free produce hut being my exemplar, I extended my point by listing which crops thrive during each season.

Another aspect of this essay is my explanation of food deserts. With community education on at-home gardens, this crisis could potentially be on its way to being solved. I offered ideas of seminars, seed-trading, group-gardening, etc. I found all of my own articles on scholarly websites to complete this project, my investigations were integrative.