The Sound Green

The topic of dead zones has been observed and studied scientifically often over the last decade, but has had little presence in the public sphere in the Northwest United States and even the global sphere. A failure to recognize the existence and expansion of dead zones in the Puget Sound would be fatal to the health of the environment and the standard of living of those that reside in the Northwest. Dead zones are of particular relevance because its relation to the world’s current issues of climate change, food scarcity, and pubic health. Research analysis of dead zone discourse and the larger contributing factors reveals that dead zone growth is enabled by an absence of regulation, poor accessibility and transparency of dead zone information, and insufficient funds to solve the problem. The findings suggests that education and working to solve the problem in small communities would be more efficient as policy making decisions on regulation has been sluggish and needs additional reinforcement from society.

     There is a large network of individuals that are readily available for contact on public areas of the internet.  With the growing number of social media users, and new marketing tactics to tap into that population, my objective was to introduce or expand some of those concepts to volunteerism and environmental communication.  Ultimately, to implement a strategy which would frame the organization’s visibility as appealing to isolated persons, and consequently increase the number of volunteers.  To target the strategy locally, make it easily shareable, and be personally appealing, I suggest ways for the GSP to implement social media directly on their website.  For volunteer forest stewards that wish to put in the effort to maintaining a Twitter account, I recommend an appropriate way to do so.  Finally, I create a Facebook fan page for Camp Long, which is undergoing governmental review but has the potential to be a template for all Seattle Parks pages.  While not everything has worked out as anticipated, these efforts thusfar have driven more traffic to the GSP website.

This is an advocacy project to help spread the word on the Puget Sound water system and the non point-source pollution that haunts it. Hopefully by the end of the project we will be able to educate people on the cause of pollution, why it is harmful, and what we can do to prevent it. In order to achieve this we attended events and interviewed specialists, conducted research on local non point source pollution, and created a graphic design to educate the uninformed citizen. The poster will be sent all around the internet as well as posted physically on public billboards. Only the most valid and applicable information was on the poster in order to quickly and effectively communicate to our audience. The goal is for a poster of this type to represent the harm caused by non point source pollution and how you can make easy everyday changes to reduce your pollution contribution.

For my project on water pollution I've decided to focus my research on dead zones and also addressing dead zones in the Puget Sound. My Paper outline looks like:

Nature is a PBS show that is in its 28^th season. The show is designed to bring the ‘natural world’ into people’s homes. It has received upwards of 450 awards. Does the number of awards it seems to accumulate mean that people do care about nature? Is the show soaking up the advantage of having a widespread audience to get out an environmental message for change. Messages need outlets to be heard and this show is a perfect one. It is an example of working with what is popular to make something else popular. I recommend watching a show!

http://ncseonline.org/NAE/envirojustice.html

Here is the link to some of the “alternative” environmental views of Native Americans. Essentially they look at humans, plants, and animals as equally important. I was actually talking to my roommate about this over the weekend and his response was, “Hey just like those blue people in Avatar.” This is absolutely correct, because the “blue people” of Avatar are BASED on the ideas of Native Americans, which many people don’t actually realize. This makes me think of the “Avatar Depression” people faced, where after seeing Avatar they became depressed they can’t live in a place like Pandora. When in reality there are places like this and Native Americans have been teaching these “alternative” views for a very long time.