Using Moss To Push Government Action in Seattle’s Duwamish Valley

When Nico Vargas spent her time mentoring teenage girls in South Seattle last year, they were just trying to make it through another day in high school – all while disproportionately burdened with air pollution.

Vargas, then a senior at Western Washington University studying environmental policy, walked them through neighborhoods in the Duwamish Valley to collect moss that the United States Forest Service (USFS) would later screen for air toxin concentrations. They asked about how to find viable trees to access the moss, but they also asked why navigating high school felt so impossible. It reminded Vargas of lived experiences outside of datasets often reflected in academic papers.

“The experts don’t have to just be someone in a white lab coat. Science can be used as a tool to help people with their advocacy rather than a tool of gatekeeping,” says Vargas, who now works at a salmon recovery non-profit. “Involving the community directly in research about their own neighborhood is a matter of justice. It’s not just numbers in a study, people are really living this.”

That’s one of the reasons why Duwamish River Community Coalition (DRCC) Executive Director Paulina Lopez worked with the USFS to train community scientists to investigate heavy metals around them. More than 73% of people who live in Duwamish Valley’s neighborhoods, Georgetown and South Park, are Black, indigenous and people of color. In the local government’s science-based agencies, they’ve historically been excluded from evidence collecting and evaluation in their own community.

Lopez is sharing what a team of 55 community scientists learned from measuring pollutants in moss tissues from these industry-adjacent neighborhoods. Through a complex air quality investigation, including a newly published study of heavy metal concentrations in the air, they hope to bring environmental justice to an underinvested area with a long history of environmental contamination. After reviewing their data, the government has already agreed to fund several temporary air monitors in the Duwamish Valley this summer.