In the Media
Mentions a partnership between Samish Nation and Shannon Point Marine Center, which provides safety oversight to the Samish diving team and guidance on development their own program.
A New York Times book review of Jane Wong's new memoir, "Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City." Wong is a faculty member in Western's English Department.
Jane Wong is the author of the poetry collections How to Not Be Afraid of Everything and Overpour. An associate professor of creative writing at Western Washington University, she grew up in New Jersey and currently lives in Seattle, Washington.
For the better part of the last 20 years, Western Washington University environmental science professor Marco Hatch has had his hands in the muddy shores of the Pacific Northwest and Canada, digging for clams.
Specifically, Hatch has dedicated his life's work to clam gardens and the cultural importance to the Indigenous people of the region. For centuries, they would place heavy rocks at the low tide line to build a short wall. The high tide would deposit sediment, creating the ideal habitat for clams to grow and thrive, and for other small marine species, like crabs and young fish, to find safe harbor. They managed and harvested the gardens, before colonization.
“Just like humans, dogs get characterized for what they can do, but more importantly what they can symbolize,” says Cameron Whitley, a Western Washington University sociology professor and the chair-elect of the American Sociological Association's Animals and Society section. Whitley argues that breeds' popularity depends less on their traits than on their portrayal in media and pop culture.
Op-Ed by Derek Moscato, an associate professor in the Department of Journalism at Western Washington University and a research fellow with the Border Policy Research Institute.
Eric DeChaine is the curator of the Pacific Northwest Herbarium and a professor of biology at Western Washington University, but he says that at heart he is a naturalist.
DeChaine was one of two presenters at the April 21 Wild About Nature presentation held at the White Salmon Grange.
Bothered by bugs while researching in tropical rainforests, he had the bright idea: “I’m going to the arctic!” The audience laughed as he confirmed, “Yes, mosquitoes!” He now researches in the area of the Pacific Rim, the “Ring of Fire,” which consists of an arc of volcanoes stretching from south of Japan north through Russia, across to Alaska, and down the west coast of the Americas.
Just five months after academic student employees (ASEs) at Western Washington University announced the intent to unionize, their group — Western Academic Workers United (WAWU) — has helped pass a bill in the state Legislature codifying their right to collective bargaining.
New legislation, passed by the state Legislature earlier this month, requires boats and vessels in Puget Sound to maintain a 1,000-yard buffer between them and endangered Southern Resident orcas.
But scientists and researchers at Western Washington University’s Salish Sea Institute don’t know if it’s enough, and say more research on the endangered animals is necessary.
Each year, hundreds of tons of plastics wash up along Alaska’s remote shorelines — from buoys to nets to plastic bottles. At Western Washington University, students are reimagining the future of those plastics.
In 2019, Western’s polymer materials engineering program partnered with the Ocean Plastics Recovery Project in an effort to collect and recycle ocean plastics. Over the past four summers, groups of students have engaged in intensive cleanups along the shores of Alaskan beaches, bringing materials back to Western’s labs for student research.
“Alaska is kind of shaped like this perfect catcher's mitt, and the way the currents come out of the Pacific Ocean, they push debris that's in the ocean up into the shorelines,” said John Misasi, an associate professor of polymer materials engineering at Western.