2023 Earth Day Speaker

Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land

“I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power.” So begins Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, “a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking.”

In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.

Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing up gay in a fractured land (2022), Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience (2017), and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America (2016). The Earth Day lecture draws on his most recent work, a protest memoir where Brorby bridges daydreams and nightmares: the gentle stirrings of the prairie and the violence of the oil and gas industry. Through the lens of his experience as a gay man growing up on fractured land, he explores how character and identity are shaped by the landscapes that raise us.

2022 Earth Day Speaker

Beyond Climate Doom:
Navigating Grief and Anxiety in the Age of Crisis

As our climate crisis deepens, feelings of anxiety, grief, and hopelessness are on the rise. Staying engaged in climate solutions over the long term requires us to avoid emotional burnout; yet when bombarded with so much bad news – mass extinction, dying oceans, displaced communities and burning forests – this is easier said than done. This talk explores the mental health dimensions of climate disruption among students, scientists, activists, and frontline communities, and shares practical strategies for building the emotional resilience to channel despair into meaningful action.

Dr. Jennifer Atkinson is an Associate Professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, Bothell. Her seminars on Eco-Grief & Climate Anxiety have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, the Seattle Times, Grist, the Washington Post, KUOW and many other outlets. She leads public seminars on climate and mental health in partnership with youth activists, psychologists, climate scientists and policy makers. Her podcast “Facing It” also gives people tools to channel eco-anxiety into action.

2021 Earth Day Speaker

Seattle’s Beacon Hill is a BIPOC immigrant and refugee majority community with aircraft, road, air, and noise pollution. Maria Batayola will speak about El Centro De La Raza’s and Beacon Hill Council’s organizing journey for their beloved community, the multicultural/lingual challenges, the tensions between Environmental Justice and science, the multi-layered laws, and the immediacy of climate change.

Maria Batayola is a writer and long time community equity and inclusion activist. A 1.5 Filipino immigrant, she led diversity, inclusion and equity programs for Metro and King County government for thirty years. She co-founded the anti-domestic violence/human trafficking Asian Pacific Islander Women & Safety Center, the Community Coalition for Environmental Justice, the Theatrical Ensemble of Asians and Kultura Arts. She currently serves as Environmental Justice Coordinator for El Centro De La Raza and chairs the Seattle Beacon Hill Council. She owns Jump Start, an organizational and community development consulting service.

2020 Earth Day Speaker

Sen. Saldaña grew up in the Delridge neighborhood of Seattle and has lived and worked primarily in Seattle and Oregon. She has expertise in a variety of areas including worker and immigrant advocacy, transit equity, women’s rights, social and racial justice, civic engagement, affordable housing and sustainable community development. Sen. Saldaña most recently served as the Executive Director for Puget Sound Sage – a nonprofit that promotes affordable and equitable housing and transportation policies, environmental justice and workers’ rights.

In that role, she helped secure $16 million in city funding for Equitable Development Initiatives in the 37th Legislative District, a future Graham Street Light Rail Station and transportation equity wins, including a low-income transit fare program. She is vice chair of the Senate Transportation Committee and also sits on the Labor & Commerce Committee and the State Government, Tribal Relations & Elections Committee. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Theology and Humanities from Seattle University, and lives in Rainier Beach/Skyway with her husband and two youngest children.

Although Sen. Saldaña couldn’t join us on campus, take a look at this video to learn more about who she is and the work she’s committed to.

2019 Earth Day Speaker

Matthew Vitz is Associate Professor of Latin American history at the University of California, San Diego where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Latin American and Mexican history as well as environmental history. He previously taught at Dartmouth College and was a postdoctoral fellow at Mexico’s National University (UNAM). His research on the urban and environmental history of Mexico has appeared in numerous journals. His book, A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City, was published by Duke University Press in 2018. His talk was titled: “What Environmental History Can Teach Us: Lessons for Building a Just and Sustainable Future.”

2018 Earth Day Speaker

Roger Fernandes is a Native American artist, storyteller, and educator whose work focuses on the Puget Salish tribal cultures of the western Washington region. He is an enrolled member of the Lower Elwha S’Klallam Tribe and has a degree in Native American Studies from The Evergreen State College and a Master’s Degree in Whole Systems Design from Antioch University.

He works in the fields of arts, education, and social work. All of these systems are essentially communications-focused and he weaves together elements of all three to create a unique perspective relative to teaching and learning.

2017 Earth Day Speaker

Amanda McCarty (PLU Biology ’04) is an environmental scientist and policy maker with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Her talk is entitled “Connecting Science and Policy: One Lute’s Journey from Biologist to Climate Negotiator.”

During her tenure at NOAA, Amanda has contributed to efforts to coordinate and advance the development and delivery of climate services, advanced President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, and provided leadership to international climate adaptation programs. The highlight was representing the United States for 7 years as a negotiator to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which allowed her to contribute to the historic Paris Agreement to address global climate change. Amanda is currently serving as both the Assistant Director for Partnerships and the Acting Deputy Director for NOAA’s National Sea Grant College Program, which produces and delivers science that serves America’s coastal communities, economies, and ecosystems.