Osprey Fall 2023

O SPREY FREE

Humboldt’s student-run magazine since 1973

FALL 2023

OSPREY CELEBRATES 50 YEARS Humboldt music scenes melt together

p. 4

Coping with climate grief

p. 17

Latine researchers in the sciences

p. 45

plus... harm reduction resources, DIY sticker sheet, horoscopes & more

Front cover: Osprey by Michael Rothman Back cover: “Ocean Spirit” (2022) Haifa, IL by Michael Rothman

Osprey magazine 1 Harpst St. Arcata CA 95521 osprey@humboldt.edu

We made this magazine while living and working on the present and ancestral Homeland and unceded territory of the Wiyot Tribe. Tribes and Nations in Humboldt County include Hupa, Karuk, Mattole, Tolowa, Wailaki, Wiyot, Yurok. We recognize that our words must be matched by action and approach. Here are some actions we suggest for our readers: ▶ Learn about whose land you live/work on by visiting native-land.ca. ▶ Pay the Wiyot Tribe’s honor tax. Visit honortax.org to learn more and download the form. ▶ Support the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab. Visit giving.humboldt.edu/nas-lab-fund to learn more and donate. ▶ Support Native-owned businesses. ▶ Students may also educate themselves on this land, its peoples and history through participating in Native American Studies classes and seminars, and visiting the Goudi’ni Gallery located on campus in the Behavioral and Social Sciences building.

Art by Char Valencia and Bug.

editor’s note + staff Editor-in-chief

Colwyn Delany

Managing editor

Ruby Cayenne

Layout editor

August Linton Michael Rothman Eli Featherstone

Illustrators

It’s been an honor to edit this semester’s Osprey magazine, which proudly marks fifty years of publication.

As writers, we collaborated with our sources to tell their stories as honestly as possible. As photographers, we worked to capture images respectfully and with spirit. As editors, we took a finetoothed comb to one another’s contributions to this issue, making every story the best that it can be.

I hope you enjoy the thoughtful coverage of marine sciences, helpful compilations of local resources, histories of campus communities, and fun bonus content along with every other piece included in these pages.

Thank you to our adviser Jessie for your essential help throughout this process. Thank you to my staff: you brought strong heart and attitude to this production, and it shows. Thank you to my family: I wouldn’t be here without your boundless energy and support. I love you. Thank you to our readers: I hope that you find something in these pages to bring out into your life.

Thanks for reading Osprey!

Colwyn Delany, editor-in-chief

Social media manager

Erin Holmes

Photo editor

Bryan Ellison

Photographers

Peyton Leone August Linton Michael Rothman

Writers

Ione Dellos Amber Rae Dennis Maranda Vargas Nat Cardos Colwyn Delany Ruby Cayenne August Linton Michael Rothman Erin Holmes Bryan Ellison

Copy editors

Adviser

Tori Olsen Tanya Gonzalez August Linton

Jessie Cretser-Hartenstein

contents Humboldt music scenes melt together

4

Back on the mat: wrestling returns to Humboldt

8

Twilight seaweed harvest: a photographic exploration of kelp cultivation

11

Cut up this magazine: a sticker sheet of student art

15

How to cope (or not) with climate change

17

WTF is CCAT? all about the Campus Center for Appropriate Technology

21

The CCAT foraging cookbook

24

Humboldt’s own harm reduction faerie

26

Harm reduction resources

28

Fired up: students work with fire

29

Hungry for change: food insecurity in Humboldt

33

Food resources

37

Autumn horoscopes

38

Who is the Humboldt Honey? 40 years later...

40

I was born knowing you, I was born loving you

42

‘Small paper cuts’: perspectives from Latine researchers in the sciences

45

50 years of Osprey magazine: a retrospective in covers

52

HUMBOLDT MUSIC SCENES MELT TOGETHER

by Nat Cardos

Gary Numan cover band New Gary Man Group plays the Seance House in Arcata.

4

A

show in Humboldt is watching your coworker’s friend’s band in a bar with a bunch of people you saw at the show last week in the backyard of some place called Dyke Dungeon. You then indulge in one to five drunken cigarettes. The next morning, you wake up following at least three new bands and six new people you don’t really remember the names of on Instagram, a showbill folded uncomfortably in your back pocket.

Humboldt County is exceptionally small and the music scene is exceptionally smaller. It reflects the unique charm of the Arcata Farmers’ market where hippies, yuppies and college students awkwardly shove past each other on the crowded sidewalk. Instead it’s metalheads, punks and EDM fans in an overcrowded venue.

Venues range from actual licensed establishments serving food and drinks to empty lots where the instruments and speakers are powered by a borrowed generator and some determination. There’s the option

New Gary Man Group at the Seance House, a DIY venue in Arcata that started hosting shows in early 2023.

¡¡hoUse ShoW!!!

THURSDAY | jULY 27

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mauve (pdx fifth-wave emo)

cardboard keesta doll

doors at 6 music at 7

$10

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DM @snailhobbyist for location

Cancer Christ playing at Savage Henry’s Comedy Club on their Pacific Northwest leg of their God Hates Cops tour.

of listening to electronic music while sweat condenses on the ceiling to drip on your head at the Miniplex (inside Richard’s Goat Tavern and Tea Room) in Arcata, hopefully you weren’t trying to escape the Humboldt rain. You could also smoke around the fire pit on the back patio of Blondies, drinking a chai latte from ceramic mugs while bearded men play Connect-4 with each other in-

side.

“I like the Jam alright, it just gets crowded and hard to move,” said Rah’kiv Lewis, guitarist of Arcata band Icarus and Suns. “Especially at the Goat. That’s the one I can’t do anything in and it’s almost goddamn scary in the Miniplex. Like, sometimes I can’t breathe in there there’s so many people. And their breath, bro. You literally breathe it in there.”

5

wednesday

For those performing at venues, air circulation is critical. At sold-out shows, crowds of people generate and preserve body heat, bringing to mind the winter adaptations of small mammals to stay warm. The theatrics of running and screaming on stage while playing music can get strenuous for musicians. Not to mention, they have the added challenge of amped up members of the crowd climbing on stage and throwing cans, underwear and all sorts of objects at them. “[A venue] should have an inside and outside part where you can have either an inside [music] situation or an outside situation,” said Lewis. “In the inside situation, ventilation. It’s important to have access to fresh air somewhere. And the floors should be even. Shouldn’t be any kind of, like, messing up on the floor.”

Opinions vary widely between patrons of any single venue. Some people like a spot that has good sound and food like Humbrews, but some prefer one with a place to smoke and skateboard like RampArt, one of Arcata’s more unique music venues. It’s primarily an indoor skatepark that hosts both events like ladies skate night and shows for touring and local punk bands.

The crowd perches on empty monolithic skate infrastructure, giving many a birds-eye view of the stage area. Colorful graffiti art and stickers completely cover most surfaces.

“I think it’s so fun because when like, there’s an intermission between bands, you can either watch people skate or fuck around in the bowls instead of

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JULY 19, 2023

OTHIEL AT BLONDIE'S ona, ca skramz/screamo from pom

WITH LOCAL SUPPORT:

RACKET

420 California Ave, Arcata

DOORS AT 6 MUSIC AT 7

punk/skramz

GRUG!

$5-$10

traditional caveman music

just standing there,” said Cal Poly Humboldt student Tommy Broedner.

Fresh college students’ first shows tend to take place in a living room or backyard, mostly because they’re not old enough to get into the bar venues yet. House shows, also known as DIY or “do it yourself” shows, can be a refreshing reminder that dorm life isn’t that bad. Your house could be host to a bunch of drunken strangers dancing in the living room while the band playing encourages them to “tear the place apart.” What if you’re just trying to heat up that frozen lasagna?

Some houses host shows so often they get names like the Manila Terror Center or the Seance House, with promoters that invite touring bands from out of state.

“I really like finding [bands] on social media or bandcamp or whatever and messaging them directly like, ‘Hey come play a show’,” said Atira Montgomery, who’s been promoting punk and

skramz shows since early 2023.

“It’s really exciting when they’re actually on tour and they’re a band I actually like. Like, I’ve been listening to [their] album so much and now they’re gonna come up here. It helps a lot with my depression and stuff.”

The biggest hurdle that DIY promoters face is finding a spot that will work. Some houses have an open backyard perfect for the bands and dancing, but have neighbors that will call the cops.

Or maybe there’s a perfect empty lot (or tunnel) far away from neighborhood complaints but there’s no way to power it because nobody can afford a generator.

“I think DIY is definitely a lot easier. It’s more fun but the difficulty is finding spaces,” said Montgomery. “Unless you know somebody with, like a generator or if there’s a cool spot where there’s actually outlets and you’re not gonna get kicked out.”

Promoters are the people who

Los Angeles band Cancer Christ plays at Savage Henry’s Comedy Club in Eureka in April 2023.

organize the bands and make the bookings for shows. Some make flyers as well and tape them to lamp-posts around town, while others post and share the flyers all over Instagram and Facebook.

Most do both. Typically they can be found working the door or running around the venue making sure all members of the band that’s about to play are present.

With the DIY nature of these shows comes a natural element of instability.

“I can think of a lot of cons with some of the venues I’ve dealt with so far,” Montgomery said. “One show I booked ended up getting the date triple booked. Thankfully the first people found a different spot. And then the other ended up playing the same night as my

show at that spot.”

Promoters also have to deal with the people attending the shows, because they’re usually made responsible for any damages caused by a rowdy crowd.

An example of this happened two years ago at a show at the Eureka Veterans Memorial Hall when someone graffitied on the walls of one of the bathrooms, losing the promoter their two hundred dollar deposit.

“Everything’s been pretty chill doing stuff at Savage Henry’s,” said Eric Fitzgerald, promoter of Metal Mondays at Savage Henry’s Comedy Club. “The only time somebody got in trouble for tagging anything was a guy touring with an out of town band tagged one of the bathroom sinks.”

Savage Henry’s Metal Mondays started two years ago as Monday night metal shows every two to three months. Now, the tradition has become so popular that it’s a weekly event, bringing in touring bands on their way to Portland from San Francisco or vice versa.

It’s created an interesting community blending comedy lovers and metalheads.

“It’s definitely turned into a ragtag bunch of funny people for sure,” said Chris Durant, owner of Savage Henry’s. “I don’t interact with the metal community as much other than just being the guy behind the bar, but it being almost every Monday now, I’m starting to see regulars and metal people showing up to comedy shows too.”

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Photos from vintage Humboldt yearbooks courtesy of Cal Poly Humboldt Special Collections.

8

Back on the mat Wrestling returns to Humboldt

by Michael Rothman

T

he Cal Poly Humboldt Athletic department is looking at applicants for coaching staff.

Once hired, the coach will work on conference scheduling and recruiting talent. These are the next steps for creating a new wrestling program: men’s wrestling is returning to Humboldt for the Fall 2024/Spring 2025 season, and many people are excited about it.

One such individual is Marty Nellis, a three-time All-American, conference champion, and multiple individual HSU record holder, who was inducted into the Humboldt Hall of Fame in 1991.

“Personally, I am very excited about it!” Nellis said. “I think it’s a great thing for Humboldt, a great thing for high school wrestling in California, helping out with the kids having another place to go on and continue their education.”

Executive Director of Intercollegiate Athletics Dr. Nick Pettit believes that support for bringing back wrestling has been high in the community for some time.

“There was a lot of community interest regarding this prior to my coming here, around the wrestling program and bringing it back,” Pettit said. “Hope from alumni and

just the community in general, where there’s a strong connection with the local youth community wrestlers.”

Coach of the McKinleyville Panthers Virgil Moorehead remained a local influence on the return of the CPH Wrestling program.

“It’s kind of been a passion of mine since I started wrestling,” Moorehead says. “Being local I think I am one of the biggest drivers to the return of the program at CPH.” Alumni from before and after his years of attendance have expressed their strong support for

I probably wouldn’t be alive if not for my wrestling background resurrecting the team.

“It would make sense given the community’s desire or their passion for wrestling to bring it here,” Pettit said.

Former wrestlers like Nellis and Moorehead are some of the most

vocal proponents of the program.

Craig Vejvoda, who graduated from Humboldt in 1980 with a degree in Business Administration, also reminisces on the hard work and habit building that student athletics require.

“Our practices involved weight lifting, running … Team practice on top of studies is what makes all student athletes’ lives different and pushes them to be hard workers and multitaskers,” Vejvoda said.

Wrestling makes lifelong impacts on the lives of the student athletes, according to many former competitors from Humboldt.

“I just think it’s a very positive experience for my family and for me personally as a first generation college graduate,” Moorehead recalled. “Now we have two college graduates and my son’s a doctor.

That all came about because of wrestling…he wrestled, too. So it’s the impact, and that’s kind of my impetus in trying to get it to come back. It’s just to give somebody that opportunity that I had that may benefit their family or their community.”

Wrestling has made a positive impact outside the ring for many former Humboldt athletes.

“It was the time management aspect,” Nellis remembered. “To

9

be able to compete at a high level train all the time, go to school, to your classes, and other things that were expected of you. You were a taskmaster by the time we got out of college and therefore carried into your career.”

Vejvoda contracted COVID-19 last year and underwent heart surgery. During his stay in the hospital he was supported by his former wrestling teammates who helped him survive the health crises.

“My brothers were there to prop me up and routed me on,” Vejvoda said. “That’s the great thing about the sports brotherhood! I probably wouldn’t be alive if not for my

wrestling background, just saying.”

“One of the things I learned early on was you’re not going to win every time. And that’s okay if you don’t win the match, but it’s not okay to quit. It is really helpful when you’re going through health stuff. I’ll just say that.”

The young men who come to Humboldt to wrestle in 2024/2025 will need to be hard working, for certain, to live up to the power and strength of Humboldt’s wrestling program of the past. Especially if they intend on breaking any individual records from Coach Cheek’s era.

One cannot talk about Cal Poly

Humboldt’s new wrestling program without mentioning the popular and beloved wrestling and softball coach Frank Cheek. The winningest coach in Humboldt’s history with 270 Wrestling wins, three of his wrestling teams (1973, 1977 and 1980-81) have been inducted into the Humboldt State Athletics’ Hall of Fame.

Cheek was inducted into five different Hall of Fame categories: the California Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA), National Fastpitch Coaches Association (NFCA), San Francisco State Athletics, California Wrestling, and Ceres High School. Several of Cheek’s individual and team wrestlers and softball players and teams were inducted into the Humboldt State Athletics’ Hall of Fame.

Opening night should be a fantastic night to attend Humboldt Wrestling. Casting a wide net, the Athletic department will invite as many former wrestlers from Humboldt as possible.

“The legendary Coach Cheek will most definitely be honored opening night, as he is the winningest wrestling coach in Humboldt history,” Pettit said.

The Wrestling Program is on its way to fully returning to Humboldt and the community is more than ready for it. Many former wrestlers of the student body will likely be there to support the new wrestling program each home match.

The late Coach Frank Cheek’s recliner faces photos of wrestlers that he coached over the years. photo by Mary Lou Cheek

10 10

Twilight seaweed harvest

A photographic exploration of kelp cultivation

by Amber Rae Dennis photos by August Linton

O

n a windy cliff above Baker’s beach, just south of Trinidad, a small group of research students from Cal

Poly Humboldt’s Fisheries Biology Department prepared to hike to the cove. The day’s mission: to collect kelp spores for experimentation. Specifically, they’re collecting a variety of seaweed known as

winged kelp, or Alaria marginata.

Below the cliffside, the crashing waves roar in the background completely out of sight. A hint of mist in the air, and the taste of salt and cheap gas station coffee on their Marzia Fattori, Braden Dahms, and Nathan Wiggins discuss their strategy for gathering samples in the choppy, cold and misty conditions at Baker Beach

11

Nathan Wiggins holds a sample of winged kelp.

tongues, they gather – putting on headlamps and securing belongings. Above, it looks as though someone has tossed a bucket of glitter across the sky, the sparkling stars themselves enough to get the scientists out of bed before sunrise despite the crisp 41 degree breeze.

Just past 5am, they began the steep treacherous hike along the cliffside, slowly climbing down in a single-file line until they reached the sand. It was nearly pitch black when they arrived at the desolate cove, hardly seeing but hearing clearly the thundering waves hitting the large rocks. Sinking in the sand as they proceed, the team walked to the water’s crashing edge. Aiming to induce the spawning of this variety of kelp in a controlled environment, the team hopes to collect enough tissue, known as sori, to bring back to the

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university’s laboratory. The unique composition of the California coast creates the perfect environment for species such as winged kelp to flourish, making Baker’s beach a prime spot for harvesting samples.

Led by graduate student Marzia Fattori, the students gather their collection materials and make a game plan for entering the water, scoping out the best possible spot for ample seaweed spore collection. The waves were rougher than expected this particular morning, and the first attempt at collection didn’t result in any samples. Fattori worried about stufents embroiled in the foaming water between the rocks. Samples could possibly be collected another day when tides are more favorable, but the whole crew would have gotten up before 5 a.m. for naught.

The group walked further down

the beach in hopes that collection would still be possible, and discussed the possibility of having to return on another day. On the students’ second attempt, however, they are able to wade waistdeep between the large rock formations. Reaching over crashing waves, they gathered enough kelp spores in order to bring them back to the Trinidad Marine Laboratory for further examination. After slowly hiking their way back up the cliffs above the beach, they began the drive to the lab, just a short car ride away. The samples of sori were preserved in plastic bags of cold seawater, but they would not stay fresh enough to spawn forever.

It was early enough still that the sun hadn’t risen; the Marine Lab was completely empty except for the small group of 7. As they gath-

ered in front of the building, the excitement was palpable among the group. The relief that sori samples were successfully gathered led to a new rush of energy amongst them. Turning lights on as they moved through the desolate building, footsteps echoing through the hallway, they made their way to the north side of the laboratory. Walking past rooms filled with bright green colored algae experiments and tanks of seawater.

Water trickled in surrounding tanks, they gathered in the main classroom of the laboratory. Adjacent to overfilled tables of seashells and previous experiments, the group picked a cleared area to begin their work. The next steps involved in harvesting reproductive tissues from the samples. Students set about analyzing their Winged Kelp sori, they grabbed gloves and flasks of seawater. Under the direction of Fattori, the three undergraduate students began by cleaning the kelp spores in

flasks filled with iodine and then seawater, preparing them for an activity that will be conducted in a fisheries class that afternoon where students will be viewing the sori under microscopes.

“We’re going to disinfect the sori before it gets spawned, because otherwise there’s going to be microorganisms or stuff growing into your cultures, which you don’t want. So this is the step before spawning,” Fattori explained.

Utilizing the same techniques they previously used to get bull kelp to spawn in an earlier experiment, they hope to victoriously transpose this method for the first time to winged kelp. Carefully cutting the sori with razorblades to separate the reproductive tissues from the excess, the team continued preparing the samples for experimentation. They placed the cut sori in damp paper towels, the group then moved through the lab to the south side of the building.

Taking the samples to where the

incubator is located, they concluded by inserting the winged kelp into the apparatus. Now, it’s time to wait and see if all the hard work they completed before dawn was worth it.

In separating the reproductive tissues, the team hopes that they’ve stressed the sori into releasing spores that other student researchers will then be able to later grow in the lab. If this process is successful, current Fisheries Biology graduate student Evan Simpson aims to later germinate the grown winged kelp in Humboldt Bay as part of his ongoing thesis project focused on the viability of farming this variety of seaweed locally.

“I personally see aquaculture becoming a very big industry hopefully on the west coast,” Simpson said. “I kind of see this as almost the pilot for if it’s even feasible to do on the west coast or even in a more smaller sense, in Humboldt Bay.” Marzia Fattori, Braden Dahms, and Nathan Wiggins place samples of winged kelp in plastic bags of cold seawater.

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Braden Dahms and Nathan Wiggins prepare samples of winged kelp to be spawned.

Marzia Fattori waits for a bucket to fill with seawater.

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Cut out this art by Cal Poly Humboldt students and stick it on your wall, your dashboard, your cat. We couldn’t afford to print an actual sticker sheet so you’ll have to do it yourself.

1. Cut out your chosen piece of art.

2. Cover the front side with clear packing tape, allowing excess on either side.

3. Stick your DIY sticker wherever your heart desires.

15

gr am m : @ , Bl ar ke art ake r, .vo Kn Au id a gu d,) pp st al (In 20 co s23 ho l

This is the wrong side of the page, but it’s also where you can find the names of the art and artists that you enjoyed, on the right side of the page. Support your local artists!

More ideas for where to put these stickers: -Inside of your dresser door -Bottle of viniagrette in your fridge -Your bike -Split between piano keys

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eople are grieving for the Earth. One rainy day at the Campus Center for Appropriate Technology (CCAT), they grieved together.

15 members of the Environmental Studies Club sat on an assortment of old couches and folding chairs, with hair hanging damply.

Cheerful shiny rain gear squeaked against itself, its bright colors a counter to the day’s subject matter: climate grief and anxiety. Representatives from the Meditation Club led a ten-minute anxiety-focused session; deep breathing joined the whoosh of air conditioning, the sprinkling of rain on the old house’s roof.

The students expressed fear of wildfire and mourned biodiversity loss. Some harbored hot anger towards those responsible for the climate crisis. They also described the weight of that anger and said they thought about the climate as little as they could.

Environmental Studies Club President Mason Rewerts said he feels responsible for fixing the climate. It bears down almost physically on his shoulders and chest.

Most times he sees no option other than to ignore it.

“I’ve been getting really good at hiding it away and not thinking about it,” Rewerts said. “Concentrating on the little things that make me happy.”

The end of the world behind an electric fence, constructed and powered out of self-preservation. Pearls or protection forming

around grains of anxious irritation. A tight chest, a sick stomach and heavy shoulders. A pelican coated in oil. These are images of students’ anxiety, or the mechanisms they’ve constructed to live with it.

“Whenever I come into contact with something that makes me feel sad about the environment, I envision that poor pelican covered

partment and author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet, Ray has made an academic career out of facing her feelings about climate change head-on.

She researches the sociology and philosophy of climate communication, as well as the activism intertwined with it.

Experiences of climate grief

in tar trying to get out of the water,” Rewerts said.

Guest speaker Sarah Ray listened intently as club members described how their feelings about climate change affect their daily lives.

Chair of the Cal Poly Humboldt (CPH) Environmental Studies de-

often center around the innocence of those affected by climate change. Children and young adults are a resting place for climate grief and anxiety: those who will be forced to live in an uncertain future for which they bear very little responsibility.

“That loss-of-innocence grief is

17

also tied to white guilt and white fragility,” Ray said. “All this stuff that we’re about to encounter, other people have been encountering and ‘Oh shit, it’s kinda my fault.’”

Ray described hearing about a colleague’s six-year-old “beset” by anxiety about wildfires. The focus on innocence has contributed to a growing number of young people saying that they don’t want to have kids. The journal WIREs Climate Change has published several studies showing that anxiety about climate change has a con-

18

sistent impact on the reproductive plans of young people. Why pass on the inheritance they’ve been subjected to?

Animals and the natural world are blameless for, but profoundly affected by, the changing environment. Ray has observed how specific species of animals can serve as microcosms for people to grieve over. The suffering of other creatures can be a less existential outlet for larger, less actionable climate grief.

Rewerts described how witnessing roadkill and construction

in the wetlands lining Humboldt Bay on his daily commutes from Eureka forcibly reminds him of humans’ destructive influence.

“I’ll think ‘oh fuck, they’re doing it wrong,’ and then I have to go back to my day,” Rewerts said. “I’ll get really sad for a while, like maybe ten or fifteen minutes and then I’ll distract myself with homework or a chore or something.”

Sticking one’s head in the sand is generally frowned upon and mocked with illustrations of ineffectual ostriches. It’s also the only way that some people afflicted with climate anxiety can function.

To participate in society we must cope not only with the immediate climate horror but also with the guilt of feigning ignorance.

“The implications of accepting climate change as a problem that is not being fixed quickly enough are so destabilizing that it’s understandable that most people cannot walk around in a daily life thinking about that,” Ray said.

Bleak media messaging about climate change often doesn’t help anyone shake the sand out of their hair. The 2023 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesis report swims with words like “unavoidable” and “irreversible,” along with phrases like “rapidly closing window of opportunity.” The cold finality of science’s conclusions is translated into portents of doom by headline writers, such as in a 2023 article from the Washington Post titled “World is on brink of catastrophic warming, U.N. climate change report says.”

There is a growing movement to combat climate nihilism in the media; climate doom is distinctly unfashionable. Despite this, deadline after deadline and threshold after threshold pass us by, and there’s always an article to read about it.

How we as a culture conceptualize our changing world affects

what we can do about it. Philosopher Timothy Morton describes the current holistic view of climate change as a “hyperobject,” dispersed across space and time in ways that we cannot grasp in their entirety. The enormity of climate change floods over every bit of mental structure, every levy against overwhelm. It is the death of our world as we know it.

Ray said she has been critical of the entire framework of climate change, due to how its scale overwhelms.

“In terms of risk-perception theory, climate change cannot be computed by the human brain as a risk the same way a bear chasing you would be a risk,” Ray said. “I still feel like my cognitive capacity doesn’t allow climate anxiety in… when it actually manifests it has to do with the fact that my students can’t imagine their future.”

Much of the current framing is defined by scientists, who may not be in touch with how climate change communication can drain energy and psyche. Completely objective, functionally nihilistic information dominates news about the climate and contributes to inaction.

People deal with the cognitive dissonance of climate messaging in a myriad of ways. Ray chose to face it head on, thinking about the unthinkable every day.

“I dove into it because I just thought ‘that’s not acceptable… got to have some other way of grasping this particular problem,’” Ray said. “It’s one way of coping.”

Ray said she talks to a lot of people who go into denial because they feel they can’t do anything about it.

“To me that is just so sad, so unfortunate, and just frankly unacceptable,” Ray said. “It is also my instinct. It is the elegant solution cognitively to all the different impossibilities of how climate change is being taught to us.”

One of these seeming impossibilities: significant governmental action towards climate justice. According to the 2023 IPCC report, to slow climate change would take “deep, rapid and sustained global greenhouse gas emissions reduction.” Capitalism’s starring role in this regulatory refusal as well as its seeming inevitability contributes to an all-or-nothing attitude.

“You either are totally cynical or you’re blindly optimistic, and neither one of those is really based in reality,” Ray said. They usually say more about the individual, the baggage and costs and conditions of their own life than they do about whatever reality is.”

“A lot of people are pretty hardcore about change, like it should be like this,” Rewerts said, snapping his fingers. “But I think we often forget that we grow, we don’t just change…It takes one incremental revolution at a time for change to happen.”

Evidence that the Earth may be unrecognizable well within our lifetimes terrifies, but it also tinges any experience now with a nostalgia more bitter and less sweet than usual.

“I frequently look out at…the

greenness of where we live and think ‘that might not last very long,’” Ray said. “It immediately conjures up grief like ‘what if we don’t have any rain, when are we not going to have rain.’”

The Environmental Studies Club has swelled from only five members when it was re-established in Fall 2022 to hundreds of club signups and 20-30 active members.

They hike together in Humboldt’s natural areas and host community service days, as well as regular discussion meetings.

Rewerts said that this community, which rivals any other club on campus in scale and vigor, has been a true outlet for feelings that would otherwise remain pent up.

“Fighting climate anxiety is having fun,” Rewerts said. “My main goal with the club so far has been connecting passionate people together. We’re not necessarily making change, we’re just creating a community.”

Rewerts’ hopes and dreams for a better climate future rest on the power of community and education. He grieves for those who aren’t willing to think about climate change, who are subject to false information or excessive doom on

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social media.

He wants the club to create solidarity between climate-minded people and educate them on local environmental issues. He planned a birding walk at the Humboldt Bay Wildlife refuge on the first day of hunting season, to explore the intersections of hunting and conservation.

The club’s climate anxiety-specific meeting gave members an opportunity to process together, to realize they’re not alone in guilt.

“If you often feel something, it probably means everybody else feels it too,” Rewerts said. “I felt like I needed to have that night, to get people to come out and talk about it.”

Maddy Montiel takes another approach to collective processing of climate grief. Co-president and co-founder of the Meditation Club, meditation is one of Montiel’s main coping strategies for climate grief and anxiety.

“When I fall out of practice, the anxiety comes on to me stronger, and it’s harder to deal with,” she said. “[Meditation] allows me to have the fuel to continue to be obsessively positive.”

At the special climate anxiety

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meeting of the Environmental Studies club, Montiel led a guided meditation focused against feelings of anxiety and guilt. Eyes closed, members breathed in unison. Together, they attempted to confront and manage those feelings they usually repress.

“I think meditation in the future has a really strong role in creating community and getting people together, to use their energy and generate positive good,” Montiel said.

Montiel envisions two climate futures. One she describes as realistic: the severity of climate disasters escalates to the point that society at large is forced to change.

In this scenario, the pivot to sustainability comes too late.

Her other scenario is that a large-scale climate movement forms before that tipping point, galvanized by growing passion about the climate. Montiel believes that this can happen, if enough people get angry enough.

“Our energies will fade back into whatever our atoms are on this planet,” Montiel said. “Or we’re gonna wake up to our power as a collective and come together.”

Existential terror creates Schro-

dinger’s climate future; until we experience it it’s still possible to tentatively believe that the world will be okay. Uncertain futures make the present uncertain.

“Activism is not a game of chess, it’s more like a dive into the dark,” Ray said.

Ray said that because climate change is a collective ailment, it requires a collective treatment.

On the opposite side of Highway 101 from Humboldt Bay, small farm Organic Matters Ranch hosts a yearly pumpkin patch.

Owner Johnny Gary knows that the land he now tends will most likely be covered by the bay within his lifetime.

“I’m aware of it but I have too much to do to access that on the daily,” Gary said, gesturing to the families enjoying the sunlit late October day, laughing and picking out pumpkins. “What I’m focusing on is the community activity that’s growing here.”

“I see it at school, more people are coming in with fiery attitudes, they want to make good change,” Rewerts said. “That collective consciousness and that collective reality is changing to that better future because we’re doing this work.”

WTF is CCAT ?

All about the Campus Center for Appropriate Technology

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n a world where heady theories often leave us pondering their real-world applications, the Campus Center for Appropriate Technology emerged as a valuable resource, offering a bridge between knowledge and hands-on experience. CCAT was founded in 1978 aiming to explain appropriate technology but also to showcase its practical application in real-world scenarios.

The term appropriate technology was first coined by economist Fritz Schumacher in a 1973 series of essays called Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered.” Schumacher argued that humanity was depleting natural resources at an unsustainable pace.

He advocated for a fundamental shift,

by Bryan Ellison emphasizing the need to address these issues locally rather than exporting our problems and their associated pollution to other nations.

Appropriate technology considers the implications of introducing a technology into society: its societal, ethical, economic, and environmental impacts. CCAT’s serves as living proof that treading lightly on the Earth is not only feasible but also incredibly rewarding.

The CCAT dream began as a one-story house, originally intended to be used as a firefighter training facility. A passionate group of environmentally conscious students recognized its potential as a practical showcase for appropriate technology.

“A bunch of

students sat in and protested and said they didn’t want to burn the house…They had a sit-in protest and they won,” said CCAT external co-director James Lara.

The house uses sustainable technologies including a water heater and radiant floor heating system both powered by solar energy. The radiant heating system, celebrated for exceptional energy efficiency, delivers warmth directly to the floor through the gentle transmission of infrared radiation.

A significant milestone in this sustainability journey occurred in 2009 when the solar panels adorning the house received an upgrade, enhancing their capacity to the point where they now contribute up to 50% of the house’s heating requirements.

“Every detail of the house…has been chosen with sustainability in mind,” said

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James. “From the choice of paint to the insulation, windows, curtains, lighting, and countertops.”

Nestled in a quiet corner of the property lies the shed. The walls are crafted from cob; a mixture of sand, clay, and straw, and insulated with hay. Here, sand serves as the sturdy foundation, straw lends vital reinforcement, and clay binds these elements together.

What adds to the shed’s unique charm are its skylights fashioned from recycled glass bottles, sourced from local bars.

The raw materials used in its construction were Students carve out pumpkins for the haunted garden on a volunteer Friday. drawn from the immediate surroundings: the clay hails from the grounds of CCAT, and the sand originates from the banks of the Mad River, Near the shed you’ll find the “rocket mass cob heater bench,” a creation that took form during 2018-2019.

The wood-burning stove reduces fuel consumption by up to 80% when compared to traditional open-flame cook stoves.

It channels the heat up a brick chimney concealed beneath a metal drum, transforming the drum’s top surface into a functional cooking area.

Underneath the bench’s seating area, a network of ENST Club members Zach Meyer, Mason Rewerts, and Maggie Demorest jam at CCAT. Visitors bask in the warmth of the all Associated Students of Cal Poly piping intricately weaves. Crafted bench while awaiting the delectaHumboldt (AS) programs this year, from materials with substantial ble pies. The oven has become an and CCAT is no exception. These thermal mass, the bench serves as integral and enjoyable component financial challenges stem from last a radiant heat source, utilizing the of CCAT’s mission, showcasing the year’s budgetary decision, which warmth generated by the stove’s boundless potential of appropriate was predicated on an optimistic piping. technology in a hands-on and ap2,000 incoming students for the This is a source of delight and petizing manner.

Fall 2023 semester, coinciding camaraderie at CCAT, now known Budget cuts cast a shadow over with the introduction of the new for their cob-fire-cooked pizzas.

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Cal Poly moniker. However, the influx fell drastically short, with fewer than 100 new students joining the campus, a significant factor contributing to AS’s current $400,000 debt. AS President Sam Parker describes how dire the situation is on the Associated Students’ end.

“Even if we took out all of our reserves to cover that difference, we’d still be in the hole about $100,000.” He believes the low enrollment was due to a “concern around housing” deterring potential students from applying.

“We had all those big protests last year around the same time students would be registering… and when you search ‘Cal Poly Humboldt’ news articles pop up about the housing problems.”

These budget cuts will have a profound impact on CCAT given their already lean financial resources.

“The budget that we even have now is not enough,” Lara said.

“There’s more things we’d like to have access to, but we are limited in what we can get. Especially for fixing up the house. I think a lot of times AS is under the assumption that we can get donations easily

which isn’t always the case. We have gotten donations in the past, but…”

Another principal component of CCAT, the MEOW (Mobile Energy on Wheels) power generator, has fallen victim to vandalism multiple times and is in dire need of an upgrade. A distinctive trailer that may be familiar to you from its presence in front of CCAT, the MEOW was once a marvel capable of powering an entire household. It uses pedal bikes inside to human power and solar panels adorn its roof.

“CCAT used to take it to events, and at times even let people borrow it,” Lara said.

External co-director James Lara In 2012, it was stoGrafman’s ENGR 305 class made len from a sustainability festival at efforts to restore it by replacing the Samoa Cookhouse, only to be the missing components with car recovered months later in Hoopa batteries. However, the MEOW where Lara said “a majority of its suffered another bout of vandalcomponents were stripped entireism during the summer of 2023: ly.” In the spring of 2023, Lonny the theft of its car batteries. Today, it rests in a state of disrepair on the CCAT property.

Despite its long-standing legacy on campus as a symbol of handson sustainable learning, the cherished community garden is slated for removal by the end of the school year.

At the garden, they cultivate a diverse array of produce, from onions and peppers to kiwis and huckleberries, embodying the essence of sustainability.

“They’re going to get rid of that and take it down within the year, and they’re going to place (a new) sustainability office where the community garden is. Which is kind of ironic,” Lara said.

Internal co-director Natalie Luna preps for the haunted garden.

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The CCAT foraging cookbook Foraging can be an exciting and educational adventure. It requires learning about the environment and practicing plant identification. It underscores the delicate harmony we share with nature and champions the ethos of self-sufficiency while ensuring your sustenance is sourced sustainably and ethically.

It’s a way to preserve and pass down traditional knowledge and practices and can be an important aspect of cultural heritage.

On top of all this, “wild foods” often contain various extra nutrients and antioxidants and can increase dietary diversity.

These recipes made from plants foragable on the CPH campus have been collected over the years by CCAT after student Tori Bernal started the project.

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Humboldt’s own harm reduction faerie

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pstairs in the Student Health Center, you’ll find the office of Cal Poly Humboldt’s very own Harm Reduction Faerie, Mira Freidman, M.S.W. Baskets full of Narcan, toothpaste, toothbrushes and supplies fill the spaces of her office. The walls are covered in colorful posters, how-to signs and informational pamphlets.

Freidman has led the Health Education and Clinic Support Services at the university for nearly two decades, and jokingly refers to herself as a “harm reduction faerie.”

While completing her undergraduate degree in Social Work at HSU in the 90s, Friedman became familiar with Humboldt County and the various needs of its citizens.

A bachelor’s in social work laid the foundations of the work she would later do. She fell in love with the area and decided to stay.

During her time working at Planned Parenthood, she ran a medical outreach program that provided STI screenings and birth control access, often partnering with the University to provide care to community members, including students. In 2004 a job opened up as a health educator on campus.

“They wanted somebody with a master’s degree. And I didn’t have that. And so I said, “I’m just going to explain why my lived experience is really important and how that demonstrates my willingness to be a good health educator, maybe they will consider me.”

She was hired shortly after. A shining example of the importance of

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by Amber Rae Dennis

self-advocacy, Friedman has a knack for explaining the relevancy of lived experience.

“When I ask students if they want to work for me, I don’t necessarily ask for a resume. Instead, I ask about who they are, what their goals are, what their values are,” Friedman said.

When Friedman was hired, there was no set agenda from higher up.

“It allowed me to develop– with students, of course, and a team of staff peoplewhat we have today, which is our peer education program, Oh!Snap student program, and our Check It program.

And then I also provide support to the clinic.”

Check It, the university’s sexual assault awareness initiative, started under Friedman’s guidance, along with the Campus Advocacy Team.

Mira Friedman poses in her Halloween costume, a giant box of Narcan.

Both work in tandem with the North Coast Rape Crisis Center to provide services for individuals affected by sexual violence.

Friedman’s team has secured a gender-inclusive bathroom in the Behavior & Social Sciences building, as well as installed sharps containers in all single-stall restrooms across campus.

Her campus team have partnered with countless state and local organizations.

In an effort to fight food i n s e c u r i t y, they work with Earthly Edibles, a local organic farm, to provide fresh organic produce for students through the Oh!Snap program on campus. Partnerships such as this exemplify the collaborative self-reliance of rural communities.

Friedman and her team of student interns and staff can think of endless possibilities to lessen think of endless possibilities to lessen harm harm in our North-State community.

“Harm reduction for me is meeting people where they are at: without judgment, without shame, without fear,” Friedman said. “Prov i d i n g people

with tools and information to make decisions for themselves that feel right. I’m not going to tell anyone what to do with their lives.”

In a world where disinformation and misleading figures about drug-related subjects are rampant, communities need reliable sources for medically accurate information.

Harm reduction is an evidenced-based approach designed to lessen the negative effects of various behaviors, legal or not. This model informs how Friedman and her team provide resources to the campus community. They stock the vending machines across campus (found in the SAC and Nelson Hall) which dispense with harm reduction supplies such as free Narcan and menstrual supplies.

Also available in these machines are pregnancy and COVID-19 tests, birth control, and other basic needs items such as toothbrushes and deodorant at affordable rates.

Since the semester began in August, Friedman’s team has distributed more than 800 boxes of Narcan on campus, along with fentanyl test strips. Narcan, a brand-name nasal spray consisting of the active drug naloxone, is a medication that instantly begins to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose, and can save the life of someone who is overdosing.

“We just ordered 2000 more boxes,” Friedman said.

She and her team frequently train people how to use Narcan effectively, hoping to curb the spike in opioid-related deaths throughout the Humboldt region.

According to the California Department of Health (CDH), the leading cause of accidental deaths in the state of California are drug overdoses. Each year, a majority of these deaths are caused by opioids.

Humboldt County has seen an astronomical increase in drug-related overdoses and deaths in recent years.

In 2021, CDH reported that nearly 37 out of every 100,000 residents in Humboldt died of an opioid-related death. In 2022, opioid-related deaths soared to 61.7 out of every 100,000 Humboldt residents. That means our county saw 76 opioid deaths last year.

The Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services states that fentanyl-related drug poisoning deaths increased 363% in 2021 from 2020, accounting for 64% of all drug-poisoning deaths. fentanyl is easier to obtain and is cheaper to produce than opiates such as heroin or prescription medications.

“When I started doing this education two years ago, it was like one spray [of Narcan] and the person will come to, two was just unheard of,” Friedman said. “Now it’s like four or five sometimes because it [fentanyl] is so strong. It’s easy to make, and it’s in all our drugs.”

Health education experts warn that unless substances come from a pharmacy, they may contain fentanyl. Fentanyl is 50-100x more potent than morphine. The Humboldt Coun-

ty Substance Abuse Mortality Rate report from 2022 stated that, “When compared to California and the US, the mortality rate by age range from drug poisoning in Humboldt County is significantly higher across most age ranges.”

Friedman and her team continue to draw awareness to the current opioid epidemic in Humboldt County, presenting at university events and gatherings.

“When I started doing this education two years ago, it was like one spray and the person will come to, two (sprays) was just unheard of.

Now it’s like four or five sometimes because it [fentanyl] is so strong. It’s easy to make, and it’s in all our drugs.”

In an effort to curb deaths from drug overdoses, the California Assembly recently passed AB 472, commonly referred to as the Good Samaritan Law. This law protects individuals who call emergency services such as 911 from the scene of an overdose from prosecution.

Friedman hopes that this law, in tandem with increased access to supplies like Narcan and fentanyl test strips and increased education, will lead to a reduction in opioid-related deaths across California.

“We need to really destigmatize drug-use so that we can talk about it, and get people the help they need… because it [accidental overdose] can happen to anyone,” Friedman said.

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Where to get free Narcan nasal spray and fentanyl test strips Cal Poly Humboldt campus • Health product vending machines wellbeing.humboldt.edu/vending-machines • Student Health Center (707) 826-3146 • OhSNAP Student Food Pantry (707) 826-4556 • Peer Health Education (707) 826-5234 • Check It (checkit@humboldt.edu) Off campus • Public Health (Eureka) (707): 268- 2132 • Humboldt Area Center for Harm Reduction (Arcata) (707) 407- 6013 • NEXT Naloxone: Narcan can be mailed to you. visit nextdistro.org/cachoice

How to respond in moments of crisis What can an opioid overdose look like?

• Breathing is very slow, uneven, or has stopped altogether • Pupil / center of the eyeballs may be very small • The individual is lethargic /appears sleepy • The person is not responding to a loud voice or to being rubbed firmly in their sternum / mid chest area • The person might be fully unconscious or slipping into unconsciousness • The person’s fingertips and lips may change color 28

What to do Administer Narcan if available and position the person on their side.

Call 911. Stay with the person until help arrives, and in the meantime follow any instructions given by medical/emergency personnel such as chest compressions or rescue breaths. If emergency personnel haven’t arrived and the individual is still unresponsive or seemingly relapsing, administer Narcan every 2-3 minutes, interchanging nostrils until help arrives.

Fired up

Humboldt students work with fire

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elicopters whirred in the sky above as bucket drops poured water down in the surrounding area to suppress the fire raging below.

Any thoughts in Cal Poly Humboldt student Brenden Wade Nye’s head diminished as his training kicked in.

Nye was working on his first forest fire of the summer. As a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) employee, Nye went through all necessary training in order to prepare him for this endeavor, including EMT certi-

by Erin Holmes

fication and completing a fire academy at Shasta College in Redding.

“It’s really surreal, especially the first fire I went on,” Nye said. “You start thinking less about your technique. You’ve trained to the point where you can start focusing on your task. All the pieces just fall into place.”

While other returning students were enjoying river days, catching up on sleep, and working jobs in town, Nye spent his summer with Station 22 located out of Shasta-Trinity National Forest. While it was a comparatively slow fire sea-

son, Nye still worked with wildfires, gaining various skills during handson training before returning to Arcata to continue school for the year.

This fall semester, Cal Poly Humboldt formalized their relationship with CAL FIRE, a federal agency responsible for fire suppression.

The CAL FIRE-Humboldt partnership increases students’ access to research opportunities and field work, potentially meaning more students working in the field while finishing their degree.

Jeff Kane teaches fire ecology and fuels management and advises the

Nika King (left) and Osiel Palomino moving between drop points during a prescribed burn near Ferndale on Sept.

23, 2023. photo by Ian Babb

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Sara Groban, Osiel Palomino, and Ed Laskey ride in the bed of a pickup truck near Ferndale photo by Sara Groban

Osiel Palomino, Nika King, Issac Miller, Endellion Trento, and Tristan Fritsch take a ridgetop group photo after a day of burning near Ferndale photo by Tristan Fritsch

SAFE (Student Association of Fire Ecology) club on campus.

“Starting this semester, in conjunction with the transition to Cal Poly, we have a full fire major called the Applied Fire Sciences Management,” Kane said. “It’s not a forestry degree, it’s a fire degree.”

This major specifically prepares students for work in the fire industry, rather than being an extension of the forestry department.

Erin Kelly, professor and Department Chair of Forestry, Fire, and Rangeland Management believes that with the new major at Cal Poly Humboldt will create a rise in interested students to the field of fire.

“There’s this immediacy, I think, that people are interested in how to incorporate fire as an ecological process, not just see it as a threat,” Kelly said. The university

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maintains relationships with many groups, not just CAL FIRE, including local tribes and non-profit organizations.

Cal Poly Humboldt students that have worked within the fire industry have, without a doubt, gotten hands-on experience and have taken away something from their time in the field. The consensus, however, varies depending on the individual.

SAFE club president Ellis Brandt worked as a forestry technician and firefighter based out of Willow Creek on Engine 333. He and his team were focused on suppressing the fires they faced. Brandt’s fire season was relatively high, reaching 10 fires in three months.

“Our primary job is to be ready so that when someone calls in a smoke or active flames, we can go to that

and try to put it out as quickly as possible,” Brandt said. Brandt’s summer provided him with training he could not gain while in the classroom.

“All these little details are stuff I learned on the job. I didn’t know how to suppress a fire going into this job,” Brandt said. “I had no idea what that was like.” This student’s positive takeaways outweighed his negatives in the long run.

“I got my first season on fire. I saw and did things I was really hoping to do.

I did initial attacks, bigger campaign style fires,” Brandt said.

“It’s positive I have a

bit of a path.”

As a student, it is a commitment to work in the field over the summer. Employees work long shifts back to back for an extended period of time. However, there is an upside to this condition of the job.

“I think it’s really important because they go together,” Brandt said. “Doing one will make you better at the other.” This opportunity complements classroom learning, and studying the industry improves time spent in the field.

Angelica Mercer-Garcia is among the first students to participate in and eventually graduate from the new Applied Fire Science and Management program at Cal Poly Humboldt. Mercer-Garcia spent her summer in Willow Creek working for the Forest Service. During the school year, she volunteers as a logistics member for Arcata Fire District.

As a part of Hand Crew 52, Mercer-Garcia helped keep the engine clean and prepared for work, cut down paths, and spent time learning to use a saw. There was emphasis put on the importance of physical training over the summer, whether it was hikes or runs.

“You just gotta keep on working towards it, stay on top of being physical,” Mercer-Garcia said. “It’s a lot of physical work.”

Her local work for Arcata Fire District allows her to stay connected to the fire industry during the school year. As someone who wants to eventually become a firefighter for

You don’t do the job because it’s safe, you do it because it needs to be done

a local community, this has served as a great opportunity for Mercer-Garcia. Not only is she building connections within the community and gaining CPR certification, but she is able to aid the firefighters by keeping things in order.

This includes having water prepared, and ensuring the engines are cleaned and that safety protocols are followed in the field. The logistics members serve as a helping hand and observer of the work being done. Because this is a volunteer position, Mercer-Garcia is able to manage her work time on her own terms.

As a fire gets called in, she can analyze whether she is available or not. This comes in handy when a student is juggling their coursework in the mix.

“It’s on my own time. Whenever I have the time and availability, I like being able to help the community,” Mercer-Garcia said.

Nye is also majoring in applied fire science and management but has not yet begun fire courses due to his transfer status and the increase in prospective students in the department. With classes full, Nye wanted to get a start on his career and found CAL FIRE. Even without having taken fire courses through the university, Nye had completed requirements during his time at Shasta College.

“I did a fire academy at my junior college,” Nye said. “I got my

EMT training in the fall and my fire academy in the spring.”

As a Firefighter 1, his duties consisted of engine checks, preparing the tools for the day, practicing hose lays, and participating in physical training. He worked with cross lays, which help prepare for easy and quick hose deployment during a fire, moving through various obstacles. The structured schedule CAL FIRE provides motivated Nye in his work. This was a seasonal position that allowed him to finish before returning to school. While the training is crucial, getting to be hands-on is an exciting aspect for workers.

“Being able to go on calls is the greatest way to get experience,” Nye said. “All these training sessions are great. They give you an idea of what you might do in a situation, but each situation is so dynamic that you need to be a problem solver and use all your tools available.”

Nye places a great emphasis on safety within the field. “A lot of the physical training coincides with mental training. It’s less about how much you can produce and more about how long you can produce it,” Nye said.

While some may thrive in the industry due to the adrenaline rush of fires, Nye found his passion over the summer for another reason.

“It’s not so much about the fires,” Nye said. “They’re fun and super intense; people get amped up. It’s more about being able to help the public and dedication to the community.”

Wherever there

are positives, there are negatives.

Even those who gained new skills and enjoyed themselves can speak on the issues within the industry.

Javier Ramos-Cool was stationed out of Eureka at the Six Rivers National Forest and Redwood National Park working for the Forest Service.

Ramos-Cool had a great time, particularly learning how to properly use a chainsaw. However, he has chosen not to continue a career in the fire industry, specifically with field work. Because of the need for workers in the field, employees work inconsistent shifts, threatening the balance of work and home lives.

“I was working with people who had been firefighters for a long time and they were getting drained,” Ramos-Cool said. “They were in their late 30’s, early 40’s and it’s taken a serious toll on their bodies, so I realized I didn’t want to do this for a long term career.”

Aside from this realization, Ramos-Cool gained insight and knowledge due to his time over the summer. “ Wo rk i n g tightly with my crew was a blast.

We were learning all the time b ec au s e

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we were all making mistakes,” Ramos-Cool said. “For now it’s fun to screw around.”

JD Wilder worked as a wildland firefighter for Crater Lake National Park over the summer. As someone who intends to go into a more municipal career, Wilder planned to use his time in the field to gain knowledge. He and his engine crew would work on hose lays, dig fire lines, and work on compass, map, and radio communication skills.

It was a slow season for this crew.

Wilder was able to complete a leadership classroom-style course and apply his university education in the field. In addition to this, however, Wilder’s assumptions of field work were confirmed.

“The lack of free time definitely pulled me away,” Wilder said. “I feel like the low pay really keeps people away from the job. It’s really hard work, super demanding, terrible on your body and the reward isn’t all that good.” “I think the major issue is that there’s so much work to be done and not enough people, time, and money to do it,” Kane explained.

These complaints as well as gender inequality and safety concerns are problems workers are facing within the industry. Mercer-Garcia opened up about her feelings on the issue.

“I wish there were more females in the career path like me,” Mercer-Garcia said.

“So much testosterone after a while can really wear on you,” Brandt said.

Through the good and the bad, Nye advises students at Humboldt to consider working in fire.

“There’s a lot of people here in California that have been greatly affected by wildfires. I see the younger generation take that experience and step into this role,” Nye said.

“There’s a desire and dedication to serve that’s still present. You don’t do the job because it’s safe, you do it because it needs to be done.”

Hungry for change Food insecurity in Humboldt

by Maranda Vargas

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O

n a warm sunny September day in the coastal community of Eureka, the sun’s rays shine on the constant flow of cars entering the north parking lot of Bayshore Mall. Several rows of bright orange traffic cones and volunteers wearing bright yellow vests form lanes in a well-orchestrated attempt to direct the incoming traffic.

The two long serpentine lines lead toward several tables stacked with prepared bags of food, which Food for People volunteers rapidly load into vehicles.

Food for People is a food bank that serves Humboldt County, providing food assistance county-wide to those who are experiencing food insecurity. Food for People offers a myriad of programs and services, including the community food distribution event at the mall parking lot in Eureka.

The California Association of Food Banks estimates that up to 20% of people in Humboldt County report not having enough to eat.

Volunteer Scott Thompson rushes to assist one driver, directing the senior driving the vehicle towards the back of the line.

Thompson, who also serves on the organization’s board of directors, began volunteering with them doing senior homebound deliveries over three years ago, but this is his first time working at an event.

“It’s shocking, not in a good way.

It’s also really impressive how efficient they are getting people what they need,” Thompson said. “There were already people waiting here at 9 a.m. and that just shows the amount of need and that there is the fear that people have that there’s not going to be enough.”

Carly Robbins, director of Food for People, explains that at the food distribution event in August, they nearly ran out of food.

“Typically, during one of these, you’ll see about four to six hundred households; last month we saw as high as seven [hundred],” said Robbins. “It’s hard to plan but we try to make sure we have enough food on hand.”

Robbins is concerned about the organization’s ability in the future to provide the services the community requires, up against increasing need “We rely on food donations. We also do a lot of our own food purchasing, and food prices are going up for us just like everyone else,”

Robbins said.

The Choice Pantry operates as a grocery store for income-eligible individuals to access healthy and nutritious foods. The Choice Pantry coordinator Erin Tharp, who has worked for the nonprofit for nine years, says the hardest part is not being able to meet everyone’s needs. The food is supposed to be supplemental and sometimes an individual’s needs are greater than the pantry can meet.

“We’re seeing more new clients than we’ve ever seen before,” Tharp said. “The costs of everything are rising, all these programs have ended, and it puts people in a position where they can’t meet all their needs.”

In August the Eureka Choice pantry saw a record-breaking number of pantry visits. The pantry served 1600 individuals in a month, the largest amount since the nonprofit opened in 1979.

“There’s definitely the concern of ‘can we keep up our resources with the demand,’” Robbins said.

One-in-five Californians are experiencing food insecurity, meaning they do not have enough funds to cover living expenses and purchase food for themselves and their families. In March 2020, as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress provided an emergency allotment that lifted 11.5 million people out of food insecurity.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act, passed in February, ended the funding of the emergency allotments. As of March 2023, the state of California has stopped its emergency allotment program,

Previous page: Julie Ryan, volunteer and Direct Services Manager for Food for People, holds an apple.

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with significant cutbacks to those who receive CalFresh and Snap benefits, The recipients felt the impact of those cutbacks in April when some saw their benefits decrease as drastically as $281 to $23 per month.

The cost of food, gasoline and utilities has increased, while most residents have not seen an increase in income. There has been an increase in need for the resources that pantries like Food for People and OhSNAP provide.

Volunteers were all smiles at the event, rushing into action as each car was called forward. Volunteer Cathryn Noel-Veatch grew up in Eureka and enjoys volunteering and assisting the community.

“It’s really nice to just be able to give back and be able to help out where I can,” Noel-Veatch said.

“They’re a really great organization.”

For community members living in rural areas, accessing fresh food and resources can be difficult. Food for People has mobile

It’s shocking, not in a good way. It’s also really impressive how efficient they are getting people what they need.

produce pantries that travel to both local and rural communities. The program is intended to bring an extra amount of produce in addition to the pantry services; however, since the pandemic, they have been adding a larger variety of food, including non-perishable items such as peanut butter to the delivery boxes.

Heidi McHugh of Food for People has seen a steady increase in requests for Food for People’s services and expressed concern for the local economy. “[Economic depression] has a ripple effect through our communities and our workspaces.”

College students have been impacted by the loss of SNAP benefits. During the pandemic, the Department of Agriculture relaxed SNAP eligibility requirements for college students, allowing for single household adults to qualify for financial aid regardless of hours worked. Researchers estimate as many as 3 million college students were added to the program as a result.

Tori Norgren, a Cal Poly Humboldt psychology major saw their EBT benefits significantly cut in

April because of the ending of the emergency allotments. Norgren, whose benefit was decreased by $150 a month after the end of the emergency allotments, just recently learned of the resources available on campus through OhSNAP. “I really appreciated it more,” said Norgren. “I try and tell everyone about it because it’s really important and you can get free food.

It’s free food and it’s free healthy food.”

The OhSNAP pantry located on the campus of Cal Poly Humboldt has also experienced an influx of student visits. The pantry is a valuable resource for Humboldt students who are struggling to afford food. The pantry helps students to meet their basic needs and to focus on their academic success.

“Even though I have EBT it’s nice just to have another source of food you can get on campus, “ Norgren said.

Cal Poly Humboldt students can visit the pantry once a week to receive a free bag of food items, and visit twice daily for snacks.

The pantry offers a variety of food items for the students to shop for

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including fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy products, as well as a weekly fresh produce stand during the Fall semester. The fresh produce is purchased from local farm Earthly Edibles, during the growing season. OhSNAP also offers CalFresh application assistance, outreach events, recipe cards and connections to other local food resources.

OhSNAP coordinator Ani Glenn reports that since reopening in August for the Fall semester, the pantry has seen an average of 650 students a week, a slight increase from previous years. Previously the on-campus pantry had served 600 students a week during their busiest times.

“That’s something that we’re really hearing about from our folks who are coming in is that they don’t have money for groceries,” Glenn said. “They’re often coming to us for their only produce that week.”

Glenn says OhSNAP has needed to purchase more food than usual for the pantry to keep up with the demand; however, not all the funding has come through yet this semester for the program. Glenn said they’re spending the funding a lot quicker than the pantry normally would.

“Food insecurity is a really large issue not only on this campus, but in this community,” Glenn said. “I think it’s super important that we put that effort towards staying open and making sure we have accessible hours for folks to come in.”

Beyond increasing access to food, organizations like OhSNAP and Food for People strive to destigmatize food insecurity. The pantries are often set up as to give the customer purchasing power, to shop for themselves from a selection of groceries.

The North Coast Growers Association (NCGA) is part of the California market match consortium, a statewide organization of over 300

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farmers markets throughout the state. The Market Match program currently doubles CalFresh funds up to $15 towards the purchase of fresh produce at the farmers market.

Laura Hughes, director of operations with the NCGA, reports a decline in spending and attendance by those with EBT at the farmers market since the ending of the emergency allotments. Hughes is concerned that programs like Market Match are at risk of losing more funding in the future. The loss of money spent at the farmers’ market also transfers to the farmers and local economy.

“We’re all very scared to see what budget reconciliation is going to happen on a federal level because of the debt limit and the negotiations that two parties are trying to make about spending reductions,” Hughes said. “And we know that benefits programs like

It’s free food, and it’s free healthy food.

SNAP are going to be some of the first things that are on the cutting room floor…We can’t afford yet another decrease in benefits on top of what’s already happened after the pandemic.”

The Open Door Community Health Centers operates several community wellness gardens around the county where volunteers grow fresh produce to be donated to the community. The community wellness garden located in Arcata offers produce from the weekly harvest at the Humboldt Open Door Clinic and NorthCountry Clinic lobbies. Open Door Community Health centers also provide a food pantry on site.

Without the support of community donors and volunteers, food banks such as Food for People

wouldn’t be able to serve the community effectively. Julie Ryan, volunteer and Direct Services Manager for Food for People, knows the importance and value that volunteers bring to the organization.

“Volunteers are about 30% of our people-power. And last year, put in more than 15,000 hours of work,” Ryan said. “It’s a lot of really dedicated community-minded people who see hunger as a crucial issue.”

Those like Ryan, who work closely with the community and know hunger is a real issue are expressing a growing concern over the increase in food insecurity in the community.

“The part that weighs on us is that these people are our friends, our neighbors; they’re senior citizens, grandparents, veterans, people with disabilities, people with low paying jobs and families with small children,” Ryan said. “You can’t pay rent and buy groceries on minimum wage.”

Food for People has mobile food pantries, satellite pantries, senior programs, backpacks for kids, birthday bags for kids, children’s summer programs, drive thru distribution events, food drives, nutrition education as well as an emergency and disaster program.

It is the people that volunteer for the organization as well as those they serve that delights Ryan. Stories of friendships formed and a purposeful mission fuels those who grind behind the scenes to keep the organization propelling forward.

“Our community is incredibly generous. A lot of that generosity often comes from people who are just regular folks. As my grandma would say, it’s just down home folks who like to help,” Ryan said.

“It’s just a wonderful connection that we have in the community. It feels like ‘okay, we can’t solve all the world’s problems, but we can resolve things in this bubble.”

HUMBOLDT COUNTY FOOD RESOURCES FOOD FOR PEOPLE Food for People is a food bank serving the food insecure in Humboldt County through its 18 community food programs. Food for People strives to eliminate hunger and improve the health and well-being of the community by providing access to healthy and nutritious foods along with community education and advocacy.

1720 10th St., Eureka (707) 445-3166 CAL POLY HUMBOLDT, OHSNAP! Oh SNAP! Student Food Programs is a student-driven initiative. Our mission is to increase access to nutritious and culturally appropriate food for all Cal Poly Humboldt students by engaging in campus and community partnerships and by raising awareness of food insecurity among our peers.

Rec and Wellness Center Room 22 (707) 826-4556 CALFRESH APPLICATION CalFresh provides eligible households with an electronic benefits transfer (EBT) card that works just like a debit card and can be used at participating grocery stores and farmers markets.

929 Koster Street, Eureka (877) 410-4700 MARKET MATCH, NCGA Market Match is California’s healthy food incentive program that matches a customers’ CalFresh nutrition benefits at farmers’ markets and other farm-direct sites.

The North Coast Growers Association offers a Market Match, which doubles up to the first $15 spent at each market.

5720 West End Road, Building 2, Arcata (707) 441-9999 ARCATA OPEN DOOR OUTREACH Arcata House Partnership hosts “The ANNEX” that serves as a service hub offering a variety of community outreach services including a food pantry and mobile lunch truck.

501 9th St., Arcata (707) 633-6236

ARCATA FOOD NOT BOMBS

Food Not Bombs is an all-volunteer movement that uses recovered food that would otherwise be discarded to create free vegan and vegetarian meals to feed the community. Food not Bombs is in over 1,000 cities and 65 countries in protest to war, poverty, and destruction of the environment.

Arcata Plaza every Sunday at 4 (707) 840 - 4610

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Autumn Horoscopes Scorpio Do you have any wishes? Do you wish to be an opossum on an examination table?

Sagittarius Stop trying to talk things out with your college roommates and fight them instead. Loser has to go live in the woods for a week.

Gemini Is there a horoscope written in the stars for you today? Is there a loving god? Try some existential thinking. Hopefully it brings you more than just dread.

Cancer It’s not over, not yet. There is always the light of a new day awaiting you, and on that new day, awaits your favorite flavor of yerba mate. Always look forward to what tomorrow brings, because sometimes, it brings a yerba mate.

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Aquarius Don’t go drinking tonight. Come on, it’s a Monday, and you have a lab report for that GEOL 303 class due at 9am. Regretting taking those early morning classes now?

Capricorn Tomorrow, your coffee will be lukewarm. Do not let this dishearten you. Sometimes, you just have to feel like a cup of lukewarm coffee for a while until you feel better.

Taurus You could really use a boost in morale this week. Try getting some accomplishment from rolling a cantaloupe across a suburban neighborhood using only your chin. It’s not going to be the weirdest thing someone has seen in Arcata.

Libra Don’t make an eight hour drive up to Portland for someone who is emotionally unavailable.

Try finding emotionally unavailable people in your area! At least you won’t have to cry on the drive back.

Leo Have you seen Elvis lately? There might be an Elvis sighting in your future. Start stretching, you’re going to have to run.

Pisces Lacking emotional enrichment in your life? Go to town on a German made car and just tear everything apart! Crunch on those tubes and munch on those gears. Take a page from the book of weasels, they love to eat German made cars. Seriously, look it up.

Aries On January 2nd, 2025, you are going to be put into a machine that turns people into wild horses and set loose into the prairies of Illinois. What earthly desires you have will no longer matter, and you’ll finally be free from the United States electoral cycle.

Virgo This will be a very lucky week, but only if you hold an object of your choosing, kiss it gently, and put it on the top of your toilet. Get smooching!

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The original Humboldt Honey poster, designed by Ingrid Hart featuring Leoni Nichol and photographed by Pat Cudahy. courtesy of Ingrid Hart

Who is the Humboldt Honey?

40 years later

T

he Humboldt Honey stares out from a poster stocked at any of the small shops that line the sidewalks of Humboldt County towns. Her name adorns local goods from sushi rolls to weed strains to actual honey. Her gaze is faraway and Mona Lisa-like, according to her creator, Ingrid Hart.

A Brazilian immigrant and transplant from Orange County, Hart (‘85) found the culture of Humboldt “enchanting.”

“I had fallen in love absolutely, with the land, the redwoods, the rivers and the ocean. And then this totally counterculture set of people,” Hart recalls.

One day, trying to describe her experience away at school in a letter to her mom back home in Orange County, she drew a simple stick figure. Complete with arrows pointing out various features of dress and attitude, the drawing represented a “Humboldt Honey”- it was even labeled as such at the top.

Having settled into her dorm room at Humboldt State University, she began the search for the customary dorm decor staple- a tongue-in-cheek poster of one sort or another. That’s when the idea came to her: A poster depicting the type of woman she saw out and about around the small town of Arcata, CA. “I just thought it was kind of funny,” Hart remembers. “It was equal parts satire and tribute… I wanted to venerate this incredible woman who was an ideal to me, all about peace, love and flowers.”

The Honey is an amalgamation of

by Colwyn Delany her favorite parts of the culture she noticed around her in Arcata.

“She was just a super cool hippie chick that had a lot of friends, who studied Gandhi’s philosophy of non violence; she was an activist, she was a deadhead. She was just basically all these different qualities that lived in my own heart,” Hart says. “But, you know, obviously, nobody’s gonna have all those things with them all the time.”

Going to the printer to make her own personal copy of the poster, she got the idea to print more to sell.

“It costs just as much to make one poster as it does to make 1000 posters, the only difference is paper cost,” Hart says. “And then, you know, they were just gobbling them up. You know, like, ‘hey, we need twenty-five more, we need fifty more, we need two hundred more.’

And so the whole thing sold out.”

Within two months, Hart had sold a thousand copies of the poster at various local shops and businesses around Humboldt County, but not everyone was a fan. Hart received accusations of misogyny and condescension from community members concerned with the poster’s representation of the “Honey.”

“If you did something like a Humboldt Hunk … I think it would have been perceived so radically different,” Hart recalls. “And I think the fact that she was or she is a woman made it so it was an easier target, something that you could really tear down.”

Reflecting on the Humboldt Honey, Critical Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (CRGS) department chair Dr. Ramona Bell says that the

perspective of the creator often impacts critiques of their media.

“She’s giving her perspective of the world. Now, you don’t have to agree with that perspective… this is why it’s important for people to produce their own images,” Bell says.

“We live in a heteropatriarchal society, right, where a certain perspective has been promoted more than others,” Bell says “It has to do with power; a certain perspective has been promoted, has been encouraged, has dominated, if you will, our culture, in ways that have been very problematic.”

Hart sums up the criticism she received at the time, after the poster was published in the Times-Standard: “‘This woman is trash, and she lends women a bad name.’”

She recalls certain comments, like, ‘I’m going to need a hundred copies of this for my outhouse.’

“And then somebody would else would say, ‘Oh, I love her.’ And then the other person would say, ‘It’s satire, you know, you don’t have a funny bone,’” Hart remembers.

But on the other hand, she has received plenty of very positive feedback over the years.

“There are so many old-timey people that would be linking arms and saying, ‘I once knew a Humboldt honey and this is her: I married her!’” Hart says. “Everybody has their own experience with her.”

Bell says that art’s function, much of the time, is to generate controversy.

“Representation is always going to be something that’s contested,” Bell says. “The beautiful thing about art is it’s up to one’s interpretation.”

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I was born knowing you I was born loving you

I

By Ione Dellos

There is no love like a sibling’s love

was born knowing you, and I was born loving you. The only person I’d run through an airport for is you. Wherever you go I go, and I’m sorry I wouldn’t give you my gluestick the night before you had a big project due and you had to turn it in a day late because of me. You do not know what I would give to take it all back.

There is no love like a siblings’ love. Our relationships with them change with time, and many college students are experiencing life away from their siblings for the first time. When you pull the veil

of childhood from your eyes as you grow older, you start to see the cracks and splits in those memories.

Childhood does not always go smoothly. We scratch and scream at our brothers and sisters, and sometimes are downright terrible to them. You storm off, crying and slamming doors in your wake.

There is the brief separation, and then the slow walk to the spot you know they go to when they are upset, as they know yours as well.

You offer an apology tentatively.

At first it’s grudgingly accepted, but soon the two of you are back

Gina and Mau Munoz-Villanueva grab a photo together before school.

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to whatever you were doing before and laughing at how silly the circumstances of your argument were. You resume the paused game, return to the lego set, continue to roll around in the snow until your parents think you’re going to freeze right then and there.

We still carry those memories.

What if your first apology wasn’t enough? If you reopen those wounds now, it can hurt worse than when it was originally inflicted. But it’s necessary to fully stitch it closed, to separate your relationship from the cruelty of the past. Ask your sibling to pass you the thread, or help you thread the needle. It’s easier to sew with two sets of hands. Scars that were created together should be mended together.

We will be looking through those relationships that both bond and break us, through the unique perspectives of five sets of siblings.

CHAPTER ONE: Gina and Mau Munoz-Villanueva “My brother and I didn’t have the best relationship growing up,” Gina says. “Yeah, we just didn’t really get along when we were children, and we were constantly fighting. We didn’t have the closest relationship and we didn’t have that much in common.”

Gina and Mau have been arguing for the larger part of their lives.

Only since they moved in with each other a year ago have they

Lars and Ione Dellos pose outside Mckenzie Elementary School in Wilamette, Illinois.

really started to get along.

When they were nineteen, Gina moved out of their childhood home in San Diego to Arcata for school, but didn’t get to see their brother as much anymore. “We just didn’t know each other that well,” Gina said.

They really started getting to know each other when Mau moved out at 18, coming to live with Gina for school. Now that Gina is 20 and Mau is 19, the two have been living together ever since. Having to split chores such as doing the dishes, laundry, and cleaning the house forced them to get along very quickly.

and they would wrestle each other over it. They still fought after Tobin grew larger than his brother, but it was a definite turning point in their relationship.

“He’s my little brother, but he’s probably four inches taller than me. We did everything together,” Blake says. “We were almost like twins. I think he had a lot more love than I had.”

Now that Blake is 24 years old and Tobin is 23, their childhood tempers have mellowed with time.

It’s been seven years since their last major argument, right before the two of them parted ways for college.

CHAPTER TWO: Blake and Tobin Ramirez Blake was the bully who would fight with his younger brother more than his other siblings until Tobin outgrew him. Tobin would tease him for being so uptight,

CHAPTER THREE: Ella and Henry Moore When Ella and her brother were very young, they fought a lot and would press each other’s buttons constantly.

“He’s genuinely the expert at

getting, he knows exactly how to annoy me, he knows just… everything,” Ella says. He used to call me screechy when I was little, and it’s because I would screech at him,

You always said you hated me because I stepped on your nose when I was learning to walk, and now I know it was because you were probably helping me find my footing. and that would make me screech more, and it was the ever fulfilling prophecy of screechy.”

They have both significantly mellowed out since they were children, and they have learned how

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Zane and August Tulecki at ages five and three.

to be around each other again.

Henry is not “spicy” by her standards anymore, and has given the title of screechy a rest. Now, they go mushroom hunting and hiking together, and Ella is trying to convince him to move to the Bay Area with her and become baristas.

He was like a practice run of living in the real world, and she wouldn’t be the same person if she hadn’t gone through childhood with him.

CHAPTER FOUR: August and Zane Tulecki August and Zane have lived in the same house since they were children. Their rooms sit directly across from each other. With August at 20 and Zane at 23, they have come a long way from stepping on each other’s appendages.

Now, their conflicts are more psychological, and August couldn’t

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look at banana bread for a solid month after Zane turned their kitchen into a banana bread warzone.

“He made like six or seven loaves for the county fair to perfect the recipe, but he always fuckin’ wins!”

August says. “He didn’t have to make that many! If I look at one more loaf of banana bread, I’m gonna hurl.”

Despite the banana bread situation, they still love Zane, even though he is a culinary arts student. They help him make drawings for class, illustrating all sorts of pastries with very complicated names. The two get boba together, braving the insanity of Orange County side by side.

“You always said you hated me because I stepped on your nose when I was learning to walk, and now I know it was because you were probably helping me find my

footing,” August says.

CHAPTER FIVE: Lars and Ione Dellos Lars and I haven’t always been perfect to each other, although no matter how mad I got at him, I was always worried about him hating me. Now, I don’t know what I would do without him. There is still so much that I should say to him, and there isn’t a postcard in the world that could fit all of my feelings on it.

He would quite frequently sport the ‘oldest sibling thousand yard stare’ when I would follow him around, vying for his attention and approval. It is the classic trope between siblings, the younger one dragging themselves along with the older sibling, much like chain chomps from Mario Kart.

Despite our discrepancies, when our home life turned upside down, we became each other’s safe harbor. He would let me stay with him in his room when our former step father became aggressive, tell me to put on his noise canceling headphones and play video games until it passed.

“I mean, maybe I was too much of a dick to you, but that’s just being kids. I think baby Ione is very funny, and very accomplished, and that Ione is going to grow up and do a lot of cool things,” Lars says.

We also fought a lot during our first two years of college, but what brought us back together (partially) was a video I saw on Twitter. It was a compilation of siblings portrayed in media, from shows such as “The Bear”, “Succession” and “Fleabag.”

I watched it three times in a row and then started bawling because I realized how tender and beautiful the relationships you have with your siblings are. All the times we had fought didn’t mean anything anymore, all the moments we had spent loving each other and being our goofy selves was all that really mattered.

‘Small paper cuts’ Perspectives from Latine researchers in the sciences

by Ruby Cayenne 45

S

panning continents and borders, there are some who go the distance to bring their professional dreams to fruition, in fields that are typically populated by ethnicities and genders unlike them.

“I think folks, Latino folks have a lot of things to show. And oftentimes we don’t get the same attention that other people do,” said Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Catalina Cuellar-Gempeler.

Some people are not as welcome in certain spaces, even in a self-proclaimed modern world. This is particularly visible in the sciences and academia of Western society. People from under-served communities and ethnicities may no longer be shunned from academics, but their lack of representation is still felt.

“There are other historically excluded groups in our fields, women being one of them,” said Jose Marin Jarrin, assistant professor for the Department of Fisheries Biology at Cal Poly Humboldt. “If you look at our numbers in our department, we have few, percentage wise, we have less women than we have Latinx. Like it’s just mind blowing how poorly we’re doing in some of these other areas, let’s not even talk about LGBTQ.” EXPERIENCES BEING LATINE Jarrin felt like an outlier because his father went to graduate school.

It allowed him to have access to a familial manual for navigating college.

“I still faced a lot of the issues that other Latinx people do. I did poorly in GREs, for example, which we know are biased against people of color,” Jarrin said.

Jarrin described being congrat-

ulated on a talk at a conference, despite that it was an entirely different person of color who looked nothing like him that gave the talk.

“It’s these small paper cuts,” Jarrin said. “Some days it doesn’t hurt, some days it really stings. And it takes a while to shake it off.”

Jarrin has also been supported on his path. His PhD advisor, Dr. Jessica Miller, accepted him as a graduate student regardless of his GRE scores because of her admiration for Jarrin’s character.

“We need those allies that can help us and that can show us the way where no one else is showing, right”, Jarrin said. “It’s not on books, it’s not on anything written.

We need those people to say, hey, this is the way.” His advisor played a significant supportive role in his academic career, which he hopes to be for his students.

Jarrin said Latine people were not traditionally scientists because the idea of an expert on a single subject did not apply to their way of life.

“We would have known about marine fish and freshwater fish and plants. Because for our cultures, this idea of separating things into their own little boxes, it makes no sense,” Jarrin said.

Cuellar-Gempeler’s experience in the sciences is shaped by being an immigrant from Colombia.

“It takes a little piece of yourself to move to another country,” she said “I’m not saying you lose a piece.

You definitely gain a lot, but it changes, you know, it’s a different environ-

Previous page: Alexis Hernandez holds a crab at the beach in Samoa.

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ment and it’s a different language and it’s a different culture.”

She said that no matter where you are an immigrant from, that experience changes how you perceive the world. Growing up in Colombia in the ‘90s exposed her to violent politics.

“You know, nothing happened to me and my immediate family was fine, said Cuellar-Gempeler. “But it was a context of kidnappings and bombings and just really horrid assassinations and a lot of horrible things that are just around, you know, and it permeates your reality even as a kid. And then it influences your reality as an adult.”

When Cuellar-Gempeler works with a diverse group of students, she emphasizes that it does not matter where you come from, there is a lot of growth you can accomplish.

“I understand a lot of the aspects of their experience because you know, my family is back home and I’m far and I miss them and it’s hard to plan the visits and it’s expensive,” Cuellar-Gempeler said. “When they [her students] speak Spanish, I speak Spanish to them and, you know, we talk about food and we talk about music and it makes it good for them, good for me.”

She has been disrespected as a Latina in the sciences at times.

“It’s hard to know whether it’s

because I’m a woman, or I’m Latina and I have an accent, or if I’m short,” she said. “The treatment that you get sometimes is just so disparaging of, like not recognizing that you’re capable or important.”

Her frustration and exhaustion that comes from having to prove herself wears on her. She figures it out internally but does not enjoy having to explain herself when she is an accredited professional scientist. She has found ways to be less affected by these situations and more strategic in preparing for those kinds of interactions.

First, she advised to be careful about who you pick to be your principal investigator in graduate school or who your boss is.

“I am of the policy that you should express all of yourself in those interviews. And if people don’t like that, then that’s not the people that you want to work with,” Cuellar-Gempeler said.

Secondly, she says to remind yourself that racist and discriminatory comments and actions are their problem, not yours. She also suggests practicing how to react to disrespect.

“In the moment, it’s really hard to react appropriately, right,” Cuellar-Gempeler said.

Oscar Mauricio Vargas Hernandez, professor of botany at Cal Poly Humboldt, has been successful as a Latine person in the sci-

ences. However, when applying for professorships, there were times he felt his accent and youthful appearance might have caused the people to be biased.

Surrounded by violence growing up in Colombia in the ‘80s and ‘90s, he expressed a deep desire to change the way that Colombia was perceived by the world.

“You were in constant, really like constant fear,” Mauricio Vargas Hernandez said. “There was a bomb that was [found] next to the office of my dad. It’s just so normalized… that’s what you see in the news every single day.”

He feels a lot of Colombians work to show that the country is much more than Pablo Escobar and cocaine, that Colombians are very welcoming.

There is great work being done in the sciences in South America that doesn’t often get translated back to the United States and other marine researchers, says Natalie Cosentino-Manning, a habitat restoration specialist for NOAA Fisheries.

She wants the Latine community in the United States to understand that you can have a very successful career working in the marine and environmental sciences. To make this a reality, Latines need to study marine science in college, and ideally in highschool. She has gone to a number of high schools in her community to talk with them about the opportunities and possibilities there are with NOAA. Malcolm Edwards-Sil-

va, a student at Cal Poly Humboldt, stressed the importance of young Latine individuals seeing Latine breakthrough scientists.

“Definitely I want to be someone that inspires them to kind of show you can do anything,” Edwards-Silva said. “It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, any upbringing or whatever. You are you… and you can do what you want.”

He is proud of his heritage and is very grateful his mother chose to raise him in Mexico. He feels it has given him a different perspective on life and allowed him to be more in touch with his ancestors and his family. Edwards-Silva explained that he has found a greater connection to his heritage as he matures.

If he ever has children he wants to pass down his appreciation of his ancestry and have them grow up with the same culture he was raised in.

Silvia Pavan, museum curator and assistant professor at Cal Poly Humboldt, says she has encountered bias being Latine in the sciences.

She feels that at Cal Poly Humboldt, people are somewhat conscientious about the importance of having diversity to build up conversations and have an enriched environment.

“You can see the bias on how you get higher approval for people that are not minorities, on when they submit the paper, the rejections, the rejection levels, so you kind of always feel that you should be really good in what you do to surpass any potential biases that might exist,” Pavan said.

She thinks that diversity in the sciences is going in a bet-

47

ter direction because many people are acknowledging diversity as an important component and that bias is prevalent on several lines such as research and education. “Because you add diversity, you enrich, right?” Pavan said.

BEFORE COLLEGE Jarrin is originally from Guayaquil, a coastal city in Ecuador, and also spent some years as a child in Michigan where his dad went to graduate school before moving back to Ecuador. He was raised bilingual and has lived close to the ocean for most of his life. His parents are both naval engineers and his father has a particular love of the ocean.

Cuellar Gempeler grew up with the smells of the vast city that is Bogota Colombia and the subtropical paradise of her grandfather’s coffee farm intertwined together.

At the farm there were fruits hanging down from trees all around her, animals about and a beautiful and constant state of weather. At the

same time, she had access to education and other opportunities in the city.

“I feel enormously privileged in all the opportunities that I had but that life in the farm also cemented my interest in nature, and just thinking about how things grow and how they interact with one another,” Cuellar Gempeler said.

Also in Bogota, Mauricio Vargas Hernandez was born and raised in a middle class family. He considers himself to be a “city boy,” but his great grandfather had a farm he often visited, which inspired his desire to study nature.

Cosentino-Manning’s parents are both from Argentina, so she is the first generation to grow up in the United States. Her hard-working parents insisted she spoke Spanish at home and instilled a sense of care for being in nature through frequent camping trips.

She grew up in Southern California close to the beach and found

her love of marine biology in high school. “And so I always wanted to have some part of my life be part of the marine environment,” she said.

“To be able to communicate the importance of these habitats…that we need these habitats to be able to keep these fish, you know, to keep our whales, our marine mammals,” Cosentino-Manning said.

Malcom Edwards-Silva was born in Southern California but lived in Cuernavaca Mexico until he entered kindergarten.

“My mother wanted me to be raised near her family, wanted me to grow up with her culture and everything, wanted me to have Spanish be my first language,” Edwards-Silva said.

Silvia Pavan was born and raised in Southeastern Brazil in a coastal province called Espírito Santo. Before deciding to study small mammals, she described falling in love with work she did in a lab that studied and collected mammals as well

A researcher takes notes on a cabezon.

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as studying the evolution and morphology of mammals. From then on, she knew that was her focus.

DURING COLLEGE Jarrin attended high school in Ecuador and stayed in the country to earn his undergraduate degree in general biology at the University of Guayaquil. He focused his thesis on invertebrates, specifically small shrimp and crablike organisms. He got his masters degree at the University of Oregon and his PhD at Oregon State University.

He researched small bug-like creatures, and the ecosystem importance of Chinook salmon, surf perch, smelt, Dungeness crab and many others.

His academic focus is marine fisheries ecology, specifically fishes and invertebrates that are of commercial importance. “We say commercial, but what I really mean is its ecological, commercial, and cultural importance, because some of the species that we work with are not necessarily sold, but they’re eaten for consumption by different communities, both here in the U.S. and in Ecuador,” Jarrin said.

Cosentino-Manning remarked that her parents somewhat struggled with her decision to work in the marine science field. Her father thought she would follow in his footsteps as a mechanic, but she followed her dreams She did two years at Saddleback Community College and got her Associates of Arts before transferring to then-Humboldt State University to study environmental biology. “[A subject] I really enjoyed a lot was marine phycology, which is the study of seaweed,” she said.

Cuellar Gempeler got her bachelor’s degree at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá in both biology and microbiology. Her interest is in how microorganisms interact with plants and animals, and ecology to see how interspecies interactions impact microbes.

Her research focus was on fiddler

crabs, which she conducted at a lab in the Yucatan. To collect crabs she used little plastic cups, bringing them back to the lab in a cooler on her bicycle. Each crab had a separate cup so that they would not contaminate each other’s bacterial biome.

Once, Cuellar Gempeler had maybe 50 crabs all organized in their cups and a gust of wind lifted the chest cooler up into the air and all the crabs and cups just went flying away.

“From then on, I carried two rocks inside of the chest so it wouldn’t fly away,” she said.

She moved to the United States to get a PhD at the University of Austin.

“Fortunately, I had a good support system of Latino people mostly, and Colombian people that were fantastic,” Cuellar-Gempeler said. “It’s a transformational kind of growth, not only academically, but also personally and culturally.”

Her PhD was centered around crabs’ bacterial biomes; how many species of bacteria there were, what the quantity of them was, what they were doing and how they related to one another.

Crabs are a particularly interesting subject for this study since they shed most of their exoskeletons and replace it with one that is completely sterile, and the entire bacterial community has to reattach.

This allowed Cuellar-Gempeler to study the rules of bacterial colonization.

Mauricio Vargas Hernandez did his undergraduate and masters degree in Bogota at Universidad de los Andes. He researched plants that have not been studied in a long time,and created an identification guide for them. He developed the common name for the species he researched, dubbing them “wooly daisies.”

For his masters, he found that the group of plants with the genus name Diplostephium is actually two

groups by sequencing their DNA, and discovered a new genus.

For this project he traveled through the mountains in Peru.

“We were going to stay in a house and the owners of the house didn’t speak Spanish, they only spoke Quechua,” Vargas Hernandez said.

“I have met indigenous people in Colombia, but they were always able to speak Spanish.”

In Austin, Cuellar Gempeler played in a band called Gajeenaz, an informal spelling of the word gallinas (hens in Spanish).

The band included cello, guitar, ukulele, banjo, and small latin-american guitars, the cuatro and the charango.

She and her husband now write science-focused tunes to do outreach by playing in bars and at events. They use their music to bring science into the conversation, so everyone can just “nerd out about how cool the world is.”

From a young age Edwards-Silva was interested in the sciences.

When he first went to school, he studied environmental engineering but didn’t enjoy the coursework and dropped out.

Once he started doing field work in the marine sciences at Orange Coast College he found his passion and ended up transferring to Cal Poly Humboldt and pursuing an oceanography degree.

He primarily focuses on larger scale global processes of wave motions, upwelling and other factors that affect all organisms.

He also investigates how genetic and environmental factors affect photosynthesis in sub-aquatic vegetation, with eelgrass being his main focus.

His capstone project cohort is approximately 40% Latine, it makes him feel more confident and at ease.

One of his friends in the cohort is fluent in Spanish, “and it keeps my tongue sharp,” Edwards-Silva said.

Pavan and her team found a new species in genus Juliomys through

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specimen examination.

“We describe that, this one as [Juliomys] ossitenuis, and the name has to do with the skeleton being really delicate, and comparatively to the others, it’s kind of like a very delicate species,” Pavan said.

She moved to the Amazon to get her masters degree in a combined program between Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi and Universidade Federal do Pará in Northern Brazil.

Her PhD was done at the City University of New York. She did postdoctoral research at the Smithsonian Institute, the Center for Conservation Genomics at the National Zoo in Washington, D. C., and at Universidade Federal do Pará in Brazil. She also got some experience teaching at the City University of New York and in Northern Brazil for a graduate program.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER When Pavan moved to this country she left her extended family in Brazil. It’s hard for her to be away from them, but she’s grateful that her husband and two children came to the United States with her. At Cal Poly Humboldt, she is the Head Curator at the Vertebrate Museum and an Assistant Professor.

She wants to show how important biodiversity is and how important it is to preserve the environment through her work with museums.

Her work has primarily focused on marsupials, opossums and rodents. At Humboldt she is continuing her postdoctoral research on squirrels and shrews because they are here locally. She also travels to South America about once per year to keep working with marsupials.

On an expedition in Peru her team started getting daily visits at their campsite from the only species of South American bear, the Tremactus ornatus. At first, the group was thrilled to see this rare bear grace them with its presence, but as it continued to show up, the thrill diminished and it became an

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issue when the bear discovered their traps and severely damaged them.

Since the bear became such a frequent visitor of the research team, they decided to name it Gustavão.

At some point, the bear found the makeshift latrina that the group had been using as a restroom and took a bath in it.

“And then they [the group] were saying, Oh, Gustavão, Gustavão!

Coberto em mierda, Gustavão! Vá te embora!,” Pavan said.

Currently, she teaches mammalogy at Cal Poly Humboldt, and facilitates the organization of tissue sample and cryogenic collections at the Vertebrate Museum of Cal Poly Humboldt. The goal of this project, Ranges: Building Capacity to Extend

We talk about food and we talk about music and it makes it good for them, good for me

Mammal Specimens from Western North America, is to have all of the information of the samples available online for researchers to access.

Edwards-Silva plans to continue his education into graduate school, taking a biological approach to his programs of interest rather than physical or geological oceanography.

He is interested in the problems with overfishing and wants to develop sustainable fishing practices, as well as adaptations of marine organisms to ocean acidification.

Jarrin’s work with species in Humboldt County considers the limited number of fishes present and

ensures that there will be enough left for years to come. He finds this process to be similar to the values of traditional ecological knowledge.

“Only take what you need, make sure that you leave some for the next person, or for the other animals that are, that need this food,” Jarrin said. “It’s the same idea for fisheries management.”

Jarrin works in collaboration with the Tolowa Deni Nation, Resighini Rancheria, Yurok Tribe, Wiyot Tribe, Trinidad Rancheria and Blue Lake Rancheria to exchange knowledge and assist in their existing research on coastal habitats. They work together to collect, measure and age fish as well as use different technologies, such as satellite imagery and spatial analysis.

He teaches two classes and one lab per semester at Cal Poly Humboldt. Depending on the semester, he teaches fishery science communication, ichthyology, U.S. and world fisheries, ecology of marine fish and biology of sharks, rays and skates.

Cuellar-Gempeler’s research in Florida during her postdoctoral studies was primarily focused on pitcher plants and other carnivorous plants called Sarracenia purpurea. In California, she works with Darlingtonia californica, the California pitcher plant.

Pitcher plants use a cup-like modified leaf to attract and trap insects, in order to use their nitrogen to survive in soils low in nutrients.

Cuellar Gempeler’s work with these plants seeks to understand how microbes come together in communities and how the diversity and composition of these communities leads to the function of consuming animals and insects.

She loves how field work connects her to nature, and interrogates who she is. She wants to give everyone that opportunity.

“We have a lot of students that are, you know, Latinos from inner

A researcher holds a striped surfperch

cities, that have not had the opportunity to go out there and, or be in a lab and really experience that. Just try things, make mistakes.”

After graduating, Mauricio Vargas Hernandez did two post doctoral research studies in the tropics, studying the phylogenetics and evolution of the Brazil nut family in the Amazon then transitioning to researching spiral gingers in Central America.

At this point in his career he aims to do research that is informative to conservation efforts in California.

“I’m in a really good position to do that type of research,” he said.

That’s what my students are doing.”

Currently he is teaching Plant Taxonomy at Cal Poly Humboldt.

“My class is about…being friends with plants,” Mauricio Vargas Hernandez said. “You just spend time with them. This knowledge about their names, their colors, their features is going to come to you naturally.”

He cherishes seeing his students have “aha” moments when they

are looking into a microscope and understand something that he was trying to explain.

“I’m really passionate about plants,” he said. “So passing that passion to somebody else or like, maybe they already have the passion, but it just needs to be ignited, that’s really cool.”

Cosentino-Manning now works on oil spills and contaminant leaks that impact these habitats, developing plans to restore them and working with those responsible.

She has worked on very large oil spills such as Deepwater Horizon, Costco Busan, the Refugio oil spill and the Long Beach Pipeline spill.”

During her time at NOAA she has gone down in a one person submersible, received training through the sanctuary program and worked with the National Marine Fisheries Service restoration center. She is a part of a group within NOAA doing equity and environmental justice work.

“I’m part of that national strategy group to make sure that we

are looking inward and outward,” Cosentino-Manning said. “Making sure that we’re inclusive of…all races, all genders and making sure that our work reflects our communities.”

Cosentino-Manning recently returned to Argentina for the first time in 30 years with her 18-yearold son and husband.

“My heart was just bursting to be able to see my son with my cousins and my aunt and get to really know more about me too,” Cosentino-Manning said.

Her son is now at UCLA studying environmental science and biology.

Now that her parents have seen firsthand how successful she is in her profession, they’ve changed their views on her going into the science field.

“It’s kind of bittersweet, you know, my mom passed three years ago and I wish she would have been able to know that my son is also successful and is following the same career path.”

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50 years of

OSPREY

“The Osprey was started this quarter in an attempt to create a campus magazine, geared along the lines of the old HSU Hilltopper, which was a monthly news feature publication.

Ospreys are hunting birds, and are found in Humboldt County as well as in other parts of the world. They are ‘highly specialized’ in catching fish.”

-Osprey staff, May 1973 Osprey magazine has since been published twice- or thrice- yearly (depending on the structure of classes) since 1973, making it the second longest running student publication on campus after the Lumberjack weekly newspaper.

The Osprey staff of undergraduate students collaborate to write, edit, and publish longform feature stories, photography and art, covering issues from the heart of our campus and community and telling local stories relevant to students, alumni and community members alike.

Special thanks to Sarah Godlin at Cal Poly Humboldt’s Special Collections for her assistance in gathering and digitizing these covers.

Left: Volume 1, Issue 1 of Osprey magazine, published in May 1973.

Next four pages: Approximately all covers of Osprey from 1973 to 2023.

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OSPREY Spring 2023

Cal Poly Humboldt faces new challenges amidst housing crisis 1

Are you a student looking for professional experience in writing, publishing, editing, photography, or art?

consider joining

OSPREY student-run magazine

Osprey Fall 2023 staff from left to right: Jessie Cretser-Hartenstein, Nat Cardos, Amber Rae Dennis, Michael Rothman, Bryan Ellison, August Linton, Colwyn Delany, Ione Dellos, Erin Holmes, Maranda Vargas, and Ruby Cayenne. photo by Peyton Leone

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