May Pub Talk
Science Pub: The Language of Water: How It Supports Us And What It’s Telling Us
May 7th, 2019 | 6:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Paradise Creek Brewery’s Downtown Restaurant – 245 SE Paradise St
Free Admission – $5.00 suggested donation (all donations support the Palouse Discovery Science Center)
Sip your favorite brew, while you learn a thing or two! Science Pub is an opportunity to enjoy learning about science in an informal atmosphere; no scientific background necessary! Just bring your curiosity and a thirst to learn.
Topics and presenters are arranged by the Palouse Discovery Science Center (PDSC) and WSU’s Entrepreneurial Faculty Ambassador (EFA) Program. All Donations support PDSC. Click here for more information.
This month’s speakers:
Do you know where your water comes from? Water is essential to human life, but ensuring we have it when and where we need it is a difficult task. Over millennia, humans have responded to this challenge by developing increasingly efficient ways to collect, store, and access water. Now, however, we’re realizing that while we’ve made water available anytime we desire at the turn of a tap, this convenience leaves us disconnected from the environment and from each other. People who spend a lot of time living near wild rivers and lakes have a different connection to water than those of us who access it through our kitchen faucets. They understand that water is capable of agency and action, that it has the ability to deeply influence human connection and human storytelling, that it has a language that can be heard and interpreted.
Join Julie Padowski and Debbie Lee to learn more about how to reconnect with water by better understanding how we use it and what it is saying to us.
Julie Padowski is the Assistant Director of the Center for Environmental Research, Education, and Outreach (CEREO) at Washington State University, and a Clinical Assistant Professor with the State of Washington Water Research Center. She was a NSF-IGERT graduate fellow, receiving her PhD in Soil and Water Science from the University of Florida, and was a post-doctoral scholar with the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Her interdisciplinary training allows her to integrate hydrological and human dimensions to understand patterns in and consequences of human development of water sources, including the physical, social, economic, and institutional drivers. Padowski’s current research interests span a spectrum of water management issues, ranging from the food-energy-water nexus, to green stormwater infrastructure, and municipal water systems. Her work has been funded by the NSF, USDA, NASA, and USAID as well as by the WA Department of Ecology and she has published more than 20 scientific publications in journals such as Global Environmental Change and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as well as in other academic journals and books or as reports.
Debbie Lee is Regents Professor of English at Washington State University where she teaches literature and writing and directs the Visiting Writers Program. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction and fiction, and a PhD in 19th-century literature. She is author/editor of eight books on the environment, oral history, poetry, and travel literature, most recently The Land Speaks: New Voices at the Intersection of Oral and Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2017). Her literary nonfiction book Remote: Fifteen Years through the Wilderness is forthcoming in 2020. She is director of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness History Project for which she received a four-year National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant and an Idaho Humanities Grant. She’s also recipient of the Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and the Arctic Circle Artists Residency. In addition, she has published over 25 creative nonfiction essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Terrain, Narrative, and Vela among other journals and anthologies, where they have been contest finalists and received a Pushcart Prize special mention, is a fellow at the Black Earth Institute, an environmental think-tank, and a board member at-large for the Selway-Bitterroot Frank Church Wilderness Foundation.