Artist Jann Rosen-Queralt and ecologist Lea Johnson highlighted the way species, water and energy move through the landscape, exposing ecological patterns and processes often overlooked or unseen. During their walk they highlighted the way species, water and energy move through the landscape. Participants were exposed to ecological patterns and processes often overlooked or unseen. They concentrated on nested scales and connections between things that happen locally, experiencing how macro emerges from micro and micro is shaped by macro. Attention to urban stream headwaters, native plants and animals (i.e. yellow crowned night herons) that survive and thrive in cities brought this into view.

The arborglyphs shown in this photograph may record the history of Basque herders in southwestern Oregon, a history largely unwritten except for the names, dates, and often erotic drawings found in secluded stands of aspen trees throughout southwest Oregon and in parts of Nevada and California. We present this image as a key to our project because it exemplifies how data are not always aligned for our consumption and use, as standing reserve (we nod to Heidegger) for our interpretation. Data are written into the land itself, through centuries and indeed millennia of ecological management practices, through intimate interspecies encounter, from the traditional ecological knowledges of indigenous nations and immigrant herders to the Eurowestern sciences of US federal agencies. The data storytelling about our public lands that we engage at the University of Oregon begins in explorations of regional landscapes and oral histories. Typically, what is collected is narrative and accidental poetry, the inadvertent data of experts whose expertise often goes unrecognized or under-appreciated, as "tradition." The scientific knowledges of federal and state managers
make an exception to this characterization, although in some cases these managers are deeply embedded in local communities to the extent of repurposing the data of university science through the eyes of ranchers and agricultural practitioners, both settler and indigenous. 

To answer "What Are Oregon's Public Lands"?--Most of our oral history subjects respond by showing us, in words and in photographs, in walks and tours, that data are most importantly relationships.

The Houston Data Storytelling event (fall 2020) is a collaboration between the research team behind the NSF RAPID #1760400 “Recovery, Relocation and Alluvial Awareness in Post-Harvey Houston” (PI: Dominic Boyer) and the Houston Flood Museum (Director: Lacy M. Johnson). The RAPID investigated the impact of multiple experiences of catastrophic flooding upon floodies in the Houston area focusing especially upon the Meyerland and Greenspoint neighborhoods. The Flood Museum emerged from the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey with a mission to exhibit the connections between human activities and catastrophic flooding—as linked to wealth inequality and racial disparities—and to act as a catalyst for reimagining the ways Houston, the Gulf Coast, and the wider world evolve in a context of persistent natural disasters. Both the RAPID and the Museum have actively gathered oral histories of flood experiences in Houston since 2017. The RAPID team found that 53% of floodies reported being wholly or mostly unaware of their flood risks, although Houston has averaged one major flood event annually in its 183-year history. While rich in personal experiences related to flooding, Houston is poor in public communication and understanding of flood risks and impacts. Our collaboration aims at developing better strategies for narrating flooding in Houston to improve public understanding of its risks and consequences.

Until the Philadelphia refinery blew up in June 2019, most Philadelphians believed they would long be stuck with a dirty, backward-looking industry. In operation since the 1860s along the city’s rivers, the refinery complex has claimed these tidal wetlands, devastating the area’s marsh ecosystem and making generations of humans sick. By 2100, even under conservative sea level rise scenarios, water will again wash over areas where refinery operations long continued. In the wake of the June explosion which finally shuttered the struggling operator, the City of Philadelphia set out to discover and report what is known about the explosion and about the refinery’s history. Data about its effects on public and environmental health remained inconclusive. Data strongly suggested that contaminants “have migrated offsite,” affecting drinking water; available data strongly suggested that Philadelphians’ high rates of cancers and asthma are correlated to “emissions like those generated by the refinery.” Amidst scenes of devastation, the refinery’s impacts on environmental and human health eluded precise quantification. Fence line neighbors felt its impacts in their bodies, “My mother’s whole crowd she used to hang with died of cancer. ... Her, my step-dad, the neighbors around the side, the neighbors across the street ... Everybody was dying back to back.”

Beyond making just petroleum, this refinery has also produced uncertainty. While the site’s new owner has no apparent plans to resume refining operations, much remains up in the air. Futures Beyond Refining addresses this uncertainty and asks: In the wake of suggestive, but inconclusive data, how might the refinery’s public and environmental health impacts (past, present, and future) be known? How might shared storytelling practices augment quantitative metrics? How might futures beyond refining in a climate-changing city be animated by collaborative, participatory knowledge communities?

Futures Beyond Refining has developed two ongoing public research projects. The first prompts participants to see the future of former refinery lands--and then to share that vision today in a digital gallery and in illustrated cards mailed to elected officials. The second, Gray’s Ferry Community Tour, is based in a collaboration between refinery fence line neighbors (coordinated by Charles Reeves, Resident Action Committee 2) and faculty and students at the University of Pennsylvania, also a refinery neighbor (coordinated by Bethany Wiggin, Penn Program in Environmental Humanities). The collaboration has developed a tour led by tour guide neighbors whose families have lived with the refinery for generations. Their lived experiences have been generously shared with public tours led in December 2019 and February 2020, the second with 8th-grade students from two Philadelphia schools was reported on by The Philadelphia Inquirer . Faculty and students have also collected oral histories, and these and other research materials form the basis of a digital tour now in development.

Sensing with the Body explores how human beings come to produce, know, and circulate climate and environmental data through performance throughout New York City. A series of extended interviews with dancers, curators, and scholars of theater brings focus to the diverse modes by which beings sense and produce environmental knowledge. Featured experts share how experimental narratives unfold through bodies (of human and non-human animals, of water and land) to offer alternative scenarios for the present and future. Furthermore, they attune to the ways that diverse bodies morph, react, or adapt to environmental shifts that may be invisible to the eye. The project will host at least one public storytelling event on February 4, 2020 (co-convened by Patricia Kim, Carolyn Hall, and Clarinda Mac Low) in which students, scholars, dancers, and activists will work together through a speculative storytelling and performance workshop.