The inaugural panel brings together three local leaders who are working on finding ways to counteract the impact of extractive economies on the Pacific Northwest’s lands, watersheds, and ecosystems.

This is a panel for the PLU Steen Family Symposium Inaugural Panel on Environmental Issues

Panelists:

Eirik Steinhoff, Center for Responsible Forestry and Legacy Forest Project (co-founder)

David Troutt, Natural Resources for the Nisqually Tribe 

Lowell Wyse, Executive Director,  Tacoma Tree Foundation

About the symposium:

We are grateful for the Steen Family’s generous contribution to fund this annual symposium, which brings informed speakers who challenge current thinking and propose healthy change to the PLU campus for the purpose of contributing to educate for “lives of thoughtful inquiry, service, leadership and care — for other people, for their communities and for the Earth.” The symposium shares PLU’s and the Environmental Studies Program’s commitment to thinking about environmental issues from intersectional perspectives that bring into focus the connection between the health of the environment and the health of the communities and people who inhabit these.

The 2023 theme of the Symposium and Earth and Diversity Week, Sowing Resilience in Fractured Land, invites us to examine the wide-ranging and long term impact that the violence of natural resource extraction has on ecosystems, communities, and individuals. Following the Symposium’s commitment to proposing healthy change, this year’s speakers share alternative ways of living and coexisting on fractured lands and watersheds. Their work models how creativity, tradition, ingenuity, and laborious community-based work can provide a path toward resilience at the local, regional, and social scale.