Author: Ruby Cayenne

Disease killing high number of seals and sea lions in Humboldt County

Ruby CayenneLeave a comment

by Ruby Cayenne

The MMERP interns measure and examine stranded marine mammal at Trinidad State Beach and verify the condition and species. All marine mammal research is carried out under NMFS MMHSRP permit # 18786.03| Photo by Ben Pridonoff

Humboldt County and other parts of California have seen a spike in marine mammal strandings and deaths caused by a bacterial disease called Leptospirosis.

It affects the kidneys of seals and sea lions and can lead to paralysis and death. Humans and pets can contract this disease through contact with bodily fluids from marine mammals such as urine or feces in water, soil and sand, remarked Outreach Director for the Cal Poly Humboldt Telonicher Marine Lab, Emily Curry. She also recommends not consuming shellfish or fish caught locally because they may have Leptospirosis.

Leptospirosis can cause high fever, headache, chills, muscle aches, vomiting, jaundice, red eyes, abdominal pains, diarrhea, and rashes in the first stage. If the second phase occurs untreated, a person may have kidney or liver failure or meningitis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dawn Goley is the director of Cal Poly Humboldt’s Marine Mammal Stranding Program (MMSP) and Marine Mammal Education and Research Program (MIRP). Goley, staff and students work together to monitor dead marine mammals that wash up on shore in the counties of Humboldt, Del Norte and Mendocino.

The normal number of marine mammal deaths due to Leptospirosis is around 120 in a year, explained Goley. As of Sept. of 2023, there had already been 197 strandings caused by this disease. 

“There’s a huge uptick in the number of marine mammals that are stranding and the majority of those are California sea lions,” Goley said. 

Goley said many sea lions contracted a neurotoxin in the summer caused by large algae blooms from rising sea temperatures in southern California. The ones that survived and migrated Northward for the winter are likely weakened making them more susceptible to Leptospirosis.

“…when they started to come up here, we started to have an increase in strandings of those animals in particular,” Goley said. “And it became apparent that they were affected by a bacterial disease called Leptospirosis.”

Community members can reach out to report a dead marine mammal on local beaches by contacting the Cal Poly Humboldt Marine Mammal Stranding Program at marinemammals@humboldt.edu or our hotline at 707-826-3650. If the marine mammal is sick or injured, please call the North Coast Marine Mammal Center hotline at 707-951-4722.

“If the reporters can share a good description of the location (latitude/longitude are especially helpful, but not necessary), as well as a photo(s) of the animal – that would be the most helpful for us to mount a quick response,” Goley said.

Some carcasses may have zip ties around their flippers which means that the animal has already been examined and reported to the stranding network.

The Cal Poly Humboldt Marine Mammal Stranding Program is available to students of any major and has no prerequisites. To get put on the email list for an application, message marinemammals@humboldt.edu.

Decolonizing Sustainability Speaker Series continues on Oct.12 at Cal Poly Humboldt with professor Kaitlin Reed

Ruby CayenneLeave a comment

by Ruby Cayenne

Left: Speaker Brittani Orona who presented on Sept. 14 | Photo provided by Orona. Right: Speaker Kaitlin Reed who is presenting Oct. 12 | Photo provided by MARCOM

Two additional speakers will take part in the Decolonizing Sustainability Speaker Series this fall. The first speaker was Brittani Orona on Sept.14, and the next speakers are professors Kaitlin Reed on Oct. 12 and Dana Loyd on Nov. 16. The in person events will be at the Native American Forum room BSS 162 at Cal Poly Humboldt from 5 – 6:30 p.m.

“The speaker series is really designed to kind of interrogate the centrality of settler colonialism and white supremacy in a lot of American environmental movements, both historically and in the present,” said Assistant NAS Professor and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) Faculty Fellow Kaitlin Reed. She is the main organizer of the series and an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe.

Brittani Orona – September Highlights 

Orona is University of California president’s postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Cruz and serves as the Board Secretary for Save California Salmon, among many other things. She is an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe. Her research and teachings are focused on Indigenous history and human rights, environmental studies, public humanities and visual sovereignty.

Orona explained that the subject of her talk on dam speculation focuses on her current research around the organized resistance against the proposed water infrastructures on the Klamath River from colonization into the present day.

“The period of dam speculation began with early colonization on the Klamath River Basin when various waves of settlers from both the Upper Basin and the Lower waged violent wars against Native people,” Orona said. “These wars began the period of resource extraction and environmental degradation through salmon fisheries, timber and gold mining.”

Orona argued that many Californian agencies say they didn’t formerly understand how building dams on the river would affect Native people and the environment. She argues that they fully understood how they would affect these things and that this argument of past ignorance is “an interesting settler scheme.”

“So, the occupation of stolen lives, lands, stolen lives, dispossession, all of this that I’m talking about right now, very much ties into climate catastrophe,” Orona said. “And it starts during this very intense period of colonization. And I’m really looking here at the Klamath River Basin as an example of this.”

Kaitlin Reed – Oct. 12

Reed explained that conservation and preservation movements are often juxtaposed with mindsets that want to take from nature when in fact, they are “two sides of the same coin, a very Eurocentric coin.” Reed explained that these mindsets view humans as being separate from nature rather than just a part of the same system as humans.

Professor Reed just published a book called Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California, which is the topic of her talk.

The green rush refers to cannabis cultivation, specifically trespass cultivation. The book also touches on the timber rush and the fish rush, and concludes with a critique of the back to the land movement, Reed said. She explained that in Humboldt, the back to land movement is often romanticized, when in fact, its origins stem from white people leaving urban and suburban areas to buy up land in Humboldt that became very cheap because of the timber collapse.

“They quickly realized they had no idea how to live off the land,” Reed said when speaking about the need for money that was soon realized by the settlers. “So, they start cultivating cannabis as a way to earn a cash income.”

Reed goes deep in her book about cannabis cultivation in Yurok Ancestral Territory as well as other tribal nations and the exclusion of tribal nations’ participation

in the legal cannabis economy. She stated that trespass cultivation affects water and land by toxifying them and is also a source of land dispossession and violence toward Indigenous people.

She argues that before we can envision a sustainable cannabis industry, land needs to be given back and the dams must come down so that the rivers can recover from the critical condition they are currently in.

New academic programs and faculty at Cal Poly Humboldt

Ruby CayenneLeave a comment

by Ruby Cayenne

As Cal Poly Humboldt continues to expand, the university is actively adding new programs within various departments and hiring new faculty, being twelve new programs in fall of 2023 and spring 2024 and approximately 39 faculty. Engineering, technology, applied science, and science are the departments that have added new programs.

The College of Natural Resources and Sciences (CNRS) gained seven new programs for the 2023-2024 academic year, especially because engineering falls under that umbrella. According to Eric Riggs, Dean of CNRS, in many ways having all of these programs together is a huge advantage because they are able to cross-pollinate all of these disciplines.

Riggs expressed that the university is focusing on making sure that they implement the Cal State system while also “constantly acknowledging the needs of society, not just sort of doing science for its own sake and then applying it without consequence.”

An individualized degree program (IDP) has been added which allows students to either get a general bachelor’s degree from Cal Poly Humboldt or sit down with the IDP director, Rebecca Robertson, and create a degree that is unique to what a student wants.

“There are testimonials already from a number of students who are like, this prevented me from dropping out, or this made me come back to school,” Jenn Capps, Provost of CPH said when speaking about the IDP program.

According to Capps, the decision to develop all the new programs came from listening to students, faculty, and employers, reviewing workforce demand data, looking at which programs campuses have that are in high demand but are also competitive and thinking about what programs are best suited for students who are interested in going to graduate school.

Some of the new faculty were purposefully chosen to work in multiple colleges at the university. “There’s also been some intentionality in the new programs and in the faculty hires to look for connections between the colleges, because I think in our vision of what it means to be a polytechnic is we advance that kind of unified vision,” Riggs said.

While the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHS) did not receive as many new programs as CNRS, there have been a number of new hires within the college, and a few cross-disciplinary programs that involve CAHS.

“I would argue that journalism, the arts, for example, and then other fields also are polytechnic in nature in that there applies direct learning that is done with the learning experience, but then the work and the way it engages directly with the community,” Jeffery Crane, Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences said.

In 2022, 22 new faculty were brought on to aid in these new programs and others that aren’t polytechnic-related such as arts, humanities, ethnic studies, social sciences, and professional studies. For the academic year 2023-2024, another 17 faculty were hired.

To ensure the hiring of diverse faculty and staff, Cal Poly Humboldt has implemented a number of strategies. Go to http://www.humboldt.edu/about/polytechnic/staff-and-faculty-faqs for a complete list and additional details. For faculty hired for the academic year 2022-2023, over 50 percent of the faculty are BIPOC, according to Capps. Numbers are not yet available for 2023-2024.

Groups such as the BIPOC Faculty Affinity Group have been in place for many years, but recently, a BIPOC Staff Affinity Group has been developed, which according to Capps, had 60 to 80 people attend the first meeting who were seeking out support.

The most recent professional development day for faculty and staff focused on the university’s anti-racism action plan and highlighted combatting unconscious biases. “We had over 250 people come from campus,” Capps said.

Some of the things this extra support has done are ongoing program orientations and connecting faculty with people beyond their respective departments which develops inter-disciplinary collaboration. New hires are also given help with less institution-related topics such as where to find good healthcare providers or good places to eat to further orient them to the community.

“We were researching the acceptance numbers in the spring, and we were quite worried. So, I’m glad that the amount of students who have actually come is more appropriate to the amount of faculty to give them that really thorough experience. It’s a little bit more one-on-one, you know, classroom space, lab space, housing is an issue, I mean, all of it is wrapped together,” Riggs said.

Fog of War and Control Room – 11/02/23

Ruby Cayenne4 Comments

The overarching understanding that was further established by intaking these two pieces of media Control Room and “The Fog of War, and the Deadly Toll of Reporting from Gaza and Israel” is that this current war between Israel and Palestine is the culmination of many decades, if not centuries, of conflicts around the same topic: ownership and possession of land. While that description may be a gross simplification, it is the fear of displacement, or frustration of current displacement, coupled with the desire of possession that fuels hatred and war in this instance. 

You don’t just have a few problems with a group of people if you are okay with blockading them, as with Gaza, or by initiating a gruesome attack, as with the initial attack from the Hamas. This seems more like an underlying display of hatred on both sides. I am not educated enough on the origins of this feud to speak much further on the reasonings behind the war and unfortunately, I do not have the mental capacity to deep dive into that research right now because of personal reasons. 

Beyond personal reasons, I am intensely overwhelmed by the never-ending cycle of war and the destruction and chaos it brings. In Control Room the narrative that is threaded throughout the entire film is that each side, the USA and Arabs, frequently insist that the media from the other side is propaganda and largely staged. 

“We know that Al Jazeera has a pattern of playing propaganda over and over and over again. What they do is when there’s a bomb that goes down they grab some children and some women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children and it seems to me that it’s up to all of us to try to tell the truth to say what we know to say what we don’t know and recognize that were dealing with people that are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further their case…” Donald Rumsfeld said. This is a perfect example of a US representative slandering an entire news organization just to make the USA look like the good guys, or maybe he truly believes that which is just as unsettling. 

Media Analyst Abdallah Schleifer tried insisting to Eid Al-Shammre, coorespondant of Abu Dhabi Television, that it was his job to put all personal feelings aside and report on the war with a smile on his face. Al-Shammre became frustrated saying “how could I smile when my people are being killed.” 

I believe that in situations like war, the ability to be completely objective becomes impossible, no matter what anyone says.  Joanne Tucker, manager of Al Jazeera.net said in an interview that having objectivity in an event like this is a mirage, when talking about the 2003 invasion of Iraq. For example, Lt. Josh Rushing, Press Officer, Central Command, said when they saw images of dead us soldiers it affected them a lot more than when they saw images of dead Arabs. This speaks to that unintentional lack of objectivity. 

Rushing also said, “when I watch al Jazeera and I can tell what they are showing and then I can tell what they are not showing by choice, same thing when I watch fox on the other end of the spectrum.” You see this happening now with the Israel Palestine war. Different news outlets are reporting on different pieces of the whole image based on the target audience and values of the news outlet, rather than steering away from sensationalism and reporting all sides and only reporting facts. 

“History tells us that human beings have short memories. Who thinks now in the United States about what happened in Somalia in 1993, nobody. Who thinks about what happened in Bosnia, nobody thinks about that. History is written by the victors. All what will be left from this war are just scrips and some history books and that’s it,” Samir Khader, senior producer Al Jazeera said. “We wanted to show that any war has a human cost, okay, we focused on that there is a human cost because we care for Iraqi people, we are not like Rumsfeld who says we care for the Iraqi people. He doesn’t care at all okay, we care for them, we are Arabs like them, we are Muslims like them.”

In “The Fog of War, and the Deadly Toll of Reporting from Gaza and Israel” Brooke Gladstone says that “there’s a sense that the world is unraveling,” when speaking about the current Israel-Palestine war and other conflicts. I feel that the disparities between reports on the story regarding decapitated babies and the hospital bombing, for example, are so immense and no one has answers. “All sides have lied before,” said Gladstone. Journalists seem to be quickly eating up information released without fact checking or even having a way to fact check. So many reporters/journalists are sensationalizing news surrounding this war.

“There hasn’t been a lot of international journalists inside Gaza for a while. There is a dwindling number because of the high risk and the calculation made covering that conflict over the years,” Sherif Mansour, Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. At the end of the day, it is up to each journalist to decide how much they will risk telling a story. In the case of any war, without people on the ground reporting, it is challenging to get the facts, so the people who do put themselves in harm’s way to report the truth the best they can have all of my respect. 

Situations like this make the grey area of ethics become even more muddled. Arguably, the only way to ethically consume media in cases like this is to take the immense amount of time to vet out sensationalized news and do a large amount of independent research to discern what the truth even is. This is a wildly taxing task, both mentally and emotionally. It is supposed to be the journalists job to provide this information, to do that research for the average person, but when journalists succumb to sensationalism, informational disaster ensues. 

Tareq Bacori talked about how this war could have a domino effect around the region as Palestine becomes a vehicle for “people in the region to begin to express their anger and dismay at regimes who are aligning themselves in ways that are ideologically opposed to their own people.” Places such as Jordan and Egypt have a “cold peace” with Israel. Lebanon is still formally at war with Israel and has aligned itself with the Hamas. 

Bacori said it was a huge miscalculation on the part of the Israeli government to assume that the blockading of over two million people in Gaza was sustainable, also underestimating the anger and passion with regard to the plight of Palestinian people throughout the region. “To think that this is something that is limited to Palestine is to miss the possibility that Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Iran could very quickly be embroiled in this just because of the politics around Israel-Palestine. In a global reality where we also have a European war, and we also have major geopolitical realignments happening, this is more explosive than it’s ever been in my lifetime, at least.”

https://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/680

https://www.betterhelp.com

https://www.spj.org/ethicswartime.asp#:~:text=The%20Code%20of%20Ethics%20of,”%20and%20“Be%20Accountable.”