An integral focus for my Master Plan was developed in the Biology in the Age of Technology class. This is where I created my Disappearing Rio Grande website. The website currently includes a virtual tour of the Rio Grande, threats to the river, history, and will host stories and interviews.

https://disappearingriogrande.wordpress.com/

The main focus of this project was the virtual tour of the Rio Grande: https://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com/builder#play/ahJzfmd3ZWItdG91cmJ1aWxkZXJyEQsSBFRvdXIYgICAp6yfoQkM

The tour starts at the river’s headwaters and continues down along the river’s course with historic dates, opportunities for recreation, dam projects, and threats. This includes the first place the Spanish encountered the river, dates of dam construction, and instances of pollution. I love building websites and had a lot of fun plugging information into the map.

It was researching this project that I first got the idea for my Master Plan. Most of the sources I found about the history of the Rio Grande and Rio Grande Valley begin with Spanish arrival in the 1500s. Yet Native groups had been farming and living in the area for hundreds of years. I hope the website will someday tell a more complete story of the area and how people have been using the river for so long. By showing traditional uses, New Mexico can hopefully get some ideas on sustainable water use moving forward, and include often marginalized groups in the larger narrative of our history.

On the website I created forms where people can submit pictures and stories about the river. The goal is to share the website with Native American communities so they can share stories that tell their history for a wider audience. As I continue to build upon this project even after graduation, I hope people will submit their own stories that I can add to the website so people can find their own history and a more diverse history reflected on the map.

For my Independent Study in the fall of 2016, I completed a 30 page paper on the history of the Rio Grande Valley. It focused on how water has been used sustainably for thousands of years until recent dam projects. Uploaded as a pdf here.

In the conservation community, up until recently, there has been a large focus on setting aside large tracts of land to protect it. This paper focused on the fact that people have been altering the landscape and utilizing natural resources for thousands of years, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Performed in a sustainable way, humans and nature can coexist in mutually beneficial ways. By laying out traditional uses of the Rio Grande, I hope to guide current users of the river to a more sustainable future.

I was able to interview a member of the Pueblo of Isleta who was one of the people who identified how polluted the water was on their land - I had no idea this was who I would be interviewing when I first reached out to him! For years, the city of Albuquerque had been dumping pollutants in the Rio Grande that ended up downriver in Isleta. This led to a landmark Supreme Court decision that the Pueblo of Isleta won. According to Ted Jojola, the person from Isleta Pueblo I interviewed, despite first fighting the lawsuit, the city of Albuquerque now praises it's water quality.

Looking back, I took the Leadership Challenge very seriously and literally as I decided to really exit my comfort zone. Two things I am not comfortable with are speaking in public and working with children. However, these are two things I often have to do at work and I figured the only way to get better was to practice. For my Leadership Challenge, I identified a need in my community and pushed myself to address it.

New Mexico has an ongoing education crisis. In 2016, New Mexico was ranked 49th in the United States when it comes to quality of education measures (Nott, 2017). The low ranking was nothing new for the state, with similar reports giving the state an F, C, and D- in 2010, 2011 - 2013, and 2014 - 2015 respectively (Nott, 2017).

In addition to education challenges, New Mexico also has an ongoing poverty crisis. According to the nonprofit Talk Poverty, New Mexico had the highest poverty rate in the nation in 2015 with 20 percent of the population living below the poverty line (TalkPoverty, 2015). Poor education and poverty levels in New Mexico are intertwined - it is widely documented that people from low-income backgrounds often do not receive an adequate education - therein continuing the cycle of poverty (van der Berg, 2008). With an ongoing budget crisis, extracurricular activities aimed at providing students with more opportunities to learn or get outside, are often the first programs to be cut.

Outside of New Mexico, children across the country are losing touch with nature and the outdoors due in large part to more time inside or in front of screens. Some estimates show that children between the ages of five to 16 are spending six and a half hours a day in front of screens, up from just three in 1995 (Wakefield, 2015). A thirty year decline in hunting and fishing licenses sold shows that less and less of the population is participating in these outdoor traditions - despite a slight uptick in recent years (Rathke, 2014). The sale of hunting and fishing licenses supports many conservation efforts, and re-engaging Americans with hunting and fishing will not only reconnect people with the outdoors but sustain conservation programs as well. The New Mexico Wildlife Federation (NMWF) where I work, an affiliate of the National Wildlife Federation, aims to connect youth to the outdoors and introduce them to hunting, fishing, and hiking.

NMWF began working with the Santa Ana Pueblo wellness center in 2016, assisting in their after-school program on roughly a monthly basis. Activities included making a cloud in a bottle, identifying animal tracks, tying fly lures, and practicing fly fishing. While this is a great start, the opportunities to educate and connect children through similar venues is almost endless. In my role at NMWF, I mostly create marketing materials and communicate with the public through online venues. As a small organization, all staff assist on various events and programs and I had helped at the Santa Ana Pueblo numerous times. I had never created a curriculum or program, and am not especially comfortable doing so given a fear of speaking in public and being uncomfortable around children in an educational capacity. Creating a curriculum NMWF can utilize at the Santa Ana after school program - and hopefully other Pueblos across New Mexico - was a big challenge for me and a great benefit to these communities that often do not have the best access to educational resources.

By working with students in the after school program at the Santa Ana Pueblo, I am reinforcing the importance of water, native species, and make additional connections in giving more Native communities a voice when it comes to land and water history and the future of water conservation.

Since I wrote my paper and incorporated my changes into the Santa Ana Pueblo, this program has been pitched to Sandia and Isleta Pueblos by one of my coworkers who has connections at these Pueblos. The Pueblo of Acoma reached out to NMWF to get involved. The program has even been pitched to the Onondaga Nation in New York State, and the president of the National Wildlife Federation is excited about the opportunities provided by the program as well.

Pictures from the program on the NMWF Facebook page: 

https://www.facebook.com/nmwildlife/posts/10155759492154424

https://www.facebook.com/nmwildlife/posts/10155602687279424

For the professional media workshop, I edited a 30 page paper I completed for my independent study down to 10 pages for submission to High Country News. I read this publication a lot as they are focused on issues in the Western United States, including public lands management, water issues, and Native stories. They have a long form section as well as guest columnists, I felt that my paper would be an appropriate fit for either of these sections. I eventually chose the long form section for submission.

To make this eligible for submission, I told more of a narrative rather than the comparative paper I wrote during my independent study. This was definitely one of my biggest challenges of an assignment as editing something I had put so much time into was a real struggle. In a continuing struggle I had throughout my graduate studies and especially around my Master Plan projects, I was not able to get IRB certified to conduct more interviews to include in the final version of my story. More first person accounts could have definitely told a more compelling narrative for a newspaper publication.  

Even without the additional interviews, I believe my end product highlighted the need for a different outlook when it comes to water management in the Rio Grande Valley, and I'm proud of the end result even it ended up not getting accepted by High Country News.

In my Environmental Stewardship in my Community class, I created an outline of a "water saver" app. The idea was to have people compete with each other on how to save water - similar to how people track and compete against their friends or family to have the most "steps" to get fit. This project identified ways to engage my community in water conservation, save money, and share ideas on how to save water.

Water conservation is key in New Mexico where you either have too much or too little (increasingly too little). By making water conservation a friendly competition, I hoped to engage different members of the community as well as local policy makers.

This project took into account the science behind behavior changes, the needs of my community, and thinking creatively to get people thinking about conservation in a new way. It also involved technology and how leaders in the conservation community can use technology to our advantage, at a time when many are wondering what role technology can and should have in getting people outside and helping the environment.

The reintroduction of the Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout (Oncorhynchus clarki virginalis) has been a year’s long process across New Mexico. The official state fish of New Mexico, this trout species has become threatened due to climate change and introduced non-native species (New Mexico Department of Game and Fish). A popular fish amongst anglers, getting their numbers up has been a priority for the state’s Game and Fish Department.

Reintroducing a native species is not as simple as dumping said fish in a stream. This is a controversial practice as a piscicide (a poison meant to kill fish) is released in streams before the native fish are introduced. The releasing of the piscicide is a necessary step prior to the release of the introduced species. The non-native fish are killed so the introduced fish can have the best chance at a successful reintroduction. Inconclusive studies have linked this poison to health disorders so many communities do not want the chemical released in their water supplies.

My organization is invested in the reintroduction of the Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout so I wanted to take a deeper look at this issue. For Issues in Biodiversity, I came up with an online survey that was shared with teachers and students at the Santa Fe Indian School which includes community members who may be impacted by a plan to reintroduce Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout.

The survey asked the following questions:

• Do you know the current threats facing Rio Grande Cutthroat trout?
• Do you know about the plan to reintroduce Rio Grande Cutthroat trout in your area?
• If you answered yes, please give us a brief description of your understanding of the project:
• Are you in favor of the plan?
• Explain your support or opposition to the plan:
• Would you be interested in learning more about the plan?

While I did not have a great response rate to my survey, this helped me understand how organizing and outreach works in New Mexico. In-person meetings with invested stakeholders are crucial.

This also helped me dive into some really thorny issues about native species and conservation. When do you draw the line at saving a species? What makes a species? Throughout this program, we have learned to critically analyze scientific research and engage in inquiry by asking our own questions. This project highlighted some of the core tenets of AIP.

This community mapping project was from way back when I was in the Bronx program. I've always been interested in water issues, so with this project I tracked recent whale and dolphin sightings on the Long Island Sound and around the five boroughs to highlight the improved water quality in the area. I partnered with Darren Klein who worked at the New York Audubon Society and happened to have an interest in making apps. He set up a system where I could plug locations and information into a website and it would populate on a map. People could click on a sighting and learn more about what animal was seen, by whom, and when.

While my move to the desert made an ocean Master Plan focus pretty much impossible, community engagement based around water quality has remained a focus. This project also showed me the importance of planning when it comes to community conservation to make sure you're hitting your deadlines.

After two and a half years of hard work it seems hard to believe my grad school program is finally coming to an end. It doesn't seem real yet, and I think that's because this work will never really be complete. I would've never guessed when I started this program that I would finish it in New Mexico of all places and have created my own educational program. I thought my big project would be my website and while I definitely aim to work on that past graduation, I know my education program at multiple Pueblos throughout New Mexico will definitely continue to grow.

In a few weeks I will have a follow up meeting with Santa Ana to assess how the program went which I hope will make it even more successful going forward. I also hope to continue to get the word out about my website and have it be a resource for communities across New Mexico.

This program has given me a great basis for community organizing going forward, and I can't wait to see how I continue to learn!