Shana Lee Hirsch investigates the Columbia River Basin of the past, the present and the sociotechnical imaginaries of the River in her new book. In this episode, we discuss emerging approaches to restoration and getting in right relationship with climate change.

Last summer, UW Press published Hirsch’s book: Anticipating Future Environments: Climate Change, Adaptive Restoration, and the Columbia River Basin. Shana is a Research Scientist in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at UW. She has an interdisciplinary background in sustainability social science and water management and policy. Her work draws on participatory design methods and theories from science and technology studies. She is also Associate Director of the Pacific Marine Energy Center, where she brings collaborative methods for understanding innovation to power remote communities.

The Basin ecosystem provides for us, and Shana gets into the details about a subset of people who really care about the Basin in return. She provides insights into the everyday of restoration, the tools people use, and the emergent tactics of coping and getting in right relationship with climate change – which in turn changes us and the science itself.

Within the current system people are trying to help. People. Love. Salmon. The strength of the River restoration is really the strength of that relationship with the fish and their connection with everything else. The restoration effort combines that love, the human wherewithal and resilience through adaptation.

Hirsch, S. L., & Long, J. (2020). Adaptive Epistemologies: Conceptualizing Adaptation to Climate Change in Environmental Science. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 0162243919898517.

Hirsch, S. L. (2019). Anticipatory practices: Shifting baselines and environmental imaginaries of ecological restoration in the Columbia River Basin. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 3(1), 40-57.

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