Speakers

Everyone loves trees! They make our cities beautiful, clean the air and water, help us de-stress, and give us shade and cooling in the summer. So why is Tacoma's urban forest struggling? Why do some neighborhoods have more trees than others? And what can we do about it as a community? Lowell Wyse will share about the efforts of the Tacoma Tree Foundation to bring trees and shade to the Tacoma communities that need them the most.

An English professor turned urban forest advocate, Lowell Wyse, Ph.D., is the executive director of the Tacoma Tree Foundation. For over a decade, he taught college writing, literature, and environmental humanities, focusing on the many ways that social and environmental issues overlap. His scholarship resulted in the book Ecospatiality: A Place-Based Approach to American Literature, published in 2021. In 2016, he founded a community group called Tacoma Needs Trees, to call attention to the urban forest crisis in Tacoma, where tree coverage is the lowest of any city in Western Washington. He now lives in downtown Tacoma (Puyallup territory).   

Hear from BirdNote Executive Director Nick Bayard about the popular daily public radio show about birds and what BirdNote is doing to advance equity and inclusion in the worlds of public media and environmental conservation. 

Nick Bayard is the Executive Director of BirdNote, a public media nonprofit organization with an estimated 6 million radio and podcast listeners that seeks to inspire people to care about--and take steps to protect--the natural world. Prior to this role, Nick served as Assistant Chief Equity Officer for the City of Tacoma and Director of the REACH Center. He also served in the Peace Corps in Paraguay, where he founded a tri-lingual radio show. He holds a master's degree in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School and a bachelor's degree in Environmental Studies from Brown University. You can learn more about BirdNote at www.birdnote.org.