Digging Deeper to Understand Tacoma’s Environmental Future:  A View from the Center for Urban Water
Jul 27, 2017
Joel Baker
Digging Deeper to Understand Tacoma’s Environmental Future: A View from the Center for Urban Water

Professor Joel Baker holds the Port of Tacoma Chair in Environmental Science and is the Science Director of the Center for Urban Waters. He earned a B.S. degree in Environmental Chemistry from SUNY Syracuse (1982) and M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1988) degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Minnesota. 

The natural beauty of Tacoma and the Pacific Northwest provides tremendous social, spiritual, and economic values to our community.  While there is a strong consensus to ‘protect our environment’, the public is bombarded with often widely conflicting information both about the status of our environment and what they should do individually and collectively to preserve and enhance our surroundings.  At the Center for Urban Waters, University of Washington scientists and engineers develop and use cutting edge tools to describe the current state of the environment, to assess the impact of a variety of stressors, and to enable decision makers to make science-informed policy.  This presentation will explore several Urban Waters projects and challenge Tacoma Rotary 8 members to go beyond the headlines of contemporary issues facing Tacoma.The natural beauty of Tacoma and the Pacific Northwest provides tremendous social, spiritual, and economic values to our community.  While there is a strong consensus to ‘protect our environment’, the public is bombarded with often widely conflicting information both about the status of our environment and what they should do individually and collectively to preserve and enhance our surroundings.  At the Center for Urban Waters, University of Washington scientists and engineers develop and use cutting edge tools to describe the current state of the environment, to assess the impact of a variety of stressors, and to enable decision makers to make science-informed policy.  This presentation will explore several Urban Waters projects and challenge Tacoma Rotary 8 members to go beyond the headlines of contemporary issues facing Tacoma.The natural beauty of Tacoma and the Pacific Northwest provides tremendous social, spiritual, and economic values to our community.  While there is a strong consensus to ‘protect our environment’, the public is bombarded with often widely conflicting information both about the status of our environment and what they should do individually and collectively to preserve and enhance our surroundings.  At the Center for Urban Waters, University of Washington scientists and engineers develop and use cutting edge tools to describe the current state of the environment, to assess the impact of a variety of stressors, and to enable decision makers to make science-informed policy.  This presentation will explore several Urban Waters projects and challenge Tacoma Rotary 8 members to go beyond the headlines of contemporary issues facing Tacoma.