A volunteer group of volunteers met at the Northwest Outdoor Center on Seattles Lake Union on a sunny Saturday in January. Girls South King County young women piled into kayaks to clean up the water.
Plastic, toxic waste and runoff are all accepted at Lake Union [are]Ebony Welborn, cofounder of Sea Potential, a Seattle-based marine education organization, stated that they addressed all major issues. We gathered at the end of the cleanup [a]Majority [of]plastics and Styrofoam
Through innovative educational curricula, and hands-on experiences young peopleWelborn and Sea Potential cofounder Savannah Smith, ages 12-18, encourage water justice among youth from communities and color, particularly girls.
Welborn explained that the kids who volunteered their time on that cold winter day were there to have fun and support the water. The intention was to have the opportunity to experience a reciprocal relationship with water.
Sea Potential programs are field-based environmentalism that is based in the Puget Sound area. This encourages curiosity and learning about marine environments. Simply put, they want Seattle’s children to love water. The organization also aims at promoting equitable representation for non-white professionals in maritime careers or any other profession that is connected to water.
Sea Potential is rooted in Smith’s and Welborns childhoods. Both leaders learned early on the importance and benefits of aquatic life in their respective ecologies from young Black girls. Welborn grew up in the Carolinas and spent much of her childhood outside, often with her brother and their dogs at a creek close to their trailer park community. Smith spent her childhood in Renton where her family hosted a variety of non-human relatives including hermit crabs as well as peacocks.
Smith and Welborn would both go on to get undergraduate degrees in marine biology or environmental studies. They met while working as environmental service workers in Seattle.
They formed a friendship and shared many dreams. Many of their goals in the beginning were intended to reduce impostor syndrome in environmental spaces for women of color. “It’s really important for youth to see that they can exist in these spaces,” said Smith, in her typical contemplative manner.
“And we are focused on creating that heart-based connection to water,” added Welborn, energetic and sunny. “There are so many aquatic spaces around us, whether that be a stream, or a creek, or the ocean or the Sound, she continued. We want to encourage people, even winter, to spend time on the water in all seasons.
Sea Potential’s roster of funded programs expanded as the organization grew. Its events now include a variety of fun activities such as tide pooling and beachcombing, decorative Kelp pressing, and even dancing in rain. Participants enjoyed a summer adventure at Discovery Park in Seattle with Young Women Empowered. They splashed around in the briny waves and flipped stones covered in seaweed to uncover small creatures. The group encounters a plainfin midshipman from the toadfish family. He is languid, big-lipped, and he lives in the sunny shallow.
Silvia Giannattasio–Lugo is the development director at YWE. She believes that Sea Potential was a great way to get youth, who identify either as female or nonbinary or are assigned a gender at birth, out into the natural world. “Anything that involves outdoors activities, our youth love. They want to get outdoors and touch and do things,” Giannattasio-Lugo said.
YWE and Sea Potential’s collaborative programs allowed the Girls young women to seek “connection and community” through safe and respectful interactions with intertidal creatures, Giannattasio-Lugo added. “During COVID, people have been desperate to be together right now, and especially our youth. Many of them were going to school online. They needed to be together and not be so isolated from others. They love to be outside and touch and do things. They love to play games, socialize and explore.”
Sea Potential’s core is based on science-based environmental activism. Its ultimate goal is to build a mutual relationship with water among children of diverse backgrounds.
Smith and Welborn want to draw attention to the rich histories of peoples of color who have connected with water in positive and meaningful ways. They also hope to encourage this practice within their immediate communities in the Pacific Northwest. Sea Potential will therefore be focusing on cultural resilience, Smith explained.
Another element of Sea Potentials mission is “to acknowledge theIndividual and intergenerational trauma that exists for BIPOC [people] in [water] spaces,” Smith said during a summer 2021 panel with Young Women Empowered, referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color. This part of Sea Potentials’ work touches upon a fundamental truth: that in some cases, the generational histories and water of non-white communities have been fraught with fear and abuse.
From stolen Black ancestors in the Middle PassageTo commemorate the wartime exodus by Southeast Asian communities across treacherous seas, Indigenous water supply threatened when industrial pipelines are builtThe organizers pointed out that imperialist capitalism’s demands for sovereignty and black people’s livelihoods have deprived them of their water for many generations.
During that summer 2021 outing, YWE and Sea Potential participants spent time reflecting on King County’s Clean Water PlanIt will be used to assess its effectiveness and to brainstorm improvements. The plan allocates billions of dollars to municipal resources for water quality protection.
However, attendees raised questions about conflicting priorities in water protection and pointed out a perceived contradiction.
2001 was the year that the Environmental Protection Agency declared it the Lower Duwamish WaterwayA section of the Duwamish River Superfund site. The city artery had been subject to a century of commercial activity and abuse. Dangerous layers of carcinogens and plastics as well as arsenic created sedimentary swathes along the riverbed. Until 2014 when local advocacy groups successfully lobbied EPA to increase regulations regarding riverbed cleanup and prevent more pollution, long-term polluters in the construction, oil, and gas industries escaped responsibility.
The Duwamish River cleanup requirements were reversed by Seattle Public Utilities, King County Wastewater, and Port of Seattle last fall. Updated cleanup proposal from EPA. Suggestions for policy reversals would permit higher levels of waste compounds such as PCBs, arsenic and dioxins into the Duwamish River. Rollbacks would also reduce accountability for long-standing corporate polluters of Duwamish, such as Jorgensen Forge (a metal producer that closed in 2018).
BJ Cummings, Seattle writer and activist, said that lower standards for the cleanup of waterways would harm the health in low-income, largely white communities that are connected to rivers.
In a Crosscut interview 2020, Cummings characterized the neglect of the river as “blatant environmental racism.” Noting that the river’s cultural history is shaped by “10,000 years of the Duwamish people [and] seven generations of settler and immigrant history,” today, Latino, East Asian and East African immigrants are among the diverse communities that live along the Duwamish. The ecosystem’s environmental protections will be removed. Reintroduce toxins to your lifeThe river is connected to and within the city.
Activists in King County are focusing on empowerment of diverse communities as they face a Duwamish-related water crisis. Protect both the Duwamish and Fraser RiversIts surrounding rivers, sounds, and seas. Sea Potential is one such activist program. Through their programs, they have helped to educate young adults about water rights and environmental policies. Sea Potential is a program that focuses on intellectual development for younger generations. However, the lessons they teach us are valuable for all.
As Chandrika Francis, environmental educator for YWE, put it: It is helpful to think about water as having a relationship with a person there are so many ways where we are all in very deep, lifelong connections with water our entire history is a relationship with water,” she said. “In a lot of Indigenous African cultures, water is where ancestors lived. The relationship is already deep, intricate, and already there.
Water is universal: A building block of basic survival and an element that connects us all, water is vital to our well-being.
Sea Potential strives to spread this message every day. It’s worth listening, especially in a time where the sanctity and integrity of our local Duwamish are under threat.
Ann Guo
She is an urban anthropologist with a base in Seattle and Istanbul. You can follow her adventures on Instagram @ann.thropologist.
