New Work from Jon Rosales
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and class of ’13 SLU graduate Jon Ignatowski have an essay “Identifying the Exposure of Two Subsistence Villages in Alaska to Climate Change Using Traditional Ecological Knowledge” in Climate Change. Professor Rosales describes their work:
The article is the latest from Dr. Rosales’ research project Alaskans Sharing Indigenous Knowledge (http://AKSIK.org). AKSIK focuses on the impacts of climate change on two native subsistence villages in Alaska – Savoonga and Shaktoolik – making their concerns visible, advocating for their assistance, and calling on governments to act on climate change. This article was written with Jon Ignatowski (’13), an Environmental Studies/English major who accompanied Dr. Rosales during the summer of 2012 to the villages to conduct interviews of hunters, fishers, and gatherers of traditional foods. The article is the result of those interviews and is based on Ignatowski’s Senior Year Experience and Honor’s work. The article outlines the specific impacts of climate change villagers are noticing and compares their knowledge of the changes to the scientific literature on climate change. The result is that both traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge largely corroborate when it comes to the impacts of climate change in the Arctic. Dr. Rosales is now taking the results of this article a step further and surveying the measurable strength of that traditional knowledge, something that has largely been described qualitatively.
This builds on Dr. Rosales body of work which includes publications in The Huffington Post, Conservation Biology, and The Bulletin of Science, Technology, & Society as well as presentations at conferences such the Society for Conservation Biology, the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences, and the North American Benthological Society, i