For Our Common Home Lecture Series

Fall 2025 - Registration Links to the below events will be available in late summer 2025

September 19 - Sea Change Within Us

Performed by: Karin Stevens Dance and Gonzaga University Dance

Sea Change Within Us, by Karin Stevens Dance, is a sixty-minute performance addressing local Washington state water concerns and climate change consequences through the voices of real people we interviewed, combined with moving rigid structures of water images by dancing human bodies. Ten dancers move four panels into dynamic configurations to express concerns about rivers and dams, endangered species, ice, ocean and sea-level rise, flooding, migration, Indigenous fishing rights injustice, divisive politics, and human dis/re/connection. Within these turbulent thematic layers, grief is addressed through the real sounds of Tahlequah’s cries in the “Rivers, Dams, Salmon, Orca” section. Collective awareness is awakened in the section “Descending Pressure” with the repeated phrase from a climate activist-artist, “Our bodies are a source of wisdom.” The performance encourages unification with our ecosystems and throughout difficult content there is contemplation and beauty to support the felt-urgency of our crises. As a message to disrupt a myopic, singular viewpoint, the audience is invited to view the work from all sides and participate in a simple, guided embodied movement practice to re/connect to a whole-bodied relationship with water and the ensuing performance. The project was conceived, directed and choreographed by Karin Stevens, with original sound compositions by Kaley Lane Eaton and Jessi Harvey, and large-scale installation by Roger Feldman. The recreation of this 2019 project was funded by ArtsWA, National Endowment for the Arts, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, Earth Creative, and 4Culture.

About the performers: Karin Stevens is a Seattle-based choreographer, performer, writer and facilitator in somatic and spiritual healing. Through her dance company, Karin Stevens Dance (2009-present), she creates at the interchange of movement, art, ecology, spirit and humanity. She believes we must commune, collaborate and converse through movement, sound and ideas for co-creating visionary art beyond our current crises, as healing spaces performatively entangled in a transformational process with the world around us. Since 1999, Karin has created over ninety professional concert dance, theater, and education-based movement-art works, and produced over twenty evening-length concerts, including Record of the Anthropocene Movement (2017), named a 'must see performance' by City Arts Magazine. She has an MFA in Choreography and Performance from Mills College and a BA in dance from The University of Washington. Her work has received support from 4Culture, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, ArtsWA, National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, ArtsFund, Kawasaki Foundation, Abundant Blessing Foundation, Seattle International Dance Festival and Earth Creative. Karin Stevens Dance believes that dance is a radical, vital art key to our future in this 21st Century.

October 1 - Spokane Candidates Climate Change Forum

Speakers: Multiple

What do local candidates for office think about climate change? How will it affect your vote in November? To aid citizens in their democratic deliberations, Gonzaga’s Institute for Climate, Water, and the Environment is proud to host the Spokane Candidates Climate Change Forum on the first Wednesday each October. The Climate Forum has been hosted annually since 2019 and is a non-partisan space where candidates for local office can share with local voters and citizens what they would or would not do or support if elected to office.

About the speakers: See the Spokane Candidate Climate Change Forum site for updates on candidates invited and those who have confirmed whether they will attend.

October 3-5 - Climate Change Action Plays

Performed by: Gonzaga University Theatre

A collection of short climate-conscious plays from a global consortium of playwrights seeking to effect change through the medium of live theatre.

About the performers:  Gonzaga Theatre joins theatre artists around the world to produce a collection of climate-conscious short plays to explore Gonzaga's relationship to its place, Spokane and the river. 

October 22 - Forest Health, Diversity and Productivity in the face of the Forest Health and Wildfire Crisis

Speaker: Joshua White, Forest Supervisor, Colville National Forest

Healthy forests deliver benefits that people need, but due to past management and a history of fire suppression, our forests are unhealthy and in need of restoration. To address the departure of our landscape and reduce the risk of uncharacteristically severe disturbances, we must restore the health and resilience of the Colville National Forest, minimize detrimental impacts of disturbance to important values, and provide relevant opportunities to our communities. Our Forest is departed from its healthy and resilient state. This departure means that the Forest cannot meet the needs of the people, especially in the face of increasing wildfire risk and climate change. In many cases, our landscapes have crossed a threshold and cannot restore themselves without meaningful collaborative management and active management, including use of wildfire, will be necessary. For the past 8 years, the Colville National Forest has been working to change the trajectory of our forested landscapes, and to do so at a meaningful pace and scale. This presentation will highlight successes and challenges the Forest Service has faced moving toward a meaningful restoration program, the opportunities moving into the future, and the challenges faced every day.

About the speaker: Josh is the Forest Supervisor on the Colville National Forest where he is responsible for the management of over 1.6 million acres of public lands in NE Washington. Josh served in the US Army infantry from 1994 to 2002, and after serving in the Army, he attended Boise State University where he earned a B.S. in Ecology, and a master’s degree in Plant Community Ecology. Josh has worked for the Forest Service as an Invasive Species Coordinator, a rangeland management specialist, a supervisory natural resource specialist, a District Ranger, and a Deputy Forest Supervisor through out the Pacific Northwest. Josh, and the Colville National Forest, have been recognized as an agency leader in forest management and the use of active restoration to address issues related to forest health and wildfire risk, all while working to create resilience across the landscape in the face of a changing climate. The innovative approaches of the Colville National Forest have increased the scale of this restoration work and has brought recognition to NE Washington by both State and Federal officials.

November 4 - Safeguarding Our Drinking Water in the Pacific Northwest in an Era of Megafires

Speaker: Kyle Shimabuku, Associate Professor, Civil Engineering, Gonzaga University

Wildfires pose significant risks to environmental health, not only through air pollution but also by contaminating our drinking water supplies. After a wildfire, rainstorms can wash partially combusted materials into rivers and lakes, releasing a mix of pollutants that can severely challenge downstream water treatment facilities. In some cases, water treatment plants have been forced to shut down as contaminant suspended particle levels spiked by orders of magnitude. Moreover, the effects of burned forests on water quality may not also be visible or obvious, as some wildfire-derived substances that are not inherently toxic can react with water treatment chemicals to form cancer-causing compounds. When wildfires move into the wildland-urban interface, harmful chemicals from building materials can be more easily released into water sources, and drinking water infrastructure, such as pipes, can be directly contaminated where there is no barrier between the contamination and drinking water consumers. This talk provides an overview of how an interdisciplinary team of forestry hydrologists, watershed modelers, analytical chemists, and drinking water engineers is tackling this complex issue. By combining watershed water quality modeling, appropriate water treatment techniques, and effective water system management, the team is developing science-based recommendations. These insights aim to guide policymakers, water system managers, and individuals in mitigating health risks from wildfire-induced contamination of drinking water. The goal is to ensure safer, more resilient water supplies in the face of increasing wildfire activity.

About the speaker:  Dr. Kyle Shimabuku is an environmental engineer and Associate Professor in the Civil Engineering Department at Gonzaga University. He was inspired to specialize in drinking water treatment given the growing challenges to safe water access, which millions of people still lack. His work as a practicing engineer and researcher includes the development of low-cost, locally produced water treatment technologies derived from waste materials to remove fluoride from drinking water, a contaminant that negatively affects tens of millions of people worldwide. He has also contributed to the development of sustainable materials like biochar to address the growing concern of PFAS, which have been detected at concentrations exceeding regulatory limits in Spokane County. Recently, Dr. Shimabuku has focused on preparing water utilities in the Pacific Northwest for wildfire impacts to drinking water sources, which is a growing issue driven partially by climate change. His work is rooted in a commitment to ensure safe drinking water for all communities.