Sam Allen, Senior Environmental Studies and History Major, shares about their internship with Sustainable Northwest in Portland, OR.
“Hey all! My name is Sam Allen, I’m a senior from Lake Oswego, Oregon, majoring in Environmental Studies and History. This summer, I am interning at Sustainable Northwest, an environmental nonprofit based in Portland.
Sustainable Northwest works to build community engagement and design creative or entrepreneurial solutions to environmental issues around the Pacific Northwest, helping bring local stakeholders into agreements on issues like water, forestry, and energy production. One of the largest and most important efforts that Sustainable Northwest has been involved with is the twenty-year long successful fight to remove four dams on the Klamath River of southern Oregon and northern California. The deconstruction of these four dams has begun this summer, representing the largest dam removal action in American history and a huge victory for the region’s Indigenous tribes, the environment, fishing and recreation enthusiasts, and for the model of cooperative activism that Sustainable Northwest engages in.
My own project for the summer has been to interview and learn from the people at the heart of this story, building a narrative article which can both explain the process by which dam removal became possible and provide insight for other dam removal advocates. This is complicated but fun work; many people of many perspectives and experiences have been involved in the conversation around the Klamath River, and attempting to collect their stories lets me put the skills I’ve been building at Whitman to the test. I spend a lot of time in my classes learning about issues of environmental justice, coalitions, and the function of different styles of activism. I’ve also done a lot of research on water control in the western United States and how dams have historically affected the environment and the communities around them. The opportunity to do an internship that is directly relevant to my academics makes my education at Whitman feel meaningful and makes my internship more fun. I am glad that the Whitman Internship Grant was able to support this project, because otherwise, nobody would be attempting to do the specific oral history collection that I am working on, and it is possible that some of the stories and thoughts that are fresh on people’s minds while the dams are coming down might be lost forever.
I rely on my skills as a historian to put the testimony I have collected into context, but I also learned valuable skills for this project while participating in Whtiman’s Semester In The West program last fall. On that program, we learned the distinctive culture of the rural West which colors many resource conflicts in the region, and learned to conduct empathetic interviews with people with whom we fundamentally disagreed. This mixture of classroom and field experience has prepared me to work on these projects in what I believe to be a unique and interesting way. I look forward to finishing my report later this summer and I hope it will help with future projects learn from the story of the Klamath dams.