People & Nature with Dr. Rebecca Zarger

Hosted by UFAEC graduate student Adeyinka Ayodele, this episode features Dr. Rebecca Zarger discussing how communities in Tampa Bay can strengthen climate resilience through urban forestry, storytelling, and community-driven solutions like the Blue-Green Action Platform (Blue Gap Project). Explore how connecting scientific data with lived experiences can inspire meaningful environmental action and help bridge the relationship between people and nature.

Dr. Rebecca Zarger: https://www.usf.edu/arts-sciences/departments/anthropology/people/zarger.aspx

People & Nature Symposium: https://tbep.org/people-nature-symposium/

Transcript

Adeyinka

Welcome to streaming science the people and nature Podcast Series. I'm Adeyinka Ayodele with University of Florida's department of agricultural, education and communication. In this series, we explore how people interact with nature and the environment around them. We attended the first ever people and nature symposium at UF/IFAS, Austin Carrie forest campus. We interviewed leaders, innovators and visionaries in conservation social science, and we are excited to share with you what they have to say. Today, we are joined by Dr. Rebecca Zarger who talks about how communities in Tampa Bay can strengthen climate resilience through urban forest storytelling and community driven solutions like the blue gap project.

Rebecca

Hi. My name is Rebecca Zarger, and I am an environmental and cultural anthropologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida.

Adeyinka

It's great having you with us this evening. When you hear the phrase “people and nature”, what does it mean to you?

Rebecca

When I hear the phrase people and nature? I want to remove the “and” between people and nature. So as an anthropologist, I'm really interested in bridging what has always been this dichotomy between humans and the living world around us, or the environments that we inhabit. So replacing it with some other kinds of relations. And relationality is something that I would be wanting to do. 

Adeyinka

So from your perspective, do you think people today feel more disconnected or more connected to nature?

Rebecca

Well, I think it depends on who you ask. So you know which people, in which place and who you maybe speak with in a place would really determine how the sort of more than human world, or the ecosystem and environment around us, and it's very situated in particular places and times.

Speaker 1  

So if people misunderstand nature, what's her the consequences?

Speaker 2  

Well, that's a great question. I think one of the other questions that could be asked is, How is nature varied from one person to another? How they see nature, how they experience nature. In anthropology and other fields like human geography, we've thought a lot about the question of how nature is socially and culturally constructed. So what sort of counts as nature is going to be very different in you know, one one country to another and one community to another, and

Unknown Speaker  

really depending on who you

Unknown Speaker  

ask. So why do you

Speaker 1  

think this relationship with nature matters right now, especially in the community

Speaker 2  

where you work? That's a great question. So I work in several different places, I have been studying how people relate to trees and changing forest canopy and within the city of Tampa, I've also worked on the topic of water pollution and how that's being experienced in different watersheds in Florida, as well as some other locations in the US. And then I also work on coastal sustainability in Belize in Central America. I think one of the answers to the question. what's sort of most important for people and nature or relationships right now is to really grapple with the fact that we're not addressing the fundamental causes of climate change. And additionally, we are thinking that things you know may slow down or get better, but a lot of the science and the information we have suggests otherwise. So, when you ask people what they want for their community five years from now, 10 years from now, I think considering how people feel and relate to the living world around them, is really fundamental to that question.

Adeyinka

Thank you so much. So how can community in Tampa Bay become prepared, or better prepared, for environmental risks like Hurricane through their relationship with nature?

Rebecca

That's a great question. I think this question really came to a kind of forefront of my mind as a resident of Tampa in the 2024 hurricane season, where we experienced two hurricanes back to back, Helene and then Milton, and as someone who had been studying changing forest cover and people's relationships with trees before the hurricane and then we've now done a study of how that affected people's perceptions of trees and priorities around tree planting after the hurricane. I think being able to plan for extreme hazard situations is a really important element of being prepared. But I also think, thinking really long term. So, you know, we lost a lot of grand, really large old trees within the city boundaries of Tampa, especially in my own neighborhood and central Tampa was one of the areas that was hit the hardest as far as tree canopy loss, and it's really affected people emotionally, economically. It's made them reconsider the real value of trees, the shade that they provide, the biodiversity that they house, all the benefits of trees in a city mitigating runoff and that kind of thing. And so experiencing a severe hurricane has really gotten the topic on people's minds about, you know, how can we make our city more livable in the future? What can we do to increase the amount of shade that's available increase the number of trees to replace ones that we've lost.

Adeyinka

What role can urban forest play in Strengthening climate resilience in cities like Tampa.

Rebecca

Yeah, that's a great question. So the urban forest plays a really central role in thinking about how to adapt to, you know, warming temperatures more frequent and stronger storms of all kinds, whether it's, you know, a sort of summer thunderstorm or a tropical storm or a category five hurricane, the trees do provide a lot of really important sort of resilience in an urban setting. You know, a strong tree canopy cover provides a lot of shade for people to walk from one place to another. You know, shades playgrounds, trees also are connected with personal stories of events that happen underneath trees. In our research, we've heard a lot from people about the important life events that they connect with particular trees that are very special to them in their neighborhood or in their city. People were very emotional when a lot of these trees came down as a result of high winds and oversaturation in the soil. A lot of grand trees did not fail, as far as you know, breaking in the middle, but they uprooted, and that was because we've got unprecedented amounts of rainfall with Hurricane Milton. So a lot of the trees uprooted. And so thinking about the benefits of trees, I think you also have to consider the limitations of certain species of trees can be planted needs to be considered. So thinking about planting the right tree and the right place is really important, but also working with neighbors and communities to understand what their priorities are for you know where to locate trees, where not to locate trees. What trees are they really excited about seeing in their neighborhood, they may be really interested in planting fruit trees, for example, in addition to species like live oak and bald cypress. So, you know, I think one of the things about an engaged approach to city resilience that incorporates trees and the Urban Canopy is really understanding where people are, and how they feel about trees, from all different perspectives

Adeyinka

talking about Blue gap. What does blue gap means? And what solution is the blue gap projects offering to address water pollution at the community level?

Speaker 2  

Well, the blue gap project refers to Blue Green Action Platform, and we came up with that name. The project team, which is led by an environmental engineer at USF, Dr Maya Trotz and I was one of the CO PIs on that project. We were very interested in linking cutting edge data on watershed pollution with stories of how that pollution has affected people's daily lives. We also learned as we interviewed people, as we attended public events and community meetings, talk with people who have been involved in this issue for many years, the interest kind of is beyond pollution and thinking about things like water based recreation, how can access to safe spaces for swimming, diving, snorkeling, kayaking be incorporated into thinking about the way people relate to watersheds in the Tampa Bay region, and so the blue gap project is really interested in linking the storytelling with the data in an interactive way, so that people can also connect with others who are interested in the same issues.

Adeyinka

Thank you. So let's address the storytelling aspect of your job. So how can storytelling be used more effectively to move people from awareness to action on environmental issues?

Rebecca

I think stories are really motivating. But also I think it's important to note that the action needs to be kind of coming from a place of a community member deciding for themselves, you know what, what their priorities are, as opposed to someone coming in and telling them, what they should care about or what their number one dream is for their community. That's something that they are very much need, to have the ability to express that to educators and decision makers and policy makers. And I think storytelling is one of the most compelling ways that seems to be effective so but that's based on my work in the Tampa Bay area as well as in Belize, with a lot of projects that I've been involved with over the last several years, we've seen that kind of linking up data, whether it's ecological data or geoscientific data on beach erosion or loss of tree canopy, linking that with kind of oral histories of how the environment has changed, what this these places mean to people and what their hopes are for the future of their communities, has been an effective way of, kind of matching the human experience with the scientific studies and the data, so it brings it alive for people who are in positions of power to make decisions about how to address these big challenges that we're facing.

Adeyinka

Thank you so much. So looking ahead, what is one practical step communities can take to build long term resilience in Tampa Bay? 

Rebecca

Ask people how they define resilience themselves. As an anthropologist, I think I would encourage, anyone who is interested in this topic of resilience to, build in an element where you may have a definition from the literature or from doing research on, you know, what makes a community or a neighborhood or even a whole city more resilient to factors such as,  changing sea level rise or increased temperatures or increased rainfall, and those are very important elements to consider. But I think just as important is how someone who is, an individual who lives in a neighborhood would define resilience from their point of view. So, you know, what does it mean to live a good life? How can I be happy in this place? You know, 10 years from now, what would I want it to be like? And how would I want to see the community changing? 

Adeyinka

Thank you so much. Is there any other thing you want to share with us? 

Rebecca

I would just like to say thank you to the organizers for hosting the people and nature conference because I have been working um in this area for my whole career much of it in Florida and it's just really exciting to see all the different uh participants um in different organizations and parts of Florida represented as people grapple with some of our big environmental challenges that we're facing right now.

Adeyinka

Thank you so much. It's a great privilege to have you on the podcast. 

Rebecca

Thank you. 

Adeyinka

Thanks for joining us today. I'm your host, Adeyinka. We appreciate Dr. Rebecca Zarger for sharing her insights on climate resilience and community action in Tampa Bay. To learn more about our guests and their work, as well as streaming science, Tampa Bay Estuary Program and the people & nature symposium, see the link in our show notes. You can also explore more conversations like this through The Streaming Science on all social media platforms.