Stanford’s Bill Lane Center tackles coastal resilience in 2024 Sophomore College course
By
Kylie Gordon
During the three weeks prior to the start of Stanford’s 2024-2025 academic year, the Bill Lane Center for the American West led a group of students on a Sophomore College (SoCo) course titled "Coastal Resilience: Problems and Solutions to Extreme Weather Challenges on the West Coast." Students traveled over 500 miles down the California Coast, then all the way up to Seattle and the San Juan Islands. Along the way, the group engaged with over 60 stakeholders through site visits, lectures, and guest speakers.
Designed to address the growing threats posed by climate change – challenges such as sea level rise, flooding, land subsidence, drought-stressed water supply, pollution, unsustainable fishing practices, and more – the course explored possible solutions to these problems, and the relentless collaboration required to solve them. By the end of their SoCo experience, after meeting with policy experts and public officials from governmental agencies, utilities, universities, and public interest groups, students grasped the intricate and interdisciplinary nature of achieving coastal resilience and adapting to a changing climate.
A trip to the Hetch Hetchy Regional Water System early in the course illustrated some of this complexity, particularly for Dillan Saltsman, a sophomore studying environmental systems engineering on the freshwater track. The system plays a key role in water delivery throughout the state of California, and it “involves extensive collaboration between the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, the National Park Service and the National Fish and Wildlife Service,” explained Saltsman during a final presentation for the course. “An example of this is the Upper Tuolumne River Ecosystem Project, where San Francisco puts forward sediment into the river [to restore ecological balance], monitors sensitive species, and manages the flooding…downstream.”
Before participating in this course, as an engineering student, Saltsman had primarily focused on the technical aspects of water delivery. But during the Hetch Hetchy tour, he was given “a firsthand look at this large infrastructure [which] took me beyond the engineering perspective – from construction to policy decision-making – to understand how this water reaches the Bay Area, serving the communities that depend on it and ensuring everything functions smoothly."
SoCo participant Anushka Rawat echoed Saltsman’s emphasis on the collaboration required for communities to truly adapt to a changing environment and sustainably manage natural resources. Rawat pointed to the group’s stop in Monterey as a turning point in her understanding of water management. “Dinner with Prof. Dick Luthy opened my eyes to…how water is so much more than just a basic resource. It is vital to tying together communities, industries, and ecosystems.” She went on to explain how meeting with Monterey’s mayor, Tyller Williamson, gave her “a new perspective on leadership, showing how water issues are deeply interdisciplinary, blending science, politics, and economics.”
Of course, students focused on far more than water management during the course. Other topics included energy, how public utilities function, wastewater treatment for reuse, how various jurisdictions work together in regional partnerships, and more.
These partnerships can sometimes be fraught, acknowledged student Marin Brant, whose final presentation for the course was on the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, which is surrounded by tribal land in San Luis Obispo County. Before touring the plant with PG&E, the students met with Mona Tucker, tribal chair of the Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County and Region.
“Buried beneath our feet were vital cultural resources [belonging to the Tribe],” Brant shared, reflecting on her time spent with Tucker and the power plant tour that followed. “Tucker praised how the land has remained protected as a result of the security requirements of the plant, but lamented the lack of access by tribal members to the land and to the decision-making process. Her perspective on the continued operation of the plant is really eye-opening in terms of how we think about our approach to our energy future. She was pretty supportive of the plant remaining operational, recognizing how essential this clean energy source can be for reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and increasing our energy independence. And she believes that the Diablo Canyon Plant is a pretty safe option for doing so. But she does want the Tribe to have more access to the lands, and if the plant were ever to be shut down, she wants to ensure tribal rights and desires are taken into consideration when envisioning the land's future.”
From San Luis Obispo, the students traveled south to Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and then San Diego. In those cities, they met with officials from Santa Barbara County’s Board of Supervisors and Public Works Department, as well as the Los Angeles Deputy Mayor of Energy and Sustainability, Nancy Sutley. They toured the Orange County Water District, the Robert A. Perdue Water Treatment Plant, Sweetwater Reservoir and the Richard A. Reynolds Groundwater Desalination Facility, and attended an expert panel on coastal resilience, water management, and sustainability, led by Bill Lane Center affiliated scholar Blas L. Pérez Henríquez.
As if their California itinerary weren’t full enough, the cohort made a final stop in Seattle before closing out their trip in Friday Harbor. At the University of Washington, public policy experts Craig Thomas, Grant Blume and Katherine Cheng met with the group to discuss equity and effectiveness in collaborative marine partnerships. The following day, students had an opportunity to learn from journalist Lynda Mapes who covers the environment, natural history, and tribal issues for The Seattle Times. Mapes’ talk was followed by meetings with an environmental engineer from the City of Kent, a river and floodplain ecologist from King County, and a salmon recovery manager for the Green/Duwamish & Central Puget Sound Watershed. For the final learning session of the 2024 Lane Center SoCo, students visited the seawall in Seattle with the Puget Sound Partnership to learn about their ecosystem restoration and monitoring program, and the various collaborative processes that it coordinates.
Everyone enjoyed some free time in Friday Harbor the next day, as well as a dinner generously hosted by David Kennedy, the Center’s co-founding director. Before flying back to campus, students worked hard to prepare final presentations on coastal management, water, and energy. They shared this material at an alumni dinner on their last day of Sophomore College, offering highlights of what they’d learned and describing the course’s deep impact on their academic (and potentially even career) trajectories.
With an itinerary as diverse as the topics covered, each stop during the course provided unique insight into the regional challenges posed by extreme weather and offered a glimpse into the collaborative efforts required to adapt.
Professor Cain emphasized the importance of these first-hand experiences for students grappling with the complexities of climate change. “The task of finding creative and collaborative solutions to the West’s climate change problems is felt heavily by this generation of students,” Cain said. “We wanted to take our SoCo cohort up and down the coast to show them that despite the threats posed by sea level rise, flooding, drought, etc., there are good people working at all levels of society to find sustainable solutions. This includes engineers, local officials, policy experts, public utilities, and others whose combined efforts make the challenge of adapting to extreme weather a little less daunting. I think the students left the course with a good sense of both the gravity of the situation and the possibilities for collaboratively addressing it.”
By the end of the course, students had certainly gained a deeper understanding of the complex, interdisciplinary nature of climate resilience. It provided an important blend of academic and field work at a time when extreme weather poses a significant threat to the future of the West. And for this ever-optimistic cohort of Bill Lane Center students, it demonstrated that while the problems faced by coastal communities are enormous, the commitment and innovation from a variety of sectors offer hope for a sustainable future.
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During the Lane Center's 2024 Sophomore College course on coastal resilience, students traveled up and down the West Coast, hearing from various stakeholders about how to address the growing threats posed by climate change.