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Press release from Cal Poly Humboldt:

While universities across the nation look at California’s higher education system for insight on increasing diversity after the recent affirmative action decision, Cal Poly Humboldt and nonprofit Improve Your Tomorrow (IYT) have put an innovative twist on a tested tool the University of California (UC) system has long used: Guaranteed Admissions.

The partnership between IYT and Cal Poly Humboldt establishes a guaranteed admissions pathway to the newly designated polytechnic institution, as well as the opportunity to increase diversity and innovation in STEM.

IYT supports thousands of young men of color across Northern California with a 12-year mentorship program that begins in 7th grade and continues through high school and college. The partnership also offers admissions to IYT students who are in community college, addressing a critical achievement gap currently experienced most prominently by students of color in California.

“Up until joining IYT, college seemed unclear to me, but traveling across the state to visit campuses helped me internalize the goal of not only becoming the first generation in my family to go to college but also pursuing a degree in Sociology with the hopes of making an impact on the next generation and helping them get to college,” says Oscar Chavez, an IYT member and third-year Cal Poly Humboldt transfer student. “I chose Humboldt because, along with the natural beauty of the area, the outreach I received from the Sociology students embodied the community building I felt I needed to thrive during this time in my life.”

On Thursday, Oct. 19, IYT and Cal Poly Humboldt held a signing ceremony to celebrate the partnership launch and the investment in the college-bound dreams of California’s young men of color. The ceremony included CEO and co-founder of IYT and Humboldt alum Michael Lynch (‘11, Business Administration), Cal Poly Humboldt President Tom Jackson Jr., and Humboldt students who are current members of IYT and participated in a pilot program.

“My time at Cal Poly Humboldt, helping to run after-school sports programming, set the stage for a future I couldn’t have anticipated, co-founding Improve Your Tomorrow,” Lynch says. “Today, we’re building a bridge that will provide this next generation of young men of color the same kind of life-changing opportunities and experiences that were available to me. Who knows what innovations or social impact will be made through the coming years thanks to this partnership.”

IYT provides support and academic advising to help its students complete California State University and UC eligibility requirements, such as the A-G courses. Students also have the opportunity to visit Cal Poly Humboldt and experience “college life” on the North Coast long before application season begins. “Cal Poly Humboldt is dedicated to providing every possible support to students who aspire to pursue a four-year degree program,” says Chrissy Holliday, Vice President for Enrollment Management & Student Success for Cal Poly Humboldt.

“We understand that visiting campus can be a challenge for many students and their families, which is why we have made it a key component of our commitment to help them make informed decisions about pursuing their education at Humboldt. Our priority is to get these students to our campus so they can see it for themselves and assess whether it is the right place for them.”

With nearly 2,000 high school students currently enrolled in IYT and more than 12 college trips planned for this year, the IYT and Cal Poly Humboldt partnership is a shining example of how collective efforts can bridge the gap and create opportunities that were once out of reach. It’s a reminder that through collaboration, innovation, and unwavering commitment, institutions and community organizations can build a brighter and more inclusive future for all.

“We believe that providing a positive, meaningful educational experience at Cal Poly Humboldt begins before students get to Humboldt. We’re excited about the collaboration with IYT and look forward to continuing to help students of color in the program achieve their college dreams at Cal Poly Humboldt,” Jackson, Jr. says.

Press release from the Arcata Fire District:

On October 22, 2023, at 1:30 P.M. firefighters from the Arcata Fire Protection District responded to a report of smoke coming out of the windows of a maintenance room of the Redwood Sciences Laboratory on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus on the 1700 Block of Bayview Ct.

Firefighters arrived on scene within minutes to find the building full of smoke. Upon further investigation, the source of smoke was found to be a small fire on the exterior wall. The fire had been reported and controlled by an occupant, but the smoke entered the building through the exterior wall and had risen to the second floor where a smoke detector sounded.

Two engines from Arcata Fire District, a chief officer and University Police were on scene for thirty minutes for smoke removal, overhaul and investigation. The cause of the fire appeared to be a newspaper that had been intentionally set ablaze near a pile of debris, and the cause continues to be under investigation by the Arcata Police.

Dogs are a part of everyday life in Humboldt County. We have so many wonderful places to explore the great outdoors here and many of us take advantage of these recreational opportunities with our furry friends. Nova Garwood, a seventh grader at Jacoby Creek Elementary School, has a black Labrador retriever named Sunny and loves to get outside with him. But on these adventures, she started to notice a large amount of dog poop on the trails she hiked – particularly near the trailheads.

Figure 1. Nova’s dog Sunny at Guthrie Creek Trail. She left no scats!. Photos by Nova Garwood.

Based on these experiences, she developed and tested a question in early 2023: Is dog scat being left on trails a serious issue? After rigorous data collection and analysis, her Humboldt County Science Fair project made it to the state level.

Garwood went out and hiked our trails to map the location and amount of dog scat left by humans and compared the amount of scat she found on more popular urban trails to the amount she found on rural trails. She hypothesized that urban trails would have more dog scat than rural trails because they get more use. She also suspected that she would find less scat on trails with doggie bag dispensers and trash cans and that it would be more common to find the scat at the beginning of the trails because dogs would most likely have to relieve themselves early on the trails.

She identified 15 trails across the county and visited them with her family. Upon arrival, she meticulously mapped dog poop on the first third of a mile along the trail, collecting data on number of poops and distance from the trailhead. She then correlated this data with whether or not poop bags and trash cans were available at the trailhead.

Garwood was committed to collecting the most accurate data possible. She was so dedicated that she even returned just over two weeks after her initial surveys to record any new scat that had been left on the trails since she had last visited.

After she concluded her research, she found that most of the dog scat was found on urban trails, which is what she suspected. Surprisingly, even when dog bag dispensers were available there was still a lot of poop. In conclusion, she was able to answer her main question and found that Humboldt County does in fact have a dog scat pollution problem.

“It’s really surprising how many people don’t notice how much there really is on trails and how big of a problem it is,” said Garwood, when speaking on the issue. She talked about how it takes away from the beauty of nature when you’re having to watch you’re every step to make sure you don’t step in dog poop. The goal is to get people out into nature and on these trails but when poop is being left all over the trails it makes visitors less likely to want to come back.

Along with making trails less enjoyable to walk on, dog scat poses threats to the health of hikers, their dogs and the wildlife of the areas. Scat contains harmful bacteria that can have been known to cause diseases such as E. coli, salmonella, giardia and more. Parasites such as heartworms, whipworms and tapeworms are also commonly found in dog feces. These diseases and parasites can be transferred to humans, wildlife and other dogs that come into contact with the scat.

When left on the ground, the waste seeps into the soil and contaminates nearby water sources, which can lead to potential health hazards for both humans and wildlife. Many think that the scat just decomposes into the ground and becomes dirt but many times it washes into watersheds and contaminates the water. The odor can also throw off a predator’s sense of smell which allows them to hunt their prey. It can also be harmful to humans if they were to come in skin-to-skin contact with it because of diseases that could be spread.

All of Garwood’s hard work paid off when she was awarded at her school’s competition and won $50 for the project related to wetlands category at the county competition, as well as being sent to state to be interviewed. “I usually don’t win anything so it felt really good especially with a lot of people telling me that I wasn’t going to win and that my project sucks,” recalled Garwood.

Although not everyone was supportive, Garwood stayed focused on her goal and, with her unwavering determination and the help of her dad Justin and her dog Sunny, she was able to create an amazing project and was awarded for all her hard work. To appease this problem, Garwood proposes several solutions including better signage at trailheads that informs the public of the dangers of leaving so much poop along our trails. She encourages the public to be more diligent in leaving no trace as well. So maybe next time you’re walking on a trail with your dog and picking up after them seems too hard, you’ll think twice before just walking away.

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Bella Fratkin is an Arcata High School senior and an intern at Backcountry Press.

Are you a high school or college student who has done research on some little-known aspect of Humboldt County’s people, places, flora, fauna? Write up a precis and share your work with the mighty Outpost audience! Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com, and put the words ‘Student Science’ in the subject line. Professors welcome too, I guess.

“In the next ten years, one of the things you’re bound to hear is that animal protein … is one of the most toxic nutrients of all that can be considered.”

— T. Colin Campbell, director of the Cornell-China-Oxford Project on Nutrition, Health, and the Environment

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When it comes to diet, humans are usually considered to be omnivores, that is, we’ll eat anything. Almost anything, even mushrooms (some, only once!). In particular, we’re opportunistic carnivores, as opposed to our distant ancestors who survived, as the great apes still do, on plant food: fruit, nuts, leaves, shoots and roots. If meat is there for the taking, we’ll take it.

Most people will, anyway. I’ve been told (as I tuck into my soy burger) that meat eating is natural, it’s in our genes, we were born to crave a juicy steak or a 1200-calorie Wendy’s Big Bacon Triple. But truth is, meat eating is culturally mediated, and it doesn’t take an anatomist to figure out that, as carnivores go, we’re pretty sad specimens. In fact, we’re really herbivores. Consider, for instance:

• Real carnivores have large canine teeth and sharp claws, perfect for killing prey and tearing flesh off. We have dainty fingernails and small canine teeth.
• Carnivores can’t move their jaws from side to side, as herbivores do—watch a cow chewing, or think about our large, flat, back molars, just the ticket for grinding fibrous plants.
• Carnivores make up for their inability to chew by swallowing chunks of flesh whole; what would probably pass for battery acid in their stomachs does the rest. We herbivores have much less acidic stomach juices, good to digest chewed fruit, for instance, not so good for unmasticated meat.
• Humans’ intestinal tracts are long, between 20 and 30 feet long: good to break down and absorb the nutrients from plant matter but bad for meat to pass through, since the bacteria in meat can multiply and cause food poisoning during the long trip from stomach to rectum. Carnivores have much shorter intestines than herbivores.

If our Homo erectus ancestors hadn’t figured out how to start and control fire a million or so years ago, we’d still be chewing plant-stuff. Fire made all the difference: cooking meat pre-digests it, since heating denatures protein (i.e. breaks molecular bonds). See here.

Until a hundred or so years ago, before factory farming came into its own, poor folks raised meat and, for the most part, only rich folks ate it. (It’s no coincidence that following the Norman conquest of England, the Anglo-Saxon words for animals — cows, sheep, pigs — were subsumed by the words used by their Frenchified overlords for cooked meat: boeuf, mouton and porc.)

Today, Americans eat meat by the bucketful, on average over 200 pounds per person annually, with all the consequential health problems. Meat eaters have a greater incidence of heart disease, strokes, diabetes and obesity than non-meat eaters. (Correlation isn’t causation, but still…) Oh, and each pound of meat uses about 2,000 gallons of water to get it to the table.

Summing up, meat isn’t essential to good health and is probably harmful. (Protein comes in many non-meat forms, and B12, the only essential vitamin coming exclusively from animal sources, is found in fish and eggs — and supplements.) Our bodies aren’t designed to eat meat; instead, we’ve adapted to it. 

If any of this strikes a chord, check out the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think tank working to accelerate the production of “alternative protein,” i.e. meat, indistinguishable from the real thing, made from plants or cultivated from cells.

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Press release from the Humboldt Library Foundation:

The Humboldt Library Foundation (HLF) today presented the Humboldt County Library system with over $100,000 in grants to purchase new books, ebooks, graphic novels, and continued access to language learning resources.

“On behalf of the library staff I want to thank the Humboldt Library Foundation for their generosity and commitment to providing dynamic and relevant resources to the library community,” said Library Director Chris Cooper. “Readers of all ages will be grateful for the vibrant expansion of the graphic novel collection.”

Board President Elizabeth Murguia said, “These annual contributions continue to be pivotal to our local Library system and it’s all thanks to our generous donors. We continue to be amazed by the level of support we receive from the community as we work to keep the library open and relevant for years to come.”

This grant funding includes re-envisioning the Library’s graphic novel and manga collection with the opening of a dedicated section to the genre and an expansion of new materials. Once the domain of superhero comic books and newspaper dailies, comics have become their own legitimate format, winning Caldecotts, Newberys, Coretta Scott King Awards, Hugo Awards, and even Pulitzer Prizes. This new expansion is another example of the library remaining responsive and relevant to patrons old and new. Subscriptions to Mango Languages will also be supported for another year with this funding, in addition to a significant physical and ebook expansion.

“The Foundation’s support is vital to our Library collection, providing up-to-date, useful, and popular books & AV,” said Acquisitions and Technical Services Manager Michael Logan. “This year, we’re especially thrilled to give “graphic narratives” (comics, manga, graphic novels/nonfiction, etc.) their own separate and unique section. The Foundation’s generous support guarantees a huge new infusion of titles to inaugurate what’s sure to be an extremely popular collection. This is huge, and it wouldn’t have happened without the HLF.”

HLF was formed in 1996 to build financial support for the Humboldt County Library system, which includes the Main Library in Eureka, ten branches and a bookmobile that serves fourteen rural communities.  HLF raises funds in the community and makes direct annual grants to the library to help purchase new materials, add programming and provide technology upgrades. Since its inception, HLF has provided over $1.4 million in grants to the library. 

Donations of any size are welcome.  If you wish to create a donor-advised fund or want more information on the Humboldt Library Foundation and how you can give, visit our website www.humboldtlibraryfoundation.org, ‘like’ us on Facebook, or call the HLF office at (707) 269-1991.

This week, Cal Poly Humboldt Assistant Professor Jennifer Marlow and Graduate Research Assistant Alec Brown join Jen Kalt of Humboldt Waterkeeper to talk about the 44 Feet Project, which is focused on the future risk of climate and coastal hazards to Humboldt Bay’s spent nuclear fuel site above the town of King Salmon. The first privately-owned nuclear plant in the U.S, the Humboldt Bay Power Plant produced electricity from 1963 to 1976, leaving 37 tons of spent nuclear fuel to be stored indefinitely 115 feet from the edge of an eroding bluff just 44 feet above current sea level.

Two recent developments will be of particular interest to residents of King Salmon and other Humboldt Bay communities. In June, the Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury made recommendations for improving disaster planning and emergency preparedness in response to “any Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation-related emergencies.” In September, the California Public Utilities Commission recently issued a Final Decision in which PG&E agreed to update the tsunami hazard assessment for the spent fuel storage site.

For more info:

• The climate threat to California’s stored nuclear waste - Yale Climate Connections, Oct. 2023
• Spent nuclear fuel sits on a crumbling California coastline. So what to do? - Boyce Upholt, California Sea Grant News, July 2023.
• Humboldt County Emergency Preparedness: Ready or Not? - Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury Report, June 2023
• 44 Feet Project website

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Most folks who have lived in Humboldt for a long time are well aware that we live in mountain lion territory and probably even know what to do if you encounter one. But for those who are new to the area or maybe not familiar with how to properly deal with these large cats, Ian Keith – a human-wildlife conflict biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) – would like to offer you some tips to help protect your pets, livestock and yourself when a mountain lion is about. 

Keith reached out to the Outpost to offer his expertise after a mountain lion was recently spotted at the Fortuna Sunrise Cemetery. This particular sighting is what Keith referred to as a “no harm, no foul situation,” where there is a confirmed sighting, but no reports of the animal causing any depredation, such as killing pets or livestock or attacking a human, or any concerns that the animal may be injured or unwell. In this type of case, there is no need for the CDFW to respond to the sighting. “But it is good for people to be aware and be reminded that maybe [they] shouldn’t let their small dog or small pet outside without being there,” he said. 

Mountain lions, also called pumas or cougars, inhabit more than half of California. But because they are generally solitary, elusive animals, they generally avoid humans and coming into contact with one is pretty rare. There has been an uptick in reported sightings over the last few years, but Keith said that’s likely because of improved technology, such as more people having cameras and motion sensors, and not because there are more of the animals. 

Map showing mountain lion habitat area in California

But even though mountain lions don’t prefer coming into town, where there is a lot more noise, light and people than out in the woods, it does happen. There are a few factors that can lead to a cougar ending up in your backyard, Keith said, including the lion being young and an inexperienced hunter, or that the lions get pushed out of their usual territory because of natural factors like wildfires. But the most common reason is because they’re hunting deer and, as a predator, they go where their prey goes. The fall and spring are migrating seasons for some deer, which could also contribute to more mountain lion sightings during those seasons, Keith said.  

Though their preferred prey is deer, mountain lions will eat the occasional small prey, such as rats, raccoons, or people’s pets or livestock, if given the opportunity. For this reason, the best way to prevent mountain lions from causing trouble is to not leave out your tasty-looking animals to entice them. 

“Most of the [mountain lion] depredation cases that I see are goats and sheep that don’t have any protective measures in place,” Keith said. 

Keith recommends putting your livestock away in some sort of enclosure – like a coop or a barn – and bringing your pets inside at night. Fences are also an option, but they have to be tall, strong and away from trees, since lions can jump, climb and even manipulate wire fences with their claws. Another good option for livestock protection is getting a trained guardian dog, which can scare the mountain lion away. 

Another way to deter mountain lions is by using noise or visual elements, such as alarms or motion sensor lights. For people who live near wooded areas, Keith recommends removing the understory – the trees and shrubs between the forest floor and tree canopy – to eliminate places for the mountain lion to hide. This will make your area less attractive to a mountain lion, as they like to stay covered when they are hunting. 

And it probably goes without saying, but you should never approach or harass a mountain lion. In fact, it is illegal to harass mountain lions, as they are treated as a protected species in California. It is, however, legal to kill a mountain lion on your property if it is causing harm to you, your animals or your property. But you must report it immediately to the CDFW. 

Screenshot of a mountain lion captured on someone’s security camera in 2021 | LoCO file image

If you happen to run into a mountain lion right out in the open, you should try to make yourself look bigger by holding your arms or an object over your head. You should make lots of noise and can even throw objects if there are any handy to distract or scare the animal. You should NOT ever turn your back on the animal or try to run away. This might make you seem like prey and trigger the cat’s desire to chase you. And you are not fast enough to outrun a mountain lion!

Mountain lion attacks on humans are very rare, but when it does happen, it is usually because the animal mistakes the human for prey. Again, it helps to make yourself seem big and be loud to scare it away and wearing bright colors can also help distinguish you from animal prey. Mountain lions do most of their hunting at dusk and dawn, so you want to be particularly cautious during these times of day. If you like to jog in the woods, Keith also recommends not wearing headphones or earbuds so that you’re more aware of your surroundings. And if your favorite activity is jogging at dusk in a deer costume, you should probably stop doing that. 

But there is no need to be scared of mountain lions as long as you stay vigilant.

“People should just assume there’s mountain lions around because we live in Humboldt,” Keith said. “They’re around a lot more than people think. But if they were really that dangerous to people, we would have a lot more calls.” 

If you would like more information, you can check out this document Keith shared with the Outpost, ”Preventing Conflict With Mountain Lions in California.” You can also visit the CDFW Human-Wildlife Conflicts Program’s website for information on what to do when you encounter mountain lions and other local wildlife, including coyotes, bears, bats and raccoons.