An Environmental Justice digital story

Digital storytelling uses digital tools to help “ordinary” people tell a story in a compelling and emotionally engaging form.   Here is a six minute Environmental Justice (EJ) digital story about people who catch and consume contaminated seafood from the Lower Duwamish Waterway (LDW).   The LDW was designated a Superfund Site in 2001 and is in the process of being cleaned up.   The EJ digital story was made by Seattle-based International District Housing Alliance’s Wilderness Inner-city Leadership Development (WILD) students. The WILD program is made up of diverse youth from a number of Seattle public schools who participate in after-school activities that foster leadership skills and benefit the Chinatown/International District community.  They interviewed fisher people asking them what kind of fish they caught, how they prepared it, and whether they knew the river was contaminated.   The students then made this digital story about what they learned, how it made them feel, and what they wanted to do about the contaminated river.  The youth narrate this photo slideshow in both English and their native languages: Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tagalog, and Khmer.   JHA, the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition, and Eric Becker collaborated with WILD to make the digital story.