Stories of Fire: online exhibition series spring 2023 As part of our Pacific Northwest Stories of Fire Atlas Project , working with the University of Idaho's Prichard Art Gallery , we showcased works by visual artists and designers in the online exhibition series, Stories of Fire . These exhibitions will highlight the manifold ways artists and designers are marking, mapping, engaging and articulating personal and community experiences of wildfire in the region. Organized into three parts, GROUND TRUTHS (Spring 2023), FUEL LOADING (Fall 2023) and SIGHTLINES (Winter 2024), each exhibition is loosely framed by a particular disciplinary lens— cartography, fire management and urban planning—and the range of ways artists express and explore parallel concerns. fall 2023 winter 2024 Stories of Fire Participating Artists Laura Ahola-Young Jean Arnold Anne Acker-Mathieu Jackie Barry David Paul Bayles & Frederick J Swanson Karin Bolender / Rural Alchemy Workshop Lisa Cristinzo Megan Davis Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes: Overlook Field School Margo Geddes Kelsey Grafton Megan Hatch Alice, Maggie & Rob Keffe Katie Kehoe Kate Lund Amiko Matsu + Brad Monsma aj miccio Miriam H Morrill Julie Mortimer Allison McClay Meredith Ojala Eric Ondina Oregon Episcopal School & Sophia Hatzikos Asante Riverwind Andreas Rutkauskas Gerard Sarnat Martina Shenal Enid Smith Becker Sonia Sobrino Ralston Siri Stensberg Liz Toohey-Wiese Mary Vanek Smith Doug Tolman & Alec Bang Justin Webb Sasha Michelle White Suze Woolf exhibitions presented in collaboration of: and made possible by the generous support of: Next

Stories of Fire is an interdisciplinary project that explores personal narratives of wildland fire and informal STEM learning in rural Idaho.  Stories of Fire Integrative Informal STEM Learning Through Participatory Narratives Teresa Cavazos Cohn, Erin James, Leda Kobziar, Jennifer Ladino, Kayla Bordelon, Jack Kredell, Jenny Wolf funded by the National Science Foundation Constructing fire board models of wildfire scenarios with students in the Stories of Fire project. Stories of Fire is an interdisciplinary project that explores personal narratives of wildland fire and informal STEM learning in rural Idaho. The American West is rife with personal narratives of evacuation, smoke, disaster. Yet alongside these dramatic events and the deep, powerful emotions that come with them, fire scientists carry a quieter but no less important message: fire has always been a part of the western landscape, many wildland fires play natural and beneficial roles, and in a warming world we must learn to live with more fire. Indeed, prescribed burns — set intentionally by fire managers — are a critical management tactic. Rather than dichotomizing “fire as terror” and “fire as tool,” we explore narrative as a means of integrating the deep emotion of lived experience with fire science to support a better, more holistic, understanding of wildfire in Idaho. Bringing together a science communicator, a narratologist, a fire ecologist, and a specialist on emotions and public lands, our interdisciplinary research team explores: 1. What characteristics of narrative inform fire science communication, and 2. What audience-centered approaches best support participant narratives in informal STEM learning? Our team works collaboratively with informal educators based in rural areas of Idaho, including the Sawtooth Interpretive Center, Ponderosa State Park, Celebration Park, the McCall Outdooor Science School, and Craters of the Moon National Monument. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2006101. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Learn more about the project . Next

featured artist Suze Woolf Seattle, WA Suze Woolf’s work is about human relationships to nature. A painter she explores a range of media from watercolor to paper-casting, from artist books to pyrography and installation--sometimes all together. Her background includes fine art, computer graphics and interface design. She has exhibited throughout the U. S. West and across the United States and Canada, received numerous art awards and held residencies in Zion, Glacier, Capitol Reef and North Cascades National Parks, as well as the Grand Canyon Trust, Banff Centre, Vermont Studio Center, Willowtail Springs, Jentel, PLAYA, Centrum, Mineral School and Sitka Center for Art & Ecology. Her work is represented in both private and regional public collections. Her installation “State of the Forest,” based on 14 years of painting individual burned trees, is currently part of the Environmental Impact II tour ( 2019-2023). featured artwork "Splintered," varnished watercolor on torn paper mounted on laser-cut polycarbonate & shaped matboard, 52in x 25in, 2023. An ancient burned juniper from the new BLM wilderness area Oregon Badlands. "Core Values," fabric installation of knit/felted tree cores, woven ice cores, dyed and quilted sediment cores, dimensions variable, up to approx. 18 sq ft, 2023 "Carved Out with Fire Pit," tree: Varnished watercolor on torn paper mounted on shaped Gatorboard with wood hanging cradle. fire pit: black paper, rocks, spray-painted gas pump handle, empty propane tank, coal, insulator, corn cobs, 2022. barbed wire, model airplane, model semi-truck and model oil tanker railroad car added 2023 "Logged, Drifted and Burned," varnished watercolor on torn paper mounted on shaped foam core with wood hanging cradle, 52in x 25in, 2023. washed-up log found on Newskowin Beach, Oregon. responding to Fuel Loading Raised and based in Seattle, I have watched glaciers shrink and burned forests increase across my home, the Pacific Northwest. At first, I painted beautiful intact landscapes but was increasingly compelled to portray their ecological disturbances: portraits of individual burned trees became my metaphor for human impact. Despite my anxiety, I also see unusual beauty. Fire-carved snags are all the same – carbonized, eaten away; yet each different – the fire’s physics and the tree’s structure create unique sculptures. Painting them is my meditation on climate crisis. Recent expansions of the works have added a "fire pit" in front of the paintings, where the contents are blackened symbols of the largest carbon-emitting sectors: energy production, transportation and agriculture. "Core Values," a "craftivist" installation of hand-made fabric ice, sediment and tree cores, adds speculative, future layers to a scientific data set that only shows the past. Some of the simulated tree cores are burned, some have insect pathogens, some grow faster and some become dimensional lumber; according to OSU’s Dr. Beverly Law, there is more carbon stored in a burned forest than a logged one. more from Suze's perspective The first encounter with the log that was the model for Logged, Drifted & Burned on Newskowin Beach while a 2023 artist-in-residence at Sitka Center for Art & Ecology. photo credit: Orchidia Violeta Suzee and friend Chris Moore hiking through the 2021 Cedar Creek burn as she admires the totem that eventually became the painting Burned at the Roots . photo credit: Steve Price. Suze installing After the First Death, a temporary winter installation of the painting After the First Death wrapped around a living tree near Mazama, Washington. photo credit: Ruth Nielsen Chat back to exhibition Chat

AIF crew 2024 Kylie Mohr Missoula, MT Kylie Mohr is an award-winning freelance journalist and High Country News correspondent based in Missoula, Montana. Many of her stories focus on the intersection of science, policy and people in the wildfire space. She's covered everything from how fire impacts evolution to the experience of two hikers trapped by a wildfire. Mohr also writes about conservation, lands, water, wildlife, recreation and climate change in the West. Her editorial bylines include National Geographic, The Atlantic, E&E News/POLITICO, Hakai Magazine, Deseret Magazine, CBS News, Vox, NPR, CNN and more. Mohr earned her bachelor's degree from Georgetown University and a master's degree from the University of Montana. When she's not clacking away behind a keyboard, you can find her deep in the backcountry on skis, backpacking through wildflowers, or trail running with her pup, Nuna. TREX involvement More on her story in Fall 2024... but for now, Kylie is very much looking forward to experiencing fire with her own two hands and feet. She writes, talks and thinks about fire often as a journalist covering wildfire, but fire as a force (and a force for good!) still remains abstract to her in some ways. She's excited to experience the preparation and execution of a prescribed fire viscerally, from up close, and be able to translate that experience into future reporting projects. She hope her readers will be able to tell the difference! Chat back to AIF residency Chat

featured artist Kasia Ozga Greensboro, NC Kasia Ozga is a Polish-French-American sculptor and installation artist most recently based between Greensboro, NC and Saint-Étienne, France. She reuses, revalues, and reanimates mass-produced materials into unique artworks and inverts the associations made with different types of waste. Ozga is a former Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship recipient, a Harriet Hale Woolley grantee from the Fondation des Etats-Unis, a Jerome Fellowship recipient at Franconia Sculpture Park, and a Paul-Louis Weiller award recipient from the French Académie des Beaux-Arts. Her work has been exhibited in over 15 different countries and she has participated widely in residencies in Europe and North America, including Shakers, Nekatoenea, Pépinières Européennes de Création, ACRE, and KHN. Currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at UNCG, Ozga holds a PhD from the University of Paris 8, an MFA from the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, and a BFA from the SMFA at Tufts University, Boston. featured artwork "RE_MOVE N.22" batik, ink, and watercolor pencil on handmade paper, 2020 "RE_MOVE N.24" batik, ink, and watercolor pencil on handmade paper, 2020 responding to SIGHTLINES My work begins and ends in the human body. Our remnants (what we cast off and leave behind in the form of waste, trash, memory etc.) ground and connect us to the earth. My work asks where the things in our lives come from and where they go once we’ve used them. By representing and re-animating remains, I explore the potential of materials to ask questions and to evoke larger environmental relationships. I reuse and revalue ordinary and mass produced materials into something one-of-a-kind. The RE_MOVE series is the product of a transatlantic dialogue in image and text from 2019-2020 between myself and poet Dan Rosenberg. The images engage a batik process with materials reclaimed from multiple former and ongoing projects including handmade paper, architectural drawing templates, thread, and found pigments. Fire, and its effects on the built and natural environments from the Notre Dame Cathedral in France to forests in North America, is a recurring theme in the series. I have visited the Pacific Northwest several times over the past few years, primarily during the summer months. These trips have been marked by moments of wonder at the immense scale of the region's trees and open spaces and exhaustion from the intense thick smoke that blankets the region when forest fires are in abundance. From the stark rocky beaches of the Pacific Coast to primordial tree trunks at Olympic National Park to mountain meadows blooming for brief windows of opportunity near Mount Rainier to hazy orange skies at Glacier National Park, I am drawn to these places that reify the natural and invite me to question how we as a species shape our landscapes in the context of the Anthropocene. more from Kasia's perspective Photos taken by Kasia from a moving train in Glacier National Park in Montana during an extensive fire episode on the West Coast in 2021. Hazy skies have begun to appear earlier and earlier in the region, from year to year, as heat and particulate pollution increase. The acrid taste of warm thick air affects our lungs, but also our eyes, changing how we perceive the natural environment even in sites associated with pristine beauty and fresh, reinvigorating experiences for the body and mind. Chat back to exhibition Chat

LAB publications "I Was Born!": Personal Experience Narratives and Tree-Ring Marker Years Nick Koenig and Erin James. Philosophies 9 (6): 166 (2024) open access link Unsettling Fire: Recognizing Narrative Compassion Erin James, Jack Kredell, Jennifer Ladino, Teresa Cavazos Cohn, Kayla Bordelon, and Michael Decker. Narrative 32.3 (October 2024). PDF available Building a Geospatial Archive of Species Loss as a Response to Local Caribou Extinction Jack Kredell, Chris Lamb, and Devin Becker. Environmental Humanities 17.1 (March 1, 2025). PDF available Why Worry? The Utility of Fear for Climate Justice Jennifer Ladino. Climate Justice Educators Toolkit. Jennifer Atkinson and Sarah Jaquette Ray, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024. link to projejct Telling Climate Truths: Harnessing Storytelling for Rural Communities Jennifer Ladino. Love Your Mother: 50 States, 50 Stories, and 50 Women United for Climate Justice . Mallory McDuff, ed. Broadleaf Books, 2023. link to book Fiction, Belief, and Climate Change Erin James. The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief . Alison James , Akihiro Kubo , Françoise Lavocat , eds. Routledge, 2023. link to book The Potential for Changing Public Perception on Climate Change Through Narratives Kristin Haltinner, Dilshani Sarathchandra, Jennifer K. Ladino, Erin James, John W. Anderson, Matt Grindal, and Markie McBrayer. Sociology Compass , 19: e70046. open access link Fuels and Ladders: Catalizing the "Fire Humanities" for Fire Adaptation Sasha Michelle White. FAC Net , November 2, 2023. open access link The Power of Prescribed Fire: A Wildfire Journalist Steps Behind the Drip Torch Kylie Mohr. High Country News , February 1, 2025. open access link How Nostalgia Drives and Derails Living with Wildland Fire in the American West Jennifer Ladino, Leda N. Kobziar, Jack Kredell, & Teresa Cavazos Cohn, editor: Natasha Ribeiro Fire, 2022 open access link Feeling skeptical: Worry, dread, and support for environmental policy among climate change skeptics Kristin Haltinner, Jennifer Ladino, & Dilshani Sarathchandra Emotion, Space & Society, v.39, 2021 PDF available LAB reports: 2019 - 25 2022 2021 2020 2019

The Confluence Lab engages in creative interdisciplinary research projects that bring together scholars in the arts, humanities, and sciences, together with community members, to engage in environmental issues impacting rural communities. Celebrating the Artists-in-Fire Crew project spotlight: The Confluence Lab’s inaugural Artists-In-Fire (AIF) residency is supporting artists and writers from the Pacific Northwest and adjacent regions as boots-on-the-ground participants in prescribed fire. Over the course of 2024, they will travel individually to participate in a Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX ) or other immersive, prescribed fire experience. Returning home, AIF artists and writers will reflect upon their experiences through their creative practices and share those reflections with their home communities. read more AIF Sam Chadwick with other participants of WTREX at the Niobrara Valley Preserve in Nebraska in April 2024. Artist-in-Fire Spolight: Jennifer Yu Artist-in-Fire Spolight: Kylie Mohr Our central premise is that the tools of the humanities and arts—especially those related to storytelling, representation, emotions, and communication—are important complements to scientific knowledge and can help develop novel approaches to environmental issues. We use the creativity generated through interdisciplinary and community-based approaches to partner with diverse communities on pragmatic projects that work toward more just, sustainable, and equitable futures, focusing especially on issues such as public land use, wildland fire and fire management, and the causes and effects of climate change. our primary goal thanks to our research partners & affliates: College of Letters, Arts & Social Sciences College of Natural Resources College of Art & Architecture Read More About Our History lab stories & news Sightlines "Just Futures" Sightlines "When the Smoke Clears" Sightlines "The Future is Patchy" read more

AIF crew 2024 Adam Huggins Galiano Island, BC, Canada Adam Huggins is an artist, podcaster, practitioner of ecological restoration, teacher, and naturalist living in the Salish Sea of southwestern British Columbia, on Galiano Island - the unceded lands and waters of Hul’qumi’num speaking people. As an environmental professional, he implements watershed-scale ecological restoration projects for the Galiano Conservancy Association and teaches a class in the Restoration of Natural Systems program at the University of Victoria. As a storyteller and musician, he produces and co-hosts the Future Ecologies podcast, which is currently wrapping up a 5th season of long-form audio pieces at the intersection of the human and more-than-human worlds. TREX involvement More on his story in Fall 2024... but until then, Adam notes he is looking forward to this opportunity because "ecologists have hypothesized that pyrodiversity begets biodiversity. I am especially interested in the human diversity of the prescribed fire movement, and so I am most looking forward to meeting the other attendees at the TREX and learning more about who they are, where they are from, and what they hope to accomplish when they return home. " Also give the podcast he produces and co-hosts a listen! Chat back to AIF residency Chat

Confluence Lab intern and MFA candidate Isabel Marlens worked with University of Idaho librarian Evan Williamson to create Fire Lines: Exploring the Legacy of 1910's Great Fire in the Northwest. Fire Lines a Stories of Fire Project Isabel Marlens w/ Evan Williamson Fall 2022 to Spring 2023 supported by the Confluence Lab and the University of Idaho English Department at the University of Idaho Confluence Lab intern and MFA candidate Isabel Marlens worked with University of Idaho librarian Evan Williamson to create Fire Lines: Exploring the Legacy of 1910's Great Fire in the Northwest . This digital humanities creative nonfiction essay combines holdings from UofI's archives with Marlens's original writing on the history of fire management and our evolving cultural understandings of wildfire. The essay, part of the Confluence Lab's Stories of Fire atlas projects , launched in April 2023 and will be part of the permanent collection at UofI's Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning . Fire Lines was supported and informed by the Lab's partnership with the University of Oregon's Just Futures Institute, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation. Using JFI research principles and support from Confluence Lab and English faculty, Marlens focused on Idaho's unique history and rural and Indigenous communities. Combining creative nonfiction and historical visual and archival materials, Fire Lines is just one example of the Confluence Lab's ongoing, multidisciplinary efforts to document our region's Stories of Fire. This project is part of the Lab's Stories of Fire Atlas Project. read the FULL ESSAY . Next

AIF crew 2024 Doug Tolman Salt Lake City, UT Doug Tolman is an interdisciplinary artist and place-learner practicing in Great Salt Lake and Colorado River Watersheds. He believes inquiry and dialectic are our strongest tools for solving the West’s socio-ecological problems. He is a recent graduate of the University of Utah MFA program where he received the Frankenthaler Climate Art Award, Global Change and Sustainability Center Fellowship, and College of Fine Arts Research Excellence Fellowship. Residing in the space between sculpture, image, and community work, his practice is informed by place-based youth education, ecological science, and biomechanical travel. The materials and imagery he works with come from burn scars, floodplains, lakebeds, and lava flows, places where geologic and anthropogenic time are in constant dialogue. His collecting process is rooted in generational rock hounding, map reading, and wood carving, which he now employs to deepen and reflect on a complex relationship with the land he calls home. By facilitating generative spaces of inquiry, he attempts to deepen his community’s sense of place in pursuit of solutions to climate and land-use challenges. Doug's TREX reflection Good Fire On The Ground As I sit down to write this reflection in Salt Lake City, wildfire season in my bioregion is in full swing. A fast-running grass fire just happened in the foothills above my house, while big old-growth wildfires are smoldering out in the ranges above both my parents’ and grandmother’s homes in Southern Utah. After 40 hours of asynchronous safety training this past spring, my time as an Artist-in-Fire began as I crossed the Great Basin in my rickety old truck. The basins and ranges passed like waves as I made my way west, Elko, Pyramid Lake, Reno, and finally Plumas County, California to participate in a regional Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX). Before this experience, I’d had minimal direct fire experience - most of my fire knowledge was obtained from stories of my dad’s experience in wildfire suppression, watching smoke columns rise from neighboring mountains, cauterizing wood surfaces with a torch, and exploring burn scars. photo credit: Jade Elhardt The event, Plumas CalTREX was hosted by The Watershed Research & Training Center and Plumas Underburn Cooperative . We were stationed at a summer camp within the scar of the 2021 Dixie Fire. It was a somber background to show up to - nearby Greenville was still in the process of rebuilding. The nerves of being a newcomer to both fire and place settled quickly as I learned how genuine and welcoming this community is; expectations of macho fire culture were quickly dispelled. We were split into crews, following a rigid chain of command which somehow felt non-hierarchical despite the top-down structure. Each day was spent in workshops and drills leading up to a prescribed burn on the property during our final day. Drip torch drills were balanced out by a workshop on cultural burning with Danny YellowFeather Manning. Long, hard hours of digging line were softened by fire art therapy with Zach Browning of the Sierra Institute . Given the setting, structure, and community, it was essentially six days of prescribed fire summer camp. On the final day, everyone gathered to put good fire on the ground. It was very reminiscent of a metal pour - anticipation built as we accepted position assignments, working together toward a common goal as smoke soaked into our fire-resistant clothing. I spent most of my time on holding, using hoses and hand tools to follow and care for the fire as it crept along the property. It felt good to steward the fire as it moved itself along, a living being breathing oxygen and eating carbon. I’m now back home working on an ArcGIS story map that involves prescribed burning of invasive Phragmites weeds here at Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve , and spending time building Beaver Dam Analogues with Sageland Collaborative - something I see as very adjacent to prescribed burning (Beavers after all were taken from the West around the same time as good fire, the lower water table and channelized streams left behind are closely associated with increased fire danger ). Though nothing concretely in the realm of art has propagated, the impacts of seeing good fire on the ground have trickled into my everyday life and work, the line of inquiry is continuing to grow and integrate. By the time an opportunity opens, hopefully this line of inquiry has developed into a place for an installation piece. My Final Takeaways: Buffer the corner, corners are where most problems happen. Fire is a life form that breathes oxygen and eats carbon. Oaks are prized and cared for in the Sierra, but are seen as ubiquitous in the Wasatch. Land tells what it needs, spend the time to listen. -Doug Tolman, summer 2024

Narrative Science Training in Narrative and Emotional Literacy for Science Practitioners Erin James, Jennifer Ladino, and Teresa Cavazos Cohn Fall 2023 to present Narrative science is an innovative approach to science communication and practice that foregrounds the role of stories, storytelling, and emotions in the scientific process. The idea that science needs a good story is not new; indeed, many specialists in science communication emphasize the need for scientists to become more adept at using stories to disseminate their work to an increasingly apathetic or resistant public. What is new is the idea that science is storied from the start—that narratives and their corresponding emotions play a significant role in all stages of scientific inquiry, from hypothesis formation through to the communication of results. As such, we can do better than to conceive of story as an “add-on” or container into which scientists must pour their work to make it palatable to broader audiences. Instead, narrative science helps make the narratives and emotions that inform science legible to scientists and identifies the storytelling strategies that best harness those narratives and emotions for particular audiences. Narrative science begins with the idea that narrative—more commonly known as story—is not only a vehicle for sharing scientific knowledge but also a powerful sense-making device. By this we mean that narrative is more than a communicative tool. It is the primary mechanism by which humans think and understand their world, and thus is always present in the observations that we make, the questions that we ask, and the methods by which we go about answering those questions. Humans think in narrative, and those narratives are innately emotional. The primary goal of narrative science is thus the “restorying” of science—the recovery of the narratives and corresponding emotions that inform a specific scientific project—and the development of new stories and emotions to communicate that project to various target audiences. Interested in Narrative Science training? Contact us at theconfluencelab@gmail.com .

our story Like many good stories, the story of The Confluence Lab starts with a road trip. In September of 2018, Jenn Ladino and Erin James travelled from Moscow, Idaho, to the Taft-Nicholson Center for the Environmental Humanities to share research and institutional strategies with a regional network of environmental humanities scholars. The Center, a branch campus of the University of Utah located in the Centennial Valley in Southern Montana, part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, is a place of tensions. The campus is situated atop an abandoned ghost town that the university benefactors had exhumed and restored some years earlier. (We stayed in the cabin called “Jail,” with metal bars on the windows, which had been fully buried underground just a few years before.) It’s a wild enough location that grizzly protocol meant always walking in pairs, but where the closest neighbors, 8 miles down the road, are the powerful political activists the Koch brothers. Before we left, our geography colleague, Teresa Cavazos Cohn, had enigmatically warned us to “look out for the polar bear.” Now, this valley is home to elk, moose, and pronghorn, among other land-dwellers, and over 260 species of birds, including peregrine falcons, sand hill cranes, and trumpeter swans. But try as we might, we couldn’t spot any polar bears. That is, until we came across a pristine taxidermied full-sized adult polar bear in the living room of the house of the Center’s benefactor during a reception. We sipped cocktails as the bear loomed over us, chatting with the benefactor about wilderness and the changing nature of the American West while this preserved hypercarnivore stood frozen by our side. During the nine-hour car ride back to Moscow, our conversation kept coming back to the bear. For the benefactor, having the bear in her house made total sense—it was a symbol of what is disappearing from the pristine wilderness that she hopes the Center is protecting, a symbol of the emotions that she feels for this place. For Jenn and Erin, the bear helped us unpack the narratives of wilderness and “untouched” nature that still have sociopolitical impacts in the West and elsewhere in our increasingly divided country. Beyond our excitement at having solved Teresa’s treasure hunt, the polar bear was a powerful reminder of how a symbol can travel and stand in for emotions and stories that are often buried or unacknowledged. The whole experience got us thinking about the surprising yet productive ideas and occasions that get scholars collaborating outside of their comfortable disciplinary silos and outside of our institutions. We left the valley fired up to make things happen on our campus. In the car, we took turns driving and typing, drafting a mission statement (and an embarrassingly bad acronym) and an application for office space for what would soon become The Confluence Lab. We met with Teresa the week we got home, and the three of us excitedly hashed out ideas for public-facing, interdisciplinary work that would study, respond to, and potentially help to mitigate the divisive environmental and cultural issues of our home state of Idaho. The idea for The Confluence Lab was born.