The Salish Sea Center for Innovation and Transformation

The decisions we make the today will make or break the future the next generation inherits.

Who We Are

Our Roots

The Salish Sea Center, founded in 2022 by Sono Hashisaki and Philip Murphy, is focused on bringing innovative technologies and skills needed to accelerate the recovery of the lands and waters of the Salish Sea for the long term benefit of people and all life that make their homes here.

The Salish Sea Center is the result of a long held vision for a place where people can bring their gifts, skills, and experience to join with others to learn and contribute to the long term recovery and resilience of the Salish Sea. Many people have contributed to this undertaking, pointing the direction, and helping to build a foundation and guiding vision for the Salish Sea Center.

Ways We Help

We provide tools and spaces for sense making, experimentation and decision making

Sense Making

Sensemaking is both art and science. It requires the ability to understand a moment in time in the context of past understandings and an unknown future. Perhaps the paradox of this endeavor is that all the knowledge and information brought to bear can never fully represent the unfolding moment to moment reality that we each experience. That said, it is human nature to perpetually undertake this exercise for it is in the end, the most adaptative way forward.

Sensemaking today is a collective effort. What science tells us about how things are, how things have been, and how things might be is needed. It also depends on less formal ways of knowing including lived experience, shared stories, insight, and the council of others, young and old and from across disciplines and all walks of life. Sensemaking is a critical step in the path to good judgement and wise decision making.

Experimentation

When the data collection and analysis are done, we then bring sensemaking with diverse community inputs and interests to to craft new approaches and novel solutions. This sets the stage for testing proposed actions for how best to proceed under alternative future scenarios.

This design and testing phase takes place in a collaboratory or collective experimental environment. Alternative pathways and potential solutions can be tested for effectiveness today and under future population growth and climate change scenarios using custom decision support applications. This space can accommodate and support the hard work of integrating and leveraging actions and resources across sectors, with new audiences, and under different sets of assumptions, priorities and indicators of interest.

Decision Support

We need to act now to slow and reverse the decline of the Salish Sea and our own communities. This means we need to provide support for decision making to our communities so they can take needed action.

To understand which actions today will have the greatest benefit in 40 years time means we need decision support systems that simulate how the Salish Sea region will fare with and with out the actions we are proposing taking place. Since we are facing uncertainties that we don't control, we need to test these simulation under , climate change and population growth scenarios.