Community Calendar

East Central Walking Tour

East Central was once Spokane’s most racially and economically diverse neighborhood. In many ways, the story of East Central is a familiar one: racial diversity led to redlining, which led to economic disinvestment, leaving the community vulnerable to destructive infrastructure, in this case the construction of I-90. Today, East Central – with the help of the City of Spokane, federal grants, and non-profits – is attempting to respond to the mistakes of the past while avoiding what has too often been the last chapter of this tale, displacement and gentrification. This walking tour will visit sites of East Central’s past, present, and future, with some detours into the history of park and library design.

The tour will begin at 11:00 am on Oct. 3. We will leave from the Liberty Park branch of the Spokane Public Library.

Come on down to Auntie's to meet THREE authors: poet Weston Morrow, fiction author Chris Vanjonack, and memoirist/poet Maya Jewell Zeller!

Cloud Builder by Weston Morrow~~What do we owe the dead? And what do we--who will soon be dead--owe the living?

Out of Body by Chris Vanjonack~~A Wildly inventive collection of interconnected speculative stories---spanning the multiverse, demonic attachment, and life after death--from an electrifying new voice in fiction.

Raised by Ferns by Maya Jewell Zeller~~Born in the Pacific Northwest gas station to itinerant, countercultural parents.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP on our event page.

For decades, environmental law in the United States has operated primarily within a conservation framework that regulates pollution and extraction while continuing to treat the natural world as property for human use. As climate disruption intensifies and biodiversity loss accelerates, this model is increasingly criticized as structurally incapable of preventing ecological harm at its roots. This lecture examines an emerging jurisprudential shift: the movement from protecting nature as an object of regulation to recognizing ecosystems as subjects of legal rights. Focusing on Rights of Nature as both a legal and philosophical development, the presentation will explore how this framework challenges anthropocentric assumptions embedded in conventional environmental and property law. It asks what follows when rivers, watersheds, forests, and other ecosystems are understood not merely as resources, but as living systems with interests the law should recognize and protect. The lecture will also consider how this shift reframes the relationship between human communities and the natural world, emphasizing that human health, stability, and flourishing are inseparable from the flourishing of the ecosystems on which communities depend. Alongside developments in Washington State, the talk will situate these questions within a broader global movement, tracing how jurisdictions and communities around the world are advancing new legal approaches to ecological governance. The result is not simply a new environmental doctrine, but a deeper challenge to the assumptions that have long structured modern law.