—Wendell Berry
THERE WAS A time when developing a spiritual, psychological, physical attachment to place came naturally; today, awareness of our surroundings and our role in this larger life must be developed purposefully, not only by each of us, but by government and business.
One day, I found myself riding through Las Vegas with a Nevada State Parks ranger. We drove through the casino district, commercial strips, and into the land of interchangeable stucco homes and shopping centers—the same cityscape that dominates our urban regions and, increasingly, our mood, in so much of the United States. I looked up and saw the ring of white, blue, and gold that surrounds the city. To the northwest, there is Charleston Peak, which the local residents call Mount Charleston (when they think of it at all). With Joshua trees at its base, and ancient bristlecone pines at its heights, the mountain reaches nearly twelve thousand feet. There are the Spring Mountains and all those distant ridges and peaks that circle the city, and beyond them the Valley of Fire, a vast, beautiful expanse of red sandstone formations that look like beached whales or human hands.
I had been out there just a few weeks before, hiking with my photography buddies, Howard Rosen and Alberto Lau. We had been stunned by the little-known landscape within an hour or so of the Strip. The three of us stood on a rock to photograph petroglyphs. Our shadows from the low sun were cast on the red wall. We instinctively raised our arms. Our silhouettes, arms and legs elongated, seemed to dance on the smooth curves and undulations of the rock wall and matched the depictions of human beings on the rock, with their elongated torsos, arms, and legs. Perhaps the earliest people in the Valley of Fire had stood right here, considered their shadows, then made their mark.
“All that beauty, so close to the Strip. Does Las Vegas promote that as part of what defines Vegas?” I asked the ranger as we drove through the city.
“Some. Not much.” She shrugged. “Not enough.”
“Wouldn’t it be in the region’s interest to do that?”
She looked over at me with a bemused expression. “Would seem that way, wouldn’t it?”
As it turned out, this was a sore point. She explained: The big casinos decide the reality of Las Vegas, and the last thing that the owners of the casinos want is for tourists to go outside. They want them gaming. “The little casinos, out on the edges, they might want to do that, but not the big ones.” It seemed to me that in an economic downturn, and as Indian casinos across the country siphon off some of the gambling business, diversification in tourist incentives should be attractive.
I looked up again at the ring of white, blue, and gold surrounding the city.
“You could call it the Golden Ring,” I said.
When I asked the ranger if Las Vegas promoted that ring, I didn’t just mean as a tourist attraction (though diversifying this region’s economy wouldn’t hurt); I was thinking more about a richness of identity, of purpose.
As our lives grow more technological, media-dominated, and abstract, our hunger for a more authentic sense of personal and community identity will grow. As the parts of modern existence become more interchangeable, two outcomes are possible. The value we place on authenticity will fade, or our yearning for it will become so painfully felt, so clear, that we will be drawn irresistibly to whatever remains authentic and real. If the latter, the value of the natural world will grow in our eyes and in all our senses. We will come to view natural history to be as important to our personal and regional identities as human history, particularly in those places where human history has been interrupted or forgotten.
Just as individuals can develop a natural sense of place for their own well-being, the leaders of a region—a city, a town, or a bioregion that crosses man-made borders—can become more purposeful by identifying the unique natural qualities of their bioregion.
As defined by the Planet Drum Foundation, a bioregion is “a whole ‘life-place … a distinct area with coherent and interconnected plant and animal communities, and natural systems,” often marked by a watershed. Raymond Dasmann, a professor emeritus of ecology at the University of California - Santa Cruz, as well as a founder of international environmentalism, and Peter Berg, an activist who founded Planet Drum, are cited for bringing the bioregion concept into the public conversation in the I970s. (Poet Gary Snyder’s writings, a decade earlier, also explored this theme.) Planet Drum sponsors publications, speakers, and workshops to help start new bioregional groups and encourages local organizations and individuals to find ways to live within the natural confines of bioregions. Dasmann and Berg call their approach reinhabitation—or “living-in-place…. Simply stated it involves becoming fully alive in and with a place.”1 Fully alive. That, to me, is the most active phrase. We can reinhabit our bioregions, according to Dasmann and Berg, through exploring, mapping, naming, and promoting their special natural qualities, and then incorporating them into a bioregional identity, creating a new story for a region. Or an old story, newly realized.2
We already have early-stage examples of such communities. Branded “Ecotopia” by Ernest Callenbach, the Northwest is known for its (not always consistent) commitment to environmental values. Salmon, for instance, has historically shaped Seattle’s daily culture and its ever-present iconography. In the late I990s, I attended a conference about a conflict between Canada, the United States, and several Indian tribes—or First Nations, as Canadians call them—over salmon fishing rights and the threat of Pacific salmon extinction. “Soon we’re going to be arguing about the last fish!” said Billy Frank, the man who forced the U.S. government to honor its fishing treaties with the Northwest tribes. To Frank and others, the debate was not only about economic resources, but also about personal, tribal, and regional identity. Then-Rep. Elizabeth Furse, from Washington County, Oregon, agreed. She spoke about salmon as an icon of health and identity. “Their presence is what tells us that we are or are not healthy. On a personal level the reason the salmon mean so much to me is that they have such a sense of home. The salmon know how to get home. They know where they came from.”
Adirondacks Park in upstate New York is an example in the United States of a purposeful place that has been both reinhabited and rewilded—brought back to a natural condition that had been lost for a century. No land-planning model is perfect, in execution, and none are applicable everywhere. But Adirondacks Park suggests one approach to restoring environmentally damaged bioregions, by seeding them with people.
Howard Fish, director of communications for the newly opened Wild Center at Tupper Lake, a natural history museum dedicated to the region, explained why this could serve as a model for other regions around the world.
“Outside of the state, and even most places in the state, people really don’t know how remarkable this park is,” he said, as he drove me north to the Wild Center. Here, the word park has a special meaning. Unlike most mountain ranges that run north, offering migration paths, this massive dome of rock and forest—visible from space—was a cold barrier to human transportation, for American Indians and early European settlers alike. That is, until the loggers arrived. “Centuries-old white pines fell for their timber; other trees destined for pulp mills and steel furnaces jammed Adirondack rivers,” according to Fish. Photographs of the region from a century ago show wide swaths of devastated landscape largely denuded by loggers, a fit habitat for skeletal stumps and mud. Remarkably, the region is wilder today than it was in the late nineteenth century. “There may be nowhere else on Earth where the same claim can be made for a space of this great scale,” said Fish. “The mountains are again blanketed in wild forests. Moose bugle here; beavers smack their tails and it’s possible that mountain lions growl.”
Driving through this region, one sees seemingly endless lakes and streams and marshes and mountains, fertile forests inhabited by bears and people. How did this happen?
First, in 1894, a group of scientists, everyday citizens, sportsmen, and conservationists persuaded New York voters to amend the state constitution and designate some five hundred thousand acres “forever wild.” Over time, through land trusts and other methods, the original five hundred thousand acres grew to three million. This is the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States, larger today than Yellowstone, Great Smoky Mountains, Yosemite, Glacier, and Grand Canyon national parks combined.
The second characteristic is that the region was designed for people, the prescient idea being to achieve human/nature restoration, a return of wildness and human habitation, as one piece. The entire park boundary encompasses some six million acres, nearly half belonging to private landowners. From the outset, the preserve resembled a series of islands more than a protected park. They exist inside a park boundary that is like a lasso that loops often random parcels into a single entity. Inside that loop there are Forest Preserve lands, and private holdings, including towns and hamlets, some no more than a store at a crossroads, along with farms, timberlands, businesses, recreational camps, and homes. The Adirondack Park Agency sets hamlet boundaries “well beyond established settlements” to allow for expansion. The Nature Conservancy is currently engaged in major transactions that, when complete, will add another one hundred thousand acres to the protected area of the Adirondacks. “The lands they are securing include Follensby Pond, where Emerson and others gathered in 1858 to reflect on the value of wilderness to the human spirit,” said Fish. “This is one of the places in the United States where a human population and wildlife live together in relative harmony. If 20 percent of New York State can be wild, then we can have Adirondacks-like preserves—for humans and other animals—all over the world,” albeit not as large.
As Fish and I traveled across this wild land and through occasional settlements, I wondered if a U.S. map had ever been drawn identifying those areas of the country where such a model could be applied: ecologically damaged regions that could be restored in a new way, as, essentially, human/nature reservations. No, he said, but there should be such a map, and not only for the United States. “What has happened here is that the natural landscape of a region the size of Vermont has been brought back to life. People have made this restoration happen.” And in the process, people have been restored. And when they move away, like those salmon of the Northwest, they often come home.3
The creation of the purposeful place on a large scale requires a sophisticated toolbox that includes individual effort or programs that encourage individuals to find their sense of place; regional planning; rewilding; a method to measure the complete economic value of a region’s natural history; and news media and policymakers who consciously value a bioregion not only for its extractive or recreational value, but also for something deeper.
Let’s consider one of those tools, the need to define the full economic value of a bioregion by measuring a number of indictors, including nature’s impact on human health. Translating the natural world into economic worth is a controversial subject; many people resist reducing nature to dollars and cents. Doing so, they say, commodifies and devalues spiritual life enriched by the world, as well as nature’s intrinsic and immeasurable worth. Indeed, if we go down the road of economic measurement without an accompanying moral argument, we risk applying the same reductionism that shaped education reform in the recent decade: Only that which can be counted counts. (It’s apropos that the sign on Albert Einstein’s office door at Princeton said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”)
Still, if a community fails to make the economic argument for a bioregion’s worth based on values involving the health of the humans and other creatures who live in that zone, then the community rolls out a red carpet for corporations or governments that wish to strip nature of what they define as its economic worth. These interests know exactly how to define their interpretation of value; through the economics of extraction and, ultimately, destruction. Those of us who place more value on nature’s intrinsic worth and its impact on human health and well-being need a more convincing set of metrics. Ideally, every urban region in every bioregion should establish the economic importance of nature experiences for children and adults. Today, many cities and states produce Kids Count report cards, which compare the conditions of children over time. Similarly, cities, counties, states, and economic development agencies could produce report cards on economic health—again, with the purpose of comparing progress or decline over time. Policymakers are inclined to rely heavily on such reports.
A Human/Nature Report Card would include but go beyond traditional measures of profit and revenue from outdoor recreation (fishing, boating, hiking, and so on), or concerns about the negative results of environmental toxins; it would consider the positive economic impact on public mental and physical health, education, and jobs. Measures of the influence of the natural world on child and adult obesity and depression, for example, could be translated into direct and indirect costs of health care and lost productivity. The positive impact of parks, open space, and nearby nature on property values could also be measured, year to year, going beyond the spot studies that already show a higher resale value of homes on the edge of natural places. The economic benefits of outdoor classrooms and place-based education might be estimated.
Such an ongoing, comprehensive regional study—linking human health and economic well-being to the health of the bioregion—would help policymakers who do care about the environment make a convincing argument for its protection.
In 2009, the New Economics Foundation announced its first Happy Planet Index (HPI). Caerphilly County Borough in South Wales, which scored well, pursues the goal of regional vitality. In 2008, the borough “became the first local authority in the UK to truly build well-being into its understanding of sustainable development,” according to the HPI. “Living better, using less,” is the borough’s motto. Caerphilly already had one of the lowest ecological footprints in the UK, but saw room for improvement. “A key aim of the new strategy is to enable [members of] the communities of the county borough to live longer, healthier, more fulfilled lives, in a sustainable way that breaks the link between wealth and resource consumption, and between resource consumption and fulfilled lives,” according to the HPI report. Caerphilly adopted HPI’s equation as a key element when explaining its definition of sustainability, with a goal of achieving the three main objectives of the strategy. Their target date is 2030, when the world is expected to hold eight billion people. Among other actions, Caerphilly has started work on developing community gardens, “which get people doing mild exercise, meeting others in their community, eating healthily, and reducing their reliance on imported food.”
HPI offers an intriguing formula for achieving its interpretation of sustainable development; it reaches beyond the traditional definitions of sustainability and economic and human health—combining them into one measure.4
Or consider Costa Rica, which in 2009 was at the top of a list of 143 countries measured by the Happy Planet Index 2.0.5 In addition, the World Database of Happiness gave Costa Rica 8.5 points out of 10; runner-up Denmark scored 8.3 points.6 The fact that Costa Rica hasn’t funded a national military for decades helps; that money goes to social services, education, and protecting their natural areas. The government there also raises revenue through a carbon tax, introduced in 1997, and it ranked third in the world, behind Iceland and Switzerland, in the 2010 Environmental Performance Index published by Yale and Columbia universities. (The United States held sixty-first place, just behind Paraguay.)7 In a 2010 article headlined “The Happiest People,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, “Costa Rica has done an unusually good job preserving nature.” Which is not to say Costa Rica has entirely transcended the troubles of the rest of the planet; for example, drug and related crime problems continue in that country. (“It’s surely easier to be happy while basking in sunshine and greenery than while shivering up north and suffering ‘nature-deficit disorder,’” he added.)
The search for personal happiness is one impetus for moving toward a living-in-place philosophy. Another related motivation is the surging need for energy efficiency, including the local production and distribution of food, and the creation of localized electricity sources through solar and wind-driven generators, ocean wave turbines, and other methods. Architect Sergio Palleroni, a professor and Fellow of the Center for Sustainable Practices and Processes, Portland State University, Oregon, predicts: “Housing will get more regionalized. Too much of housing is driven by prototypes that are supposed to apply nationwide. Increasingly, sustainability is driving us to understand local issues and opportunities, both in how buildings perform and with changing economics.”8 In other words, think globally, build and plant locally.
This brings us to the Transition Town movement. At this writing, there are 266 communities (towns, cities, regions), mainly in the UK (a few exist in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand) that have identified themselves as transition towns, cities, villages, or regions. By transition, proponents mean a shift to the postpetroleum age. Rob Hopkins, a British teacher and permaculturalist, hatched the idea in 2006. Permaculture is the practice of designing human communities and food systems that mimic sustainable ecologies. In essence, permaculture is permanent agriculture. The transition philosophy holds that, in the era of peak oil, we can’t wait for our governments to make the necessary changes, and individuals can’t create a new society entirely on their own. But communities can move relatively quickly to plan a fifteen- to twenty-year transition to locally grown food, restorative transportation (more walking and biking paths and alternative fuel vehicles), the use of local building materials, and other approaches.
Communities considering becoming transition towns are called “mullers”—as in, they’re mulling it over. One of the most advanced transition towns is Totnes, in the southwestern corner of England. When I visited Totnes and surrounding countryside, I was impressed by the foundation already in place: a medieval pattern of small cities and villages, circled by land that had remained in agricultural use or forested for centuries. Good place to start.
Hopkins remains determined to win people over with upbeat ideas. Far from doing with less, the creators of transition towns believe they’re part of a twenty-first century renaissance. “It’s about unleashing that potential,” says Hopkins, “and you don’t do that by trying to depress everyone into action. It’s about feeling part of something historic, something timely… . I often liken where we are now to 1939. It’s like a wartime mobilization. Scale of response is what we need to get through this process.”
In 1939, though, government led the mobilization. So government will be required to reach the scale Hopkins believes is necessary. Still, one can imagine a coalescing of place-based movements: energy- and food-focused Transition Towns, Sense of Place explorers, experiential educators, Citizen Naturalists (to be described later in these pages), and a host of other nature-oriented campaigns. One shared characteristic of the leaders of these campaigns is that they’re not waiting for the usual authorities. They’re taking Buckminster Fuller’s advice: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Today, I no longer have quite the same reaction when people ask me where I am from. In the past, I might have said Kansas or Missouri. But now, increasingly, when people ask me about my roots, I might mention Kansas, but then I say that California is my home. Given a chance, I will also begin to tell them about the richness of my region, the strangeness of it, and that this strangeness and beauty comes from the biodiversity. And I would describe my region’s nascent sense of purpose that comes from efforts to create natural corridors for animal migration, protect endangered species, produce more local food, and at least begin to think about building nature-focused neighborhoods and greening older neighborhoods.
Not long ago, Mike Hager, president and CEO of the San Diego Natural History Museum, asked me to do some brainstorming with him about the future of the museum. I was eager to meet with him, to share some of my thoughts.
What if the museum, working with the zoo, the universities, media, businesses, and others, were to rethink how we describe our region and how we market it? What if we took deep pride in our diverse and fascinating bioregion?
Without that pride and that sense of regional identity, there will be no protection of the miraculous. Even as I spoke with Hager, a coalition of groups was busy designing what it calls a “conservation vision” for a 2.5-million-acre area of Southern California and northern Baja. One of the initiative’s goals is establishment of an extensive binational park system connecting wilderness, forests, and parkland. Several years ago, California’s Condor Recovery Team, led by a longtime researcher with the San Diego Zoo, released three condors in the Baja’s isolated Sierra San Pedro Mártir. The researchers hoped that the condors would someday fly north to Ventura, to Sespe Condor Sanctuary or the wilderness near Big Sur, and join their U.S. relatives. Prior to this, the last condor seen in the Sierra San Pedro Mártir was in the 1930s—by a young rancher named Andy Meling, whom Jason and I had met so many decades later. I can imagine him then, hat set back on his head, squinting into the fading light, watching creatures with nine-foot wingspans circle the lost world.
Perhaps, I suggested to Hager, we should name our region, with its great natural attributes, including sea and mountains and microclimates, something romantic and mysterious that would identify this region for people from all over the world, a name that would place nature first. Perhaps an ancient Kumeyaay Indian word. Or Cuyabaja? Pandora? By any name, this would be our found world, our purposeful place.
In every bioregion, one of the most urgent tasks is to rebuild the community of naturalists, so radically depleted in recent years, as young people have spent less time in nature, and higher education has placed less value on such disciplines as zoology.
The word amateur has fallen on hard times, as in, “Oh, she’s such an amateur.” It’s become something of a pejorative. The original use of the word probably came from the French form of the Latin root, amātor: lover, or lover of, or devotee. In Thomas Jefferson’s time, when society was agrarian, few people made their living as scientists; most were amateurs, as was Jefferson. He was an amateur naturalist who tutored Meriwether Lewis in the White House before sending him off to record the flora and fauna of the West. The times are right for the return of the amateur, a twenty-first-century version—the citizen naturalist. (A form of that concept that already exists is the “citizen scientist,” but I prefer the word naturalist because it is more specific to nature and, well, sounds like a lot more fun.) To be a citizen naturalist is to take personal action, to both protect and participate in nature.
Citizen naturalists are especially valuable in a region like San Diego, a biodiversity hot zone. Here, fortuitously, four hundred volunteers helped compile the landmark San Diego County Bird Atlas before massive firestorms burned 20 percent of the county’s land surface, possibly wiping out entire bird populations. The volunteers expanded our knowledge of the nearly five hundred species of birds that live, vacation, or loiter here, from geographically confused parrots to a bushtit that builds its nest from spiderwebs. These volunteers detected changes in bird ranges and discovered a few avian species not previously known to live in the county. The atlas’s chief compiler and author, Philip Unitt, calls these citizen naturalists the book’s backbone, its spine.
This approach offers equal billing to catastrophe and fulfillment. “Our focus isn’t only on endangered species, but on all the other birds that live around us,” says Unitt. In short, he wants to keep common birds common—iridescent in late afternoon light, and alive.
If Unitt’s success with volunteers is any indication, a nascent citizen naturalist movement is already beginning to expand. In my region, citizen naturalists are young and old; they’re teachers, journalists, and plumbers. They sit on mountaintops for weeks in the Anza-Borrego Desert to record the ghostly presence of bighorn sheep and help track mountain lions; they trek through backcountry in search of the genetic Adam or Eve of rainbow trout, which may still live in nearly inaccessible creeks. Students, working with a marine biologist, tag and track threatened shark species. Around the world, in Africa and Europe, Asia and the Middle East, other amateurs do similar work, sometimes losing or saving their lives in the pleasure of the pursuit. These are passionate, dedicated people, Jefferson’s spiritual heirs.
In response to concern about the shortage of professional naturalists and taxonomists, the BBC launched an unprecedented project called Springwatch, inviting viewers and listeners to help map climate changes in the British Isles. Focusing on six key signs that spring has arrived, the BBC collects data sent in by the public and uses it to create a televised seasonal event. Participants are encouraged to record their findings online. Meanwhile, a Springwatch partner, the Woodland Trust, the UK’s leading woodland conservation charity, is expanding its network of over eleven thousand registered nature “recorders.”9
Some U.S. conservation and nature-education organizations are moving in a similar direction. For example, the California Academy of Sciences organized the Bay Area Ant Survey, recruiting citizen naturalists to help document more than one hundred distinct types of ant species in the eleven-county Bay Area.10 On a larger scale, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), with over four million members, is expanding its efforts to train young people to become NWF-certified citizen naturalists. And Cornell University’s Project FeederWatch has for many years enlisted the interest and sharp eyes of amateur birders across North America to help scientists understand movements of winter bird populations.11 With these amateurs’ help, researchers track trends in bird numbers and distribution over the United States and Canada. Volunteers pay a small fee, are issued a participant kit, and follow clear guidelines to ensure accuracy. They report their counts, by species, to Cornell University for data analysis. The annual survey extends for twenty-one weeks, from November through the first part of April. Results are published in scientific journals and shared online.
In some communities, citizen naturalists are taking up “plant rescue.” In King County, Washington, the Native Plant Salvage Program organizes hundreds of volunteers to save plants threatened by development. As James McCommons writes in Audubon magazine, these salvage operations “draw up to 300 people, who literally run into the woods to stake out hard-to-find species—trilliums, sedges, and mosses.” The plants are transferred to ecological restoration projects, demonstration gardens, and wildlife habitats created in backyards. Ambivalence comes with the turf. Some may see plant rescue as another form of mitigation, green-washing the destruction of habitat by developers. More accurately, it’s a creative response to development and a way to publicize the threats to the natural habitat. In Tucson, Arizona, the Tucson Cactus and Succulent Society organizes volunteers to rescue cacti. “Wherever lands are being developed there are opportunities to do plant salvages,” McCommons writes. “Even small parcels, such as a lot for a single-family home, can yield a treasure trove of native flora.”12
Another citizen naturalist role is “work-camper.” During the Great Recession, some park managers felt the economic pinch so acutely they closed the gates, but others relied on volunteers in their motor homes to keep trails clear and trash picked up until funds become available to hire regular staff. “Work-campers come together in one place—leading nature walks or staffing visitor centers, typically working 20 hours to 30 hours a week—then take off to their next assignments,” reported the New York Times13
At Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo, Deborah Jensen, the zoo’s president and CEO, would like to see more community involvement. Typically, zoos offer education programs, but Woodland Park, with a more regional focus than most, is planning a particularly ambitious outreach program. Rather than just taking animals to local schools, the zoo will become the focal point for a growing network of the state’s environmental education programs. Jensen told a story that illustrated the potential role zoos could play. A few years ago, a gyrfalcon escaped from the zoo. “This was a large bird with an attached transmitter, but we couldn’t find it, so we put out a press release to the media,” she says. People all over the region, young and old, were looking for the bird, and someone found it. “Later, we received a letter from a boy who had been one of the searchers. The experience changed him. He said he had never realized how many birds lived in Seattle, how much nature was in his own neighborhood.”
So let’s increase the number of front-line citizen naturalists, who count, chart, map, collect, protect, tag, track, heal, and generally get to know countless species of plants and animals in the wild, in the elfin forests of their own backyards, or the woods, or the great national parks, or at the end of the alley in an inner-city neighborhood.
With human/nature social capital in mind, we must create or retrofit whole communities in which humans, wild animals, domesticated animals, along with native vegetation, live in kinship. This can be done in a way that strengths the diversity of human settlements and the planet. The question of human/nature kinship is one of the great architectural, urban planning, and social challenges of the twenty-first century.
Let me introduce you to a hero and friend of mine. I sat down with him recently, at a conference focused on connecting the next generation to the outdoors.
Juan Martinez, twenty-six, was wearing his customary flat-brim ball cap and baggy chinos. Juan was raised in South Central Los Angeles, and he grew up angry. “I was the poor of the poor. People would make fun of me, people would tease me about my clothes. So it was my defense mechanism to pretty much kick their ass,” he recalled. At the time, he seemed to be a prime candidate for a short, unremarkable gang life. When he was fifteen, a teacher at Dorsey High School in South Central offered an ultimatum: Juan could flunk the class and likely be held back a grade, or he could join the school’s Eco Club.
Begrudgingly, he chose the latter. “The first couple weeks I didn’t talk to people. I focused on growing my little jalapeño plant,” he said.
“Why a jalapeño?” I asked.
He described how his mother had broken through a piece of concrete behind the family’s house, exposing soil for a small garden. There, she grew jalapeños and medicinal plants, including aloe vera for cuts and burns. “She would make teas out of these plants whenever we were sick,” said Juan. “So I wanted to show my mom that I could do that, too, that I could grow something, that I could give her something in return.”
A trip to Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, organized by the Eco Club and Teton Science Clubs, changed his life forever—and at first, not entirely for the better.
“I saw bison. I saw more stars than I could count. I was where there was no concrete, no gunshots, no helicopters over my head,” he recalls. When he came home, he found he couldn’t get enough nature. “It became like an addiction.” He joined the Sierra Club’s Building Bridges to the Outdoors program, and participated in every program he could that would transport him back to wilderness, becoming an outdoor leader. “Every time I came back from a trip, I was more depressed with where I lived. I would lock myself in my room. I just hated being home.”
His growing distaste for what he considered “the dreaded dead-end road” of South Central showed and, he says, limited his effectiveness as a leader. Fortunately, his outdoor mentors noticed his depression, and understood its source. “They sat me down and talked to me. Then they took me to community gardens and local green spaces, places not so far away, places that I could get to on a bus.” And he continued to organize wilderness expeditions.
As we spoke, Juan told me about taking twenty kids from Watts on a backpacking course into the Eastern Sierra. Many of them were heavily medicated for behavior problems. “The first day of the fourteen-day trip was a rough one, with threats of violence, crying, fighting,” he said, but halfway through the trip the young people began to settle into a more natural rhythm. “Our nightly fires were filled with laughter. All they wanted was to be listened to, to be heard, to be recognized. They talked about the songbird that had captivated them that day or why people got hooked on drugs back home.”
Around that fire, he found himself thinking of his own community, which was hundreds of miles away. And he came to a realization: “I love nature because I love people,” he said. Juan concluded that he had to stop thinking mainly about what nature did for him personally. “It was never just about me! It was always about the love I have for my family, for my culture, for my community, for the mentors that have stood by my side through thick and thin,” he said. “I became a better person when I stopped caring about only my smile, my sanity, my therapy in nature and I found one of my greatest joys came from the laugh of a kid (whose mother had beat her with a bat and abandoned her in an alley), helping them make s’mores for the first time, making a wish on a star.”
He returned from that backpacking trip with a purpose: Instead of leaving South Central, he would commit to it. “I would do all I could to share with my community the joy of nature, even by building a place in the middle of the ‘hood for songbirds, by sharing the crops of our small garden at home and teaching others how to do their own raisedbed gardens.”
Since then, Juan’s work has expanded. He serves as National Youth Volunteer Coordinator for the Sierra Club and leads the Natural Leaders Network of the Children and Nature Network, a group of several hundred young people, many of them, like Juan, from inner cities. He also advises U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on his department’s emerging plan to create a youth conservation corps. And Juan has been invited to the White House twice.
But he always comes home to South Central.
As Juan talked about his mother’s garden of jalapeños and medicinal plants, I was reminded that it’s a mistake to focus only on the cultural or geographic barriers that stand between nature and people. We need to consider the strong cultural links to nature that already exist and can be built on. This requires thinking outside the tent, not only beyond ethnic and racial stereotypes, but about what qualifies as outdoor recreation. For example, national and state park officials describe, with respect and appreciation, the many Hispanic families who use the outdoors for family picnics and reunions—social activities now seemingly rare among people who look like me. That’s natural capacity.
“Portland was once a lily-white city. With more Hispanic and Asian immigration, we’re changing rapidly,” says Mike Houck, Portland’s wildscaper. These populations are often overlooked in the effort to protect or expand wildlife in a city. When Houck asked a local Spanish-language radio station to help out with an effort to save urban wetlands, 450 Hispanic residents showed up for a rally. In California, where 37 percent of the state’s citizens are Hispanic or Latino, that population voted disproportionately in favor of an open-space initiative. “It all depends on your approach,” he says.
African Americans bring their own heritage to the outdoors. “Stereotypes persist that African Americans are physically and spiritually detached from the environment,” writes Dianne D. Glave, in Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage. “This wrongheaded notion is so ingrained in our culture that many of us have begun to believe it ourselves.”14 The history is complicated but rich. Forests and farms existed in the shadows of slavery. Nature, therefore, could be a forbidding place. Despite that, according to Glave, “African Americans actively sought healing, kinship, resources, escape, refuge and salvation in the land… . These positive and negative forces made the wild theirs, for better or worse.” That, too, is natural capacity.
In the age of climate change and nature-deficit disorder, such experiences underscore this truth: Our relationship with nature is not only about preserving land and water, but about preserving and growing the bonds between us.