- (Public Value) UCANR: Developing a qualified workforce for California
- Author: Maggie Swanson
My name is Maggie (she/her), HREC's newest GrizzlyCorps fellow, alongside Brenda. Under the mentorship of Hannah Bird and John Bailey, I will be supporting the REC in land management projects and youth education programs.
I hail from Milton, Massachusetts, a town just south of Boston. I lived in New England through my early twenties, graduating from Middlebury College in Vermont in February, 2023 with a degree in Conservation Biology and minor in Computer Science. I spent the summers tending a local organic farm; monitoring endangered shore birds; and diving for coral reef research in the Caribbean in an effort to immersively understand our planet's varied ecosystems. After graduation, I forged my way West and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail to witness our changing climate in a region defined by a scarred biosphere. I encountered unprecedented snowfall, heatwaves, and wildfire across the 2,650-mile trail which cemented an interest in working toward rural climate resiliency in California. Last spring, I returned to Marin County and studied Spotted Owls with Point Blue Conservation Science and am filled with gratitude to be back working in and among Hopland's beautiful oak woodlands here at HREC.
I am most excited to work alongside life-long learners: preschoolers bottle-feeding lambs for the first time; post-docs investigating biological and ecological data years in the making; and tribal leaders who have stewarded this land since time immemorial. Cheers to embarking on a new service year!
- Author: Hannah Bird
I lived and worked at a ranch in Santa Barbara the following semester, doing school online. During that time, I wrote my undergraduate thesis based on feedback from some regenerative ranchers and farmers in California who said that there's not enough information about how regenerative techniques are applicable on a given farmer's land with its particular conditions. To engage with this, I proposed an experiment to study the effect of the Indigenous Three Sisters intercropping system and no-till techniques on soil health and soil organic carbon across climate types. I graduated in the fall of 2021 with a degree in biology and a minor in studio art. Since then, I lived at and helped renovate a collective in Germany, hitchhiked through Greece and Albania, and worked restoring a piece of land in Bodega, CA. I firmly believe that a community facing a challenge is best positioned to find appropriate solutions for it, and that science should be done by and for the people it affects. Values which I'm excited that the extension system shares.
While here, I will be building HREC's capacity to conduct work around climate resiliency: supporting regenerative grazing and sustainable forest management; educating and facilitating citizen science using the land as our primary teacher; supporting new technologies on working and research landscapes; and building and deepening partnerships in the community.
If you're curious about the GrizzlyCorps program you can find more information here: https://www.grizzlycorps.org/