Laura Lee Lienk – Bringing People to Nature and Nature to People
Big concepts such as conservation, environmental protection and ecological justice can sometimes appear vague or abstract, the subject of worrying headlines or of feel-good ad campaigns. For Laura Lee Lienk, director of Return of the Natives Restoration Education Project (RON), focusing on the environment is all about getting your hands dirty. A program of the Watershed Institute at the California State University at Monterey Bay (CSUMB), RON aims to bring people to nature and nature to people through hands-on habitat restoration and service learning projects in the schoolyard and the community. Rather than seeing human and natural communities as separate, RON’s programs and activities highlight the social aspect of environmental work, helping individuals and communities come together through the healing experience of restoration.
Sometimes this means bringing artists and musicians to landscapes where crews of all kinds—children, youth, families, seniors—are doing restoration work.
“It’s joyful,” Lienk says, “joyful and exciting. People really come together through the act of restoration.”
RON was formed in 1992 when a group of Salinas schoolteachers looked at their schools and saw buildings that reminded them of prisons. “These teachers said, ‘Schools should be more beautiful than prisons,’” Lienk says. “They wanted these children to be future college students, not future prisoners.”
RON became associated with CSUMB’s Watershed Institute when the university opened in 1995. Lienk, fresh out of a Peace Corps stint in Argentina, was its first employee. CSUMB is nationally known for its focus on service learning projects in the community, and students wishing to focus on environmental issues are sure to find their way to Lienk’s door; among the many hats she wears, she is also the Service Learning Institute’s Applied Science and Technology Coordinator. For Lienk, it all adds up to building an ecologically conscious populace.
“It’s slow and patient work,” she says. “You’re planting seeds. Like a tree, it may not reach its full potential before 30 or 40 years.”
Lienk gives the example of a student from a Salinas high school who participated in a RON field trip, then attended CSUMB, where she continued her connection with RON. Today she is an elementary schoolteacher in Castroville who regularly schedules field trips with RON.
Making sure that children living behind Salinas’s “Lettuce Curtain” have access to green spaces outside their home urban environment is a special focus of Lienk’s. Through its partnerships with the Bureau of Land Management, Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District, City of Salinas, and California State Parks, RON is working hard to expand park space in Salinas, a stressed and overcrowded population where people do not have regular access to nature.
The Big Sur Land Trust is a major partner of RON’s in this effort. “We are thrilled to be a partner,” Lienk says. “Our work is very complementary. Our goals overlap.” Lienk notes that in addition to its ability to work with complex land and funding issues, the Land Trust has been increasingly looking beyond the landscape and into the lives of people. “They are putting the two together, bringing people into the landscape. It’s really, really important work.”
Such overlap can be seen in a description of RON’s goals: to protect the waters of the Monterey Bay through restoration of the waterways and the lands draining in the Bay and to bring people and nature together on restoration and garden projects in the watersheds of the Monterey Bay, from the Monterey Peninsula to North Monterey County and from Salinas to San Ardo. Together, these goals describe a vision of healthy communities in which everyone’s potential can be recognized and respected, where both people and environment are valued and where people understand what really sustains their communities: clean water, clean air, and the land.
“It gives me great joy to participate in a small way,” Lienk says. “Every one of us can really make a big impact in the lives of our families, our communities, as well as in our own lives.”
