Growing Solutions Restoration Education Institute
2024 Growing Solutions Update
To Restore, Survive And Thrive
By Don Hartley and Karen Flagg
As a teacher, you never know if you’ve made a difference in the lives of your students. You always wonder if the hours spent lecturing, explaining and showing make a difference to any given student.
Turns out it does.
While attending the Tenth California Island Symposium this November we were pleasantly surprised to be welcomed by former students and employees expressing their gratitude for the valuable knowledge and skills they gained working with us and Growing Solutions.
The first to come up to us during the meet and greet was Jared McEntyre our former SBCC student and GS employee in the early 2000’s. After leaving Growing Solutions, he went on to teaching college and has since been at Ventura High School for the last sixteen years teaching AP Environmental Science and Honors Biology where he takes his students to Santa Rosa Island each semester. Talk about passing the torch!
Holly Huff, a former student now working at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, specifically thanked me for introducing her to our colleague and mentor Dr. Kathryn McEachern which created the opportunity to work with Kathryn on the cloud forest project on Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa islands.
It was heartening to see many younger folk earnestly taking notes and giving presentations alongside the elders who freely shared over 50 years of ongoing Channel Island research. It gives us hope that this vital work will continue in good hands.
One buzz going around the conference: the Island bedstraw, Galium buxifolium and Santa Cruz Island Dudleya, Dudleya nesiotica were delisted this year from the endangered species list. This is certainly a victory for these beautiful rare species—a confirmation that the Endangered Species Act works and an affirmation of our efforts to all of us who have hiked the hills, experimented, filed reports, researched and developed and implemented plans to facilitate the recovery of these species.
Our takeaway is that conservation and protections work, and progressing the critical research and hands-on work from experienced scientists and practitioners to the next generation can be a fun yet critical way to understand natural systems while producing tangible restoration results.
And while the challenges are great and the threats terrifyingly real, we are hopeful that we at Growing Solutions are providing the space, tools and knowledge to give ourselves, and the planet, a realistic chance to protect, adapt and thrive.
Thank you,
Don and Karen
One of Growing Solutions legacy projects is working with Dr. Kathryn McEachern since 2006 to rescue and restore the endemic Santa Cruz Island Island Bush Mallow which had been reduced to only a handful of individuals scattered across the island. Now there are more than 5000! Click the short video to see the story (and the nursery structures we built with students and volunteers).
Restoration * Stewardship * Community
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