By Dan Kirk Britney Zaparolli, or “Z” is our current member in our Green Collar Corps program, which is a paid internship for students in the community to get some hands-on job training experience in the environmental field. The following is an interview with Z, who shares a little bit about her path to The Watershed Project. So you are in school for landscape architecture, right? What drew you to that interest? Working in Sonoma this past year was the first time I realized I could have a career focused on caring for the environment. Before that I had been studying architecture but I …
Blast from the Past: Celebrating MLK
Since 2009, The Watershed Project has been leading MLK events in the Richmond area. Here are a few images from our earliest MLK Day events. The above photos are of MLK volunteers working at the Dotson Family Marsh. Volunteers and TWP staff work together to eliminate the ice plant to get the site clean and ready for the survey and planning of a large restoration project. Ice plant removal is a great team activity and volunteers enjoy the quick transformation. Over the years, TWP volunteers removed all problematic patches of ice plant from Point Pinole and Dotson Marsh, filling over 12 …
Thank You Organizers and Volunteers at MLK Day of Service 2022!
Since 2011, The Watershed Project has participated in the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service celebration on the Richmond Greenway. Last year the event was virtual due to the pandemic, but this year once again, the Friends of the Richmond Greenway (FORG), a collective of community-based organizations which includes The Watershed Project, organized community service projects at the Richmond Greenway. Over the years, thousands of volunteers have worked shoulder to shoulder on the Greenway to honor Dr. King’s legacy of service to our nation and his tireless pursuit of justice for all. We draw …
What Will Our Shoreline Look Like When Sea Level Rises?
By Naama Raz Yaseef It is hard to imagine, but still, this will happen: areas near the Bay will be drowned. With climate change and global warming, the sea is rising, and this means that parts of our shorelines will be lost, with devastating implications to assets on or near the shoreline. Ten years from now, areas in North Richmond will be flooded during large storms like the ones we recently experienced (and we will have more and more of those!) or during king tides. This also has broader implications for communities living farther away. For example, the West County Wastewater facility is …
What’s in your Watershed? | Casper: The Friendly Risso’s Dolphin
By Audrey Matusich One of my favorite things about growing up in the South Bay is its proximity to several amazing places. Whether I’m in the mood to go wine tasting in Napa, become a tourist for the day in San Francisco, lounge on the beach in Santa Cruz, or explore the tide pools in Monterey, any of these excursions can be accomplished in a day. As a self-designated “land mermaid,” any trip to the ocean growing up amounted to a perfect day, and one of my favorite places is Monterey. On my last trip to Monterey, I decided to go on a morning whale watching tour. The sky was clear, …
The story of The Watershed Project
The scene was 1997, and the board of directors had just been selected for the Aquatic Outreach Institute. It was a brand new nonprofit organization created by a group of educators and scientists that wanted to help make outdoor science education and watershed stewardship accessible to all residents in the San Francisco Bay Area. The nascent organization had two main goals, related to capacity-building. First, get kids into creeks and gardens and develop elementary school teacher training modules and curriculum to ensure all educators had the tools to teach their classes and to use …
Where is your Querencia?
If you could think of a place where you feel safe to be your most authentic self, where would that be? This would be your querencia. Your querencia can be a physical place, or it can be a metaphysical place - in a dream, memory, fantasy or experience. It can be a chapter in a book or a type of food. Maybe, your querencia is a place in nature; next to a river, on top of a volcano, a type of tree in your backyard or camping next to a lake. A few of The Watershed Project staff share some of their first memories of their querencias in nature. The Spanish word querencia doesn’t have an …
Mosses: Small Plants with a Big Impact
By Paula White Long before flowering plants existed, mosses and other nonvascular plants (i.e. plants that lack nutrient transport mechanisms such as veins and stems) paved the way for subsequent life forms, including humans, to evolve. Though oxygen was present in the earth’s atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago, it took many more eons and the continuous production of oxygen by mosses and similar plants, known as Bryophyta, to create atmospheric oxygen levels similar to today’s. Mosses share space in this plant class with lichens, algae, liverworts, and hornworts, and common names tend to lump …
