This year’s 50th Year Earth Day celebration happens in the midst of an uncertain yet hopeful time for our planet. We are collectively learning new ways of being together, physically distanced from our friends, but still emotionally connected. We are facing these new challenges armed with creativity and patience and are embracing technology with a new fervor. The Watershed Project and The City of Albany invites you to take an Earth Day journey with us and notice the nature that is all around us–outside our window, in our backyards, and in our neighborhoods.
Home Gardening: Growing your own plants is fun, relaxing, and good for the planet! It does take time, but now that many of us are home a lot more than before, watching the growth of new plants from seed to flower to fruit can be very rewarding. Tune into our home gardening series of videos for practical tips on growing vegetables, making a raised garden bed, and even installing a rain barrel.
Earth Day Art Contest: Sharpen your (colored) pencils and get ready, set, create! Craft a collage or pen a poem on the theme: What do you appreciate about your watershed? Prizes will be awarded. Entries must be submitted by May 3, 2020
Virtual Classrooms for Kids: What is a watershed anyway? Learn the answers to this and many other important questions about the natural world all around us while sheltering in place. Online classes for students in grades K-12 and their families are offered through google classroom. Classes are free.
Exploring Biodiversity: Have you ever wondered why certain flowers are always full of bees and butterflies? Or which trees and shrubs make the best bird habitat? Be a community scientist! Your observations on pollinators and birds in your backyard will contribute to a greater understanding and awareness of local bird and pollinator species. We are here to help you interpret your data collection and share findings of our own.
California’s legendary mountain man, John Muir, once wrote “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Muir’s observation about the connectedness of things in nature may have been intended more as a metaphor than as a scientific fact, but in the hundred years since he wrote that sentence, scientists and researchers studying natural ecosystems are finding Muir’s metaphor to be the literal truth. 
The epic journey of Pacific salmon— from their birth in coastal freshwater streams and rivers, migration to the ocean to mature, and return to spawn in the headwaters where they began— is a defining cycle in the Pacific coast ecology. The protection of salmon fisheries, salmon spawning streams, and river runs has driven ecosystem restoration along the Pacific coast from the San Francisco Bay to Alaska. But as we try to save spawning runs and the forests of the headwaters for salmon populations, it may be that the salmon themselves are saving the trees. Studies of trees along salmon spawning runs in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest show that as much as eighty percent of individual tree nitrogen content is derived from salmon nutrients. The salmon that have died after spawning or been eaten by bears, birds, or other animals, are transformed into nitrogen in the forest soils that feed the trees. Even in small coastal watersheds, trees hundreds of feet inland from salmon spawning runs show the nitrogen “signature” of salmon in their tree rings. The fish are growing the forest. 
As we learn more about the complex interactions of our ecosystems, it is harder to ignore the interconnectedness of things. As we find we really are “hitched to everything else…,” it is easier to see that everything we do has an effect on the life— and landscape— around us. One way to make the connection between ourselves, our communities, and the environment is through the lens of our watersheds. A watershed does not have a visible boundary, but rather it is a web of connections between living things and everything that sustains them. We are a part of that web, along with the wolves and the salmon, the redwood and kelp forests, the creeks and the marshes, and the bay and ocean. And like the Yellowstone wolves who restored the river, and the Pacific salmon that grew the forest, we can make positive changes in our own watershed. You can help create change by joining The Watershed Project during our 
