Because of you, our great community, we have been able to build deeper connections between our community, nature, and Save Mount Diablo. Our Diablo Conservation Experience (formerly known as Conservation Collaboration Agreement) program for local schools and businesses has been supported by educational and corporate leaders.
A Diablo Conservation Experience has three basic parts:
- Save Mount Diablo staff provide in-class educational presentations regarding land conservation of the Mount Diablo area to the participating students and also to the sponsoring company’s employees at their office.
- Save Mount Diablo staff teach and lead the participating students and employees in an outdoor, experiential field day at one of Save Mount Diablo’s conserved properties, which includes an environmental service project, a field ecology class, an interpretive nature hike, and a solo out on the land where each participant does a contemplative journal writing exercise about nature.
- Finally, in an act of educational and participatory philanthropy, the business will provide Save Mount Diablo memberships for all of its employees while the students will raise funds so that they can become members of Save Mount Diablo through our youth membership program.
I cannot express my appreciation enough to how special I thought yesterday was. I walked away feeling so good about our community, the Moraga School District, our next generation, our beautiful Bay Area landscape, the Save Mount Diablo organization, and my staff as individuals and as a unit. We all literally got our hands dirty with the goal of making a difference to the students and investing in a better future while preserving our present. Thanks to all of you for making this happen.
The partnership between Save Mount Diablo and Campolindo High School will provide local students with a unique opportunity to both learn about our environment and serve the community. The students will refine their scientific skills and learn how to become stewards of our local resources.
The Campolindo Science Department is passionate about providing our students with outdoor education and stewardship opportunities that connect them with the natural world. We are thrilled to be working with Save Mount Diablo, as they are providing our students with both, as well as providing excellent role models who are acting locally to protect land on behalf of people, and on behalf of wildlife. There is much bad news when studying environmental science—it is very encouraging and empowering for our students to engage with an organization that is accomplishing so much in terms of land conservancy and habitat restoration.
Campolindo Environmental Science students are so excited to partner with Save Mount Diablo to turn their passion into action, practice what they have been learning about all year long, and work to restore such an important environment so close to their community.
Community Conservation: A Long-Term Sustainability Strategy
Our Diablo Conservation Experience program showcases community conservation at work.
Community conservation is a new focus of the national land conservation movement in the United States.
Community conservation is a critical long-term sustainability strategy that builds meaningful connections and relationships between a land trust, the community in which the land trust works, and nature. You need all three legs of this stool to be strong and engaged for efforts to preserve the land to stand up to the test of time.
Reconnecting modern society to nature: a cultural realignment
A cultural realignment with nature at the center, which land trusts can assist with through community conservation work, will ensure our great legal and scientific tools used to protect nature are not dismissed by a modern, wired society largely disconnected from the natural world.
One of the ways in which we can explore the concept of community conservation is to examine it within the context of the evolving land conservation field and the cross-cultural phenomenon of natural sacred places. We must ask what we can learn from various cultures, traditions, and their relationships with nature—for example, by exploring how Hawaiian, Native American, and other indigenous cultures relate to the natural world.
I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization.
We were told that we would see America come and go. In a sense America is dying, from within, because they forgot the instructions of how to live on earth. It’s the Hopi belief, it’s our belief, that if you are not spiritually connected to the earth, and understand the spiritual reality of how to live on earth, its likely that you will not make it. Everything is spiritual, everything has a spirit, everything was brought here by the creator, the one creator. Some people call him God, some people call him Buddha, some people call him Allah, some people call him other names. We call him Tunkaschila . . . Grandfather. We are here on earth only a few winters, then we go to the spirit world. The spirit world is more real then most of us believe. The spirit world is everything…
The land is sacred. These words are at the core of your being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood.
When we recognize the virtues, the talent, the beauty of Mother Earth, something is born in us, some kind of connection, love is born.
The level of comfort and peace that I experience in the parks flows like a stream throughout my life, so that no matter where I am or what I am experiencing, there is a core of me that cannot be disturbed. It keeps me in balance all the time.
Why do you run around looking for the truth? Be still, and there it is in the mountain, in the pine, in yourself.
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
In the end, all the struggles have the same objective: the defense of life.
