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As we continue to develop our proposed Redwood Region Tour project and talk to potential partner organizations, we have become engaged with the Gateway Mountain Center in the Sierra. That non-profit carries out location-based environmental education and adventure classes for middle and high school-aged students. We recently collaborated with Gateway to bring a group of high schoolers from Marin County to the North Coast for a week-long field trip. Serendipitously, this collaboration worked to forward several agendas, as it was constructed on a parallel track in terms of engagement with organizations and activities we have been perusing for the Redwood Region Tours. Our field trip traveled first to the Mattole watershed, where the students got oriented with the watershed, the restoration history, and restoration ecology before digging in (literally) to work with Mattole Restoration Council (MRC) staff planting riparian zone trees, as well as visiting Gil Gregori's Mattole Creek Delta restoration project. We are indebted to the great folks at MRC as well as Gil, and also David Simpson and Jane Lapiner for their engagement with the students. We also took the students to the Headwaters Reserve to hike the 12-mile Elk River trail loop, along with two BLM staff people who joined us. We then traveled north to tour Humboldt Bay and environs, including Arcata Marsh, with films and speakers narrating the excursion. We see more of this kind of collaboration in the future, along with the Tours for other age groups. Highlighting the good work of the grassroots people on the north coast and engendering an understanding of economic and ecological changes in the Bay Area's forested back yard, as well as bringing urban people to grasp the value and real life experience of restoration efforts are among our goals. We invite ideas and participation from all north coast groups and individuals.
 | Hugh McGee, of MRC, demonstrating the planting of seedling trees to
high school field class.
| ![]() | | Photo: Karen Pickett/BACH |
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We continue our focus on media outreach, in our organizing and education, as we use (and share!) the resources we have developed, in the interest of helping shape messages important to our campaign work and boosting our colleague `organizations' capacities. Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters' membership in the Green Media Toolshed has brought us vastly improved capacity to research media outlets, compile contact lists, and outreach to media markets, and we share that ability by compiling lists for other organizations, producing and editing media pitches and releases, and broadcasting advisories and releases. From our behind-the-scenes perch, we have also set up countless interviews with colleague organization representatives with media outlets, and referred reporters to either people or sources of information they might not otherwise have at hand.
Our own media work has focused on the unfolding story of Pacific Lumber bankruptcy and subsequent events. To that end, our work with the various dedicated people and organizations who have had their noses to the grindstone, building and framing options in what is admittedly an excruciatingly difficult landscape, (thank you very much, Charlie) has brought us to conducting research on some of the players. Through work with Mendocino County watershed activists, we have produced material related to Mendocino Redwood Company's activity in that County, in order to shed light on how they might operate in Humboldt County, as it became apparent that they were a serious player. Even from the southern end of the coastal redwood ecosystem's reach, we all have a role to play to encourage stable and sustainable solutions on the north coast.
For more information: www.HeadwatersPreserve.org
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TOC for Forest & River News, Spring 2008
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