Latin American Community/Comunidad Latino Americano

I never thought that as an ecologist I would be consulting for designers and engineers, but the world is changing fast.  For me the natural world has been my classroom- poking around in rivers for insects to study pollutions' effects on aquatic ecosystems, hiking moose trails in search of wolf behavior patterns, planting hillsides with beachgrass to increase fish populations in streams.  After I graduated college I worked my way to California, where land meets ocean.  There I learned to bring the natural world to people by designing landscapes.  I loved my gardens, and did all the right environmental things a green designer does.  Still, I could never escape this feeling that I could do more to reconnect my tiny landscapes to a larger picture, more to make our cities and neighborhoods conducive to life on this planet.

Zooming ahead several years after my epiphany brings us here to this moment.  Architects come to me with questions of how to improve the lands and its systems with their projects.  Designers ask me to help them make their products more appealing to their users and safe for the environment.  Overnight the green revolution has become mainstream, and I'm undergoing a new paradigm shift.  We will solve the problems we face today.  I repeat, we will solve today's problems.   So lets think and plan on a long timescale to prevent creating problems for the next generation to solve.

Some of my best "Ah-ha!"  moments have been with the Biomimicry Institute when I took a course with Janine Benyus and Dayna Baumeister and the wonderful folks who make up the Institute and the Guild.  From them I learned that all over the world, people like me are using nature to solve their design challenges. 

I am a member of the USGBC and am educated in LEED environmental rating standards.  With them I use my ecology background to create places for life.

I also am an avid member of the Long Now Foundation, and through their lecture series and projects have shifted my thinking to a ten thousand year timescale. 

Other people who have influenced me on my lifelong journey are David Deppen, Henry David Thoreau, Sim Van der Ryn, Paul Hawken, William McDonough, Michael Pollan, Kurt Vonnegut, and Melody Duwe, my mother- who rescues wild animals.