Hello, I'm Chloe (she/they) and I'm thrilled to be working as a Rural Climate Fellow through GrizzlyCorps here at HREC! I grew up in Berkeley, CA watching newts navigate burbling streams in the hills and building houses for fairies in the forest. Growing up in a city of activists, I soon learned to use this connection to land as a source of inspiration for my work, creating an art installation in high school asking what our ecosystems could look like in the face of climate change and environmental degradation. Since then, I studied at Pomona College on the outskirts of Los Angeles, educating local youth about gardening and environmental justice and working at the campus bike repair shop. In the fall of 2020, I took the semester off and flew to Fairbanks, Alaska to work as a field organizer on a political campaign. While there, I was blown away by the daily knowledge Alaskans had about the land and how to adapt with grace to its constant changes. 

I lived and worked at a ranch in Santa Barbara the following semester, doing school online. During that time, I wrote my undergraduate thesis based on feedback from some regenerative ranchers and farmers in California who said that there's not enough information about how regenerative techniques are applicable on a given farmer's land with its particular conditions. To engage with this, I proposed an experiment to study the effect of the Indigenous Three Sisters intercropping system and no-till techniques on soil health and soil organic carbon across climate types. I graduated in the fall of 2021 with a degree in biology and a minor in studio art. Since then, I lived at and helped renovate a collective in Germany, hitchhiked through Greece and Albania, and worked restoring a piece of land in Bodega, CA. I firmly believe that a community facing a challenge is best positioned to find appropriate solutions for it, and that science should be done by and for the people it affects. Values which I'm excited that the extension system shares. 

While here, I will be building HREC's capacity to conduct work around climate resiliency: supporting regenerative grazing and sustainable forest management; educating and facilitating citizen science using the land as our primary teacher; supporting new technologies on working and research landscapes; and building and deepening partnerships in the community. 

 

If you're curious about the GrizzlyCorps program you can find more information here: https://www.grizzlycorps.org/