Hopeful By Nature

A four-year-old in Zimbabwe watches a VHS tape of David Attenborough narrating a wildlife documentary shot in Kenya. She watches it again. She starts rescuing millipedes off the ant trail in her yard. Years later, she's running an organization trying to give that same jolt of recognition to kids growing up minutes from elephants they've never seen. Vimbainashe “Nicky” Chitauro is the Found...

Most people haven't connected the proposed Meta settlement of up to $17 billion to outdoor learning yet. In Part 2 of this conversation, Karen Cowe and Craig Strang of Ten Strands make the case for what "responsible optimism" actually means when the stakes are this high — and answer a harder question: does hope actually work as a motivator, or do we need fear instead? This is Part 2...

Craig Strang almost didn't take the class that set his entire career in motion — he thought "five units for a beach field trip" had to be a scam. Fifty years later, he and Karen Cowe are behind a California bill that passed every committee unanimously and still didn't make it through. Karen Cowe is the founding CEO of Ten Strands , the California nonprofit that's spent thirte...

What if the thing standing between your kid and a national park pass isn't belief — it's a budget line? Jackie Ostfeld has spent 20 years finding out, first as a naturalist teaching thousands of kids directly, then as the policy leader who helped build — and twice had to save — the program that gets every American fourth grader into their public lands for free. Jackie directs Sierra Club&#...

For years, Odalis Avalos believed that speaking Spanish as her first language was a disadvantage. Then she helped teach a lesson about bees to a room of bilingual elementary kids, and everything about how she saw her own language changed. Odalis, Christian Trujillo, and Diana are the co-founders of Ciencia Para Todos — Science for Everyone — a volunteer-run organization that trains future STEM edu...

Jamie Lynn Langley had just finished teaching a room of therapists how to help kids safely assess the risk of climbing a tree — when to stop, how to guide instead of forbid — when they stepped outside and passed a dad doing exactly that with his son. She didn't plan it. This week, Jamie joins Scott to talk about what thirty-seven years of play therapy have taught her about risk, attention, and...

Celeste Royer has retired from environmental education twice — and she’s still working, this time on a bill headed to the California Senate. Celeste spent over thirty years directing environmental and outdoor education for the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education, running the Rancho El Chorro Outdoor School before becoming a consultant with Ten Strands. She’s been in the room for nearly ever...

A sea otter has no blubber. No fat reserve, no savings account — just fur, and a metabolism that burns through calories almost as fast as it can eat them. Gena Bentall is the founder, director, and senior scientist of Sea Otter Savvy, a Central Coast California nonprofit that's spent ten years turning marine science into behavior change — for kayakers, wildlife photographers, tribal partners,...

Julianna Acuña grew up landlocked in Tucson, Arizona — and fell in love with the ocean anyway, on childhood summer trips to San Diego. One afternoon, swimming out further than she probably should have, a pod of dolphins surfaced close enough to see. She was maybe ten years old. "I think this is my future," she remembers thinking. That moment became a career: a B.S. in Ecology and Evoluti...

Aaron Haiman was six years old the first time he met an ornithologist, wandering the East Bay Hills near his childhood home. That was enough. Twenty-some years later, he's built an entire career, and a philosophy of science communication, on the idea that people only protect what they love — and only love what they already understand. Aaron is a birder, naturalist, and environmental scientist...

A Cinereous Vulture named Clarence didn't like most people. For sixteen-year-old Marco Wendt, working his first summer job at what's now the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, earning that bird's trust anyway became the first lesson in a career built on one idea: you don't get to skip the part where you earn it. Marco is now a spokesperson for San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, where he'...

A ladybug landing on a dysregulated child's arm shouldn't be a behavior intervention strategy. For Amy Reyes-Hauff, it worked anyway — one example of what she calls a "balanced sensory diet" that only the outdoors can provide. Amy is the founder of Get Wild Wyoming, an outdoor learning initiative now serving over 350 classrooms and roughly 6,000 children across the state. She sta...

Scott Shepherd grew up jealous of his cousins, who spoke Spanish at home with their godmother — until the language was deliberately removed from the house out of fear it would hold them back in school. He spent years afterward chasing that language himself, sailing around the world and studying abroad to claim it as his own. This week's guest grew up the opposite way. Sergio Corona-Munoz's...

Scott Shepherd has ADHD, and he didn't have real language for what that meant until he became a teacher and started building accommodations into his own classroom — timers, visual cues, time outside. What he didn't expect: those accommodations helped every student, not just the ones who needed them most. This week's guest discovered the same principle from the opposite side of the desk. Emily Wish...

A sigmoid colectomy took nine inches of Scott Shepherd's intestine and nearly a year of his mobility. For twelve months, he was a member of the disability community he'd never thought much about before. This week's guest has spent her career building access into that community for others. Susie Schroer manages the Youth Empowerment Stewards initiative — YES — placing young adults with...

Ghar Se Bhago. It's a Hindi phrase that means run away from home. But not away from something — toward something. The discomfort of the unfamiliar. The growth that waits just outside your front door. Krishna Patel found that phrase on a sticker at a campsite in the Indian Himalayas after her 21-day NOLS backpacking course. She put it on her Nalgene. It became her life motto. And it might be th...

The beach where Scott Shepherd learned to surf is closed. Not occasionally — up to 300 days a year, Imperial Beach in San Diego County is posted as unsafe for swimming. Decades of inadequately treated sewage from the Tijuana River have contaminated the Pacific Ocean in the southwest corner of the United States. The waves are still there. The water is not safe. This week on Hopeful by Nature, Scott...

Alex Terry's father has been blind most of his life. He couldn't drive, couldn't see the trailhead signs or the snow conditions. But he could get excited. And when a young Alex came home talking about some upcoming adventure, his father would light up — not politely, genuinely. That's what started it. Not perfect outdoor education. Not expert instruction. A blind man getting excite...

She learned to swim two years ago. Now she's teaching kids in Cameroon to dive. Forbah Sandra Ngwemetoh grew up in Limbe — a coastal city on the edge of the Atlantic, inside one of the most biodiverse marine environments in Africa. Environmental science wasn't in the curriculum. Ocean literacy didn't exist in her school. When she became an educator and asked her students what careers they dreamed...