My Fond Farewell to ForestWatch

I was leaving Chinatown and heading into Little Italy one hot, muggy afternoon in late July when Jeff Kuyper, ForestWatch’s Executive Director, called me to talk about a job I had applied for earlier that summer. It was 2016, and I was in New York City for the first time in my life, taking a quick train up from Washington D.C. after a work conference there earlier in the week. This was the call I was hoping to get for weeks. Two interviews later, Jeff offered me the role of ForestWatch’s very first Conservation Director.

To this day, I’m not sure why Jeff hired me, a guy from Arkansas who had little knowledge at the time about chaparral, California condors, or wildfire. I was in my mid-twenties with a master’s degree in environmental science and just a couple of years of nonprofit experience under my belt. I knew next to nothing about the Central Coast or its many unique and complicated issues. Nevertheless, I’ll be forever grateful that Jeff took a chance on me—I can’t imagine a life where I didn’t move to Santa Barbara and work at ForestWatch for nearly a decade.

Our staff total increased to three when I joined. Jeff gave me a tiny yet very charming office in an old apartment building turned office space on Mission Street. A map of the southern Los Padres National Forest, complete with circled points of interest and little notes left by a former ForestWatch employee and local legend, Craig Carey, hung on my wall. I studied that and countless other maps, read books like the A Naturalist’s Guide to the Santa Barbara Region by Joan Easton Lentz (of course I’m plugging the ForestWatch Bookstore in my farewell post), and scoured the web for any information that could help me better understand this amazing landscape.

About a month into the job, we took a “short” staff backpacking trip into Santa Paula Canyon. Seeing bigcone Douglas-firs in person for the first time was something special. I could have done without the serious poison oak rash all over my arm a few days later, though if you’ve ever been on a guided hike with me, you know I have a deep love for this special native plant. But that two-night trip was when I started to really understand why Los Padres National Forest is so alluring and so worthy of protection.

Over the next few years, I became completely enamored with everything about the region. While working on our Save the Carrizo Plain campaign in 2017, I was able to visit the national monument during an April superbloom, which ignited my passion for its big open spaces and incredible diversity of plants and animals. I fell in love with plants like the chaparral yucca and its gorgeous flowers covered with little yucca moths. Soon after, I fell into a chaparral yucca while leading a volunteer tamarisk survey along Manzana Creek. Fortunately, my hands and rear end broke my fall, but unfortunately, I learned that yucca leaf tips like to bury themselves deep in the skin and break off. Removing them involved some tweezers and a surprising amount of bleeding, but it was nothing compared to one of my SUV tires being fully punctured and flattened by a dried out piece of yucca on the drive home.

Working at ForestWatch wasn’t all just lions and yuccas and bears, though. I spent a fair amount of time analyzing project proposals and writing long, detailed comment letters expressing our concerns about the many different issues affecting public lands. At least a couple of those letters ended up being longer than my master’s thesis, which would be quite the suprise to grad school me.

I quickly found that I absolutely love making maps. I’ve been fortunate enough to make maps for nearly every interesting thing we’ve worked on at ForestWatch, whether it be about trails, wildfire, and plants and wildlife, or about proposals we were fighting, such as oil drilling, logging, and more. A couple of my favorite maps I’ve made were animated, showing the movements of black bears and California condors.

Perhaps more than anything, I’ve enjoyed getting to meet so many wonderful people while at ForestWatch: tireless volunteers willing to spend hours picking up pieces of lead at old target shooting sites, budding plant nerds oohing and ahhing on our guided nature hikes, teams of friends and families competing for the glory of winning one of our nature themed trivia nights, the talented Board of Directors giving their time and expertise to advance the organization, and, of course, our many donors always eager to help protect the places we all love.

And then there are my coworkers. I have never known such passionate people as the staff at ForestWatch. Day in and day out, these amazing individuals pour their heart and soul into carrying out the organization’s important mission. I have been so lucky to have worked with each and every one of them over the years. I’ve been even luckier to call them friends.

Now, I’m moving on to serve as the first Director of Advocacy and Education at Runners for Public Lands. I was a founding board member for that organization and am so excited to help be part of its growth in a new capacity.

While I’m excited about the adventures that lie ahead, the hardest part about all of this is leaving ForestWatch and my circle of colleagues, friends, and supporters here. But I have no doubt the organization will continue to thrive after I’m gone and will continue its successful track record of protecting these lands and the cherished memories they forge for all of us.

I’m not going far. You may still hear from me from time to time, and maybe we’ll even cross paths on the trail, bump into each other unexpectedly while birding, or stumble upon (but hopefully not onto) a yucca together. Until then, from the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone—and every place of wild splendor—that made my experience at ForestWatch unforgettable.

For the forest,

Bryant