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Category: Environmental Stewardship

Zero Waste Cultura

por Maritza Oropeza

Every year, a total of 100 million pounds of trash is generated by National Park visitors. As much as I love that National Parks grant everyone access to the natural world, I have also seen how humans can ruin these environments unknowingly. I am a firm advocate for the Leave No Trace principles and can’t express enough how important they are. In Latino culture, we are taught that nothing goes to waste. My grandma was reducing, reusing and recycling before it was even a slogan. Before eco-friendly was cool. She would use the Wonder bread bags to pack our lunches on the weekends when we would go to our local pool during the summers. You can never trust a Latino fridge. Was it butter, salsa or frijoles in that reused container? It was a surprise every time.

Maritza Oropeza

You’ll find the use of random Tupperware in almost every Mexican household, including mine. As much as I hated reusing my old shirts as cleaning rags, I understood it more as I got older. My mom and grandma taught me that frugality was a way of life. We were taught to reuse everything and let nothing go to waste. Mexicans are essentially a zero waste society. It wasn’t until much later that I thought about how this attitude could have a much greater impact on the world. If more people took after my grandma and put things to use over and over rather than making them trash immediately, the world wouldn’t be filling with waste. Hard working people around the US, people of modest means, like my grandma, are some of the best environmentalist because they can’t afford not to be. 

Maritza Oropeza

Many of the youth of today have a better understanding of the need to preserve our world for future generations, than we did as children. They can see that they are part of those future generations that we always talk about saving the world for. What they need us to show them are the simple actions they can take in their everyday life to do just that. It’s overwhelming to feel the responsibility to protect the world every day. So, showing kids that the simple act of not throwing something away that can be used again and again can help make them feel powerful. That, coupled with giving them the opportunity to see places unspoiled by reckless consumption has the potential to show them their place in the struggle to preserve our planet. We need to start making decisions for the welfare of all, not for our own convenience. ¡Yo cuento!

Maritza Oropeza lives in Portland, Oregon and volunteers with Latino Outdoors.

My Connection to Nature

por Erynn Castellanos

Growing up we’re told stories about el chupacabra and la llorona, stories our grandparents and parents told us so we wouldn’t be out en la calle all hours of the night as kids, stories on why we should fear the outdoors. These stories helped us believe the narrative that the woods are still a place for us to fear, a place our padres warned us about, places to never go alone.

My grandparents grew up in Sula, San Martín de Hidalgo in Jalisco Mexico, a tiny pueblo a few miles outside of Guadalajara. They moved to the United States when my grandmother was sixteen and my father was a couple months old in the early 1970’s. They settled in Lincoln Heights, California at the height of a polarized political climate. The anti-Latino movement encouraged my parents to stay indoors and to avoid traveling to isolated woods alone. Their concept of the outdoors now meant being outside in the streets, an unsafe place with bullets and gang members. Their connection to nature instead happened in small urban backyard lots.

My grandmother was an environmentalist without being an “environmentalist”. She showed me that I could have a garden filled with limones, guavas, bananas, yerba buena, and nopales. I could water that garden by using the bucket that awkwardly sat in the shower with me so that no drop would be wasted. She taught me how to love her garden, how to be self sufficient and how to feel at peace in nature. My grandma wasn’t an environmentalist, she was a survivor that used every piece of everything she had.

When I was 8 my family moved from Lincoln Heights to a suburb 25 miles East of Los Angeles. When I was stressed my mother would take me, usually against my will, to go for long walks with her “far away” (about 20 miles away) from home. These little adventures became the only thing that would take me out of the complications of my day to day life. I began to find the beauty in morning runs and the feeling of accomplishment in dominating vistas overlooking the valley.

Erynn Castellanos

I was easily labeled as an Environmentalist with a capital “E”, meaning my family thought I was crazy when I became a vegetarian in middle school, and took up sewing patches on my clothes instead of throwing them away. When I got older I wanted to go on hikes with my friends, they called me a crazy adventurer because I didn’t fear the outdoors like they did. Although I had a strong connection to the outdoors, especially the small pockets of nature in my urban jungle, it wasn’t until I finished my degree that I wanted to reform environmental education in my community.

While I was going to school for Communications and Political Science from California State University, Northridge, I began working for an environmental nonprofit. I found some of the biggest challenges in the organization was trying to assist homes of people living in climate vulnerable neighborhoods how their lifestyles could be more sustainable. There was a significant absence of representation at meetings and seminars. Attending these meetings led me to understand that the reasons these issues were present correlated with the lack of access to spaces of nature, and the lack of environmental curriculum in these neighborhoods.

Erynn Castellanos

I am currently the only person of color in my environmental studies cohort in Montana. Now I am looking to be a leader in making the environment a more equitable and welcoming place for people needing to find the same peace and escape that I found. My hope is that in the near future, jobs in conservation, environmental science, and nonprofit work will be flooded with applicants of all colors and backgrounds. I also hope the fear surrounding the Latino community in the outdoors can be faced with the same explorative courage our ancestors(my grandmother) had when they wanted to create a better life for their children

Erynn Castellanos is a Los Angeles area native with a desire to change her city and the world for the better. She graduated from California State University, Northridge with a degree in Communications and Political Science and is currently attending the University of Montana Graduate School for Environmental Studies. Her passions include exploring cities, forests, and literature. Along with pursuing her M.S., Erynn also works to promote educating children (K-5) about Earth sustainability.

The Outdoors over Stores

por Luis Villa

As we begin the home stretch of this hike we call 2019, many of us are starting to turn our attention to the flurry of year-end holidays that annually announces its arrival in the form of candy and mask-stocked store shelves and goes out with a literal bang on the last day of the year. Shoe-horned in between is a notorious Friday that has been Frankensteined into an unofficial shopping holiday, serving as a gaudy example of the rampant consumerism that seems to take center stage during the last several weeks of each year. It is precisely during this time that we have the opportunity to become more cognizant of the forces that pressure us towards a way of life that puts a premium on having more material possessions, prioritizes quantity over quality, and defines “bigger” as being synonymous with “better.”

We owe it to ourselves to question this. I am trying hard to check my own consumptive habits and behaviors, and I admit there is plenty of room for improvement. I buy things that are unnecessary and do not add to the quality of my life, likely even detracting from it. I eat more meat than is necessary and healthy. I often miss opportunities to reduce or reutilize, mistakenly thinking that recycling is enough. I don’t always vote for a sustainable economy with my dollars.

Still, I try to be better each day. I begin by asking myself a simple question: Do I really need this? Then, I do my best to answer honestly, without being influenced by the barrage of media messaging insisting that I cannot do without this or that product or service.

“I begin by asking myself a simple question: Do I really need this? Then, I do my best to answer honestly, without being influenced by the barrage of media messaging insisting that I cannot do without this or that product or service.”

Luis Villa

The author chooses outdoors over stores.

Still, I try to be better each day. I begin by asking myself a simple question: Do I really need this? Then, I do my best to answer honestly, without being influenced by the barrage of media messaging insisting that I cannot do without this or that product or service.

Besides trying to distinguish between necessity and frivolous desire, I also reflect on how a consumptive act on my part, no matter how seemingly small, comes with a corresponding effect on the natural environment. At the beginning of (and elsewhere along) the supply chain leading to a particular good or service, we will find extractive actions exerted upon the planet’s stock of natural resources. Rivers were diverted, trees were felled, metals and coal were mined, oil and natural gas were drilled for (and subsequently burned). A measure of natural capital was somehow converted to manufactured capital. Something was taken from the Earth so that I could have my stuff. For me, one of the starkest examples of this comes from Costa Rica, a country in Central America that I was fortunate enough to call home for 12 years, doing conservation and ecological restoration work there with Nectandra Institute and the rural communities of the Balsa River watershed. In the 1940s, around 80 percent of this tropical country was covered in old-growth forests. During the following decades, that number plummeted to approximately 25 percent, as rain forests and other native woodlands were cut down to make room for grazing lands for the production of beef. Much of that beef was exported to the United States. Forests were cleared from Costa Rica so that some people could have hamburgers.

Finally, I try harder by redefining the idea of “quality of life” and paying attention to how having more material possessions rarely makes me happier in any meaningful way. At Latino Outdoors we are expanding the definition of “outdoor engagement” to be more culturally relevant and representative of the different ways in which Latinxs connect with the outside world, often emphasizing familia y comunidad over individualistic pursuit. In similar fashion and as a global society, we should reimagine the notion of “happiness.” We should better leverage the potential for achieving fulfillment through experiences, not purchases. Madre Naturaleza offers us a wonderful outdoor setting in which to enjoy such experiences, whether individually or together with friends and family.

In a world of ever growing socio-environmental challenges, it’s time we all moved away from the unsustainable idea that bigger is better. Instead, let’s improve the quality of our lives through an approach that emphasizes that actually, less is more.

Let’s choose the outdoors over stores.