Meet LandPaths - Sharing Our Love Of Nature Every Step Of The Way

Director's View - Winter 2010

Welcome to LandPaths' quarterly Calendar of Outings for the Winter of 2010. As a local nonprofit working to build a better world starting here at home, LandPaths works with a diverse array of community partners - including you - to connect people to the landscapes of Sonoma County. Most outings in this calendar visit wild and working lands protected by your County's Agricultural Preservation & Open Space District (the District).

For this New Year I am excited to share with you, in brief, the upshot of a strategic planning exercise completed by our staff and board this past year. It is noteworthy because it charts a course for the year and because it is already having an impact on how LandPaths continues to plan for success. That said, if LandPaths is successful four conditions need to occur:

1) Healthy Land & Healthy Nature Exists;

2) People have access to the land;

3) People know about / understand the land; and,

4) People act from care for the land.

To explore this momentarily, How will an interim measure to open new public land - the LandPaths-managed Willow Creek addition to Sonoma Coast State Park - adapt as a now-functioning park access model for the longer term so that people both understand and work even harder to care for it? Or, What can we do in order to truly insure greater access to the Bayer Farm/Park in urban Santa Rosa? These questions are vitally important to the aforementioned lands, and to Santa Rosa's Taylor Mountain as we embark on opening up this property in partnership with the District, Regional Parks and volunteers from hiking, biking and equine groups.

In the same moment, ‘Healthy Land Exists' can be satisfied by efforts to set aside and steward - when necessary - wildness for nature's sake. LandPaths' Riddell Preserve is a case in point. Ultimately, these ‘conditions for success' clearly require not only a team-oriented approach, but an enormous team. That is, in order for LandPaths to be successful at its work it must partner, and partner well, with other nonprofits, local government, citizen groups and area businesses.

~Craig Anderson, executive director