When young people experience education outside in the fresh air, something magical happens. They get to be a kid. They relax more, breathe deeper, their nervous systems grow calmer and their minds open up. Summer camps are about to begin and Sonoma Ecology Center is ready to help local kids experience the great outdoors of Sonoma County in their summer science camps.

For Sonoma Ecology Center that’s not just a summertime event. The SEC goes into local classrooms to teach environmental education focused on the Sonoma Creek Watershed and then takes students on field trips to experience a bit of what they’ve been learning about.

Tony Passantino, SEC education program manager believes this type of education is important for young people.

“I think that the main thing with environmental education is really taking off our shoes and putting our feet back in the grass and identifying with what’s real in this world,” he said.

Passantino noted that in today’s world we get so into our mind that we get out of our body and the land that we’re on.

“The somatic experience of identifying ourselves on this planet and as a part of a system, rather than a silo, is really important to learn at a young age so we can develop those skills of community and stewardship as we get older,” he said. “And kids, you know, they tap right into it. I mean it doesn’t take them long when they’re at a field trip at Sugarloaf or at the [Sonoma] Garden Park, that feeling of awe immediately comes back to them.”

He said they can tell the kids are having a good day at the garden when the leaders call them for lunch and the kids aren’t ready to stop yet. He said that’s the moment when they know the kids are truly invested and excited about this opportunity to be outside.

Not just for kids

SEC also has programs for older students through their EnviroLeaders and the California Naturalist Program. EnviroLeaders must be 14 years old and are recruited to work a few hours per week with SEC staff at the Sonoma Garden Park and other parks in Sonoma Valley. They learn about things like irrigation, drought tolerant landscaping, organic farming and park management. The California Naturalist Program is for college age or advanced high school students and college units are available.

Tony Passantino shows Jenelle Strand and Gabby Reed how to make a spiral herb tower. Students in the Enviro-Leaders program learn about sustainable agriculture and environmental restoration working in the Sonoma Garden Park (Photo by John Burgess/The Press Democrat, 2015 File photo)

Internships are available through SEC. New staff member Mickey Abate was hired last fall after completing an internship with the Sonoma Garden Park. She is now an environmental educator and garden-nursery assistant.

Abate finished her master’s degree in ecology, spirituality and religion with a focus on education and critical methodology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in early May. She is continuing to learn about environmental thought, practice and things such as biodynamic farming.

Her study of spirituality brings an added element to her work.

“It is impossible to separate spirituality and religion from ecology and our understanding of where we are and how we got to be here,” she said. “The ways that we are taught to connect to place and taught to understand the land around us, I think is, especially in Sonoma, kind of inextricable from what we might consider religion or spirituality.”

Passantino said he appreciates what Abate brings to the program.

“Mickey comes in with a very interesting and creative way that she is conveying the goals that we’re trying to reach these youth on,” he said. “She has the higher-level learning from her graduate studies. She’s got the local resource of being a Sonoma Valley graduate from the community. She’s just kind of coming onto her own feet herself and her career path and so she’s kind of identifying with the younger population more easily.”

Abate grew up in Sonoma Valley and went to Woodland Star Charter School and Sonoma Valley High. She said she was very studious, but she performed in school theater and was in track and field.

“I have a lot of roots here,” she said. “I grew up working at the Meals on Wheels, and the two women who ran it were like grandmothers to me. My aunt helped found Woodland Star. So I’ve been kind of a country mouse for a lot of my life until I graduated high school.”

Abate said her favorite thing about Sonoma Valley is the people.

“It’s that community spirit of getting together and doing something, whether that be harvest markets or fundraising after the fires,” she said. “I work at Plain Janes and so I see a lot of community action in terms of resale and people giving recommendations for services. I think it’s got a lot of that small town close-knit culture. It’s very connected here and people want to be connected.”

Learning about farming

Abate said many of the Sonoma Valley kids she’s working with tend to be familiar with farming. Even so, she said she and her students are learning together about farming practices that support healthy soil and biodiversity.

She noted that Sonoma Garden Park is one of many places around the county that’s trying to address farming in a way that is beneficial to the entire land rather than just one product. “It actually is so much more productive in the long term,” she said.

Abate’s work with SEC is varied and she said she loves all of it and that it’s rather like a mosaic. She said sometimes the work allows for retrospection. “Whether I’m just setting up for a class or if I’m even hauling dirt, when I’m alone I find myself thinking back on experiences with people who have changed the way I see the land and the world around me,” she said. “My favorite part is being able to be in sync with the land and think with it and remember with it.”

During the school year she helps with environmental education in local classrooms. All of the lessons are directly tied to the wildlife, plants and landscapes that the students have grown up seeing. She said sometimes they are able to teach the classes outside in the school gardens.

The lessons are expanded further when they take students on field trips to immerse them in the landscapes they’ve been studying and invite them to use their senses to see what more they might learn. Abate said they take field trips to places like Sonoma Garden Park, Montini Open Space Preserve, Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, Van Hoosear Wildflower Preserve and the Sonoma Botanical Garden.

Abate said she hopes to instill a sense of curiosity and bravery into the kids she works with.

“It’s an essential aspect of being able to grapple with the current state of our planet and whatever the future might hold,” she said.

She also has been learning a lot from the kids she works with and sometimes that’s simply because they’re closer to the earth.

“They are so much smaller, they have a different perspective,” she said. “They’re seeing the world literally 3 feet below the world I’m seeing, and so their eyes can catch monarch caterpillars where mine can’t. They are faster to see animal tracks on the ground or to spy scat.”

She tries to relate the garden experience to what the kids are into at the moment and she’s constantly changing her lessons accordingly.

“I’m happy to relate back to them, you know, how this garden might seem like their garden video game,” she said. “So they keep kind of expanding my reference of what they’re connecting with and what they’re excited by. What they’re excited by is what I want to teach.”

This will be Abate’s first season with the SEC summer camps.

Summer camps

“I love having my firsts in this job because I’ll oftentimes be having them alongside students who have also never done that thing before, so we’re able to sort of learn and gain our footing together,” she said.

The Earth Explorers Camp is held at Sonoma Garden Park for 6 to 11 year olds. The camp hosts three, weeklong sessions in June. SEC partners with local master gardeners to help teach the campers about local food sources. They’ll learn about gardening, compost and they’ll get to help feed the chickens.

They’ll get to enjoy a nature play center with a water fountain, a seesaw and other great activities. They’ll be doing nature crafts and playing games. “There’s going to be plenty of raspberries and blackberries to eat, which is always a highlight, might I say, of the Sonoma Garden Park,” Abate said.

Creek Camp at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park is for kids ages 8 to 12 with four, weeklong sessions held in July. Passantino said Creek Camp would be a good fit for those kids who might be more of the young up-and-coming backpackers, hikers and kids that like to go camping. They’ll be hiking on Sugarloaf trails down to the waterfall and up to the vista lookout. They’ll also have guest lecturers visiting to talk about reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates with a higher level kind of biology experience.

“Obviously it’s going to be summer and it’s going to be hot, so it’s called Creek Camp for a reason,” Passantino said. “We’re going to get wet and we’re going to have them exploring knee deep in the creeks as we’re wandering around checking out what we can find under rocks and logs.”

Abate said she’s looking forward to all the hikes at Creek Camp and playing games in the forest.

She will be doing bug hunts at both camps and she thinks that is a really good exercise for kids of all ages. It inspires thoughts and questions like, ‘I’m scared of this bug, but can it hurt me? I’m a huge, clumsy giant to this bug.’ “You know, pushing those thoughts about what we might be nervous about with the creepy crawlies, and also the really cool stuff, you know, like the butterflies and dragonflies,” she said.

They even have a tie-dye workshop planned. “I’m really looking forward to this summer,” she said. “It should be a lot of fun.”

Abate mentioned that she has two amazing people helping to guide her in this work, her co-workers Camille Miller Sanchez and Jonny Ehlers.

“They are wonderful instructors and it’s so clear in everything they do how much they care about the experience of the kids, the land around them and having a good safe time,” she said.

Just like those camp counselors, Passantino noted that SEC does not work alone. They have a partnership with many other environmental education providers around the county, and they work in coordination through the Sonoma Environmental Education Collaborative.

They are trying to identify the schools across the county that are under-resourced for environmental education and trying to find partners that can help fill those gaps.

“Many of the school districts in our county are in a deficit and unfortunately environmental education is being cut,” he said. “I don’t want to argue against the other things that they have to cut. I mean, there’s a lot of things they’re losing in the schools, but environmental education is one of them.”

Passantino said that through their environmental education, SEC hopes to inspire children to want to come back to the Sonoma Garden Park, to Sugarloaf, or any of the other wonderful outdoor areas SEC takes them on school field trips.

“Environmental education should be an everyday experience,” he said. “And so when they have that fervor, when they have that excitement and say ‘it wasn’t enough, we want more,’ that’s another sign that we’re doing our job.”

For more information on programs and to check on any open spots at the SEC summer camps, visit https://sonomaecologycenter.org/science-camps.