Ranchers share educational programs at Quivira Coalition’s “No Child Left Inside” roundtable

By Page Lambert

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Author of the best-selling memoir In Search of Kinship: Modern Pioneering on the Western Landscape

On January 18, 523 people gathered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to attend the 6th annual Quivira Coalition Conference www.quiviracoalition.org. Quivira, a non-profit organization located in Santa Fe, was founded in 1977 by a rancher and two environmentalists. The group’s mission is to foster ecological, economic and social health on western landscapes through education, innovation, collaboration, and progressive public and private land stewardship.

At last year’s Quivira conference, keynote speaker Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, suggested that farms and ranches could be ideal locations for innovative, land-based youth education. This year, Quivira rose to the challenge, hosting a “No Child Left Inside” roundtable discussion. Courtney White, executive director of Quivira, expected a few dozen folks to participate. Instead, over 100 showed up, all eager to explore ways in which farms and ranches could become outdoor schoolyards.

Included in the gathering were ranchers, students, environmentalists, federal range conservationists, state park employees, educators, restoration business owners, and tribal members. More than 8 western states were represented. Students from the Santa Fe Girls School, Bosque School, School on Wheels, and from the Camino de Paz Farm School, spoke to the group about their outdoor classroom experiences.

A student from School on Wheels, who has been working with the conservation group River Source, Inc., spoke about his experiences planting trees on a watershed project. “What I love about this is that I actually get to go out there and see it, touch it, feel it.” When asked if he would be more apt to go work on a ranch now, he said, “Yes. If it affects the natural world, then it affects me.”

Students at Camino de Paz Farm School, a Montessori middle school in Santa Cruz, New Mexico, spend much of their school day outside tending chickens, raising sheep and goats, carding wool, harnessing their two Belgian work horses, and planting and harvesting crops. Every Saturday, at least two students go to Santa Fe to help sell the school’s produce at the local farmer’s market.

Many of the ranchers who attended the roundtable have already been hosting student groups. Tuda Libby Crews and Jack Crews, of the Ute Creek Cattle Company in New Mexico, have had educational events at their ranch since 2003. In addition to giving student tours of their specially designed, low-stress corrals and handling pens, Tuda spoke to the group about Ute Creek’s wild bird sanctuary. 82 people attended the 2004 wild bird workshop for students, held in partnership with the Rocky Mountain Bird Preserve out of Fort Collins, Colorado. “The presence of a diverse species of birds tells us the health of an ecosystem,” Tuda informed us, “and each year, we find more and more new species here at the ranch.”

Linda and Dave Overlin, of the Chico Basin Ranch, an 87,000-acre ranch owned by the State of Colorado, have an astounding 800 – 1000 students visit each year. Chico Basin, the largest conservation reserve tract of land in Colorado, has been home to abundant species of wildlife and large cattle herds for over 100 years. The ranch also has one of the healthiest, intact sand-sage ecosystems in the country. The state wanted the land to remain a model working cattle ranch with a strong conservation and education component. Linda, a science teacher, was named Colorado’s Conservation Teacher of the Year in 2002. Linda tailors all programs to fit the needs of the K-12 and college students who visit Chico Basin. She estimates that 80% of them have never before been on a ranch. Many of the programs have formal components, but not all student activities are structured. “Sometimes we just go out and we sit in the grass, and we pretend we’re prairie dogs,” said Linda, “or we clip the grass and pretend we’re cows, measuring how much it would take for us to live off the land.”

Chico Basin Ranch is also unique because, unlike most of Colorado, it has abundant water. Healthy riparian areas provide habitat for a wide variety of wildlife. The Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory Education and Bird Banding Station at The Chico Basin Ranch, one of only 6 bird banding sites in Colorado, provides educational programs where students learn about bird adaptations, migration, healthy bird habitat, the how’s and why’s of banding birds, etc. Of the 800-1000 students who come to Chico Basin Ranch, nearly 500 a year visit the bird observatory.

During the Quivira roundtable discussion, it was obvious that ranchers and farmers like Tuda and Jack Crews and Dave and Linda Overlin, care about the land because they have, over a lifetime, forged intimate relationships with the land. The programs they manage on these ranches help students to also learn to care about the landscape by allowing them opportunities to forge their own relationships with the land, something the majority of them have never had a chance to do.

Peter Forbes, executive director of the Center for Whole Communities, www.wholecommunities.org (last year’s keynote speaker) believes, as the ranchers do, that the conservation movement will not truly succeed until we can save not only places, but the relationships with these places. Through an intimate connection with the land, and through the stories that arise from these connections, we will be able to save our wilderness areas, and our farms and ranches, for future generations.

Thursday evening, following the roundtable, over 500 attended the keynote talk and discussion given by renowned writer, conservationist and farmer, Wendell Berry. Many of the questions posed by the audience centered not only on discovering ways to re-inhabit the landscapes we love, but on questions of rediscovering nurturing methods to farm and ranch the land. “Our nation needs twenty percent of its population involved in agriculture,” Berry told the crowd, “instead of the mere two percent we have now.”

It was clear from the concerns voiced by the audience, and the discussion during the roundtable session, that it is critical that we continue to find ways to reconnect ourselves, and our children, to the land. But as Berry pointed out, it is equally important that we find ways for those already on the land, young people raised on ranches and farms, to stay on the land. Their land-based wisdom represents an invaluable contribution to our nation’s consciousness. Berry told the rapt audience, “The most precious people our nation has ever produced, are those young people on the land today.”

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Page Lambert is the author of the best-selling memoir In Search of Kinship: Modern Pioneering on the Western Landscape, has been writing passionately about the natural world for fifteen years, finding her own spirituality deeply connected to the Colorado mountains where she grew up, and to the Wyoming ranch where she reared her children. Her nature-informed writing portrays an intimate look at the strands of life that connect us all.

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