Five Takeaways from the City’s Nature-Based Climate Solutions Conversation

Hi, I'm Marty Matsch. I'm the Deputy Director at Eco-Cycle, and Eco-Cycle is a homegrown Boulder County nonprofit organization. Founded in 1976, we made Boulder one of the first communities in the nation to offer curbside recycling to its residents. And we are now one of the oldest and largest nonprofit recyclers and zero waste organizations in the US, and we have now an international reputation as a leader and innovator in resource conservation. Our mission is to innovate, implement and advocate for local and global zero waste solutions to foster a more regenerative, equitable and climate resilient future. Eco-Cycle is proud to be a part of the Cool Bolder program, and one of the many ways we're partnering in the effort is by engaging our network of more than 1000 volunteer Eco-Leaders. The volunteer Eco-Leader network has long been the backbone of Eco-Cycle and how we are able to create change.

These volunteers go through a series of trainings with us at Eco-Cycle to become the local person-in-the-know and a resource for all things zero waste so that they can turn around and share their zero waste knowledge with their social networks, in their neighborhoods, in their workplace, their clubs and places of worship. Their superpower is that they are helping to create change right where they live and everywhere they go. Our Eco-Leaders care deeply about natural resources and climate, and they want to do everything they can to both mitigate climate change and to adapt our communities to be more resilient in the face of climate change. In 2018, we engaged this network in a three year pilot program to help with what we call our Community Carbon Farming Campaign, where volunteers trial the use of compost and other compost products in their backyards, applying these to their soils, to determine whether we can use urban landscapes, particularly yards to help draw down and sequester carbon safely and beneficially in the soil.

Now that we've closed out the carbon farming trial, that three year period has come to a close, these volunteers are ready to share what they've learned with the whole community, and it ties in beautifully with what the Cool Boulder program is trying to do. Eco-Leaders are ready to share what they know about carbon farming on urban landscapes to build healthy soils for the sake of creating absorbent landscapes. These volunteers are also lining up to help with Bool Boulder projects, like heat mapping throughout the community and for helping to generate and distribute compost that they themselves generate for the purposes of sharing with their neighbors and networks. The goal of the Cool Boulder program is that it truly be a community-based effort, and the engagement of the Eco-Cycle Eco-Leader network is a great way to really make change with trained community members working backyard by backyard and neighborhood by neighborhood.

My name is Morgan Crowley. I am the Habitats and Invasive Species Program Manager for Wildlands Restoration Volunteers. We focus on doing ecological restoration projects, primarily, that engage volunteers with our land management partners all over the state. Our work takes us from like the prairies, all the way up into high alpine environments, doing work that can be anything from collecting native seeds to removing invasive species, improving trails for sustainability, closing old four wheel drive roads, and then you know, doing a lot of restoration following floods and wildfires. Our projects can range from like an afternoon maybe collecting native seed nearby to an urban center – and those are a little bit more accessible and open to families and younger volunteers – to anything from like three or four days in a backcountry setting moving rocks that are a bit more technical and physically demanding.

One of the things that I'm really most excited about in partnering with Cool Boulder is, you know, I think we're trying to find some opportunities to bring some of our – what WRV has been doing with wet meadow restoration kind of more in Western Colorado, we're going to try to bring that to the Front Range. So to give you a little bit of a background in what we've been doing out West, WRV initially became involved with this kind of work back in 2014, when we were invited to partner with the Gunnison Climate Working Group to try to address critical habitat loss for the federally threatened Gunnison Sage Grouse. So they had brought in this stream restoration expert Bill Zeedyk, who developed these really innovative methods for restoring and reversing erosion in dry or arid landscapes. So, that's pretty much all of Colorado. People commonly call them Zeedyk structures, because they're named for Bill.

The structures themselves are mostly really simple and relatively small rock structures, which is great because that makes them very well suited for volunteer work. They're designed to do a variety of things from stopping erosion from advancing, slowing down water and trapping sediment so that they can build eroded creek beds back up. So these structures really work to retain moisture in the landscape. We run probably 200 to 250 volunteer events every year. All of these opportunities are easy to find on our website wlrv.org. You know, especially now when there are so many challenges facing us, it really gives people a way to concretely give back and bring some more hope into the picture.