By Elizabeth Dodge
The Green Friday speaker series is beaming straight into your home via Zoom! Join us virtually on the second Friday of each month at 7:30 p.m. for presentations on some of the most interesting and important environmental issues of our time. Read more and register (free) via the calendar listings on our Activities and Events calendar or using the links below, and we’ll send you instructions for how to join via Zoom. Catch up on past Green Friday programs on our YouTube channel.
Sep. 10 — Tales and Trails of California’s Mountains
Prepare to be inspired by outdoors writer Matt Johanson’s presentation “Tales and Trails of California’s Mountains,” a motivating tour of Golden State adventures. Matt will share photography, history, and personal experiences from his guidebooks, especially his newest work, California Summits. Expect plenty of beginner-friendly trip suggestions and advice on elevating your enjoyment of the outdoors, especially climbing.
Matt Johanson writes about the outdoors for numerous California newspapers and magazines. Matt’s outdoor books include Yosemite Epics, Yosemite Adventures, and Sierra Summits. His newest work California Summits guides climbers of all abilities atop 50 achievable mountains throughout the Golden State.
Oct. 8 — Tule Elk in Point Reyes National Seashore
Julie Phillips will share her expertise in nature-based teaching with a focus on the rare tule elk, found only in California and at the center of a controversial plan to shoot them in the Point Reyes National Seashore. Julie studies current tule elk locations (and compares those locations to established home range data from 30 years ago) to better understand tule elk natural history and the impacts of land use patterns and human disturbance on long-range re-establishment of the tule elk historical range.
Julie Phillips has an M.A. in Biological Sciences from San Jose State University with a focus on wildlife management. She spent seven years studying habitat utilization and acclimation of reintroduced tule elk in areas throughout California, including the Mt. Hamilton region of the Diablo Range, the Gabilan Range, the Temblor Range, and throughout the Carrizo Plains. Julie published A Citizen’s Guide to Tule Elk in 2013.
Nov. 12 — How Human Impacts Are Amplifying California Tree Diseases
Matteo Garbelotto will explain how the intersection of climate change, anthropogenic pressure, and emergent diseases is a major threat to California trees. His talk will explore four types of tree pathogens: invasive exotic pathogens recently introduced in California from other regions of the world; invasive pathogens, exotic and not, long present in California that have recently moved into forests from agricultural or horticultural settings; native pathogens whose impact has increased exponentially because of modern forest management practices; and latent pathogens that are triggered into becoming aggressive, deadly pathogens by climate change. Together, these four types of pathogens are capable of reshaping the distribution, composition, and structure of California forests within a single human generation.
Matteo Garbelotto is a Cooperative Extension Specialist and Adjunct Professor at U.C. Berkeley and the director of the Forest Pathology and Mycology Laboratory.
Chapter Seeking New Volunteer Green Friday Program Coordinator!
Are you interested in getting more involved in Chapter activities? You can help organize our educational speaker series, Green Fridays, held on the second Friday of every month! The position requires about three hours of work per month finding speakers, coordinating with Chapter staff, and setting up meetings (on Zoom for now), along with attending the monthly two-hour presentations.
If you’d like to help bring interesting and informative speakers to our members, please contact Joanne Drabek at joanne1892@gmail.com. We’d like to extend a huge thank you to Elizabeth Dodge for all of her hard work as our Program Coordinator the past few years! If you have any questions about the position, you can contact her at lizdodge@icloud.com.
Photo credit: Mother and calf tule elk in Point Reyes by AdititheStargazer via Flickr Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).