Sierra Club Our Wild America Organizer, Christian Gerlach, and his father, Siegfried.
By Christian Gerlach
Many of us are blessed to have learned from the generations that came before us. Knowledge, language, cultural traditions, world views, oral histories, natural resources, and special places connect us; these are handed down to us by those who stewarded such things for us.
I was raised by a wise man who taught me the lessons of our place in time and on this planet, and our role in it. I feel privileged to share those with you today. My father Siegfried Gerlach, whom we unfortunately lost late last year, taught me life-changing lessons as a very young boy, lessons that led me down the path of a profession with the Sierra Club and in land conservation. He taught me I was a mortal being, destined to be once again reunited with the land. I learned from a young age that we borrow resources from future generations. For that reason, we need to act as stewards of the land so that future generations of not only our species, but all species, will exist into perpetuity.
My father learned these lessons from his step grand-father, Ompa Bastischkite, my step-great grandfather. My Father picked up this knowledge from Ompa Bastischkite as a young boy in the 1940s in Bergfelde, Germany. Ompa Bastischkite had learned these lessons from the traditions of the Ojibwe people, with whom he spent time in the early 1900s in and around the Great Lakes. Decades later, my own Father came to Nevada in the 1960s to work at the local telephone company, Centel. He made friends with coworkers who were members of the Moapa band of Paiutes and the Western Shoshone Nations. My father, Siegfried, spent lots of time in the wild landscapes of Nevada with these friends. It is what led him to fall in love with the local history, traditions like pine nut picking, and the vast landscapes of our public lands.
And for me, that story has now come full circle. Today, I work closely with friends--people I consider family-- who are members and descendants of the Nuwu or Southern Paiutes Peoples, and the Newe or Western Shoshone. In support of them, we work together to advocate for the conservation of lands in Nevada-- which are these communities’ traditional and ancestral lands that were taken from them forcibly. Their history is embedded in these places, and they continue to work on handing down their intergenerational knowledge and traditions which were once almost eradicated with boarding schools and colonization.
My work with the Sierra Club has always been about preserving natural resources that have been stewarded for us by past generations. Sometimes preservation has been done well, but not always. The traditional knowledge many of us have received from our ancestors is now what scientists and national governments across the globe are calling for--to preserve the natural world and the systems that provide us and all species on this planet clean air, water, and life itself. The Sierra Club is heeding this call with our new initiative to protect 30 percent of our planet’s public lands, waters, oceans and green spaces between now and the year 2030.
There are several places that will always be near and dear to our hearts from the memories we have of them and the people we shared those places with. Many of those places which are also not yet recognized and protected. We must urge our leaders to act to preserve as many of those special places and natural world so that future generations may continue to explore, enjoy, and protect them one day too.
Take action today. Tell your Governor to support protecting 30% of your state by 2030.