Hopeful By Nature

Most people haven't connected the proposed Meta settlement of up to $17 billion to outdoor learning yet. In Part 2 of this conversation, Karen Cowe and Craig Strang of Ten Strands make the case for what "responsible optimism" actually means when the stakes are this high — and answer a harder question: does hope actually work as a motivator, or do we need fear instead?

This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation. Part 1 covers AB 2158, now in Senate Appropriations with a hearing scheduled for September 28 — listen to that one first if you haven't.

In this episode:

• What the proposed multistate Meta settlement of up to $17 billion would fund if approved

• What it could mean for outdoor learning, and what it doesn't guarantee

• Karen's line for the whole conversation: "less screen time, more green time"

• The global movement toward outdoor learning — the UK, Maine, and beyond

• A real answer to whether hope or fear better motivates climate-era kids

• How to plug into this work, wherever you live

ABOUT KAREN COWE Founding CEO of Ten Strands. 🌐 tenstrands.org

ABOUT CRAIG STRANG Consultant; Associate Director Emeritus, Lawrence Hall of Science, UC Berkeley. 🌐 tenstrands.org

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Craig Strang almost didn't take the class that set his entire career in motion — he thought "five units for a beach field trip" had to be a scam. Fifty years later, he and Karen Cowe are behind a California bill that passed every committee unanimously and still didn't make it through.

Karen Cowe is the founding CEO of Ten Strands, the California nonprofit that's spent thirteen years connecting nearly every environmental literacy effort in the state. Craig Strang spent 32 years at UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science before going independent, and now co-leads the California Campaign for Outdoor Learning alongside Karen.

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation about what it takes to build a coalition of 700+ people across party lines — and what happens when the bill they built together gets held in the Senate Appropriations "suspense file" at the last possible step.

In this episode:

• How Ten Strands became the connective tissue for California's environmental education field

• Karen's path from math textbook publishing to founding a nonprofit

• Craig's origin story: a freshman-year course at Año Nuevo that set a 50-year career in motion

• What AB 2158 actually would have required of California schools

• The moment the bill got held in the suspense file — and why

• What Karen and Craig are already planning for 2027

ABOUT KAREN COWE Founding CEO of Ten Strands. 🌐 tenstrands.org

ABOUT CRAIG STRANG Consultant; Associate Director Emeritus, Lawrence Hall of Science, UC Berkeley. 🌐 tenstrands.org

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

What if the thing standing between your kid and a national park pass isn't belief — it's a budget line? Jackie Ostfeld has spent 20 years finding out, first as a naturalist teaching thousands of kids directly, then as the policy leader who helped build — and twice had to save — the program that gets every American fourth grader into their public lands for free.

Jackie directs Sierra Club's Outdoors for All campaign and co-founded the Outdoors Alliance for Kids, a coalition of 100+ organizations working to close the nature gap in access to the outdoors.

In this conversation, she and Scott trace her path from a segregated South Carolina classroom to the halls of Congress, and unpack why getting kids outside turns out to be one of the few genuinely bipartisan issues left — and why that still isn't enough to guarantee it gets funded.

In this episode:

• Why "the nature gap" is measured in zip codes, not attitudes

• The real story behind the Every Kid Outdoors pass and the fight to save it from being cut

• How a 100+ organization coalition got built out of a single 2010 meeting

• UC Berkeley's research on awe: a 29% drop in PTSD symptoms after a wilderness rafting trip

• Why almost nobody actually disagrees kids need to be outside — and where the real fight is

• The new One Million Kids Outdoors campaign and how to get involved

• Simple ways to bring more awe into a 20-minute walk with your own kids

ABOUT JACKIE OSTFELD Director, Sierra Club Outdoors for All campaign; co-founder, Outdoors Alliance for Kids. 🌲 sierraclub.org/outdoors-for-all

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.

For years, Odalis Avalos believed that speaking Spanish as her first language was a disadvantage. Then she helped teach a lesson about bees to a room of bilingual elementary kids, and everything about how she saw her own language changed.

Odalis, Christian Trujillo, and Diana are the co-founders of Ciencia Para Todos — Science for Everyone — a volunteer-run organization that trains future STEM educators and teaches science to Spanish-speaking families across California.

What started as an angry flyer at Cal Poly Humboldt in 2019, born out of feeling unwelcome in their own environmental science classrooms, has grown into a statewide movement built on one idea: bilingualism isn't a gap to close. It's a superpower.

In this episode:

• How a single 2019 flyer became a statewide bilingual STEM organization

• Why Spanish went from feeling like a disadvantage to a superpower

• Building science vocabulary in Spanish from scratch, with no formal training

• Partnerships with US Fish and Wildlife, NASA, and Redwood Parks Conservancy

• Why belonging to a culture doesn't require fluency in its language

• What Ciencia Para Todos needs most right now — and how to help

• A mid-episode note on Latino Conservation Week, September 12–20

ABOUT CIENCIA PARA TODOS A volunteer-run nonprofit training future STEM educators and teaching science to Spanish-speaking families and students across California. 🌱 https://hsucienciapt.wixsite.com/original

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Jamie Lynn Langley had just finished teaching a room of therapists how to help kids safely assess the risk of climbing a tree — when to stop, how to guide instead of forbid — when they stepped outside and passed a dad doing exactly that with his son. She didn't plan it. This week, Jamie joins Scott to talk about what thirty-seven years of play therapy have taught her about risk, attention, and why she now writes some clients literal prescriptions to go outside.

Jamie is a licensed clinical social worker and instructor at Middle Tennessee State University, and past president of the Tennessee Association for Play Therapy. The first fifteen years of her career were traditional, indoor play therapy; the rest has been built around what she calls nature play therapy, after discovering Richard Louv's work on nature deficit disorder two decades ago.

The conversation moves through her concept of "hummingbird parenting" — flitting in and out instead of hovering — her research-backed "Big Three" case for getting kids outside, and the simple tools, a magnifying glass, a pair of binoculars, that can turn a child afraid of bugs into a discoverer.

IN THIS EPISODE

• What play therapy and nature-based therapy actually look like

• Why kids increasingly don't know how to play without instructions

• Hummingbird parenting vs. helicopter parenting

• The research case for risk: as safe as needed, not as safe as possible

• The "Big Three": focus and mood, cortisol, and long-term wellbeing

• Nature prescriptions, nature play kits, and trading screen time for green time

• Making nature accessible when time, transportation, or safety are real barriers

ABOUT JAMIE LYNN LANGLEY

LCSW and instructor at Middle Tennessee State University, specializing in play, expressive arts, and nature-based therapy. Past president, Tennessee Association for Play Therapy.

ABOUT YOUR HOST

Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Celeste Royer has retired from environmental education twice — and she’s still working, this time on a bill headed to the California Senate.

Celeste spent over thirty years directing environmental and outdoor education for the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education, running the Rancho El Chorro Outdoor School before becoming a consultant with Ten Strands. She’s been in the room for nearly every major piece of California’s environmental literacy infrastructure since 2014 — the state Blueprint, the California Environmental Literacy Initiative, and now AB 2158, the Outdoor Learning and Environmental Literacy Act of 2026, which just passed the State Assembly 77 to 0.

Celeste and host Scott Shepherd talk about what it actually takes to get people who disagree about nearly everything else to agree on kids — and why the bill’s coalition went looking for support from pediatricians and English-language-learner specialists before it ever wrote a page of legislation.

In this episode:

- How AB 2158 passed the California Assembly with unanimous, bipartisan support

- Why “student health” became the unifying frame for the outdoor learning campaign

- The California Environmental Literacy Initiative’s Partner Portal, and how it connects teachers to nearly 700 community-based organizations

- Scott’s own research on field trips and school motivation

- What forty years in one field, and two retirements, actually teaches you about advocacy

ABOUT CELESTE ROYER Celeste Royer is a consultant with Ten Strands, working on the California Environmental Literacy Initiative and the campaign for AB 2158, after more than 30 years directing environmental and outdoor education for the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education. 🌿 tenstrands.org

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

A sea otter has no blubber. No fat reserve, no savings account — just fur, and a metabolism that burns through calories almost as fast as it can eat them.

Gena Bentall is the founder, director, and senior scientist of Sea Otter Savvy, a Central Coast California nonprofit that's spent ten years turning marine science into behavior change — for kayakers, wildlife photographers, tribal partners, and the businesses that put people on the water.

We talk through the physiology that makes sea otters uniquely vulnerable to disturbance, the simple "rule of thumb" for judging safe distance, and why calling people in works better than calling them out.

In this episode:

• Why sea otters have no blubber, and what that costs them energetically

• The rule of thumb for judging safe wildlife-viewing distance

• "Death by a thousand cuts": how cumulative disturbance adds up

• The "publicity problem" of being the internet's favorite cute animal

• How CAWS certifies kayak outfitters and other Central Coast businesses

• Calling in vs. calling out: changing behavior without alienating people

• Otter 841 and the real cost of viral fame for an individual animal

• Sea Otter Savvy's Northern California recovery work: https://www.seaottersavvy.org/we-were-here-seaotters

ABOUT GENA BENTALL

Founder, Director & Senior Scientist, Sea Otter Savvy.

🦦 seaottersavvy.org

ABOUT YOUR HOST

Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.

🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Julianna Acuña grew up landlocked in Tucson, Arizona — and fell in love with the ocean anyway, on childhood summer trips to San Diego. One afternoon, swimming out further than she probably should have, a pod of dolphins surfaced close enough to see. She was maybe ten years old. "I think this is my future," she remembers thinking.

That moment became a career: a B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Arizona, the presidency of the school's Marine Awareness and Conservation Society, and a curatorship of the largest stickleback fish collection in the country — built entirely from a landlocked state.

Right now, Julianna is spending her summer on a Marine and Community Conservation Externship through the National Geographic Society and The Nature Conservancy, researching human-wildlife interactions at La Jolla Cove during peak sea lion pupping season. In this episode, she and Scott talk about what surprised her about the research, why facts alone don't change public behavior, and her plan to build a nonprofit blending mentorship with science communication.

In this episode:

• A childhood dolphin encounter that set the course for everythingBuilding a marine science career from a landlocked state

• Curating the largest stickleback fish collection in the country

• Studying human-wildlife interactions during sea lion pupping season at La Jolla Cove

• Why storytelling changes behavior when facts alone don't

• Turning research into a self-guided audio tour and public awareness campaign

• Building a nonprofit around mentorship, science communication, and access

• The "rule of thumb" for safe wildlife viewing distance

  ABOUT JULIANNA ACUÑA Marine conservationist, science communicator, and aspiring shark biologist. B.S., Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona. President, Marine Awareness & Conservation Society. Currently a Marine & Community Conservation Extern with the National Geographic Society and The Nature Conservancy. 🌊 Instagram: @monstros_mom

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Aaron Haiman was six years old the first time he met an ornithologist, wandering the East Bay Hills near his childhood home. That was enough. Twenty-some years later, he's built an entire career, and a philosophy of science communication, on the idea that people only protect what they love — and only love what they already understand.

Aaron is a birder, naturalist, and environmental scientist with the California Wildlife Conservation Board, where he manages the state's Stream Flow Enhancement Program. He's also the author of a brand new book, Birds of the California Delta, and has run the blog A Birding Naturalist for thirteen years, born out of frustration that bird scientists and birders — two communities that should have been one — almost never talked to each other.

In this episode, Aaron and Scott talk about the disconnect between people who study nature and the people trying to teach it, what it took to write a field guide that reads like a story instead of a specimen list, and what it's actually like to take national political heat for defending California water policy, a wildlife crossing, and a monthly video series about queerness in the animal kingdom.

In this episode:

• Growing up in the East Bay Hills and meeting the ornithologist who changed everything

• Why "we protect what we love, we love what we understand" is the whole thesis of his work

• Homeschooling, academic burnout, and "saving up" endurance for an advanced degree

• Starting A Birding Naturalist to bridge bird scientists and birders

• Writing Birds of the California Delta and working with illustrator Martha Espinosa

• What actually gets people to stop scrolling — and why it's garden snails, not evolutionary theory

• Drake's Beach Sanderlings, the longest-running youth bird-a-thon team in the country

• Taking national heat over California water policy and the Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing

• Making the case, every June, that queerness is completely natural — and trying to do it without becoming a savior

ABOUT AARON N.K. HAIMAN Environmental Scientist, California Wildlife Conservation Board. Author, Birds of the California Delta (Heyday Books). Founder, A Birding Naturalist. B.A., UC Berkeley; two M.S. degrees, UC Davis (Avian Science, Animal Behavior). 🦅 [link TBD]

ABOUT YOUR HOST Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen.

A Cinereous Vulture named Clarence didn't like most people. For sixteen-year-old Marco Wendt, working his first summer job at what's now the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, earning that bird's trust anyway became the first lesson in a career built on one idea: you don't get to skip the part where you earn it.

Marco is now a spokesperson for San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, where he's spent nearly thirty years working with the animals people find hardest to love — cassowaries, vultures, flamingos, cranes, raptors. Not because they're dangerous, though some are, but because nobody projects easy affection onto a cassowary the way they do an elephant or a panda. Closing that gap, animal by animal and person by person, has become his life's work.

That instinct didn't start with animals. Marco grew up first-generation Mexican American in San Diego, one of the only Mexican kids in his classroom, punished for speaking Spanish instead of supported through it. He learned early to hide who he was. A cartoon called Captain Planet — where the Latino character's "lame" power was heart — became the thing that eventually pulled him back out, and it's shaped nearly every program he's built since.

In this episode:

• The first bond that felt like more than an animal, and what a rescued vulture named Clarence taught him about earning trust
• Growing up as one of the only Mexican kids in the classroom, and getting punished for speaking Spanish
• Captain Planet, representation, and the "lamest power" that turned out to be his life's work
• The Plan to See program: giving lower-income San Diego families a real sense of belonging in zoos and aquariums
• What quality allyship looks like when it isn't performed for credit — "sometimes you just have to listen"
• Mentoring the next generation, and why he's already thinking about who takes his place
• Why the pandemic, for all its grief, reminded people what connection actually feels like
• Tailoring hope differently for a room of executives versus a room of eight-year-olds — and why every talk still has to end somewhere hopeful

ABOUT MARCO WENDT
Spokesperson, San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Nearly 30 years in wildlife conservation and education, working with cassowaries, vultures, flamingos, cranes, and raptors. Builder of bilingual programming and access initiatives centered on representation and belonging. 🦅 sdzwa.org

ABOUT YOUR HOST
Scott Shepherd is the founder of Wildward Institute, based in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. As a dad, practitioner, educator, and outdoor veteran, Scott helps schools, camps, and nature-based programs make meaningful experiences academically impactful for learners of all ages. Scott's work aims to design programatic leaders who communities stand behind and attract funders to support. 🌿 wildwardinstitute.net

New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.