Our Stories

Ana Paola Rangel Romero—better known as Paola—has been involved with the Willamette Laja Twinning Partnership since 2018, when she participated in a university exchange in the Willamette for three months as an ITESI forestry student. Since her return to Mexico, she has taken on the role of instructor of the environmental education program Aves Compartidas (Birds Shared). “My participation in the partnership has been to teach environmental education workshops in rural primary schools, where students have developed in a natural environment in the presence of birds, flora, and fauna,” Paola explains. “I was born in a rural community, and that’s why I pursued an engineering-forestry career, with a focus on habitat conservation and restoration.”

Paola says her main goal is to awaken children’s interest in the care for and protection of the environment. “They are at an ideal developmental stage, which will allow them to be taught to look at the world through an environmental lens,” she says.

In her role as teacher-educator, Paola has the unique opportunity to approach children with whom she can share the development of interests, knowledge, and skills regarding environmental education that helps them assess the richness of natural resources and their surrounding environment. “Near the Emiliano Zapata school, where the project is carried out, there is a protected natural area called Peña Alta,” she says. “I believe participating in a program that’s in close proximity to nature will have a lifelong impact on students. With this project, we are contributing a little to the destiny of the planet—inspiring children and young people to contribute their grain of sand in the fight against climate change.”

Paola’s personal and professional objective is to get physically and intellectually involved and share her knowledge, skills, interest, and love for her work with the community. She believes information should be not only theoretical but practical, enjoyable, and fun. “Let's do more environmental education for future generations!”

Though he was born in Mexico City, Arturo Garcia Lozano grew up in the municipality of Guanajuato, his mother's land. In 1980, as a teenager, he moved with his family to the Sierra de Santa Rosa—and that's where his love of nature developed. “After high school, I decided to learn about restoration practice and looked for courses focused on conservation,” Arturo says. As a result, he has obtained diplomas in wetland conservation and productive projects and participated in congresses, courses, workshops, and seminars on topics of community development, environmental education, natural resource management, planning of protected natural areas, and wildlife contingencies. In 2002, with the support of Salvemos al Rio Laja A.C., Arturo completed a year of training to become certified in tributary restoration by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service in Flagstaff, Arizona.

In 1998, Arturo formed the civil association Cuerpos de Conservación de Guanajuato, A.C. and implemented the sustainable development program Sierra de Santa Rosa e Proyectos de Consultoría Ambiental and Investigación de la Avifauna, as well as training workshops and rehabilitation actions of tributaries. Many of these actions and results have been replicated in other mountains and protected natural areas of the state of Guanajuato.

As a result of his commitment and dedication to nature as well as the training of rural communities, Arturo received two important recognitions. The first was awarded in 2006 by the American Act for the Conservation of Wetlands (NAWCA) Mexico Program for "Contributing in the Conservation of Wetlands of Mexico for the Conservation of Habitat of Migratory Birds and Other Species Shared Between Canada, Mexico, and the United States.” The second was a National Award bestowed upon Arturo by the government of Mexico on February 2, 2010 for "Contributing in the Restoration of the Riparian Wetlands of Guanajuato."

Arturo says his passion for birds began in 1992, when Dr. Mary Richards (q.e.p.d.)—former director of Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary in New York— taught a training course for bird monitoring in the Santa Rosa Mountains. “She planted a seed in me that would later bear fruit in the form of studies on the birdlife of the Santa Rosa mountain range and the Laja River Basin,” he says. “Subsequently, several primary schools in these mountains provide environmental education workshops aimed at inspiring children to learn about birds and how to conserve their habitat, with an emphasis on migratory species.

“When young people and adults perform habitat restoration in the mountains, we teach them how birds are environmental indicators that help us determine if our work is successful over time,” he says. “Conserving the habitat of birds means protecting the habitat they share with many other plant and animal species of a shared ecosystem.”

Arturo’s undeniable passion for conservation has permeated his family, especially his children Saúl Esteban and Sandra Eréndira, who chose to pursue university careers in geomatics and environmental engineering. “Their involvement in Cuerpos de Conservación de Guanajuato, A.C.  is increasing and they may be able to continue this extraordinary environmental task,” he says. “As a family, we have decided to continue living in and working for the conservation of this wonderful mountain range!”

Mexico has a wealth of avifauna and shares a large species population with the United States and Canada. This triangular-shaped area results in the largest number of species in the world gathering in North America. Billions of birds come together from the north and south each fall and return to northern latitudes each spring. “Ensuring the permanence of this extraordinary spectacle requires that every person in North America is aware of the multiple environmental benefits and is involved in their conservation from a trinational perspective,” he explains. “This is only possible by building bridges via medium- and long-range environmental education strategies.

“By strengthening the programs and actions of our Brotherhood Program, I am convinced many children of the Willamette River and the Laja River will be able to enjoy a better world or at least the same one as the one we met in our youth,” Arturo continues.

Arturo would like to express his gratitude to Tara Davis, the Twinning program coordinator. “Due to her confidence in me, I had the opportunity to present our migratory bird ‘flag species’ at the 20th International River Symposium and Environmental Flows Conference, held in Brisbane, Australia in September 2017, which was a great honor for me.”

Long before Greta Thunberg appeared on every TV and social media feed worldwide for organizing school climate strikes and calling out world leaders who fail to properly address the climate crisis, Alyssa Powell was living an environmentally friendly lifestyle. Thanks to her parents, Alyssa inherited a respect for nature and learned the importance of taking care of the planet from an early age. “My mom was really into making smart choices and not buying individually wrapped plastic or single-use items, and she was a proponent for reusing what you already have,” Alyssa says. “It’s just ingrained in how I think now.”

 Born in Lookingglass, Oregon, Alyssa spent much of her childhood enjoying the outdoors—hiking, running around the beach covered in sand, camping. “That really instilled a love for being outside in general,” she says. “And there was almost a survivalist-type mindset fused with minimalism that developed…like take in what you can and pack it out.”

 Suffice to say, Alyssa found solace in nature and still reflects fondly on the camping trips of her youth. “My dad had a camper that we would take sometimes, and I can remember listening to the rain on the tin roof,” she says. “It was just so relaxing knowing I was surrounded by the woods—it’s calming.”

 Though Alyssa never stopped communing with nature, in high school, she embarked on an adventure of a different sort: learning a new language. She started by taking the requisite courses to graduate but eventually found herself enrolled in AP Spanish by her senior year. In college, she tested into a high-level Spanish class, which is when her interest level really piqued. “I ended up studying abroad in the north of Spain through Oregon State University’s Spanish program, and from there I decided to major in it. It wasn’t until I went to live in Spain that I really felt in control of the language. When I felt like I could actually use it to communicate, I started to see the language as a skill set rather than as a class I was taking. Language is empowering!”

 Alyssa enjoyed studying in Spain so much that she ended up living there for four years after she graduated with her double major (English and Spanish) from OSU. While there, she taught English in elementary schools, worked as a dance instructor, and even earned her master’s degree so she could teach Spanish as a foreign language.

 Now in her fifth year as a fourth-grade teacher at South Shore Elementary—the only bilingual school in Albany, Oregon—Alyssa jumped at the opportunity to combine her love of Spanish and nature by incorporating conservation themes in her current curriculum via the Willamette Laja Twinning Partnership. “When I found out the program involved science and culture and all these great things—and that we could do it bilingually—I was like sign me up!” she says. “I just think it’s great that it can incorporate language, culture, art, science, conservation, migration, and environmental issues all in one program.”

April Gaydos’ conservationist origin story is hard to pin down. Rather than spawning from a single moment in time that forever changed her trajectory, her superhero backstory is comprised of an amalgamation of moments woven together by one common thread: her love of nature. One such experience occurred when April was four and her family moved to a house in Milwaukie, Oregon, surrounded by big trees, with a stream running through the backyard. “I vividly remember lying on the lawn one day, looking up at the sky and watching the clouds, thinking I could feel the earth rotating,” she recalls. “It was a moment of wonder.”

She also fondly remembers building moss-lined boats from tree bark at Campfire Girls camp and watching them float down the river at night, lit by glowing candles, whilst she and her fellow Campfire Girls gleefully sang songs about water. Moments like these, combined with being raised amongst rivers, forests, and mountains, instilled in her a lifelong love for nature.

As someone who holds the outdoors in such high regard, April has a difficult time coming to terms with the current health of the planet. “To me, it is deeply immoral that the ecological crisis and societal conflicts we have helped create will be passed on to our youth and future generations to solve,” she says. “It is equally immoral that we are contributing to the suffering of species and perpetuating their extinction. It is this generation’s responsibility to actively conserve, regenerate, and restore our biological systems, and it’s also essential that we actively facilitate the necessary transition to a conservation way of being.”

This passion transformed into a formal mission of April’s in the mid-1990s, when she began managing annual conferences for the Governor’s Watershed Enhancement Board (now the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board) and the American Planning Association. “This deepened my awareness of the increasing pressure on resources and habitat loss, and the importance of stakeholder and citizen involvement,” April explains. “It was the catalyst for me returning to school to study community development and environmental sciences.”

April says her conservation work truly came to life when she became the program manager for the Urban Watershed Institute, which offered professional development courses and conferences on emerging conservation practices on topics such as wetlands conservation, river conservation and restoration, erosion control, green infrastructure design and construction, and strategies for the protection of salmon. A move to Palm Springs, California, led her to become involved in citizen initiatives, which resulted in the preservation of hundreds of acres of hillside land as a biological and scenic corridor. She also served on Palm Springs’ first sustainability commission, helping to lay the groundwork for incentive-based water and energy conservation. In addition, she’s proud to say she was involved in advocating for a 50-mile car-free pathway that links seven desert cities.

In 2010, April moved to San Miguel de Allende, and within a month she became involved with Audubon de Mexico. Not long after attending her first board meeting, she accepted a position on the board, and by 2014 she was named president of the organization. In this role, April is involved in program development and partnership initiatives, outreach, fundraising, and government relations. “I actively participate in our volunteer programs, such as helping to maintain our pollinator garden at Parque Juarez, removing invasive plants from native trees, and taking part in periodic shore clean-ups,” she says.

April’s invaluable work with Audubon de Mexico is precisely what connected her to the Willamette-Laja Twinning Project. “We were interested in learning from the experience and expertise of conservation practitioners in the Willamette watershed and strengthening our local alliances and efforts,” she explains.

Audubon became involved with the youth education program Aves Compartidas and integrated the curriculum into its existing school-based program, Niños y Naturaleza. “We viewed Aves Compartidas as an opportunity to provide our students with a unique experience that would help them envision the world beyond San Miguel and build their sense of place as they explored the commonalities and differences between students in Oregon and their two watersheds. In addition, learning about the migratory journey of their shared birds helps them become aware of their landscape connection to distant places and people and to discover a sense of camaraderie and a shared purpose in caring for the habitats that support these birds.”

When Katie Lynch was a child, she spent hours playing in the forests, ravine, and creek behind her house—careful to adhere to her parents’ rule of returning home when the bats came out. Throughout her life, she’s developed an affinity for plants, crystal blue waters, and old-growth forests. But one of her more formative experiences with nature occurred in high school, when her favorite teacher, Mr. Mohling, launched a class called Student Naturalists. During this unique course, which was taught in a 15-acre outdoor lab behind the school, Katie had the opportunity to participate in the restoration of native tallgrass prairie as well as lead field trips for elementary school students.

 To say the course had a major impact on Katie’s trajectory would be an understatement. Upon graduation, she pursued a bachelor’s degree in environmental policy analysis and planning at University of California, Davis. During this time, she learned the power of collective action and the meaning of community, which led her to participate in Bike-Aid. “This cross-country bike ride [Seattle to Washington, D.C.] provided a forum to learn about the interconnections between environmental and social justice issues, both here in the U.S. and globally,” she explains. “As we rode, we participated in community service projects and created a cooperative community of cyclists.”

 Following that transformative journey, Katie headed to Costa Rica to study tropical biology and ecology, where she fell in love with the beauty of tropical cloud forests and became an advocate for rainforest conservation. Her next stop was the University of Florida, where she evaluated the potential of medicinal plants as a conservation strategy for her master’s. “I lived with midwives and healers who taught me how critical women are in meeting local health care needs in these communities,” Katie says. “Thus, my study became one of the interconnections between gender, healing, and conservation in the northern Peruvian Amazon.”

 During Katie’s research, she became involved in the Managing Ecosystems and Resources with a Gender Emphasis (MERGE) program at the University of Florida, which gave her the skills to become a gender trainer and afforded her opportunities to facilitate and coordinate workshops and courses on gender analysis and participatory methods in the U.S. and Latin America. “This work led me to studying the potential for environmental education to promote conservation in southern Ecuador for my Ph.D.,” she says. “This is where I reconnected with my love of teaching.”

 After completing her doctorate, Katie became a research partner at the Institute for Culture and Ecology in Portland, where she was part of a team that examined the relationships between forest policy and management, biodiversity conservation, and nontimber forest products (culturally important plant species other than timber, such as wild foods and medicinal plants).

Then, in 2005, she was offered a position at the University of Oregon, where she’s been since, serving as a faculty member in the Environmental Studies Program and co-director of the Environmental Leadership Program. “I have the awesome job of creating hands-on, service-learning projects for our undergraduates that address real environmental issues in our community,” she says. “The Environmental Leadership Program is a community-based program designed to provide our undergraduate students an opportunity to apply what they’ve been learning in the classroom to address a real environmental issue in our community. We coordinate about six projects a year, and one of our new partnerships is with the Willamette-Laja Twinning Project. They were looking to expand to the southern Willamette Valley, and I had teams working in local elementary schools for years, so it seemed like a natural partnership.”

 It’s clear  Katie enjoys imparting her love of nature to future generations. “I love working with students—working together to see how we can push our practice toward a more just and sustainable world,” she says. The main point she wants her students to take away from the Environmental Leadership Program is a sense of responsibility—for them to take their privilege, strengths, and passion and make a positive difference in the community.”

As a child growing up in the suburbs of Maryland, Chris Orsinger was no stranger to the outdoors. As he likes to say—with a hint of Southern charm—he’s been interested in nature since he was a tadpole catching tadpoles. Whether he was backpacking through the Appalachians with his brothers, encountering black bears, venturing to the majestic Great Falls along the Potomac River, visiting the Delaware shore, or riding his bike through local wooded trails pre-BMX popularity, he was steeped in bucolic surroundings, all of which imprinted upon him. But he recalls one fateful evening from when he was 13 like it was yesterday—an experience that would significantly contribute to his evolution as a conservationist. “I walked to a beloved woods and a bulldozer had come through, knocking down most of the trees for the next housing development,” he explains. “So I was on the edge of sprawl in this natural area. And I felt it like a scar—and I felt like the trees were asking me for help.”

Standing beneath the glow of a full moon on that fall night, Chris was overcome by a feeling that he needed to do something, so he made a promise that only the woods would hear: “I’ll see how I can help.” Having such a deep connection to this once-woodsy wonderland heightened Chris’ sense of loss, which helped cement his intention as a young person to do whatever he could to heal the planet.

Fast-forward to the present, and Chris has more than kept his word. Since attending the University of Oregon in the 1980s and earning an interdisciplinary degree comprised of communications, environmental sciences, and international relations, Chris has worked for the Council of Human Rights in Latin America (which helped him learn Spanish and instilled in him an affinity for all things Latin American); made an impact at numerous nonprofits; and, most recently, served as the executive director of Friends of Buford Park & Mt. Pigsah for 30 years. During his tenure, the organization worked collaboratively with other nonprofits and governments to acquire and restore 1,700 acres of Upper Willamette floodplains, river channels, and oak savanna to benefit salmon, turtles, and many other species. To strengthen the community’s love and stewardship of nature, the group built or improved 10 miles of trails and established a nursery that still propagates more than 125 species of native plants for Willamette Valley habitat projects. “Working in collaboration resulted in greater impacts than anything we could accomplish alone,” Chris says.

Though his time at Friends of Buford Park & Mt. Pigsah came to a close in 2019, true to character, Chris remained steadfast in his mission. Rather than settle into retirement, he used the pennies he’d squirreled away and planned out a sabbatical with a purpose. “I had three intentions during my sabbatical,” he says. “The first was to travel, including Europe, Costa Rica, and Mexico. The second was to explore climate solutions—specifically what people can do tangibly to reduce emissions and increase the sequestration of carbon. The third was to participate in international exchanges. I have an interest to travel to different places and support the exchange of ideas—because everybody is a teacher and everybody is a student.”

It just so happened that a visit to Guanajuato to visit the Twinning Partnership’s partners in the Laja checked all of Chris’ sabbatical boxes. While there, he gave presentations to conservation leaders as well as fifth graders, co-planned the Las Tinajas restoration project, and visited local nurseries (read more about his trip to Guanajuato here).

If those idyllic woods from Chris’ childhood could talk, they’d undoubtedly thank the 13-year-old boy who grew up to be an irreplaceable steward of our planet for keeping his promise to make the world a better place.

Learning about the severity of the climate crisis is enough to stop many people in their tracks—but in Jalil Aragon’s case, a deep dive into these pressing issues resulted in temporary paralysis that left her bed bound for a week. “When I learned about climate change, I think my feelings of anxiety shut down my body,” she says with a nervous laugh. “So after I got better, it was crucial for me to determine what I was going to do to be part of the solution. I don’t know how others read about this crisis and don’t do anything. It’s like when you receive news about a family member who is very sick: You sit down and make a lot of changes about how we’re going to eat, who’s going to take care of them, and such.”

Plagued by the state of the planet, with bleak facts swirling around her head, Jalil is determined to find answers—but she is weary of solutions that won’t work for the masses. “Every time I propose a solution, a new reality where happiness and wellness exist, I first ask myself, ‘Would I do this?’ If the answer is no, I just don’t do it. If I’m not happy with what I’m doing, then how can I ever tell others to do it?”

Born and raised in Nogales, Sonora, Jalil is a self-described border girl, through and through. Following the untimely passing of her parents, she moved to Acuña at the age of 12. For her 7th and 8th grade years, she attended school in Del Rio, Texas, during the day and in Mexico at night. “Essentially, I was in school the whole day,” she explains.

This pattern of hard work followed Jalil throughout the years. She began studying fiscal accounting at a young age, which eventually led to a managerial position in the automotive industry. Inspired to push herself further, she attended a program in Spain and obtained her master’s in industrial engineering. With her master’s under her belt, she returned to the automotive industry, where she proceeded to oversee the launch of two automotive plants from the ground up.

But a visit to her brother reminded Jalil of her roots and moved her to take a step back and reevaluate her life—especially since she was now a mother. Her parents had been free spirits who raised her on a vegetarian diet and encouraged her to play outdoors. “For my first 10 years or so, I was a nature girl—I didn’t care about anything else,” she says. I used to be in the hills all day. One day, they said, ‘We’re moving to the beach.’ I used to have yellow hair and was very, very sunburned, because I was in the ocean all day long.”

Revitalized from her trip, Jalil made it a point to focus on nutrition and more sustainable living. Soon, she began attending meetings in San Miguel de Allende regarding the community’s water crisis. She’d be the person in all the meetings, hand in the air, asking questions, which eventually led her to the fateful meeting about the climate crisis that made her so physically ill she couldn’t move. Once she was up and around, Jalil made it her mission to do her part. She started by writing a family sustainability agenda that included building an environmentally friendly home complete with solar power and water caching—and a small lake comprised of recycled shower water. In addition, she incorporated a diet based on a deep respect for animals, the environment, and the health of her family.

Thanks to being very vocal in all those community meetings (she’d often receive an inquisitive look akin to who is this woman?), Jalil developed a relationship with Agustin Madrigal, director of Salvemos al Rio Laja, with whom she now closely works. In addition, she is an integral collaborator in the Willamette-Laja Twinning Partnership’s Aves Compartidas education program.