Words By Ken Owen, Executive Director of Channel Islands Restoration
At some point toward the end of a busy 2021, I rather suddenly realized that CIR had been in existence for nearly 20 years. One-third of my life had gone by in that time, and it was the most productive and personally satisfying time of my nearly 60 years.
The organization had survived the pandemic, we had just helped save 101 acres of the San Marcos Foothills from development, we had active projects in two national forests and along a large section of the Santa Clara River, and we were working on dozens of other habitat restoration projects across a three-county region.
We were busy, but we also had 20 years of accomplishments to look back on proudly, and we have a bright future. It was time, I thought, to remind our friends and community of our two decades of hard work and to look forward and plan for the next 20 years, which, if I am lucky, I will also be around to experience as a principal of CIR.
CIR volunteers and staff are seen here on Santa Cruz Island during one of CIR’s first restoration trips to the Channel Islands in 2002.
I also found myself thinking about the next 50 years, and what the world might look like 100 years after my birth, and how much I wanted CIR to outlast my lifetime and be around to take on the challenges of a quickly changing planet. That was a lot for me to take in. I realized that I am reaching old age and that the future could well be perilous. I decided that the next 20 years of CIR’s history and of my life needed to be even more productive than the last. My next thought gave me a lot of hope. The first 20 years were consumed with the myriad of tasks needed to build a non-profit organization, so over the coming decades, CIR was well positioned to make an even greater impact.
In so many ways the last 20 years or so had flown by. One day at the end of the last century, I was riding in a jeep on Santa Cruz Island with Steve Junak, an expert in the botany of the Channel Islands, who would become a great friend and personal mentor.
I had visited the island many times, but with Steve’s inspirational talks about island ecology and endemic species, I was seeing the Island (and the natural world) in a totally different light. I also found myself unconsciously questioning the direction my life was taking. I was gainfully employed, but I found myself blurting out the most important question of my life.
I asked Steve, “How does someone work out here?” I was curious intellectually, but the question also came from an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the boring way I made a living as a minor partner in a software company. This was more than a year before the dot-com crash happened which eventually put me out of a job.
Steve took me seriously. He started talking to me about how someone could enter biology as a profession, even relatively late in life.
We had about an hour more to drive together, and every 10 minutes or so he would bring up different aspects of careers in biology and how I could get involved with them even without a university degree. I found myself kind of regretting that I asked him the question because I felt like I was wasting his time.
I was not actually thinking of changing careers (I was too risk-averse for that at the time) but the more he talked, the more I found myself thinking that working in such a wonderful place like Santa Cruz Island would be quite amazing, and maybe even possible for someone like me.
Ken Owen leads volunteers in 2022 at the San Marcos Foothills West Mesa. CIR recently helped turn this land into a nature preserve.
It was a quaint thought, but I mostly put it out of my mind for the next year and a half.
However, I did start studying the Channel Islands and visiting more of them, plus studying botany and ecology on a mostly informal basis. Well, the dot-com crash did happen, and eventually our software business was no more. Over the next couple of years, with the help of folks like Darlene Chirman and Cristina Sandoval and the mentorship of Steve and many other inspiring teachers at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and Santa Barbara City College, I founded CIR along with Duke McPherson.
Just one inspirational trip and one off-the-cuff question utterly changed my life and the lives of many, many people who have been involved with CIR for the last 20 years. Several of our employees started working for us, first as volunteers with no formal environmental experience, and then went on to important jobs in related professions.
Our experience with halting the development of high-end homes and instead turning the land into a nature preserve has really made me realize how seemingly simple things can actually be very consequential.
So, recently, when I was standing at a trail fork on the San Marcos Foothills, which by now, without the intervention by many, including CIR would have been paved roads called the intersection of Via Gaitero and Via Terrazzo Roads, I looked across the channel at Santa Cruz Island and felt very grateful.