In hopes of encouraging environmental activism in the Santa Barbara Community, the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden has recently released a YouTube video series on the conservation of our shared land, Elings Park. This treasured natural landmark is overgrown in some areas with invasive weeds. These weeds are taking away from beneficial habitats for essential wildlife and biodiversity. There is an effort to remove these plants and replace them with native plants such as certain types of sage, succulents, and oak, as this educational series explains.
Elings Park is an important community center in the Santa Barbara community, connecting both Santa Barbara and Goleta. It is a 230 acre park full of walkways and stunning views of the city. Elings Park is impressively also the largest privately funded park in America, which shows just how important this asset is for Santa Barbara. However, restoration is needed to revitalize the unique biodiversity of the land and to improve and strengthen natural processes or the “web of life.” The Community Transformation project aims to preserve what makes this place so essential and beneficial to an environment that we all coexist in.
Denise Knapp, Ph.D, the Director of Conservation and Research at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, emphasizes that, “Elings Park’s transformation serves as a powerful example of how native plants restore ecological health and inspire communities to come together and work toward a shared future.”
On the topic of interconnectedness, the issue of diminishing plant life is also something that this series urges us as community members to recognize. Viewers can watch this series and attain a deeper understanding or consciousness about the environmental effects of cultivating non-native plants and its danger to the specialized species relationships in nature. Community members can take this native plant knowledge into their own lives, or backyards. It is encouraged by the Garden to have at least 30 percent native plant life at your residence to broaden the ecological scope of restoration. Each plant and creature fits with a purpose in regards to native wildlife in the Santa Barbara community.
This video series is free to view on YouTube, with some videos released already. New episodes will be released weekly until January 28. Knapp encourages viewers that, “we can help mitigate the impact of climate change and foster vibrant ecosystems for generations to come,” through this community effort to restore and educate others on the weight of our actions, and how we can directly make a positive difference for biodiversity. This video series aims to enact active change and participation in restoring our environment in light of climate change and stress on California’s biodiversity.
View the series at youtube.com/@SBBotanicGarden.
