UC Santa Barbara Opens New Center to Incubate Environmental Leaders 

Undergraduates, like eggs, can be incubated with the right amount of care, attention, and humidity. 

Well, maybe not humidity. But a beachside campus certainly doesn’t hurt.

Students in the Environmental Leadership Incubator (ELI), a nine-month program at UC Santa Barbara, are taking initiative and creating change, hatching into young leaders in their field. 

Some nurture their surroundings, such as alum Emily Hernandez, who installed a garden on campus. Others are figuring out how to tackle existential problems, like new student Kaan Johnson, who is studying the psychological effects of climate change.

“This program pushed me forward to realize this is what I wanted to do with my life,” Hernandez said. 

ELI has been incubating these future leaders — combining coursework, projects, and mentorship — for five years. But if ELI was the seedling, it recently sprouted into the tree that is the Center for Undergraduate Environmental Leadership (CUEL; pronounced “cool”), said Faculty Director Dr. Simone Pulver.

“It is cool,” Pulver said probably one too many times during the center’s launch party last Thursday. 

CUEL will build on ELI and provide more opportunities — including career workshops, training, and networking — to further support and shape the students that walk through its metaphorical doors. 

It was made possible thanks to Greti U. Croft, a philanthropic real estate mogul who loved the great outdoors and left a sizable donation to the school in her will. The center was named the Greti U. Croft Center for Undergraduate Environmental Leadership in her honor. 

Croft’s best friend, UCSB alum Terilynn Langsev, was brought to tears speaking about Croft, known for providing affordable housing for farmworkers in Santa Maria and investing her own money for solar energy at her properties and providing it for free to many of her tenants, among other good deeds.

During Langsev’s speech, she recalled sitting down with Croft a few years ago. “She asked me, ‘What was the best thing you did last year?’” Langsev’s answer was donating to the ELI program, which was in its infancy at the time.

“Before I even finished telling her about it, she was saying, ‘Bring me my checkbook.’”

Through the ELI program, and now CUEL, students will continue to foster community and do environmental work, such as creating running shoe recycling programs, curating art exhibits about edible bugs, certifying UCSB as a bee-friendly campus, or promoting sustainable surfing — “It is Santa Barbara, after all,” in the words of Environmental Studies professor David Pellow. 

Executive Director Erika Zollett said their next focus is the first of their annual expos for students, called the “Eco Expo,” for students to learn more about ways they can get involved in environmental initiatives and communities on and off campus, to be held on October 22.