Northern Nevada Green Living Podcast gogreenlocally.org

In this episode, we're thrilled to explore the world of sustainability in Northern Nevada with Donna, the visionary Founder and President of greenUp and the Nevada Green Business Network. Not only is she leading the charge in providing environmental education to businesses, but Donna is also at the forefront of an exciting initiative—the Green to Go Reusable Container Program. This program is set to revolutionize takeout practices, offering businesses and consumers an eco-friendly alternative to single-use containers. Join us as we delve into Donna's journey, innovative initiatives, and the positive impact she's making on the environment and our local community.

Keisha & Casey Ernst have been focusing on soil regeneration and habitat restoration as a team since 2011. They have studied under Dr. Elaine Ingham over the past eight years and worked alongside her on many projects. In 2018 Catalyst BioAmendments was founded as an experimental and educational-focused compost lot. The aim was to apply the techniques taught by Dr. Elaine Ingham to compost on a large scale and to improve the processes to ensure the product reliably hosts diverse populations of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes.  
Catalyst successfully created a biological-healthy focused product, and since 2019 Keisha & Casey have been using the compost with their consulting. You can see examples of that success. They aim to raise the quality of food grown by helping farmers increase microbial biomass in their agricultural soils and to help microbe farmers worldwide to improve their composting practices. 
Their main overarching focus is on fostering a community around microbe farming. They are passionate about helping the unseen lives in the soil come into view through microscopic images.
https://www.catalystbioamendments.com/

Zoe Bray is a professional artist based in Reno, Nevada, who started offering eco-art classes to children to help them enjoy simple, timeless beauty and connection with nature.
As a professional artist, her practice focuses on painting and drawing from life, using traditional fine art techniques, and experimenting with unconventional approaches. 
Zoe explores the boundaries between art and ethnography, engaging in questions of identity, representation, and human relations with nature.  Zoe trained as a painter in various parts of Europe. She has a Ph.D. in Political Science (Florence, Italy) and an MA in Anthropology (Edinburgh, Scotland). 
International shows include painting performances at NYC's American Natural History Museum, the Chicago Art Incubator, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and Beita, the Social Based Art Center in Jerusalem, Israel/Palestine. She recently exhibited in the Basque Country in France and Spain, and in Carson City, Nevada.
https://zoebrayartist.com/
Zoe's my new children’s book!

Colin Watley started Scrub Jay Farm in the Spring of 2021 as a result of a career change and a desire to experiment with gardening methods and goals that differ from standard production farms. The emphasis at Scrub Jay Farm is on edible flowers, herbs, food preservation, testing new plant varieties, and seed saving.
The farm consists of hugelkultur beds built throughout a 1/6 acre residential lot with permaculture principles as a central focus. In 2022, the second year, the focus has been on planting shrubby intermediate and taller fruit tree layers and continued soil development.
The work has also shown Colin the secondary benefits of working with plants can be much greater than the value of the flowers or vegetables grown. This has developed into a talk and hands-on workshops that he has presented for several grade schools, an assisted living facility, NAMI, and the Empowerment Center.
Colin also realized that many of the emotional benefits available being around outdoor plants are equally available through indoor plants as well.  Since then, he has started offering indoor green-scape installations and services to local Reno businesses. The goals now for Colin and Scrub Jay Farm are to continue to hold talks and workshops and offer more indoor plant-scaping for local businesses.
 
Indoor plant work, Golden Trowel 
Urban test farm, also on Instagram, Scrub Jay Farms
Nonprofit website, Non-Traditional ART
 
Local ag events, 
https://www.growingnv.com
 
Contact Colin for specialized edible landscaping and exotic indoor plant installations. Free consultation at Colin.Watley@gmail.com
 

Quinn is a local botanist, ecologist, gardener, and Nevada native. He has spent most of his career studying the native plants of Nevada and fire ecology in the Great Basin.  He’s researched how to effectively restore burned plant communities in our Nevada deserts.
More recently, he began working as a garden manager for Farmily, one of our local non-profits partnered with the Boys and Girls Club to teach social-emotional learning through the garden and providing healthy food to the kids and their families.
As we learned about in our last episode, Farmily's newest project, Katie's Garden, is a collaboration with the Katie Grace Foundation, Boys and Girls Club, and Bridge Church, and will house a food forest, production garden, and native plant pollinator garden.
Quinn on his own also has begun hosting native plant walks to teach our community about the fascinating and diverse flora of our deserts.
Since recording this podcast we learned that Quinn was awarded a fellowship from the National Science Foundation and will be moving to Oahu, Hawaii to start his work towards his PhD.  We are super excited and proud of Quinn and wish him all the best in professional eco journeys to make this world a greener place!
Instagram:  q_campbell
Email:  quinncampbell@gmail.com

Today on our podcast I’m speaking with Rebekah Stetson who has worked in the Northern Nevada green community as a connector, leader, passionate activist and as an organic farmer. 
I had the pleasure of interviewing Rebekah two years ago in April of 2020 for the podcast, Locals Share Green Action episode number 7.  We’ll be dipping back into some of the topics that she shared then and bring in some of the new things she’s up to now.
For those who don’t know Rebekah, she’s a Northern Nevada Native whose life is led by synchronicity. She is also an organizer, a mother and a philanthropist. She is passionate about the delicate networks that are intertwined leading to the well-being of all ecosystems. She has been active in advocacy at a local, regional, and national level in a variety of areas including and not limited to organic agriculture, public health, environmental protection, and wildlife habitat. 
Some of the many hats she’s wearing now: include being the farm manager at Flint Street Farm, the Chairwoman at Coalition for Healthy Nevada Lands, Wildlife and Free-Roaming Horses, is the CEO of Farmily, and is a sustainability consultant at the Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District. 
http://www.ourfarmily.org/
https://www.facebook.com/Flint-Street-Farm-100394011745374
https://www.facebook.com/healthynevadalands
https://www.facebook.com/rebekah.stetson.may