Local program connects elementary students to their desert environment

Rattlesnakes and rabbits, snakes and lizards, coyotes and bobcats, and ... lions? These were just a few of the desert creatures that third-graders at Las Palmitas Elementary School in Thermal shouted out on a Tuesday in May when asked to name animals that live in the surrounding desert and hillsides.

The students, all participants in Coachella Valley Unified School District’s After School Education and Safety (ASES) Program, learned about the local desert environment and watersheds from environmental educators with local nonprofit Friends of the Desert Mountains, as part of the organization's goal of educating the next generation about environmental conservation.

Long focused on acquiring and protecting land in the Coachella Valley area, the organization is increasingly focused now on education programs that aim to spark an interest in the outdoors and conservation among the valley’s younger residents.

Friends of the Desert Mountains’ Environmental Connections por Vida program stopped at 14 elementary schools in the district this school year, bringing an interactive lesson focused on the local watershed and the broader desert ecosystem.

At Las Palmitas Elementary School in early May, the lesson started with dividing students into two groups, each with half of a map of the Coachella Valley region and a pack of stickers representing the flora, fauna and landscapes found in the area. Students affixed stickers of pine trees near Pinyon Pines, palm trees near Thousand Palms, farmland near Thermal, as well as large stickers of the mountain ranges that circle the valley: the San Gorgonio Mountains, the San Jacinto Mountains, the Santa Rosa Mountains, the Mecca Hills Mountains, and the Little San Bernardino Mountains.

“These mountains are a really important part of why we live in a desert,” explained Venessa Becerra, an environmental educator with Friends of The Desert Mountains. She then explained the rain shadow effect, or how “the mountains are so tall that they block the rain from making it over, which is one reason why we’re a desert.”

Friends of the Desert Mountains, which recently celebrated its 35th anniversary, formed in 1987 with a goal of protecting local desert landscapes. Since then, the organization has acquired and conserved over 60,000 acres of desert, mountains, canyons, and woodlands. But in recent years, the organization has increasingly expanded its focus beyond just acquiring land to include educating young people in the valley about the importance of protecting the local environment.

“We have spent 35 years in conservation and have achieved many successes, but we know that without the support of future generations, our preservation efforts may be in vain. We have made it our mission to reach out to tomorrow's leaders,” the organization’s mission statement reads. 

It’s part of a broader trend in the conservation movement as longtime conservation groups look to increase access to the outdoors and protected lands.

“For so many years, we were just focused on land conservation,” said Executive Director Tammy Martin, who explained that land acquisition has slowed a bit with less land available to buy and higher asking prices on the land that is available. “As we moved forward, we’d always wanted to do youth education, so we started providing a program to teach young people about land conservation and getting them out on the land so that they can appreciate what we appreciate, because they’re our future.”

The program started in 2019, then went on hiatus for a few years due to COVID-19. The organization hopes to eventually expand the program to other area schools outside of Coachella Valley Unified.

Following their classroom lesson, students spend the next afternoon hiking with the Friends of the Desert Mountains staff. Las Palmitas students did a short hike in La Quinta Cove, which many of them said was their first hike.

Students peered at plants, searched for animals, and jokingly looked closely at each other using binoculars provided by the organization, then were encouraged to slow down and appreciate the surrounding views by drawing what they saw in sketchbooks during the hike, drawing palm trees, mountains, and flowers.

“We’re getting our youth more comfortable with being out there in nature and being able to do that safely, and hopefully encouraging them to start hiking with their families,” said Oscar Ortiz, the organization’s director of education and mayor of Indio. “The goal is to increase their basic knowledge on the very pressing issues we have here, like air quality and pollution, and as we teach them that those kids will be more prepared as they grow up to address those issues,” possibly through their own environmental-focused careers.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Friends of the Desert Mountains program connects youth to the desert