Natalie Olivas

Natalie is originally from Bakersfield, which is surrounded by buildings and oil rigs. One of her first memorable experiences with the outdoors occured during an elementary school trip to the Cambria mountains. There Natalie got to see animals interacting within their habitat for the first time. Her passions grew as she got older and realized she wanted to find a way to ameliorate some of the environmental problems she had seen and experienced growing up. Natalie views a naturalist as someone who is knowledgeable about an environment and the species that inhabit it and how they interact. Through her naturalist path, one of her biggest struggles was the fact she had a very limited access to role models that had similar past experiences as her. Natalie recalls her most memorable naturalist experiences as one where she was able to provide education and outreach about natural history in Spanish. She was really excited because she could tell the group she was working with was in awe of bilingual programming and became heavily engaged.

Natalie thinks we can make the naturalist community more inclusive by improving representation in the naturalist community. She believes that inviting diverse backgrounds is not enough, if the programming doesn’t take into consideration the knowledge of people coming from a diverse community. a career option. Natalie believes it is important to provide start providing more decolonial outreach with natural history and to better acknowledge that indigenous people have been natural historians long before it became a science or career.