Rick Flores

For Rick, being a naturalist is a different level than being an outdoor recreationist. There is a wide range of what a naturalist can be, there are professional naturalists, and there are also everyday amateur naturalists learning about the outdoor world around them. A naturalist is someone inquisitive about the natural world and seeks to understand it.

Rick grew up in Los Angeles, where he took advantage of every outdoor opportunity he found. He would constantly be exploring and loved to hike and fish from a young age, but his passion sparked even greater during his regular trips to Hawaii to visit relatives. There Rick would snorkel, learn about living off the land and homesteading as some of his indigenous ancestors had before him. During these trips he would also learn about plant and ethnobotany in Hawaii, which got him curious about “what plants can you eat in California?”

Rick believes we could greatly improve diversity in the Santa Cruz naturalist community. He says that if you remove the student population (which is constantly fluctuating), the general population is not very diverse. One issue he is trying to work through is how do you go about improving the diversity in a community, when the diversity in the overall community is not already present. One solution to draw people of diverse backgrounds is to tell more history and stories about communities of color that have been part of environmental movements for a long time. Indigenous people stewarded this landscape for thousands of years, and have been naturalists long before the word itself, yet they are always forgotten. For example, the westside used to be a more industrial area with a relatively higher population of black and African Americans, similar to how there used to be a large fishing industry and Chinese population in Capitola.

To help address some of these lost knowledge bases, Rick Flores partnered with Brett Hall from the Arboretum and Chairman Val Lopez and the Amah Mutsun Land Trust to establish a collaboration called the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program. Rick is the steward of this program where he works with the local indigenous tribe, the Amah Mutsun, in relearning ethnobotanical knowledge and stewardship of native California ecosystems.