My mind was abuzz with my friends: the milkweed going to seed, the new crop of sugar pine cones getting ready to fall. We are so dependent on everything but our own skills and consciousness to be happy.

Quincy

If you meet and have an open-ended process of “let’s find some solution,” but you don’t really agree on what’s being accomplished, you end up in years and years of meetings with very little accomplished.

Sonora

We need to make sure this record is kept, not only for ourselves, but for the living native Americans who have preserved traditions and still live in the foothills.

Mokelumne Hill

As a part of the Environmentally Concerned Organization of Students at Sierra College, what I've learned is that to really make a difference, it's going to take a team. It has to start in the elementary schools. We have the ability to get this sense of community back.

Rocklin

The forest is where I feel most at home and where I feel safe in a world that isn’t always the most comforting place to be. It’s just always offered me serenity and hope. So I feel that it is important to protect it as best I can.

Jenner

The old growth, with the rate that we’re cutting down trees, will be gone in the next 20-30 years. I think we need to work to preserve the old growth and bring in young trees.

Oroville

Today I took a walk in the 'Inimim Forest. I never noticed how much there is to know and learn about it. I just walk through it without even noticing how the light touches a leaf or how a bug survives.

Learn more about the Woolman Semester.

San Juan Ridge

I think it is vital that every human being do as much as we can to conserve and protect our water sources both for swimming and for drinking, keeping in mind that they are also the water sources that nourish the plants and the animals and the things that grow and keep us alive.

Berkeley

I don’t know what to think or say about the future of our beautiful Sierra. Those people who go there for the first time don’t get to see it like I did.

Fresno

"The sense of loss of the natural environment here in the Sierra can be hard to take, yet some of the voices I have heard on this documentary remind me of our power, and the way nature can speak through our minds and bodies."

(Ludi Hinrichs composed and performed the original music for the documentary, Saving The Sierra: Grassroots Solutions for Sustaining Rural Communities. You're listening to a short musical clip that we use for station breaks in the program. We are hoping to produce a CD of the music from the documentary.)

Read more about this collaboration on our Blog.

San Juan Ridge