Michael Kraft
When one thinks of the North Coast’s natural beauty, it’s natural for the redwoods to come to mind first. As much as I love them, however, you’re more likely to find me in the dunes or on the beaches below them. We’re fortunate to have a 32-mile-stretch of coastal dunes, with something like 2,000 acres protected extending from Moonstone Beach in the north to Centerville Beach in the south. Friends of the Dunes owns 130 of those acres and plays an active management and restoration role with much more.
The formal mission of the organization is to conserve “the natural diversity of coastal environments in northern California through community supported education and stewardship programs.” Their informal mission, per Executive Director Suzie Fortner, is to help you fall in love with Humboldt’s dunes. And for good reason: our forested dunes are unique in the world, with a combination of native plants that is just not found elsewhere. As she and I talked, we both found ourselves using the word “magical.”
The original effort goes back some 40 years. At that time, the Nature Conservancy owned Lanphere Dunes and a group of volunteers working under the Conservancy’s umbrella worked on restoration and education. When the Nature Conservancy transferred ownership to the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge, those volunteers became the foundation of the nonprofit organization.
Volunteers continue to be at the heart of the agency’s work. They provide educational programs, lead tours and staff the Humboldt Coastal Nature Center. They remove invasive species, such as European beachgrass and iceplant. At any one time, Suzie says that about 100 people serve as active volunteers. “Our budgets for snacks and gloves are high,” Suzie says.
Interestingly, one not-quite-local plant the volunteers attack is yellow bush lupine. It’s a ubiquitous yellow flowering plant which is native on California coasts south of San Francisco but was brought to far northern California as an ornamental. The lupine turns out to have this unhealthy side effect. As a legume, a nitrogen fixer, it draws the fertilizer nitrogen from the air and stores it in the soil. This, in turn, makes other invasives such as exotic grasses feel at home where they shouldn’t be. Suzie states that “dune environments are meant to be lacking in nutrients.”
Friends of the Dunes participates in science that is related to dunes, erosion and resilience. The Humboldt Coastal Resilience Project rigorously examined the effects of native v. non-native species on erosion. This multi-year, multi-site study demonstrated that dunes recover faster from storms and are generally resilient to the impacts of climate change when they are dominated by native species.
Suzie Fortner’s job has its nice outdoor moments, but for the most part there are similarities to the work of executive directors across the spectrum: grant management, supervision, running a facility and providing the same kind of fiscal umbrella the Nature Conservancy once provided the original Friends. The 501c3 nonprofit status proves to be useful to apply for grants only available to nonprofits, allowing the Friends of the Dunes to partner with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the National Wildlife Refuge on restoration efforts in their jurisdictions. The organization also provides a fiscal umbrella to the Tolowa Dunes Stewards, an allied group in Del Norte County.
There are various ways to get involved. You can become a member. You can volunteer. You can donate, with about 1/3 of the Friends’ operating budget coming from local donations and small grants. You can take a California Naturalist course. You can find information on all of these things on the Friends of the Dunes’ website: https://www.friendsofthedunes.org/.
But what Suzie wants you to do most is to get out in the sand and fall in love with the dunes. Which, I have to say, sounds like a great plan.
Michael Kraft writes the Good Work series, volunteering on behalf of the Northern California Association of Nonprofits (NorCAN). NorCAN supports connections between people and organizations that work every day to keep our communities healthy and strong by offering professional development, board support, networking connections and more. Learn more at https://norcal-nonprofits.org/.To nominate a deserving nonprofit organization to be profiled, email michael@kraftconsultants.com.
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