Growing up in the Holly Park and High Point subsidized housing projects, Reco Bembry didn't know much about the ecology of urban greenbelts he and his friends inhabited.
They ran around, built forts, dug for creepy-crawly bugs, invented games and assumed characters that allowed them to escape.
"We went to the woods to feel normal. We didn't feel poor. We didn't feel like we didn't have much," said Bembry, 48, who later developed an outdoor recreation program for city parks. "Everybody's equal in the forest."
Today, southeast Seattle has the city's largest population of school-age children. But it remains the only quadrant of the city not served by a major environmental-education center.
Audubon Washington aims to change that, with plans to establish an environmental-learning center at Seward Park, which would serve 58,000 children and adults annually.
The environmental organization -- which has worked with the city of Seattle and community leaders to make the project happen -- has started a capital campaign to raise $3 million for the project.
So far, it has received $1.8 million from the city's pro-parks levy, the state and several major donors. Now, it's turning to the community, with an initial focus on raising $300,000 to fund the first three years of the center's operations.
"This is a way to help kids understand there's a whole different world out there, literally and figuratively," said Nina Carter, executive director of Audubon Washington. "There's a whole arena of jobs and opportunities that students may not know about because there's nobody ... to take them to a park and say look at how this amazing system works or how this park is managed."
Audubon Washington plans to renovate the historic Tudor building at the entrance to Seward Park, which was built in the late 1920s to house food concessions.
The center will include classrooms, state-of-the-art laboratory space and places where community groups can hold meetings. It will have a particular emphasis on programs for middle- and high-school students, who enjoy fewer opportunities for environmental education.
In a pilot project, students from southeast Seattle middle schools are combining biology lessons with mapping software to develop field guides for the Seward Park's plants and animals.
The center also plans to recruit senior citizen volunteers, hoping to bridge a generation gap, said Christina Gallegos, a Seward Park naturalist with Seattle Parks and Recreation.
The 300-acre park -- with its old-growth forest, great birding opportunities and Lake Washington shoreline -- lends itself to educational opportunities. Yet until Gallegos was hired in 2000 and started leading owl walks and other trips, the park had virtually no organized programs.
"As a congregating space for both people and animals, it's the perfect place for this to happen," Gallegos said. "It's where human diversity meets biodiversity."
Bembry, now a youth recreation consultant who is working on the Seward Park Audubon Center, said as life and the city grow busier, it's even more important for urban residents to have restorative places. That's particularly true for minority communities, he said.
"People are so connected and so plugged in, and people are starting to get the power of unplugging," he said. "People are starting to gravitate back towards the parks, because they're starting to see and understand the beauty of nature."
The Seward Park center will be part of a national network of 73 different Audubon nature centers and sanctuaries across the country, Carter said.
In the past eight years, the national organization has focused on opening centers in underserved, ethnically and economically diverse communities -- in part to counter perceptions that the environmental movement is relevant only to privileged, white constituents.
"That's exactly what we're trying to break out of," Carter said. "Audubon really wants to walk the walk and talk the talk on this."Seattle Post-Intelligencer
