I started Urban Ecology Conservatory knowing that I have accomplished a lot, with very little. Seventeen years ago, October 11, 2008, I photographed an Eagle Scout troop building the dry arroyo parkway along Arlington Drive, and it changed my life.

By that November, I transitioned from a role as Sr. Designer at the Museum of Contemporary Art, to landscaping. I was so inspired by what I saw happening at Arlington Garden. I began to understand, there is so much we can accomplish in healing the environment, and regenerating the soil. In 2016, I was recruited by Betty as the Executive Director July 1, 2017. When I started there was no electricity, annual reports, water fountain, drinking fountain, wifi, photo permit booking system. I immediately put the professional gardeners to work together with the volunteers to help train them on best regenerative gardening practices.

Over the next several years, I grew the organization’s annual budget seven-fold, diversified revenue streams, and significantly expanded community engagement, partnerships, and outreach—driving both innovate programs and broader community impact, and served as the first, and only full-time staff member of the Pasadena nonprofit for seven years.

I have lived in the realm of visual documentation and reflection since I picked up my father’s Nikon F2 when I was 15 and started taking photos for the school newspaper. Eventually it became a medium format Mamiya, Fuji 6” x 9”, a Toyo 4” x 5”, then a myriad of digital cameras. Now I take photos with my phone. I have an archive, a visual accumulation, a record that is buried in a hard drive, on a cloud, in negatives, in boxes. In the photographic work, “Everyday Past 1981-2001,” for my USC Master of Fine Arts thesis, “I revisited the places where I lived, went to school, and played. All the days that I have lived in Los Angeles can be charted through the spaces that I have occupied, domestic and institutional. Each group of individual images is defined by street address or the name of a place.” (Matthews, 2001). I was looking and studying the built environment and how it impacted the quality of my life, although I didn’t understand it yet.

On Sunday, March 30, we hosted a virtual workshop titled Soil Testing for Contaminants, led by Dr. Danielle Stevenson, founder of the Center for Applied Ecological Remediation, and UEC Founder & President, Michelle Matthews. The workshop provided participants with essential protocols for soil contaminant testing, covering key topics such as the importance of testing soil, how to design an effective soil sampling plan, techniques for collecting samples, what contaminants to test for, and how to interpret test results.

Solastalgia is not about looking back to some golden past, nor is it about seeking another place as ‘home’. It is the ‘lived experience’ of the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation; of being undermined by forces that destroy the potential for solace to be derived from the present. In short, solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’. Glenn Albrecht