2022 May General Meeting - Maya Elson
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Please join us for our May Meeting at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History or on Zoom. This will be our final general meeting of the season. Our next meeting will be in September.
If you plan to come in person, please RSVP via this Google Form. For those of you who would prefer to join us via Zoom, Please Join Here. The session will be opened at 6:30 pm for those who would like to socialize and chat with fellow mycophiles before the main meeting, which will start at 7:00 pm. Zoom participants will be able to chat among themselves until the start of main meeting. After the business part of the meeting, join Maya Elson, Executive Director of CoRenewal and Mycological Educator, who will speak with us about the role of fungi in ecological recovery from the CZU fire.
Maya is a teacher, naturalist, mycologist, organizer and lover of the wild. As the Executive Director of CoRenewal, she is dedicated to enacting effective and just solutions to environmental and social crises by working in collaboration with fungi. As one of the founding members of the Radical Mycology network, she’s worked on various fungal cultivation and educational projects in Olympia, WA and the San Francisco Bay area. She’s worked as a campaign organizer with a number of climate justice and wilderness defense struggles over many years. Maya is the founder of Wild Child Santa Cruz, a nature immersion program for homeschoolers. As an instructor of Mycopermaculture, Fungal Biology, Mycorenewal and Mushroom Identification for both adults and children, she has experience writing curriculum and giving mycology-related workshops. She is currently studying Ecopsychology, leading mushroom hunts with ForageSF, leading rites of passage programs with Gaia Passages, and raising an enchanted child.
With the rise of catastrophic megafires in California, there is a growing concern about post-fire toxic ash, and the consequences of ash-runoff entering the surrounding waterways. As the rainy season nears, we are facing complex contamination and likely unprecedented harm to fragile and sensitive aquatic ecosystems. In this conversation Maya will share with us CoRenewal’s response to research and develop more effective and widely applicable methods with multiple benefits for our water, soil, communities.