Join us Thursday, November 19 to hear from speaker John Artim, who will argue for caring about our ecosystems as much as we do our beloved native plants and the birds, insects, and mammals those plants support. He’ll talk to us about what an ecosystem is, and how to measure how well that ecosystem is doing, or how to measure an ecosystem’s function.
John will then use this perspective to get us thinking and talking about how ecosystem function gives us insight into the broad impacts of our work at CNPS. He’ll start this talk in a coral reef and will finish it in an oak woodland!
John has followed a long and twisty professional path from his University of California Santa Cruz undergraduate Psychobiology degree, and a Masters degree in Experimental Psychology. This education was followed by a 22-year career as a software engineer, starting at IBM, followed by a major IT project at OOCL, then a couple of start-up companies, and several years of consulting at the Silicon Valley consulting firm, Expert Support. This ultimately led to his dream engineering job at Danger Research, creator of the Danger Sidekick, the world’s first personal smartphone.
During all this, he enjoyed decades of backpacking, mostly in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range especially along Highway 395. In his 40s, John tried out SCUBA diving California’s nearshore Kelp forests, and a bit later, tropical coral reefs in the Caribbean and Pacific.
When Danger Research tried to go public and was instead bought by Microsoft, John stayed long enough to collect the bonus money, then used that to pay the costs of a PhD in Environmental Sciences at Arkansas State University, where he spent five summers doing coral reef research out of a screen cabin in a remote corner of St. John in the US Virgin Islands. After earning his PhD, John stayed in Arkansas to teach for nearly a decade, and is now retired in our fair city of Redding and figuring out how he wants to continue doing something useful.
The meeting venue
With sincere gratitude to McConnell Arboretum & Botanical Gardens, Shasta Chapter CNPS continues to meet in the new Turtle Bay Nursery Classroom, 1125 Arboretum Drive, Redding. There is lots of free, paved parking just steps away from the classroom building, and nice, curbed sidewalks. To get to the new venue, from South Market Street, turn east onto Arboretum Drive. Veer right at the first opportunity (so you don’t end up at Turtle Bay Elementary School!), and drive a short way to the “curvy” parking lot to the east of Arboretum Drive.
The Nursery Classroom is just inside a large wrought-iron double gate, which is just north of the entrance to the botanical gardens proper.
Photo taken August 30, 2024, by Don Burk.
The meeting time
We will get the show on the road no later than 6 PM for our short Chapter meeting and announcements, followed by our speaker’s presentation. Or come as early as 5:30 PM to socialize and see what sort of pre-meeting activity or display we might have for you!