I always had a very romantic idea about the Amazon. The Amazon for me was an untouched nature with an immense forest and huge trees. Very much the classic thought of wilderness of Cronon (1995) that we have discussed during our course. Last week, I had a unique chance to experience the center of the Amazon rainforest in Para state for one week. CI organized an internal workshop to strengthen efforts to promote the Amazon restoration program. Is there better motivation to restore the Amazon other than experiencing the rainforest yourself? This workshop was a great opportunity to understand the magnitude of the program being proposed, to know CI members from all over, and to feel how it is to live in the Amazon.

Honestly … there are A LOT of moving pieces with my placement currently. Last week there was a four day long Y2Y board meeting that jump started my placement and gave it a full-on power boost!

So, in the spirit of cultural immersion and a nod to the title, I started this post yesterday and decided to complete it tomorrow (or today rather). When in…Iceland, right?

I left off in my first post pre-placement, hesitant but with great anticipation of what was to come. I’d be hard pressed to say that both the hesitation and anticipation weren’t both warranted and underrepresented. I made it to the island (thank you mother nature) and I am now two weeks into my placement. When I get asked how it’s going my response is, “Definitively a learning experience”.

It has been now over three weeks since I started the summer leadership placement at the Evaluation Unit of the UW- Extension Natural Resources Institute (NRI) and I must say, it has not been easy. As I mentioned in my first blog, I was overwhelmed by the amount of information I needed to process to accomplish my original goal of developing logic models for each of the Natural Resources Institute’s environmental programs, including an integrated logic model for the Institute. I spent a lot of time thinking how to begin, I made at least three different frameworks to organize data so it could be easier for me to integrate them into a final model. None of them was making sense and I was not feeling very optimist. I took a deep breath (or maybe five) and decided to stop thinking about the final result and just going step by step. I met with my host supervisor and he agreed that I should focus on the “land and water” program area of the NRI, and set aside other programs, centers and reserves. The “land and water” program area includes seven NRI branded programs: the Aquatic Invasive Species Program, the Water Action Volunteers Program, the North Central Region Water Network, the Regional Natural Resources Education Program, the Conservation Professional Training Program, the Wehr Nature Center Outreach Program and the Wisconsin Master Naturalist Program.

Following the Map:

The work I’ve done for my placement so far is very similar to the expectations outlined in my proposal and preparatory discussions with my current supervisor. Namely, I’ve been handling community outreach, mitigation planning, review of the Flooding Resilience Scorecard and ingesting an almost obscene amount of terminology and associated acronyms. One key difference is target audience. While most of my proposal and initial work focused on the Village of Viola, now that they’re “off the ground” they have also slowed down their process and are in what appears to be a holding pattern until Hazard Mitigation Grant awards are in circulation. However, another community, the Village of La Valle is just getting started. So, much of the work description that follows comes from engagement with their newly formed Revitalization Committee, which has been a pleasure to sit in on.