Rivers & Birds' Mission:
Our mission is to provide experiential education that connects youth with the lands, waters, flora and fauna of their home, and empowers them to become stewards of their environment.
Rivers & Birds has been teaching environmental stewardship in Northern New Mexico for over a quarter century. Every year, the Rivers & Birds Adventures in Stewardship program offers hundreds of Taos County public school students the opportunity to explore, understand, connect with, and protect the stunning natural landscapes that surround them. Our legacy programs, such as the Watershed Learning Project, have earned multiple awards and received state-wide recognition for their educational quality and impact. Rivers & Birds programs continue to be an integral part of the community, connecting public school students to the natural heritage of their home, and the traditions of environmental stewardship that sustain it. New programs, such as the Future Farmers Internship and the Taos Habitat Project, are creating opportunities that engage older students to be agents of change and active participants in caring for our shared habitat.
Rivers & Birds’ Core Beliefs
At Rivers & Birds, our ethos of environmental stewardship is based on an acknowledgement of the cultural landscapes that surround us in Northern New Mexico–landscapes that have been shaped by people for thousands of years. From the original Indigenous inhabitants to the Norteño Hispano cultures, the watersheds and agricultural lands of the Taos valley have been enriched by generations of tradition and stewardship. These landscapes depend on people, just as people have always depended on them. We believe that in order to sustain these social-ecological systems, and the biodiversity that depends on them, this cycle of reciprocity between people and nature must remain intact.
But this relationship is by no means ensured. Histories of land enclosure, expropriation and exploitation have alienated families from their ancestral lands. Gentrification and macroeconomic changes continue to separate land-based communities from traditional lifeways. Modern technological and social pressures further disconnect youth from the natural world. In pursuit of restorative justice, Rivers & Birds creates opportunities for youth in Taos to connect with, learn from, understand and care for the lands and water of their home, and the traditions of stewardship that have sustained them for generations.
