This story aired in the June 1, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
The Bay Area is known for its beautiful natural places and for being the birthplace of many social movements. One school program has found common ground between the two. For over 25 years, two high schools in the city have combined ethnic studies with environmental studies.
Reporters Paula Sibulo and Olivia Mendez are recent graduates of San Francisco State. In this story, they wanted to explore how this helps young people feel a stronger sense of connection and responsibility to the land and themselves.
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Story Transcript:
Sound of students walking through grass
ALEX LOPEZ: Oh, look, there's a banana slug over there.ANOTHER STUDENT: Where is it?
ALEX: It’s right here, you stepped on it.
REPORTER OLIVIA MENDEZ: Alex Lopez and Adamari Lopez, students at San Francisco’s Downtown Continuation High School, are poking at a squishy slug under the redwoods.
ALEX: A banana slug! Chat, we found a banana slug.
REPORTER: They’re visiting Sam McDonald Park in San Mateo County for the first time as part of their school’s Wilderness Arts and Literacy Collaborative program, also known as WALC.
ADAMARI LOPEZ: We are here taking pictures and doing a hike and taking demographic…
ALEX: Demographic data
ADAMARI: Demographic data.
REPORTER: As part of the program, students travel to national and state parks all over California to learn environmental science and history. And today, they’re taking photos of the forest and using tally counters to note who they see.
Today’s survey, combined with the data they collected at the six other parks they visited, shows that over 80% of the nearly 1,400 people they tallied were white. Their survey confirms a national trend: People of color in the U.S. are underrepresented in parks and other outdoor spaces.
Their teacher Catherine Salvin gathers the students around for a history lesson under the trees.
Sound of birds chirping
She tells them what’s special about this park is that it was originally owned by a person of color. Sam McDonald was one of the first African Americans to own property in the California redwoods. And before he died in the 1950s, he requested that the land be dedicated to young people and communities of color.
CATHERINE SALVIN: Here's a person of color, a black person, who was able to accomplish all of this, even at a time when institutionalized racism was even more prevalent than it is today. That's remarkable.
REPORTER: Throughout history, people of color have often been systematically excluded from national parks and other outdoor spaces. They are also statistically more likely to be impacted by environmental pollution. All of this results in people of color not feeling like they belong in the outdoors.
CATHERINE: So often our students are forced to feel like they don't belong anywhere, not here, not there, not anywhere. Not in this country, not in the city.
REPORTER: So Catherine co-founded this program that combines outdoor field studies with ethnic studies to counter that.
A 2026 study on American education found that, on average, students in the San Francisco Unified School District, particularly those who previously struggled, saw a boost in their GPA after taking a year-long ethnic studies course.
And Catherine says teaching ethnic studies in combination with environmental studies is important because it gives students a stronger understanding and connection with places they call home, building a sense of agency and responsibility.
CATHERINE: Offering students a stronger sense of place is fundamental to ethnic studies and is fundamental to understanding the environment. When we unpack the science of where they live and the history of where they live, then it helps reaffirm that they do have somewhere that they belong, and ideally, that will help them forge a stronger sense of self-determination.
REPORTER: The WALC program is offered to students at Downtown Continuation and Balboa high schools in San Francisco.
Catherine got the idea for the program in the late ‘90s when she first started teaching at Downtown High, an alternative school for students who weren’t supported by the traditional high school model.
At the time, she says Downtown High wasn’t supporting them either.
CATHERINE: It was like a bad Hollywood movie about an inner-city high school. It was a mess; it was chaotic; it was very low investment on the part of the students and the teachers.
REPORTER: Catherine spent a year researching other schools that were teaching alternative curricula. Meanwhile, her partner, Conrad Benedicto, a teacher at Balboa High, had been taking his students of different backgrounds hiking and camping on the weekends as a way to bond.
CONRAD BENEDICTO: I just grew up outdoors. Back in the Philippines, I spent most of my summers outdoors, and it's always been a place, a place that forged friendships for me and positive experiences, self-awareness. There is some kind of magic outdoors.
REPORTER: On those trips, Conrad realized he wanted the students to learn about the places they were visiting.
CONRAD: Through those initial lessons, the connections between ecological principles or environmental education and ethnic studies became very, very apparent.
REPORTER: So by the year 2000, Catherine and Conrad had started the Wilderness Arts and Literacy Collaborative, or WALC program, at both of their schools. The program teaches science, history and language arts through outdoor field studies around the Bay Area. Here’s Catherine again.
CATHERINE: We're lucky that we live somewhere where, within an hour and a half, two hours of the city, we can go, and we can explore and learn about the environment, learn about nature, be immersed so close to home.
Sound of students chatting
REPORTER PAULA SIBULO: This is Paula. A few months after the trip to Sam McDonald Park, I head to the Mission Cultural Center, where the students from Downtown High’s WALC program are having their end-of-semester exhibition. Students are showcasing the projects they’ve been working on for months. They’re nervous, but ready to share what they learned.
Sound of a bell ding and students presenting
REPORTER: Students, teachers and parents travel around the room from table to table, hearing presentations on restoration, preservation and environmental justice. Photos taken by students on their trips decorate the walls.
Alex Lopez, who was freaking out about banana slugs at the park, is presenting on how redwood trees sustain themselves.
ALEX: Redwood trees can live up to 2,500 years and have been alive for 240 million years. They are the tallest living things on Earth and can grow up to 380 feet tall.
REPORTER: Another student, senior Nicko Gonzalez, is presenting on restoration work in the Bayview-Hunters Point district, a primarily Black neighborhood today, that was home to a Navy shipyard that left behind a ton of toxins and pollution
Sound of Nicko Gonzalez presenting
NICKO GONZALEZ: I was in the Bayview-Hunters Point a lot in my childhood. So I would be riding my bike around. I would see a lot of trash, dumping, everything, everywhere.
REPORTER: Through his project, Nicko learned about how the neighborhood experiences environmental racism, where communities of color are disproportionately affected by environmental pollutants, and cleanup efforts are neglected.
NICKO: It kind of just opened my eyes more. I could actually do something instead of just leaving it up to the city or companies around or I could actually get into action and do something about the place where I live and where my family is at, too.
REPORTER: That’s a big part of WALC: to help students like Nicko and Alex learn about the history of these places so they can see themselves as a part of the story.
ALEX: At every lesson at the end of the day, we would connect it to ourselves. It helps us connect so much to our roots and to our nature and our environment.
REPORTER: She says her graduation means more than just receiving a diploma. It means pushing past societal expectations.
ALEX: They said it was an independent school and I wouldn't succeed there, and I got into the school, and I have never been more supported in my life.
REPORTER: Alex graduated from WALC in December 2025, but her environmental and social justice work hasn’t stopped there. She’s taking a horticulture class at City College of San Francisco. She’s interning at a Family Resource Center, and in August, she’ll be interning with Literacy for Environmental Justice, or LEJ, where she’ll be teaching youth in Southeast San Francisco how to grow native plants and their own food.
WALC Co-founder Catherine Salvin says the end goal for her students is to simply continue their lives with confidence to make their own path, whether it be related to environmental and ethnic studies or not.
CATHERINE: WALC ultimately is a way to offer students a greater sense of place, a greater sense of self, a greater sense of agency, a way to move through the world where they feel more empowered and more capable.
REPORTER: As Catherine and Conrad near retirement, they hope the program can continue, combining environmental and ethnic studies, to give students not only a fuller academic experience but also the confidence to make a change.