Liliana Griego talks about the Los Angeles River with both reverence and frankness. She recalls the first day she truly recognized its importance as habitat for local birds, marveling at the serene elegance of Great Blue Herons and Great Egrets soaring above the waterway. She also acknowledges that some people might perceive the river, sandwiched between and crisscrossed by massive highways, as little more than a concrete ditch.
For her though, Los Angeles’ urban setting didn’t dampen her love for nature; it catalyzed it. After graduating with an environmental science degree from the University of San Francisco and an international master’s degree in marine conservation, she returned to Los Angeles with a new lens that allowed her to attune her senses to the thriving biodiversity of her hometown: “I discovered I don’t need to go outside of LA to find nature. There’s actually a ton of nature right here.”
She has become a passionate advocate for urban nature and is delighted by the life that proliferates among the jumble of built environment and natural ecosystems. “Even though I had a masters in science, I really wanted to focus on access and getting people to connect with nature, and specifically nature that’s nearby to them,” she says. After earning her degree, she began volunteering in campaigns to bring people to the San Gabriel mountains that fringe the city and working with Friends of the LA River, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming the river into one that supports the collective wellbeing of all of Los Angeles’ diverse communities.
It was in that role that she began exploring the river and its birds, and she was hooked. “When I get into something,” she admits, “I really get into it.” She signed up for all the available bird outings with local Audubon chapters, took a beginner birding workshop with El Dorado Audubon, and volunteered on the bird banding team at the Audubon Center at Debs Park.
Now, Griego is the senior program manager of coasts with Audubon California, supporting ecological restoration projects, advocating for sound coastal policies and equitable access to the shore, and prioritizing inclusive and community-centered conservation.
Her favorite places are coastal wetlands, the merge of freshwater and saltwater, which she describes as “a coming together of worlds.” In college, a marine ecology course enraptured her. “I felt like I was learning about a new universe when they would talk about the ocean,” she remembers. Never one to do things by halves, Liliana first earned her scuba certification and then pressed on to become a dive instructor. Griego revels in the underwater world she’s able to plunge into as a diver, floating in the dreamy kelp forests off Santa Catalina Island and the other Channel Islands—and she knows how lucky she is to be there.
In Los Angeles County, where the shore can be a grueling hours-long bus ride from home, many people, especially those who are low-income or people of color, haven’t had the chance to build a meaningful relationship with the coast, let alone explore the ocean. There are numerous access hurdles, like limited public transportation, insufficient parking, language barriers, cultural and social factors, and inequitable educational and experiential opportunities.
Griego has personal experience with that disconnect. If it weren’t for her luck getting paired with an environmental scientist as a college advisor, her science career might have taken an entirely different path. Growing up, she didn’t consider herself outdoorsy. Outdoorsy meant, “having the technical hiking gear, and going camping and backpacking, and knowing how to ID all of the flowers.” In essence: not her. Her forays into local waterways and time spent studying roly-polies in neighborhood bushes didn’t match up with typical portrayals of environmentalists and naturalists. She had no idea what a wetland was until she learned about them in school. And when her passion for birding took hold, she often found herself an outlier as the only young adult, the only person of color, or the only beginner birder.
Griego wants others to have access to the experiences she now has, and have an easier time getting there. This year, she launched a Coastal Leadership Program, creating an opportunity for ten Los Angeles residents between the ages of 20 and 29, especially those with identities not traditionally represented in the birding world, to build and create their own relationships with the coastline.
“Through the outreach process, when we were looking for folks, we were looking for folks all throughout LA county. So really trying to bring people together from different neighborhoods to come to the coastline,” she emphasizes. The inaugural cohort brought together a diverse group of young folks in a safe, welcoming community where they had access to the support, resources, and relationships to explore their passion for the environment and wildlife.
The program’s four field trips introduced participants to different coastal areas and conservation initiatives—everything from restoring coastal habitat to monitoring snowy plovers and sea turtles.
Besides bringing people to the coast itself, Griego made it a point to connect participants with a diversity of people in the conservation world so they could establish relationships with people who had similar backgrounds as them, including those who took non-traditional routes to their current environmental leadership positions. Broadening understandings of who is engaged in conservation work and the routes that brought them there “helps people see that there is a way forward for them.”
Griego is looking to reprise the program next year, and is excited to see how this cohort builds on the networks and the skills they’ve developed. For her, the program is one of many ways that accessible, community-centered bird conservation can drive important coastal priorities. “Birds bring people together and birds bring a lot of light to people, so how do we use that to help improve our ecosystems and help improve our connections to the land and help promote forward thinking policy?”
