Radhika Thekkath, an executive board member of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) Santa Clara Valley Chapter, cares deeply about native plants, the health of pollinators, and local ecosystems. She has a mostly native home garden, gives talks on native plants and related subjects for CNPS, and is passionate about preserving California’s remaining native flora and fauna for future generations to enjoy.
To help CNPS achieve its mission to save California’s native plants and places, Radhika wanted to supplement her deep volunteer experience and scientific knowledge with an understanding of how to influence government policy. To learn how, in 2021 she enrolled in the Green Foothills Leadership Program.
“I knew other CNPS members who had participated in this program, and they were recommending the program highly,” she said. “At that time, I had been volunteering for CNPS for 10 years or more but did not know how exactly the advocacy side of environmental movements worked. I was curious to learn how to effect wider change.…Elected officials seem to have the final say in how we treat our environment and the people who live in it, and yet they are not always clued into science and the long-term consequences of (our) actions…The Leadership Program met my expectations and I was happy to learn and be exposed to different ways in which one can begin advocacy work and bring about policy-related changes….it has had an impact on how I plan actions and execute them now.”
Empowering Action and Building Connections
“The most important thing I learned (in the Leadership Program) is that one’s ability to effect change is only as large as one’s sphere of influence,” she said. “The best way to contemplate change is to think about how one can grow relationships and friendships. It is important to not only make friends in larger circles, but also to mentor and help the growth of newer and younger people because they add to the volume of your organization’s important messages and public educational goals.”
After completing the Leadership Program, Radhika took on the role of President of the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of CNPS, a position she held from 2022-24. This leadership experience allowed her to amplify the chapter’s mission to educate the public on the benefits of native plants for local ecosystems. Under her guidance, the chapter engaged in several initiatives, including community gardening and conservation projects designed to restore native habitats.
In addition to leading the chapter and engaging in advocacy, she has appeared twice on KQED’s Forum to advocate for people to go out and experience California’s natural wildflower displays, but to do it responsibly. She explained that the increasing interest among the general public to see these spectacular displays will play an important role in supporting policies and actions to preserve California’s remaining natural meadows, mountainsides, and riparian areas. She also authored an article connecting native plants to human health benefits in the October 2024 issue of the Santa Clara Valley Medical Association’s bulletin on the environment.
A Vision for Sustainable Development and Conservation
Radhika joined the Green Foothills Advisory Board which, she said, “has helped me greatly in understanding some of the real issues facing us today, the conflicting need to provide adequate housing while not also ruining our open spaces and environment. I believe that this conflict only exists because people do not yet have the knowledge and education to know that there are better and cleaner ways to create housing. Denser housing made with low-carbon materials and integrated with pollinator-friendly habitat and food forests in urban/suburban areas can be created without destroying the remaining open hillsides and river banks, which we can leave to preserve California’s remaining biodiversity.”
Radhika’s commitment to sustainable development has manifested in a project with her husband, Chandu, to build low-carbon, multi-family housing using straw-bale construction—straw-bales, an agricultural byproduct, reduce greenhouse gas emissions while embodying more carbon into a building’s walls with a higher insulation. This makes the building very energy efficient in the long run. The four-townhouse complex they are building integrates solar power, electric car charging, rainwater to refill toilets and water the landscape, a greywater system, vegetable beds for tenants, and a habitat garden with native plants and fruit trees to support the local ecosystem. They hope to use this project as a demonstration of how housing can be made to sequester carbon and when built to scale, contribute very little to the worsening global climate, provide a healthy indoor environment for people, provide food resilience, and be climate resilient.
Looking Ahead
Radhika is poised to take her message further, educating communities, developers, and policymakers about the potential for sustainable housing that supports both people and the planet.
“My next step with the sustainable and climate resilient housing demonstration and ideas is to educate as much as I can on the possibilities,” she said. “I need to get out there and present what we have discovered with this project to people and organizations to show that this is possible. The path will not be smooth and we will need to line up materials and processes to make this scalable, while also working on policy changes that will provide incentives and subsidies to encourage more developers to this way of doing business.”
The skills and strategies she learned in the Green Foothills Leadership Program are sure to help her as she pursues this work. If you would like to learn more about Radhika’s endeavors, you can reach her at [email protected].
If you or someone you know would be interested in the Green Foothills Leadership Program, you can learn more at greenfoothills.org/lead.
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