Looking Back on Four Decades of Building Common Ground in Sonoma Valley
If you ask anyone about Richard Dale, Sonoma Ecology Center’s co-founder and executive director, recently named this year’s Sonoma County Climate Crisis Champion by Congressman Mike Thompson, a common thread emerges. Richard’s approach, much like that of a healthy ecosystem, is collaborative and supportive, it unites unlikely allies, and always works toward achieving outcomes that benefit the whole, rather than any one individual.
Over the past four decades, Richard’s positive, consensus-driven leadership has left an indelible mark on both the ecological health and civic culture of Sonoma Valley. Under his guidance, the Ecology Center has grown capacious enough to support a wide range of programs, serving as fertile ground for many of these initiatives to flourish into independent efforts of their own and expand their impact beyond what would have otherwise been possible.
His partner in both work and life, longtime SEC biologist and senior project manager Caitlin Cornwall, notes that Richard’s gift for building common ground can be traced to formative early experiences. While working on his college honors thesis after the election of Ronald Reagan, Richard anticipated sweeping rollbacks to many of the country’s environmental protections.
Motivated to act, he reached out to leaders of major environmental organizations to understand their strategy, only to discover that they had no shared plan for a unified response. This absence of coordination, the huge missed opportunity to rally the entire spectrum of environmental stakeholders, left a lasting impression on Richard and his belief in the importance of collaboration and collective action to effect change…