Morton La Kretz, a business and philanthropic visionary, has passed away at the age of 100. He supported environmental conservation and sustainability – long before these were everyday concepts. He invested in clean energy, innovation, and environmental conservation at universities, botanical gardens, and nature reserves, and changed the built environment in one of the largest cities in the world to help connect people to nature. His work leaves a lasting legacy throughout California. Here at Sedgwick Reserve, we have witnessed the transformative power of how one person’s strategic and purposeful commitment to conservation can unlock incredible potential.
Grand buildings in Los Angeles bear the name La Kretz. You might hear, “I do research at the La Kretz Center,” to which another will ask, “Which one?” There is the Institute of Environment and Sustainability on the UCLA Campus, and the renovated UCLA La Kretz Botany Building, The La Kretz Center for Conservation Science at in Santa Monica Mountains, La Kretz Hall laboratory facilities at CSU Los Angeles, and The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s La Kretz Innovation Campus. These centers support thousands of students and professionals every year working on the most complicated and critical conservation issues of the 21st century.
Yet another La Kretz Center is two-and-a-half hours north in the Santa Ynez Valley. A modest one-story building within the footprint of what once was the Sedgwick family garage proudly bears the La Kretz name. Inside, a researcher plunks down a dusty pack, shakes the ants from her hair, and takes a long pull on a water bottle. Teams are wiring equipment, weighing plant matter, and chatting about their discoveries. Two staff, Frank Davis and Kristen Zumdahl, make introductions, give advice, and take them out into the wildlands of Sedgwick Reserve.
Established in 2017 by Morton La Kretz and his daughter Linda Duttenhaver, the mission of the La Kretz Center at Sedgwick Reserve is to spark an interdisciplinary, collaborative, translational science and develop solutions for today’s pressing environmental problems. These same words could be found in countless mission statements for just about any company. How to bring the best minds together to work creatively and support one another? Conferences and conventions can be refreshing; but the inspiration is short lived with little follow through. The La Kretz recipe for solving this problem includes a sense of place, a physical location where humans can meet and work together rather than in parallel. Sedgwick Reserve has a powerful sense of place: It is a gorgeous 6,000-acre living laboratory where people come together and can really get their hands dirty.
The La Kretz Research Center at Sedgwick Reserve is making an impact. Frank and Kristen have supported a number of large collaborations at Sedgwick to take advantage of large-scale projects where people can work on multiple perspectives of the same big questions. The NASA SHIFT campaign coordinated natural reserves across 640 square miles. People from 7 universities, TNC, USGS, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory met at Sedgwick to embark on a massive ground truthing experiment to compare data collected from satellites, planes, and drones to measurements collected on foot in the field. The prescribed burn program provides the opportunity to collect pre-, post-, and during fire data. In hosting four prescribed burn training exchanges, the La Kretz Center has brought together over 80 researchers and 150 fire practitioners from over 50 organizations. Fire practitioners, ecologists, and tribal members gather to exchange knowledge, then take their knowledge home to share with others. A new NSF-funded oak project called MalADAPT led by UCLA’s Victoria Sork, US Forest Service scientist Jessica Wright, and UCSB’s Leander Love-Anderegg and Frank Davis will study valley oaks and coast live oaks collected from throughout their ranges to look for drought adaptations through a “common garden” experiment at Sedgwick Reserve, greenhouse trials at UCSB, and genomics analyses at UCLA. The project will also study seedling physiology and even has a remote sensing component led by UCSB Geographer Zoe Pierrat.
Sedgwick is now known as a place where you can study all aspects of the natural world, better understand fire, obtain job training, learn together, and make life-long connections. These amazing collaborations would not have been possible without the generous support of Mort and Linda. With the right combination of vision, potential, and people power, truly great things can come from modest beginnings. The work we do today will affect generations to come.