Inner City Ranger’s Aurelia Casey is on a mission to help kids appreciate nature in the urban environment

This article is posted here with permission and the original can be found on the Children & Nature Network’s website.

When Aurelia Casey spent summers with her maternal grandmother on Staten Island, she often pulled weeds to help make way for gardens.

She later learned that the weeds were part of nature’s wealth, not its waste.

Wealth in the dandelions that could be brewed into teas to combat high blood pressure and inflammation. Wealth in the milkweed that attracts butterflies.

“I never looked at it as punishment when my grandmother had me pull weeds from her front yard,” Casey says. “I liked it…and it led me to go exploring in the backyard.”

“My oldest brother was a Boy Scout. He’d teach me stuff that he learned with the Scouts,” she continues. “It taught me how to love the outdoors and to see the beauty in all of it.”

That childhood lesson led Casey, 27, to pursue a career in environmental education.

It’s a career that has included internships at the Hudson River Park Trust in New York City, the Student Conservation Association, the National Park Service in Washington D.C. and New York City, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Southeast Louisiana.

Casey also teaches American Sign Language to elementary school children and holds a master’s degree from City University of New York in Youth Studies, focusing on environmental education for urban youth.

In 2017, after serving three years in a variety of nature educator roles, Casey created something that might very well be her legacy in the Brooklyn community that nurtured her: Inner City Ranger (@InnerCityRanger).

Casey developed and serves as lead educator for the program, which operates each summer out of the Brooklyn Center for the Arts. Around 100 or so kids from Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, preschool aged to 12 years old, participate in Inner City Ranger.

The program, for the most part, teaches kids how to identify and appreciate nature as it exists in their urban environment; to see things like plants, trees and animals, not just concrete and asphalt.

“It’s learning about different flora and fauna in Brooklyn, through looking at nearby plants and going on field trips,” said Casey, who also works as a catalyst organizer for Partnerships for Parks on Staten Island.

Among other things, being a catalyst organizer requires her to help form alliances with residents to revive parks in struggling Staten Island neighborhoods. In other words, it complements her work with Inner City Ranger, which helps everyone see the value of their urban environs.

“I’m a woman of many hours in the day,” Casey says.

“With Inner City Ranger, we start by talking about things kids might see on their walk to school, things that a parent or neighbor might be growing in their household or yard. We talk about pets if they have any, and things they’ve noticed, like trees that have been planted around their schools,” says Casey. “We also organize local nature walks and talk about things that they see.”

Things they might see on those nature walks are pin oaks, silver linden trees, tulip trees and even milkweed.

“When we see milkweed, we talk about the substance it produces to attract butterflies,” Casey said. “Even if the kids don’t like insects, they like butterflies.”

Inner City Ranger earned praise from National Geographic Education this past January for educating urban youths about the environment from an asset-based rather than deficit-based perspective.

“In Brooklyn, we don’t have immediate access to a forest or an open water space,” Casey told National Geographic, in explaining how she fosters an “explorer mindset” in youths. “But an exploration doesn’t always have to be outdoor-based. It can be how your thinking changes and transforms.”

Like seeing insects as “beneficial and not icky”—an example being the ladybug, the official insect of New York State and one that eats other harmful pests, says Casey.

Inner City Ranger often invites local Black and Latinx beekeepers and pollinators to the program so that youths, most of whom are Black and Latinx, can see people who look like them working in nature-based careers.

They also examine the legacies of Black and Indigenous people such as the Lenape, who lived in the area between New York City and Philadelphia before Europeans arrived in the 17th century.

“There are nature stories when we look at those two groups,” she says. “We discuss that using natural resources was how our ancestors and Indigenous people lived and survived in Brooklyn back when there was no technology,” says Casey. “We talk about the bark of the trees being used to build canoes for the waterways and how it may have been used to carry tools. We go to Hudson River Park to learn about the different fish and wildlife that live in and along the river,” says Casey.

That’s important, she notes, because the Hudson River tends to be characterized more by its polluted sites than by the thriving areas that oysters, seahorses, peregrine falcons, terrapins and even bald eagles call home.

“The whole approach is about reshaping their mindsets,” continues Casey, who says Inner City Ranger tries to help youths understand the forces behind pollution and how beliefs about what is and isn’t polluted may be exaggerated.

“If we’re going to label something as dirty and polluted, then we need to know the ‘why’ behind that,” she says. “If we think something is dirty when it really isn’t, then let’s explore that.”

Casey says that while being a catalyst organizer is her main job, she still has big plans for Inner City Ranger.

“My goal is to get more young people interested in green careers,” she says. “The whole idea is to expose them to a career field that is so massive and that is one of the STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering Math] pathways that isn’t as intimidating as others.”

“If they grow up and want to become advocates for food justice, or urban planners, I want to make sure that their choices benefit green spaces,” Casey continues. “The seeds are being planted so that they know more about their community and how to appreciate the nature within it.”