Vallejo to celebrate environmental heroes at Visions of the Wild Festival

VALLEJO — The Visions of the Wild Festival returns to Vallejo this year for its eighth annual event, with a theme of "Global and Local Environmental Heroes." The festival went on hiatus last year and faced an uncertain future, but a group of dedicated volunteers have resurrected it.

The first Visions of the Wild Festival was held in 2014. Visions of the Wild founder Steve Dunsky worked for the U.S. Forest Service when the agency moved its offices from San Francisco to Vallejo in 1999. “For the first 15 years we had not done anything with the community,” Dunsky said. “As a resident of Vallejo and as an employee of the Forest Service I always felt that was kind of unfortunate.”

Dunsky had the idea to tap into Vallejo’s culturally rich arts community to create a film and arts festival that would bring people to nature and connect them with ideas about conservation and wilderness.

“We were also looking to provide some economic benefit to a downtown that was and continues to struggle,” Dunsky said. “We felt that that was something that we could do as an agency to help make Vallejo a little bit better place.”

In addition to films and art shows, the groundbreaking festival included hikes and river cruises up the Carquinez Strait and Napa River.

Vallejo was in the midst of an arts renaissance that year, with the The Hub and Artiszen community gallery spaces facing each other across Georgia Street. “We had multiple events over four days and it was really quite elaborate in different venues,” Dunsky said. “I was really pleased to see the amount of people that we had come to downtown Vallejo.”

The event was originally planned to be a one-time thing, but a lot of people in the community told Dunsky “hey, we want to continue this.” The Forest Service agreed to continue to sponsor it and Dunsky continued to help organize it.

The event continued annually, though on a smaller scale, until the COVID -19 pandemic in 2020. Instead of the planned in-person 50th anniversary of Earth Day, they switched to virtual webinar events.

Dunsky said he wasn’t sure the festival would continue after COVID and his recent move to the East coast. “I don’t think we did anything in 2022,” Dunsky said. “I figured, well, that’s the end of it.” He said he was thrilled when Hannah Dunton and Janet Martinez-Eliot told him they wanted to revive it.

Dunton said it helps that a lot of the volunteers who had been working on the event years were enthusiastic about keeping it going, and skilled new people have stepped in to help out. “Luckily we have the best people working on this and it's really exciting,” Dunton said.

She said they wanted to make sure that kids feel included. They reached out to young Vallejo artist Orobosa “Bosa” Olotu to create the anime-style logo and promotional artwork for the event.

The event will span three days starting with an opening reception at the Vallejo Museum on Oct. 12, and continue though Oct. 14 with an exhibit of works by local artists, two film screenings, a panel celebrating Vallejo’s environmental victories, a family discovery zone, and musical celebrations. Admission to all of these events is free.

Six community-nominated Local Environmental Heroes will receive awards at the Visions of the Wild’s opening event at the museum. The event will be hosted by Vallejo resident Rue Mapp, the founder of Outdoor Afro, a non-profit that celebrates and inspires Black connections and leadership in nature, and the author of “Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors.”

An art exhibition featuring Global Environmental Heroes will open at the Temple Art Lofts gallery on Oct. 13 during the monthly Art Walk event and also be open during the Farmers Market on Saturday. Local artists were recruited and given a stipend to depict an environmental hero from around the world.

The Visions of the Wild Family Discovery Zone will be open Oct. 14 at the RiverBank on Georgia Street from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. There will be demonstrations about gardening, how honey is made, and Information about backpacks and park passes that can be checked out from the library.

International Bird Rescue will have information about the birds they care for, and the Vallejo Watershed Alliance will bring water bugs from Lake Chabot. Giant inflatable plant sculptures by Astro Botanicals and large Napa River fish puppets by Magical Moonshine Theatre will enhance the space. Kids can make nature-themed crafts like seed balls, animal masks, friendship bracelets and super eco hero capes.

The festival will host two film events. The Empress Theatre will show shorts from the Nevada-based Wild and Scenic Film Festival on Oct. 13. The films are described on the organization’s website as “stellar filmmaking, beautiful cinematography, and first-rate storytelling to inform, inspire and ignite solutions and possibilities to restore the earth and human communities while creating a positive future for the next generation.”

On Oct. 14 at RiverBank on Georgia Street, Bay Area Cinema will present “Norcal Environmental Heroes,” hand-picked films about environmental activists in Vallejo and Northern California.

Conservation Lands Network’s science adviser Stu Weiss will hold a Q&A at the end of the screenings. Weiss’ conservation work is featured in two of the films, “The Coyote Valley Connection” and “Monarch Meetup.” Also in the lineup will be Casey Toth’s “Voting on Vallejo’s Future” about the grassroots movement to stop the Orcem cement plant, and director Nancy Kelly’s “AWE,” four shorts about  “Awesome Women Environmentalists.”

Dunsky will moderate a panel discussion on Oct. 14 “Celebrating Vallejo's Environmental Victories” that will examine four episodes where local grassroots organizations won conservation victories: The fight to save Cullinan Ranch on Highway 37 from a big development and restore it to a tidal marsh; the fight to save Lynch Canyon, now a vast open space on the northeastern border of Vallejo, from becoming a landfill; the fight against the development of a liquefied natural gas plant on Mare Island; and the fight against the Orcem “green” cement plant at the site of the former Sperry Mill.

Dunton said she’s especially excited about Dunsky’s panel. “That's going to give people an idea of the history of what this little town can do when they put their mind to it,” she said.

Editor's note: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Janet Martinez-Eliot.