Greg Lukeman has been volunteering with the Nature Trust since 1999, which makes him one of the longest-serving consistent volunteers in our 30-year history!

He first connected with the Nature Trust during his graduate studies at Dalhousie. “It was a lot of math,” he laughs. “I needed something that wasn’t math to occupy myself.” As a child in New Glasgow and Antigonish, he had felt drawn to the outdoors “as a reaction to growing up in suburbia. I was always wondering, Where’s the edge of that? Where’s the forest beyond that?” But he didn’t get as many opportunities as he craved. So when Colin Stewart, a titan of the Halifax environmental community, suggested he look into the Nova Scotia Nature Trust, he immediately emailed the recently-installed Executive Director Bonnie Sutherland to ask how he could get involved.

That email led to designing and implementing a new website, which, according to Greg, “lived an unreasonably long time” (until the current version of the website was created, in fact). He was invited to join the Board of Directors, where he supported fundraising, the annual dinner and silent auction, and general Board activity. “It was really cool because I was still a kid!” Greg says. “I was in my twenties, going to grad school, but I was getting to hang around people who had been in the environmental movement forever.” He served on the Board until 2004, when he and his wife moved back to Antigonish and driving back and forth for meetings became too cumbersome (those days before video calls!).

“Antigonish was a region with no conservation lands, and no real presence,” he says, “and the Nature Trust was really viewed as an HRM organization.” So for several years Greg found ways to promote the Nature Trust locally: setting up a table at the farmer’s market, introducing local landowners to the conservation options available to them through the Nature Trust, and more.

But what he really wanted to do all along was “get outside and stomp on some properties,” he laughs. When the stewardship team was ready to establish regional hubs to coordinate Property Guardians, Greg jumped in. His family spends every summer at their cottage in Guysborough County (where, he says, “I’m in the canoe every single day”), and he canoes down the St. Mary’s River at least once a year, making his Property Guardianship of lands along the river a natural fit.

These days he is also working to get all of the Nature Trust’s conservation lands uploaded into iNaturalist, a citizen science tool that allows anyone to easily record on-site observations of plants and animals. For Greg, using iNaturalist out in nature has been “a real way to start observing the world more closely, without going back to the guidebook laboriously for every single species.” Users can take a picture of an organism, and iNaturalist will identify what it is with remarkable (though not infallible) accuracy. “Just by virtue of doing that as an education process,” says Greg, “suddenly I can name everything in the forest around me.” He’s excited to help the Nature Trust get more people recording their observations because “those observations are actually used – for property monitoring, knowing how observations change over time, seeing things that are endangered or at risk, without staff always having to go out and physically observe.” He notes that “it also demonstrates that somebody is paying attention to a property and cares about it.”

Paying attention and caring is at the heart of Greg’s dedication as a volunteer. “Once you start doing something,” he encourages, “then you can see all the areas where there could be something to do. There’s nobody that doesn’t have a talent that could be helpful.” Of his own wide-ranging volunteer contributions, he shrugs. “They’re all small ways to be involved, but it’s nice to be part of the success of the Nature Trust.”

And Greg has a clear picture of what he means by success. Having joined the Nature Trust just a few years after it formally came together, he traces how the early efforts and successes evolved into the strategic and effective organization he sees now.  “Originally it was, ‘preserve this beautiful space I’d like to be in or at least know it’s wild.’ That remains true, but now there’s this whole other climate layer on top of things, where land conservation is a powerful tool towards climate goals. These lands are preserving some of the last habitats and examples of ecosystems that exist in the province, and the Nature Trust has focused from Day 1 not just on land acquisition but on a priority list based on the ecological value of that land. I think that approach is paying dividends now.”

Please join us in thanking Greg for his many years of volunteer service!