Chris Berry
CHRIS BERRY is the Watershed Compliance Manager for the City of Santa Cruz Water Department. He’s involved primarily with environmental regulatory compliance work for the Department, but he’s also involved with Drinking Water Source Protection. Chris notes this is what the rest of the world knows as watershed protection, but in the context of the Safe Drinking Water Act, there’s actually an emphasis on protecting the watersheds for the sake of drinking water quality.
Chris was born in Putnam, CT. He grew up in northeastern Connecticut and central/northern central New Hampshire. Chris wasn’t sure what he wanted to do when he grew up, though he thought he’d like to be some kind of conservationist and knew he didn’t want to work in an office; that is he didn’t want to work a traditional kind of job. Chris wanted to do something with social and environmental importance.
His brother, who was a real influence on him as a kid, is now an environmental attorney who runs a non-profit land-trust back East. Chris thought that might be a neat path to go down. At least, it looked like a good excuse to get out of his little hometown and come to Santa Barbara, where he enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of California.
Chris came to Monterey Bay as a 22-year old looking for a graduate school with surfable waves that were better than those in Santa Barbara. Chris landed at UC Santa Cruz, though he admits his first priority was to locate somewhere where the waves were good.
Chris started studying aquatic biology in Santa Barbara. But by the time he was ready for grad school, there was a critical mass of people doing ocean-related things in the Santa Cruz area, and it was a time when watershed science was really starting to take off, too. Freshwater ecology and watershed science, as well as marine ecology, were both starting to pick up then. So Santa Cruz had terrestrial and marine draws for Chris. He feels fortunate to have landed a non-traditional job that allows him to work outside and do something with social and environmental importance.
