Violet Sage Walker, chairwoman of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council (NCTC), has been featured in TIME Magazine’s TIME100 Climate 2025, recognizing her as an influential leader driving action on climate change.
Hailing from San Luis Obispo County, Walker has dedicated more than 10 years along with her father, Chief Fred Collins, toward establishing the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary.
Walker’s family became the first Indigenous applicants for a marine sanctuary in 2015, when they found out that the coastal waters between San Luis Obispo and Gaviota would be used for oil exploration and seismic testing. Spanning over 4,500 square miles of ocean, sea floor, and coastline, this sanctuary is now the first Indigenous-led and the third-largest in the country.
After Collins died in 2021, Walker led the cause. Their efforts and campaigning eventually met with success and in November 2024, the Biden administration designated the sanctuary. While fishing is allowed, offshore drilling, undersea mining, and some other activities are prohibited in the sanctuary.
“We ran one of the most visible and successful campaigns in the nation,” Walker told TIME.
She received the Peter Douglas Coastal Stewardship Award in October 2025.
But her work is far from over, she said. She is now trying to preserve and sustain the Dos Pueblos Ranch, situated on the Gaviota Coast, under tribal stewardship. Over the years, the ranch has served many purposes, including agriculture, cattle farming, racehorse breeding, and was once the world’s largest orchid farm.
Known for its biodiversity, including a year-round stream and coastal tidal zones, the NCTC is trying to return the land to the Chumash people to protect the ranch and honor the tribe’s cultural heritage.
Indigenous Climate Solutions
As an indigenous Chumash farmer, developing sustainable food sources using regenerative agriculture is significant, she told TIME.
Indigenous knowledge encourages sustainability and restorative land stewardship. This includes using organic cover cropping to improve soil health and attract pollinators, and using methods to boost soil fertility, such as composting, mulching and no-till farming.
The NCTC is currently in escrow on a property that has a kelp production and storage facility, she said. The facility is the only working mechanical kelp harvesting boat on the coast of California.
Calling it a facet of blue carbon that can help mitigate climate change, she said kelp can capture and store carbon over a shorter time frame than forests.
Walker will use the resource to expand the use of kelp and red seaweed as sustainable food sources.
“This solution will be particularly vital during the increasing periods of extreme weather that our planet will soon experience,” she told TIME.
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I really hope the NCTC takes stewardship over the Dos Pueblos Ranch property.
Not a fan of their kelp harvesting operation. We need more kelp, not less. Kelp is habitat, and it’s diminished greatly over many decades.
Uh-huh, and exactly how does the kelp harvesting operation result in the diminishing or harm to the kelp? How familiar are you with the operation?
Uhh..it’s literally removing kelp from the ocean. They go through with a specialized boat that acts like a giant lawnmower right through the kelp beds. I guess you haven’t ever seen it out there but I have. It can remove many tons of kelp in a day.
Keep arguing?
UHhh….. sustainable kelp harvesting like this is only removing the top layer, not ripping out or destroying kelp beds like climate change is.
BASIQ is upset that oil and gas exploration and drilling aren’t prohibited there. So he passive aggressively pointed at the Chumash tribe.
Wrong. I don’t have any problem banning drilling out there. My problem with yet another Sanctuary is that we’re getting more and more of this every decade. Enviro’s and their NGO’s ALWAYS want to shut down access to our waters. If they had it their way, all we’d have is a bunch of whale watching and bird watching Nat Geo tour boats roaming around full wide-eyed never-getting outdoors tourists going crazy over seeing some porpoise. Same folks would then be buying all their seafood from the many sh-thole fisheries in the western Pacific that are completely destructive. Have some great shrimp!
It’s been going on for decades throughout CA. The Sanctuary designation is a legitimate stepping stone in the direction of another massive closure to sport and commercial fisheries.
I was 100% right. You were being passive aggressive with the anger stemming from your own agenda – and wrongly making up some mystical kelp harvesting operation the Chumash tribe are fronting. Now you have moved onto gaslighting, spreading more misinformation, and attempting to make yourself feel superior (good luck). You have no special knowledge of the preserves other than your misguided ignorance from a few years untangling lines and making burgers on a sportfishing vessel.
BASlQ tried equating “sustainability” to “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”. He hit a complete new low (when I didn’t think that was possible). He wanted us to previously run from the CRT boogeyman. It’s those rage politics that the hateful MAGAcrats want to throw out there and pretend they are a victim of some sort.
Yeah, and if nothing is sustainable, then why not stop all harvesting of any resources, and make it all sanctuary, which he hates? He speaks with a forked tongue, as usual.
And destroying kelp beds like urchins are because sea stars died off from wasting disease. New info on that infection:
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/western-fisheries-research-center/news/solving-mystery-sea-star-wasting-disease-a
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02797-2
Uh-huh, now tell me exactly how the harvester works and how it cuts kelp and how that impacts the health of the kelp forests and how that harvesting has caused kelp to diminish over many decades. Because I know. And I really don’t think you do.
A highly uninformed comment from BasicIQ. It is always entertaining to see someone make an argument who has never needed to substantiate a point with a footnote in a college paper.
But, BI Guy being BI Guy, he ignores the fact that the loss of kelp forests is almost entirely caused by global climate change resulting from our flooding of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.
That may or may not be true. There are surely many reasons for diminishing kelp. How about water quality/pollution from urban runoff? Sea urchin barrens as a result of fewer of their predators (sea otters)? Ever dive around here?
But hey, let’s say climate change is the main cause though, how do you then justify making things even worse by harvesting what little is left? Cmon.
No, it is true. And what part of sustainable didn’t you understand?
Hey, Basic, here’s another research question for you. Exactly what percentage of the kelp harvested is used to feed the baby, endangered abalone which are being gown out there and returned to the reefs along the coast? Oh, you had no idea about the conservation and restoration activities which the kelp harvest is supporting? Of course not.
Basic, please tell us more about the commercial kelp operation you are accusing the Chumash tribe of “running”. We would love to hear more about your expertise in this matter.
It’s right there in the article. Read up.
BASIC – so you don’t understand the words you read, other than “harvesting.”
The information above is minimal and your personal “observation” (which is likely a total lie) is meaningless.
However, if you understand other words and how sentences are used to convey meaning, you would understand this is one the many sustainable kelp harvesting operations that actually can benefit kelp beds.
Of course, that’s too “sciency” for you.
sacjon – BasicIQ will defend the oil companies that pollute, spill, and kill marine life – And he supports a president whose slogan has been “DRILL BABY DRILL”. The noodle armed conservative beta men are clowns.
Typical low information cop-out…