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In the late 1990s Naomi Maasberg and Joleen Palmer thought the handful of acres they owned in Kingston would make a great retreat center. As they began planning the center, they invited a number of people out to the land to gauge interest. During this planning process they learned two important things. They learned more about the land and its place in the Carpenter Creek watershed, and they discovered that many of their visitors were uncomfortable being outside in the environment.
“We began to think that environmental education made more sense,” said Palmer, the center’s program director.
So the two women founded Stillwaters Environmental Center in 1999 to offer educational programs to the community about the surrounding watershed. They’ve planned the center to emulate the Olympic Park Institute located near Lake Crescent.
“We were inspired to do something like that,” said Massberg, Stillwaters’ administrative director, although she is quick to point out that they are currently a much smaller venture.
The relative compactness of the Carpenter Creek watershed, and the location of the Stillwaters’ property within it, is one of the benefits to having an environmental center there, said Palmer.
“On a two-hour tour we can show someone the entire watershed,” she said. “There are all sorts of cool things to show people.”
The timing of the center’s founding coincided with Chinook salmon being listed as an endangered species, which Palmer and Massberg describe as a galvanizing event in the Puget Sound area when it came to conservation and restoration.
“There was all this energy coming together in Puget Sound as a result of this,” said Palmer, “there was a lot of wanting to learn what’s missing in the habitats, what led to the salmon’s decline.”
Perhaps in part because of this energy, Stillwaters Environmental Center has been well received and supported by both the community and the county.
“As soon as we decided we would be an environmental center, everything took off like gangbusters,” said Palmer.
Today Stillwaters Environmental Center focuses more or less equally on restoration and education.
“They go hand in hand,” said Massberg.
The non-profit center relies on a lot of volunteer power to function. It offers a wide variety of educational programs for all generations, taught by experts who volunteer their time or accept a small stipend. Stillwaters has a close relationship with many of the surrounding schools and offers an excellent location for students to meet science and academic requirements, although it doesn’t currently have facilities to host large groups of students on the property.
“We’re still in a capital campaign to set up the campus to accommodate large groups,” said Maasberg.
One of the center’s most popular class offerings are the discussion courses that focus on sustainability, and what choices we can make for sustainable living.
“They’re very inspirational,” said Maasberg. “People come back and talk about how they’ve changed aspects of their lives.”
On the restoration side of things, Stillwaters and its community group, the Cutthroats of Carpenter Creek, work on a number of projects, often in conjunction with the county, including stream and estuary monitoring, watershed assessment and the development of a 10-year restoration plan. They were also instrumental in getting the Army Corp of Engineers involved in a $3 to $4 million culvert replacement project on West and South Kingston Roads.
Other offerings from the center include its popular annual Earth Day celebration, EcoFest.
The center currently doesn’t offer any business-specific courses, although plans for a course offered to real estate professionals on wetlands and critical habitats is in the planning stages. There were also plans to put together a directory of “green” businesses in the area, businesses that were engaging in sustainable practices.
“That didn’t get very far because there were so many businesses that needed to be praised,” said Maasberg. “There are so many businesses that are doing something.”. | 
