Esmeralda joined Big Waters in August 2022 as a Land Steward. She works with our land stewardship manager, Lee Amos, to conserve and steward land across Southwest Florida. Born and raised in Manatee county, Esmeralda ventured to the far northern reaches of North Carolina to earn a degree in Environmental Science & Policy at Duke University. After graduating, she served two years with AmeriCorps—first with the Choctawhatchee Basin Alliance, where she restored coastal habitat and taught school kids about local ecology, and then with the Root Nashville campaign, which aims to plant half a million trees and improve urban canopy equity in Nashville by 2050. In her free time, she enjoys writing, gardening, and crafts.
Esmeralda Figueras
Land Steward
I spend my childhood traipsing through the woods, building Spanish moss huts and making crafts out of the air potato vines we were constantly pulling from the trees. My parents called it “playing with sticks and mud.” Well, now I get to traipse around in the woods professionally, and make sure that there will always be woods – and cow fields, and marshes – for kids to play with sticks and mud in.
