In their recent McGirt v. Oklahoma decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Native American reservations comprise nearly half of eastern Oklahoma. Tribes are widely celebrating this decision as it defends their tribal sovereignty, but now they’re facing a big challenge as Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt is calling to override the McGirt decision and force fracking and drilling on the state’s tribal territories.
A new press release, jointly released by two Bioneers alumnae — Casey Camp Horinek, Environmental Ambassador of the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma, and Pennie Opal Plant, co-founder of the nonprofit organization Movement Rights — serves as a call to action by illustrating the scope of implications for indigenous rights and the environment. Read the full report below to learn more about this pressing issue and what you can do to help.
WHITE EAGLE, OK: Following decades of broken treaties, brutal forced removals and diminished tribal authority over their own lands, in a July 2020 landmark decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that much of Eastern Oklahoma falls within Indian reservations. Known as the McGirt decision, it is a victory for tribes with far-reaching implications, including affirming tribal sovereignty over environmental lawmaking. OK Governor Kevin Stitt (R), has already announced his intention to undermine the SCOTUS decision by stripping environmental authority from tribes and placing it under the auspices of the EPA.
“The actions of Governor Stitt are not surprising,” says Ponca Tribal Environmental Ambassador, Casey Camp Horinek, “The State of Oklahoma was founded on racism, and Stitt follows a long line of governors who have considered tribes sacrifice zones for fossil fuel industry profits.” In recent years Oklahoma has shifted its economy to become a fossil-fuel dependent state, now home to the largest convergence of pipelines in the US, a fracking boom, and fracking wastewater injection-wells resulting in massive man-made earthquakes.
Much of these oil and gas activities are placed on or near tribal land, contaminating soil, rivers, aquifers and air while adding to the climate crisis and directly impacting community health. “Tribes across the state have been targeted for environmental genocide at the hands of the oil and gas industry, enabled by state agencies and government officials, including the Governor’s office,” says Horinek, “and it all comes down to money.”
Governor Stitt, who has already received $239,102 in oil and gas industry donations since his November 2018 election, is asking the Trump-era EPA to override the Supreme Court and give his state control over environmental regulations on Native American reservations—including regulating fossil fuel activities. While the SCOTUS ruling has clearly empowered tribes to enforce their own environmental laws, Stitt believes he has found a loophole. In 2005, a “midnight rider” was quietly attached to an unrelated federal highway bill that Stitt claims requires tribes within Oklahoma to request permission from the state to be treated as sovereign states.
“Tribes are already sovereign, despite decades of attempts to diminish our authority over our own lands to protect our communities and make laws governing clean water, air and soil,” Horinek says. “On Ponca territory, our well water is so polluted from industry activities we now must buy water for our community.” In 2017 the Ponca banned fracking and became the first tribe to pass a statute recognizing the Rights of Nature to be free from fossil fuel contamination by asserting that ecosystems, including humans, have legal standing in a court of law.
Pennie Opal Plant, co-founder of the Indigenous and Rights of Nature organization, Movement Rights, says, “Following the Ponca, several other tribes across the US have also recognized Rights of Nature as law consistent with their Indigenous values and traditions, and as a way to protect clean water, air and soil not only for their tribes, but for everyone. We all live downstream and downwind from fossil fuel pollution and we all share the same climate.”
Fighting for Industry profits is not the first time Governor Stitt has attempted to thwart existing law when it comes to Native American tribes in Oklahoma. He has also been in a pitched battle with the 39 federally-recognized tribes over casino profits. While not all tribes operate casinos, through a state compact that was set to automatically renew in January, the state receives between 4-6 percent of gaming revenues, generating about $184.3 million in 2020 alone for the state’s Education and General Revenue Fund. Despite the automatic 15-year rollover renewal of the Compact, Governor Stitt wants to renegotiate more money from tribes.
With growing unrest among many tribes and communities about the role of fossil fuels in the state in 2017, Oklahoma was among the first to pass anti-protest laws. It is now felony with a mandatory $10,000 minimum fine to block or impede fossil fuel operations. Oklahoma’s law is unique in that it also broadly targets groups and organizations “conspiring” with protesters. This law paved the way for TC Energy’s Keystone XL pipeline extension, poised to move through Oklahoma, including through reservation land beginning this year. It is unclear whether the SCOTUS ruling would enable protestors to blockade the project on tribal land with tribal permission, yet another reason Stitt is keen to work with GOP lawmakers to put tribal land under EPA control.
“It is more race-baiting,” says Horinek. “The tribes impacted by the Supreme Court’s McGirt decision and all tribes in the state must stand together. Our very existence is at stake. If Stitt has his way the fossil fuel industry will line his pockets with our lifeblood.”
Jeff Moyer has been with The Rodale Institute for over 40 years starting as a farm laborer and currently as its CEO. Jeff designed and built out the roller crimper, an instrument that makes it possible for organic farmers to minimize or eliminate tillage, a practice that damages the soil. Jeff has also been involved in Rodale’s long-term Farming Systems Trial that provides rigorous scientific data proving the benefits of organic agriculture.
ARTY MANGAN: J.I. Rodale once said,“Healthy soil equals healthy food equals healthy people,” but the USDA reports that the nation’s soils are becoming increasingly deficient in vital nutrients. What’s happening with agricultural soils?
JEFF MOYER: The big problem is that we’ve never focused on the idea of healthy soil. J.I. Rodale was making references to healthy soils back in 1942. He was absolutely correct in saying that the health of humans is directly connected to the way we treat our soil. Now The Rodale Institute has added the words “healthy planet.” Conventional farming is narrowly focused on yield. Yield, not quality, is the metric used to judge the success of almost all farm operations in this country and around the world. We know that a good bit of the farm acreage between me in Pennsylvania and you in California is made up largely of corn and soybean. Corn and soybeans are planted in the spring and harvested in late summer, but the rest of the year the ground is bare, and nobody thinks about the health of the soil; it’s just how many tons or bushels of corn and soybeans can be produced and how cheaply it can be done. Any time you set up just one metric as your measurement of success, you’re doomed to failure because you have to look at the entire system.
As a society and a farm community, focusing on yields has created a lot of problems; the health of our soil is declining. As the health of our soil declines, the nutritional value of our foods declines because if it’s not in the soil, it can’t be in the food. Seeds and plants don’t make minerals; they just take them out of the soil and put them into a form that you and I and animals can consume. Likewise, if a contaminant is in the soil, that ends up in the food, and, of course, it ends up in us. By focusing on the soil and soil health, we stand a much better chance of producing healthy populations of people and a healthy planet.
ARTY: The Rodale Institute has been a pioneer in advancing organic practices, and in the 1990’s you were part of the process that developed national organic standards, but now Rodale is promoting the concept of regenerative agriculture. Why has it become necessary to go beyond organic?
JEFF: In the 1980s, much of the world was focusing on the words “sustainable” and “sustainability,” but sustainable is a weak word when you look at it in the context of agriculture because to sustain something is to maintain a status quo, It’s difficult to have something static in a living biological system. It’s either improving or degrading. It won’t stand still. That’s why Bob Rodale began using the word “regenerative.” So now at Rodale, we’re focusing on regeneration. We want to improve the resources that we use to produce food and fiber instead of degrading them. Our goal is to improve the soil’s health while we use it. And we can do that because the soil is based on biology.
We can actually improve the soil while we use it, and we can produce all the food that this planet needs to feed a growing population. In fact, it’s the only way to can feed an expanding population. The conventional system, has not, and will not be able to sustain a healthy population of humans on this planet. Organic systems and organic regenerative systems are the only systems that can do that.
ARTY: But organic hasn’t completely fulfilled its promise in that regard, otherwise you wouldn’t be pushing for this new standard, a regenerative agriculture certification.
JEFF: There is a lot of science in the last 20 or 30 years that shows us we can move the needle on organic farther and faster, but the current organic standard doesn’t really allow for that. What we have now is a baseline minimum standard. As long as you meet that standard, you’re in the club, you get your organic certification. So, the goal financially, for many organic farmers, is to get as close to that standard as you can without going under it, but there’s no incentive to get better. The federal law, the Organic Food and Fiber Production Act of 1990, mentions soil health, but the USDA standards for soil health in the regulations are very weak. They’re also very weak in the area of animal welfare, and they’re completely silent on the issues of social justice and fair conditions for farm workers.
With regenerative organic certification, you must first be certified organic. That’s a minimal starting point, but we believe that in order to be completely regenerative, you have to include those other criteria. We know that aware consumers go to the marketplace with a suite of values, not just one individual value. While organic may be important to them, so is social fairness, so is animal welfare, and so is soil health. And yet the organic standard is very quiet about those things. What that means is we’re either forcing farmers to have multiple certifications to satisfy the consuming public, or we’re asking consumers to choose between values that may be equally important to them in their purchasing decisions.
We feel that organic regenerative certification can include all of those things that are important to the public. It will be more cost effective for those farmers who want to do that, and more cost effective for consumers. We can move the needle farther and faster by giving consumers the products they want for their personal health, as well as products they feel good about in terms of environmental impact. A truly regenerative system can regenerate the health of the soil and of the consumers who purchase the products. It can also regenerate the spirit of farmers and their communities.
ARTY: Some people say, referring to certification, that regenerative agriculture shouldn’t be an exclusive club, that there shouldn’t be barriers to entry. The argument is that we need large scale Midwestern farmers to adopt regenerative practices, and if you mention the word organic, they’re going to slam the door in your face.
JEFF: We understand that, but we firmly believe that true leadership sets high standards. We don’t want to be so far out in front of the masses that they can’t see where we are, but as more and more of the industry begins to gravitate towards organic, we really believe the time is right now to move the bar to a higher level.
As the industry grows and matures and puts products on the shelf that consumers who demand a high standard want, we believe the entire industry is going to move. When BMW invented disc brakes and put them on cars, everybody looked at that and realized that it’s a better way to stop cars. Now every car and bicycle has disc brakes because everyone followed the engineering leaders. Why would anyone make drum brakes anymore? No one would buy that car. I have a ’59 Chevy. It has drum brakes. When you push on the brake pedal, you’re pushing and praying at the same time hoping it will stop.
We know that whenever an industry leader sets a high standard, it forces the entire industry to move in that direction. Will every farmer in the Midwest become certified regenerative organic? No. But will many of them adopt regenerative principles and begin to move in that direction? Yes. So, if every acre of land between you and me this fall gets planted with a cover crop, I’ve done my job. Even if they’re not organic or regenerative, we’ve improved the biology of the system, we’ve sequestered more carbon, and we’ve brought more life back into the soil. It’s going to take time, but over time, everyone will become regenerative organic because it is the future, and it is the direction in which we have to go.
ARTY: There’s a lot of conversation around agriculture’s role in climate change, and how it can be a part of the solution.
JEFF: Rodale Institute is in the process of writing a climate paper to be a sequel to our carbon paper, which we wrote about six years ago, and which has elicited a lot of interest around the world because of the bold stance we took. We have the science that showcases how the way we farm can have a very positive impact on climate.
For too long, farmers have not been considered part of the problem. If you’re not considered part of the problem, then you cannot be considered part of the solution. Agriculture and managed soils hold one of the keys to reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere because the soil is really the only economical sink that we have for pulling atmospheric carbon out of the air and sequestering it long term. There is a magical, wonderful process called photosynthesis that does that for us. If you or I had invented photosynthesis, we’d be Nobel Prize winners, and we’d be touted as the greatest heroes the planet has ever seen. And yet because it happens naturally, we take it for granted and we haven’t put it to work. All the carbon that is pumped out in the form of coal was sequestered by the process of sunlight on plant leaves.
The more we can cover the ground with something growing, the more we can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it in the soil. If we can do that, we’re going to use less water. Irrigation rates go down when you start managing plant cover on the soil. All these things are interconnected.
ARTY: You mentioned soil as the most economical carbon sink that we have, and there’s science to back that up, and yet there are people who are dismissing the ability of soil to significantly draw enough carbon to help heal the climate.
JEFF: I think they’ve bought into a false narrative. They’re looking at the predominant production practices in place across the world and saying those soils cannot sequester carbon under that management, and they are absolutely correct. If you talk to the world’s leading scientists on carbon sequestration, they will tell you that conventional, corn planting across the United States sequesters no carbon. What we’re talking about is radically changing the entire production system to focus on the soil not on the crop, and you begin to do that with the goal of making people healthy and making the planet healthy. By focusing on the soil, the whole world changes, and then carbon can be sequestered.
If you look at our system of livestock production in large feedlots across the Southwest, where they have taken feedstock grains out of the bread basket of the country and are sending them to feedlots in Kansas or New Mexico or Arizona, the manure never goes back to where the feed was grown. So, carbon goes in one direction and it cannot be sequestered, but if you focus your energy on carbon then what you should be doing is growing grass. One-third of Iowa, Indiana, Illinois and Ohio should be in grass. The animals shouldn’t be in the arid Southwest; they should be out in those states walking around the countryside moving across a landscape on their own four legs eating grass.
Maybe we’d have a little less biofuel, but that’s okay with me. We don’t really need ethanol. The animals would be healthier, people would be healthier, the soil would be healthier, and we’d sequester carbon so the planet would be healthy. So if you look at the current feedlot system and say it doesn’t sequester carbon, you are absolutely correct, but that’s not what we’re suggesting. We’re suggesting rewriting the rules for how we farm. Anytime you do that, people who are making money with the system the way it is will put out papers saying it cannot work.
ARTY: One of the principles of regenerative agriculture is the idea of mimicking nature. How does regenerative agriculture mimic nature?
JEFF: It mimics nature, but it doesn’t try to copy nature. It looks at a natural system and tries to identify its strengths and weaknesses. We have to ask how can we superimpose a population of seven to nine billion people onto natural ecosystems and make it work. We know we’re going to have to muck with the system a little bit. The landscape of the Midwest doesn’t want to be corn and soybeans. It wants to be either tall grass or short grass prairie, but people are not inclined to eat grasses. We’re not suggesting we put three million bison on the prairies and have Native Americans manage them. That was a system that worked in the past. It doesn’t work for where we are as a society and a planet today, but we still want to look at nature and get grass back into this system. That’s how soils are built. They’re built with grass. So, we need more grass and more animals in the system. Raising grasses on a prairie landscape is mimicking nature.
We also have to change our diet. Our diets should not be so heavily focused on meat. We need to reinvent ourselves as dieticians and nutritionists. The Rodale Institute recently wrote a white paper called The Power of the Plate promoting a whole-food, plant-based diet.
We just opened up a research station in Iowa, and one of the reasons we did that is because it’s very difficult to buy any food that was produced in Iowa. Iowa is sitting on some of the best farmland in the world with a climate that in the summer can produce almost any crop you want, and yet there’s no food being producedthere for local consumption. So, Iowa is a food desert. That’s almost criminal. It’s certainly insane that Iowa is a net importer of food. It just doesn’t make any sense. So how do we get more of our landscape involved in real food production?
I think the USDA says that we use about to three percent of our landscape for fruits and vegetables. The rest is in commodity crops that can be produced cheaply, stored economically for the long term, and torn apart chemically as ingredients for processed food that ultimately makes people sick. That’s inherently wrong.
ARTY: Another principle of regenerative agriculture is biodiversity. Why is biodiversity important?
JEFF: We talk about biodiversity above ground, but we focus a lot on the biodiversity of micro-organisms below the ground, in the soil. We know that in order for any system to function in a biological manner, it has to be diverse. We don’t fully understand the complexity and the diversity that takes place below the soil, but we know we can manage it and have an impact on it, positive or negative, based on how we farm. When we have more diversity, we build resilience into our systems.
The Rodale farming system trial, which is 40 years old, compares side-to-side a conventional production system to an organic system. For four decades, it’s been managed with the same equipment for both the organic and conventional production models. When we look at the microbial life of the soil on the conventional side, we still have a very large pool of microbes but within a very narrow spectrum of diversity because conventional farming self-selects for microbial life that can live in the chemical soup that that system dumps into the soil. It can live with salt from fertilizers. It can live with pesticides. It can live with herbicides. It’s not particularly useful in making people healthy or in facilitating plant health, which is why we have to put a lot of nutrition into the plant. The more you use that system, the more fertilizer you need because the soil becomes inherently dead.
On the organic systems, we may have the same sized pool of microbial life, but the complexity and the diversity is off the chart, and for much of that we don’t even understand what’s happening. It’s very dynamic. It’s changing all the time. But within that complexity and diversity, we can become very efficient and effective at growing crops without chemical inputs.
Once you start using chemicals in your system, you need more. In an organic system, we’re invested in soil health. There’s more diversity within the system, there’s more diversity within the people involved in the system, there’s more diversity above ground. You need crop rotations to be a regenerative organic farmer. We have farmers that call us and they say, “I want to adhere to the new regenerative organic standard, but I just want to grow soybeans on 3,000 acres. That’s not going to work. You’re going to have to diversify your crop rotation.
So, we’re working with some of the large global players in the world who are buying grains and saying you’re going to have to diversify your buying practices. You’re going to have to buy the spectrum of crops a farmer produces, so farmers can have longer crop rotations because the more diversity they grow, the more resilient and stable the system gets. We’re trying to make the global commodity processing and trading companies understand that they have to change the marketing. We have to change all these ancillary systems that are built around agricultural production.
It’s not impossible. We can do it if we choose to do it, if we as a society say that’s what we want to do. There will be opportunities for everybody to make a living in this system and to become healthier while we do it. We can heal the planet and we can heal people by doing it.
Patsy Craig is a curator/producer, author/artist and Indigenous rights advocate who has for over 16 years generated and cultivated a wide range of cross-cultural collaborations in the fields of art, music, architecture, and urbanism. This output has included publications, exhibitions, and events, including lectures, concerts, symposia, workshops, etc.
Four years ago, Craig turned her focus to environmental and Indigenous issues and spent time at Standing Rock to support the water protection movement there resisting the infamous Dakota Access Pipeline. Since then she has continued her activism and seeks to provide platforms that contribute to amplifying Indigenous world-views and ancestral knowledge. She recently opened AWA Galería in Cusco, Peru to showcase the work of Indigenous artists.
Bioneers Arts Coordinator Polina Smith interviewed Craig in August 2020.
POLINA SMITH: Patsy, could you tell us about your own background as a curator, artist and author and how you came to open a gallery in Perú.
PATSY CRAIG: I grew up in New York and from the age of 12 my family lived in different countries in South America due to my father’s work. I received my Bachelors degree in fine art from the Rhode Island School of Design (USA) and my Masters degree in Cultural Studies from Birkbeck College University of London (UK). A few years after graduating from art school I moved to England where I have lived for the past 24 years. My mother was Peruvian and my father American. On both sides I have Indigenous ancestry but my upbringing was very Western and unfortunately very unconnected to these roots. But I have always felt the pull of my ancestors which is what I believe took me to Standing Rock in 2016, and that became a real turning point for me. I’m ashamed to say I had not been involved in environmental activism until then but I was very moved by everything that was going on there and it changed everything for me. After my time at Standing Rock, I decided that I wanted to focus my efforts on Indigeneity and environmentalism so ever since I’ve been trying to educate myself as much as possible about the Indigenous cultures that I have connections to. Since 2016 I have spent most of my time in the US and in Peru researching various aspects of traditional environmental knowledge and I began focusing on what I might be able to contribute towards disseminating a greater understanding of Indigenous world views. Given my background, providing a platform for the work of Indigenous artists made a lot of sense and seemed imperative.
POLINA: What inspired you to go to Standing Rock in the first place?
PATSY: I remember the moment clearly: It was in September 2016, I was in Berlin, Germany and I was watching “Democracy Now,” which was one of the first news programs to cover the water protection movement at Standing Rock. I was outraged by what I was seeing but also very inspired by this Indigenous-led movement. I believe it was the call of the ancestors that sparked a bright light in my mind and heart and I decided on the spot that I needed to support it. So I contacted my cousin who lives in the Bay Area and has had a beautiful connection with Native culture most of her adult life- she and Winona La Duke were friends and roommates at Harvard for a few years- and we decided to go out and be there for Thanksgiving, to give a new meaning to the celebration. It was amazing, we stayed in a yurt with Cheryl Angel and other folks at Sacred Stone Camp. I learned so much and have been learning ever since. And it wasn’t just me. There was something incredibly special about that time and place so there are quite a few people who were very moved by their experience at Standing Rock and are now doing significantly relevant things in the world. Beyond being physically present there, I think it resonated the world over and brought a lot of attention to the climate crisis and Indigenous-led environmental movements generating a lot of much needed momentum in this regard.
POLINA: So, can you share a bit more about your trajectory from Europe to Standing Rock to recently opening your gallery in Cusco?
PATSY: After moving to the UK in 1996 I was very involved in the art world there but eventually I became disenchanted with it. I felt like it was all about money and it had lost a lot of the appeal that originally drew me to it so it wasn’t feeling right for me. After publishing my book Making Art Work (Trolley 2003) about how ideas translate into physical form, I began working with music, with jazz. Music felt less ego-driven, more joyous and joyously collaborative. And so I moved in that direction, but it was always with a social conscience and not just a purely aesthetic pursuit. I invited many American jazz luminaries to perform in London and in so doing learned a lot about jazz in those years both as an art form and as a culture, which was beautiful. The origins of jazz are about resistance and the music is of course associated with social struggle and civil rights, and that always resonates with me. So while my experience at Standing Rock was pivotal, in this way it didn’t seem like a huge leap, but rather a re-focusing, and it started me down a path of connecting to aspects of my own roots that I hadn’t yet delved into. It also brought me back into the visual arts, which I had to a large extent left behind. Ultimately, I feel my path, my trajectory, is resolved by my guardian spirits, my ancestors.
As a result of my research in Peru, early last year I decided to take an exhibition of contemporary Amazonian art to London to coincide with a project I was working on with UCL to provide platforms from which to amplify Indigenous world views in the UK. So last June the exhibition called The Invisible Forest was presented at Gallery 46 in Whitechapel. Presenting this beautiful selection of works was unique in a London context. In the heart of Empire my intention was to make visible an understanding of the Amazonian rainforest that was invisible to most and I organized talks with our artist-in-residence, a native Amazonian, which brought together folks from different worlds, anthropology, art, and environmentalism mostly. At one point while in the gallery I was on a Skype chat with Alexis (i.e. Alexis Bunten, co-director of Indigeneity Programs at Bioneers) and I was showing her the exhibit, and it just kind of popped into my head, I said, “Why don’t we show these works at Bioneers?” She agreed and put you and I in touch and with the help of the Peruvian Consulate in the Bay Area we managed to make it happen for the 2019 Bioneers Conference, which was wonderful.
After that I decided to live in Peru to generate something that ironically doesn’t exist here. Even though Indigenous culture is so prominent here in the Andes and in all the different geographical regions of Peru, there isn’t a gallery like mine, one that elevates contemporary Indigenous culture giving these art-forms the status they deserve in this dominant capitalist system, which of course is very divorced from original Indigenous contexts… It’s complex, tourism dilutes the local culture and the traditions become a spectacle here often very removed from their origins. Plus, art schools in Peru are very steeped in Western art traditions, which seems crazy given the ever rich cultural history of these lands. This erasure being one of the legacies of colonialism obviously. So for me this is my personal process of decolonization and a return to my roots. Cusco is a centre of Indigenous culture in the Americas, the belly button of the ancient world some say- I am blessed to be here, have much work to do, and it feels right.
POLINA: What has it been like during the pandemic for you in Cusco?
PATSY: Well I just opened the gallery in January, and obviously the gallery is not physically open right now. I’m trying to figure out ways to make it work that are adapting to these circumstances and I’ll find a way to make it relevant because I feel profoundly that COVID is a teacher. And I feel certain that this virus has made itself manifest in the world at a time when we actually desperately need to pay attention to what it has to teach us, so I don’t see it as a totally negative experience even though I know many people are suffering. We have just come out of one of the world’s longest quarantines which for me was a spiritual time.
POLINA: I’m wondering if you could share a little bit about the artists who are exhibited at the gallery.
PATSY: There is a strong energy now in Peru around contemporary Indigenous Amazonian artists so I was drawn into that scene and I started meeting people in Lima, the capital, that were a part of it. When I started digging deeper I went to the jungle and met various artists in their villages and in their homes and studios, etc. The exhibition I brought to England, “The Invisible Forest,” was a result of that research. This second exhibit, “The Sacred Forest,” is also about the jungle but is about a deeper gaze, it’s about looking at the sacred aspects of the forest, the plants, the knowledge that comes from working with the plants and understanding something about their healing energies.
POLINA: How do you find your artists?
PATSY: I follow my nose! Some of them are known in Peru, and some of them are less known. I tend to dig deeply when I do things, I do research, I use my eye and I go to the places where people live; when you seek, you find…The principal artist of “The Sacred Forest,” Dimas Paredes, began painting fairly late in his life. He studied with an internationally renown artist from Ucayali, Pablo Amaringo, who started the Usko-Ayar School in Pucallpa where students are taught to recreate their personal experiences through paint related to the biodiversity, cosmology, and mythology of the forest influenced by Ayahuasca visions. In this context Dimas developed his own unique personal style. I found that quite a few of Amaringo’s students copied the master and didn’t develop their own authentic personal voice but Dimas definitely did. And Dimas’s father was a well-known master healer in that region so you can see in his work that he has a deep understanding of the magical qualities of each plant represented in his paintings. He’s a “modern” artist because he paints on canvas, which is not a traditional format, but his iconography is steeped in an ancient tradition and way of knowledge.
POLINA: Given the ayahuasca-inspired paintings in this beautiful show you’ve curated, I was wondering if plant medicines have been part of your own journey?
PATSY: Not really, I haven’t taken ayahuasca or many plant medicines like it. It may be surprising to some because I am Peruvian and I’ve been coming to Peru all of my life to visit my grandmother and other family members so I’ve long been aware of these native traditions of healing that include sacred plant use but I’m wary of plunging into the whole Western immersion and appropriation of ayahuasca that’s been so intense in recent years. I have reservations about many aspects of that scene because I want to be careful and respectful of the cultures that originated the use of ayahuasca and other sacred plants. I have great respect for those traditions and want to learn as much as I can about them and to support the Indigenous artists who work with that imagery and those teachings, but sacred plant use has not so far been a part of my own personal experience.
POLINA: More and more Westerners are coming to Peru to try ayahuasca. Some of the artists you work with create art inspired by the medicine; what are your and their thoughts around this?
PATSY: I think money is a big part of it, it’s a whole touristic industry here now, and I think it has the potential to dilute the culture in ways that are having a negative impact, so I’m quite critical about it, actually. And I feel like there should almost be some kind of regulation on how it is dealt with. I’m not quite sure who the regulating body would be, so maybe that’s unrealistic, but when the authenticity and real cultural connection isn’t there, it loses its purpose and its power and its intention, so I feel like it needs to be done well, and needs to be done less. I feel like people need to have more respect for all that it is about and often you don’t see that. You just see a kind of Consumption.
Western culture is a culture of addiction in many ways, and I feel like that just gets translated into this. It’s a problem, but I’m not quite sure what the solution is. And many Westerners have a very incomplete sense of how these plants are used in traditional healing practices. Often it is just the healer who ingests ayahuasca, for example, as a tool to help see or “diagnose” the person’s condition, and then prescribes the appropriate plants or other healing techniques. So, it’s much more complex than this mainstream consumption that is so prevalent now. I’ve never even done ayahuasca and I feel like I could do it “well,” but I haven’t because I don’t want to participate in what I’m referring to. I want to be thoughtful and only participate in ways that are respectful of its origins and its better intentions. If the right time comes, I will engage because I am interested in its true value, and not just in ayahuasca, but in many other healing plants too. I think the artists I work with understand the tradition and its purpose.
POLINA: Will you share a little bit more information about the gallery?
PATSY: So I’ve done these 2 exhibitions presenting Amazonian art. The first one went outside of Perú, and this one is here in Cusco, although I’d love to have it travel abroad too so if anyone has suggestions or an interest in hosting it elsewhere I’d love to hear from them! But my intention is not to only focus on the Amazon. My intention ultimately with the gallery is to also represent Indigenous artists throughout South, Central and North America. And in this way I also hope to be a bridge that connects these various cultures, to encourage alliances and environmental activism always in hopes that these alliances can be an empowered protective resistant force. In this context I also aim to raise consciousness and encourage the art education system in Peru at least to become far more inclusive and open to evolving their own rich, ancient and homegrown artistic traditions. On their own decolonized terms.
POLINA: If your wildest dreams could come to fruition with this gallery, what would they be?
PATSY: The art is a means through which to enter into Indigenous world views, something I feel is crucial in these times. The dominant culture is clearly out of balance so we are at a critical point right now with preserving life on this planet and I think most people don’t connect these dots, which are ultimately about learning how to live sustainably with nature from cultures that have done this for thousands of years. We all have much to learn from this wisdom which respects the interconnectedness of all life so for me it’s about valuing Indigenous peoples and cultures, many of which are in danger of being lost. It’s about giving them physical, spiritual, and political space to exist and thrive. This I feel strongly will result in a mutual flourishing. Let’s hope we get it right.
I also hope to be a bridge that connects Indigenous folks throughout the Americas. For example, Lyla June is someone I’m in touch with, and I would love to translate the great work she is involved with online into Quechua and Spanish, so that it can be accessible to Indigenous communities here in Peru. I’ve begun to do that with her work but I need funding to continue. And I’d love to share the voices of others like Lyla’s mom Pat Mcabe and Casey Camp-Horinek, who I invited to London- both amazing women! And Tom Goldtooth who I met through Bioneers, and Wendsler Nosie Sr, who I met while supporting the movement in Oak Flats, Arizona, and Cheryl Angel who was my teacher at Standing Rock, etc. And on and on. I’d love to connect them all with folks down here to facilitate an empowering dialogue of interconnection and alliance…but I need support to do the work of translating Spanish, Quechua, and English content to present on radio and the internet.
You know, for a long time indigenous-led environmental activism in much of Latin America has been considered by the powers that be, a kind of terrorism, even more than in the U.S., so I’d love to be able to help open up these dialogues to change that perspective and those misinformed and destructive policies- to de-stigmatize the efforts of the protectors of these beautiful traditions and open up their profound teachings to a wider audience.
Every year Earth Island Institute’s New Leaders Initiative recognizes six young environmental activists from North America, ages 13 to 22, for their outstanding efforts to promote ecological sustainability and social justice. We are excited to announce the 2020 recipients of the Brower Youth Awards.
Clockwise from left: Danielle Boyer, Alexandra Collins, Haana Edenshaw, Diego Arreola Fernandez, Chander Payne, Isabella Wallmow. Photo by New Leaders Initiative.
Alexandra Collins, 16
Hinsdale, Illinois
Battling Cancer-Causing Air Pollution
In 2018, Alexandra Collins discovered that for 30 years industrial sterilization company Sterigenics had been emitting high levels of ethylene oxide (EtO) — a colorless gas that is a known carcinogen — near homes and schools in her neighborhood in Hinsdale, Illinois. Collins’s community suffers from a cancer rate nearly nine times the national average. After learning that many students and teachers were unaware of the danger EtO posed, Collins and her sister co-founded Students Against Ethylene Oxide (SAEtO), which harnesses the energy of young people to fight for a ban of ethylene oxide emissions, especially near schools and residential areas.
In the fall of 2019, SAEtO and allied community groups persuaded the Sterigenics facility near Collins’s home to close.
Recently, Collins also helped launch SAEtO’s first specialized project, EtO-Free that reviews EtO-free beauty products and pushes for transparency in product manufacturing and labeling.
Danielle Boyer, 19
Troy, Michigan
Bringing STEAM Education to Indigenous Youth
After teaching her first kindergarten science class at age 10 in Troy, Michigan, Ojibwe youth Danielle Boyer became acutely aware of how disparate access to quality STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) education among low-income students disadvantages them and impacts the future of our Earth. She’s been working to increase STEAM education accessibility and affordability ever since through innovative programs that promote technical competency and develop a tangible love for our Earth. In January 2019, Boyer founded her own educational organization, The STEAM Connection, to further this cause.
The STEAM Connection prioritizes work with communities of color, particularly Indigenous communities, providing free classes and events on recycling, innovation, and sustainable design.
Haana Edenshaw, 16
Haida Gwaii
Suing Canada for Its Role in the Climate Crisis
A member of the Tsitts Gitanee clan of the Haida Nation on Haida Gwaii, Haana Edenshaw is one of 15 Canadian youth suing the Canadian federal government for its contributions to climate change. Edenshaw has been an environmental justice and Indigenous rights activist for much of her life, organizing climate strikes, speaking alongside Greta Thunberg at the 2019 Rally for Climate Justice in Vancouver, and delivering a speech in the Masset dialect of the Haida language at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues last year.
In the lawsuit, Edenshaw and her co-plaintiffs argue that their rights to life, liberty, security of person, and equality, and their public trust rights, are being violated by the Canadian federal government due to its continued support of fossil fuels. The lawsuit is part of a global movement of youth, supported by the nonprofit law firm Our Children’s Trust, holding governments accountable for their role in the climate crisis.
Diego Arreola Fernandez, 18
Mexico City, Mexico
Fostering Environmental Activism in Mexico
Diego Arreola Fernández created Green Speaking after learning about the devastating consequences of plastic pollution and excessive consumerism while at the 2019 Ocean Heroes Bootcamp in Vancouver, Canada. His campaign uses in-school engagement, social media, and motivational videos to encourage children, schools, and businesses in Mexico to fight plastic pollution by modifying their habits, policies, and strategies.
In a country contending with serious gang-related violence, deep poverty, and pervasive social inequality, raising awareness about the environment is no small task. But the need for it is urgent.
Arreola Fernandez’s next goal is to turn his campaign into an environmental organization with the mission of cultivating more environmental leaders prepared to raise their voices for the planet and inspire people towards a truly sustainable future.
After noticing a lack of fresh produce at his school in Bethesda, Maryland in 2016, Chander Payne connected his school food pantry with a local rooftop farm and began delivering 20 pounds of fresh produce to the pantry each week. That summer, he fell in love with regenerative agriculture and returned to school with a mission to use the practice to help marginalized youth grow food. He founded Urban Beet farm in his high school’s courtyard and invited young people from the Washington DC-based Homeless Children’s Playtime Project to grow and harvest vegetables there.
Over the past two years, Urban Beet has provided 2,500 pounds of produce to underserved families and people experiencing homelessness, and it has begun to replicate its work at other schools across the country.
Isabella Wallmow, 20
Andover, Minnesota
Creating a Healing Space for Incarcerated Youth
While volunteering with incarcerated youth at a juvenile detention center in Warrenville, Illinois, Isabella Wallmow came to realize that the youth needed healing, not punishment. After learning about the holistic, community-oriented approach of permaculture agriculture in 2018, she had an idea: set up a gardening program. With support from the Resiliency Institute, which uses permaculture design to transform suburban communities, as well as enthusiastic detention center staff, Wallmow launched the Seeds for Change Garden Program in 2019.
Seeds for Change puts voices, visions, and dreams of incarcerated youth at the forefront of running the garden. It creates a safe, healing space for them and equips them with a marketable skill.
Save the Date:Join us for the 2020 Brower Youth Awards! The awards will be celebrated virtually on October 15 and will be followed by a virtual Q&A session with the winners on October 20. To register for these events, visit: broweryouthawards.org.
What a week. Rough for all Californians. Exhausting for the firefighters on the front lines. Heart-shattering for those who lost homes and loved ones. But a special “Truman Show” kind of hell for the cadre of men and women who’ve not just watched California burn, fire ax in hand, for the past two or three or five decades, but who’ve also fully understood the fire policy that created the landscape that is now up in flames.
“What’s it like?” Tim Ingalsbee repeated back to me, wearily, when I asked him what it was like to watch California this past week. In 1980, Ingalsbee started working as a wildland firefighter. In 1995, he earned a doctorate in environmental sociology. And in 2005, frustrated by the huge gap between what he was learning about fire management and seeing on the fire line, he started Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. Since then FUSEE has been lobbying Congress, and trying to educate anybody who will listen, about the misguided fire policy that is leading to the megafires we are seeing today.
So what’s it like? “It’s just … well … it’s horrible. Horrible to see this happening when the science is so clear and has been clear for years. I suffer from Cassandra syndrome,” Ingalsbee said. “Every year I warn people: Disaster’s coming. We got to change. And no one listens. And then it happens.”
The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”
Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.
Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.
Mike Beasley, deputy fire chief of Yosemite National Park from 2001 to 2009 and retired interagency fire chief for the Inyo National Forest and the Bureau of Land Management’s Bishop Field Office, was in a better mood than Ingalsbee when I reached him, but only because as a part-time Arkansan, part-time Californian and Oregonian, Beasley seems to find life more absurd. How does California look this week? He let out a throaty laugh. “It looks complicated,” he said. “And I think you know what I mean by that.”
Beasley earned what he called his “red card,” or wildland firefighter qualification, in 1984. To him, California, today, resembles a rookie pyro Armageddon, its scorched battlefields studded with soldiers wielding fancy tools, executing foolhardy strategy. “Put the wet stuff on the red stuff,” Beasley summed up his assessment of the plan of attack by Cal Fire, the state’s behemoth “emergency response and resource protection” agency. Instead, Beasley believes, fire professionals should be considering ecology and picking their fights: letting fires that pose little risk burn through the stockpiles of fuels. Yet that’s not the mission. “They put fires out, full stop, end of story,” Beasley said of Cal Fire. “They like to keep it clean that way.”
(Cal Fire, which admittedly is a little busy this week, did not respond to requests to comment before this story published.)
Carl Skinner (Courtesy Carl Skinner)
So it’s been a week. Carl Skinner, another Cassandra, who started firefighting in Lassen County in 1968 and who retired in 2014 after 42 years managing and researching fire for the U.S. Forest Service, sounded profoundly, existentially tired. “We’ve been talking about how this is where we were headed for decades.”
“It’s painful,” said Craig Thomas, director of the Fire Restoration Group. He, too, has been having the fire Cassandra conversation for 30 years. He’s not that hopeful, unless there’s a power change. “Until different people own the calculator or say how the buttons get pushed, it’s going to stay that way.”
A six-word California fire ecology primer: The state is in the hole.
A seventy-word primer: We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not.
Megafires, like the ones that have ripped this week through 1 million acres (so far), will continue to erupt until we’ve flared off our stockpiled fuels. No way around that.
When I reached Malcolm North, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who is based in Mammoth, California, and asked if there was any meaningful scientific dissent to the idea that we need to do more controlled burning, he said, “None that I know of.”
How did we get here? Culture, greed, liability laws and good intentions gone awry. There are just so many reasons not to pick up the drip torch and start a prescribed burn even though it’s the safe, smart thing to do.
The overarching reason is culture. In 1905, the U.S. Forest Service was created with a military mindset. Not long after, renowned American philosopher William James wrote in his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” that Americans should redirect their combative impulses away from their fellow humans and onto “Nature.” The war-on-fire mentality found especially fertile ground in California, a state that had emerged from the genocide and cultural destruction of tribes who understood fire and relied on its benefits to tend their land. That state then repopulated itself in the Gold Rush with extraction enthusiasts, and a little more than half a century later, it suffered a truly devastating fire. Three-thousand people died, and hundreds of thousands were left homeless, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and attendant fires. The overwhelming majority of the destruction came from the flames, not the quake. Small wonder California’s fire ethos has much more in common with a field surgeon wielding a bone saw than a preventive medicine specialist with a tray full of vaccines.
More quantitatively — and related — fire suppression in California is big business, with impressive year-over-year growth. Before 1999, Cal Fire never spent more than $100 million a year. In 2007-08, it spent $524 million. In 2017-18, $773 million. Could this be Cal Fire’s first $1 billion season? Too early to tell, but don’t count it out. On top of all the state money, federal disaster funds flow down from “the big bank in the sky,” said Ingalsbee. Studies have shown that over a quarter of U.S. Forest Service fire suppression spending goes to aviation — planes and helicopters used to put out fire. A lot of the “air show,” as he calls it, happens not on small fires in the morning, when retardant drops from planes are most effective, but on large fires in the afternoon. But nevermind. You can now call in a 747 to drop 19,200 gallons of retardant. Or a purpose-designed Lockheed Martin FireHerc, a cousin of the C-130. How cool is that? Still only 30% of retardant is dropped within 2,000 yards of a neighborhood, meaning that it stands little chance of saving a life or home. Instead the airdrop serves, at great expense, to save trees in the wilderness, where burning, not suppression, might well do more good.
This whole system is exacerbated by the fact that it’s not just contracts for privately owned aircraft. Much of the fire-suppression apparatus — the crews themselves, the infrastructure that supports them — is contracted out to private firms. “The Halliburton model from the Middle East is kind of in effect for all the infrastructure that comes into fire camps,” Beasley said, referencing the Iraq war. “The catering, the trucks that you can sleep in that are air-conditioned…”
Cal Fire pays firefighters well, very well. (And perversely well compared with the thousands of California Department of Corrections inmates who serve on fire crews, which is very much a different story.) As the California Policy Center reported in 2017, “The median compensation package — including base pay, special pay, overtime and benefits — for full time Cal Fire firefighters of all categories is more than $148,000 a year.”
The paydays can turn incentives upside down. “Every five, 10, 15 years, we’ll see an event where a firefighter who wants [to earn] overtime starts a fire,” said Crystal Kolden, a self-described “pyrogeographer” and assistant professor of fire science in the Management of Complex Systems Department at the University of California, Merced. (She first picked up a drip torch in 1999 when working for the U.S. Forest Service and got hooked.) “And it sort of gets painted as, ‘Well, this person is just completely nuts.’ And, you know, they maybe are.” But the financial incentives are real. “It’s very lucrative for a certain population of contractors.”
By comparison, planning a prescribed burn is cumbersome. A wildfire is categorized as an emergency, meaning firefighters pull down hazard pay and can drive a bulldozer into a protected wilderness area where regulations typically prohibit mountain bikes. Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the state’s mighty air resources board, and its local affiliates. “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go.
“One thing to keep in mind is that air-quality impacts from prescribed burning are minuscule compared to what you’re experiencing right now,” said Matthew Hurteau, associate professor of biology at University of New Mexico and director of the Earth Systems Ecology Lab, which looks at how climate change will impact forest systems. With prescribed burns, people can plan ahead: get out of town, install a HEPA filter in their house, make a rational plan to live with smoke. Historical accounts of California summers describe months of smoky skies, but as a feature of the landscape, not a bug. Beasley and others argue we need to rethink our ideas of what a healthy California looks like. “We’re used to seeing a thick wall of even-aged trees,” he told me, “and those forests are just as much a relic of fire exclusion as our clear skies.”
Mike Beasley (Courtesy Mike Beasley)
In the Southeast which burns more than twice as many acres as California each year — fire is defined as a public good. Burn bosses in California can more easily be held liable than their peers in some other states if the wind comes up and their burn goes awry. At the same time, California burn bosses typically suffer no consequences for deciding not to light. No promotion will be missed, no red flags rise. “There’s always extra political risk to a fire going bad,” Beasley said. “So whenever anything comes up, people say, OK, that’s it. We’re gonna put all the fires out.” For over a month this spring, the U.S. Forest Service canceled all prescribed burns in California, and training for burn bosses, because of COVID-19.
I asked Beasley why he ignited his burns anyway when he was Yosemite fire chief. “I’m single! I’m not married! I have no kids. Probably a submarine captain is the best person for the job.” Then he stopped joking. “I was a risk taker to some degree. But I also was a believer in science.”
On Aug. 12, 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the U.S. Forest Service chief and others signed a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, that the state needs to burn more. “The health and wellbeing of California communities and ecosystems depend on urgent and effective forest and rangeland stewardship to restore resilient and diverse ecosystems,” the MOU states. The document includes a mea culpa: “California’s forests naturally adapted to low-intensity fire, nature’s preferred management tool, but Gold Rush-era clearcutting followed by a wholesale policy of fire suppression resulted in the overly dense, ailing forests that dominate the landscape today.”
Ingalsbee looks at the MOU and thinks, That’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. Likewise Nick Goulette, executive director of the Watershed Research and Training Center, has seen too little movement for too long to believe anything but utter calamity can get us back on track. In 2014, Goulette participated in a planning exercise known as the Quadrennial Fire Review, or QFR, that asked the grim question: What is the disaster scenario that finally causes us to alter in a meaningful way our relationship and response to fire? The answer: something along the lines of a megafire taking out San Diego. In the wake of it, Goulette and others imagined one scenario in which the U.S. Forest Service morphed into an even more militaristic firefighting agency that “overwhelmingly emphasizes full suppression” and is “extremely risk averse.” But they also envisioned a scenario that spawned a new kind of fire force, one focused on “monitoring firesheds” and dedicated to changing the dominant philosophy away “from the war on fire to living with fire.”
This exercise took place three years before the devastating 2017 Napa and Sonoma fires, and four years before the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise in 2018. Goulette thought those events would have prompted more change. The tragedies did lead to some new legislation and some more productive conversations with Cal Fire. But there’s just so much ground we need to make up.
When asked how we were doing on closing the gap between what we need to burn in California and what we actually light, Goulette fell into the familiar fire Cassandra stutter. “Oh gosh. … I don’t know. …” The QFR acknowledged there was no way prescribed burns and other kinds of forest thinning could make a dent in the risk imposed by the backlog of fuels in the next 10 or even 20 years. “We’re at 20,000 acres a year. We need to get to a million. What’s the reasonable path toward a million acres?” Maybe we could get to 40,000 acres, in five years. But that number made Goulette stop speaking again. “Forty thousand acres? Is that meaningful?” That answer, obviously, is no.
The only real path toward meaningful change looks politically impossible. Goulette said we need to scrap the system and rethink what we could do with Cal Fire’s annual budget: Is this really the best thing we could do with several billion dollars to be more resistant to wildfire? Goulette knows this suggestion is so laughably distasteful and naive to those in power that uttering it as the director of a nonprofit like the Watershed Research and Training Center gets you kicked out of the room.
Lenya Quinn-Davidson at September Burn in Bear River. (Thomas Stratton)
Some fire Cassandras are more optimistic than others. Lenya Quinn-Davidson, area fire adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension and director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council, remains hopeful. She knows the history. She understands that the new MOU is nonbinding. Still she’s working on forming burn cooperatives and designing burner certificate programs to bring healthy fire practices back into communities. She’d like to get Californians back closer to the fire culture in the Southeast where, she said, “Your average person goes out back with Grandpa, and they burn 10 acres on the back 40 you know, on a Sunday.” Fire is not just for professionals, not just for government employees and their contractors. Intentional fire, as she sees it, is “a tool and anyone who’s managing land is going to have prescribed fire in their toolbox.” That is not the world we’ve been inhabiting in the West. “That’s been the hard part in California,” Quinn-Davidson said. “In trying to increase the pace and scale of prescribed fire, we’re actually fighting some really, some really deep cultural attitudes around who gets to use it and where it belongs in society.”
All Cassandras believe California’s wildfires will get worse, much worse, before they get better. Right now, said Crystal Kolden, the state’s fuel management plan, such as it is, is for Cal Fire to try to do prescribed burns in shoulder season. But given that the fires are starting earlier in the year and lasting later (we are not even this year’s traditional fire season yet), the shoulder doesn’t really exist. “So where is the end?” she asks. “It’s not in sight, and we don’t know when it will be.” The week before this past round of fires saw the hottest temperatures ever recorded in California, the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on earth: 130 degrees, more than half the boiling point of water, and just 10 degrees below what scientist consider to be the absolute upper limit of what the human body can endure for 10 minutes in humidity.
“Meanwhile, our firefighters are completely at the breaking point,” said Kolden, and there’s little they can do to stop a megafire once one starts. “And after a while you start to see breakdowns and interruptions in other critical pieces, like our food systems, our transportation systems.” It doesn’t need to be this way. We didn’t need to get here. We are not suffering from a lack of knowledge. “We can produce all the science in the world, and we largely understand why fires are the way they are,” said Eric Knapp, a U.S. Forest Service research ecologist based in Redding, California. “It’s just that other social political realities get in the way of doing a lot of what we need to do.”
The fire and climate science before us is not comforting. It would be great to call in a 747, dump 19,200 gallons of retardant on reality and make the terrifying facts fade away. But ignoring the tinderbox that is our state and our planet invites more madness, not just for the Cassandras but for us all.
As Ingalsbee said, “You won’t find any climate deniers on the fire line.”
This article contains the content from the 8/28/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
Indigenous communities have spent thousands of years living alongside fire as a crucial element to regulating ecosystems and promoting biodiversity.
We’ve entered an era that necessitates a healthier relationship with fire. Climate change is intensifying these disasters with drier and hotter conditions, as we’ve witnessed an unprecedented wildfire season in California wreak widespread destruction. Modern society has much to learn from traditional ecological knowledge — which may hold the key to coexisting with fire, rather than struggling to control it. Instead of associating fire with danger and destruction, what if we shifted our mindset toward embracing the renewal and rebirth that come from the ashes?
This week, we highlight the work of fire ecologists helping communities become “fire adapted” in a rapidly warming world.
Living With Fire: Dr. Crystal Kolden on Fire Resilience, Biomimicry and TEK
The California wildfires are razing through homes, cities, and ecosystems at a higher intensity than natural fires — and this problem is far from over. Dr. Crystal Kolden, a self-proclaimed “Pyrogeographer,” has spent years examining humanity’s relationship with fire through the lens of environmental conservation and land management. As an expert, Kolden has gained an intimate understanding of how society can adapt to the more frequent and intense wildfires precipitated by climate change.
In this interview, Kolden uplifts what she’s learned about creating fire-resilient communities, which could be the key to sustainably co-existing with one of the world’s most powerful natural elements.
Fire and Water: Land and Watershed Management in the Age of Climate Change
As climate change makes the environment drier and hotter, wildfires are worsening throughout California. This season alone, these fires have razed hundreds of thousands of acres and continue to spread rapidly.
Fire ecology experts are leading the search for solutions, which includes restoring the natural role of fire in ecosystems and combating the poor land management practices that have led us to this crisis. In this panel discussion from the 2016 Bioneers Conference, four leading fire ecologists discuss one burning question: How can modern society renew our relationship with the land to stop the wildfire crisis?
Nature’s Phoenix: Fire As Medicine | Chad Hanson and Frank Kanawha Lake
Contemporary Western fire science is integrating what Indigenous Peoples discovered over thousands of years of observation, and trial and error: fire is key to optimizing forest vitality and biodiversity. The merging of these two ways of knowing could signal the end to our misguided policy of fire suppression at all costs, and the beginning of an era of building fire-resilient communities with a new relationship to one of nature’s most elemental and fearful forces.
This Bioneers podcast episode features fire ecologists Chad Hanson and Frank Kanawha Lake.
Initiation by Fire: Life During and After a Major California Wildfire
The Ojai Foundation in Ojai, California, is a 42-year-old retreat center whose mission is to “foster practices that awaken connection with self, others, and the natural world.” The new co-directors, Sharon Shay Sloan and her husband Brendan Clarke, were invited to lead a transformation of the space. But disaster hit just weeks after they arrived. The Thomas Fire — one of the worst in California’s history — blazed through the education center’s 37 acres and destroyed 80% of its buildings.
In this interview, Sharon discusses the aftermath of the fire and how she’s leading the effort to rebuild Ojai from the ashes. This story holds deep lessons on being resilient in times of disaster.
In 2019, Bioneers hosted a screening and panel discussion of “Wilder Than Wild: Fire, Forests, and the Future.” This compelling one-hour documentary reveals how fire suppression and climate change have exposed our forests and urban landscapes to high intensity wildfires – and explores strategies to mitigate their impact. In 2020, as multiple wildfires are torching large areas of California, Wilder Than Wild offers an invaluable overview.
California Fire Safe Council | This nonprofit organization leads community efforts toward wildfire risk reduction and resiliency, by bringing together citizens, community leaders, governmental agencies and corporations.
National Fire Protection Association | Firewise USA is a voluntary program from the NFPA, which provides a framework to help neighbors get organized, find direction, and take action to increase the ignition resistance of their homes and community.
This article contains the content from the 8/28/2020 Bioneers Pulse newsletter. Sign up here to get the newsletter straight to your inbox!
Wildfires in California and across the Western US are razing through homes, cities, and ecosystems at record-breaking rates for yet another summer — and this problem is far from over. Dr. Crystal Kolden, a self-proclaimed “Pyrogeographer,” has spent years examining humanity’s relationship with fire through the lens of environmental conservation and land management. Using Biomimicry as a lens, Dr. Kolden and her colleagues have gained an intimate understanding of the solutions needed to adapt to a rapidly warming world, including empowering the leadership of First Peoples.
In this interview with Bioneers Senior Director of Programs and Research Teo Grossman, Dr. Kolden discusses her research into transforming our societal relationship with wildfire, leading towards the creation of fire-resilient communities which can sustainably co-exist with one of the world’s most powerful natural elements.
Dr. Crystal Kolden
DR. CRYSTAL KOLDEN: I am an Assistant Professor of Fire Science based in the Management of Complex Systems Department at UC-Merced. My research is focused broadly on wildfire in a coupled natural-human system. I am a geographer by training, so I call myself a “Pyrogeographer” because I really look at how fire works in the physical Earth system and ecosystems. However, because humans are strongly coupled to that natural landscape and to those ecosystems, we can’t ignore humans. There are feedbacks in that human-natural systems relationship, so I look at understanding how fire works in that coupled system and where fire affects those feedback processes between humans and the landscapes we live on.
TEO GROSSMAN: It’s a crazy moment we’re in — and for many it feels like we keep having more and more of these summers. California fire managers are basically saying the fire season extends year-round at this point. There is obviously a climate signal in this, compounded by a century or more of fairly intense fire suppression. Where is the science currently at?
KOLDEN: That’s a big question. In a nutshell, as the globe warms, we see more local extremes. People have a hard time wrapping their head around global warming as a big, abstract concept. What does it really mean that the planet has warmed an average of two degrees in the last century?
One local manifestation of climate change is change in the frequency and the timing of when extreme events occur. As the temperature warms globally, the variance increases in local systems. Literally thousands of high temperature records have been broken around the world over the last several years. We see more of these extreme events, not just really hot days, but hot days coupled with strong winds, or hot days following a multi-month or multi-week, or even multi-year drought.
These extreme events affect the condition of the vegetation whether it’s forest, shrub lands or grasslands. One of the key drivers of big, explosive wildfires is what we call the vapor pressure deficit, which is a measure of aridity. Extreme heat wave events or drought coupled with heat waves produce really high vapor pressure deficits and all you need is a spark. Depending on location, there are different ratios of human to lightning ignitions. But generally, there is never a shortage of ignitions.
We have stretches of drought followed by a really wet winter that will produce massive growth in vegetation, and then we get a really dry summer following it. That’s always happened, but now the magnitude of the regrowth (and the resulting fire) is much more extreme.
It’s all very interconnected. There are other factors — forest management practices, land management more generally, where humans are building — which all relate to how a lot of these fire disasters play out. The key is that many of these other factors vary locally and can be quite different from from country to country. But we see these fire extremes that I’ve described globally. That’s why, as a fire scientist, I really point to global climate change as being the big driving factor related to increasing fire disasters.
TEO: I first became aware of your work in an article that you wrote with Alistair Smith and David Bowman titled Biomimicry Can Help Humans to Coexist Sustainably with Fire. Can you describe what you and your colleagues were trying to accomplish?
KOLDEN: There are a number of different adaptations that plant species and even animal species have to fire. What we wanted to do with this paper was suggest that we really need to start looking at nature as we try and figure out, as humans, how to live in these fire-prone landscapes. One of the things that humans have realized over time is that nature can be a really powerful teacher, because evolution has basically required species to evolve to become efficient and effective so they can continue to occupy a niche.
“We really need to start looking at nature as we try and figure out, as humans, how to live in these fire-prone landscapes.” – Dr. Crystal Kolden @pyrogeog
We tried to look at a lot of different species and ask, How can we think about mimicking what these plants or animals have already evolved over time, in terms of how they exist in this environment of fire? How can we, as human society, adapt some of those traits in our own way so that we can learn to live successfully in these fire-prone systems and not constantly be having fire disasters.
When fire scientists look at how natural systems function with and without fire, one of the things we see over and over again is that a great many species on Earth are adapted to fire in some way, shape or form. They have evolved with fire. That evolution and those characteristics take many different forms. Some species have evolved to actually be fire dependent. The charismatic mega flora that everyone loves to point to is the Giant Sequoia, a revered tree in California and in Western North America. Giant Sequoias are these amazing trees. It turns out that they actually depend on fire to regenerate. Their cones have a bit of a resin on them and they only open up, allowing the seeds to actually get into the soil to regenerate, if there has been relatively frequent or recent low-severity fire.
Other species are fire adapted in that they will tolerate fire. These might be trees that have developed really thick bark, or armor essentially, so that when fire comes through, they can survive. The Ponderosa Pine tree is one of the most widespread trees in Western North America. Ponderosa Pine can grow very large and has these big, thick plates of bark. When a fire comes through, the first branches on a mature Ponderosa pine are so high up in the air that the flames on the fire actually can’t even reach the lowest branches. The bark is so thick that the heat never penetrates into the core, the living piece of the tree where the water and the food are moving. Ponderosa is a species that is adapted to fire. It doesn’t depend on it, but it also is used to frequent fire and easily repels the effects of fire.
Then there are species that don’t do very well with fire. We think of them as fire intolerant and they are the species that grow in spaces where there is not very much fire or it is highly infrequent. When these species they experience any kind of fire, even just a little bit, they will die and they won’t come back again, often for hundreds of years.
TEO: How similar were your biomimetic findings compared to current approaches for creating fire-resilient or fire-permeable communities. Did they match up? Did you find new strategies that you hadn’t expected?
KOLDEN: Yes. One of the things that we really try and push in our paper is that we as humans have an opportunity to use biomimicry to think more outside the box in terms of how to create fire-resilient communities. A good example of this is that for many decades now, our approach has been to view communities as places where fire should not be. We’ve tried to prevent fire from coming into communities. This approach may work in a city or in a suburban or ex-urban area with relatively dense housing, but as we look at some of these more rural areas, there are subdivisions that are half-acre, one-acre, two-acre lots with houses relatively spread out and with a fair amount of vegetation between homes. Trying to keep fire from moving into those communities is an exercise in futility in many ways.
Instead, one of the things we see when we look to nature is that fire is not kept out of some forests. It is allowed to move through. The evolution of certain forests has facilitated fire actually moving through quickly and at relatively low severity so that it doesn’t kill the big trees. I’ll go back to my example of the Giant Sequoias and to some extent the Ponderosa pines. There are a lot of pictures from early explorers and some of the early settlers in the Western US that show these big park-like areas where the trees are incredibly widely spaced, and the understory is relatively short. It’s grass. It’s mostly short. When a fire moves into those areas, the only thing in the understory is either short or tall grass. Fire burns grass pretty quickly, so it moves fast, and then it also burns at low intensity. There’s not a lot of heat coming off of a grass fire, so there’s not a lot of what we call residence time around the bowl of a tree.
If you light a match, take your finger and you can actually touch the head of a match for a nano second and you won’t really burn yourself. You can put out a candle by just quickly pinching your fingers together on the flame. But if you take the match and you have it right next to your finger, and you hold it there you’re going to give yourself a pretty bad burn. It’s the same thing with trees.
These forests have evolved so that fire moves through quickly and burns off the understory grass and doesn’t have a high residence time around the bowls of the trees. We asked whether we can do the same thing with a lot of these rural communities. Can we actually set them up so that we facilitate fire moving through a community, through some of these land parcels, moving through quickly and at low severity, so that there aren’t a lot of embers generated that can land on houses and ignite housing materials, and so there’s not a high residence time.
I envision being able to live in a community someday in a house that is fully hardened against fire. You see the fire coming, you close all your doors and your windows, and you turn off your air circulation system so it’s not sucking anything in, and you watch the fire go racing by, and you wait a half an hour for the last bits of it to burn out, and then you open your door again, and, yes, you’ve got a blackened property around you, but at low severity, within a week or two, it will actually begin to green up. That type of approach is much more aligned with what happens in a functioning ecosystem than what we see today with communities trying to keep fire out. That’s a really simple example.
When I say that Biomimicry generates outside-the-box ideas, some of the things that we speculate on in the paper are questions and ideas such as whether we could have of elevated communities where the wildlands grow from the soil, from the surface, and the housing is built up on stilts or up in the trees. There are boreal communities of different kinds of species whose approach when a fire comes is to climb the tree, get out of the way, that’s where their nests are, and fire does not affect them at all. Could we say, okay, let’s go ahead and put our houses up on stilts. We do it in some places in flood plains. We do it in some places for hurricanes. It’s an interesting question and one that I’m not qualified to answer from an engineering perspective, but we wanted to put that out there as an idea that it’s in the natural world and it works for species in the natural world. It is something that we can think about that’s an outside-the-box solution for wildfire-prone areas.
TEO: One of the themes in your work (and hopefully increasingly in fire science in general) is the realization that fire is both an essential regenerative process of the landscape as well as a reality that humans, as a species, have always been living with. Modern society seems to have lost touch with the reality of living with fire. You note that Indigenous fire management practices were historically widespread and sophisticated. I’ll add that these practices were frequently stamped out by colonizers. Some of the first laws on the books in colonial California and Australia were bans on traditional burning practices. In some places traditional ecological fire management is still taking place. The science appears to be catching up in some ways. What’s the next step? Where do we go from here?
KOLDEN: It’s interesting that you note that the science may have caught up. I would say science still actually has a lot of catching up to do, particularly with regard to Indigenous knowledge and how Indigenous people were part of that evolutionary process in terms of fire-prone landscapes globally. This has been an interesting debate among fire scientists for a long time. There are fire ecologists and fire scientists who don’t think that there was actually that much Indigenous burning across the landscape. Then there’s a substantial amount of anthropological research and traditional ecological knowledge that supports that there actually was an enormous amount of Indigenous burning, to the point that in places where there was not very much lightning, these landscapes are still very, very much shaped by fire. The only place that that fire could have come from was from widespread Indigenous burning with high frequency. We’re still sort of catching up in that regard.
There are Indigenous communities and tribes throughout the world, who still have that knowledge and have maintained it through oral history and by continuing to use cultural fire. As we start to look at next steps going forward, I think those are the people who should be leading. We should be empowering them as leaders to think through and prescribe how we can take some next steps towards increasing fire on these landscapes.
It’s always really counterintuitive for people to think that the best way to increase our ability to live on these fire-prone landscapes is to fight fire with fire. But it really is. The place that we should be starting from is applying fire in a smart and intentional way, consistent with how fire was applied on these landscapes for millennia by lightning as well as Indigenous people.
TEO: It is really about living with fire, isn’t it? If there’s one takeaway here, it might be getting everyone to really wrap their heads around that phrase, because it’s not going away. We live with wind and rain. Fire is always going to be there.
KOLDEN: I do a lot of press interviews and community outreach work, and one of the things I always ask is: How do you want your smoke? Because that’s really the thing that ends up impacting the most people. The dream of living in a smoke-free world for most of us in the Western US is gone. Those decades are gone. It’s hard for people to let go of that. It’s like addiction. In stage one, admit you have a problem. Once we get to the point of saying, okay, we’re going to have fire and we’re going to have it every year, then we have to ask: how do you want it? Do you want it predictable and spread out over the course of the year via prescribed burning so if you’re highly sensitive to smoke you can plan around it? Or do you want it for two or three weeks in late summer when you simply can’t control it, and you’re stuck, and it’s hot, and you want to be out recreating but you can’t because there’s so much smoke it’s unhealthy?
It’s hard for people to wrap their head around that because they want the good, ole days without fire. But thanks to global climate change, those days are gone. Now we have to figure out how to mitigate the discomfort of having a little bit of smoke instead of being trapped by a lot.
We’re a long way from living sustainably with fire, and we need to get there faster rather than slower.
The Ojai Foundation in Ojai, California, is a 42-year-old retreat center whose mission is to “foster practices that awaken connection with self, others, and the natural world.”The new co-directors, Sharon Shay Sloan and her husband Brendan Clarke, were invited to lead a transformation of the Foundation. But disaster hit just weeks after they arrived. The Thomas Fire — one of the worst in California’s history — blazed through the education center’s 37 acres and destroyed 80% of its buildings.
Arty Mangan, Director of the Bioneers Restorative Food Systems program, interviewed Sharon about the aftermath of the fire and how she’s leading the effort to rebuild Ojai from the ashes. This story holds deep lessons on being resilient in times of disaster.Shay will be facilitating Prayer and Action Talking Circles at the upcoming Bioneers Conference.
ARTY MANGAN: Shortly after you left Sonoma County in 2017 – right after the Tubbs Fire had devastated Santa Rosa – and moved to Ojai to co-direct The Ojai Foundation, you experienced one of the largest wildfires in California history. How did you get through that?
Sharon Shay Sloan
SHAY SLOAN: We got a call within the first hour or two of the fire starting. At that point, it was a small neighborhood fire. It didn’t have a name yet. A dear friend and colleague got word from a neighbor, and he let us know. We went up to a ridge and as far in the distance as we could see, there was the fire. It was a freezing cold night with 80 mile-an-hour wind gusts. So, it was already very extreme. Even though the fire was very far away, we immediately felt a sense of the power of the moment.
It’s an east-west valley. On the southern half of the horizon, a red puff of smoke completely covered the hills and the sky, and the northern half of the valley was a crystal clear, star-filled, full-moon, bright night. It was gorgeous, the world as it was made. And on the southern side, the world that the humans made and how that interacts with natural forces. There was this visual visceral imprint that came through watching the fire move through the landscape.
I take that much time to describe the moment because in large part that was what sustained us. We had literally seen the coming of something, the arrival of something, the energy and the strength, the potential, and amidst that, the backdrop of what was happening on the CB radio and the news.
There was little coherence in the wider social fabric, immediate overwhelm, and a sense of near-panic already in the air that was apparent from the first moment of the fire.
Sharon Shay Sloan inspects The Ojai Foundation land after the fire | Photo from The Ojai Foundation Archives
So many people have pointed toward this time, toward the coming changes whether it’s climate change or social uprisings, whether it’s through prophecy or science. I would say that I have been preparing for these times and have been privileged to hear the stories and learn from many people who motivated me to prepare, to the best of my ability, both in relationships and in practices.
There was the seeing and perception through direct experience, and then there was the being held by relationships by people who were not in the same immediate crisis, but who were aware of and caring about our experience, on a personal level and for The Ojai Foundation itself, as well as the wider community.
Then there are the practices. What do you do day-to-day when there’s so much stress running through your body? The people around you are moving in and out of panic. The emergency services, the county, the state, were completely in over their heads. So, we rely on the inner, the relational, and the spiritual.
ARTY: That was really beautiful and powerful and devastating to hear. Once the fire had gone through and done damage and changed lives, did you experience post-traumatic stress syndrome?
SHAY: Honestly, I felt, for the most part, that we were able to keep pace with the changes in a way that we weren’t accumulating trauma. We were watching and studying all the maps. We had to get around the police barricade. We lived through the intensity of the experience. We were the first ones on-site to walk the full land and take in what had been burned and what hadn’t burned. We were still putting out fires while we were there. We were very much on the frontline of that experience.
The Ojai Foundation’s Sage House before the fire | Photo from The Ojai Foundation Archives
We did accumulate stress from the administrative challenges of life. When you lose almost everything that you have, there’s so much to deal with. We suffered that loss on a personal level. And The Ojai Foundation lost 80 percent of all structures; all of the residents and all of the staff lost homes. We couldn’t operate the business. We lost all of our tools. It was a complete devastation, and yet there was something about the resting into what I named previously that I feel really gave us a minimal accumulation of traumatic residue.
Sage House after the fire | Photo from The Ojai Foundation Archives
But the way that I am able to recognize that we did have some trauma is that even to this day, we will barely buy anything. There’s a feeling that it could all go. Knowing impermanence is part of it, and not wanting to hold onto anything because it could be lost again. But there’s another part, which is we also felt what it was like to not have stuff. I left with a suitcase and a duffel bag. There was a lightness to being that was very freeing. There wasn’t only loss, there were gifts. I think so much of the story that gets told is about the devastation, the trauma, loss, and the horror, and all of that is true. I can say yes, I lived all of those things, and I don’t carry around so many things with me anymore. Many of them, I didn’t actually need.
So, there’s a lot of mixed experience. And I feel we’ve been able to have both the gift and the losses of that time.
ARTY: How did that experience change the way you understand or embody emotional and spiritual resilience?
SHAY: Resilience is often talked about on an individual level. Do we have the capacity to regenerate and continue to harness our energy and bring our gifts to the world through challenging times? I rest my weight in that, but I also rest weight much more deeply in community resilience, not just local community but also interwoven communities. The experience that we had of people from literally all over the world writing, sending letters, sending funds to The Ojai Foundation, sending gifts of clothes to me and Brendan. There was so much outpouring of support that made our resilience possible.
We extend our wellness and resilience to each other in times of need, and that allows for the buoyancy, for the uplifting of one another through a time when otherwise we could buckle under the pressures of our own circumstance.
The need of relationship, not only for networking on a superficial level, but developing networks of committed relationships, is what gave rise to the Fire Fellowship. This is one of the programs that we have launched at The Ojai Foundation since the Thomas Fire, and so far have been able to continue it through the time of the pandemic. Part of our intention is to support the Fellows to develop a network of resilience and support, as well as to gift the practices that helped us to go through that process, combined with other practices that the fellows themselves are carrying.
Ruins of the kitchen | Photo from The Ojai Foundation Archives
ARTY: In our previous conversation, you said: “What do I need and what can I offer? How did that guide you and how did it express itself?
SHAY: There’s a saying from Christina Baldwin: “Ask for what you need, offer what you can.” That has definitely been helpful guidance, both since the fire, as well as in life in general. I find this is increasingly important the stronger our need becomes, whether it’s a need for love, or need for shelter, or need for money, or friendship. Needs come on so many different levels. The more that we focus solely on the need, the more we create the conditions where that need cannot be fulfilled. If someone is feeling a poverty of the spirit, if they focus on what they have to offer, what are their gifts – no matter if it’s a penny, an hour of time, an ability to grow food or whatever the gifts are – there’s a way where we restart the cycle of reciprocity in our own hearts and minds again. Through that reciprocity, I find both resilience as well as strength and stronger relationships.
It’s never just I need something from you, but I have a need and here’s what I have to offer. It’s become a bit of a mantra for my life. It saved my butt time and again in my marriage. If I get really into that indignant position of: I need this thing; I need it. That other person can become so resistant to that kind of demand, but if I can center on what do I have to give, what do I have to offer, and I have a need you can help with, it’s received so much better.
ARTY: That’s really impressive and uplifting. But I also want to ask you: In your darkest moments, what do you fear?
SHAY: Years ago, when I was contemplating if I wanted to be a mother? Is that part of my path? I found myself in a very, very deep conundrum, and I wasn’t able to put words to what I was feeling. At a certain point, I found some of the feelings that were underneath, and I cried and I cried and I cried. What I realized was that I will not be able to protect a child. There’s only so much I can do to protect them from the conditions, from the society, from the violence, from the fires, from all of those kinds of things. I am coping with the limit of my ability to protect that which I love – my child, a wilderness area that shaped me, peoples who live on the front lines. There are so many aspects of my life where I have come to understand the helplessness that I feel when faced with the scale of what we can actually protect. So, the deeper fear underneath is no, we can’t.
We’ve seen that time and time again. We couldn’t stop the fire from taking our home or The Ojai Foundation. There are many things that have been lost and destroyed from species to people who we love who have been lost to disease or suicide. It’s the reckoning with that. It’s not so much a fear, but a reckoning with reality or potential reality.
ARTY: What do you want to instill in your 18-month-old son about how to face a future that in all likelihood will be more unstable and dangerous than even the world we live in today?
SHAY: I take refuge in believing that he’s made for these times. The young people today are coming into a time of such deep initiation through transformation of the culture and transformation of the environment that for him and other people it is the fabric that they’re growing up in. It’s not like life was something and then it becomes something else. This is his life from day one.
Burnt out landscape at The Ojai Foundation | Photo from The Ojai Foundation Archives
The more that I can lean into seeing the world through his eyes and understand the innate capacities that he and other young people are coming in with, the more I can and learn from them and nurture those strengths.
I can show him how to lean into networks of support, resources and practices. My husband is mixed race, and so my son is mixed race. I feel we have a very deep responsibility for his education on anti-racism. They say that by age 2 or 3, babies start to internalize racist ideas and beliefs and start to sort the world through what they’re seeing and experiencing in the culture, in the books, in the media, etc. So how do we maintain and create an anti-racist education for him from day one so that by the time he is 2 or 3, which is coming for him in the next 6 months to a year and a half, he is already internalizing an anti-racist view and way of life.
It’s a job I take very seriously. I’m very grateful for the people and practices, and all of the work that has been done already in these ways. For young people who are awakened and good people who are here to support the youth in building those intergenerational relationships, I take refuge in all of those things, certainly on a more personal level and in a different way than I did before I was a mother.
ARTY: After the rebuilding from the fire, what are some of the aspirations and challenges for The Ojai Foundation?
SHAY: It’s been a long road. We did an extended period we called the Recover and Reimagine phase. Many people asked, “When are you going to rebuild and put it back the way it was?” But it was very clear to us that there was no going back, that things had changed at a scale and in such a way that we could only go forward. So, we put our daily attention toward recovering basic infrastructure and basic safety on the land. Whether it was from tree work or repairing electrical or water damage, or damage to buildings or simply moving debris. We also turned our attention toward reimagining how to be with the landscape, how to be with the organization, and with the community and the work.
In going through that process, a wonderful man, Andy Lipkis, founder of Tree People, who’s a long-time friend and colleague, came and walked the land, and he said, “Everything must teach. Everything you do through this recover process has to teach what’s possible.” That really resonated for us, and it’s part of why we knew there was no going back. We weren’t going to put buildings back on the periphery of the ridge in a place where we knew fire would come and ravage them again in a similar way. We had lived through climate disaster and we learned the lessons of what that means in that landscape.
There was a very strong lesson around the relationship of earth and fire. So, we have only rebuilt two things, a round, earthen meeting building that’s 80 percent done and an earthen tool wall to store all of our garden tools. Other than that, we’ve just restored the land and the infrastructure.
Our approach to the land itself is to model climate resilient design and stewardship of the land. That will be a slow process of continuing along the lines that I’ve named and moving at a pace good for the land. The land is still in deep recovery. If you dig down anywhere on the land, you still find ash. That ash is like medicine containing minerals and other gifts to regenerate the soil. So, it’s a slow build. And we’ve prepared the land for camping and day use, but we will not be building back the larger structures quickly.
Post fire view from The Ojai Foundation | Photo from The Ojai Foundation Archives
On the level of reimagining programs and the organization, The Ojai Foundation is 45 years old, and there are so many teachers and people who have come through. The practices and ways of being and doing have gifted thousands and thousands of people. I don’t really know the numbers, but I would guess over a hundred thousand people have had direct and transformational experience on that land or with our practices. We’re now in 2020, so if we were going to start with something new, would we start with what was happening in the 1970s or anything in the past? No. Because we’re in different times. This time has given us very, very deep pause to ask how do we go forward? What does the leadership look like? Do we carry on the same practices? How do we continue to evolve?
First Spring after the fire | Photo from The Ojai Foundation Archives
We are pausing many of the programs and asking for an evolution. We were planning to reopen in March, and literally the week before that reopening, the global Coronavirus pandemic erupted. So, our closure has been extended because of the pandemic.
We find ourselves again in a perpetual closure of the land base, certainly through 2020. We don’t know what will happen going forward. The combination of these things got us into a very deep contemplation of potentially closing the land base, potentially closing the organization, looking at how to go forward and asking if it might it be time for a complete change of form.
Sharon Shay Sloan and her son Kian after the fire | Photo from The Ojai Foundation Archives
After a three-month listening period in which we considered whether it’s time for a complete change of form or not, the comments from the board will be sent out to 270 of The Ojai Foundation’s closest allies. It basically says that while we thought we were turning toward a rapid change of form and potentially leaving the land base, what we have learned from this time of deep listening and meeting with the community and stakeholders is that there is still important work to do in the name of The Ojai Foundation and in the land sanctuary that we steward. That work has to do with increasing multi-cultural leadership in the organization and a much further evolution of the practices. It has to do with looking squarely at issues of power, equity and access, both within The Foundation and in the broader community connected to it. Now is a time to ask what gifts have been received and given through the work of The Ojai Foundation? From where have they been received, and to whom have they been given? What harm has been caused alongside the gifts? Who has been missing or excluded from the conversations, practices, and leadership? As we honor what has been, we also recognize that for our organization to remain visionary, we must continue to evolve our forms, our practices, our conversations and our relationships.
That’s what is immediately ahead for us, and we’ll see how it continues to unfold. It’s been a big three months; to be honest, I think in some ways it’s been harder than the fire because for this process we have to choose everything. With the fire, we were responding to what happened, but this requires another kind of decision, one that means walking consciously toward transformation. That is a whole other human capacity, and one that we all carry. If every organization, nation, business, marriage, and individual contemplated completely changing the form and deeply engaged that potential, I am curious what new possibilities would arise in the wake of the old. What world would start to become possible?
Bioneers hosted a screening of Wilder than Wild: Fire, Forests, and the Future in September 2019 at the Smith Rafael Center in San Rafael, CA. This compelling one-hour documentary reveals how fire suppression and climate change have exposed our forests and wildland-urban landscapes to large, high intensity wildfires – and explores strategies to mitigate the impact of these fires. In 2020, as multiple wildfires torch large areas of California, once again forcing tens of thousands to evacuate their homes and millions to breathe air thick with smoke, Wilder than Wild offers an invaluable overview. In addition to being broadcast on PBS stations across the country, the film can be purchased for educational and community screenings and will soon be online for video on demand. See the film’s website for details.
The screening was followed by a panel with the following guests:
Elizabeth Azzuz is a member of the Yurok Tribe, the largest in California. She gathers traditional foods, medicines, and basketry materials. Elizabeth is on the Yurok Cultural Fire Management Council, and she is a communications and logistics trainer during prescribed fire training exchanges when Klamath River tribes and non-Indian communities work with the Nature Conservancy’s fire learning network.
Tamra Peters is Executive Director of Resilient Neighborhoods. She has worked with the Nature Conservancy, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and other conservation organizations. A board member of Sustainable Marin for seven years, Tamara has worked with hundreds of Marin families who are reducing their carbon footprints and building more sustainable communities.
Mike Shuken, firefighter and paramedic for the City of Berkeley Fire Department, was a first responder to the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa in 2017. In the film we witness his experience of the wine country wildfires via footage he shot through the windows of his fire engine.
Kay White is the originator and coordinator of Pacheco Valle FireWise community in Novato. She and her neighbors work together on community improvements as well as on fire prevention. Their work provides a model for similar initiatives elsewhere in Marin County.
The film’s director Kevin White also attended, along with writer/producer Stephen Most, who moderated the panel.
KEVIN WHITE: When Stephen and I started this film, we had no idea that we would be sitting here in the middle of 2019 with this legacy of catastrophic fire behind us, and probably arguably in front of us. One of the things that really struck me as we made this film was that the fires and the wildland urban interfaces (WUI) were getting bigger. In fact we had a rough cut on October 8th, and then on October 9th we woke up and smelled smoke. We rushed up to the wine country to film. Fortunately, we connected with Mike Shuken and were able to get some of the footage that he amazingly captured while he was fighting the fires. It was clear that something fundamental has changed, and we witnessed it in the last five to six years.
Since then we’ve had more than 250 community screenings. We have really seen how wildfire has impacted communities up front and personal. It is really clear that the solution lives in communities working together.
Kevin White, Director of Wilder Than Wild
The Rim fire devastated communities and really undermined so much of the ecological surrounding areas. We saw an environmentalist and a logger come together to create consensus, which is a great lesson. It’s really inspiring to see the amazing work of the Yurok tribe, Elizabeth and Margo and everyone. It’s clear that community is key.
STEPHEN MOST: Mike Shuken, you say in the film that we learn something from every fire and you talk about how fire departments adapt. You point out that for urban fire departments, it’s not just someone dropping a cigarette in a home or the wiring going bad, but that it’s important to address how fires come from the outside and consume entire neighborhoods. How does that affect an urban fire department like your own?
MIKE SHUKEN: In the early 1990s we had a fire in the Oakland/Berkeley hills, and we lost about 3,000 structures. In that particular fire, a number of fire departments came in to help us fight it. But they couldn’t connect their firehoses to our fire hydrants because all fire departments select their own hoses and have different threads. That presented a big challenge. So in 1994, a law was passed that standardized hose fittings.
Fast forward to the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa. With very few exceptions, hundreds of fire agencies from around California and the Western United States had matching hose couplings. In that fire, about 6,000 structures burned down with a loss of 22 lives. This was tragic, but it was a smaller number than we were anticipating. That fire was early in the morning, and there’s a large senior citizen population there. So for us as firefighters, that was pretty remarkable.
Mike Shuken, firefighter and paramedic for the City of Berkeley Fire Department
Early on in that fire, the decision was made by the fire department to try to not defend any of the structures that were burning, but to focus purely on evacuating the citizens of the community. They worked in conjunction with the sheriff’s department to do that.
But when we actually looked at what saved the lives of most people who lived there, it was their neighbors. It was the fact that the people came out of their house, saw their community was burning, and immediately alerted their neighbors’. They helped disabled people, senior citizens, families with children. So we need to recognize that everyone basically becomes a first responder in that kind of situation.
So as an urban fire department, one of the things we focused on is giving the community the tools to be able to respond.
STEPHEN MOST: That’s a great point, Mike. Often those of us who live in cities might not know our neighbors at all. But when we realize that a fire can sweep in from the hills outside our neighborhoods and affect all of us, all of a sudden people are not strangers. We have a shared fate. Understanding our neighbors’ situations, knowing who is handicapped, who’s a senior, who can’t get out in time becomes a very vital thing for us to do for all of our sakes.
Elizabeth Azzuz, many people see fire in negative terms. But your colleague, Margo Robbins, says in the film that your community saw fire as the number one important thing to have. What are the benefits of fire for your community, and what is the traditional ecological knowledge of the Klamath River tribes on how to use cultural fire safely and productively?
ELIZABETH AZZUZ: Our community is extremely rural. The sign says there are 250 people, which is incorrect, because it’s said that since I was a child. However, we’re a very culturally oriented people. We spend a lot of time hunting, gathering, fishing, and a lot of time on the land. We gather our foods, our medicines. We spend time in nature. We pay attention to our environment, the times of the day that the wind travels. How our environment interacts with us, we need to interact with it.
For our community to come together and say that fire was the most important thing, you have to realize our aunties run our communities. When our basketweavers don’t have hazel sticks, the younger generation jumps because they say so. We have been able to go from not having hazel for our weavers – and some of our women are some of the best weavers, I believe, in the world – to now having young women and girls as young as 5 years-old making baby baskets, food baskets and medicinal baskets, and being able to gather in large groups rather than hiding your family’s gathering spot because it’s the only one around.
It’s very important for us to be able to stand out in the forest and look as far as we can see in either direction. We’ve seen animals come back that people haven’t seen in their lifetime. The hunters are extremely happy. The weavers are extremely happy. And those of us who gather medicinal medicines are very happy also.
Elizabeth Azzuz, Yurok Tribe Cultural Fire Management Councilmember
It’s really, really important for me to know that communities get together and communicate with one another. Take care of your neighbors. Take care of your environment, because when we’re clearing our land, when we’re burning, it helps the water, our environment, the fish, it helps all of the things that we live with.
I’m speaking to an audience that probably doesn’t even know what most of this means because you see buildings for miles. All I see in my home are trees. I live directly above the confluence of the Klamath and Trinity River, so I’m a little jealous that you have all of these wonderful things at your hands, but on the other hand, I’m really happy to be where I’m at in the woods.
STEPHEN MOST: Tamra Peters, would you tell us about Resilient Neighborhoods? I understand you’re focused on climate change and improving the carbon footprint of the neighborhoods you work with, but how do you view wildfires in this context of climate change?
TAMRA PETERS: Let me start answering your question with a quote that I really like from President Obama. He said we’re the first generation to feel the effects of climate change, and we’re the last generation that can do something about it. So that’s what led me to create Resilient Neighborhoods nine years ago. I wanted it to be a community-based organization that would help people reduce their family’s carbon footprint, their own carbon footprint, but also do something about the effects that climate change was going to bring our way, the adaptation that we were going to need. I had no idea nine years ago that we would be living it right now, and wildfires is a big part of that.
We have about eight to 10 families who get together to form a climate action team. They calculate their household carbon footprint from the beginning, where they are right now as a baseline, and then we have actions that they can take to reduce that. We also have a section on emergency preparedness and adaptation: what can you do for your family? Do you have a household emergency plan? Do you have supplies? Do you have adequate insurance? Then it goes to what you can do in your neighborhood. Do you know your neighbors? Can you exchange a key and look out for one person on your street and build it that way? Could you create a neighborhood response group, and a fire safe Marin community?
Tamra Peters, Executive Director of Resilient Neighborhoods
So we are building a climate movement in Marin, and a climate movement of safety. What we’re going to need is to connect with our neighbors and start it from there. Also, as we have heard, we need to get back to understanding that we are a part of nature and nature’s systems. I love that about the film.
We’ve had over 1300 people go through the program and reduce 7.5 million pounds of carbon here in Marin. It’s really exciting to connect with their neighbors, and we’re working with everybody here to build a more resilient future.
STEPHEN MOST: Kay White, what can individuals do to protect themselves from possible wildfires in the wildland urban interface – the WUI – where we live?
KAY WHITE: How many people here live in Marin? About 80 percent of you or maybe 100 percent of you live in a wildland urban interface. This was not clear to me until 2015, when I saw the community wildfire prevention plan through our Novato Fire District. They showed a wonderful presentation mapping the 16 high-risk WUI neighborhoods in Novato. That’s just one little community up in the north end of the county. What I saw there was my valley, Pacheco Valley, my road and my house and all of the wonderful combinations for a WUI fireplace. I thought, we need to do something about this. I asked the Novato fire chief to come to our neighborhood and show the rest of our neighbors, a little over 1,000 people. We are a development, but we are in an area that’s beautiful.
When we first moved there, I thought, this is like walking in the valley of Yosemite. I mean, we have lots of oak trees, bay trees, and grassy woodlands, and lots of underbrush, and we’re surrounded by the county open space district. And guess what? There’s a lot of understory fuel load there.
Our biggest neighbor is the county open space district. We got together with the help of the Novato fire district, and the chief informed what’s called a FireWise community. That’s a pretty easy process, and we work one-on-one, neighbor to neighbor, looking at how our houses are constructed, what’s growing around them, and working on that one on one. It’s very slow, let me tell you. It’s beyond my patience at times. But thanks to a film like this, I think it brings it back again.
Kay White, originator and coordinator of Pacheco Valley FireWise community
I would recommend if you are not yet familiar with FireWise, please look online at FireSafeMarin.org. It’s not a hard process. It’s a long process, and it’s a good process, because it’s building community to reduce the potential of fire in your neighborhood. You have to collaborate with all sorts of people, not just your neighbor, but with the Marin County district, with the cities, with the water district, you name it. You get to know them all. So I would highly recommend it.
STEPHEN MOST: Quinn Gardner, we’d all like to believe that it won’t happen here, but I don’t think we can afford that illusion anymore. Let’s assume that a catastrophic wildfire strikes the WUI near San Rafael. What transportation and communications infrastructures are in place for such an event? Please advise us on how best to respond, for our own safety, but also how to protect our families and community members.
QUINN GARDNER: Yes, I’ll touch on some other things. Registering for emergency alerts is one way. We know that communication systems might not work, especially if we look at power outages and widespread usage, and that’s why that neighbor-to-neighbor piece like we’ve seen with these other fires is so essential. But getting signed up for emergency alerts through AlertMarin.org, and Nixle, which is as simple as texting your zip code to 888777.
We have a lot of infrastructure in place and a lot of mutual aid agreements. Just yesterday, we had a fire right in Novato, but because of the systems that are in place, our communication systems, our mutual aid agreements, our relationships amongst our fire departments, we were able to get that under control quickly.
In terms of transportation, there are cameras that you can access that have 24/7 monitoring, so there’s live monitoring happening of all of our higher risk fire areas all the time. Different communities are using different types of alerting tools. Mill Valley just tested their long-range acoustic device system (LRAD). But fundamentally, Marin is a peninsula, and when you take away our bridges and you take away one highway, we become an island very quickly.
Quinn Gardner, Emergency Manager for the City of San Rafael
Again, so much of it becomes neighbor helping neighbor, knowing your evacuation routes. One of the things that struck me with the film was when they were doing some of the aerials over the North Bay fires. You could see the parking lots, and within those parking lots, those trees weren’t burned. Those could be safe areas if you can’t get anywhere else. Right? You have places near you, whether it’s large ball fields, places that are void of fuel, where there is a lot of work we need to be doing in terms of fuel management, but there are places that already exist that might be safe, at least in that short term as we move through more of an evacuation process and everything else.
What you can be doing in addition to knowing your neighbors, becoming a FireWise community, reducing your carbon footprint to limit impacts overall? There are really three things I always talk about: the alerting; having your plan and knowing your evacuation routes, knowing where you’re going to meet, knowing who to talk to; and then supplies, having your go backpack ready, having long sleeves, masks, water and food are a big one. I can spend hours talking about this stuff, but the big three – alerts, plans, and have some supplies ready so you can be ready to keep you and your family safe.
KEVIN WHITE: Quinn, what would you like to see in terms of fuel reduction, and what is the plan for that?
QUINN GARDNER: Just yesterday I attended a seminar called Living with Fire. One of the big things is taking responsibility on your own property, and really that 0 to 5, and then when you get into that 30-foot zone. What you can do there is scientifically what we’re seeing can make the most impact because of the way those embers are flying and landing. The question you need to ask yourself when you look at your own home is that if an ember landed here, at the driest, windiest, worst fire weather day we had, what would happen to that ember? If the answer is: it would catch this bush, which would catch my house, then you probably need to adjust. If the answer is: I’ve done my fuel mitigation and I’ve spread things out, or maybe it’s just your cardboard boxes by your recycling bin. Are they in your bin with the lid closed where an ember could land on the plastic and be fine? Or is your lid open and you’ve got a huge fuel source right there?
In terms of the overall efforts, one of the biggest things we’re seeing with fuel mitigation work – and this is certainly because of the heavy urban area we’re in – we don’t necessarily have the same type of ability to do the burning that can really benefit and work well in other areas. We have to look more toward manual fuel reduction, which has high costs and its own carbon issues.
One thing the film really covers is the benefit of burning to reduce the understory. We might not have that ability to burn here in Marin and San Rafael, but we do have the ability to clear the understories. A lot of people think vegetation management means removing everything, and it’s not about that. It’s about reducing latter fuels, it’s about reducing density, and in most cases, we want to see our mature trees survive and thrive. We’re not talking about removing those mature trees. It’s really reducing those understories for the same benefits you’re seeing with burning, we just have to do it in a much more intense, manual process.
TAMRA PETERS: Kay White, what motivated you to volunteer to do this for your neighborhood? And did you do it alone? How did you get other people to start working with you?
KAY WHITE: Really the story presented itself by seeing the wildfire plan for Marin County and for Novato in particular. We have a valley, one way out, and it’s very clear that there’s a lot of fire risk in our neighborhood. It’s self-interest, fright, property interest, and environmental interest. We love where we live. It’s a beautiful neighborhood, so it was a natural confluence of interests among our neighbors.
The way it worked in Pacheco Valley is I got together people who I knew were in some way leaders of different interests. We had the former mayor living in our area, and she knew a lot of people, which helped. We have six different homeowners associations, so I made sure we got someone from each of those associations, and it just bonded. It’s a collaboration, not just among our residents, it’s with all of the other jurisdictions that influence our environment in Pacheco Valley.
It’s surprising how many people there are, how many different organizations we have to work across, but that’s okay.
QUINN GARDNER: There are areas like that across Marin where it’s one road in, one road out, and there tends to be a mindset that evacuation means get to Highway 101. Evacuation means to get somewhere safe. Those places are probably a lot closer than most people think. And it is scary. It is intense.
One of the other things to take away from the film and the visuals is you saw all these firefighters very close to extreme flames. I’m not saying I want you to be in that situation, but that is something that is survivable. So the goal when you’re talking about a really mass evacuation like we saw in North Bay is not necessarily to get to Highway 101, to San Francisco or over a bridge, it’s to get to somewhere you can survive that immediate threat.
The other thing to keep in mind is that, generally speaking, once something has burned, the fuel is gone. When we think about evacuation – and again I can’t speak to every situation – don’t go uphill, stay in your vehicle, and stay on pavement as much as absolutely possible. In the campfire in Butte County last year, we saw the visuals of the cars burned out on the side of the road. Nobody died in their car on the pavement. Those cars burnt out after the fact. People did die leaving their car, going into wooded areas and into brush.
The intensity of wildfire that we’re seeing means citizens need to think like firefighters. It’s not about putting people into the middle of the forest to fight fires, but they have a safety plan. They have somewhere they can evacuate to be safe should that fire come in their direction or escalate. So we’re really trying to figure out how to get that message out where people can feel comfortable taking on that mindset.
KAY WHITE: Another thing I learned is that blackened soil is safer than unburned soil. So go back into the place that’s been burned rather than go forward and try to get out of it, which is counterintuitive. In our neighborhood, some of our neighbors have said, well, I’m just going to get out and hike up the trail, because we’re in the valley and they’re going to get up on the ridge. No, please, don’t do that! The fire moves uphill. There may be a fire truck barreling down the fire road. Stay on the pavement.
Most of all, prevent it. Get those leaves out of there. Get the fire prone vegetation out. You don’t have to wait for your city council to vote for it. You can do it on your own right now. I understand it’s a long, expensive process for most homeowners. It is for me. I’ve been working on things for three years and I’ve got 10 more years to go on my house.
KEVIN WHITE: Ask a really important question, which is: How did it start? And certainly that plays a role. What I always want to ask is: How did it spread? The starting in the Rim Fire, for example, was a hunter who was hunting out of season. We all know these conditions: Barometric pressure, low humidity, high heat, a lot of wind. We all know now up here, certainly in Northern California when we have those conditions. If you don’t know it, you should learn about it, because that’s critical, that’s when you need to be alert.
One of the challenges is you can have five homes, four people do a great job of defensible space, one house doesn’t. What do we do?
TAMRA PETERS: I think that question is coming up before some town councils, because people are saying—How can we be safe? We’re all doing this, and yet this person’s inaction could be threatening the whole neighborhood. Is that about personal rights? Where does it negate the responsibility to look out for the rest of the community? That’s an issue that’s being debated in councils in Marin right now.
QUINN GARDNER: Certainly. There are a lot of discussions going on about what codes can be put in place to help with that. But there’s really three ways fires spread: 1) direct flame contact; 2) radiant heat, you’re close enough to something that’s hot long enough, you start to get burned, that eventually will start a fire; 3) and embers.
When you’re looking at your property, there are things you could be doing to defend against all of those. Certainly in some situations, your properties are so close that if your neighbor’s house catches on fire, even as a structure fire, that radiant heat has the potential to ignite yours. But there are a lot of fire-resistant materials. And, again, things we learn from every fire, all of these structures being rebuilt in Sonoma are being rebuilt to a very different standard than many of them were to begin with to prevent things like that. If you’ve done everything right, and there’s a reasonable amount of space between you and your neighbor, that hopefully is going to be enough. Now, there are conditions that no matter what it’s tough to fight.
Both of those alerting tools that I mentioned – Nixle and Alert Marin – are both opt-in systems, which means you need to register in order to receive those emergency alerts. Alert Marin is a tool that gets used in other jurisdictions, but the software used to run that also has the capability to do some other messaging that generally people equate more with Amber alerts, which is not an opt-in. You get Amber alerts whether you want them or not. The challenge with that is as we move up the pyramid of ability to force people to receive a message, we lose geographic control and it gets shorter.
One of the things that we are really excited about in the county and in Northern California is a pretty recent headway we’ve made with NOAA, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, basically the weather service. There are what they call “NOAA weather radios”, which have been used in the Midwest, South, and East Coast for decades. Basically they’re on all the time and they’re silent unless there’s an emergency weather alert, like a flash flood, a tornado, or some other severe type of take-action-now. They will also do that with wildfire, which is a great redundancy to have and something we can use, especially for folks that don’t sleep with their phones by their beds; I turn it off at night; it wouldn’t wake me up when I take out my hearing aid, whatever the case may be.
So we have the ability to message through NOAA weather radios. The problem is people have to get them. You can get them in the $20-40 range online, depending on which version you want, and certainly we’re going to be socializing that concept more, because it adds an additional redundancy to the Alert Marin, and it’s not cell phone tower based, it’s radio waves which helps as well.
But, again, like we’ve seen with so many of these things, it comes down to neighbors. One of the things with FireWise communities and neighborhood response groups and Resilient Neighbors is that knowing your neighbors and the people around you, you can have agreements. It can be as simple as: If you hear me blaring the horn in the middle of the night, I’m not just like having a party. I’m committing that if I get an emergency alert, I’m going to lay on my horn on the way out; or I’m going to walk over and pound on your door until you answer, and then you do the same thing one house down. As you build those relationships, you can have those conversations to help everybody communicate.
The other big piece of this alerting system is staying aware, and self-aware. If you smell smoke and something feels wrong, tuning into whatever makes sense, whether it’s the emergency alerting, whether it’s social media, the news of course, which picks up basically every Tweet that goes out from an official entity as it relates to something like a wildfire. So you can be informed and you can make those decisions. When in doubt, leave early, whether that’s a mobility issue, young kids, older folks, you’ve got a bunch of pets to wrangle. I use this joke all the time, but if the only time you ever put your cat in the carrier is to go to the vet, if there’s a fire or something crazy happening, you’re not going to find your cat. Right? And so find them when you can, put them in the carrier, worst case they’re mad at you at the end of the night because they just spent a couple of hours cooped up, but it’s what we can do to move before to evacuate as soon as we can so if or when we get that warning, that we can be ready.
TAMRA PETERS: Another thing we do in Resilient Neighborhoods is to get our participants to fill out a household emergency plan that asks questions like: What would you do if you have five minutes to leave? What would you take with you? Where’s your gas shut-off valve? It’s the things we don’t know when we’re panicked. They will cost time. We forget them. Put a little sign in your go bag that says don’t forget your pills and glasses. It’s the really practical things that are so important.
MIKE SHUKEN: How many people remember the drills for the Soviet missiles that were supposed to come in? [LAUGHTER] So we do have a tradition for practicing for disaster in our communities, but we realized that we really hadn’t done any of these things we’re talking about as a drill.
So last month in Berkeley, we actually ran three drills where we did everything from activating the Nixle system to having volunteers take our evacuation paths. The police department has a trailer they tow around with a loud speaker that penetrates through walls and broadcasts evacuation plans. We actually didn’t know if it worked or not. So for three days we did these drills that were announced to the community, and they took place at 10:00 in the morning on Sunday with no wind, with really nice weather.
It’s important to help organize and arrange these sorts of drills in your communities. We certainly found a lot of flaws in ours in Berkeley when we did it that we’re working on.
QUINN GARDNER: Yes, there are evacuation drills that happen around the county. And do your own drills, right? Set your microwave timer for 10 minutes, and see how much you can get out of your house. If you don’t have a grab-and-go list, start making one. There are drills you can do at home with your family to help create muscle memory and identify challenges.
KAY WHITE: We have wonderful National Weather Service information through the NOAA. Pay attention, especially in September, October, November, for red flag days. Those are the times you can get all your gear together, get your pet together. You may be ready to leave before any kind of evacuation is ordered.
ELIZABETH AZZUZ: I would say that reaching out to all of the agencies – NOAA, CalFire, Forest Service, any of the fire departments, any local agencies that deal with this are going to have all the information you need to be able to survive anything that’s coming.
Another piece that none of us have talked about is children. We work very closely with our Head Start and our elementary students to teach these things. So they go home and nag their parents and grandparents about why their stuff isn’t ready. Where’s their go bag? How am I going to survive this? So it’s not just the adults. It’s not just the pets. It’s the children, and if you get them involved, they’ll keep you active in everything you need to know to survive.
Reach out to your legislators. We’re very, very rural. There is one way into the reservation where I live and one way out. We had a severe few years of arson. At one point, there were 80 arsons in this corridor. And after doing our prescribed burning and working with all these different agencies, we brought them down to I think one last year. So it’s definitely about communication. We actually created a Facebook page that’s called the Weitchpec/Down River Community. That’s for all of us that live off-grid – because I live totally off-grid. I can get in my window, turn my generator on, and send a message, or they’ll be messages going: Elizabeth, where’s the fire? Who needs to be evacuated? Who needs what? It is communication. Reach out to the people in charge and nag them if you have to. Just don’t let up. Keep working.
California is a biodiversity hotspot, but its complex ecosystems are some of the first to model the consequences of a warming atmosphere. Wildfires are currently raging throughout California, burning through hundreds of thousands of acres and spreading rapidly. Climate change is fueling these wildfires — a problem that will only continue to escalate as the environment becomes drier and hotter.
Fire ecology experts are leading the search for solutions, as they seek to restore the healthy and natural role of fire in ecosystems, while combating the poor land and watershed management practices that have led us to this crisis. In this panel discussion from the 2016 Bioneers Conference, four leading fire ecologists discuss one burning question: How can modern society renew our relationship with the land to stop the wildfire crisis?
Featuring Jason Mark, editor-in-chief of Sierra magazine; Frank Lake, a forest ecologist working with the U.S. Forest Service, who is also a deeply knowledgeable holder of Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge practices; Brock Dolman, co-founder of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, a long-time leader in the permaculture community; and Chad Hanson, a leading fire ecologist who works in the San Bernardino National Forest.
Jason Mark
JASON MARK: My name is Jason Mark. I’m the editor-in-chief of Sierra magazine, the national magazine of the Sierra Club, and I do a lot of writing on environmental issues but, these days, a lot about climate adaptation. As we all know, even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels today, we’re locked into serious climate change dislocations in the century to come. Even in the unlikely event countries were to faithfully follow the Paris Accord Agreement signed last year, we’re still going to blow pretty far past 2 degrees centigrade temperature rise, certainly in the lifetime of my 1-year-old daughter. That’s going to have obvious consequences globally — for biodiversity, for ecosystems, for all the natural systems on which human civilization depends.
And it’s obviously going to have big impacts here in California. It’s going to dramatically affect the water and fire cycles and all our natural systems. Those changes might have been easier to manage if we were living more lightly on the land, but with soon to be 40 plus million people here in this construct called California, it’s going to be very tough to adjust. What’s that going to look like? How are we going to do it? Well, that’s what we’re here to discuss with some leading experts on land management issues here in the Golden State.
We’ll start with Brock, and I’ll ask a question that has to be on a lot of people’s minds here: Is California likely to keep getting drier?
Brock Dolman
BROCKDOLMAN: California is likely the most hydrologically deranged place on the planet, and folks have been taking a whack at the integrity of watershed function from ridgeline to river mouth for quite a while now. Mark Twain said “whiskey’s for drinking and water’s for fighting over” when he was commenting on California water politics in the 1870s, so we’ve been at this for a while.
California contains many climates: if you go from the extremes of the wet Klamath Siskiyou system to the bone dry Mojave, with all kinds of regions somewhere along that scale, the rain totals can go from an inch or two yearly average in the deserts to some places that have nearly 100 inches. And we know there is far greater population density in the south and way more water availability in the north, and lots of big canals and dams disrupting water flows all over the place. The “dam age” has produced a lot of damage in this state. To heal it we will have to figure out how to “think like a watershed,” and how to craft the lifeboats called watersheds in the face of global weirding towards a resilient retrofit. That’s going to require modeling our behavior on the ecologically literate Indigenous knowledge of the first peoples of this region, and I’m really looking forward to Frank’s ideas on that. We will also have to examine how we think about earth, air, fire and water, and how we can learn to respect these fundamental forces so we can create conditions conducive to life for the long haul in this beautiful but dynamically changing state.
JASON: Brock mentioned earth, air, fire and water. Chad, what do we know about the history of fire in the state of California and what do you think we’re going to see regarding fire here as climate change intensifies?
Chad Hanson
CHAD HANSON: There’s actually been a lot of research on how much fire we have now versus how much we had before the era of fire suppression. Interestingly, we actually had a lot more fire historically, and that’s well known among ecologists, though it’s not as well known among the general public or policy makers. But in forests, we actually have a significant deficit of fire in the forests of California, and that’s broadly true across nearly every forested region of the West. It’s not true in every vegetation type. There are certain vegetation types where we actually have more fire now than we had historically, such as chaparral systems in Southern California and some other parts of the state, especially low elevation chaparral that’s in close contact with some large population centers. In those places you get an enormous number of unplanned human ignitions. So in those areas we have more fire, but in forests broadly we have significantly less fire; in many cases half as much, one-fourth as much, in some places one-tenth as much as we did historically, and generally it’s a deficit of fire of all intensities.
And the reason that matters is that there are many wildlife species that depend on post-fire habitat, so it has biodiversity consequences. As to where we’re going in the future, that’s harder to predict because climate modelers are not in agreement at all on what we’re going to see with regard to fire. There’s broad consensus that temperatures are going up and that they’ll continue to go up. What that means for fire is a much more subtle question. There are a number of studies that say we’re going to have more fire by the end of the century in forests, but likely not as much by the end of the century as we had historically before fire suppression. That’s one group, and that generally is based upon assumptions of hot or drier conditions in the future.
Another group of scientists say, well, actually, under hotter, drier conditions, from a climate perspective, you would expect more fire, and we may see that temporarily, but ultimately by the middle or end of the century, we’re going to see less fire, and less intense fire because of vegetation shifts in the understory in a hotter, drier future, in other words, sparser understories and not as much to carry flames. And still other groups of scientists predict a warmer but wetter future with less fire. Many of them predict more fire in some places and less in others. Basically there are three different scenarios: moderate increase in fire relative to historical norms; a mixed bag with some increases and some decreases; and broader decreases in fire. For me as a fire ecologist especially focused on biodiversity, the question I’m most interested in is how do we keep fire roughly within the natural range of variability, not too high or too low, and the concern that I have right now is that in our forests we have fire way on the low end of the scale.
Frank Lake
FRANK LAKE: I want to add some context to this. I’m not only a research ecologist for the forest service; I’m also a tribal descendant well trained in the cultural beliefs and ecological practices of the traditional people along the Klamath River, and I work a lot with many California tribes. When we think about variability versus change, if we think about where we’re at climatically, we’re coming out of the “Little Ice Age,” one of California’s cooler, moister periods that extended back from 150 to probably 500 to 700 years ago, and a lot of the forests and ecosystems we have now developed in that cooler, moister period.
What most people don’t realize is that, besides natural fires started by lightning, there were historically also a lot of intentional Indigenous ignitions throughout the state from the coastal headlands all the way to alpine meadows, through many different chaparral, other grassland, oak, and other forest types all the way up to mixed conifer, even true fir forests. They used fire extensively as a land management tool with techniques they had refined for many centuries.
Tribal people saw water as a sacred element and still do, but they also saw fire as one of the most energetic ways to manage vegetation to maintain consistent water supply and rich biodiversity, the kind of diversity that underlies a strong social and cultural community and enhances resilience. So we need to think not only about the components of the natural fire regime but also about what we can learn from the systems aboriginal people here used to manage fire for biodiversity and for water management.
JASON: That ecosystem and climate variability makes our work as stewards really tricky because how do you plan for change when the change could be all of a sudden really chaotic and manifest itself in such a wide range of variability. Brock?
BROCK: I think it’s helpful in thinking about fire behavior and water behavior, hydrologic behavior performance, if you will, to think of those as verbs and less as nouns. Some key factors are intensity and frequency: the intensity and frequency of storms or fires, but the impacts of those disturbances depend a lot on the condition of the land’s surface, and our current land management regimes in, say, the logging industry or in agricultural but urbanizing watersheds exacerbate negative impacts. Impermeable surfaces and road networks tend to increase runoff volumes and decrease water quality with sediment and pollutants. And our over-aggressive fire suppression ultimately leads to really big fires instead of more frequent but low-intensity, cool burns.
So how do we work to manage vegetation within watersheds to be resilient when those big “pineapple expresses,” these immense atmospheric rivers from the Pacific bring huge bursts of water but distribute it totally unevenly? Just a week ago in one of these sorts of storms we got three inches of rain in Occidental where I live, but Santa Cruz got 11 inches and southern Humboldt got 14 inches. So some folks get hosed down and others just get a squirt on the side.
We have to learn to pattern landscapes to be resilient in a situation in which occasionally and unpredictably you’ll get a bucketful on your watershed, but for long periods of time you won’t get much if any water. So I don’t think we live in a water-scarce of fire scarce area; we live in a water storage scarce area that we’ve failed to make sufficiently fire resilient. The question is: “How can we, hydrologically and pyrologically, literally sculpt the performance of landscapes to interface optimally with the increasing uncertainty that global weirding is bringing forward?”
JASON: So how do we?
BROCK: As one of my great mentors when it comes to roads, the earth scientist Danny Hagans, says: “Nothing in nature mimics a road.” How we design our road networks, parking lots, roofs, farm fields, vineyards, forests, rangelands, etc., can either decrease or increase water runoff quantity (aka the runoff coefficient) and improve or degrade water quality. We have to rethink roads so they are no longer drainage networks but “retainage” networks. In general the optimal land use is one that slows, spreads and lets water gently sink into the water table. And as part of that we have to manage animal systems so they create regenerative disturbance regimes that increase the complexity of the vegetation and increase water infiltration and reduce runoff. So, in a nutshell, we have to design our interface with the natural world so that we slow, spread, sink, store and share the water.
When it comes to fire, to echo what Frank was saying, I think we have to honor and emulate that which is still applicable of the traditional ecological knowledge-based practices of the first peoples of this region who observed and worked with these ecosystems for 600+ generations, some 10 to 12,000 years of being people of place and witnessing the fluctuations of the land. We have to study their caretaking methods with deep respect and humility.
JASON: It does seem to me that as hard as water issues are, fire is a lot tougher. And the pre-colonization cultures that were shaping the landscape had a much smaller population density than we do today. How much of that traditional ecological knowledge is applicable now that there are a lot more people living here?
FRANK: Well, I think first of all I kind of wanted to dispel the myth that California was sparsely populated before European colonization. Obviously it wasn’t as populated as today, but it actually had one of the highest population densities in North America, second only to the Mexico Valley. And most of the Indigenous people in California were fire dependent and fire adapted cultures. Fire management played a key role in the production of their foods, medicines, building materials, and water supply. They learned over the centuries to use fire adaptively by adjusting their practices when climatic conditions became warmer, hotter and drier or colder and wetter. And they used a wide range of intentional burns, from lower to higher intensity depending on the conditions and their specific resource objectives.
Of course the landscape is radically different now: some areas that had higher population densities for centuries are now national parks or wilderness areas, and other places now have massive urban infrastructure and development beyond what will ever be compatible with traditional Indigenous land management, but we can still be guided by their overall approach to watersheds, to optimizing permeability, and to conscious management of the fire regime.
JASON: Frank, could you discuss some of the research you’ve done on how to take that traditional ecological knowledge and have it inform land management practices today?
FRANK: Let me cite an example of a traditional food staple. Acorns were a very important food source for many California peoples. Many communities used fire in very specific ways in their oak forests, usually in the fall, in 5 to 7 or 7 to 15-year cycles depending on the specific place and local conditions, in order to reduce understory and competition from other tree species to promote larger crowns in the oaks. This boosted acorn production but it also benefitted a wide range of animal species from insects to birds to deer, antelope and elk that consume acorns and/or thrive in oak ecosystems, and that was understood as a benefit by those traditional cultures. The idea of helping the abundance of other species was understood to be part of the human mission.
Unfortunately many contemporary fire scientists I have to work with aren’t knowledgeable about this traditional knowledge. These first peoples wanted highly productive oak woodlands and a good acorn crop for people but also for the whole food web, so they sought to manage fire at just the right frequency and seasonality to achieve that goal, and because they had been at it in the same place for a very long time, they got very good at it.
And they used the same approach to using controlled burns to enhance the variety, quality and quantity of basket making materials. They would burn in different ways with precise spacing in time and in different seasons to get either small shoots of plants such as California hazel for certain types of baskets, or firmer longer shoots for more rugged pack and cooking baskets. So they applied fire at precise times, for very specific purposes to get a desired outcome, and they took a lot of factors into account: soil types, the contours of the land, whether it was a riparian area, a certain forest type, or chaparral, or high meadows, etc. And I think that basic approach is something we can learn from—how to develop a cultural perspective that permits us to think more holistically about how to manage fire wisely and precisely to get desirable environmental and social outcomes.
JASON: Chad, do you think the land managers at state and federal agencies who work on fire ecology are of aware of these traditions Frank described?
CHAD: There’s a broad understanding that historical fire patterns were always a mix of lightning strikes and intentional Native American ignitions, but I think that beyond that broad understanding, the particulars are not well understood by those folks. One of the biggest challenges is getting land managers to understand that a wide mix of fire intensities from lightning strikes and Native American ignitions shaped these forests. That’s the system in which the native biodiversity evolved, developed, was sustained and nurtured, and in fact, you know, we now know that there are many plant and wildlife species that have evolved over many millennia to depend upon particular types of burn intensity in fires. Some need more low-intensity burn areas; some like moderately burned landscapes; and some thrive in scorched zones.
What I think is most misunderstood is that we do need some high intensity fires in some landscapes sometimes. They actually create a very, very rich habitat some species depend upon. For me the biggest challenge is getting land managers to understand the ecological value of mixed intensity fire regimes and encouraging them to allow more mixed intensity fire to occur in the forest, especially away from vulnerable human communities of course.
We have to get away from this sort of 19th to mid-20th century notion that we have to suppress high intensity, super hot fires, and that those types of fires destroy the land. Actually that post hot fire land can produce some of the most biodiverse habitat, comparable to old growth forest.
FRANK: To add to that, by integrating contemporary fire science with traditional knowledge, we can study the changes between fires in an ecosystem with more clarity and understand the benefits of each stage. The first year the soil is black and seemingly lifeless, but animals are going to come in there, roll around in ash, eat the charcoal and get rid of parasites that way. After a while, the mycorrhizal community, which forms an indispensable nexus between the trees, the shrubs and the soil, will start to recover. The next three to five years are going to see a flush of wildflowers, which bring in pollinators, including hummingbirds, and then you’re going to have an abundant insect community, which is going to attract other birds, some of which for traditional people were their regalia species whose feathers are used for ceremonies, some, such as grouse or quail, were food species. Each stage of recovery offers different advantages to people and to a range of species in a complex cycle between fire events. So that traditional knowledge and land use pattern enriches my understanding as a scientist of the ecological value of a post fire landscape over time.
JASON: And today we’ve got this patchwork of habitats, a mosaic pattern of wild lands, pastoral lands and peri-urban lands. We will really need better migration corridors so flora and fauna can move upslope or north, due to rising temperatures and changing weather patterns.
FRANK: That’s another thing Indigenous groups paid close attention to: the connection between geographic and ecological zones. They built trail networks along critical ridge systems, along watershed boundaries, and sub-trails to significant patches of land with specific characteristics, so they could link the various parts of the landscape and manage fire and water flows most effectively, and protect zones of high biodiversity, high ecological integrity, and high human and wildlife compatibility, which were also often sacred sites.
JASON: Have any of you done any controlled managed burns?
BROCK: Private landowners can burn, but you have to take on the liability if something happens with that burn. And so we up at OAEC have done some very targeted, prescribed fires where we had very specific goals in a unique spot on a grassland because we had some biodiversity goals or some thatch removal goals. We had just gotten a couple of inches of rain, so very early in the morning we said some prayers and engaged in some pyro-intensive horticulture. It was a quarter acre here and a half-acre there, and it was really targeted. It was a gorgeous morning and it felt calm and spiritual, like painting with fire. The Troglodyte in me had a firegasm going off. It felt deeply humbling. You have to be really cautious and totally present. It’s an amazing process.
FRANK: I did a burn in an oak orchard on my land I’m restoring working with the Nature Conservancy, who work on projects in my area with the Karuk tribe, the mid-Klamath Watershed Council, and other community-based groups. We did a burn on my property, but it took working with the fire safety council and getting my neighbors on board to all come together to agree that we were using traditional fire in a contemporary context, to achieve multiple resource objectives. And for me it was great to have my 4 year-old son hanging out with the burn boss and beginning to feel responsible to his acorn trees that he will inherit along with the cultural responsibility for stewardship. And we burned.
We also used the opportunity to do some acorn research on the bugs with my UC Berkeley students, and we improved the egress route between my neighbors and my property. And I helped to restore the oaks. Today when I see my acorn crop and listen to the woodpeckers, the jays, the squirrels, and see the bear and deer signs, everything’s telling me that it was a good fire. So if you do it right, you can achieve multiple objectives—community safety, resource enhancement, enhanced food security, intergenerational learning, and those best practices can then be emulated and spread through a community.
JASON: But do you feel that the big land management agencies at the federal and state levels are also starting to think about fire this way?
FRANK: There’s still a long way to go, but I’m hopeful. I’m seeing in my work on traditional ecological knowledge and tribal fire management, working with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Department of the Interior, that there’s starting to be a positive change and more cooperation between government and tribal foresters and groups such as the Nature Conservancy, but there will need to be a bigger social movement around fire education.
JASON: Brock, we were talking earlier about all the habitat value that’s created when you allow forests to regenerate naturally without going in there and logging right after a fire, and you were talking about fire as a partner. Could you could talk a little bit, switching back to the water theme, about animals as partners, wildlife as partners, and some of the work you’ve done there at the Water Institute.
BROCK: As a wildlife biologist, I have been fascinated with how nutrients cycle in ecosystems. To cite one example, anadromous fish such as salmon, and we are in the southern end of “Salmon Nation” here, hatch in streams in our regions and then spend a lifetime at sea and come back to spawn at the end of their lifecycles, and when they die, they not only feed people, eagles, otters and bears, but the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium and slews of other minerals and nutrients they bring back into the watershed re-invigorate the land. You can find isotopes of those minerals directly traceable back to those salmon in the needles of coniferous trees far from streams, so the hydrological cycle forms relationships of nutrient exchange and return between different ecosystems. If the whole landscape is tended well, with respect and a deep appreciation of these cycles, as many Indigenous groups did, you create conditions conducive to the wellbeing of many species and of entire watersheds.
And then there is one very special critter in the riparian part of our watersheds, and that’s our beaver. Right now many of our watersheds have been damaged in all sorts of ways, including by being overharvested and eroded by roads and off-road vehicles. We’ve reduced the complexity of those systems and their capacity to support diverse life, especially aquatic life, but really all life that depends on water. But beavers are forest farmers. They slow, spread and sink water, and they increase the wetted width of their habitats to grow the food that they eat because they’re herbivores. They eat bark and cambium and cattail roots and grasses. They need to slow water down to grow riparian forests and wetlands, which happen to be then sequestering carbon and creating other habitat. They are great hydrological engineers, and we should hire as many of them as possible.
Right now in California we have a decreasing snow pack in many of our high elevation systems, but runoff volumes are increasing in mountain meadows and systems lower down. Our natural water storage capacity and distribution system is out of balance. If we can we work with beavers as a keystone species, they can interface with these processes and play an important role in re-establishing a healthy hydrologic cycle. And there’s some good science on beaver habitat mitigating the intensity of fire by creating fuel breaks in the bottom ends of these systems. Beavers rehydrate the valley bottoms and increase the wetted width of these linear corridors that then act as natural firebreak systems. So bring back the beaver in California!
JASON: Frank, kind of on that same tip around collaborating with another critter like the beaver, what would traditional ecological knowledge, as you’ve studied it, have to instruct us about striking collaborative relationships with other animals, trying to get away from having our relationships with many animal species be so conflictive, as they so often are, in our industrial society?
FRANK: So I come from a line of storytellers, and I think traditional storytelling is a way to embed deep-time knowledge about ecological prescriptions for how to live in a specific place. Many of our stories involve animal personifications that convey traditional teachings about certain keystone species. Certain regalia species whose feathers are used in ceremonies are seen as highly valued, spiritual beings, and of course some animals provided crucial food and materials, but the stories about them indicate that they are indicators, that their presence is an expression of wealth and of the ecological integrity of the land. So Indigenous folks harvested some of them of course, but only in very specific places where it was allowed, because they knew that if they could no longer hear, say, woodpeckers, then they knew something was wrong with the land. And woodpeckers, and bluebirds, another sacred species, need fire in the landscape to thrive, so how well you manage the fire cycle determines whether you have a healthy population of the animals that are sacred and useful to you.
For a water quality indicator, many of the tribal traditional accounts mention various physical trees, insects, animals and reptiles as being physical manifestations of that water spirit. One of my teachings is that the Pacific giant salamander (this is primarily among the Karuk and Yurok and the Hoopa) is that spirit being who physically purifies and watches over the water. If you go to that spring on the hillside or you go to that creek, and you see that Pacific giant salamander, you thank them for guarding and protecting and purifying the water. If you’re going to that spring and there are no salamanders or just deformed or unhealthy or dead ones, it’s an indicator that something’s wrong in the system.
Patsy Craig es curadora/productora, autora/artista y defensora de los derechos indígenas. Durante más de 16 años ha generado y cultivado una amplia gama de colaboraciones interculturales en los campos del arte, la música, la arquitectura y el urbanismo. Esta producción ha incluido publicaciones, exhibiciones y eventos, incluyendo conferencias, conciertos, simposios, talleres, etc.
Hace cuatro años, Craig centró su atención en los problemas ambientales e indígenas y pasó un tiempo en Standing Rock para apoyar el movimiento de protección del agua allí resistiendo el infame Dakota Access Pipeline. Desde entonces, ha continuado su activismo y busca proporcionar plataformas que contribuyan a amplificar las cosmovisiones indígenas y el conocimiento ancestral. Recientemente abrió AWA Galería en Cusco, Perú para mostrar el trabajo contemporáneo y tradicional de artistas indígenas.
POLINA SMITH: ¿Patsy, Podrías contarnos sobre tus propios antecedentes como curadora, artista y autora y cómo llegó a abrir una galería en Perú?
PATSY CRAIG: Crecí en Nueva York y desde los 12 años mi familia vivió en diferentes países de América del Sur debido al trabajo de mi padre. Recibí mi licenciatura en bellas artes del Rhode Island School of Design (USA) Y mi maestría en Estudios Culturales del Birkbeck College de London University (UK). Unos años después de graduarme de la escuela de arte, me mudé a Inglaterra, donde he vivido durante los últimos 24 años. Mi madre era peruana y mi padre estadounidense. En ambos lados tengo ascendencia indígena, pero mi educación fue muy occidental y desafortunadamente muy poco relacionada con estas raíces. Pero siempre he sentido la atracción de mis ancestros, que es lo que creo que me llevó a Standing Rock en 2016, y eso se convirtió en un verdadero punto de inflexión para mí. Me da vergüenza decir que no había estado involucrada en el activismo ambiental hasta entonces, pero me conmovió mucho todo lo que estaba sucediendo allí y cambió todo para mí. Después de mi tiempo en Standing Rock, decidí que quería centrar mis esfuerzos en la indigeneidad y el ambientalismo, desde ese tiempo he tratado de educarme lo más posible sobre las culturas indígenas con las que tengo conexiones. Desde 2016, pasé la mayor parte de mi tiempo en los Estados Unidos y en Perú investigando varios aspectos del conocimiento ambiental tradicional y comencé a centrarme en lo que podría contribuir a difundir una mayor comprensión de las cosmovisiones indígenas. Teniendo en cuenta mis antecedentes, proporcionar una plataforma para el trabajo artístico indígena tenía mucho sentido y parecía imprescindible.
POLINA: ¿Qué te inspiró ir a Standing Rock en primer lugar?
PATSY: Recuerdo claramente el momento: fue en septiembre de 2016, estaba en Berlín, Alemania y estaba viendo “Democracy Now”, que fue uno de los primeros programas noticieras en cubrir el movimiento de protejer el agua en Standing Rock. Me indignó lo que estaba viendo, pero también me inspiró mucho este movimiento dirigido por indígenas. Creo que fue la llamada de los ancestros lo que provocó una luz brillante en mi mente y corazón y decidí en ese momento que necesitaba apoyarlo. Así que contacté a mi prima que vive en San Francisco Bay Area y que ha tenido una hermosa conexión con la cultura nativa la mayor parte de su vida adulta, ella y Winona La Duke fueron amigas y vivieron juntas en Harvard durante algunos años, y decidimos hacer el viaje y estar allí para Thanksgiving, para dar un nuevo significado a la celebración. Fue increíble, nos quedamos en una yurta con Cheryl Angel y otras personas en el Sacred Stone Camp. Aprendí mucho y he estado aprendiendo desde entonces. Y no fui solo yo. Había algo increíblemente especial en ese momento y lugar, por lo que hay bastantes personas que se conmovieron por su experiencia en Standing Rock y ahora están haciendo cosas significativamente relevantes en el mundo. Más allá de estar físicamente presente allí, creo que resonó en todo el mundo y atrajo mucha atención a la crisis climática y a los movimientos ambientales liderados por los indígenas que generaron un impulso muy necesario a este respecto.
POLINA: Entonces, ¿puedes compartir un poco más sobre tu trayectoria desde Europa hasta Standing Rock para abrir recientemente tu galería en Cusco?
PATSY: Después de mudarme al Reino Unido en 1996 estuve muy involucrada en el mundo del arte allí, pero finalmente me desilusioné. Sentí que todo se trataba de dinero y que había perdido mucho de lo que originalmente me atrajo, así que no me sentía bien. Después de publicar mi libro “Making Art Work” (Trolley 2003) sobre cómo las ideas se traducen en forma física, comencé a trabajar con música, con jazz. La música se sintió menos impulsada por el ego, más alegre y alegremente colaborativa. Y entonces me moví en esa dirección, pero siempre fue con una conciencia social y no solo una búsqueda puramente estética. Invité a muchas luminarias de jazz americanos a tocar en Londres y, al hacerlo, aprendí mucho sobre el jazz en esos años tanto como una forma de arte como como una cultura, lo cual fue hermoso. Los orígenes del jazz son sobre la resistencia y, por supuesto, esta música está asociada con la lucha social y los derechos civiles, y eso siempre resuena en mí. Entonces, aunque mi experiencia en Standing Rock fue reformador, de esta manera no fue un gran salto, sino más bien un reenfoque, y me inició en un camino de conexión con mis propias raíces. También me trajo de vuelta a las artes visuales, que en gran medida había dejado atrás. Finalmente, siento que mi camino, mi trayectoria, se resuelve con mis espíritus guardianes, mis ancestros.
Como resultado de mis investigaciónes en Perú, a principios del año pasado decidí llevar una exposición de arte contemporáneo amazónico a Londres para coincidir con un proyecto en el que estaba trabajando con UCL para proporcionar plataformas desde las cuales amplificar las cosmovisiones indígenas en el Reino Unido. Así, el junio pasado, la exposición llamada “El Bosque Invisible” se presentó en la Galería 46 en Whitechapel. La presentación de esta hermosa selección de obras fue única en el contexto de Londres. En el corazón del Imperio, mi intención era visibilizar una comprensión de la selva amazónica que era invisible para la mayoría y organicé conversatorios con nuestro artista en residencia, un amazónico nativo, con un publico de mundos diferentes- de antropología, arte, y el ambientalismo mayormente. En un momento, mientras estaba en la galería, estaba conversando por Skype con Alexis (es decir, Alexis Bunten, codirector del Programa de Indigeneidad de Bioneers) y le estaba mostrando la exhibición, y me vino a la mente, le dije: “¿Por qué no mostramos estos trabajos en Bioneers?” Ella estuvo de acuerdo y me puso en contacto contigo, y con la ayuda del Consulado peruano del Bay Area logramos traerlo de Londres para la Conferencia de Bioneers 2019, y fue genial.
Después de eso decidí vivir en Perú para generar algo que irónicamente no existe aquí. A pesar de que la cultura indígena es tan prominente aquí en los Andes y en todas las diferentes regiones geográficas del Perú, no hay una galería como la mía, una que eleve la cultura indígena contemporánea dándole a estas formas de arte el estatus que merecen en este sistema capitalista dominante, que por supuesto está muy divorciado de los contextos originarios… Es complejo, el turismo diluye la cultura local y las tradiciones se convierten en un espectáculo aquí a menudo muy alejado de sus orígenes. Además, las escuelas de arte en Perú están muy inmersas en la tradición del arte occidental, lo que parece una locura dada la rica historia cultural de estas tierras. Esta eliminación es uno de los legados del colonialismo, obviamente. Entonces para mí este es mi proceso personal de descolonización y un retorno a mis raíces. Cusco es un centro de cultura indígena en las Américas, el ombligo del mundo antiguo dicen algunos. Tengo la bendición de estar aquí, tengo mucho trabajo por hacer y se siente bien.
POLINA: ¿Cómo ha sido para ti durante la pandemia en Cusco?
PATSY: Bueno, acabo de abrir la galería en enero pero la galería no está físicamente abierta en este momento. Estoy tratando de encontrar formas de hacer que funcione adaptándome a estas circunstancias y encontraré una manera de hacerlo relevante porque siento profundamente que COVID es un maestro. Y estoy segura de que este virus se ha manifestado en el mundo en un momento en que realmente necesitamos prestar atención a lo que tiene para enseñarnos, por esto no lo veo como una experiencia totalmente negativa a pesar de que se muy bien que mucha gente está sufriendo. Acabamos de salir de una de las cuarentenas más largas del mundo, que para mí fue un tiempo espiritual.
POLINA: ¿Me podrías compartir un poco sobre los artistas que se exhiben en la galería?
PATSY: Ahora hay una gran energía en Perú alrededor de artistas indígenas amazónicos contemporáneos, así que me sentí atraído por esa escena y comencé a conocer gente en Lima, la capital, que era parte de esa escena. Cuando comencé a cavar más profundo, fui a la selva y conocí a varios artistas en sus aldeas y en sus hogares y estudios, etc. La exposición que traje a Inglaterra, “El Bosque Invisible”, fue el resultado de esa investigación. Esta segunda exposición, “El Bosque Sagrado”, también se trata sobre la selva pero se trata sobre una mirada más profunda, se trata de entrar a los aspectos sagrados del bosque, las plantas, el conocimiento que proviene de trabajar con las plantas y entender algo sobre sus energías curativas.
POLINA: ¿Cómo encuentras a tus artistas? PATSY: ¡Sigo mi nariz! Algunos de ellos son conocidos en Perú, y otros son menos conocidos. Tiendo a cavar profundamente cuando hago cosas, investigo, uso mi ojo y voy a los lugares donde vive la gente; cuando buscas, encuentras… El artista principal de “El Bosque Sagrado”, Dimas Paredes, comenzó a pintar bastante tarde en su vida. Estudió con un artista de renombre internacional de Ucayali, Pablo Amaringo, quien comenzó la Escuela Usko-Ayar en Pucallpa, donde a los estudiantes se les enseñaba a recrear a través de la pintura sus experiencias personales relacionadas con la biodiversidad, la cosmología y la mitología del bosque influenciado por las visiones de Ayahuasca. En este contexto, Dimas desarrolló su propio estilo personal. En Pucallpa descubrí que bastantes estudiantes de Amaringo copian al maestro y no desarrollaron su propia voz personal auténtica, pero Dimas definitivamente lo hizo. Y el padre de Dimas era un conocido maestro curandero en esa región, así que puedes ver en su trabajo que tiene un profundo conocimiento de las propiedades mágicas de cada planta representada en sus pinturas. Es un artista “moderno” porque pinta sobre lienzo, que no es un formato tradicional, pero su iconografía está impregnada en una antigua tradición y forma de conocimiento.
POLINA: ¿Dadas las pinturas inspiradas en visiónes de ayahuasca en esta hermosa exhibición que has curado, me preguntaba si las plantas medicinales han sido parte de tu propio camino?
PATSY: En realidad no, no he tomado ayahuasca ni otras plantas medicinales. Puede ser sorprendente para algunos porque soy peruana y he estado viniendo a Perú toda mi vida para visitar a mi abuela y a otros miembros de mi familia, así que he estado al tanto de estas tradiciones nativas de curación que incluyen el uso de plantas medicinales, pero yo no quiero participar en la apropiación occidental de la ayahuasca que ha sido tan prevalente en los últimos años. Tengo dudas sobre muchos aspectos de esa escena porque quiero ser cuidadosa y respetuosa de las culturas que originaron el uso de ayahuasca y otras plantas sagradas. Tengo un gran respeto por estas tradiciones y quiero aprender todo lo que pueda sobre ellas y apoyar a los artistas indígenas que trabajan con estas enseñanzas, pero el uso de plantas sagradas no ha sido hasta ahora parte de mi experiencia personal.
POLINA: Cada vez más occidentales vienen a Perú para tomar ayahuasca. Algunos de los artistas con los que trabaja crean arte inspirado en la medicina; ¿Cuáles son tus y sus pensamientos sobre esto?
PATSY: Creo que el dinero es una gran parte de éste ambiente, es una industria turística completa acá ahora, y creo que esto tiene el potencial de diluir la cultura de maneras que están teniendo un impacto negativo, por lo que soy bastante crítica al respecto. Y siento que tal vez debería haber algún tipo de regulación sobre cómo se maneja. No estoy muy seguro de quién sería el organismo regulador, así que tal vez eso no sea realista, pero cuando la autenticidad y la conexión cultural real no están allí, pierde su propósito y su poder y su intención, así que siento que debe ser bien hecho, y debe hacerse menos. Siento que la gente que se involucra en esta practica necesita tener más respeto por todo lo que se trata y esta actitud no se ve mucho, mas que nada se ve una cultura de consumismo.
La verdad es que la cultura occidental es una cultura de adicción en muchos sentidos, y siento que eso se traduce en esto. Es un problema, pero no estoy muy seguro de cuál es la solución. Y muchos occidentales tienen un entendimiento muy incompleto de cómo se usan estas plantas en las prácticas curativas tradicionales. A menudo es solo el sanador quien ingiere ayahuasca, por ejemplo, como una herramienta para ayudar a ver o “diagnosticar” la condición del “paciente”, y luego prescribe las plantas apropiadas u otras técnicas de curación. Por lo tanto, es mucho más complejo que el consumismo tan predominante ahora. Nunca he tomado ayahuasca y siento que podría hacerlo “bien”, pero no lo he tomado porque no quiero participar en este consumismo, quiero ser reflexiva y participar solo de manera respetuosa con sus orígenes y sus mejores intenciones. Si llega el momento adecuado, participaré porque me interesa su verdadero valor, y no solo de la ayahuasca, sino también de muchas otras plantas curativas. Creo que los artistas con los que trabajo entienden las tradiciónes y sus propósitos.
POLINA: ¿Podrias compartir un poco más de información sobre la galería?
PATSY: Bueno, he realizado estas dos exhibiciones que presentan arte amazónico. El primero salió fuera de Perú, y este está aquí en Cusco, aunque me encantaría que viajara también al extranjero, así que si alguien tiene sugerencias o interés en alojarlo en otro país, ¡me encantaría saber de ellos! Pero mi intención no es solo enfocarme en el Amazonas. Mi intención en última instancia con la galería es representar también a artistas indígenas en toda América del Sur, Central y del Norte. Y de esta manera también espero ser un puente que conecte estas diversas culturas, para alentar las alianzas y el activismo ambiental siempre con la esperanza de que estas alianzas puedan ser una fuerza protectora y poderosa. En este contexto, también pretendo crear conciencia y alentar al sistema de educación artística en Perú al menos a ser mucho más inclusivo y abierto a la evolución de sus propias tradiciones artísticas antiguas tan ricas. En sus propios términos descolonizados.
POLINA: Si tus sueños pudieran hacerse realidad con esta galería, ¿cuáles serían?
PATSY: El arte es un medio a través del cual entrar en las cosmovisiones indígenas, algo que siento es crucial en estos tiempos. La cultura dominante está claramente desequilibrada, por lo que estamos en un punto crítico en tanto a la preservación de la vida en este planeta y creo que la mayoría de las personas no conectan estos puntos, que en última instancia se trata de aprender a vivir de manera sostenible con la naturaleza de las culturas que lo han hecho por miles de años. Todos tenemos mucho que aprender de esta sabiduría ancestral que respeta la interconexión de todo lo que está vivo, así que para mí se trata de valorar a las culturas indígenas, muchos de los cuales están en peligro de perderse. Se trata de darles espacio físico, espiritual y político para que puedan no solo existir si no también prosperar. Creo que esto dará como resultado un florecimiento mutuo. Esperemos que se logre bien.
También espero ser un puente que conecte a las personas indígenas en todo el continente americano. Por ejemplo, Lyla June es alguien con quien estoy en contacto y me encantaría traducir el gran trabajo que ella presenta en línea al quechua y al español, para que pueda ser accesible a las comunidades indígenas aquí en Perú. He comenzado a hacer eso con su trabajo, pero necesito fondos para continuar. Y me encantaría compartir las voces de otros, como la madre de Lyla, Pat Mcabe y Casey Camp-Horinek, a quien invité a Londres, ¡ambas mujeres increíbles! Y Tom Goldtooth, a quien conocí a través de Bioneers, y Wendsler Nosie Sr, a quien conocí mientras apoyaba el movimiento de salvar a Oak Flats en Arizona, y Cheryl Angel, quien era mi maestra en Standing Rock, etc. Y así sucesivamente. Me encantaría conectarlos a todos con originarios aquí para facilitar un diálogo de poder de interconexión y alianza…pero necesito apoyo para hacer el trabajo de traducir contenido en español, quechua e inglés para presentar en la radio e Internet.
Sabes, durante mucho tiempo la lucha ambiental liderado por los indígenas en gran parte de América Latina ha sido considerado por los que están en poder una forma de terrorismo, incluso más que en los Estados Unidos, pero me encantaría poder ayudar a abrir estos diálogos para cambiar esa perspectiva y esas políticas mal informadas y destructivas, para desestigmatizar los esfuerzos de los protectores de estas hermosas tradiciones y abrir sus profundas enseñanzas a un público más amplio.
Sunrise Movement Bay Area has released a podcast discussing the ways in which climate change intersects with different aspects of our society, “broadcasting the decade of the Green New Deal from the occupied territory of the Ohlone people.” The podcast hosts, Maritte O’Gallagher and Richard, along with other local correspondents, meet with other activists and leading experts to share climate solutions and stories of real people impacted by climate change. The podcast also offers ways for each of us to get involved in the collective fight for a more livable future.
In the debute episode, Sunrise explores how both climate change and the coronavirus pandemic are undermining public health and exacerbating health inequality.
Sunrise correspondent, Adam, speaks with Dr. Linda Rudolph, the Director of Climate Change & Health at the Public Health Institute, about the ways in which climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic threaten health justice. In their conversation, Dr. Rudolph emphasizes that many of the same structural inequities and living conditions that make people more vulnerable to climate change are also making people more vulnerable to Covid-19.
“We need to address our energy, transportation, food and agriculture, building and land-use systems if we want to make our communities more resilient in the face of climate change but then also have greater resilience in the face of other health threats.”
Dr. Linda Rudolph
Dr Rudolph also speaks to how our evolving global changing climate leads to more drought, which in turn leads to higher food insecurity and poor nutrition. She gives the case study of the most recent droughts in California where people in low income, rural, predominantly Latinx farmworker communities lost access to clean drinking water. She poses the question of “What would the implications of drought be under the conditions of a pandemic when the most important thing you can do to stop the spread is washing your hands?”
They go on to discuss how the Green New Deal can proactively address public health and make sure that the well-being of frontline communities is the primary focus of policy change around the climate crisis. To support this work at the intersection of health justice and climate justice, check out this call to action on climate health and equity!
In the latter half of the episode, Sunrise correspondent, Mukta Kelkar, meets with the founders of Climate Health Now, Dr. Ashley McClure and Sarah Schear, about how medical professionals play a crucial role in organizing to stop climate change and protect the wellbeing of their patients. They discuss how around the world we have seen an upswelling of intergenerational solidarity to protect our elders as Covid-19 most severely impacts older members of our society. Climate Health Now advocates that we have to do the same and take action around climate change to protect our children and future generations. They emphasize the need for “robust humane public health measures that are really aimed at supporting every person” as outlined in the Green New Deal.
Listen to the podcast on Spotify or Anchor to find out about how these leading experts envision a Green New Deal that could bolster public health for ALL Americans.
