The RegenNarration Podcast
The RegenNarration podcast features the stories of a generation that is changing the story, enabling the regeneration of life on this planet. It’s ad-free, freely available and entirely listener-supported. You'll hear from high profile and grass-roots leaders from around Australia and the world, on how they're changing the stories we live by, and the systems we create in their mold. Along with often very personal tales of how they themselves are changing, in the places they call home. With award-winning host, Anthony James.
The RegenNarration Podcast
208. Bringing the Beaver Back in an Uninsurable State: With Brock Dolman, co-founder of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Centre
A couple of weeks ago, I received some big news. The California State Assembly unanimously passed what’s been dubbed the ‘Beaver Bill’. Yes, California is bringing the beaver back. For those who might not be fully across how big this news is, the beaver is a keystone species that assists in restoring watershed and ecosystem functions in areas that need them most. And in an era of warming, fire and desertification, and with insurers leaving the state in droves, recognition of this is growing here. That’s with thanks to the community that’s been building a campaign for 25 years. And this is just the tip of the beaver dam of what they’ve been up to in that time.
The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) has just celebrated its 30th anniversary, and as it happens, has also just been announced as the 2024 Non-profit of the Year for its Senate District. It’s a wonderfully restored 80-acre residential, research, demonstration, advocacy and organizing center in Sonoma County, California, a bit over 50 miles north of San Francisco. And extending out from there, it develops strategies for regional-scale community resilience, working with tribes, non-government organizations, private landowners, and an array of agencies to achieve this, locally and internationally.
So you can imagine how happy I was to meet one of its co-founders while we were in California, Brock Dolman. A man Judith Schwartz describes as an all-round brilliant natural historian, restoration practitioner, teacher and raconteur. All of that is in evidence in this conversation, as we trace Brock’s fascinating life journey from military child to adventurous seeker to founding the OAEC with some other ‘crazy people’ with little money. And how together they would become a powerhouse at bringing people together for increasingly remarkable regeneration.
As always, head here for chapter markers. You can find a transcript there too (also available on Apple and some other apps), which is AI generated and imperfect, but hopefully provides greater access for those who need or like to read.
Recorded 9 May 2024.
Title slide: Brock Dolman.
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Music:
Green Shoots, by The Nomadics.
Regeneration, by Amelia Barden, from Regenerating Australia.
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And they went back before in the satellite imagery, before the burn, and found places that had beaver pre-burn and then looked at those same sites post-burn, and where there was still beaver, and they found these incredible green oases of beaver habitats and beaver wetlands that didn't burn during the fire. It's black everywhere else around it, but the beaver water doesn't burn. And so these Smokey the Beaver showed up and in fact in Southern California they had a moment where they saw a bear, a black bear took refuge in beaver habitat.
Brock:So Smokey the Beaver helped save Smokey the Bear.
AJ:G'day. My name's Anthony James and this is The RegenNarration featuring the stories that are changing the story ad-free, freely available and entirely listener-supported. So thanks a lot, Samantha Jewel, for subscribing this week, and to one of the earliest members, Ben Symons, for doubling your subscription amount. I so appreciate it. If you're also finding value in all this, please consider joining Samantha and Ben, part of a great community of supporting listeners. For as little as $3 a month, or whatever amount you can and want to contribute, you get exclusive access to behind-the-scenes stuff from me, additional news and tips and a few more things. Just head to the website via the show notes regennarration. com/ support and thanks again.
AJ:A couple of weeks ago, I received some big news. Th e california state assembly unanimously passed what's been dubbed the beaver bill. Yes, california is bringing the beaver back and, for those who might not be fully across how big this news is, the beaver is a keystone species that assists in restoring watershed and ecosystem functions in areas that need them most. A nd in an era of warming, fire and desertification, and with insurers leaving the state in droves, recognition of this is growing here. That's with thanks to the community that's been building a campaign for 25 years, and this is just the tip of the beaver dam of what they've been up to in that time. The Occidental Arts and Ecology Centre, OAEC, has just celebrated its 30th anniversary and, as it happens, has also just been announced as the 2024 Non-Profit of the Year for its Senate District.
AJ:It's a wonderfully restored 80-acre residential, research, demonstration, advocacy and organising centre in Sonoma County, California, a bit over 50 miles north of San Francisco. A nd extending out from there, it develops strategies for regional-scale community resilience, working with tribes, non-government organisations, private landowners and an array of agencies to achieve this locally and internationally. So you can imagine how happy I was to meet one of its co-founders while we were in California, the fascinating Brock Dolman - a man m an Judith Schwartz describes as an all-round brilliant natural historian, restoration practitioner, teacher and raconteur. All of that is in evidence in this conversation which, funnily enough, as time got away from us out at the property, took place at dawn the following day back home amidst he and his wife's incredible home garden in the hot tub. Oh, and Brock mentioned that, if you're inclined, download the Merlin app to ID the amazing number of birds as you listen. This is breaking new ground Brock, there we go.
Brock:Well, we are immersing ourselves in the subject matter that is closest to my heart the liquidity of life. It's on planet water where the primary assets are liquid.
AJ:Well, as a freediver, I've been acutely aware of that. In fact, I used to have a. There's one of these moments when out of a newspaper came a full spread and it continued in a series for weeks in a mainstream newspaper and I reckon, like 15 years ago, planet Ocean, and the series went through from there. How delightful that stayed on the wall for a long time. Yeah, just to express a bit of the obvious that we never think about. But speaking of what we never think about, let's pick up from where we left off last night in a way where you enlightened me as to a film that's become somewhat of a cult classic you're telling me from Australia that I've never heard of and I've never heard anyone speak of.
Brock:I love that. Yeah, it's a shortish film. It basically is called cane toads and it's a wonderful film a documentary, a mockumentary, a little bit of each. It's got a lot of humor and it's also very serious and it's a wonderful historic telling of the arrival of cane toads to Australia and the whole.
Brock:They go to Puerto Rico in the film, fictionally, to go get the cane toads and bring them back to or not back, but bring them, introduce them to Australia, ostensibly to mitigate the cane grub. And then very quickly it's determined that the life history of the cane toad and the cane grub don't match and then they discover pesticides to deal with that and so the sugar cane industry proceeds accordingly with their chemicals. But unfortunately the continent is left with the legacy of the growing nemesis of cane toad, although there are some very funny bits of people in Australia who vehemently love their cane toads and dance with them and play dolly with them and feed them with skets. And then there's the people who vehemently hate the cane toads and there's the biologists and the native species protection people and it's a wonderful film and it's many decades old because I know we would show it in permaculture design courses at Oxnard City Ecology Centre in the mid-latter 90s, certainly early 2000s, so it's definitely been around for some decades and I'm sure you can stream it on YouTube.
AJ:We'll be doing that. I almost can't laugh because it's such a dark topic in Australia and I can only assume that's why this film isn't talked about. It's too close to home, but it does sound like a terrific take, and the fact that you were even screwing it over here is really something. And so to ground us over here. The other point we left off on speaking of serious but wonderful shards of light, if you will around. What we were talking about is rematriation, and what people are increasingly talking about is rematriation. Bring us into what's happening in California on that front.
Brock:Yeah, so you know, currently, when you say here, the here, where we currently are, is in western Sonoma County. So it's a county in California that's north of San Francisco Bay, just north of Marin, on the coast, redwoods, rolling hills, increasing wine country for many folks and it's the tribal homeland of, of people, people known as the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo, people who currently are known as the Federated Indians of Great and Rancheria. So that's whose tribal homeland we are on right now and they are still here and they are thriving. We at OAEC Occidental Arts and Ecology Center have had the blessing of being invited to support them for quite a long time and I think in one of the framings I hear a lot from indigenous communities, first Nations peoples around here is this idea of what it would be for those of us settler colonists, if you will, or folks of that ilk to act as if we were good guests in somebody else's home, and whether we've overstayed our welcome or not, that's to be still determined, I think.
Brock:But nonetheless, how do we act as good guests? And I think one of those ways is this effort, um, probably better known under the phrase land back, so the giving land back, um, or giving them, figuring out how to return the land in many different ways, to the, to the indigenous peoples of, of this place. And it looks like a lot of things right now, globally, nationally, but in the greater Bay Area of California it's beginning to take shape and take form and I would say that the group of folks who are articulating it, maybe the best in the framing, is in this, this word, I think of rematriation. So really thinking about not repatriation at the root word of patriarchy and male dominated realms, but really the rematriation, and I think that's really coming from the indigenous women themselves, specifically, and the women of place, the indigenous women of place, the indigenous women of place leading the way and bringing back that matronly, if you will, energy, the mothering energy, that form of that healing style of the feminine, if you will.
Brock:And so there's a wonderful organization in the East Bay called Sagorete Land Trust, and Karina Gould is one of the founders who's often a spokeswoman for them Janella Rose, dr Melissa Nelson. They recently made quite a splash on the news because there's been a multi-generational, multi-decadal fight with the city of berkeley and a private developers on a piece of land in called the shell mounds. The berkeley shell mounds, the car park exactly where there's a car park.
AJ:These are lovely links. Esther, from cienega capital, who've had on the podcast, was talking about this because it was very local. We were in Berkeley and the links, of course, being to Paisinas Ranch, which we're going to next and you've had connections to over the journey, both founded by Sally Calhoun. So yes, esther's told us that story.
Brock:Yeah, it's a beautiful story. You know a lot of blood, sweat and tears and hard work and, in all honesty, some very significant private philanthropy, primarily from one foundation, the Katali Foundation, who really showed up with 20 million bucks, and then, and also the city of Berkeley itself ponied up with some other multiple millions of things, and the developer didn't play nice at the end, which is often how such things go. But nonetheless, all to say that that is the most high-profile rematriation vision and I think it's so critical because these places known as shell mounds there were hundreds and hundreds of them all over the greater Bay Area and the idea is you've got shells in a mound and it's not just shells, it's the ancestors' bodies, it's other remains, it's really the evidence of people's occupation in place, not occupation people's co-evolution and presence intergenerationally in the Bay Area for thousands of years.
Brock:And the layers and layers the literal layers and layers of history, the literal layers and layers of history, and those shell mounds were with the early settlers, were quickly desecrated and mined for the organic material or mined for the shell base to turn into roads, the early roads for instance and then eventually developed on and built on, and in this case, in Berkeley, there's a a parking lot on that and there's, uh, an asphalt parking lot, and I will often say that, um, at this point I don't know if we're going to argue about who's ass at fault for that parking lot, we're just going to, um, they Segurite Land Trust, have a beautiful vision of turning that two and a half acre piece of land on top of the shell mound into a beautiful, healing, regenerative, rematriated park, a place for community in East Bay and the world to regain a relationship that I think would be based on more reverential reciprocity and recognition and maybe an invitation for visitors who are not native to that place, not from there, to think about how can they be good guests wherever they come from.
Brock:What does rematriation look like in your watershed, in your community? With whom? And do you even know the indigenous peoples of your place? Are you in relationship with them? They have a beautiful thing with sagarite land trust called the shumiai attacks, where it's an invitation to local folks to quote pay a tax, uh, pay your rent for living on this land. Quote rent free, stolen land, this unseated territory, and that's an interesting vehicle that I think the Segurite Land Trust folks have really brought forward as another way to also act as a good guest, which is, you know, author, a tithing to being there, which is terrific.
AJ:I mean, it just sounds to me like another form of invitation, frankly, for what you get, which is the connection to millennia of history and culture here and you mentioned OAC, of course, already let's go into this part of the story as one of the founders there, I guess, by way of a little snapshot of what it is, what it has become and how it's connecting with that rematriation, with, you know, a broader catchment approach, if you will sure, yeah, so the back in.
Brock:In 1994 there was a group of us there were seven of us who were friends and colleagues at some level, who had had a vision of wanting to both live in intentional community together on a piece of land and also create a center that could be a place for demonstration of of various techniques organic farming, permaculture, tending of the land, social justice strategy, movement, school garden, teacher training programs. We have Water Institute. Eventually we have our Bring Back the Beaver campaign and a facility that can be a cauldron, a container for such community to come together at different levels and different scales, technically these days referred to as a retreat center. And so that group, actually of seven of us, in 94, quote bought the land, quote, took title to land, pay taxes and insurance on this property. So there's the property rights, but I think, as much as having rights to the property, I believe we showed up with an ethic that also tries to bring forward the missing R in that, which is responsibilities.
Brock:And I love an architect, bill McDonough, many years ago at a conference mentioned this idea that the founding of the US, the founding fathers, focused on our bill of rights. But we didn't get a bill of responsibilities and I think, unfortunately, in some ways because of that, as much as they took off or ripped off from Haudenosaunee culture, you know, iroquois Confederacy culture, some of the parts of the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence, those things is the lack of the Bill of Responsibilities. And so we in this democracy, we regulate responsibility. So the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, those acts where public trust resources water, air, government, to quote protect those public trust resources in a matrix of private property, and Sonoma County, as a Bay Area county, is 95 percent private property. There's very little public land here.
Brock:Wow, very different than, say, marin County to the south, which has a lot of federal property, federal parks, golden Gate National Recreation Area, point Reyes National Seashore, things like that, and so this public-private piece in America is a big deal, and the private property fetish in the United States, I think, is a very deeply held, so-called God-given sacred right to many people. And so we, this group, seven of us, took on that right, if you will, but again with the hope of relationship-based responsibilities. And so the land is actually legally owned by a limited liability company, an LLC, it's called Sewing Circle S-O-W-I-N-G.
Brock:So Sewing Circle LLC is the landowner. That's the intentional community we meet every couple weeks. It's a consensus-based collective community. This is our 30th year of living in community in a consensus-based way, in a way that's based on collaboration and cooperation and sharing resources so that not everybody has to have all the same things, that maybe we can reduce our quote footprint in some way, in a collaborative way, and have shared home and shared meals every night in the community kitchen. And at the same time, in 94, we created and co-founded the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center and that's in US tax code. That's a 501c3 nonprofit, a tax-deductible nonprofit, an NGO, and that's really the entity that is the public face, if you will, of the programs that we do, the workshops that happen on the land over the last 30 years that we've been up to.
AJ:And this is where you showed us around yesterday and you showed us the one tree that wasn't cut down, the one tree which I've got a picture of and I'll stick on the website with this episode, and you wouldn't believe to hear that now, given how it looks and the hive of activity it was too, with different people gardening and working on the amphitheatre space etc.
AJ:The retreat centre that you've constructed as part of the sort of new wave, if you like. There now the new building, which is amazing All that. And I wonder, though at the beginning, did you just sum your savings or did you get funding? How did you acquire I mean, this is a hotter topic than ever how you can even do this now if you want to, with the price of land and other inhibiting factors? How did you guys manage it back then? And other inhibiting factors, how?
Brock:did you guys manage it back then? Well, I think you're pointing out a good part, which I was. There's a chance to explicitly name it, but one of the benefits of getting a group of people together is that you can pool your money together and I'll pitch into a shared kitty, a shared pot of money in the beginning to try to get enough capital in our case to be able to have enough for the buy down on that property and the process of the loan and the ability to then pay the terms of the loan. And so that was yeah, that was what everybody had to do. We all had to. In all honesty, in 1994, the buy down for each of us was $20,000. And for all of us in 94, coming up with $20,000 was a really big deal, and none of us had the capacity to do that of our own way, our own initiative. Nobody had the bank account to do that, and so everybody was borrowing from family and friends and that kind of thing to even get that initial nut together.
AJ:I'm not to do that. Yeah, not surprised to hear it. Maybe let's circle back to some of the broader, the tapping in around in the broader communities, catchment work. But just take this natural segue to a bit of your journey, how you came to be in this position in 1994. How do you look back on it? What was the sort of broad narrative thread that took you to that point with these people?
Brock:Yeah, well, you know, for me a very quick journey is. My parents and grandparents are all from Idaho and Montana, settler colonists there from the mid-1800s on Farmers. Then they were engaged, yeah, in the initial settlement processes and agricultural endeavors and ranching and that kind of work and eventually more say urban-ish.
AJ:Urban meaning Idaho Falls Idaho. Yeah, Not very urban. A town by all measures by all measures um and my dad joined the marines in in 1968, um, or in 64.
Brock:I mean, was he conscripted in that time or was that voluntary? No, that was voluntary. He chose to join the marines when, uh, he and my mother found out that she was now pregnant with me and they were not married at the time. So they quickly got married and he quickly sobered up and got a job that's over. But I mean, he got a serious like, oh geez, I need to get a different kind of life. And so, yeah, I joined the marine. So I'm, I'm born on a military base in tennessee and and I get to be one of those kids who gets to grow up never having returned to anywhere. I've lived in my life before just continually moving to a new place, to a new place, and that journey goes through Southern California. Importantly for myself, it's the early years in Japan. How?
AJ:old were you.
Brock:Then I was from three years old to about six years old, very formative years, and all my best and early memories are from there, wonderful memories of Japan.
AJ:How would you sum its impact?
Brock:I think it's thinking about it. It was really just as an early child who didn't, there was no preconceived sense about difference or othering, the deepest sense of belonging versus othering. In a way where I was just a toehead, blonde, blue-eyed kid in a sea of children. I went to Japanese school and only spoke Japanese and all the other kids had very dark black hair and there's wonderful school photos of me. It's like pick the toe head out of the crowd and there I am and um, but the Japanese people, they were just nothing but welcoming, loving, taking you in like family. There's wonderful photos of me in groups of those folks and like family. There's wonderful photos of me in groups with those folks and I was very loquacious as a child and quick with language, apparently because I was apparently fluent in Japanese enough as a four or five-year-old and so you know, wonderful photos of my mom would always take. Whenever we went into town she would take me so I could do the translation and help her go shopping and do that kind of stuff Kids, right and I was clearly a little bit of an attention magnet in that culture and especially because my mom didn't like to live on the Marine bases, so we lived off base and she did enroll me into Japanese school, did enroll me into Japanese school instead of cloistering me within the gated walls of the military American frame, and so I had the blessing and I really thanks to her because she did this explicitly intentionally. I became, I got that, uh, this new, I had this book out idea out there. Third culture kids. I got a different culture. I don't know if I got the culture, but just the introduction and experience of getting to be immersed in just something else, and in the moment you don't think it's else, it just is, and so you just roll with what is um. Much later you realize when you come back to the States, like oh, that was a very different thing. But by being exposed to difference early on and difference throughout life, I think you myself, you begin to appreciate difference, you value difference, you seek out not just difference but diversity, and so always looking towards the edges, always looking outside of the interior of maybe the central dogma of your culture, that might be the so-called glue.
Brock:I very much consider myself as a conservation biologist.
Brock:I did fast forward.
Brock:I went toc santa cruz and did a double major in agroecology and conservation biology and island biogeography, and looking at fragmentation and habitats and corridors and connectivity and wildlife and movement and edge effects and ecotones.
Brock:And so I, from japan, where, where I would actually leave school and I would go first to these Japanese farmers in the rice paddy who were very happy to see me as a little boy, and as soon as I showed up I'd get hugs, happiness, they would hand me these bamboo baskets which I was so happy to get, and then I would proceed to go work through the rice paddies with a specific mission which was to catch frogs, and I would catch as many frogs as I could, and that's just a natural thing, I think, for a three-, four five-year-old to do anyway. But in this case, I was incentivized by their joy because when I showed up and gave them this basket of however many frogs I could catch, they were so excited and that's all I needed was to feel like I was a part of something. I was in some way in service, I was giving to the village. I was, I was had, I had a job to do.
Brock:If you will, I had a responsibility to provide and none of that was ever made explicit and I didn't subconsciously. You get that. I think we all were looking for meaning and responsibility and a way to show up. It's many years later when I realized oh every time I showed up and got frogs that meant on their rice bowl for dinner that night.
AJ:They had frog legs because they were eating on frogs.
Brock:It was a very utilitarian extractive effort on their behalf. For me it was just the pure joy of catching frogs and their smile. But then I would leave and go to my favorite place every day, which was actually. Then. I would go to another building nearby the house and it was always full of women and they were always dressed in these fabulous outfits and and I and they just loved me up and I would get to go in and there was one gal, she clearly was the center of this universe and she was my best friend and I would get to sit down and they would. Sometimes I would get to be dressed up in little silk kimonos and things, because it was all very japanese at that point, um, and these kimonos and silken robes, and there was a table and I can remember being sitting there and little cookies and candy and treats and it was just nothing but love and joy and just being present in that space. And then eventually I would get to come home and you know my dad is off in Vietnam.
Brock:He did three tours in Vietnam and you know, lived with my mom, my younger brother at that point, who was three years younger a baby at that point, and it was not until I was likely in my late teens or early 20s sitting with my father at one point and telling the story, my memory of that story, and he kind of sheepishly shakes his head and wiggles it around and he's like, yeah, that was the geisha house and that was the madam geisha, and so I just spent the best memories of my upbringing in the front house of the geisha house and it was nothing but pure love and femininity and beauty and all of that as well. So I got to keep the male farmers happy with frogs. And again, as a young child, there is no, it just is.
Brock:And you're not there's nothing none of the trappings of what was going on there, any of that. There was no consciousness of that per se. So not defending that or not, but just that was what was happening. From there on moving to other places California, idaho, maryland, chesapeake Bay I was always not an outsider in every community I was just an edge species and making new friends and going to school. And then a couple years later going to new school and making new friends and going to school, and then a couple years later going to new school and making new friends.
Brock:And so the natural world in every one of those places, from rice paddies in Japan to river creeks in Oceanside, california, to the Grand Tetons in West Yellowstone, where our family cabin is in Idaho, to the Chesapeake Bay of Maryland, the natural world, water creeks, snakes, frogs, fish, turtles, birds, those were the consistent friends.
Brock:The pattern of nature was consistent, but the diversity of nature wasn't. And so I had a field guide and I would study the field guide of all the plates that had the snakes on them and try to then study up on the snakes that occurred in the place we were moving to in advance, so that I could then try to go find all those snakes. So the the biologist, uh Virgo, if you will, taxonomist, comes through pretty early on, and but also a social cultural diversity, I think, of sense of fairness and justice is also woven in through those years in a way of acceptance of complexity and other versus um, some of the very sort of interior communities that we would live in, the military community, or the sort of dominant US cultural community of each place which I'm a member of. For sure, but I didn't drink all that Kool-Aid.
AJ:And part of that, I could imagine, was the pivotal experience you had then in the late 80s, of hitchhiking through Latin America to Ecuador.
Brock:Yeah, yeah. So I would say Santa Cruz is where I had moved in 94 and went to junior college there and studied biointensive agriculture and people like Rich Merrill and Murray Bookchins folks who I got to listen to, did you really? And so that's where, I think, the beginnings of a historic political cultural reframe also commenced.
AJ:Was that 84? 84, yeah.
Brock:And that is so. The ecology biology base. That foundation was super strong and this was the beginnings of learning about history and cultural dynamics and injustices. And all through high school, actually, I worked at junior senior year. I worked at a nuclear power plant. I would go to school half a day and then I would leave and I would go work doing landscape maintenance at a nuclear power plant. I would go to school half a day and then I would leave and I would go work doing landscape maintenance at a nuclear power plant and weed eating around where they keep the rods they're cool or spraying Roundup on the double razor wire fence and it was very that life. And so to, within a couple years, be in Santa Cruz with a new landscape company called Chem free landscaping and getting a consciousness around organics and anti-industrial agriculture and a social justice movement and the beginnings of uh yeah, of a people's history of the united states. If you will, it's a wonderful book and so then, yeah, I did.
Brock:I did a journey with a backpack where I hitchhiked from Tijuana, ultimately, to Ecuador, over two years with two thousand dollars, so a thousand bucks a year, from 87 88 and through every country, from from Tijuana all the way to Ecuador, with significant stops in many countries, of which a year of that time was in Ecuador, but um of four months or three months of that was in Nicaragua in 1987, at the height of kind of in the Sandinista revolution, which is 1979.
Brock:But by the late 80s it was really the Contra War that the US were funding right Iran Contra Gate Reagan gets busted, ali North, people like that, trading weapons and cocaine for money to fund the Contra up on the Honduran border, and we were nearish enough to that border of Nicaragua, very much a US puppet dictatorship, augusto Samosa himself, which was true across the region, across the entire region. There's a wonderful book that I read early on called Inevitable Revolutions, and it went through every country in Central America and told a history of pre-colonialism, the colonial struggle, the fight, the dictatorship in that moment in the 80s. It's a really fascinating review of that book.
AJ:It's a hell of a thing now, though, isn't it, brock to? I mean just drawing on my experience in Guatemala to get to know the people.
AJ:I don't know about you, but for me to get to know the actual people who were doing that was at once emotionally traumatic for me, as bizarre as that seems to sound like. I hit rock bottom emotionally at one point because of the visceral reality of the stuff I'd read, but here it was in people who had been tortured but who had lived in the mountains trying to, were doing this incredible work and end up prevailing in many ways I mean in many ways it's still. It's still all in it and still in the to and fro of it all too, in Guatemala as well. Both ways, some incredible outcomes as well and some really tough stuff. Nicaragua is another vexed story, but just personally I remember feeling the gut-wrenching nature of the connection with those people and then where it went to, being so animated by them and so affected still here today by them.
Brock:I imagine that was some of what you were experiencing well, it was fun to learn yesterday about the that the amount of time you spent in guatemala and the years you spent in the important work you were doing there, part of this trip.
Brock:Since I was coming from the north, I, after mexico, gu, guatemala is the next country.
Brock:So I spent quite a bit of time in Guatemala before Nicaragua and I got to witness in the late 80s it was at the height of what some people will think of as an ethnic cleansing the genocide of the military government, and I witnessed in the plazas of Antigua at night trucks rolling up with armed military men who would then just literally grab up every Mayan male they could find typically gets late at night and maybe those men weren't in their full faculties and they would just drag them and throw them into the truck and drive away and then the families never saw them again. So I I saw that firsthand. So those types of things in those, in that experience of again getting to traverse through all those countries and witness those moments in those cultural spaces in an unfiltered way, and someone who didn't begin I didn't speak any, any Spanish at the beginning of that trip at all, and it was a hard one. Aprendí de hablar con la gente, el pueblo en el cajón, me too, me too.
Brock:And again that was just very authentic to what was, just being very present, to what was and who was, and in the context of the past, but really the present present and people then rewriting their own future and the struggle which I think is in the in that period of time in the 80s in Nicaragua at the Sandinista Revolution it was a, it was one of the maybe after, like the Cuban Revolution with Fidel across the way there was considered from a progressive shaking off of dictator shackles, one of the bright spots.
Brock:I have had the blessing of going back to Nicaragua and working there in the last few years through Oxnard's Ecology Center and my co-director of our resilient community design program, kendall Dunnigan, to work with Miskitu indigenous peoples in the northeastern part of Nicaragua, on the border near Honduras, along the Rio Coco, in the Bosawas forest area and learning the history from them about their experience of just being indigenous folks.
Brock:And then British arrival early on. That was really part of kind of that whole part of the Caribbean. The British pushed back on the Spanish there for a while and even through the Somoza regime they were in some ways, as they said were, much more, there was more permissibility and they were kind of left alone, because it was so far away, on the Caribbean side of the country, from the dry Pacific side, where Managua and its capital is, and that the Sandinista revolution and the idea that we are all Nicaraguans, we are all Sandinista and the native folks never wanted to relinquish their identity as indigenous peoples, never wanted to relinquish their identity as indigenous peoples and in fact, that time of the revolution and up till now, in the tragedy of Daniel Ortega, who has gone from the 70s and the revolution to a revolutionary fighter, to, I'll just say it he's a despot and a dictator and a narcissist and he's just out of control.
AJ:It's a salutary tale of the work that needs to be done. It's not winning a battle that gets you where you need to go. There's more work to be done.
Brock:He's certainly not liberated the country.
AJ:No.
Brock:And the crackdown on civil society. You know, either anyone folks from the church, civil society, environmental groups, indigenous peoples are either in jail, are completely shut down or have left and are out as as as expats, trying to wait this period out. So I guess that's all, just to say there's a window also into time. For me that's nearly a 35-year-long witnessing of change and social change, and all in the context, simultaneously, of this container Oxnard Syncology Center.
Brock:And so to kind of wrap up this part of the story through relationships of that that era, um I, when I returned to california in in 88, 89, I was, you know, reconnected with folks and got connected to a more of a a broader social ecological movement space within the Bay Area. And one of those actors that I met was a guy named Dave Henson, and it was Dave and other folks that he was engaged with where this conversation around intentional community kicked in. And it was ultimately after I used to lead sea kayak trips in the Sea of Cortez in Baja for many years and coming back from a winter season of doing that, my wife and I at the time got wind that Dave and a bunch of other folks had a line on a piece of property in a place called Sonoma, in a little town called Occidental, which I'd never heard of.
Brock:And we're looking for other crazy folks to join in on this idea. Again, nobody had any funding. It was a really big project. It was 80 acres. It was a very infamous place because it had been called the Farallon Institute's Rural Center from the late 70s and it's one of the early expressions of biointensive gardening coming out of the work of Alan Chadwick, who was also at UC Santa Cruz in the late 60s and 70s. So it was a very well-known property and yet it was in a moment of its own transition, culturally and politically, and we showed up as the group that somehow were selected out of hundreds of unsolicited proposals to the folks who owned it at the time.
AJ:Is that right? We were.
Brock:We got picked and and 30 years later we're there and, and I would say ultimately to loop it back to the beginning of the conversation, I think in many ways we've been doing our darndest to act like good guests on coast miwok, southern pomo homeland, and take not just the physical plant of the property, the buildings, the settler infrastructure, but for me the conservation biologist, as much as fixing leaky roofs and broken irrigation systems was really taking on the 75 acres of the quote, the natural ecology of coastal prairies and redwood forests and oak woodlands and chaparral, which had been significantly degraded by settler colonialism as far as the early 1870s and 80s. And through vineyards and clear cutting we have redwood stumps that are eight feet across, that were taken out with you know, eight feet across, that were taken out with you know, mules and oxen and people with oxbow or ox, you know misery whips and oxen. And then that land was cut over multiple times for firewood and post-World War II and yet simultaneously, the process of clear-cutting it and it regrowing, the process of clear cutting it and it regrowing, and clear cutting it again and it regrowing. It was very dense and overstocked and trees were in ill health and the native people weren't there.
Brock:The grizzly bears are extinct, the salmon who used to bring nutrients from the ocean were no longer returning in the numbers they did so. So the nutrient cycles, the soil cycles, because of all the erosion, the impact of the water cycle, the runoff and also the prohibition on fire which was throughout the state of stopping indigenous burning. So we went from a pyro fire literate indigenous culture of native burning where they had high frequency of the utilization of fire as a strategic tool based on their indigenous science, their traditional ecological science. It was and is a science just like our Western science observation, hypothesis, testing, adjusting process. That's just science. And indigenous people in this landscape had 600 generations, let's say, to work out their science. These folks had, they had phds early on because they inherited the legacy of those landscapes.
Brock:In this case of, say, fire, it still makes high frequency, thus low intensity, and to move to a Eurocentric, pyro-illiterate relationship to fire, where they said no fire, n-o versus indigenous folks spell no K-N-O-W, no fire versus no fire. And that resulted in fire suppression, smokey the Bear, which, which, while you're simultaneously I remember that destructing, you're modifying the vegetation through clear cutting and it growing up and becoming a thicket and more flammable, more biomass, more combustible, but you keep the fire out so that you move from high frequency, low intensity, burning indigenous fire to flipping that script to low frequency and thus high intensity when it does burn. In California, tragically, the people of California and throughout the West have, since 2017, especially with our Tubbs fire in Sonoma County, napa County, we have the Tubbs fire, kincaid Fire, glass Fire, walbridge Fire, hundreds of thousands of acres Throughout the Sierra. We have fires that are a million acres right, and these are just the quote.
Brock:New normal, although in our Mediterranean climate there never really was a normal but the extremes of the drought or the deluge, the flood and the fire are getting more extreme as a direct result of the settler, colonist land practice of extraction and destruction of the entire landscape through logging, through plowing, through dehydration, through damming of rivers, through the fur rush of killing all the beavers and the sea otter, through the genocide of the native people.
Brock:The conditions of the catchment, if you will, the watersheds are such that the emergent expression of all of that looks like what we now call climate change as a result of global warming.
Brock:But you had to have centuries of land degradation and eventual combustion of fossil fuels of the oil age to drive an expression at a climatic level. So you had local impacts, lack of resiliency. Then basically put your pedal on the accelerator a little harder by adding climate change in the mix. So it's a pattern of impacts and extractive effects from a worldview that saw, sees the planet as commodity rather than community, sees it as rights, our right to extract it versus our responsibility to it. Not just responsibility but codependence with, and thus servitude to share. So a lot of the work at OAC has been to very pragmatically step into a landscape that was at such a level of having been radically impacted in a very short period of time, multiple times plundered, and try to find a path forward, almost like an EMT, an act of CPR and first aid to begin to take this patient and act like a medic.
AJ:That's not the first time a guest has used that metaphor, and it has animated people too.
Brock:land doctors, yeah land doctoring is an idea and I trained as an EMT when I was in junior college and after a couple rounds in the emergency room and on the ambulance and seeing enough dead people and gnarly things, I was like I'm going to do this work in the watershed, I'm going to do this work on behalf of salmon. So I worked ultimately for many years prior to OAC, as a consultant doing environmental impact reports. So for some decades I'm an endangered species vertebrate biologist. So the last of the Santa Cruz long-toed salamanders and the marbled murrelets and the northern spotted owls and the San Joaquin kit fox and the coho salmon or condors or bald eagles or peregrine falcons, like all these charismatic species that are on the brink of extinction, again as an expression of this Euro settler settlement extraction pattern. But in doing those environmental impact report processes, analyses, it became clear to me that when the hydrologic cycle of a place had been compromised through plowing, paving, piping, polluting, plundering, dehydrating, desiccating, degradating landscapes, the drain age, the make, draining it away, in the age of draining, dehydration, that the carrying capacity for life was appropriately diminished because we live on this amazing planet water, not planet earth and all life that we know. The BFF atom of life on this planet is carbon or carbon-based life, but the BFF molecule is H2O and, by volume, all of us especially, hopefully, when you're hydrated are, by volume, mostly water, and life is mostly water when it's actively respiring and metabolizing. And so the nexus for me of central, as an EMT, is really how's the carbon cycle doing in this place and how's the water cycle doing in this place, because those are the two fundamental cycles. Sustainability would be about our ability to sustain the cycles of life, our ability to sustain the cycles of life. So, as a permaculture designer, if you will, my first questions are what would carbon want and what would water want? And what is the current?
Brock:Observe the current place. Do protracted and thoughtful observation of the place we call pato, assessing sun, wind, water, soil, slopes, erosion, vegetation. What do you got? What's there, what's the intrinsic character of this land, your earth client, if you will, and then the visioning of, based on that, what do you want? And then we marry that towards a plan, if you will, a healing plan that may involve some very prescriptive surgery, if you will, some heavy-handed, intensive movement, with a bunch of chainsaws to begin with, or loppers and tools on the sharp end, on the literal cutting edge of this restoration, where we take these overstocked forests that have too many stems, because it's been clear-cut too many times and it's brushy and the bulk of the trees are competing with each other, or, because of fire suppression, other trees are invading and shading out.
Brock:And so what does it look like to do advanced gardening, weeding, with a mantra in our case is that we have fewer trees as nouns and more forest as verb, and moving it towards old growth again, if you will. Yeah, so fewer trees, more forest, old growth or late seral stage, and that's really about thinning it, and it's done on behalf of a fire lens, fire lens. How do we modify the vegetation, the stand condition, so that, when fire shows up, either prescribe fire that we've designed to show up, hopefully as a tool, or it happens to be wildfire that we aren't controlling? Have we restructured patterns, sculpted the land so that fire's less hungry, less, less aggressive, has less to feed on? Maybe, instead of immediately climbing up the fire ladders into the canopy and creating a crown fire that explodes, will it drop to the ground and move as a slow, cool, burning fire that becomes regenerative and healing.
Brock:And also, when you're limbing and thinning and doing vegetation management to reduce fuel loads, what we might call defensible space. You're going to generate a lot of biomass, organic matter, and in the traditional forestry fire space that material is known as slash, and in reality that slash is considered to be trash. For me, slash ain't trash, it's a beneficial biomass and I see this incredible legacy in our case, a once-in-a-generation amount of organic matter where sunlight is turned into sugar, into wood, through this incredible process called photosynthesis, and this is carbon that I don't want to go back to the atmosphere because we already have too much CO2 in the atmosphere already, and so I want to sequester that amazing carbon. And the way we start with that at OAC is we connect to the water cycle. Because when I ask what would water want, what I see in our forests, which are upland, we're at the tip of the catchment, the headwaters, the first order, drainage, the beginnings, and so we don't have perennial creeks, we don't have salmon spawning on our property, that's downstream. We don't have frogs breeding because we don't have water standing through our dry season.
Brock:So this is important we're in the uplands, which is the majority of any catchment. Is that we have these waterways, that, because of the impact to the uplands, the roads, the plowing, the paving, the impervious surfaces. We converted that sponge, that soil food web, that mycorrhizal network, that leaf litter, into a compacted, hardened space. So we've reduced the run, we've reduced the recharge and increased the runoff and water runs away quickly with a lot of energy and can scour out the creeks and make gullies and size channels, which delivers sediment and dirt which is what's been killing the salmon downstream. So we have this perverse, dysfunctional, degenerative landscape where it's overstocked and explosive with fire, yet all the gullies are dehydrating and incising and dewatering the uplands. The deeper the gully goes, the less water the land can hold, while it's dumping sediment to kill salmon downstream.
Brock:Sounds all very lovely, right? Very familiar thing. Very familiar, right? Yeah. So the opportunity to see slash as not trash but beneficial biomass is to strategically take that dangerous problem of quote fuel load and see it as a solution to these incised gullies in a stacked matrix of organic matter, and the brown dead sticks and the green boughs and brown green, brown green, brown green layer it up.
Brock:It sounds like a compost pile, which is what it is, and create a carbonaceous compost catcher's mitt that upgrades and rebuilds the channel compost in place, sequesters all of that carbon into a upland peat bog, basically, that now holds more water, produces clean water, lets it leak later, longer, while the compost is breaking down and holding water.
Brock:The trees that we remain of the forest then get to grow into that with their roots, and so we've basically done a underground aquaponics compost system, so the forest that remains has food source to feed on the dead bodies of its adjacent neighbors who we cut down, the ones who got the Darwin Award, become the food for the ones who get to live.
Brock:And that carbon compost, nutrient water holding capacity, resiliency, so that in that fewer trees, more forest, we also have clearer, colder, more copious water for coho, salmon downstream and salamanders to live in. And it's sequestered in the soil water space instead of the atmospheric space and its durable carbon sequestration. And so how do we get to these multi-benefit beneficial feedbacks that produce resiliency? By rearranging perceived problems into multiple solutions that stack functions for air quality, water quality, soil quality, stack functions for air quality, water quality, soil quality, fire quality, if you will, and ultimately quality of life for all life not just us as humans, and this is some of the work, then, that you've gone on to do with a range of others around the entire watershed that you're in, and beyond and beyond, yeah.
Brock:So sometimes this upland waterway stabilization work is colloquially referred to as gully stuffing. We're stuffing the gullies with this organic matter, again very strategically, not just throwing things in randomly. I've had the blessing of learning about gully stuffing and deep gullies in connection to road runoff and sediment in Santa Cruz before we moved to Occidental, and so almost 35 years now, and we brought that idea and that work to OAC and have, through permaculture courses and trainings, trained thousands of people. And at this point we formally got permits from the state of California. We had to get permits from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and our Regional Water Quality Control Board, because these gullies are waters of the state and placing slash, which is currently designated as a hazardous material and it's illegal to place it in these waterways for good reason, historically, back in the clear-cut logging days. I understand the origin of that, but right now there's a misunderstanding and so we've been gully-stuffing scoff laws for many decades. But now, with the proper permits, we have brought this to light and daylighted it and we are now working throughout Sonoma County projects in Mendocino County, humboldt County, down in Salinas, santa Barbara, throughout the Sierra Nevada. It's a more, it's a this, the methodology of gully stuffing, is but one tactic in a portfolio of strategies based on a set of objectives towards a mission, and the mission of what a group of us have framed and in fact created a couple years ago in California is based on this idea of process-based restoration, and we co-created a new organization called the California Process-Based Restoration Network. We have a wonderful website and this is an amazing organization of volunteer folks who are federal employees, state employees, private property owners, ngos, tribal community members, all across the board, who really are thinking holistically at scale, both place-based and planetary-based, around.
Brock:Rematriation is a process-based restoriation. The work I get to do is ecosystem restoryation. How do we restory the ecosystem that the story is? The planet is community, not commodity, and we are a part of, not apart from, and how do we then re-engage as good guests to clean up the mess of the party that was thrown by our ancestors here towards this rematriated idea, this restoration? But it's really process-based, it's about verbs. So how do we reverberate with the land and with the water versus the nouns of form-based, of rigidity, of fixed ideas? How do we compose with rather than impose upon? So how do you show up with humility versus hubris?
AJ:Tell us the story about the increasing pattern of uninsurability around here, which is acute now and again. Familiar themes back home. That really matters, right? It's almost like the last hurrah of that extractive system in a way. But where do we go from here? The beautiful story though that came out of this with some of the people around you that you've worked with across political divides, if you will, yeah.
Brock:Yeah, so I was joking with you yesterday and if I was, of the many books I would wish to write one of them I would title Uninsurable Planet. And it really is this moment, I think, in many parts of the planet but here in California, of the idea that the whole insurance thing which I think has been I was referring to it yesterday as a bit of a casino, a bit of a- racket has the idea that the house always wins and that casino.
Brock:Well, we're ultimately realizing that the house, which is the Greek word oikos, which is eco, and oikos, nomia household, management, ecology, the study of home that the house that's winning is the planet, is the watershed, is the living life, this dionistic planet. So the casinos are leaving town. The casinos were gamblers at the table, they thought they at the table, they thought they had the house, and so they put all in and they basically lost that bet and they're leaving the state in droves. And some of the biggest insurance companies in the nation have pulled out entirely in California in a couple of years, like seriously, and then some of the other ones that are sticking it out are raising people's rates. And so many of us in West Sonoma County right now and throughout many parts of California this is a crisis that I know best in California, but it's throughout the West have found themselves receiving a letter from their insurance company where they were already paying too high a premiums for too low a service. We're being told, you're canceled, we're leaving, you don't have insurance and folks scrambling to get insurance. In our case, at Sewing Circle and Oxnard Syncology Center, our insurance was canceled. We are now under an insurance plan that's called California Fair Plan, so basically it's public insurance from the state. But that system is marginal and underfunded and increasingly more people are trying to sign up and everyone knows it does not have the money to pay out when the next big fire burns a million acres and kills hundreds of people and thousands of homes are lost.
Brock:And so there's a group of us again in West Sonoma County. Oac is situated in a basin, a larger catchment, known as the Russian River Basin. It's a 1,500 square mile system but we live within a sub-c, a sub watershed called the Dutch Bill Creek Watershed, which is 11 square miles. It drains to the lower Russian River and then eventually out to the ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and a group of us, over a number of years, in different iterations, but in the last three or four years, especially during COVID, to be honest with you, the first meeting for on Zoom three or four years, especially during COVID, to be honest with you, the first meetings were on Zoom began organizing in a way around the idea ultimately of mutual aid, of recognizing that while there is support out there at federal, state, county levels waiting for somebody to ride in on that white horse and save us is probably not the best idea and we also need to show up on our own behalf.
Brock:And fire, I think, is really what got everyone so-called woke to the reality that the process of fire, of wildfire, doesn't pay heed, nor mind to private property boundaries or who's paying taxes on which on which property line, and it it it's very egalitarian in its capacity to rage over everybody's, whatever your economic strata is at some level. And some very expensive fancy homes were burned down next to some folks who lived in less fancy homes or trailers folks who lived in less fancy homes or trailers. And that I think reality check is so stark that there's a lot of history in West County of people coming together anyway across political, social, religious, spiritual divides, if you will, economic divides, to see common cause and community, because we're very rural, like our volunteer fire departments, are all volunteer out here, yeah.
Brock:So we're used to folks who show up on their own behalf, such as volunteer fire departments and first aid, and so a group of us began a process of getting together, and the highway that runs through our part of the world is called the Bohemian Highway.
Brock:And so we call ourselves the Bohemian Collaborative and it's primarily in the Dutchville watershed. Some other watersheds on the adjacent side, salmon Creek, green Valley, willow Creek. These are places that are connected by topography, hydrology, but also the way fire behaves and the direction fire comes at us from the east in the fall, because of how the West Coast works and organizing ourselves to come together as community and share our concerns and share the state of our properties and what we've done on our lands and share the state of our properties and what we've done on our lands. And then we did some fundraising and hired a staff person part-time, through an organization called Safer West County to help out to do the coordinating and we're currently working on a stewardship plan for this broad area tens of thousands of acres at this point, of all private property with a little bit of public land, of thousands of acres, at this point, of all private property with a little bit of public land. And we're identifying the existing conditions, the existing constraints, the current concerns, focusing on, initially, emergency response, the ability for emergency access, egress and ingress for people to get out when a fire comes and the emergency responders be able to get in Fire breaks how do you mitigate fire and then also defensible space and just the ultimate vegetation management.
Brock:So how do we strategically, intentionally and community as our own insurance policy and this was really brought forward by one of the executive director of a large camp in our watershed, a large Christian camp there, who basically, in one of these meetings of landowners, 50 or 60 of us said you know what? We got dropped, we have no more insurance, we can't get insurance. This process, you all us in the room, we're our insurance Together we insure ourselves by working together, by working collaboratively to we ensure ourselves by working together, by working collaboratively, to restore the condition of our properties as individual properties, but in the matrix of the whole, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And so it really truly is an emergent process, but I think it took an emergency, an emergency to see the emergence's, the emergency and this was conservative christians.
AJ:This was quite the moment when he expressed that, and it's what I said to you yesterday, isn't it? That in the insurance casino never was something that we particularly liked. Anyways, in a way, it's like, okay, perhaps it is an opportunity, because, in a sense, terrific if we're free of it. I think of this a bit with mainstream media too. Terrific if we're free of the old model of media. But then what do we do? And to hear this emerge is really something, and before we close up, we have to talk about something else that's emerged, of course, that you showed me stickers and caps of yesterday the supplanting of the california flag with a beaver. With the beaver you talked about the gully stuffing and so forth, but you've had pivotal success around this too, hey.
Brock:Yeah. So again, oac we're really an emergent organization that looks for opportunity and looks for nature abhors a vacuum, and so do we at OAC, and so we're always looking for those spaces. And so, while we've been doing work in the uplands because that's the land OAC has, is uplands nonetheless for many decades and specifically myself as, again, a wildlife biologist have been very dedicated to the recovery of endangered salmon, and for us that's specifically coho salmon, steelhead trout, chinook salmon in our area, and so for decades have been involved in an effort with federal, state, county, private property, ngos, rcds, a full court, press. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent throughout the US to recover these salmon, and salmon are the epitome of the death, of a thousand cuts with respect to a species whose presence in a system is an indicator or an indictment, if you will, about the relationship of land use in that system, from the ridge all the way down to the river and ultimately to the river and ultimately to the reef and the ocean, because these fish are born in freshwater, they go out to the ocean, to salt water, to get big and they return to freshwater, so they're a connecting species that links the whole system, and you have to recover salmon you have to recover the whole system, so they're truly a keystone species. Or as freeman house, with this wonderful book called Totem Salmon, talks about their totemic species. So in the process of doing coho recovery and looking at every process, from dam removal and instream structures and culverts and fish-friendly roads and sediment reduction and instream flows, I began asking the question in the late 90s, early 2000s.
Brock:Huh, there's some scientific literature in other states like Oregon and Washington that says beaver pretty darn good for coho salmon. Why don't we talk about beaver? California has a long, strange history with beaver. Our beaver were trapped out so completely and almost so comprehensively early on from the Russians on the coast in the late 1700s, early 1800s and then the main mountain men trapper types who came in the coast in the late 1700s, early 1800s and then the main mountain men trapper types who came in the early late 1820s 30s. By the time the gold rush showed up we had something we call the fur rush. The fur rush precedes the gold rush, I would say in California. Actually the soul rush is the first rush, the rush for souls, with the Jesuit Catholics who showed up here with the missions, with the Camino Real, were rushing for indigenous people's souls. So the soul rush, the fur rush, then the gold rush for people. To get clear on California history, I think.
Brock:But the so the beaver was. We had less than a thousand beaver by the early 1900s, it was estimated, and beaver is a keystone species, no-transcript of California. And even if they were, they were a detrimental species and they're a nuisance and the best way to manage beaver was through a lethal relationship of depredation, of killing beaver. And so I think increasingly in the last 20 years, last 10 years, there's been a consciousness nationally and in fact internationally, because there's another species of beaver, the Eurasian beaver, castor fiber. Our beaver is Castor canadensis, people recognizing that the activity that this rodent, the second largest rodent on the planet, castor canadensis after the capybara of South America, is our beaver. They can average 60 to 80 pounds, although there's 120 pound beaver that have been trapped.
Brock:They are famous as a rodent because in systems where they want more water, like rivers, or they want to try to make a lake, they can cut down trees, vegetation or move rocks and make dams and block up rivers and impound water, create beaver ponds, beaver wetlands and those systems, especially in the arid mountain west and the Mediterranean west where we have a long dry season and a short winter. The storage of water is our biggest issue. We get, on average, a lot of water in our system, but it comes and goes quickly or the snow melt leaks later. But how do you keep the water around when it stopped raining in January, when you want it in October? And so beaver, as sponges, as wetland creators, as water holders of the flooding in the winter, can upgrade these incised channels, can create beaver wetlands that then turn into carbon sequestering, biofiltering water, cleansing groundwater recharge systems that, at scale in certain landscapes, have been shown by Dr Emily Fairfax in her wonderful paper Smokey the Beaver.
Brock:She and a number of other authors published this work looking at Google Earth maps of areas that had big burns, and they went back before in the satellite imagery before the burn and found places that had beaver pre-burn and then looked at those same sites post-burn and where there was still beaver, and they found these incredible green oases of beaver habitats and beaver wetlands that didn't burn during the fire. It's black everywhere else around it, but the beaver water doesn't burn, wow. And so these Smokey the Beaver showed up and in fact in Southern California they had a moment where they saw a bear. A black bear took refuge in beaver habitat.
AJ:So Smokey the.
Brock:Beaver helped save smoky the bear, and so thinking about an organism, a keystone species, that is engaging in keystone processes of carbon sequestration of water, sequestration of water, cleaning of fire intensity, mitigation of biodiversity, creating habitat for many endangered species that we, the people, are spending millions of dollars trying to recover Salmon and willow, flycatchers and sage, grouse and cascades, frogs and sandhill cranes and tundra swans and moose and elk. And this organism, beaver, is helping to do what are often referred to as nature-based solutions, if you want to have a sort of commodity-centric idea on this climate-smart type of response. And in California we kill thousands of them a year. And so we at OAC, with my co-director, kate Lundquist, put together a Bring Back the Beaver campaign again over 20 years ago, but very formally, probably by 2012. That's when we created the new flag. I took the grizzly bear off the flag and put the beaver flag on. We published our first papers, we convened a working group, the California Beaver Working Group.
Brock:I think OAC's theory of change is we demonstrate, we educate, we change, and then we also do policy and rule change. So the Beaver campaign is active in all of those venues of struggle, if you will, across the spectrum, because we're using Beaver as a vehicle to address issues that society has writ large, with these existential issues of the legacy of the landscape and the condition it's in from all of the settler colonialism and then the amplification of those effects on what is called climate change or climate chaos, climate catastrophe. And what is a just transition framework? That's a socially just framework that also is ecologically resilient. And working with Beaver to do that, also working with human communities in a way that's doing just transition ecological workforce training through process-based lenses to work with communities of labor.
Brock:So uniting the struggle of labor and environmentalism together to recognize we have a common adversary in the commodification, extraction, enslavement genocide space, and so we've had the blessing, either through the California Process-Based Restoration Network, trainings like our Build, like a Beaver trainings, or an amazing organization we at OAC have had the privilege of partnering with over a number of years called North Bay Jobs with Justice, and we got public federal and state funding to do much of that upland forest fuel load, slashing, trash beneficial biomass where we're taking our fire fears and our water woes, and we're connecting those fuels into flows.
Brock:The labor that did that were immigrant farm workers, undocumented folks who were being exploited in vineyards, who've come together with this organization, north bay jobs of justice, to bring their own traditional indigenous ecological knowledge from mexico and guatem, honduras, and bringing that to bear to now be the lead folks at the front edge of doing ecological restoration at scale the fire, the fuel load, the integrated holistic watershed restoration, the carbon sequestration work. While they're doing that in a just transition framework that honors their traditional ecological knowledge and is paying them a more than living wage. In that framework, as an emergent process that the me moves to, we of a collaborative, cooperative venture that has to be intrinsically based on a just transition framework that's ecologically astute, that's proactive, ultimately towards a acting like the good guests that we ought to be to help clean up the mess of our ancestors, towards this ultimate vision of rematriating and supporting that rightful responsibility of reverential reverence.
AJ:And there'll be changes to law around the beaver.
Brock:We have worked and so, yes, we, we have helped change various policies. So so the current depredation policy, the policy that the state has about allowing people to kill beaver if they're causing damage, we helped modify that policy and have the department rewrite a new policy that is now human wildlife coexistence centric. So it centers coexistence and non-lethal management practices and in fact, we just received a $2 million block grant from the state to take state funds and create a program that's going to be a non-lethal beaver coexistence training and support program. So we're going to partner with an amazing organization called Beaver Institute and they have a program called Beaver Corps which trains people in very explicit techniques on how to coexist with beaver who are doing certain things that may be perceived of as causing damage blocking culverts, flooding property, chewing trees may be perceived of as causing damage blocking culverts, flooding property, chewing trees and legitimizing this and professionalizing this process-based restoration job work, training workforce. So how are we training people to become agents of restoration in a professionalized framework? So both training people to do that while also creating like a beaver help desk that will be a web-based platform for folks experiencing damage who can then find the resources through the platform, through us to get connected to these technical folks who can either help them and analyze their damage and then make recommendations for technically how to solve that damage, and maybe even subcontract these folks to implement and install the actual devices in the creek, in the waterway, to mitigate the damage, so that we can live with the beavers and get the benefits of the beaver.
Brock:Use the state-supported money as a cost share to partly subsidize some of that technical expertise or the cost of the materials, while the landowner may have to do some amount of trade in support.
Brock:It's not a freebie, but I think the government is willing to step up and offset some of the tax of having to rebuild a landscape that was extracted, the natural capitals plundered from before, and do right by the land, through a subsidy, if you will. So how do we subsidize sustainability and tax that toxic, if you will, towards helping land owners, land managers, do right by the land, in this case with beavers or other practices to build in resiliency that helps the state meet its goals it's greenhouse gas emissions reductions goals, its climate smart goals, its nature-based solutions goals, its 30 by 30 goals through these collaborative public-private partnerships. And so ultimately we now have a Beaver Bill going through the legislature, which is mainly just going to formally create the Beaver Restoration Program that was created by the governor, governor Newsom, through a legislative budgetary process, formalize it in statute, in the code, as a formal beaver restoration program that is managed by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, so that it doesn't exist on the annual whims of budgets that come and go.
Brock:It has its own integrity, because for us to do this work and allow Beaver to do their work, it's an intergenerational process and we need to have tenure in the capacity to support nonlethal coexistence with Beaver.
Brock:It can't just come and go as administrations change at the whims and so we really have to create a durable structure. So that's really a lot of the work that OAC as a as an entity that's helping support a deep, collaborative again of myriad organizations and other NGOs and agencies in a collaborative way that's pushing this work, this shared work together in the case of, you know, of Beaver, but again, it's what we call our basins of relations and for years we did trainings called Starting and Sustaining Community Watershed Groups, or catchment groups if you will.
Brock:And so really thinking like a watershed at the basins of relations, from ridge to river to reef, how do we rethink and retrofit for resilience in a reverential and reciprocal rematriation?
AJ:what a tale brock. I think I told you already, didn't I we close with a small story about a piece of music that's been significant in your life.
Brock:What comes to mind. Oh geez. Well, I think, since I just was talking and using a lot of R's and re and really interested in the moving from the de-storying and the destruction and the de-degradation to the restoring and the restoration, the regeneration. We just watched the film One Love about Bob Marley redemption song. As someone who grew up in those 70s 80s era and listened to a lot of Bob Marley and reggae and that music, I think that redemption song and Bob his rendition of redemption song and the invocation and the calling us all forward towards one love would be an evocative and emblematic song 100% it still is.
AJ:Thanks, bro, brock. All right, absolute pleasure to be. Yeah, thanks for having us.
Brock:Thank you, and I appreciate you and the work you're doing with regeneration to regenerative, narrate a new, a new tale forward and tell better stories and new stories and stories of inspiration, because we need them and there's so many of them.
AJ:BD: So thanks for doing that work. AJ: That was Brock Dolman, co-founder of the occidental arts and ecology center in sonoma county california. See the links in the show notes for more. The beaver bill is now off to the california senate this month and, as it happens, just before the bill passed the California Assembly, a story broke on reasons to be cheerful with the headline Beavers are back in London and they're thriving. A s always, I'll put a few photos of this episode on the website and more on Patreon for subscribing members, with great thanks to you generous supporting listeners for making this episode possible. If you're not yet one of them, why not join us? Just head to the website or the show notes and follow the prompts, thank you. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening.
