Transcript: OBI KAUFMANN on the Ecotone of Art and Science /351
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Obi Kaufmann.
Obi Kaufmann In every single cell of us, we are in the land, we are we are logically interconnected in a potentially infinite way. So, how could we understand that? How could we quantify that? How could we leave that? Because that is wholly terrestrial in nature. That is our interconnection to the biosphere process of evolution that there is no removing us from.
Ayana Young Obi Kaufmann is an award-winning author of many best-selling books on California's ecology, biodiversity, and geography. Obi’s signature style is as artful as it is analytic, combining masterful renderings of wildlife, hand-painted maps, and data-driven storytelling to present a hopeful and integrated vision of California’s future. An avid conservationist, Obi Kaufmann regularly travels around the state, presenting his work and vision of ecological restoration and preservation from the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildland Center to the Mojave Desert Land Trust. Most recently, Obi was the artist-in-residence for the National Park Service at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area. You can catch him every month in conversation with author and tribal chairman Greg Sarris in their podcast called Place and Purpose. A lifelong resident of California, Obi Kaufmann makes his home base in Oakland and is currently working on Field Atlases to come.
Well, Obi, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really looking forward to conversing and exploring and seeing where our conversation goes,
Obi Kaufmann Oh, what a privilege. What an honor. Thank you, Ayana, I am such a fan of the work that you all do for the wild. I am so excited to be a guest today.
Ayana Young Well, thank you. Well, the feeling is mutual. I was mentioning before we officially started that I am a fan and have your books in my little library and have always been drawn to the way you weave art and science together. And maybe that's a good place for us to start, which is just the way that you blend, and it's so beautiful. And I'd really love if you could explain what draws you to this weaving and why you think your work resonates so deeply with so many of us.
Obi Kaufmann Thank you. Thank you for a wonderfully deep question to kick things off here. You know, I mean, what a wonderful thing it is really that we can have an hour long conversation about this topic, what you just encapsulated right there. And your query is something that we could spend days unpacking. In fact, I do. These books keep coming out of me, Ayana. It's almost as if sometimes they get confused as to whether or not I'm making them or they're making me, right. There's this creative force. It's like pushing on me to get them out and realized, as if the books themselves are the length of a human thought that needs to be fully formed and rendered and it takes about 500 pages, and yet still per volume. But at the end of it, I'm still like, I don't know if I answered the question at all.
The teeter totter, the seesaw between science and art, where you have science answering questions, and you have art questioning answers. And yet, they often switch roles in that regard, too, isn't it? Where the art of asking the right questions in a scientific context is entirely necessary as well. The art of the well-rendered hypothesis makes science at all possible. And this was really codified in the work of one of the greatest 20th Century naturalists, at least in my mind, Edward Wilson, E.O. Wilson, who pioneered such ideas as theory about island biogeography, biodiversity. He's often credited with coining biophilia, the idea that we are hardwired to love life. His 1989 book called Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge made a meteoric impact on my creative self from a young age, where he imagines as a naturalist he puts us in sort of ecological territory, he says, "There's sort of an edge effect that occurs between between different ecotones in human thought."
So let me just unpack that for a second. The edge effect is the idea that on the landscape, there is this space between habitat structures, like between the forest and the meadow, you have this abundance of resources where species–animal species and plant specie–might find a wealth of ecological niches and [unknown], right. And so you get this abundance of a biodiversity inside of this ecotone–which is the word ecologist use for the space between spaces, between habitat spaces. So there's this edge effect that happens between art and science as well where the two overlap, and the product is greater than the sum of its parts where you have inroads to greater understanding to greater meaning to greater depth of narrative. And that's really where I hope to go to with all this work, where we're bypassing defusing, unplugging all of this divisive political rhetoric, with all this agenda-making that so often dominates our popular discourse, especially in a democratic context, right? I'd rather be in the camp of storytelling than argument making, right?
That's why I assumed the idea of being like a pundit, door politician, although I'm engaged as a citizen on whatever level, whether it be by town, by county, by state, my biosphere, whatever it is, I really push back on a couple of core constructs that include commonly used phrases such as an expert, right? Or even something like politician–one who knows one who has an agenda, or has claimed in authority over this thing called truth, especially in the context of this moment in time, this 21st century that we are wrestling with figuring out such words as sustainability, for example, or resiliency. What is the nature of human ecology and the more than human world? I'm not exactly sure. All I've got is this trajectory, this orientation based on this consilience of the physical sciences, and the aesthetic world of art making. So I think that's my little intro to how those two worlds might work. Ayana, what do you think of that?
Ayana Young Goodness. Well, there's so much to think about there. And I am really considering how we as a society seemed to have forgotten about the artistry that is so much of science, you'd kind of mentioned that in the art of the inquiry. And so I'm wondering, how can we bring back the focus to this idea and bring humanity into, I want to say into data driven pursuits, but that doesn't sound very artistic. And so, yeah, so much of science has become godlike in today's progressive communities, then I kind of also wonder about this trifecta of art, God, and data driven pursuits, I guess, and where do we blend those all together in a way that feels balanced and more true? Where one isn't overtaking the other?
Obi Kaufmann Yes. Yeah.
Ayana Young I don't even know if that's the actual question though, either, because there's so much that we can pull from here. So much of our culture is built on this trifecta. So gosh, yeah, please, just, if any of that's poking at you, I'd love to hear what you think.
Obi Kaufmann Right? Right, right. How do we know to ask the right question, especially when we use vocabulary words, such as God, I quickly go to a space where we need to sort of define the traditions of our cultural context, right? Because it's a place that is largely unfamiliar to me. I didn't grow up with any religious tradition. I don't know. Did you?
Ayana Young No, I was raised quite secularly. So no, But I long to connect with something beyond intellect and science for that matter and feel a type of I don't know if it's emptiness, but it's definitely this feeling that there has to be something more that we really don't understand the whole story, even with the best of research, there's more to it, and we may never understand that in a data or intellectual driven way. And can that be okay? And maybe that's where the art comes in. It's like the art picks up where the science leaves off. Or maybe it's vice versa.
Obi Kaufmann That's right. That's right. There is this materialist view of the world, which is certainly an ontology. Right. Ontology is the study of why matter exists, right? There's this ontology that suggests that you can live your whole life thinking that the physical substance of our reality is the whole of it. In fact, the scientific method, which as you said, it's so often substitute for godlike technology, because it is sort of a skeleton key into a particular scale of truth perception, and experimental predictability that has worked very well thus far, you know, to do what we wanted it to do. But our minds evolved on the African savannah, where we're the medium shaped creatures moving at medium speeds through phenomenological reality. And that has worked very well in a Newtonian sense.
And I find the New Physics right, here we are eighty years after the Manhattan Project, since Oppenheimer. Anyway, here we are 80 years past that when we're thinking of Post-Einsteinian reality, when we're thinking about freeing... We're thinking about certain concepts of our universe, including the Big Bang, including dark matter that are really open to new mathematical models, perhaps like the singularities that have just never worked out mathematically. And answering those questions might get us to become truly an intergalactic species. Maybe.
But over the past 120 years, since the sort of psychological revolution represented by this Einsteinian concept of reality where energy and mass are equivocal at great speeds. We're finding now and I am the son of an astrophysicist, my father, Dr. William Kaufmann, III, was the director of the Griffith Observatory for a time and he wrote many college textbooks on astronomy and whatnot. His books were called The Universe or Discovering the Universe was another one or Cosmic Frontiers of General Relativity was another one, you know…So I grew up in my father's shadow, and Dr. Kaufmann's son was going to be a mathematician. So I have something in me that is programmed. I have a lot of software in my heart, so a mind that is oriented towards mathematical models and system thinking on that level. And I still find it fascinating.
In fact, it's the roundabout way to get into a couple of things that I'd love to sort of work out with you here in real time is the ideal one, that perhaps that's not a good destiny for our species, to leave Earth. Or even more so, I don't believe that we can because of what you said before, intimated at the godlike aspect to what I ascribe that to be which is the infinity of life forms that we bodily represent. Physiologically. I mean as we are sitting here right now, you and I are both breathing in and out hundreds of 1000s of fungal spores that have co evolved with us for hundreds of millions of years into our earliest vertebral forms, even before that into the very mitochondrial DNA they have a foreign place in our human bodies, in every single cell of us, we are the land, we are the Earth, we are physiologically interconnected in a potentially infinite way. So how could we understand that? How could we quantify that? How could we leave that? Because that is wholly terrestrial in nature. That is our interconnection to the biosphere process of evolution that there is no removing us from. And I don't think that's a gloomy thought at all. I think that that is a wholly–W, H, O, L, L, Y–that is a wholly integrating impulse that fuels my creative vocation, right. It fuels the thing that I'm going after this, and the thing that I'm going after isn't a thing at all, of course, it's a process. It is a trail, it is not the destination at the end of the trail. And I think that by that practice, I'm coming, almost asymptotically, you know, it's like, they'll never quite get there, but it'll get there infinitely close. And close to what? I'm not exactly sure. Something like infinity, something like god, something like connection, something like fearlessness in the face of death, I think about that a lot in terms of climate change, and my own sense of activism and community. So like, you know, all of this sort of transcendent and immanent experience that is so well expressed by just the flow of watercolor on paper. Right? And which brings me to like the zen of the painting experience, which is why, gosh Ayana, I guess why I do what I do.
Ayana Young Well, yeah, there's so much there.
Obi Kaufmann There is… I don't need to go completely big or completely deep, but I absolutely do. Because–
Ayana Young No, I love it.
Obi Kaufmann You know, I, ya know
Ayana Young I'm totally into it. Why not?
Obi Kaufmann I think that one of the great challenges of our time, of course, is climate change, or as a sort of, less euphemistically call it in my books, climate breakdown by way of anthropogenic global warming, an apt description of what is happening in real time across the planet. There's this existential dread, this doom full heuristic that manifests itself and the real sort of deleterious... our mental health suffers from from this daily charge of what is presented to us as the weathering of the biosphere because of the choices that we are making, which is an okay way of going about it. But there are other ways of looking at it, in order such that we might be confronted more holistically from a healthier perspective, as opposed to one that is ungrounded, uncentered, panicked. And, you know, potentially undemocratic because of it as well. I'm one who really believes in the democratic process. I mean, the subject of my work is California, which is a political entity, which is a democratic entity doesn't exist except for in political, political, semiotic conversation. We have this symbol of this thing called California. And I use that as a metaphor for greater processes across the land and inside of me, and it's a capable enough metaphor to do that, to hold all of it, the whole of all of my views on how the world, society, and ecology is glued together by way of investigation of these very complex systems within systems.
[Musical break]
Obi Kaufmann Gosh, you know you're up there in Alaska today in Glacier Bay. I wonder how you are dealing with climate anxiety up there? I mean, I imagine you live in a very rural community, out far from the dense urban populations that I deal with everyday living in downtown Oakland, California.
Ayana Young Yeah, I think we can't escape the climate anxieties and the climate realities of this moment no matter where we are and it impacts us all psychologically, if not, you know, of course, materially. And I'm thinking about humans being nature and we're not separate, which, of course, is something that is, I think most of us know, in a rational type of way. But what does that really mean or look like, today with these ideas of the Anthropocene, where it seems like we have become so separate from nature, which is why we're even dealing with the issues of climate change, because we have tried to separate ourselves and think of ourselves as humans is more mighty or intelligent than the rest of nature. And, you know, we totally go down that rabbit hole of how and why we separated, even though we never can be separate anyways, we completely rely on this earth,
Obi Kaufmann Right.
Ayana Young And I really appreciate how much you engage with the idea that our human concept of nature is constructed and often serves a very specific societal purpose. But at the same time, you also recognize just how important conservation and protecting these so-called natural spaces can be. So it'd be interesting to dive into this tension a bit more deeply, and I'd love to hear what you think.
Obi Kaufmann No. I love the point you just made there. And if I understand it, I think that there's great truth there that is presented in paradox. I love the idea of paradox. The paradox, I guess, I mean, for this conversation, we can call paradox, like any sort of absurd proposition that yields surprising or counter intuitive truths because of it. Right? So one of the paradoxes might be that there's this game of alienation that civilization has played with itself–in different forms, in different degrees, on different spectrums–for 100,000 years since the cognitive revolution, when we invented the notion of fiction, when we invented the notion of art. Something seems to have switched on in us in a way that we don't really see represented elsewhere in the fossil record anywhere. And now we're chasing this Self that manifests psychologically.
See, my mom was a psychologist. So now you're getting my full family story here. I got my astrophysicist father and then I got my clinical psychologist mother. And so, somehow, the nature/nurture argument inside of my own body itself is resolved or entangled therein. I am fascinated by the psychological development of the anthropological human. What that thing then is, as you said, nature... we can call nature maybe this is really pushing the limits of what I believe is the English language, right? Nature, nature with a capital N might be what exists inside of you and that you can never separate yourself from.
But then there's the nature with the little 'n' which is the course of American policy, nature with the little 'n' is the thing to be saved, I guess. And it's also the thing to be sort of fetishized economically, it's like, well, we, if we just set aside enough of it, it's going to be okay. Which suggests whole realms of intellectual anemia, right? Like, it's just like the connective tissue that is represented in landscapes across different ecologies as a direct through line to the well being of human communities everywhere at every stage of our history across the planet. And tracing that through the deep time and space of California, I am sort of parsed into these different books that I write and explore through this conciliate theory into this aesthetic space across this complex horizon of different dancing variables inside of this matrix that is the land area, that is that is human policy, that is stories being told, that is bottlenecks being experienced inside of climatic temporality.
I find it interesting, and this is another paradox, just unpack that very complex sentiment that I just expressed, to unpack and return it to this very simple space. Every single one of my books is built on very simple questions that I'm just trying to get some good answers to. Okay. So my first book in 2017 was The California Field Atlas and that book changed my life. And that was based on a very simple question: What elements of California and that's the whole natural world, right? Because I use California, the microcosm for greater macrocosm of the natural world or the more than human world, what are those aspects that have always been, at least, you know, in the past 6 million years or so since the middle Miocene? That sort of tectonic configuration of the California space began to resemble its current self, you know, sort of say that California? What aspects of California have always been? What aspects continue to be, despite the very successfully imposed urban veneer over the past 170 years or so since the gold rush of 1850? And what aspects of California will always be, right?
So there's this temporal aspect across the spatial aspect, which is where the secret of the genre that is the Field Atlas came from, right? Field atlases don't exist, I invented it, to tell this very specific story, not about where things are, or how to get places or, you know, but to democratize the whole space, if you will, not just the marquee, things of like Yosemite are the giant coastal Redwoods in like the whole of California. These watersheds across the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, say North America's–the longest contiguous mountain range, and we're just saying it's also its highest. These watersheds across the west slope of the Sierra Nevada. You know, back then they emptied into what a geologist called San Pablo Sea, right, which is an ocean that doesn't exist now. And now, you go through all my books, and you find no roads, right? Because I'm much more interested in drawing that blue line of say, like the Yuba River, for example, not surrounded by these little red lines that will return to the dust from which they are made in the next few 100 years, right. But that blue line of the Yuba River will look like that for millions of years to come. And that sort of exploration of deep time, especially in the context of now, especially in the context of today's bottleneck, climatic bottlenecks, societal bottleneck, whatever it is, is a great wellspring of the thing called hope--this actionable, beautiful, a amorphous thing called hope.
And so that was my first book, right? So there's a temporal aspect and then I sort of organized it like, you know, these grand living systems of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. So how do these big adaptive cycles inform this world class portfolio of biodiversity that California still enjoys? Because although every single one of our landscape types here in California are either threatened, endangered or critically endangered, we have a very low extinction rate across the state still, in 2023, we have a less than 1% extinction. Now it's a little bit higher with some classifications. We've lost five to 10% of our freshwater fish species, for example, across the state. We've lost some beautiful creatures, including that magnificent creature that we put on our state flag, the California grizzly. 2023, we are commemorating the 100th year since the last California grizzly was killed in Sequoia National Forest, 1923. So what I've done in my next books, okay, so I did the state of water. And that was to go back to the simple questions. Okay, so the simple questions: California state of water, state of water, understanding California's most precious resource. That book is very simply about water storage, water conveyance, and then water usage in the state. And so that book, thin little book that sort of breaks the format of my larger books, was really just sort of a large math problem that was peppered with my poetic and artistic voice, ruminating on California, it's hydrological future, we can say, in terms of surface water and surface water ecology.
So it's a very narrow focus, then they open it up again. And this is an eye on this is the big thrust that I'm celebrating here with you today that I've written the third book, now in what has become The California Lands Trilogy. This is a series of California Field Atlases that began four years ago with the publishing of The Forests of California. And then it moves through to The Coasts of California. And now this year, my new book is called The Deserts of California and that book is arriving in bookstores, Fall 2023. It is here now and it is my baby. And don't tell the other books, but I think it might be my favorite.
So I was telling you before that all my books have very simple questions behind them. The Forests of California, the first book in this series, really asked simple questions like, "What rivers flow through what National Forests in California?" It's such a simple question, but it's a very difficult answer to get, especially on a popular level. I mean, you can go to, you know, the USFS, United States Forest Service site, or USGS or Department of Energy, and you can kind of find maps of rivers as they go through the political borders that are the Forest Service's designation of the 17 National Forests in California. But it's very difficult information to find, and it's not [unknown]–usually for a researcher or forester. They're not really on roadmaps, so I wanted to make varied information very easily accessible on that level.
And then that opened up the whole can of worms as to how the forests themselves are different in character with respect to specifically arboreal ecology, right? What is a tree at all? is another question sort of like What is nature? But you know, inside of a forest ecosystem, especially today, when we're asking questions, like What is a wildfire? or What is a healthy forest? And I found some shocking discoveries there too. For example, here we are in the 21st Century in California, and there are more trees in California now than there have ever been in its entire geologic history. There's more trees now in California than there has ever been. And so you hear recent bumper stickers everywhere, PLANT MORE TREES, PLANT MORE TREES, and I question that reasoning in regards to our goals, and the biogeographic reality on the landscape. For example, if we're really going for carbon sequestration, we need healthy forests, we don't need more trees. Our forests are, in fact, after 100 years of fire suppression policy saved from the United States Forest Service we have trees that are potentially overpopulated, infirmed, stressed, beetle ridden. And all of those things might be very well inside of larger, very natural regimes too, there's nothing new about the situation that we are in right now as far as, for example, drought is concerned, for example, as far as fire is concerned. What is novel now is the uptick in global temperature.
The simple question that I asked for my next book, the second volume was Coasts of California, and that was simply to ask, what would a biogeographic survey of the view shed of California shoreline actually look like from the very north of the state–Crescent City, say del Norte County all the way down to San Diego, south of the state? And it's funny I called the book The Coasts of California. And the idea of pluralizing the coasts was so novel, that when I bought the website, the URL or whatever, for thecoastsofcalifornia.com, I paid like 25 cents for it. Like I guess it's because nobody thought of the coast of California as more than one thing, when ecologically very much is as you know, being from Mendocino, it's like, or having lived in Mendocino. Are you from Mendocino? Or did you just live there?
Ayana Young I was born and raised in Southern California, but lived in Mendocino. So I'm, yeah, familiar with the coastline.
Obi Kaufmann Okay. Okay. So you know, you know, how ecologically different those two characters are?
Ayana Young Oh, very different, quite.
Obi Kaufmann How could you not pluralize them if you're really looking? Yes, yes. The third in the series, now The Deserts of California, this new book, beyond the Sierra Crest, beyond this temporary space, where you and I know so well, across these arid landscapes. The modern California deserts themselves, a very recent geologic phenomena. Very recent, just about the same age as the Holocene, really, in this interglacial period that we're experiencing still over the past 12,000 years. I find that in The Deserts of California, which includes like, for example, 70-72 different maps of all of the federal wilderness areas and hidden maps of how, of how the greater systems of biogeography and hydrology work within these wilderness areas, I've got 72 maps. But what those maps do, and I lament, at some point early on in the book that I could have, like, made many of these maps with a pair of scissors instead of a paintbrush, you know, just which is ideologically, politically what these land designations actually do, and how they are drawn with a broad pair of scissors that cuts the landscape up.
And so the simple question that I asked him, The Deserts book, which turns out is not so simple. There's two parts of it really. The first part would be something like, Is there a bottom threshold of anthropogenic disturbance that we can impose on the ecology by which it does not recognize itself and collapses into something completely other than what it was? Or has that already happened? Does the Mojave Desert, for example, one of the four deserts that I explore in this new book, the Deserts of California, is the Mojave Desert, something completely different now than what it was before say colonization? So the second part of that question would be: What is the role that fetishizing nature as nature can be put away into this wilderness area? This is where nature exists. Is that at all an apt way of going about the thing called conservation, and if, if not, are we going to let great be the enemy of good? It's not the greatest thing, but it's what we've got? So I wrestled with this a lot. And I think that's probably where I am at this point.
[Musical break]
Obi Kaufmann I'm in a lot of discussions these days with Sacramento, specifically, one guy, his name is Wade Crowfoot. And he's our State Secretary of Natural Resources. And let me see just if I could plug my own podcast, which is placeandpurpose.live, in which once a month, me and the Chairman of the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria in Santa Rosa. Greg Sarris, who's also an author and a Professor of Literature at Stanford and at UCLA, and he's the Tribal Chairman. He and I sit down once a month and discuss issues of seasonality and traditional ecological knowledge and whatnot. Wade, the Secretary Crowfoot joined us for a conversation this month, wherein we talked a lot about the 30X30. Program. Are you familiar with the 30X30 foot program?
Ayana Young I am Yeah, but maybe some of our listeners aren't.
Obi Kaufmann Right. Right. Right. So it's moved to a national scale, but it really added seeds here in California with the present Newsom Administration, Gavin Newsom is our governor. The Newsom Administration, who put forth the goal that by the year 2030, we will understate protection towards guidelines that are intended to protect biodiversity. Okay, in all of its different forms, under the auspices of this protection, we will have designated this land equating to 30% of it right, so 30% of the total land area of California and California is very easy to figure out. So you got like 100 million, it's about 101 point something million acres in California. 160,000 square miles. California is not small. It's not Alaska, but it's not small. So we got about 30 million acres. Right now we've got about 24 and a half million acres that qualify, so in the next six years, we've got about 6 million acres to go to protect California's land and its waters–the protected marine environments, at about 16%, so we've got a lot more work to do with protecting our offshore ecologies. But the deserts, the deserts are doing so much work. Because of these 72 wilderness areas that I've got mapped out in the book are largely because of it, but we also got some national parks and some state parks down. The desert itself is doing so much heavy lifting for this goal of 30X30. And I've gotten a lot of criticisms about 30X30. And yet, and yet, and yet, I have little choice, but to love this program, this 30X30 vision, there's no choice.
I get scared and for example, what happens if we make that goal? Are people going to acquiesce somehow into a state of complicity where it will have seemed as if we did it, we saved nature. Now we have a license to trash the other 70% Or what yeah, what if we stop? Wouldn't it make so much more sense to carry on from 30X30, to do 50X50, which is the half Earth idea, which is, which is really probably what it's going to take to give the species enough buffer zone in order to in order to retain these vectors of resiliency often embedded into the very nature of biodiversity itself. You know, in order to keep that complement that steward that miracle, if you will, of the fact that we have an extinction rate of 1%. So it's tough because what we've got here now..
Have you ever driven across the Mojave Desert, or have you done it lately?
Ayana Young Probably about two years ago,
Obi Kaufmann Two years ago, okay, perhaps if you know, if you're driving from like San Bernardino to Vegas, you will have passed the Ivanpah solar farm to the north, just really close to the Nevada border–massive solar array. Okay. So those are, those are springing up all across the desert, it's incredibly expensive, and by expensive, I'm not talking about economics, I'm talking about ecological expense. These are credibly ecologically expensive contraptions, contrivances, machines. We've got the crust, wind farms, solar farms and geothermal farms across California's deserts. We've got about on any good given day, we've got about seven megawatts of energy that that we can draw from the grid. And this is necessary in order for our greater goal, which is drawdown, carbon drawdown. We need to get away from fossil fuels. And this is what we've got right now. But by 2045 is when California plans on becoming a net carbon sink, no longer carbon source, a net carbon sink. 2045 means that we will need at least 20 megawatts of wind, solar and geothermal. Right now we're at seven. So we're going to need to raze about a quarter million more acres across the desert in order to do that, and build these solar monstrosities to find this cheap solar energy that we need to power our electric lives.
And hey, I get it. I remember that my books here are saying we're acting under an assumption that there is some sort of essential bottom level, right, you hear that a lot in conversation circles, like what is essential habitat? And I'm here to really consider that that question might be a paradox, that that question might be inappropriate, and that question might even, perhaps cynically, be rooted in economics and not in ecological science. How much can we get away with seems to be the subtext of the question. What is the bottom limit to what we can exploit, and yet still not be committing ecocide? Say, and I don't know if that's a good question.
And so, we press forward, hoping that this dangerous gamble of not letting good be the enemy of great in this democratic context of negotiation, compromise and disappointment ultimately, that the biodiversity holds on and the Mojave remembers itself. For example, that we don't lose the existential entity that is this precious jewel of biodiversity, of evolutionary, of ancient evolutionary processes that is our great gift honor and sacred duty to witness to protect and to engage with on a reciprocal level such that the investment is not wasted in how we take care of it. It will take care of us. Furthermore, it can push that further, in taking care of it, we are taking care of us. In all human communities across the history of time, there is a direct through line between the fitness and robustness of biodiversity and the fitness and robustness of the human community that's adjacent to. That goes something like this: It's like the math of like, like Biodiversity means healthy ecosystems. healthy ecosystems means predictable deliverable ecological services within naturalized regimes that are then tappable, or perhaps even exploitable by the human communities that necessarily need them for the supply chains all the way down to the bottom. And that very straightforward line of logic is something that seems so lost to the materialist. 21st century consumer capitalist industry that can't begin addressing the word sustainability. Well, that's all good to say, Ayana.
Ayana Young Yeah, yeah. Gosh, well, sustainability is a tricky one. And also I feel like rewilding is getting a bit tricky. And you had a talk called Thinking like a Watershed in the Age of Resiliency. And you say, quote, "I speak of rewilding as an evolutionary concept rooted in deep time, offering what can be a kind of genetic code, an informational cipher, even a heading for our efforts based in determining insight as the character of California's truer self. The one beyond the so successfully imposed concrete veneer of the 20th and 21st century," end quote. And yeah, I really enjoy the way you speak about the idea of rewilding and the important distinction between the idea of rewilding that comes from a misplaced idea that we can control nature, and an idea of rewilding as this deeply rooted evolutionary concept that you refer to. So yeah, I'd love to hear how you're thinking about rewilding now and the role you see it playing in California's future.
Obi Kaufmann Yeah, there's so much in a prefix right? Re-, R-E. You know, from return to reservation to rewilding to reciprocal to restoration to reverse. There is a looking backward in order to look ahead, a circular aspect to that horizon. And, you know, on my podcast, sitting across from Greg Sarri, he often talks about the Southern Pomo Kashaya Dreamer, one of the great basket weavers of North Bay. North Bay arts in the late 19th, early 20th Centuries, just make the most beautiful baskets. If you know about the traditional California basketmaking among indigenous peoples, it's wrapped up in this whole narrative of how humanity works in the world. And his teacher, this Kashaya woman, her name was Mabel McKay. Mabel McKay, says, "You think–" She's such a plain speaker? Gary does her very well. She's such a plain speaker, she says "You think your ideas are so new. Nothing is new. Discovery doesn't exist. It's just all remembering." And there's that re- again, isn't it? There's that prefix: re-membering.
There is so much wisdom in that, and so much license. License to not have to rely on the novel innovation. The novel innovation is a great help, but remembering, restoring, rewilding is about engaging very old systems. We don't have to figure it out. It does it by itself. Give it half a chance. And it'll figure it out.
There are major biotic pieces of the puzzle that are missing. For example, the beaver or the salmon, which historically have... Historically. When I say historically, I mean, the end of the last century, like, like the, the time that has passed is nothing. I mean, a century is a very long time for human, but for a place–to blink. It's not either. There's no quantifiable measure, that is recognizable in human space for how insignificant [inaudible] a time over the way that ecosystems evolve to become the resilient selves. That paradox, though, is rivaled by the extraordinary rate by which this species of ours, and its current configuration, this is worldly zeitgeist, that is this capitalistic fire cult, if you will. Fire everywhere, when you fire everywhere, I mean, even speaking, metaphorically. But even making a larger point that we are the atmosphere, we are the hydrosphere. We are agents of some sort of programming that may or may not be attended to. What is the limits of our agency?
This gets me critical of the nature of activism in general, although I appreciate local community in California where I exist is responsible for about 1% of the total carbon emissions across the biosphere every year. You know, and so we're working on that, we're working on 1%. We can do that here. Of course, you know, under the new, liberal globalist regime we're under and we're integrated into the 21st Century. What can be done on a global level remains up in the air, how do we steer the ship of 8 billion people? I'm not exactly sure. What I can attest to is the nature of community to engage one's landscape. And that is where I hope that my books as far as ecological literacy find their best quality. And what I mean by that is that I want to, for as much as possible, remain non prescriptive in my political agenda because I'm fascinated by complex systems and whatever system you're talking about, if it's complex experiences, something called emergent phenomena. Emergent phenomenon. These are these unexpected, entirely unpredictable occurrences where good things happen or catastrophic things happen, or catastrophically good things happen. And if we can just sort of stand on the teeter totter enough such that we weight it towards catastrophic success, as opposed to catastrophic failure, might we engage these endemic indigenous systems? Might we remember these systems as Mabel McKay might say, in order such that we leave the natural world of California and indeed the biosphere at the end of the 21st century, regardless of the injuries of climate change, in better shape than we left it at the end of the 20th century? I think it's entirely within our scope of work. So that's probably where I'm going to sort of generally address that question, if I did at all.
Ayana Young I mean, these questions are not capable of being directly answered, so I think what you did respond with was interesting, and I was following you and thinking, you know, it's hard not to think about old growth forest, which is something that I have been deeply devoted to for years. And I really appreciate how much you engage with the old growth forests of California, which have totally swept me away. And I just don't feel like this conversation would be complete if we didn't give some time to those just incredible spirits and places and in your talk, “Thinking like a Watershed in the Age of Resiliency,” you say, quote, "Although no human has yet witnessed the return of old growth conditions, we can imagine what such a community might look like," end quote.
And so there's a number of questions like 1) I'm imagining or I'm wondering how the power of imagination plays into your work and into your general philosophy of conservation. And then, specifically with old growth, it does challenge us to expand our frameworks of time. If that's even something our minds can, you know, or are truly even capable of which I question. You know, you'd mentioned deep time. And so, yeah, just thinking about the beauty and opening ourselves up to input from other forms of intelligence. You refer to that in the mind of the redwood forest. And so yeah, can we even comprehend deep time enough to imagine an old growth forest returning. But there again, is the re- word that I'm thinking about that from a few comments ago. And so, yeah, it's hard for me to really even directly ask you a question about this, because I'm being challenged with my thoughts on old growth forests, but I know that they call so loudly and they feel so powerful yet so fragile at the same time. And so, yeah, so just from one old growth lover to another, wondering what your thoughts are.
Obi Kaufmann This is all very new science. Like if you're a Mabel McKay Kashaya Dreamer laughing at me when I say this, but old growth for successive fire ecology science is a new thing. In fact, across the university system, just in the past 20 or 30 years, fire ecology has become its own thing apart from forestry apart from silviculture, we understand now that fire is a great creative force. In fact, the snag forest, which is the early forest, postfire, post severe fire, is the more biodiverse, holds more species of songbirds say more species of songbird rely on the snag forest than they do on the old growth forest. Right, so a lot of our notions on how valuable one type is three other are beginning to reveal new stories. And we've got some big conservation challenges. 90% of our endangered species don't exist in protected areas.
So we've got core challenges and yet it's remembering, Ayana, if I could sort of close with this dreamy story really is as compelling as it gets. You asked me about imagining and where does imagination voice in my artwork and I feel like have this place of reverie in my mind, this daydream that's like 200 years ago, or maybe it's 200 years from now. But like, I'm walking up the Sacramento River, which is the largest river in California runs through the Sacramento Valley there is fed by the northernmost rivers from the West Slope and the Sierra Nevada Spring, it's name. And you can look across the flooded waters, right because one of the things that happens in the yearly pulsing of water in California is that when the snowpack melts, it floods the valley to an enormous degree before the system of 1000s of levees and impoundments and dams across the northern Sacramento River Valley were installed over the past 100 years. The river could swell to be 15 miles wide. And I can imagine walking beside the river, looking out over the river to the east and you can see the whole surface of the water glinting nickels with the return of hundreds of 1000s of mature people-size Chinook salmon. These were four or five foot long anadromous fish returning from the marine adult lives to find their headwaters. And along the shore are these fat bears, fat bears, and when I say a fat bear, I mean weigh in at like 1800 pounds, you know, but the brown bears a California fat off this routinely got upwards of over 2000 pounds. Huge bears. And the Indigenous people of the North Bay remind us that that it wasn't until the coming of the gun that bears were dangerous to humans because of the abundance because of the fecundity of not only the land, but the stories that we told about the land for 1000s and 1000s of years in pre-contact California that bears and humans lived peace. And so you can imagine the whole landscape dotted with these fat bears across this flooded river valley. And in every step, every step is full of 1000s of different flower greens and little flower blooms.
You know in California we get so many tiny, tiny, little flowers–flowers that are much smaller than a pencil eraser. And then we have hundreds and hundreds of native bees–1000s of native bee species across North America in California but by 2000–and it almost seems as if there's a different pollinator for every flower species, right? So the whole ground is alive in this hum of an angiosperm magic–magic spring flowering. Right, so silly. So it's awash with color and then I'm walking up past this terraced landscape which is the beaver dams. Okay, so, so before the fur rush, which predated the gold rush by about 20 or 30 years, there was approximately 15 to 20 million beaver in the California floristic province. They estimated that there was one or two beaver per kilometer of watercourse across the state. And when you have beavers doing their thing, slowing the water down, sinking the water, spreading it across the landscape, you get entirely ecologies by the way of their ecological engineering. We get entire colleges resistant to mega droughts that lasted hundreds of years. We know several of them in the past 2000 years–100 year droughts in which it seems like California floristic province retained its entire complement of biodiversity solely because of the largest of all North American rodents. Do you wonder if that is the beaver?
So I'm walking up the staircase of beaver dams, beaver lodges, to find ultimately the course where this Chinook salmon going—their headwaters, where in their anadromous life cycle they are honored to lay their mortal bodies down. What we're talking about is hundreds of 1000s of metric tons of calcium, phosphorus, nitrogen, the best plant fertilizer ever. And then, you know, under the winter snows have been washed down in the floods or carried off by, you know, the 1000s of raptors that feed on their bones and drop them throughout the forest, feeding the forest. What starvation, the trees, the forest itself must be experiencing now without that clockwork return of this incredible, this incredible song song of the salmon if you will. And so it's this dream, this dream of the fecundity, this dream of abundance that is just right here. It's all written still on the landscape. We can, should, do realize it. You can see the salmon. We're doing things like taking out the four Klamath Dams now. In sort of like the last best restoration–this is the best chance California salmon have for continued survival into the last half of the 21st Century, and they're waiting for those dams to come. They're waiting today. We can hear them singing that song, that song is there to help them sing that song to witness, to say, “I hear you.” ‘I hear you’ is the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. And gets me to work on this stuff. So I'm gonna leave it at that, Ayana.
Ayana Young Yeah. Thank you.
Obi Kaufmann Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for letting me express that dream. That vision. That's the circuit.
Ayana Young Yeah, absolutely. I'm so grateful. You shared it. Yeah. Thank you. Well, it's hard to stop this conversation, because there's so much more to unpack but–
Obi Kaufmann Oh, there really is.
Ayana Young I'm grateful for this time.
Obi Kaufmann Well, you know, I feel it. I really appreciate you giving me the space to wander through my thoughts here in real time, you know, I'm not, I'm not a good sound bite guy, you know, [laughter] I really want to express my most authentic self with you, and I feel like you really, as is your gift... and I've seen this, you elicit this response from the number of authors, thinkers on this podcast, and, as I say, to be counted amongst your community, it's just such a thrill. And so the thanks is all me to you.
Ayana Young Oh, yeah. This has been really wonderful Obi and I'm grateful that you're in our community. And yeah, until the next time, we continue this wandering.
Obi Kaufmann Thank you, my friend.
Ayana Young Thank you Obi.
José Alejandro Rivera Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild. The music you heard today was by Memotone, Magnetic Vines, and Daniela Lanaia. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, Evan Tenenbaum, and José Alejandro Rivera.