In the final episode of A State of Change: Practicing Honest Hope, Ayana Young and artist-naturalist Laura Cunningham explore honest hope, cyclical time, grassroots action, and the particular places we can still protect and restore. Laura reflects on using art and imagination to reconstruct California’s ecological past, and imagines a future shaped by native grasslands, wildlife, local stewardship, and renewed relationships with place. They consider how small, sustained acts of attention can become meaningful forms of ecological care, and Laura shares a formative story of a flash flood that transformed a Mojave Desert canyon overnight, revealing the power and rhythm of natural change.

In the second episode of A State of Change, Ayana Young and artist-naturalist Laura Cunningham explore ecological restoration through the movement of water, fire, wildlife, and living landscapes. They discuss California’s lost abundance of tule elk and salmon, the return of Tulare Lake, cultural burning with Karuk and Yurok communities, and what it means to restore ecological processes rather than recreate a static past. Laura shares why slowing down, paying attention, and learning to live with change may be essential to a resilient future.

Artist-naturalist Laura Cunningham explores California’s landscapes across time in her revised book, A State of Change: California’s Forgotten Landscapes (HeyDay Books, 2026). Through art, science, field sketching, and research-rooted imagination, she considers how close observation can deepen our attention to the places we inhabit and expand our sense of what is possible. In conversation with For The Wild host, Ayana Young, she reflects on shifting baselines, ecological memory, and how remembering what a place has held can help us imagine its future.