Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Maya Khosla.

Maya Khosla What's interpreted as destruction is very often, very quickly, a force of creation.

Ayana Young Maya Khosla is a wildlife biologist and writer. She served as Sonoma County Poet Laureate (2018-2020), bringing Sonoma’s communities together through poetry gatherings and field walks after the 2017 fires. Sonoma County Conservation Council (SCCC) selected her as one of the 2020 Environmentalists of the Year. Her poetry books include “All the Fires of Wind and Light” from Sixteen Rivers Press (2020 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award), “Keel Bone” from Bear Star Press (Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize), and “Web of Water: Life in Redwood Creek”. Her writing has been featured in documentary films including “Village of Dust, City of Water,” about the water crises in rural India.

Well, Maya, thank you so much for joining us today. In preparing for this interview, I've been mentally journeying back to the forests of northern California that I missed so much, and it's a real pleasure to be able to be transported there with you today.

Maya Khosla Well, thank you, thank you for having me.

Ayana Young So I just want to start off by saying, I'm so impressed with your wealth of knowledge on the forests of northern California, both from a scientific and personal aspect. And as many of the listeners know this about me, I have just found such a great deal of love and wisdom and connection, and really familial relationships with these forests. I'm wondering, to ground our conversation, if you can give us an introduction to your relationship with the forest. Specifically, how do you exist in relationship with these forests? And what senses are activated for you when among the trees?

Maya Khosla A nice big question to start with. Thank you. I have been working in the forests for about eight years in a more dedicated way. But before that, I think my very first interaction with the forests of northern California was in Muir Woods National Monument where I was doing some habitat typing of Redwood Creek, which supports coho salmon and steelhead trout. That was a lot of, you know, hours and hours of spending time in and next to water in the middle of the Muir Woods National Monument trees, the giants. So it was a great first exposure, and completely immersive because there was this necessary work. But also, there was another side that was sort of bringing into focus some of the more poetic aspects of interacting with that world. 

Subsequent to that I've sort of immersed myself in forests after fire, there was always this question in Muir Woods, you know, “What if a fire went through, would you visit?” How would that change things? Are fires really a part of the cycle? And that was a question for a lot of the visitors and during walks and during guided tours, and of course, not realizing that at the time, I was about to plunge into my own journey of forests and how they behave and make their incredibly powerful stage by stage come back after a wildfire. And that's been, sometimes I think of it as probably 1000 hours per year, somewhere in that neighborhood. Some of it is immersive. Now a lot of it is about just field recordings, sound recordings, poetry, workshops, and even artistic installations or working with others who are interested in artistic installations. So it sort of covers quite a wide range.

Ayana Young Forest fires are such a point of contention and I'm thinking about this connection with the forest so clearly, a deeply emotional one, I would imagine for both of us, and with such closeness, I think comes an intimate understanding of change. And that change is not always a bad thing. And so I think it's so important to recognize the dynamism of the forest. And its deep rooted ability to adapt even beyond our own comprehension. And I'm wondering, how do you mourn for some of the human brought changes to the forest while also bearing witness to its adaptive capacity?

Maya Khosla It's so interesting, one of my recent poems, once we have mourned and looked away, there's a change that comes into the forest without our permission. We don't know where it comes from. It's mysterious and deep and there we go, the biodiversity starts to fall into place, stage by stage. So there is an initial state of mourning I think when I see that, through our own current knowledge and capacities, we’re putting ourselves, homes, and communities in danger. And sometimes you get too much danger because there's so much you know, the last few years, I've evacuated three times from home, and fires have come in within two miles, embers have come in probably closer. And so the fire is being seen from human eyes and human eyes are recognizing fire as a destructive force. 

In forests, fire is one of the cycles sort of like hurricanes, volcanoes, big storms, snow, it's one of the cycles. And in particular, what's interpreted as destruction is very often, very quickly, a force of creation. What is determined as a mortuary is very quickly a nursery. And that mortuary to nursery analogy I take from Dr. Tim Inglesby his work, he leads Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, I've been informed by his work and many other folks' work. You know, so it's really not destruction. And a pretty good sized group of scientists have been documenting this opposite of destruction, this beautiful creative force that comes in after a wildfire. So a lot of things that are interpreted as dead, like if you see little bottlebrush leaves on the Sequoia sempervirens, the tallest trees in the world, and interpret that as “Oh my gosh, it's sick, it's dying, it looks different. It's all charred and here's these tiny leaves coming up.” That's not the case at all. It's just making a comeback. And five years from now, it's going to be doing fine. The real matter at hand is time. Well, there's two real matters at hand, at least one is our own safety, because our sense of time is that very compacted emergency based sense of time, you know, leave, leave now. Do whatever you can, take whatever you can, but leave. But the forest sense of time is one of eons, it's one of centuries. It's a gradual comeback and if our sense of time sort of overrides that, “I want to see the forest come back now.” “I want to see, you know, not so much ash on the ground, but everything else on the ground popping up automatically right now. Now. Now.” If we do that, if we come impatient, then yeah, of course it looks like the forest is dead. We're not giving it enough time. But what I've been doing through the works independently following a lot of the works in the forests, by colleagues, scientists, and friends, is following the forests and their progress five years after a fire, 10 years after fire, and where they are left intact, where they are left to themselves. I'm finding all manner of every species that's known to occur before the fire. So the question is, you know, they're eating they're breathing, they're sleeping. I've seen foxes massaging themselves, looking like they're massaging themselves against newly growing leaves. I've seen Pacific fishers, spotted owls, right, close to very, very intensely burned forest, even hunting there because of course, initially at least before all the growth comes back, the mammals are really easy to see. So the sense of mourning then transforms into a wild sense of discovery and a need for more immersion and a need for more learning. 

I'm also saying this as a companion to the fact that cultural burning, I don’t know if you’ve seen the film Elemental, that was recently produced by Ralph Bloomer, a group up in Oregon, and filmed and directed by Tripp Jennings. And there's a line in Elemental that says, this is just, this is the beginning, it's coming right back. There are many lines like that. But you know, we can dwell on the mourning, or we can come back and keep revisiting year after year and see this incredible biodiversity unfurling, life unfurling.

Ayana Young There's so many strong threads that you pulled on thinking about deep time versus our human impatience. And I see that in so many ways when it comes to our desire for fast-paced solutions or what we think we need to do in terms of the urgency of climate change and habitat destruction. And I think that even feeds into our desire for instant gratification, whether it's from forests after a burn or Amazon Prime, like it's all coming from the same place of this quick feedback, or quick shifts, because our lives are actually quite short. And so I can understand, I have a lot of compassion for us that we want to see things moving quickly. And maybe in that there's a type of security or safety and I think maybe that also stems from wanting to control the forest or control the land, rather than working with the land’s rhythms. I want to kind of explore what that means in terms of forest policies, whether that's before a burn or after burn. I know when Trump was in office, and I might butcher this a little bit, but I think in the Farm Bill, or maybe it was a climate change bill, there is something about that the forest, especially in California, needed to be logged, so they didn't burn. And then there was also, you know, the salvage logging, where once a forest has been burned, cut all of the trees down, because the forest is now a liability. So I'd like to explore these policies with you and I'm just interested to hear how you think these are created, the short term thinking, and what are the negatives when we choose policies like that, versus if we are able to have patience when it comes to forest management?

Maya Khosla Yeah, you know, just the thought is sort of, I don't want to sound too light hearted about it. But has anyone ever thought of grass management? Grass burns, too? Yeah, we never heard the term grass management and that's because grass has no commercial value. Forest Management has been born and brought up by an interest in commercial value and so anything that goes hand in hand with forest management, you got to be really aware of the fact that there is a commercial aspect there. So I'm not saying it's the fox guarding the chicken coop, not quite, because a lot of force managers are very well meaning, very reliable people. On the other hand, the idea that all forests have to be wide and open spaced with lots of light coming in between and they're too dense, that they're too crowded, that you know, it's a judgment call. And it's a judgment call from several folks who have not been contested in the literature, including William Baker, Mark Williams, Chad Hanson, Dennis Odeon. These scientists have been calling into question the idea that all forests have to be widely spaced. Sure, some mature forests have that wide spacing. That's absolutely right. You walk into ancient redwood forests, and you will see wide spacing between big mature trees. That's true. But what about the little youngsters coming up? They come up crowded and they outcompete each other. And then they space out as time goes on, again, back to time. 

What about the areas that were managed with cultural burning? Cultural burning, which is very much close at heart to me, because cultural burning is part of what many East Indian tribes are doing in the mountains in India, burning every year, you know, that sets up the forest dynamic where there is some sort of low close to the ground, what we call bushy, that's a bad term–it's more like shrubs and herbaceous plants that are tall and maybe some short trees, they sort of get trimmed and burned and the understory gets clear. But is that the case for all forests? Anyone will tell you that you don't find quails there. You don't find fishers there. Where they are is where the shade is, where the ferns are, where the moss is, or where the lichens are. That's where you find them, you’re not finding them in these cleaned up widely spaced forests. So this exclusive idea, or imposition, if you will, that all forests have to be widely spaced and that's the only answer. We have to work against fire and climate change. Not only is it taking out way too many mature trees, live and dead both. As I said before, you know, some people will think that the little growths on the limbs of trees and on the top branches is a sign that the tree is giving out and about to blink out. It's exactly the opposite. Redwoods survive like that, that little, those little bottlebrush leaves are the key to Redwood post-fire survival. 

So actually hammering forests, with what you mentioned, salvage logging after the fire, but also thinning actions before the fire, is imposing our value system on forests without necessarily taking into account that both the so-called widely spaced beautiful, big statues of forests and tiny little one tree forests with smaller trees coming back in after the fire, both of them existed. And there's a lot of evidence for that. I mean, that's how little ones, you see little ones carpet the forest floor at the beginning stages after fire a, that there's all this conifer regeneration and other regeneration. And of course, mammals and small birds are attracted to it and everybody else is attracted to that because now everybody has food because the small mammals are back. So all those little ones are pretty crowded. You can't say they're unnatural, just because they are crowded. That's just how they grow, the seeds fall to the forest floor and they grow. And then at some point, if they get out-competed, some of them survive and the rest, maybe not. But to impose this idea that you know we have to create wide spacing around all these forests. It goes hand in hand with commercial forest management because for anyone to survive doing that, they've got to take out some of the biggest trees, it's just gonna happen. I've seen it over and over again, I've been monitoring it for over 10 years. You got to take out some of the biggest trees in order to be able to make some kind of a profit on it. Breakeven even, you know, so of course, a lot of big trees are taken out in the name of what they call thinning or fuels management.

So there's the policy side of it, then of course, you've got laws, you know that oh, now now we've got this idea that, “Oh my gosh, we've got too many dead trees, there's all these beetle killed trees, there's all these fire related dead trees.” Well, the problem with taking out all the dead trees, or even leaving very few per acre, is that those are the housing complexes, I call the standing dead trees, the low income housing of the wild, because everybody lives there. Everybody makes homes out of it, this cavity nesters of all shapes and sizes, birds and mammals that all make their homes there. So now, if dead trees are being removed, those are the housing complexes being removed. Of course, you know, the ideas that are being circulated is that they burn faster and will give rise to just a much bigger fire acreage. And that's actually been proved to be untrue. And one of the examples of that is, Dr. Sarah Hart did a 12 year study, I think she's from Colorado, she did a 12 year study of, you know, dead trees versus not dead trees and areas that were dominated by standing dead trees. And over and over and over, she found that the areas that were dominated by, you know, standing dead trees did not burn a whole lot differently from those which were all life trees. So it's these value judgments are being given and then we're tangled up with commercial extraction because just that's just the way it's been in the forests all this time. 

Ayana Young I think the question of economics is one that really rules forest management, of course, it's not about what's best ecologically and I'm thinking about places I've been, especially in the Sierras and the forests that are east of the I-5 freeway, for those of you who have driven around Northern California specifically, and I remember feeling so devastated seeing big fires rolling, and then large trees, some of which were still alive, being taken and just clear cuts, then you think about all of the erosion that happens, and the soil that becomes even more damaged by post-fire logging. And I think it's interesting too, that there's no value placed on standing dead trees for habitat. And I'm thinking about deep time again and when a forest is able to regrow, the fires bring new shoots and mushrooms like morels, and then the deer come in and they eat the morels and they poop and the soil gets the fertilized from the animals that are living in these places and are able to walk through more easily and, and then when you strip all that away, just thinking of the forest soil and what is able to regrow there over time, if we can, you know, just thinking about the depletion between logging, and then pre-fire logging, post-fire logging, and so on and so forth. It's like what are we setting up the forest to be able to do? It's almost like we're taking away some of their immune strength to regrow in a healthy, vibrant way. And so, yeah, just considering all of the ways that it's detrimental to log postfire and I think it's really challenging because for those of us who are just living our lives, and we aren't necessarily really engaged in policies or forest management, but we're seeing these things, not really knowing why they're happening, or maybe believing that it is better to clear cut these forests, because we're scared, because our homes are there. And so I think it's hard for people to know how to stand and request from their local governments, state governments, or even national governments, how to manage these forests in a better way. And so I guess maybe I'm getting to a question around how to, those of us who live in these areas, build relationships with fire and forest? And how do we engage? Whether that's on a political level or a management level? Like how do we have our voices heard? Because I don't want whoever is going to be listening to this and thinking, “Oh, well, we don't have any power here. We just need to sit back and watch it all burn and watch it all be clear cut. And we don't have any say in how these places that surround us are tended for the future?”

Maya Khosla Yeah, thank you so much for touching on so many things connected to helplessness. I see incredibly powerful films like Elemental, and in fact, by the way, Bring Your Own Brigade, that very clearly documents in one instance, how much faster a wildfire can move through a thinned or even clear cut forest. So not only is the carbon gone, but also we've got the carbon emissions related to that leading to more climate change impacts, because once the carbon is gone, at least a good fraction of it is going straight up into the atmosphere no matter which type of processing is done. And that's climate change for tomorrow, worse wildfires for tomorrow. So that carbon accounting is not being done during these clear cutting operations, but also the fact that the next fire can actually move much quicker. And that's exactly what has happened in some of the tragic fires. And yes, one eye is turned to tragedy in the beginnings of both those very recent powerful films. However, I want to turn my eye to where do these homes clearly survive? Dr. Jack Cohen has done some of the seminal studies of homes, structures, surviving wildfire and has said specifically you don't have to live in a concrete bunker in order to be able to have your home survive a wildfire. It's such an imprinted message, imprinted into my brain as a sense of hope. Not that you want to plant yourself right in the middle of where historic wildfires have been, you know, going fast and furious. No, not necessarily, don't be building right into that. But on the other hand, there's a sense of optimism. 

I know two people, I went ahead and jumped into some post-fire monitoring as soon as the 2020 Walbridge Fire was over and found all these animals coming back in tremendous beautiful, you know, bird diversity, mammals. And specifically my area of focus was two homes, one that stood after the wildfire surrounded by redwoods, the other one that did not stand after wildfire did not survive the wildfire. Also surrounded by redwoods, what was the difference? And so for me, and in this case, the difference had a lot to do with watering around the home, irrigation, and the fact that they had some water, just a few hours, they left the irrigation on and it was watering not just around the house but I think the roof as well. So here you go. There's a difference. There's the possibility of a structure remaining standing after the same wildfire. There were two houses that were just basically next door to each other and so the other home was also surrounded by redwoods, but of course structurally very different and not having that irrigation set up to where it would irrigate the land immediately adjacent. 

So I really feel strongly about talking about some of those positive stories, because what's being built up more and more is the fear of wildfires that the trees are going to bring your house down during a wildfire. And what's been shown over and over, is that where there is a crown fire, over 100 feet from homes, those homes have a capacity to stay standing. If careful measures are taken, what are those measures? Where are these stories of post fire survival, I'm seeing one or two crop up and I feel like focusing on those stories to help us beef up against a sense of intense fear that blames forests over and over again, especially where the blame leads to so much deforestation, that it actually makes climate change and future wildfires worse. The other thing you were talking about, the snags being left in place, you know, that tree is gonna burn out. It's an aesthetic value. It's an aesthetic. It's an imposed value, those snags being housing complexes and you know, of course there are bugs, then there's woodpeckers following the bugs, then there's all these other cavity nesters following the woodpeckers, even the larger mammals, not bears, but definitely some of the small ringtails and tree squirrels, and even Pacific fisher. So these animals can come in and use these snags, the cracks in the trees, the faults, the flaws, and the trees that are the reason people take trees down. “Oh, no, look at that. It's going to be sick, it's going to die, we better take that down.” All that stuff is being used. So on the one hand, I want to see the positive stories of homes and structures surviving wildfires. On the other hand, I want to see the positive stories of all these animals that rely on these standing trees, and also the living trees with flaws and cracks in them, where they can make their little spaces and raise their young. So as much space as we give ourselves we can give to the other members of the earth.

Ayana Young I guess there's a question that's coming up for me around fires and soil and thinking about the arguments people make, like “Oh, well, the fires of today burn hotter and faster.” And instead of rejuvenating the soil, or opening the seeds of redwoods or other species that need fire to proliferate, these hotter fires are actually killing the soil, and they're killing the microorganisms and the mycelium.” So it's hard because part of me is like, you know, how much can we trust, the anti-forest-fire rhetoric, because I think so much of blaming the forest and of blaming fire is to blame and otherize the Earth and that is what colonialism and capitalism has done so well, is to sever us from the living Earth and to say it's bad, it's evil, it's dangerous. It's not in rhythm with us. Like we need to control it, we need to harness the power of it and be the dominant ones. And so, you know, when I hear things like, oh, fire is actually really bad ecologically. Because like I said, you know, one thing people are saying is that it's burning up the health of the soil. Do you think that in some cases, that is true? Or how do you dissect comments like that?

Maya Khosla It's a great question. Thank you. I focused a lot on post-fire forests coming back where there are a lot of mature trees, and maybe I should also focus on areas where there aren't that many mature trees, where they've been taken out. In fact, when I think about it, sometimes on the way to one of the sites that I regularly visit, basically all over California from Sequoia in the south all the way to Lassen in the north. I'll pass an area where there's very small trees left in place and the quintessential image is a big tree, it's been burned, okay, so there's a really large stump that's also been burned. But it was obviously cut before the fire because it's a stump that has already been burned over. So it's a huge stump and then in the backdrop, there's a lot of small trees. And they've all been charred to the nubs. They've been charred all the way out by the fire. And my attention was drawn to this juxtaposition between this big tree that turned into a stump during maybe one or another thinning project, before the fire, who knows how many years before the fire, and then the little ones were left and the poor little ones didn't make it at all. And the reason is, I was inspired by another colleague, Doug Bevington, who was searching for images just to see do you see this? Or do you see these thinned landscapes with the largest trees removed and what's happening? And I am seeing big, big, big what they call high severity, like very, very little survival of standing trees, high severity fire in these areas. And over and over again, I will search around and sure enough, I'll find one more. Either like a big log, like so big, it's fallen over, right. So it's taller than I am, the diameter is way, way more than my height. Or I'll see this stump that's been burned over and it was obviously removed before the fire, or I'll see a bunch of both. 

And so I've developed this habit of taking a photo of that with this backdrop of tiny trees, and I can send them to you. I've just got, I'm just collecting them right now. It seems to me fair, because you know, the thinning was done in the name of forest health, we need to go in there, and see who's coming back there. What's growing there? You know, I need to give that a fair shake too, because I don't focus there primarily because it's silent. But that's just my impression, right? At that moment, maybe it will come back. There is really no functioning forest that I can see the elements that I like, like a beautiful creek with ferns and mosses, lichens on the trees, some swath of live trees, sort of close to the heart of the flow of the creek in this riparian corridor, oaks growing back, little sprouts coming up from the ground, root sprouts, those little signs, I'm not seeing them in those areas. So my tendency is to just give up on those areas really quickly. But that is an area that burned fast and furious. That is an area that burned hot. And that is an area that needs help. But those are areas that were already interfered with. And I don't know whether the soil is dead or not, I would have to come back. And yeah, I want to trust it a little bit and see if I can come back, you know, five years from then, and see what happens. For the most part, however, those areas are clear-cut. Not only are they clear cut, but it's down to the bare soil at the end of the clear cut. And what that means from my standpoint is that the mycelial network, subterranean mycelial network, is also being fragmented by this mechanical operation. And that's been proved in the literature over and over. 

So, you know, if it wasn't clear cut, maybe we will have a chance to see whether things come back. But years after a clear cut I've seen four or five years after a clear cut, nothing is coming back. There are even trees being planted and they're dying. And because they need help, in the beginning, little seedlings need help, they need the shade, the moisture provided by the logs, etc. One of the regeneration studies, confit regeneration studies I just helped with as a sort of independent. I helped Tanya Chi out in the field, she's a scientist I work with sometimes. And you know, we were seeing so much regeneration in areas that hadn't been cut for a long time as the soils build up, there's this slight sponginess on the feet. Whereas in those areas that burn hot and fast, that had a lot of evidence of previous recent cuts and thinning, we were not seeing that come back. Now I mean those are small examples. All of what I have said are small examples. Is that happening everywhere? I don't know, I think it's worth looking at. But there are areas and we do have the data, for example, you know, how fast does a fire go? That's easily available. Where does the fire go the fastest? That's easily available. We don't have to sit, stand by, and be helpless, we can take a look at those things. And there's no need to sort of relegate forests to the forces that are at work right now, which is primarily the extraction industry saying and understandably so in some ways, without any opposition, “Gosh, we better just take what we can, the fires are burning it.” But the question is, what does that mean? Does that mean all the old growth, apparently, that's counted now, I mean, the Merced Grove of Yosemite National Park is being taken down as we speak. And I'm not just talking about the older trees, the very, very old trees. But really big trees, well over 20 inches in diameter, are being taken down. I documented it very recently, in the name of “Oh, my gosh, a wildfire will hit it and we need to do a fuel reduction.” So since that's actually been disproved in the literature, like it's sort of hit or miss, if you take it down, we don't know if it's going to go through intense fire or not, it's sort of hit or miss, it's not really a proof. So then, you know, there is a lot that we can do I feel.

Ayana Young There's so much to this and I'm thinking about how the forests are really, it gets hard to put a blanket solution on all forest, like I think about with salmon habitat restoration and adding in coarse woody debris. And there's these grants from the government or projects from CalFire, whoever, and it's very much like okay, every 100 feet, you put a logjam in, and it's like, well, that doesn't make sense for every creek, it doesn't make sense for every river. And I think that way about pre or post fire management, that each little section of forest is so different, and has a different history based on extraction. And when we think of managing into the future, it's really hard to have these sweeping statements that I think are being sold to us by government agencies or big organizations that are contracted out to do this work. I also think, of course, it's used to log more. It's like these excuses or justifications. It makes me think of the debate over restoration versus conservation, or proforestation versus climate change mitigation and I think, because we are in a type of post-logging world at this point, and what I mean by that is, if you think of the Pacific Northwest California up to Alaska, 98% of the old growth forests have already been logged. So we're working with such a small amount of intact forest and of course, the bigger trees, most likely are the most monetarily valued. And so when I think about how we manage at this point where, you know, some of these plots have been logged three, four, fives times over and are regrowing plantation forests. And so hearing about your experiences where you're looking at forest post-fire with large trees, and then I think, “Okay, well, what are forests that have been plantation forest burned?” Like, what are the differences between forest and the ways they've been treated? And then I also think yeah, of course, if you are a large logging company, or forestry company, and you own hundreds of 1000s of acres of either plantation forest or something like a plantation forest, you want to, “protect your investment.” And it's not about an investment for seven generations or an ecological investment. It's a timber investment. And so I don't know if I have a direct question. I'm kind of just in the mud of the complications of industry versus ecology, and all of the different levels, that so many forests and how do we even say forests at this point, because, you know, okay, well, here, here's the Siskiyou National Forest versus the national forests and it’s like well these were just borders put on by the government. And, you know, even within those 100s of 1000s of acres forest, there could be, you know, ten acres next to 100 acres next to, it's also different, I guess what I'm what I'm getting at, and I'm just sitting in the complexity of it, and maybe just blabbing a bit and like the way that I'm processing it all and I'll stop now before I just keep going into this vortex and see if there's any way you can help throw me a rope in this place I'm in.

Maya Khosla Oh, that's a great image by the way. And I like how you traveled from the streams to the plantations you know, the stream restoration work with every 100 feet you can throw some conifers in and not every creek needing it. There's this movement toward process based restoration in California, and I'm sure it's been moving through other states as well, where they are incorporating large and small woody debris into very deeply incised creeks, and in some cases, well, creeks feeding meadows really. And in some cases, it's incredibly helpful. Hand in hand with some of those projects. It looks like there's definitely some extraction element going on. So that you know almost like the creek restoration project ends up going hand in hand with some level of extraction in the forest. And some of it is timber and then of course, some of it is sort of hiding behind the veil of this beautiful restoration project that's happening. So what's really interesting is that we are actually speaking about forests, more than we're speaking about grasses, grasslands, meadows, Chaparral vegetation, all of which are incredibly important for biodiversity support, some of which comes back in stages at the end of a fire. The grasses and Chaparral come back and you have those incredible biodiversity of chaparral nesting birds, like the green tailed towhee and other towhees and the quails will come back to to inhabit this forest that is making its comeback in stages, with the ground cover being very thick initially. 

What's really interesting as part of these restoration projects that no one really talks about is herbicide application. Once these forests are cut, they're actually broadcast sprayed with herbicide. I just witnessed it earlier this year for the first time. Before that, I'd heard about it and seen photos taken with the warning sign, the skull and crossbones warning 1% glyphosate, do not enter and then there's a date provided after which you can enter. And then after the herbicide applications over and I'm talking broadcast applications, they're planting the trees and of course some of the tree plantations fail, which leads me to tree plantations and a recent piece I've read a paper that came out by Steve Dunn of Oregon and several of his colleagues, I don't think he's a lead author on that, although he's been a lead author in many other papers, talking about plantations actually burning with such high severity, like they burn so fast and furious, so hot, that they sort of burn it, sort of that influence spills over into the adjacent forests that are not necessarily plantations. So that's the danger of a plantation, this juxtaposition, this very close cheek by jowl juxtaposition between the plantation forest and you know, it's sort of a more layered, multi layered, slightly more natural forest that's also been cut at some time in its history, like you're saying, the danger is that that plantation is going to influence fire behavior in the next area. And the fact is that this plantation style is all we have when we hit bare ground. I mean, when people are trying to plant they're just planting plantation style. I'm not seeing anything highly varied with a lot of beautiful trees. I'm not seeing the chaparral, I'm not seeing the native grasses, I'm not seeing the native slender stems monkeyflower. I'm not seeing that comeback. I'm just seeing that we want trees. Well, trees are non forests, you can plant any number of trees, some of which will die, of course, because of the, you know, the sort of raising to the ground of the habitat that came before. But you can't plan to forest. And that's a quote I got from my Maya Menenez who spoke at COP 26. 

I just think that we need to put our fear in the right place. We are in a quagmire, you're absolutely right about speaking out of the quicksand of all this various strands of information, some of which is a little slanted, if I may be allowed to be frank, slanted towards, you know, the extraction paradigm, “Oh, my gosh, it's, it's all dying, they're all unhealthy, we got to space them out, we've got to take a lot more trees out, we got to take out 80% of the trees, one publication this year, we got to take out more and more and more.” And more and more and more is sort of interesting, because nobody's looking at how very few people are looking at how fires behaved in those places where more and more has been taken out. It's actually just as fast and furious, if not more than areas where it hasn't been taken out. So there's some cases where it actually slows down. If a fire encounters, you know, wet soil and moss and ferns, it is going to slow down because it's all the moisture there. It's so interesting that there's such a heavy influence of fire behavior imposed by you know, the treatments that have been in place and are in place. And yet we're not really recognizing that this is really a human hand in fire rather than just fire out of control. It's the human hand and fire that we are not seeing.

Ayana Young Yeah, thank you so much for your work and your devotion and the way you can see through confusion and rhetoric and the powers that think they are trying to wield a narrative that is really short sighted and clearly on the side of industry, using any excuse to log more and more. And it kind of feels like this coming from a space of desperation, like I think about when settlers came to the west coast of North America back you know, 100, 200, 300, 400 years ago, and seeing the grandeur and these huge old growth trees that they thought would never end you know, they they thought they could just keep cutting and cutting and there would be endless supplies. And I think at this point we realized no, you know, there are limits, like the Earth has limits, the forest has limits and now it's almost like this addictive scrambling to just take everything we can get before something ends, before we're not able to anymore. It's kind of the same thing with like, making money or even this type of post pandemic world, some of us are seeing where it's like, as soon as the restrictions are off, it's like, okay, go, go, go go, even though we saw a time when emissions were down, but it's like binge until we can't anymore mentality. And I think it's really challenging to manage, or I don't even like that word honestly, but tend a forest well, in right relationship, when so, so much of the management is done in a type of what I see as a binge mentality. 

So, yeah, it's really complex. But I think the more of us who start to decipher truths and understand ecological processes in deep time, and also realize like the forest isn't for us, it's not just for us, it's not just for us to control or to use, or to make money off of, the forest has its own lives, plural. I mean, and I loved how you said a forest isn't just trees. I was very much wrapped up in the reforest industrial complex and the redwoods and it was amazing to feel the urgency and the desperation to just plant trees, plant trees, plant trees, and it's like, well, that's not how trees grow, though. And it's not how strong, resilient trees grow for sure, where they're placed in dry soil without their mother trees, or under the shade of larger trees, or having the connections through the mycelial mats, like these processes are very beautifully complex. And I have definitely gotten to a place where for me, I think, focusing on protecting what is there and then allowing time to tend to an ecosystem and just kind of stepping back and saying, you know, we don't know what to do, we don't actually have the answers. And even though I can have compassion for us wanting to help, I think in a lot of ways we're doing more harm than we are helping. But of course, when everything is based on economic growth, at an endless rate, it's really hard to give anything time, because we want a rate of return now or in 40 years. So yeah, I'm so transported, I'm sitting in Alaska right now freezing my butt off really, really cold today, the north winds are blowing hard, everything's frozen. But I'm like, very much back in the forests of California, thinking of their beauty and their diversity and just really praying for them that they'll find a way through our manic decision making and have space to grow into the future.

Maya Khosla It's really interesting, because I see something that's missing. There's two or three things that are missing in the conversation. One is that there's actually a lot of jobs that could be created through just the home hardening of defensible space work that absolutely needs to be done, more and more, especially because people are still rebuilding, people are still coexisting with areas that have a very strong history of fire. So if the focus was just homes and homes and survival substructures survival of structures, that'd be a lot of jobs out there, probably more because, you know, the focus is hands on, what do I do? What are all the structural changes that I need to put in? It's not just one bulldozer, one operator and one ground person blasting through a forest, it's a lot of people with fine skills, trying to work on home hardening and defensible space. And that's just, that's, to me, that's the bright promise. That's the bright hope, which is that there are so many jobs that are available, you know, so the economic standpoint is that the same money can be put into areas avoiding, you know, that will clearly lower the risks for community. So to me, that's one big bright hope. And the other big bright hope is just going into some of those, I guess, now we could say the remnant because as you say, so much has been removed of the forests, just going into them and listening, you know, listening to the trickle of water, to the sound of the birds, the birds warning initially, warning each other that you're there and then they stop doing that because you're pretty still even going about your business and they're going about theirs. And maybe an occasional mammal, you know, somebody climbing up the tree, a bear that shows up around the corner. There's the other bright hope the fact that when you listen and you stop, there's still we still have a chance of keeping things intact based on the nuggets that are left, if we could just let those nuggets grow nuggets, meaning small swaths of forest that have been fortunately, there out of access, mechanical equipment, it's high risk there, it's a high slope, it's very rocky, whatever the combination of some miraculous circumstances is, they've been left alone. And sure enough, they support this high biodiversity, and this incredibly interesting structure you're not gonna see elsewhere, because it's all planned out. And the memory of the place, you know, that the place has for making its own comeback is sort of wiped out by the mechanical treatment, at least for 50 or 100 years, the 50 or 100 years we don't have in terms of extraction. And in the race to extraction, I just have to say, with forest management, how much more is being taken out than is being put back. That should really sober us and give us a way to direct our hopes, you know, if we leave it in place, those wildfires of tomorrow could, you know, not be exacerbated, at the very least, because all that carbon dioxide being pumped into the air heating the planet by slow degrees is going to be on the ground. You know that sort of the slogan, keep it in the ground that folks, colleagues, have extended to keep it in the forest. You know, so I just think that those are the sources of hope, you know, just you just try, try really hard to focus on and concentrate on the sounds and sights of the things that are most loved.

Ayana Young Beautiful Maya. I would love it if you could have read a poem or two.

Maya Kohsla Oh, yeah, sure. I was thinking of this because I've done so much to translate the field into verse, so to speak, not rhyming of course. This is a dedication. This poem is a dedication to Doug Bevington and his family and it's really sort of based on a photo of his daughter in a newly regenerating forest where the young trees are actually taller than she is, and it was taken a few years ago, and it's called Cloaks of Charcoal. 

The burn trees are gathered by the hundreds,
each cloak of charcoal a sooty ship mast
floating upright in a sea of new leaves and thick slices of earth.
All around are expanses of cedar, fir, pine
blackened from their base to eye level
Alive.

Dawn brings a busy uproar,
wrens, bluebirds, black-backed woodpeckers, lazuli buntings,
pygmy nuthatches, red-breasted sapsuckers.
The first touch of sun clings to treetops like honey,
a child is bending to pick miner's lettuce.
Her father has found morels by Two Mile Creek.
Hope that was tough as heat-cracked rocks grows soft,
buoyant as leaves fluorescing from half-burned trees.

The land holds all.
A mosaic of fiery intensities, showers of ash on floors heaped with debris.
The land's memory becomes its healing, its secrets,
its breads, butters, and preserves released.
The child has found herself among monkeyflowers,
shooting stars, clarkias, and solitary bees.
Constellations of seedlings stretching out from decades of sleep.
She listens to mountain quails calling attention to the riches.

She sees leavings,
prints where bear and deer have foraged.
The walking animals have known for millennia,
the insects for longer.
Smoke runs through their instincts like greetings in a familiar language.
Rivers of birds have always been riding in
on the rivers of insects that swarm toward the source.
The salts of burned branches have always been sinking,
slow melting in rain.

The larvae chew their way through woody tunnels.
Foxes and ringtail cats switch from perch to perch.
Now the child too is singing.

Ayana Young Thank you, Maya, that was beautiful. Well, this has been such an incredible conversation. I really appreciate your time and care.

Maya Kohsla Thank you so much, Ayana, and for your wisdom and the sharpness of your questions. You just must know so much about California and I actually look forward to learning from you if you can, if you are going to visit someday soon.

Ayana Young Thank you. I feel honored and yeah, I really love working up here. The landscape is stunning, but there's nothing like the forest down south there, they’re such characters and each tree has such I don't know like I'm kind of puffing up my chest as I'm imagining them. They're grand, even the ones that aren't large yet they have the ability to be such powerful ancestors, so I miss them a lot. And I love being able to think about them with you.

Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Lake Mary, Forest Veil, Bird by Snow. For The Wild is Created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.