I delivered this Keynote Address to the Association of Environmental and Outdoor Educators on Saturday, March 30th, 2019 at their annual, statewide conference at Westminster Woods in Occidental California. I’ve edited a few comments as they were delivered and then presented here, but for the most part, it is presented verbatim. – Obi Kaufmann

I came down from Sierraville yesterday, which is about 35 miles north of Lake Tahoe, where I am living these days to be with you all here today. I am working on a series of books regarding conservation ecology in California and the parade of deadline my publisher has me up against means, that for the most part, snow has been my experience of spring. Coming home to the East Bay yesterday, I was deeply startled to suddenly apprehend the vernal, viridian wave across the hills. So much so that I was moved to pull off the road and scribble these few lines down, that looking at them again this morning I found them to be an appropriate and personal introduction to both me and the themes of my address today, so please indulge me:

The greater trajectory of my study, the life long song of praise I sing, the deeper quest for the purest expression of gratitude that I can most easily give away, is now just beginning to reveal itself as a single question: what is the character of our natural world once we are through telling our fossil fueled fantasy of endless growth? Once we prove to ourselves, the elasticity of our own consciousness and transform the story at the heart of the next version of society we invent, what scars will we map across the body of our beloved place? What narrative will we employ to justify our historic arrogance that presumed nature to work in any other way but a cycle?

(begin)

I want to begin today by addressing the theme of this weekend’s conference and explore what exactly is the box that we are thinking outside of. It is clear to me that together, the inclusive-We, the We that includes every thinking human, regardless of agency or ideology, stands at a precious moment in history defined by transformation. This transformation is manifesting as a change across the natural world and is mirroring or will mirror a paradigm change in the fundamental fabric of the human psyche. I see this transformation effecting the biosphere across temporal horizons at different scales of society.

In my address I will be using the word society a lot. I am using the word society to denote a whole nation of people governed by some kind of legislative core. As multifaceted, fitful and slippery as any given society is, whether at regional, state, national or multi-national scale, I use the word society as a dialectic in context to the other frames of reference used to lump together the human world. The society sits between the community, those gathered here today, and the world population, which is the whole-global, contemporary corpus of humanity.

To describe the temporal and ecological context of contemporary humanity and the crossroads we find ourselves at, let’s image a mountain peak. On that mountain peak stands a little girl, and let’s let her represent humanity, human consciousness and the human faculty to understand a greater context for itself. The mountain represents a couple of concepts: one, in the foreground, the slopes down from the summit, the capacity of human-civilization to transform its natural environment in the field of history – and two, the far horizon, the viewshed of the mountain represents the history of life on earth. Turn one way, call it east, and squinting, you can see the beginning of life, deep in the Proterozoic Period of Earth’s Precambrian Era, 3.5 billion years ago. Turn the other way, call it west, and look at the sunset of life on planet earth – that too is about the same distance away – 3 billion years or so, when the core of our happy sun begins to shrink and brighten on its journey to become a red giant (in about ten billion years, when its outer edge will extend past Mars) and will pass a threshold, after the oceans’ have evaporated to destroy even all the bacteria on our terrestrial globe.  We are in the middle of the story and there is absolutely we can do about that.

Let us now focus on the slopes of time and space closer to our stout-hearted little human on her summit. Turn to the east again, and look down the hill, 170 years into the past. It’s 1848 in California, and you can hardly believe the extent and capacity of life on display across this truly golden state. You can hardly believe it because you can hardly recognize it. The forests of widely spaced Ponderosa and Calocedrus trees you walk through as you descend down the west slope of the Sierra Nevada into the Sacramento Valley exist in a strict and normalized fire regime where a thousand annual fires, both anthropogenic and lightning-sourced average 300 acres with an intense burn zone of 10 acres. By way of comparison, the 2014 Rim Fire near Yosemite burned 257,000 acres with an intense burn zone of 34,000 acres. The Sacramento Valley itself at this time, is a biyearly display of birdlife, a megapolis of avian activity on the Pacific Flyway – their habitat, the Sacramento, a river unchained that routinely grew to be thirty miles wide was patrolled by a legion of 2,000 pound grizzly bears that hunted teaming populations of people-sized salmon. The Coastal ranges, packed green all summer long with bunchgrass butt up against the greatest belt of sempervirens old-growth the Quaternary Period has left, the Redwood coast.

Turn now to the other direction, to the west in our thought experiment and consider California, 170 years from now: the California we encounter then will be as unrecognizable to us now as the pre-goldrush California seems to this contemporary reality. Even in the wake of what is considered the best case scenario for climate change, a two degree Celsius change of global atmospheric temperature, California could be radically transformed despite any engineered intervention.

Although most models predict California will not experience a dramatically decline in precipitation over the next one hundred-plus years, we are entering a century that will have us considering a new kind of drought: snow drought. In the California epoch of snow drought, the precipitation we do get could be mostly in the form of rain and it could fall in huge amounts, sometimes called rain-bombs by climate scientists, over shorter intervals. If this happens, it will change the traditions of California agriculture, development and urbanization as radically, suddenly and as spectacularly as these industries came into being and continue to presently expand .

Snow drought could change the soil-climate, the nature of aridity within the living, top-layers of California’s earthen landscape and the ecosystems will flee north and upslope to seek both cooler temperatures and respite from the cycles of wildland and suburban interface-inferno that will happen with increasing intensity, at any given month of the year. We could see our colder, subalpine forests fade to extirpation as they are invaded by the conifers running up the mountains. We could witness our chaparral and our desert habitats increasing fragmented by willful invasive grasses that seek to break the natural systems of succession and engage in whole-hearted, ecological conversion. Now, while this picture is bleak, I’ve got another one on deck, stay with me – we are not fated to realize that particular feedback cascade.

The larger point that I am making is that because of events that have already begun their course, because of pieces already in play, California will have undergone two major, ecological transformations within three centuries following European settlement. Three hundred years is the blink of an eye in most, geophysical scales of measure. This period of time, probably to be remembered as the lifespan of the carbon-economy, the fossil-fuel economy in California, represents a bottleneck. Not just a bottleneck for our own species to survive its relative adolescence, but a bottleneck for all of our endemic biodiversity.  The key, I believe to understanding the larger context by which we survive and thrive, along with our more-than-human community, following the bottleneck, is by understanding what can be called, in our conceptual model, the middle ground.

Let’s return to the conceptual peak and revisit our tiny human as she looks to the middle ground. The middle ground in this model is a time-horizon of between ten and fifteen thousand years. Turning again to the easterly-past, this is a period of time when there was a clear uptick in traceable evidence of the ancient people of California. Around the globe humans ventured in this broad and vague, aeon-wide swath of human history. Everywhere that humans went, humans became very good at destroying large animals. These animals – herbivorous megafauna, were keystone species in their own local systems and their decline precipitated a positive feedback cascade that launched the now-famously called Sixth Extinction. California is a text book example of how this unfolded and continues to unfold.

It is probable that humans arrived thousands of years prior to the discovery of the Calico Man culture, or the Channel Island cultures of between 12 and 14 thousand years ago. This horizon line is significant because it empirically represents not only a timeframe for humanity in this place, but across the Holocene, we have local evidence of an anthropogenically-caused decline of biodiversity, human-adaptation to it and the natural world’s recovery from it. When I say recovery, I mean the filling of niches within ecographies (spatial ecologies) around the state with invasive species that over time, established their own rules of equilibrium in the adaptive cycle within a relatively short amount of time. For example, how bison, elk and moose from Beringia filled the niches left by dwindling populations of camel, horse and mammoth. And humans, spending thousands of years learning pyro-technologies of prescription burning for food production, established ancient cultures with stable populations in every corner of the state.  I am not saying that the decline of megafauna populations around the world was necessarily analogous to the rate at which we are losing our biodiversity today. And, I’m not saying that we should or can turn back the clock, although it might be turned back for us – what I am saying is that the time-horizon is significant when we turn our attention to the west from our summit view.

Ten thousand years from now is an exciting prospect. If you listen to too much main-stream and social media, you may be worried about the human race making it until next Tuesday. I’d like to trust you with greater thought. I’d like to ask for your trust to begin the conversation where we are imagining humanity, thriving in a beautifully fecund California ten thousand years from now.

In order to begin that conversation, we had better turn our attention back to the girl standing on the mountain top. The question we ask ourselves there then is, is there a box on her head? Can she see anything out of the box at all or does truth exist only in her mind? This is the box we need to think outside of. This is the box we are discussing this weekend.

If it is the case that she has a box on her head, than the most important question becomes how do we get her to take off the box? We can’t take off the box for her – that’s inside the box thinking. There is no external source that will present to us, a vision for us to follow – the path is internal, and the path will shift our paradigm. To remove the box, we have to not only understand what inside the box thinking is, but how inside the box thinking doesn’t work.

Inside the box thinking says that society, with simply enough information and with enough exposure to the facts will understand and adopt climate change for the threat to civilization that it is and will respond to the threat in kind. Outside the box thinking understands that the human mind, having developed in the African savanna over the past five million years, did not evolve to evaluate and properly assess the hyperobject that climate change is, for the threat that it poses.

Inside the box thinking says that faith in technology and the free market system will invent some deus ex machina, some device, or system of devices that will quote-unquote “clean up our mess” and present some band-aid solution for our bevy of ecological problems. Outside the box thinking understands that unless we change the story, the story of our own anthrocentric value above all others with whom we share this world, a worldview I would argue as being Abrahamic in cultural-origin – a worldview that fundamentally challenges the basic notion of humanity existing in tandem with a larger, living network of natural systems –  the technology won’t save us for any meaningful amount of time from these imminently collapsing, unraveling feedback cascades that we find everywhere.

Inside the box thinking wishes to dismiss me as a neo-liberal, tribal-thinker who works merely for protections of the natural world, such as personhood status for watersheds, above the concerns for the human economy upon which thousands of Californian families depend. Outside the box thinking has me standing with the children of the Sunrise Movement imagining a prosperous, post-carbon economy where we avoid the coming, Malthusian catastrophe by shedding our political subscriptions, even for a proverbial moment, to remake our collective power.

To put it simply, inside the box thinking says that there are two types of people in this world – outside the box thinking knows better.

Inside the box thinking has you all boiled down to an industrial role that reflects deeper economic patterns. As teachers and educators, you are not unlike line-workers who have the repetitive and remedial job of assembling citizens from behind the factory door from where they will emerge, largely identical. Outside the box thinking has you as the greatest and most potent army the democratic world has got, mobilized and deployed at the front lines of the war on ignorance. I don’t mean to fall back on military jargon, which is often solely about anesthetizing more-nuanced and sensitive truths, but the struggle to get that box of that little girl’s head is a long and potentially brutal campaign that requires strategy, discipline and valor.

I would like to pause here and discuss why I chose to engender the tiny human to represent humanity at the top of the conceptual mountain. I don’t mean at all to imply that the box is on her head because I call her a girl – in fact it is quite the opposite: it may be that only she has the power to remove the box – he cannot do it.  The future is not only female, so is the present. And she is also, most-certainly not white, probably transcends polarized, sexual-identity and doesn’t come from wealth. What I mean when I rather flippantly invoke the T-Shirt axiom that the future is female, with my unavoidably male voice is a deeper trend in the emergent, ecological paradigm. I don’t mean to invoke images of mythological Amazonia, ruled by shield maidens with long hair, as cool as that would be. I mean that a serious investigation of contemporary global demographics coupled with the progressive course of psychological dynamics through human and civil rights paints a picture of what has been called ecofeminism.

Ecofeminism is a word that will turn off half the audience who believe it to be a political idea, and thus one with a high-degree of elective agency – agency that is rooted in male-psychology, not female.

Ecofeminism is often mentioned in the same breath as patriarchy – as its diametrically opposed force. It isn’t. But because of this pairing – whatever it is, or it isn’t, is now tied to words like environmentalism, like sustainable, like even progress, that imply a political dogma under the banner of liberalism (little l) and are dismissed by the coded, dog-whistle heard by over half of the American populace.

If I were a braver poet, if I were less a cis-gendered, white guy, I would have another term – actually, I think the Sunrise Movement, works pretty well – so we will let it stand. Let’s let this stand too: In Paul Hawken’s extensive 2016 book with the grand title DRAWDOWN, the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming, he estimates that by 1) enabling share-ownership of small businesses around the world commiserate with the total rate of female labor within those business, namely equally pay for equal work, and 2) supplying the paltry, five billion dollar global shortfall for women’s reproductive health and family planning, and 3) if all nations adopted a plan of 100 percent enrollment of girls in primary and secondary schools, the net, cascading effect would be a reduction of 124 gigatons of atmospheric carbon dioxide by the year 2050 – in itself, potentially enough to keep the world from warming to dread catastrophe. And if that what it means to be an ecofeminist, let’s start the line to sign up as one right here and now.

I grew up the son of two scientists. My father was an astrophysicist and my mother was a clinical psychologist. I remember once, I must have been about seven years old and I was sitting in the back seat of the car and I can’t remember exactly the context of the question, but I remember baiting them with the question “where is truth in the universe?” They both responded with out hesitation and simultaneously. My father said physics, my mother said psychology. My folks and I still have a laugh to this day about that moment.

Now, so many years on, I have finally found a third answer. One that I think works better for me to understand the human mind and its relationship to the great world. If the adult me were in that car and was going to blurt out his answer just as my parents did, I would say story.

A story is a work of narrative, a fiction that reveals meaning or a cognitive device that assigns value. Evolutionary anthropologists describe a cognitive revolution that seems to have occurred in our species about seventy to one hundred thousand years ago. This revolution coincided with the first, discernable evidence of art making. Evolutionary biologists have posited that the ability to tell a story, to put together the most advanced, interpersonal communication technology the world has ever known was far in a way more important to our evolutionary success than bipedalism or our opposable thumb. Through the technology of story telling we are able to abstractly remove and maximize selected pieces of our animal instinct, selective pieces of our inherited birthright and store them outside of our bodies, in a conceptual locker for transferability between members of our species. Because of this, it didn’t matter that we were weak apes with limited physicality – we were destined to do what we did and are doing, and we were destined to do it fast.

Stories exist on many conceptual levels. There are stories that exist between individuals, like the one I am telling today, there are stories that occur in popular culture that can reap havoc on collective thought – think marketing, branding, brand-stories, and even advertising. and there are stories that work like rivers through the course of history, guiding our decisions and creating our biases and our normalities. These are the stories that we tell ourselves and these stories, our personal myths, dictate how we live our lives and why. It is by way of a story somewhere deep in me that has it as a normal bias that I should get in a car every morning, drive for hours only then to sit in front of a computer screen for eight hours, get back into the car, do it again, five days a week for 40 years. That sounds like a pretty bad story, one that considers nothing but the story I tell myself to be a productive and prosperous member of society.

I would argue that our story, the story that is human society is ready for a new iteration. The through-line of history, the over-arching story of world civilization is ready for an upgrade and it will either be imposed on us from without or it may emerge spontaneously from within.

The same story that evolved through the second and third human revolutions: the agricultural revolution, about 6,000 years ago, and the industrial revolution, which conceivably began one sunny, Sunday afternoon in June of 1775, when James Watt turned on his steam engine and brought into creation the first carbon emission. I like this date because the forces of human history, the force of story, conspires with other elements of culture. Like this date 1775, the same year that the American Revolution began, beginning the first, large-scale experiment with representative democracy in the modern age. Other great synergies of story-telling that represent leaping shifts in the axis of our worldview occur in the 16^th century with the Renaissance and the Copernican revolution of a heliocentric solar system; Darwin’s theory of natural selection (1859) coincides with the beginning of the end of institutional slavery in the United States; the invention of modern art, Pablo Picasso beginning his work on cubism with Georges Braque in 1905 coinciding the same year with Einstein’s discovery of the theory of general relativity. Through all of these examples, there is a scientific discovery corresponding, organically and with minimal obvious connection, that ties to a new story within the humanities. The arts.

If I have a single mentor, a single individual – someone who even amounts to some kind of guru in my own, private constellation, it would probably be our nation’s greatest, living naturalist Edward O. Wilson. In his book The Meaning of Human Existence, he speculates in his usual, casual yet insightful manner that “when aliens come to visit us, they won’t be coming for our science. They have that figured out. They will be coming to discover the humanities. The thing that makes us special.” Being a preeminent biologist, he goes on to explain why we haven’t ever been visited by aliens and why a galactic conquest has never even begun, due to the nature of the micro-biome within individuals collapsing under alien, geophysical forces, but that is another story.

Back to the box, or rather what the box signifies. For me, the box was always and continues to be, quite literally, a piece of paper. Throughout high school, I spent my afternoons after school tromping around Mount Diablo. I was and am so in love with that mountain. Playing with tarantulas, mapping the sage mazes, tracking coyote, drawing wildflowers. Mount Diablo was the cosmos.

And then I would go home and my father, the mathematician would sit me down for a few hours of calculus homework. Stack of paper – can of sharp number twos; still kind of the way I work today. My worldview, my story was molded in such a way that the discipline I was always studying was not the discipline itself, but a mode of investigation, based on observation, hypothesis, experiment, conclusion and consensus. This loose appropriation of the scientific method leads naturally to the 21^st century theory of applied education that involves instilling, as values of academic discipline: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication. These are the values that are proof against the wave of automation technologies; these are the inroads by which the girl on the mountain is trusted to remove the box from her head; these are elements by which new stories are found and told.

To conclude, I am going to address you all collectively as educators – a word that in my mind, carries with it the not only the obvious role as teacher and mentor, but also activist, and even more subtly yet with all the profound weight and burden of being the stalwart defenders against the collapse of civilization, you are the storytellers.

Whatever modicum of success I have realized through the publishing of the California Field Atlas and all the books to come, it is all reflected right back to my open, ready and turned on community that is ready for this nature-first narrative. My books come from me – I’m figuring this stuff out for me, because that is the posture I am comfortable taking and giving away in this bound thing that approximates cogent apprehendability. My conclusions have lead me to help with the uncovering of new stories, tracked through emerging techniques of multidisciplinary conservation ecology. These stories reveal that all natural systems are living systems and deserve an emancipated rebirth from the old modes of utility, of extraction without reciprocation. Thinking outside the box towards a new inclusive ecological paradigm is the beacon of hope we, as storytellers, offer and I believe it may be the only story that is at all worth telling.

Thank you.

 

“Methods and Parameters of Invasive Ecology” by Obi Kaufmann, March 2019

note 1, context: The natural world moves in apprehendable rhythms and cycles that reveal themselves to the scientist and to the artist alike. It is my hope that these distillations of creative and empirical truth, expressed as new, working models and supported by sound theory, serve as tools to better understand the beauty of these ecological concepts. Uniting Invasive ecology and what can be called Disruption ecology, with both Conservation and Restoration ecology, I want to map the unifying systems that govern the bedrock of all living networks.

note 2, reference: these essays make reference to other works that will appear in published works to come, so please disregard specific reference to contextual elements, posted here that make reference to other content tables and source, most obiviously Diagram 1 being referred to as 04.02 and Diagram 2 being referred to as 04.03.

note 3, locality: While these accompanying essays make specific reference to examples in California, the two diagrams are meant to present universal, ecological principles, regardless of locality. 

note 4, the adaptive cycle; the pattern of growth, conservation, release and reorganization that governs the life patterns of spatial ecology (ecography.) All living networks share the same adaptive cycle regardless of scale. New growth always evolves into mature forms of conservation within the system-body. This inevitably leads to a release of stored enery at the opposite side of the diagram from the generation of it. The decimination releases resources that make way for the reorganization of those structures. -Obi Kaufmann

When I reference a singular, identifiable, and healthy ecosystem, I mean that it subscribes to a working adaptive cycle, and optimally utilizes all the biotic and abiotic resources present at its disposal to push towards a state of equilibrium. It is equally important to examine the systems of evolution that work to undermine and exploit the adaptive cycle and their methods and consequences of disruption and invasion in California and even more generally, in any natural system. All ecosystems are subject to invasion that threatens equilibrium. Equilibrium is not a state that, if subject to any consistent disturbance is held for any amount of time. Invasivity, either the perpetrating agent or the ecosystem defending against it, is any biological exotic that threatens established, native patterns within the adaptive cycle.

Whether we are talking about ancient invasiveness, recent invasions or biological invasions of the future spurred by anthropogenic climate change, all biological change agents employ common strategies to do what they do: altering homeostasis within the adaptive cycle of any given ecosystem, towards their own ends. Instead of, for example, having a map that describes Sudden Oak Death across California, I think it may be more useful to describe the larger system that particular pathogen works in, and thereby I am describing all pathogens. The following two diagrams (04.02 and 04.03) are models of applied generalities. Nature is very complex and very innovative and in the wake of anthropogenic climate change, this systems-thinking author is sure that these diagrams must be incomplete.

Diagram 1 (04.02) – Species Invasiveness Theory and Methodology in Ecosystems

Stage 1: tools of invasivity

The methodology used by all invasive species to infiltrate and overtake an ecosystem falls under three basic, evolutionary concept-strategies. To advance its agenda, an invasive may use one, two or all three mechanisms against a native regime.

1a. Increased competitive ability; when introduced to a novel environment, often an exotic species experiences rapid genetic changes because of new selection pressures.

1b. Novel weapons; Introduced species often utilize alien systems of biochemical interaction that are unknown to the endemic systems present.

1c. Disturbance; Invasives can be adapted to, and may influence altered, abiotic regimes, such as fire or flood, and use them to their advantage.

A good example in California of an invasive that used, and continues to use, all three of these tools is the pathogen known commonly as Sudden Oak Death, Phytopthora ramorum. After arriving to California in the mid-1990’s inside of nursery plants from China, (it may have had multiple waves of introduction at multiple ports) Sudden Oak Death quickly spread to epidemic proportions, now having killed millions of trees and devastated about 230 square miles of Tan Oak, Lithocarpus densiflorus, and Coast Live Oak, Quercus agrifolia, forest – although it also infects at least eight other, native tree species. The pathogen, called an oomycete, behaves similarly to a fungus. Upon arrival, a single genotype evolved into at least three or four strands, better adapted to the local forests (1a). It seems that the pathogen then proceeded with its lethal agenda, by utilizing Bay Laurel, Umbellularia californica, to persist through the dry season as Bay Laurel doesn’t die once infected (1b). To make matters worse, the pathogen monopolized on some successive, rainy seasons that boosted its ability to spore and reproduce quickly (1c).

Stage 2: categories of invasive types

All invasive species fall into three categories. Just like in Stage 1, a single species might be one, two or all three types of invasive depending on its evolutionary agenda and the niche it is trying to occupy. These categories describe an exotic organism’s relationship role that it is attempting to infiltrate the native ecosystem through.

2a. Predator. A predatory exotic species may infiltrate a native food web on any trophic level. A predatory species is most commonly an introduced animal. Examples include the Northern Pike, Esoc Lucius and the Southern watersnake, Nerodia fasciata.

2b. Pathogens. A pathogenic exotic species may infect vulnerable ecosystem and propagate itself as a disease. West Nile Virus is a mosquito-borne disease that continues to plague California and can infect birds, humans, horses and other animals.

2c. Competitors. A competitive exotic species may employ a tool (see Stage 1) to displace a local endemic from its niche, possibly transforming the ecosystem itself. The whole structure of California’s grassland communities was restructured with invasive plant family-species such as the Bromes, Cheatgrass, Yellow Starthistle, and hundreds of others.

Stage 3: invasive deployment

3a. introduction. This aspect of diagram 04.02 represents a temporal horizon that it utilized by invasive species to carry out their agenda. The introduction of an exotic species may be accidental (rats on a boat), incidental (carried by wind and fire), or intentional (planting forage for domestic animals).

3b. establishment. It is at this stage that the invasive decides to “play nice” with others or not. If the evolutionary decision is made to transform the ecosystem in some, fundamental way it may be considered a harmful invasive. If it doesn’t, it may be on the path towards naturalization.

3c. spread. Depending how the exotic, once established species vectorizes its growth, the effects across the ecosystem can be deleterious, as described in stage 4: ecological consequence, or a new equilibrium may begin to immediately reveal itself, as described in diagram 04.03.

Stage 4: ecological consequence

4a. habitat fragmentation. All ecosystems strive towards equilibrium, it is a function of their community. These four consequences are the disparate results following the spread of an invasive through the different, living tiers of the ecosystem. These consequences are from harmful invasives. They are arranged in no particular order. For example, habitat fragmentation occurs over a medium to large scale when native groups are isolated from one another.

4b. contamination. Contamination of the adaptive cycle within an ecosystem may manifest as alterations to the nutrient cycles or a disturbance regime or even a contamination of genetic material due to hybridization. When the invasive Smooth Cordgrass, Spartina alterniflora, hybridized with the native California cordgrass, Spartina foliosa, in the San Francisco Bay, it quickly spread to previously uninhabited mudflats.

4c. pollution. Biological pollution is when disfunction is propagated within an ecosystem because of the advance of an invasive species. A disfunction is any alteration, or set of alterations, that presents a clear threat to the normal operations of the system. For example, an invasive plant, such as French Broom, Genista monspessulana, is a ubiquitous invasive plant across Northern California. Once established the effects of Broom pollution include threats to local wildlife, degraded range and cropland, increased wildfire potential, reduced water resources and accelerated erosion.

4d. depletion. The robbing from any resource store within an ecosystem is known as depletion. Depletion may result because of any of the other three consequences detailed here. Depletion may involve the lessening of any chemical resource (i.e. The nutrient cycle) or any physical resource (i.e. sunlight) that had previous assisted with the normal functioning of the ecosystem prior to introduction.

Diagram 2 (04.03) – Ecological invasivity thresholds and mediation strategies

The ability for an invasive species, or community of invasive species, to alter the ecosystem they are introduced to, and the resiliency of that ecosystem to withstand the invasion is the crux of invasive ecology. This diagram details three models that represents two sides of this ecological tension and the temporal narrative how the tension is resolved over time. As established in diagram 04.02, invasives have an arsenal of tools at their disposal, and in conditions where invasion is possible, the ecosystem will always be altered. How that ecosystem is altered is dependent on characteristics inherent in the endemic system and how rapidly the invasive species’ consequence can be mitigated.

Through these three models, a system of conditions is explored by which ecosystems fight their battle against invasion by assimilation, redefining themselves towards equilibrium – the goal of any healthy, natural community. The first model describes what are the characteristics of vulnerability are that present the ecosystem with the parameters that make it a ripe candidate for invasion. The second model describes what are largely, anthropogenic management strategies to maintain or restore ecological equilibrium. The second model describes the other side of the coin from invasive ecology, the study of conservation ecology. The third model is the battlefield upon which this drama unfolds: time. Given the parameters of model 1, applied to the field of time, will decide how the ecosystem will transform from what it was to it will become once the invasion is resolved.

Model 1: Invasivity parameters within ecosystems

1. invasivity. This is the starting point. All the invasive methodologies described in Stage 1 and Stage 2 of diagram 04.02 live here. How they manifest (Stage 3 and Stage 4 of diagram 04.02) is dependent on the five conditions of invasibility within the native ecosystem described in this diagram as surrounding the invasive starting point.

1a. natural enemies. One of the primary factors that control the populations of any exotic species is how, when released into a new ecosystem, they find themselves without the natural enemies of their former environment.

1b. empty niche. It is often simple enough for an invasive to step in for another organism missing from a network and take advantage of resources not currently being utilized. The niche may be empty because of extirpations (See model 3) or because of evolution within geographically separate but physiographically similar environments.

1c. species richness. Species rich ecosystems are more resistant to transformation by invasion than species poor ecosystems. For example, second-growth, timber harvested pine forests are more vulnerable to devastation by a single species of beetle than old-growth forests, rich in conifer diversity that leaves the beetle without a clear vector of single species transmission.

1d. propagule pressure. A propagule is a seed or any means by which an organism reproduces itself. More seeds means a greater likelihood of an established invasion. With increased temperatures over the past one hundred years,  we are seeing this kind of invasion take place in high-mountain meadows across the state. Conifers from lower elevations are invading subalpine communities and are launching a campaign of conversion (see Model 3).

1e. highly evolved competition. Habitats that have evolved extremely high levels of competition between organisms for existing resources may be more capable of resisting invasion because of any given organisms ability to out compete a potential invasive.

Model 2: ecosystem equilibrium and management strategies

2. equilibrium. This term is used in this diagram as an indicator of a broad condition that all living communities tend toward: the condition by which, the ecosystem realizes an optimal balance of resources in and resources out. An ecosystem in the state of equilibrium is self-perpetuating and is interrupted only by agents that spur succession or conversion (see Model 3).

2a. restoration. Restoration ecology is the science of returning a disturbed ecosystem back to a state of equilibrium that it was in prior to disturbance, either by a biologic invasion or other agent, i.e. fire or flood. Restoration ecology is reactive, where Conservation ecology is proactive and whose general practice is described in the following for methodologies.

2b. prevention. Inhibiting a vector of change is the most successful and cost-effective strategy for the management of change agents. There is a litany of preventative techniques at work across California, from the governmental policy of inspection on the transport of potentially invasive species through to the prescription burning by the Forest Service to maintain a healthy adaptive cycle.

2c. DRE – early detection, rapid response, and eradication. As early in the deployment stage (diagram 04.02 stage 3) an invasive species can be surveilled, the possibility of its successful failure for either conversion or succession will be determined. This can be a difficult process, as it is important to not also destroy any native organism within a similar niche. The eradication of Black rats, Rattus rattus, who threatened shorebirds and their ecosystem on Anacapa Island in 2002, was successfully carried out with the concurrent effort to preserve the native Anacapa deer mouse, Peromyscus maniculatus anacapae.

2d. long-term control and management. Long terms efforts to minimize naturalized species can be as intensive as they are expensive. Mediation is the strategy for some invasives that may be, either providing some established service, or exist on such a scale that eradication is impossible. Controlling feral pigs by hunting and timed grazing to control invasive weeds are two examples of ongoing strategies to control the spread of destructive invasives.

2e. biocontrol. Biocontrol is when another species is introduced to prey upon an already ravaging invasive species and the threat of the second species’ presence is deemed less of a threat than the first’s continued spread. For example, St. John’s Wort, Hypericum perforatum, a poisonous plant to grazing cows, was successfully mitigated in Siskiyou county in the 1950’s by the introduction of Chrysolia beetles that eat the weed.

Model 3: invasive based, ecological transformation

3a. time. Time is the key component that either assures the success or the failure of any evolutionary process. If a change agent, either biological or otherwise, is introduced slowly enough into a ecosystem that is in equilibrium, it may be possible for that ecosystem to absorb that change agent and disarm it efficacy. Heat, with specific reference to anthropogenic climate change, increases that rate at which all reactions occur – whether at the chemical or the ecological level. Speeding up the process of either the rate at which change agents return (i.e. changing the fire or flood regime due as resulted by climate change) or the interval by which ecosystems can absorb any given, invasive threat (i.e. the invasion of exotic grasses through fire distribution,) has the potential to not only fundamentally change the nature of the ecosystem, but (with enough heat, contracting the amount of time for any adaptation) may collapse the whole system itself.

3b. extirpations. Extirpation is when a species is either intentionally or unintentionally made locally extinct. Through competition or displacement between rival organisms, or through non-adaptability with the establishment of some new regime, extirpations are inevitable. Often, a cascading, domino effect forms if the exotic is not able to fulfill the services of the endemic organism, and many species fade away. An example of this in California might be how so many Salmon varieties have been extirpated from their headwater-spawning grounds by dams. This has lead to depletion of nutrients from headwater-forests that has lead to the simplification of the food web in those forests and diminished populations of all types of organisms found there.

3c. naturalizations. A naturalized species is one that has invaded and has been assimilated into the ecosystem, successfully propagating itself, behaving like a native. Naturalization takes successive generations of multiple species-members within the community to determine if the invasion is fundamentally transformative (converted) or not (succeeded).

3d. converted. A converted ecosystem is one that, because of a single change agent, or a series of connected change agents, is destroyed and transformed into a different kind of ecosystem. European grasses, that need to burn every year moving through a forest can transform that forest into a grass land in a relatively small amount of time. A converted ecosystem is defined by the collapse of the adaptive cycle.

3e. succeeded. A succeeded ecosystem is one that, because of a single change agent, or a series of connected change agents, is pushed from one segment of the adaptive cycle to the next. If this procession of succession is not dismantled by the change agency in a short enough period of time, there is a opportunity for that agency to become naturalized and for the ecosystem to realize further equilibrium.

Ecosystems change. It is what they do. By understanding the mechanisms of change can the consequences be mitigated. The idea of equilibrium inside an ecosystem is a state that is only possible in ecological isolation. In the 21^st century, ecological isolation doesn’t exist. Humans are the single most destructive invasive species the planet may have ever known. Alas, humans are also the only species to understand the mechanics of invasivity and are potentially able to engage, restore and conserve, valuable ecological networks throughout California and beyond.

Despite what is largely the dumpster fire that is American politics these days, I am thoroughly impressed with the overwhelming, bipartisan approval of S47 – the Natural Resources Management Act – which passed this week through the congress and the senate and now waits for the president’s signature. This is good governance: responsible policy that is ecologically sound, representing a good compromise between all the interested parties involved, and saves the taxpayers’ money while simultaneously securing big funds for important projects. Among key land reserves protected across the country, the Act secures the Land & Water Conservation Fund, which is of dire importance for so many, ongoing management programs. Below are some highlights of the Act as they affect California, my state of residence and study. Click to enlarge.

The Ecology of Belief
by Obi Kaufmann
Winter, 2019
Sierraville, Calif.

My relationship to the idea of belief is very specific. It has to be. I’ve worked a philosophy of belief to advance the agenda of my work. My work is the contemplation and celebration, through writing and painting, of earth’s biodiversity and the larger movement to conserve that biodiversity against the crushing wave 21^st century threats and ecological stressors. The single greatest of these threats, the threat umbrella under which can be found the milieu of all anthropogenic stressors, the original threat that spawned the sixth extinction of the Anthropocene and now threatens the very fabric that of the biosphere in its current configuration, is the human notion of belief. Belief being the measure by which all human effort is compelled. Belief, both its means and its ends, with its all-pervading ability to unite and divide, is the bedrock of every worldview. Forgive the hyperbole but stay with me when I say that belief doesn’t need to be true to be true. Belief has no problem denying evidence. Belief doesn’t require reason or validity. In relation to my work, questioning the nature of belief is necessary to uncover why this apparent cognitive dissonance is so rampant and also it is a necessary investigation into the nature of how we apprehend and interpret the cosmos.

I am not as much concerned with what people believe, but why people believe. Belief is a psychological pillar of the human mind. The mind, as it has evolved and was originally shaped by the environment of the African savanna since the advent of bipedalism four to six million years ago, underwent a revolution of cognition about 70,000 years ago with the birth of culture. It can be argued that the cognitive revolution is the dawn of human-belief systems. Culture itself is a belief system and is held together by this tribal glue of the common belief. Belief is so powerful that is often the solitary criteria for personal truth.

Religion, any faith-based truth, or any institutional tradition of a supernatural, cosmic order is only one strand in the vast braid of belief that weaves through all aspects of how we see the world.  The structures and the forms of mind that project out, probing to build order, that invent stories to understand any work of human art, for example, are rooted in belief. A work of art, a product of the humanities, is any process or artifact constructed to its own end and created through the laborious interface of human conception and human manipulation through media. Religion is art, although religion is not part of the humanities.

Belief is a tool of mind that describes communal expectations in a social context and how we manage those expectations through narrative, both historical and personal, to anticipate the outcome of any relational situation. That anticipation is not temporal, meaning that we use belief to build ideas about both how things are going to unfold and how they’ve unfolded in the past. It is this conflict between expected result, and the process of experimentation that emancipates science from being a belief system.

Centuries of scientific progress suggests that the universe is a reasonable continuum of space and time. Even at both the quantum and the super-galactic levels, where the capacity of the human conceptualizing faculty is tested, we find an environment, a natural world that is investigable and subject to experimental query. While science is not a belief-system in that the results obtained through the correctly applied scientific method are true regardless of belief holding them to be so, that the world will continue to be revealed through scientific inquiry is a belief. The world, meaning the universe, has no responsibility to make sense to our human mind – in fact, it might be that the cosmic order is so vast that our cerebral capacity is simply unable to grasp and unify all of its knowledge.

Belief, as incalcitrant as it is, is subject to paradigm shift, to game-changing. There are moments in human history when we, humanity, begin to believe the truth has a certain orientation and our belief in that orientation is so powerful that we can never go back, we can never return to thinking of the world as we once did. 70,000 years ago, humanity began to believe in the very idea of fiction, or the ability to convey instinctive truths in language, art and narrative story. 10,000 years ago, humanity began to believe that through the technology of agriculture, it had the right and the ability to harness the nature bounty of the earth. 250 years ago, humanity began to believe that all the world’s natural resources were open to industrial exploitation and that progress meant the domination and subjugation of the natural world to our own temporary, even consumable benefit. I see (or rather, I believe that) another seismic shift in the workings of our collective psyche, the mind that governs our society – or the other way around: the society that governs our mind – a slipping of the fault in our anthropocentric world view. At the beginning of the 21^st century we are beginning to imagine our place in the world and our relationship to its resources, as we have never conceived before. We are beginning to believe that a reintegration into patterns of renewal, over patterns of extraction, is the path forward for humanity. Once the shift happens, once the ecological paradigm dawns, it will change everything in accordance with the precedent that has been set a number of times before. I am skeptical about how much choice we have about what we believe. The sticky brew that is tradition, heredity and culture is, according to my estimation, largely unescapable. I do, however, believe in epiphany. When, perhaps while experiencing aesthetic arrest, the eye-of-the-universe perceives the thing-of-the-universe and the two are made one and humanity is compelled to evolve and adapt.

Obi Kaufmann is the author and artist behind the best-selling and award winning California Field Atlas. He currently bounces between Oakland and Sierraville, where he is working on his next manuscripts. He is currently booking a book tour for the Summer of 2019 to support his next book: The State of Water, Understanding California’s Most Precious Resourse. To contact Obi, please email coyoteandthunder@gmail.com 

 

 

Solastalgia is a particular form of psychological distress, brought about from witnessing environmental degradation due to industrial development, extraction and devastation. An acute feeling of homesickness while still at home. Solastalgia describes the ominous dread that we all live in a sacrifice zone. We see our home, whether local or global, being sacrificed by design to those captains-of-industry who deny all attachment to the inherent value of wild places and beings.

Shasta Lake is the largest reservoir in California and was created 75 years ago with the construction of the Shasta Dam. There is a proposal to make the dam taller by 18 feet, and a wave of misinformation and political maneuvering by both parties on the state and federal level is behind it. This project will cost at least $1.4 billion and would expand the reservoir’s capacity by only 7%. This number represents only 0.2% of the state’s total capacity, and with no benefit most years, when the existing lake does not fill. Expanding Shasta Reservoir will flood upstream rivers and streams, including the McCloud River, which is protected under the California Wild & Scenic Rivers Act. The enlarged reservoir footprint will cause permanent loss of habitat for numerous sensitive wildlife species, including Pacific fisher, northern spotted owl, northern goshawk, Cooper’s hawk, purple martin, foothill yellow-legged frog, Shasta salamander, Samwel Shasta salamander and Wintu Shasta salamander and several special status bat and mollusk species. The project will also result in the flooding of several rare plant populations and their habitat, including fully or partially inundating 11 of the 24 known sites where the Shasta snow-wreath, a rare flowering shrub found nowhere else on earth, is found. Critical deer fawning areas and winter habitat will also drown beneath the expanded reservoir.

This is not a good water project. There are a number of much better ideas on the table, if actually increasing water availability for the most California’s is actually the agenda. California’s effort to increase water supply reliability should focus first on increased groundwater storage. Storage projects that make sense for fish, water, and people. Multi-benefit storage projects should be the focus alongside smaller reservoir facilities that support public benefits. Water use efficiency and conservation should not be overlooked to meet California’s growing water needs. During the drought, Californians tightened their belts—reducing demand by 30% in critically dry years. California needs increased investment in urban and agricultural water use efficiency, stormwater capture and reuse, and water recycling.

All public comments are due by Monday. Please email or write the address below and voice your opposition:

Shasta Dam Raise Project
c/o: Stantec
3301 C Street, Suite 1900
Sacramento, CA 95816

Email:
 shastadameir@stantec.com 
received on or before 11:59 pm. Jan. 14, 2019

This entry includes modified sentences originally written by Friends of the River, CalTrout, and Mount Shast Ecology Center.