I wrote this update back in spring, and then got swamped by life. When I can’t make sense, I know that is a good time to write an update. By walking back through the trails I’ve recently traveled I think about where I’m going and what I’ve learned.
The Industrial-Colonial Ecologist
My day job continues to offer demanding and provocative activities.
We have a $9.3M settlement for alleged damages to public trust resources in Port Angeles Harbor. The bulk of those funds will flow to restoration of the harbor. This pulse of energy in the form or cash can shape the future, but it is temporary. The weight of institutions are still bent on development. How should we proceed?
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I am now plunging into ecosystem service models to quantify how shorelines serves Chinook salmon. These “hogs of the sea” once fed my settler people, and the tribes before us. Now at 5% of historical abundance, even subsistence fisheries are closing. Absence of Chinook is starving Southern Resident Killer Whales. Ecosystem service models estimate the increment of service provided to fish by each square foot of habitat allowing for compensatory work. It is bootstrapping reciprocity into a culture whose mother tongue is private property rights.
As an agent on the nation-state, I have to be careful of my work, my team, and my institution. Professionals are bannermen in a complex hierarchical system. Our chivalry is written in both law, and unwritten code, and our work must not exceed that granted authority or it our work becomes another form of corruption, another overreach of the administrative state.
These methods for quantifying the life of the earth, so that it can be bought and sold in small increments is theoretically an improvement over the current state of affairs. Our pattern for the last six generations has been to take from the living trust with no reciprocity. The cutting, clearing, paving, and building is still viewed by many as a “public good”–any economic activity is assumed to be a service to all, and thus is self-justifying. We should be grateful for any project that extracts or creates some value, regardless of its effects on natural capital.
When the financial capital flows, we can get paid, and then in turn pay for access to industrial goods that we now need. Those industrial goods now include food, water and shelter, so there is a brutal edge to our dependency.
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I have also been having learning in increments about the “rights of nature” initiatives that now seem popular. Interestingly, because of communication problems, these proposals don’t actually transfer rights to “nature”. But rather are an attempt to reassign trusteeship, from the state or nation to some other entity, more local in nature. The right of a community to protect and restore may already exists in our laws. While existing authorities are constrained by private property rights. We could a much better job of protecting and restoring ecosystems right now. City councils, county commissions, and legislatures are already assigned trustee responsibility. These authorities to protect and restore lie unexercised, in our hands and those of our neighbors. We only need to pick them up and use them. We don’t understand the tools in our hands.
An Olympia Stronghold
The writer philosopher Joanna Macy suggested that what she called the “great turning” back to relationship with the Earth will involve a mix of efforts: resistance, reform and reimagination. Part of reform is recognizing where our conscience lies dormant within existing institutional structures, and how we have been corrupted.
By definition, corruption can arrive both through dishonesty in the pursuit of personal gain, but also through unintended debasement and error. Rediscovering our precious will to love the earth is part of reform. Existing mechanisms for tending the earth are hidden in the labyrinth of the administrative state. The location is known to the construction industry and its lawyers. Use of the administrative state to protect ecological systems is fiercely contested where it constrains privatization of property. This tension between public trust resources and private property resources is a jurisdictional battlefield only known to a small part of society. If proposed “rights of nature” approaches this stronghold they will see us coming a mile away. They don’t look worried. Until we take our agency in hand as a whole community, that won’t change.
The state Shoreline Management Act is one of those places where our conscience lies dormant. Critical Areas under the Growth Management Act is similar. Our building codes control how we create shelter and how we think about energy. The building code constrains how we allow ourselves to live. Our surface and storm water utilities determine the fate of rain. The tools for a regenerative bioregional society already exist, but are organized to encourage and support industrial development.
These authorizes are largely exercised city and county staff, under the guidance of locally elected councilmembers. Often council defers to technical and legal staff, and make that deferral appear magnanimous by calling it “trust”. I regularly hear local elected officials profess how they “trust staff.” In turn, staff face heavy crossfire from different interest groups. If staff have to make hard decisions, they need to know if council will have their back. If you have a mushy council that doesn’t have clear ecological values, the easier path is to avoid risk and conflict.
These days you don’t need a coherent ecological vision to get elected to city or county council. You mostly need to make the right friends, appear legible and comfortable to your audience, and you must play your hand carefully within unspoken social-political rules of normalcy.
In Olympia, our next reckoning comes in 171 days when we elect 4 of 7 Olympia city council members. How do we take the next 171 days and make ecosystems relevant? In strategic planning a goal usually defined as that future condition that we aim for. What would a regenerative bioregional culture be able to do on election day?
- Citizens can visualize and understand the infrastructures that are under the custody of local government.
- Citizens know how they want those infrastructures to perform, and can evaluate their current condition, both ecologically, and socially. We understand what is possible.
- Citizens understand how candidates think about those infrastructures and whether they have a coherent plan for acheiving the ends we can imagine.
The Salish Sea Restoration Wiki
I have been cultivating the Salish Sea Wiki as a public interest shared knowledge exchange for a decade now. Mostly I have been working alone to gather, organize and present knowledge that travels across my desk, under a creative commons license. I have operated under the false assumption that if you work to fill a obvious need, and make that need and solution known, that others will join you.
A mechanism for sharing detailed bioregional knowledge seems like an obvious need. The wiki seems like a strong and lean response to that need. The site gets 500-1500 web hits a month, has a steadily growing facebook page, and dominates a wide range of “Salish Sea” search results. That has not resulted in more contributions.
I suspect this discrepancy between concept and performance is a unintended consequence of the commodification of knowledge. In environmental governance, information is a product that it bought and sold. There are few producers, and mostly consumers. Those who can produce knowledge then sell that capability. Professors sell to schools, and schools sell to students, professors sell their students to funders. Once students become professionals, they sell themselves to institutions. Consultants sell to agencies or developers, technical staff sell to leadership, leadership sells to legislatures. Knowledge is just as valuable as I suspected, but a consequence of its value is that it doesn’t flow freely.
The irony is that it doesn’t take much cash to encourage the flow of knowledge. People who can pay for knowledge do so to achieve an end. In our own vernacular, we are looking for “bang for the buck” or something that will “turn the dial.” The professional class aims to use knowledge for power, not for some ambiguous empowerment. The creators and holders of knowledge do not necessarily hold it tightly. Its just so few people are actually interested in knowledge. Often it seems that a producer of knowledge is grateful that someone is listening.
And at the same time, creators of knowledge often don’t see themselves as distributors of knowledge. If you are professional, and have sold your capabilities to an institutions, it becomes ambiguous what personal agency you have left. Will you institution be happy with you sharing the knowledge that the institution is paying for? If you are a creator of knowledge do you have the authority to share it, or are you out of your “swim lane?”
Why do producers of knowledge not revel in the creation of shared knowledge for empowerment? We go to conferences hungry for the company of peers. And yet for the effort that goes into a conference, so little well organized knowledge appears to remain in its wake?
Some colleagues recently put on a summit about beaches, embayments and deltas. They are now working to assemble a product that can summarize what happened at the summit. Every step of that process is laborious.
What if that community gathered for the conference were empowered and capable of creating meaning on our own. Do we know how to do that? Or have we completely relinquished the agency of knowledge to our institutions?
I am still hunting for a institutional location for the wiki. I have state actors who would contribute. I don’t have an institution that is willing to sell the wiki.
The Ecosystem Guild and Restoration Camping
The work I did preparing for and following the first Murmuration was useful and clarifying. Putting yourself of stage is kind of commitment to perform, and I have always struggled to clarify my vision, but like to perform. The Guild vision is grandiose, complex and heartfelt but blurry. I’ve noticed in my institutional work that we like leaders to tell us what to do, and I am not interested in being a “leader” in this sense–an awkward situation
Through this initial proclamation I told my story about how I imagine an Ecosystem Guild. This about a process of forming groups of groups to build strongholds. I suggested that this will require us to learn how to artfully form groups outside of hierarchies, to organize around patterns in time, and to build new social-ecological infrastructure.
Plant Nursery Work and Forest Cultivation
Growing plants is important, because it is the one component of restoration work beyond the tools that requires cash flow. If you can grow your own plants, you can transform the landscape.
Two guild members from the Marshall Nursery have started up planning to start up nursery work again in anticipation of the fall of 2021. (To be clear, I generally refer to anyone who is voluntarily taking responsibility for bioregional design and stewardship as a “guild member”)
The school nursery system is simple. At the beginning of the year we show up with pots, compost, seeds and sources of cuttings and divisions. We tell stories about the location of the school grounds in the watershed, the degraded ecosystems, the idea of a commons, and the value of building a commons within the school and watershed. We teach labor (yes, knowing how to labor effectively is a skill that most industrial youth don’t have and you have to teach them how to labor or most of them are almost useless and feckless–this is a class and subculture phenomena that is interesting and important). We then organize our collective labor to potting and planting all winter. By May we have potted stock to sell to families, and the rest is held over summer in beds. In fall we sell more stock, install restoration projects, and start over again.
The nursery project was my first attempt at facilitating formation of an autonomous volunteer team. At the end of the day, the coherence of the project seems to be mostly about individual relationships, and individual initiative. Initial vision matters less than the social circles that do the work. Without a strong team vision and effort, the effort revolves around the teacher and the immediate demands of the plants, or the ambitions of individuals with time and energy. However the teacher may be the one person least able to coordinate, not having a surplus of horticultural skills and with their plate already being full from being a middle school teacher. If there were volunteer network able to recruit and sustain group processes, that would serve the teachers better, and enable the effort to scale up. I have in the past tried to facilitate more group process, but that is not the natural pattern. I am left contemplative, and content to let it evolve rather than trying to interfere.
I believe my personal interests in this effort are around replicable system development: I would like to define the minimum technical and social scaffolding necessary to allow any middle to high-school with willing volunteers to initiate plant production as part of science and CTE programming. I’d like this work to connect the school as a facilitator of local restoration efforts, and lead to the regeneration of the school grounds. Schools are an under-capacitated commons infrastructure in the center of every community. Families care about their children. Children are better able to love the earth. But we need to avoid colonizing schools and making schools carry more burden for a broken society, but rather bringing our community in to gather around schools with a broader and expanded vision of what a school is in a community.
If we can figure out group formation in support of the school, and can develop more group functions, then network among groups could make each school stronger. I would love to cultivate a community that can curate and build out School Nursery Resources, as part of building the replicable social infrastructure. That plate will need to be spinning by fall of 2021, however new viral variants make the future of public education complex. I wonder how to engage an Evergreen Student working on bioregional education for an industrial middle school, in a way that supports coherence of the support group, perhaps as part of teaching social technology? I think my pathway here is still in training. I have started playing around with unstructured video resources at my home nursery:
And here’s a more involved exploration of Fireweed:
WoodLaCoHo and St’uchub Ravine Neighborhood
The most significant change since my last update, has been moving into Woodard Lane Cohousing in the NW Neighborhood of Olympia.
Life at “the commune” is a lovely anchor. I put out a call for a garden flash mob and got three people who helped me pull out infrastructure so I could rehabilitate a large section of our garden. I am so grateful to live in the constant presence of a helping hand. The garden infrastructure on the other hand is a classic example of a systems failure triggered by one narrow decision that then drove a cascade of decisions. This is what Mollison would have called a type #1 error–an initial design mistake after which you spend the rest of your life working to maintain. I made a quick video describing the failed system, and some of the standard drip irrigation solutions I have come up with over time, based on many mentors.
It is both a pleasure and a burden to come into a community where I am one of a handful of individuals with a love of laboring and with construction experience. The community formed around a vision of interpersonal relationships, and some deep skills around sociocracy, mediation and nonviolent communication. They don’t necessarily dedicate a commensurate effort with buildings or drainage systems or the forest edge. They do a great job supporting each other and having regular meals together, and pulling together for work parties, and it’s a good place to try to survive a global pandemic.
Some significant garden improvements are underway, I have established a small native plant nursery, and the tool shed and wood shop are now organized and cleaned out. I set up a potting bench under shelter, and blackberry cleared our sections of our 60 acre Schneider Ravine forest, ivy pulled off trees, and deer trails explored. There is always work to be done.
This tension between the physical and ecological dimensions of a community and the social dimensions of a community is an interesting play on Ostrom’s rules. The commons are both physical and social, and there is work to do in both. However, if in a community, many are busy with social contributions, while the physical work falls on a few people this is a potential source of strife. Stewardship capability promises to be a long topic. On the other hand our little community of 18 households has a lot to offer our neighborhood and surrounding community, more than if we were each alone.