Summer Solstice is the beginning of the season I call The Drying. This is the beginning of the field season for seed collecting and “in-water work” (work done in streams during low water when migrating fish are least likely to be present.)
These updates describe ongoing efforts to build the infrastructure for an “ecosystem guild”. While these various projects may appear divergent, they are part of a whole strategy. An ecosystem guild is a network infrastructure to design mechanisms of bioregional stewardship into our culture so they are not dependent on institutional authority or money. I suspect the culture of “institutional authority and money” may be a barrier to stewardship that we need to explore. Realizing big ideas requires a long game and incremental delivery. The destination keeps changing. I am trying to summon an ecosystem guild by creating its infrastructure.
I am reporting on four components: field stations, watershed maps, an open knowledge network, and strongholds. Together I hypothesize this will enable a guild that is better able to self-organize and self-replicate. I am also aiming to position the guild so it leverages the existing ecosystem industry, while itself remaining a cultural network organized around reciprocity and belonging. This is because I suspect that industrial currencies and hierarchies are deeply corrupting to our ability to regenerate the earth in ways we barely understand. I want the guild infrastructure and evolution to be a doorway to a different society.
For each of four components I try to define the problem and describe a future target condition that changes the situation. I define my current countermeasures, by which I am moving toward the target, and further describe how I imagine a guild would integrate each of the four elements to build a single cultural infrastructure. These are all hypotheses, to be “adaptively managed” (in techno geek lingo).
In reflection, just as there is an annual cycle driven by moisture and temperature, there may be a natural annual cycle for cultivating and tending this infrastructure that I haven’t figured out yet. Another recurring theme is how self-serving institutional culture limits investment in value that they they cannot control (the tragedy of the commons in reverse, where individual investment results in only marginal personal gain, even as it increases collective capital).
Field Stations
Problem: Camping is the least expensive way to visit a place and increases our connection with life processes and ecosystems. Shared residence creates meaningful relationships. Our culture and institutions prevent us from camping in the public commons to do restoration and education. Commons are neglected and the domain of experts and institutions. Gathering to study and work usually requires lots of preparation and industrial currency. We study and decide about ecosystems from desks and offices. In all these ways, our alienation from the living earth and each other is exacerbated. For 300,000 years human culture has tended places through inhabitation, working, eating, and telling stories around the fire.
Target: Develop a cultural process whereby groups from strongholds can gather on restoration sites for days to weeks to work, build relationships, and exchange knowledge and tend common pool resources.
Countermeasures: identify an initial willing land manager on public trust lands, host camping events around the restoration process, and prototype customs and infrastructure that enable self-organization and replication. Develop study resources.
Guild Integration – field stations are the central social event around which the guild develops. Field stations use the wiki to build knowledge of places and techniques. Field stations create and use watershed maps as communications tools. Through their groups field stations create a crossroads where strongholds build relationships and exchange vision. Ultimately field stations train each stronghold to identify and establish their own field stations.
I believe field stations are the central component, and it has been a beast to realize. I have remained committed to 1) legally working in a public trust landscape like shorelines, rivers, or wetlands, 2) have people sleep on site, and 3) absolutely minimize costs, so restoration field stations can operate as an inclusive cultural phenomena without continuous grant seeking. These goals have left me struggling with a John Muir vision of conservation whereby people are removed from land to make it wild.
We may have an opportunity to support the Tulalip Tribes by developing a field station on acquired riparian land in the Lower Skykomish. I spent two days and a night exploring the site, preparing a preliminary assessment–the site has everything we need. It is quietly beautiful, degraded, in restoration, and perfectly positioned relative to population centers and restoration industry planning. I have been probing different ways to host events.
With a likely site in hand, the next barrier is risk management and institutional responsibility. To meet the threat of our legal system, we need to figure out who is responsible for whom before something goes wrong and financial damages are incurred. Most land managers that control public trust lands want to assign liability, so they are not left holding the bag. “Event insurance” is for weddings, not teaching volunteers to clear blackberry with a scythe. I need to find the right “insurance pool” for field stations that can involve overnight volunteers. An initial foray into garden maintenance insurance was a dead end—the river forest as garden idea doesn’t work. A wilderness guide insurance at a $1M level (commonly requested by government land managers) would require $5-10k per year, with no short term coverage available. This requires a rapid startup to justify that level of cost. I am exploring a range of private and non-profit insurance providers, and speaking with operations managers at NGOs like Washington Trails Association. In turn I am getting a much better understanding of how the insurance industry works.
As part of this, I have also been necessarily looking into the details of my personal role. As a federal public servant, I have stringent ethics requirements. I cannot, through my public functions, self-deal, such that I am using my public station to benefit myself privately. Simultaneously, NOAA will not support me in inviting a group of volunteers to go live on a restoration site, light fires, play with sharp tools, and sleep under tarps. If private citizen Paul is inviting people to come, I would be taking all the risk personally, and to avoid this, could form a private entity and purchase insurance, but then that private entity would then be constrained by my ethics requirements. Any benefit to this personal enterprise could not be assisted by my status as a public servant, even though my sole purpose is to general public and common-pool benefits.
Many of the people who we’d interact with know me professionally as a federal ecologist who manages federal grant programs. Imagine–a local land manager provides support to my private LLC, and then a month later gets a government grant–the perfect appearance of corruption and conflict of interest. I’ve been through one round with federal ethics review, and there are still questions to work out. This suggests I need to 1) not be a site steward and a federal agent, 2) as necessary create a small isolated stewardship LLC purely as a personal liability shelter and group ownership tool but not to interact with my government partners, and 3) find other site stewards.
So even as I investigate a private general liability insurance route, I have focused on finding an existing institution that could become the initial field station host. When off-duty I would be a volunteer of that institution. I have a couple of options, and hope to have this arranged in time for the last weekend in July which is my initial field station date on the Skykomish. However, potential partners are often hungry for industrial currency, and thus everything is viewed as an opportunity to get more (part of that corruption). We have a hard time seeing non-currency benefits as sufficient to compensate for institutional participation, even when individuals in the institution love the concept and see the long-game value. Being “financially shrewd” can be clung to as a kind of moral virtue, even when the financial system was designed to devour ecosystems. This pattern where cash-flow replaces belonging and community is pervasive in the restoration industry, and what makes it an industry, rather than a community.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on getting in the field this summer. After a quick survey, I have a cluster of early adopters that want to go to a field station this summer. I would like to get enough field work done to prepare for a community design experience in the spring of 2023. I have been using this timeline to attempt to generate urgency–the whole process is frustratingly slow. I just need one more “yes” and we can get into the field. Until we are in the field, we are not really evolving anything that is tangible—it’s all just speculation.
On a parallel track, I have just started exploring the potential for another field station on public land managed by WSU on Henderson Inlet. The land manager is interested, but will also be limited by institutional membership, again centering the liability issue. I have entered the next level of the quest.
simultaneously I am drafting a “guild handbook” which is the document that defines the parts of guild culture that remain constant between events, and thereby create comfort and ease and reduce the costs of gathering.
LATE BREAKING NEWS – we have a willing sponsor for our initial camp in the Snohonmish Conservation District, and there is much work to be done!
Needs: I wish I could make an ask, but because of the complexity of my personal involvement I cannot realistically hand off liability research or negotiation with familiar partners over participation. It would be useful to have some seed cash flow, but in some ways that would obscure the actual problem of a cultural system that can operate without industrial currency flow. I think I need to finish hoeing this row, and then see what I have learned. Please keep an eye out for large ideal restoration field station parcels–I am cultivating a list, but know that most managers are going to ask about who will be responsible. If you have a favorite commercial insurance agent you like, let me know. I have some leads already.
Links
Invitation To Skykomish Field Station
Draft Ecosystem Guild Handbook
Watershed Maps
Problem: maps define how we perceive the landscape, and we have no system for creating, sharing and updating maps that define the ecological and infrastructure systems in which we live and define our survival through a bioregional lens. Ecological knowledge remains abstracted from place, rather than grounded in specificity. Maps are a key.
Target: build a system for production, distribution and improvement of maps at multiple scales that use best available data to construct a clear picture of our bioregional ecological and infrastructure systems: transportation, water, land use, soils, topography, and habitats.
Countermeasures – develop a print-on-demand web store, start producing and distributing prototype maps.
Guild Integration – maps become a tool for supporting the identity of strongholds, and strengthening stronghold coherence, and teaching bioregional literacy at a territorial scale in a way that is connected to local reality.
I now have a functioning website where I can sell print-on-demand maps at around $16 for a 16×20 inch sheet. I have a series of half-finished mapping projects described in the last update. I have made no substantive progress on these projects, and will be hunting for blocks of time where I can finish some projects.
I just obtained detailed flood modeling data to support map work in the lower Skykomish (site of the first field station). From that we can predict the level of river influence on any surface in the valley, both observing that influence on soils and vegetation, and thereby designing vegetation suited to the stress and disturbance of life in a floodplain. My professional work on “native riparian agroforestry” will use these data to develop revegetation templates that connect plant strategies to floodplain conditions.
I have been exploring census block data through an environmental justice lense related to some work projects and am considering how we can use census data to help us understand demographic aspects of bioregional landscapes. Did you know that 20% of the City of Monroe are spanish speakers, mostly of Mexican origin? (Monroe is the agricultural river town at the bottom of the lower Skykomish.)
My mom and I had a conversation about maps (as well as spiraling circular structure), and she inspired an idea of creating puzzles, where each piece is in the shape of a watershed, but the pieces were also colored to represent land use. You could piece together your bioregion, watershed by watershed, noticing how each watershed has a unique pattern of land uses from headwaters to outlet.
NEEDS – If you are a cartographer, or would like to be a cartographer, I can help you start to make watershed maps.
LINKS:
Salish Sea Wiki
Problem: knowledge storage and retrieval among ecosystem management institutions is dysfunctional, with critical knowledge of our social-ecological systems alternatively hoarded and lost. Only insiders know how ecosystem management works. Existing agencies and their websites obscure system-based knowledge.
Target: an open knowledge network that enables cross-institutional capture, storage and retrieval of knowledge about social and ecological structures, processes, and dynamics in the Salish Sea.
Countermeasures – move salishsearestoration.org to a private NGO partner as a bioregional prototype (Society for Ecological Restoration), upgrade the system, and develop a broader community of practice.
Guild Integration – the wiki provides a platform for organizing field station resources, supporting educational processes, and becomes a free platform for strongholds to document their situation, and share knowledge among similar situations. It benefits from and builds on the watershed maps, as we work toward map integration.
Even as I focus on field stations it seems that the wiki hits keep growing. The facebook group has exceeded 1,100 and is growing at 2 per day with no effort. Hits per month continues to grow without effort and have exceeded 2,000 hits a month. I think this is natural traffic related to the slow ascendancy of the “salish sea” text string combined with feedback loops from increasing stable citations of wiki pages. I am doing nothing to leverage this network. (See google analytics on the string “Salish Sea”).
I have been working on finalizing agreements to move the wiki to the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) and upgrade the user interface. I have two different funding sources that specifically invest in the wiki as part of related projects. The upgrades will make it easier to teach people to use the wiki, and thus easier to sell the wiki as a service. Those who can pay can tuck wiki improvements into their budgets. I have built an operating agreement based on sociocratic principals. The more people that use the wiki, the greater the value of the wiki, encouraging contribution. I hope this can become a positive feedback loop, but there are some insidious issues in here to unpack about whether people feel entitled to be producers and distributors of information, if their institutions don’t give them permission.
On the technical side, it turns out wiki developers are a weird niche in the overall computer industry. After some research, I have circulated a scope of work and a request for qualifications to a set of around seven companies that specialize in mediawiki. I will review in early July. Once we have a cost estimate, I will have to complete two sets of contracts to start work–a relationship between the state and SER, and then a contract between SER and the selected vendor. The paperwork is mostly done, and I am hoping this line of dominos falls smoothly.
I also am learning more about the Canadian-side of the Salish Sea, as Canadian efforts to develop shoreline planning are rapidly evolving. Some of the category structures I created 11 years ago are US-centric, and I have started to adjust to accommodate the trans-national qualities of our bioregion.
As soon as I have the wiki mounted on a stable institutional platform I can start rolling out events and training, and start looking for additional partners who would like to develop or pay for interoperability with mapping.
NEEDS – I need institutional sponsors for the wiki that will pay money to improve the wiki, and then become a wiki user. Natural targets include professional organizations, NGOs, and agency programs that struggle with information management within their institution. We always benefit from wiki gardeners that are interested in mapping part of our Salish Sea social-ecological systems. It would also be useful to have people creating video tutorials about how they are using the wiki. Once I get the platform moved to its new home and updated I will get to focus on these community development tasks.
LINKS
Networks of Strongholds
Problem – the communities in the restoration industry are poorly supported and resourced and struggle to evolve and are also disconnected from place. Outsiders attempting to influence ecosystem management don’t have access to insider knowledge. Our institutional structures don’t create synergy between professionals and activists who share ecological goals within a place. We don’t have a long-game vision for how to reform local governments.
Target – Build strong local networks among groups to form “groups of groups” that are organized around a coherent vision for a regenerative bioregional future–something between a template and a checklist that defines local infrastructures, and the necessary local government mechanisms to create those infrastructures.
Countermeasures – to be determined. Some combination of native agroforestry, technical, political and legal action around Growth Management Act and Shoreline Management Acts, a systematic approach to code revision, and infrastructure for co-education and apprenticeship, maybe related to field station events.
Guild Integration – the wiki provides an information sharing platform and a tool to support collaboration on issues and projects within and among strongholds. Field stations provide opportunities for learning and networking among strongholds and watershed maps help seeing territorial patterns, system analysis, and design objectives based on landform and settlement structure.
I am doing some casual work but am struggling with how to be effective in supporting local strongholds. There is a lot to say here and so much work to do.
My ongoing professional work in ecosystem service quantification and science synthesis has a direct application to informing, educating, and empowering local activists to create accountability systems that are aligned with state law–specifically Growth Management Act and Shoreline Management Act. These seem like the most powerful protection tools that can be activated through local governments, if sufficient political and legal power can be cultivated.
We lack a clear template for what it will look like when a local government is able to secure a regenerative bioregional future. We need a version of that picture to be able to piece together this puzzle.
I suspect that the functional roles defined by sociocratic process will be critical (a three-fold cycle for those into that kind of thing.) I call them secretary, facilitator, and lead, but they are related to the past, present, and future in time (and seem related to the three horizons framework). The secretary role tends to the past and remembers what has been done and said (the wiki). The facilitator is in the present and tends the relationships in the moment (field stations), and the lead is paying attention to the future and cultivating vision and strategy for change (the strongholds). Just shooting from the hip.
I have unintentionally started providing lightweight (for me) mentoring services to a guy interested in hydrologic restoration of developed landscapes. I have been sharing my observations and thoughts about how to catalyze neighborhood scale rain garden development. This seems like this relationship strategy could be useful and go somewhere.
The Steh-Chass Estuary Stronghold
Experimenting within my local stronghold is a key part of understanding how to build regional infrastructure that supports local strongholds. I have necessarily dropped work on my estuarine city-state as I try to roll out the first field stations up between river towns on the Lower Skykomish. There are several projects that stand out to me:
Watershed Activists – There is some great advocacy work around watershed protection being led by a troop of free agents, focused on west olympia watersheds. Green Cove Creek and the West Bay Shoreline are the lightning rods. Local governments avoid meeting their responsibilities, and there are a set of specific social dynamics by which local developers corrupt state law, and cow local officials. We need more robust strategies to create rewards and benefits for local officials and staff for how they steward ecosystems, before, during and after elections. The City of Olympia is feckless, and has been groomed as such over decades, but I am concerned that our defenders don’t have the resources and infrastructure to mount a campaign, or leverage one campaign to the next in a coherent forward leaning effort. There are many actors struggling to keep up with a complex landscape.
Olympia Coalition for Ecosystems Preservation and friends – a local NGO which is focusing on acquisition in west Olympia watersheds. I would love to support grantwriting for this group, and expand their capabilities, particularly in connecting headwater neighborhood stormwater action to greenbelt restoration. This group is specifically challenging local developers that are undermining restoration, and so is crossing over the protection-restoration threshold in ways that may be very useful. This local network can draw upon more regional partners with greater capital project capacity: Thurston Conservation District, South Puget Sound Salmon Enhancement Group.
Marshall Middle School Plants for the People – our prototype middle school native plant nursery. The ability of local kids to receive propagation materials, grow them out, and thereby reduce the industrial currency necessary for local watershed restoration still seems hugely relevant to me in building a bioregional culture capable of stewardship. There is potential to use this space as a catalyst for watershed learning that has not yet been revealed. Schools are the civic center of family life within a watershed. There is good synergy through how restoration industry budget can be used to pull the school into a well-fitted stewardship role. Exploring the community outreach portion of the nursery work could be valuable. Plant costs are the one piece of vegetation management that are most cash dependant, so school nurseries enable restoration independent of cashflow.
Right now Bob Barnes is doing a lot of work pulling together institutional partners to do transformational work in reforestation of the Marshall School grounds–engaging the county and district. I hope he can find some apprentices. This may have synergy with the nursery work. But that work may not change the native stewardship capability of the community. It does create a future challenge (maintenance of the installation). The challenge is to not confuse the capital project with the cultural project, but at the same time to look for synergies.
There are other local actors, such as Black Hills Audubon or The Carnegie Group (that fit into the Defenders category), or the Deschutes Estuary Restoration Team (trying to break trail for the restoration industry in the Steh-Chass Estuary). In any case I am focused on imagining how to manifest a durable cultural expression of the three capabilities of stewardship: restoration, protection and study. Over short time scales, strongholds that cannot mount a legal and political challenge may be ineffective given the corruptions of the colonial-industrial system.
We need to get a lot more people engaged in all three capabilities of stewardship. I suspect we lack a onboarding, coordination and mentorship systems that transcend individual projects or institutions. What is an organic structure that weaves the capabilities of many institutions–a bioregional training program that places stewards with local groups, creates social outlets, and embraces the sustained long game? I have noticed that individual institutions that attempt to build these structures start, stagger, and stop with wasted effort. There is no one responsible for the whole.
I am still working on plant propagation, ivy control, trail construction in my own community on Schneider Creek, but don’t need to profile that here. Come visit if you are in the neighborhood. I am preparing an area for casual campfire gatherings, perhaps it should become the St’uchub Field Station, as we have a few lovely campsites, two guest rooms and a community kitchen. Ultimately regular gatherings are in order.
NEED – I am happy to connect people to any Olympia networks if you are interested, and would like to provide a way of providing peer support and mentorship for people trying to make sense of local challenges through a collapse-informed, bioregional and biocultural lens.