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Developing Focus on Bioregional Infrastructures

Infrastructure (n.) – the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.

We cannot build a regenerative and just bioregional culture without reinventing our infrastructure, because our infrastructure defines our relationship to ecosystems. Humans are “ecosystem engineers”—we reshape ecosystems to enable our society. Then we depend on what we have built. Infrastructure starts out as a good idea, and then we come to depend on it for survival.

100 years ago there were few cars, fewer parking lots, no interstate highways, and the rest of the oil infrastructure barely existed. We ran a world built around steam engines and horses. Our use of energy, time, and land revolved around these historical infrastructures. Everything always has been and always will be an ecological system. But when we create infrastructure we seem to believe we are above nature. We don’t acknowledge that we are just shaping our nature and our relationship to the earth, for better or worse.

Infrastructure is the warp on the loom upon which we weave our daily routines and build a society. Our houses are made of forest fibers, bound with metals, smelted from ore wrested from the earth by machines. We are connected by pipes, wires, and ribbons of asphalt to sustain the flow of food, water, fuel, and waste. The whole construct, from industrial forest to mine to household, is driven by fossil fuels.

In our current state, we have become collectively oblivious. Yes, there are interest groups that are very aware of our infrastructures. But the choice of what to regenerate and what to produce is not a subject of popular discourse, we are deep down paths chosen by our ancestors. And how we live and who chooses how we live is not on the table.

What we have built is a system of infrastructures that defines how we live, and how we relate to each other. Our cities and towns seem like home, but they are dead zones. They receive resources and produce wastes and cannot keep us alive. Urban soils are mostly damaged or paved. Water is poisoned and the summer brings drought. 65% of the population is completely dependent on supply lines they don’t control, and most are unable to produce food or shelter in any substantive way.

The infrastructures combine with a system of ownership to both enable and define social-ecological systems. We are born into these systems, but the towns we live in are just the belly of the beast. Far away, the extractive maw chews away at industrial forests, grazed deserts, and eroding prairies, suckling hungrily at depleted aquifers, or ripping into the earth hunting for rare elements. In many cases, this extraction is greased with human blood. You don’t see extraction zones when seated in our nest of infrastructure. You can’t see the whole story strolling down a suburban street.

Having built this infrastructure, we give it to our children, along with all the attendant stories, rituals, beliefs, and taboos. This gift has consequences—it shapes our hopes, expectations, and fears, and determines the future of the biosphere.

At 7.53 billion, this inherited infrastructure is what keeps us alive—drinking clean water, eating food, and staying warm. In an earth with no ecosystem beyond reach, we are the beneficiaries. We ride the beast. This infrastructure is now required—it is our ecological niche. We no longer evolve in response to the stress and disturbances of our environment. We just use more energy to change our environment.

Through infrastructure, our genetic evolution has been eclipsed by cultural evolution, and a culture is bound to its infrastructure. Our evolution has thus become untethered from an ecological conversation. We are the self-absorbed boors at the gathering of the species. We only talk about ourselves. Sitting more alone every year, we just need to sustain our infrastructure, forever.

The problem is that the infrastructure we’ve inherited is a Ponzi scheme. Our infrastructure burns ecological capital. Even before climate change, we drained water from underground reservoirs, our soils are a little weaker each year, our river deltas a little more polluted with nitrogen, and our global forests a little younger and smaller. A few of us get to ride in style, but overall, the colonial-industrial vehicle is a disaster. Each generation makes its profit by stealing from the next, and everyone feels rich, until the well runs dry, and the fragility of the underlying apparatus is made bare.

We are conditioned to attend to numbers that have no bearing on this reality. Gross national product and capital accumulation only reflect profits skimmed off a system of declining ecological production. We measure and trade labor surrogates, all leveraging energy slaves. Like that narcissistic boor mentioned above, we measure all our activity, as if it were the foundations of life. We value destruction as much as creation as if our activity were the only thing of worth. To a large extent, our financial measures of capital ownership just describe our relative social positions inside the cultural machine and don’t measure the health of the machine itself.

And our cultural machine is largely made of infrastructures–poorly understood, rarely discussed, and usually controlled by someone else. We wouldn’t know how to change, even if we had the will. But now, more than any other moment in history we must choose. Whatever social or political future we can muster, it must involve building a new infrastructure, that lives in harmony with the earth. Any social or political system that cannot do this work, is deficient.

Not all infrastructure is made equal. Consider a well-designed biodynamic farm, where pastures feed cows and horses, which in turn work smaller crop fields that sustain a settlement. The tapestry of woodland, pasture, field, and household is a whole creature, and if rightly proportioned, the soil is richer every year. An industrial corn and soybean rotation also produces a yield of food, while degrading the soil and undermining the climate. It requires only one operator over thousands of acres but is dependant on industrial equipment and colonial supply lines, petrochemicals, and uses nutrients mined from rock and extracted from the atmosphere by burning natural gas. It is soaked in fossil energy. The second the flow of fuel stops, the well dries up, or the soil dies, the system breaks down. Now as we sit on the edge of global ecological collapse, we can take a good look at this package we are giving to our children.

Thinking About Infrastructures

We have lots of choices that we almost never make. What system shall we build for our children? These kinds of choices are too much work, too inconvenient, someone else’s job. Being creative about something like a cultural ecology requires not only massive self-discipline and effort, but demands a framework–some kind of scaffolding upon which to organize and elevate our thinking. Here are three tools that help us start:

First, we can recognize that everything we can see is our ecosystem—a collection of living and non-living components forming relationships. The parking lot in front of my condo is an ecosystem. It does a horrible job cycling energy, nutrients, or water, and is generally hostile to life. It requires constant application of energy and toxins to function and mostly generates heat and subtly poisoned water, but it is still an ecosystem. I admire any creatures that can survive there because it is designed to be dead. It’s twice as large as necessary, but that is what makes it convenient to drive in.

Recognition is not easy. Our conditioning is the unseen part of our inherited infrastructure package. We are trained to think of that parking lot as somehow a separate project—somehow apart from the living earth. But we took that land from its previous inhabitants for our exclusive use. It’s called colonization, and it’s not just a period in a history book. It is a way of life. That parking lot is a degenerate thing we created because we wanted it all for ourselves. Only when we take a step back and observe our whole landscape as an ecological system of our own creation can we start to break the conditioning that makes it seem normal. The conditioning makes the familiar seem normal, as the character Morpheus says to Neo in the movie The Matrix: ”You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.”

So first: we must see the ecosystem that we are conditioned to not see.

As a next step, we could benefit from thinking about infrastructures as plural—as made of many diverse elements. We have enterprises within enterprises and they require different structures and facilities. Our cultural orthodoxy presents “infrastructure” as a singular monolith, the sum of all that is necessary to perpetuate this peculiar colonial-industrial society. Decisions about our infrastructures are generally reserved for “leaders” while the consumers of infrastructure are thankful but generally ignorant of the details. This asymmetrical flow of information is part of the package, a package with layers of social inequity entwined with hierarchies, from families to schools to businesses and governments. We are surrounded by a multiplicity of interconnected alternatives—we are just unable to notice them. Our infrastructures are both interdependent, but also separable. Training children in schools doesn’t require an electrical grid, and water supply doesn’t require sewers, but if you don’t learn about waste management or energy systems in school you can’t see the alternatives.

Third and finally: we can learn how to organize biological systems as among the most elegant of all infrastructures. We live in a verdant coastal temperate rainforest. For a well-adapted society the forests, beaches, wetlands, and rivers are all valuable infrastructures generating food, water, shelter, and energy. They are self-organizing and self-repairing—autopoetic. To a society that has become addicted to fossil energy, annual tillage grain production, and the global transport of materials, our infrastructures are complicated, fragile, expensive, and dangerous.

Everything we build immediately begins to break down. Only biological systems have the potential to regenerate, to be self-organizing, and to grow over time. Most of what we actually need to sustain our lives can be created and maintained locally in biological systems–food, shelter, and water. Only our information, transportation, and energy infrastructures necessarily operate at larger scales. It may be energy, transportation, and communications that ultimately define colonial-industrial civilization, because they allow us to ignore local biological infrastructure, in favor of parasitizing somewhere else.

Three simple ideas: everything is an ecosystem, we maintain a smorgasbord of infrastructures, and biological infrastructures are our only viable foundation.

With these reflective lenses firmly attached, we have some of the scaffolding that might let us make sense of ourselves. We are ecosystem engineers, and everything we think, see, and use defines the ecosystems that we create. We have a heritable culture, and that heritage is both physical and social. Those infrastructures most necessary for survival are local and biological, while those that define colonial-industrial civilization operate at larger scales. Our inheritance is complex with choices that are hard to change, and we have a natural sentimental attachment to the infrastructures given to us by our ancestors. Our ancestors bequeathed us a death trap.

Infrastructure Is What Infrastructure Does

With conditioning comes blindness–once we believe something to be true we stop seeing. Once we have tools that enable a way of doing things, we forget that there are other ways to do the same thing. To assess and evaluate our infrastructures, I like to reframe them in terms of what they allow us to do. Our infrastructures are valuable because of what they enable us to do. They are embodied processes. Each infrastructure is a productive response to a perceived problem. It is this generative capability that makes them powerful. We talk about infrastructure as if they were structures, but their essential capacities are how they facilitate processes.

The core infrastructures of human societies operate as extensions of biological ecosystems and can be evaluated using ecological thinking. Like all ecological processes, our infrastructures either transform or move matter and energy—transformation or flux. To understand or design an infrastructure you need to track the form and flow of matter and energy. Only when we start to evaluate our infrastructures as ecosystems can we start to see where our troubles begin.

When infrastructures facilitate social and cultural processes, our thinking gets muddy. Redesigning ecological infrastructures will likely force us to wrestle with our social infrastructures, but let’s not yet take our eye on the ecological ball. A philosophy untethered from ecosystems is dangerous, and we have been untethered for generations. We know our systems of power and ownership are entwined herein, but surviving this game requires we play for ecological survival, and loaded down with philosophical baggage, we are likely to play poorly.

Between the ecological artifice of colonization and our conditioning, we can no longer see our ecological infrastructures. One of the qualities of a narcissist is that they are preoccupied with their self-conception. When we think only as individuals we are easily confused. The “individual” is not the scale of biological organization at which to understand infrastructures, survival, or for that matter much of anything. For 200,000 years we have functioned as households, settlements, and networks of settlements. To think about infrastructures we must strip away a bit of our self-absorption and may benefit from some language to help us anchor in the structures of society.

For the conversation, we need shared language. For most of history, people have found security by forming households and networks of households. Our closest relationships are among those who share shelter. Settlements are clusters of households where we sleep, eat, work, rest, and play. Production sites are places we go to work in the ecosystems to meet our needs. Household production is where we meet our needs within a household, and usually close to home (unless we develop a nomadic infrastructure). Community production is work where many households gather and then distribute goods in turn to many households, usually through elaborate exchange rituals involving currency.

Settlements are nested within settlements, and civilization is by definition the formation of settlements too large and dense to meet their needs through local production.
This kind of simple language can make the structures and processes of the human ecosystem more apparent. Seeing ourselves and our acquaintances as individuals in households in nested settlements, and being able to see a landscape pattern of settlements and production sites, helps us think about how we solve the problems of staying alive. It also helps us look at how our infrastructures have come to function. This is particularly important if we aim to survive on a degraded planet as we simultaneously upgrade our expensive, fragile, and degenerate infrastructure.

So what are the building blocks of infrastructure? Both household and community production require water, materials, and tools. Shelters are essential and durable cultural artifacts that moderate weather and climate. Our shelters define our settlements. Roughly half our energy is used in the operation of our infrastructures, while the other half is spent building and maintaining our shelters and tools.

Infrastructures enable ecological processes. They enable us to create a flow or cause the transformation of energy or material. Our infrastructures are a response to a problem.
As our energy sources became profligate our designs became sloppy–untethered from ecological energies. We started developing infrastructure without regard for efficiency. We wove a vast teetering tower of flows and transformations one on top of the other, all requiring energy. Through this process of stacking infrastructures on top of infrastructures, we have created a huge teetering superstructure. It is difficult to comprehend, particularly when the operating manual is encoded into a hierarchical culture, where we are strangely disconnected from ecological processes.

Why step so far back and take in this view? As we sit on the edge of global ecological collapse, it seems wise to take a good look at this package we are giving to our children. How can we make sense of the changes we need to make? Do we wait for our “leaders” assuming they are less confused than we are? They are not. They are acting out roles they inherited, roles built around a failing system of infrastructure. You can notice that many of our institutions are unable to even consider the meaning of global ecological collapse, and cannot comprehend an infrastructure other than the one we have. The endless reproduction of our existing infrastructure is hard-coded into our cultural niches. For the challenge we face, we have constructed no job to do the necessary work.

Lodged in this teetering house of cards, it can be difficult to recall the base of the tower—those essential problems and infrastructures that keep life from death. It is difficult to innovate if we cannot see the heart of things. Unable to see, we are prone to rearranging deck chairs—shuffling around aimlessly, doing the things that our parents did.
Here is a list of problems that appear to be at the nexus of life and death, using the simple language introduced above:

  1. Provide drinkable water for settlements
  2. Provide enough water to production sites
  3. Tend production site tools and shelters
  4. Move materials from production sites to settlements
  5. Assemble materials into new shelters and tools
  6. Cultivate and harvest food
  7. Store food between harvest and consumption
  8. Process and cook food
  9. Convert organic waste to soil
  10. Return wastewater to the water cycle
  11. Gather or produce fuel or energy
  12. Transport ourselves around our settlement and production landscape
  13. Move materials and products within and among settlements
  14. Care for the infirm
  15. Minimize the impacts of disease and trauma
  16. Strengthen the capabilities of children
  17. Introduce youth into creative roles
  18. Evolve our allocation of roles among members of a settlement
  19. Design, build, and keep up our infrastructure

This list is not definitive or complete. These problems could be lumped or further split. In less energy-intensive societies that live entirely on photosynthesis, these technologies are woven together into daily, seasonal, or annual rhythms. Each requires both social and ecological components. These problems can be solved at different scales, in different ways, with different implications. Our unique solution set is the operating system of our society. This is the list that matters when the earthquake comes or when we change the climate.

Some of us solve some of these problems in our daily work. A few generations ago, most of these problems were solved at the scale of a settlement or network of settlements. Now many of us have no connection to the solution set. Either we are preoccupied with “more important affairs” or we are providing household services to those that do. We may assume someone is paying attention to the fundamental health of the system.
Let’s consider for a moment the implications of the last bullet on the list of problems—the work of keeping up our infrastructures.

Infrastructures with their ecological and social dynamics are not neutral actors in a society. We spend effort solving problems of our own creation. Before I became an information worker in a vast bureaucracy, I used to work on infrastructure #5, assembling materials into new shelters, where I specialized in building soils, growing plants, and building small walls, paths, and fences. A significant part of my labor was to undo the damages caused by the construction of the shelter or the surrounding transportation system or to satisfy aesthetic rituals for households too busy to tend their own land, who never learned as children, or who had the social status to have me do work for them.

Now I work as a restoration ecologist. I spend my effort trying to undo the damage to the biosphere caused by our production sites and transportation systems. Infrastructures take on a life of their own, and we spend our time reacting, fulfilling functions defined by our constructed habitats.

The Infrastructures Of Global Flow

We have now built, and now maintain infrastructures that operate at massive scales. These are the pipelines, cables, railroads, and freeways by which we move materials and energy from one settlement to another. This system was initially built to support the movement of materials from natural production sites (farms and forests) to industrial production sites in cities (mills and factories). With the advent of colonization, and as we began to deplete the European biosphere, these flows expanded their reach. We “discovered the new world”—a place where people hadn’t destroyed their biosphere. This was the birth of what we call modern civilization. We solved a problem of our own creation, by creating new problems. As we fell deeper into the colonial-industrial system, we developed the illusion that we could live disconnected from the biosphere. We began to live in dead zones, called cities, that survived by draining the life from places that were out of sight.

More and more of our people are involved in tending infrastructures and their effects. Our survival systems have become increasingly dependent on infrastructures with unintended effects that create more work. By determining who in our “complex societies” has more power and ownership, we spend tremendous effort in accounting systems that track the work, rather than evaluating the outcomes of our work or the health of the earth. This whole fragile system is hidden from view by pipes, cables, freeways, shipping lanes, or railroads. We don’t see what is at the end of the pipe.

Global neoliberalism and its accounting system seem to suggest these “pipes” are just laid willy-nilly all over the place, and that everyone benefits equally from the pipework. The more pipes the better. However, this piped flow of global resources is neither equally beneficial nor even benign. Energy and materials flow from extractive production sites to modern settlements. This flow defines a pattern of continuous recolonization–layered histories of natural pattern, good fortune, trauma, control, manipulation, and chance. It is a vast parasitic network. The host is dying.

I suspect that our inability to perceive our social-ecological system and its infrastructures is a deep root of our dysfunction. We are born embedded in this way. We can no longer imagine a simple solution to simple problems. Instead, our attention is fixed on a financial scoreboard, decorated with ideological stories, operating at scales where we have no agency. We are simultaneously entranced, horrified, and riveted upon the colonial-industrial nation-state. We are befuddled as we try to track the pea of our individual security as if in a street-corner shell game. We are simultaneously born to habit, deprived of basic information, rewarded for compliance, and distracted by the cacophony.

We all have roles to play that consume our energy and attention. But very few of us have any cognitive connection to the underlying infrastructures upon which we depend. Those supply lines are taken as given–necessary, practical, essential. By that reckoning we cannot question the importance of sustaining that supply, nor do we follow the pipeline back to its source and seek responsibility for extraction in all its forms. We are born and we play our roles. This modern social-ecological system is both intensely interconnected and in a state of mental torpor, we are ants building a nest we cannot perceive.

A Regenerative Bioregional Culture For Cascadia

Here in the Salish Sea, we have converted our forests into a fiber factory. Between our national parks and our settled lowlands is a vast foothill landscape that was once a mosaic of ancient forests. It is now enrolled in a global industrial-colonial fiber production system. Before automation and consolidation to maximize profits for investors, our rural settlements used to be bustling production sites. This landscape is now managed to generate a continuous global flow of cellulose and wood. There are many ways to live in a forest, but this particular way provides inexpensive global feedstock for cheap single-use disposable wood and paper economy, from oversized and fragile housing to Amazon shipping boxes. The price is reduced carbon storage, declining biodiversity at multiple scales, fragile hydrology, degraded aquatic ecosystems, and declining quality of fiber.

A regenerative bioregional culture is intimately aware of its infrastructures so that it can evaluate their effects on ecosystem productivity and resilience. A bioregional culture meets its needs by working with the climate, landforms, and biota of a place, and then seeking reciprocal relationships with other bioregions for luxuries. A regenerative culture designs infrastructures that increase the underlying ecological capital of the place we live.

Alternately we can play our role to sustain a system we barely understand, ignorant of the violence and cruelty that sustains our supply lines of feedstocks, petulant if deprived of our inherited privileges, envious if we are born with less, unaware of the fragile nature of our infrastructures. This ignorant, petulant, envious, and unaware state is non-partisan–it is a kind of childhood. You can find threads of this narrative in both liberal and conservative factions of our nation-state. In some ways, fascist and white supremacist narratives may be more conscious of this survival challenge, even as they explore solutions that are unacceptable in their cruelty and inhumanity.

The only way to awaken from this state of hypnosis and delusion is to take stock of our infrastructures. It helps us remember the problems we are trying to solve. That’s why I so appreciate woodcraft, gardening, and backpacking. When you walk away from a road, you are walking away from the colonial-industrial system. What will you bring with you? What burden are you willing to carry, and what will you leave behind? What will you bring for a weekend, or a month, or a year, or to sustain future generations? I can look in a camping kit, and see the seeds of the infrastructures we actually need.

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Update 12 :: Field Stations :: 2023 Budswell

Diagram showing elements of the Ecosystem Guild vision with field stations as a collaboration and learning space among bioregional groups.

I am going to separate updates for different components of the Ecosystem Guild system, This is an update on Biocultural Restoration Field Stations. An overview of the big-picture vision is provided in update 11, referencing this diagram on the right.

Problem: Our public trust landscapes around aquatic habitats are neglected and have become the domain of experts and institutions. Study and work require preparations and cash flow among people at desks, and disempowers communities. Our social infrastructures around regulation, professionalization, liability, and private property prevent us from residing in, studying, and restoring an ecological commons. This undermines our capacities for group formation through natural work and further alienates us from the living Earth. Gathering at seasonal camps is the least expensive way to visit a place, and increases our connection to the land and each other. Shared residence and work rebuild relationships.

Target: Develop a culturally-motivated social process where groups can gather at conservation sites, for days to weeks, to work, build relationships, exchange knowledge and cultivate common pool resources (to restore the earth for both humans and other-than-human beings). A network of camps and institutions use a common protocol for establishing “field stations” and field stations become an organic co-learning environment that increases land access and tending. Field stations become a mechanism for mutual aid among strongholds. For 300,000 years in human culture, we tend places through inhabitation, working, eating, and telling stories around the fire.

Tactics: identify initial willing land managers on public trust lands, host camping events around the restoration process, and prototype customs and infrastructure that enable self-organization and replication. Develop study and design resources that support this work. Build allies by providing a unique and valuable contribution in areas where the existing restoration industry is weak. We use the wiki to build shared knowledge. Field stations create and use watershed maps for learning, and communication, and as a knowledge store.

We’ve hosted two field stations so far. The Snohomish Conservation District workload has increased. They are unable to spare staff to chaperone the field station on a monthly basis, and so we needed to cancel March Camp. The CD has resources to support the field station, but just not the staff to manage all their resources. In April and May the Werkhovens asked us to not use the site to free up the roads for their operations. They are really busy with trucks and tractors in the planting season and don’t want any mishaps. While I think this is not necessary, and we could easily slip in and out without interruption, the relationship is young enough that it is not worth it to push the issue.

I had a good conversation with Earthcorp community engagement staff, both as a potential new relationship with an institutional sponsor and as a way to augment SCD staffing. They are focused on supporting environmental advocacy in communities of color in Tukwila, Burien, and Kent. Being able to provide opportunities for training and experience outside the city may serve their partners, and they will explore the possibility and report back. My intuition says our odds are above 50-50, but that it won’t happen fast, and Earthcorps will need funding to play the role. This is not a self-organizing solution because it is dependent on financial capital to scale, but has value in diversifying our community. Given all the dynamics I discuss below, I am starting to think that some kind of self-insured system may become necessary so that camps flow from a cultural demand of willing campers, not the ups and downs of institutional life.

The components necessary for a field station build from the commitment of the site steward upward, until the invitation can be distributed. There is a feedback loop between invitations and building up enough groups to provide an opportunity for cultural evolution at field stations.

I am personally a bit overwhelmed with the many pieces of the larger guild effort and the unsteadiness of the initial field station infrastructure. The institutional sponsor piece is pretty foundational, and the unsteadiness there is very challenging. I am turning back to the eight-season year to try to make sense of it. How can the seasons and timing clarify what is important? How can I connect back to the seasons to pace myself? My wheelbarrow is taken apart in my shop next to a rocket heater project, next to several other projects. I’ve got nursery plants to get in the ground in my local greenbelt. I have seedlings to tend and a garden to dig. For me, there needs to be a rhythm to this.

I am shifting focus to design work with spring. My next hosting will be around a design experience at the new Conservation District Land in Lake Stevens in May. The CD bought 14 acres of headwater wetland and field just South of the UGA. This will involve a bunch of information development: plant lists, plant quantity calculation and cost estimates, reviews and interviews with regulators, exploration of state and federal subsidy programs, and profiling of native “crop plants”.

I have two other sites that seem very possible. One is a new conservation purchase in Thurston County, and the third is in Clallam County, an amazing saltwater site at a river mouth with an old wet prairie overlooking the strait. That site might come with a short-term institutional sponsor. In addition, I am still sitting on an old invitation to Lopez Island, and a new contact with what seems like a Bioregional Stronghold on South Whidbey Island. The institutional sponsor is really the limiting factor.

Color-enhanced lidar image showing the area of the Deschutes floodplain now in conservation. Note the active channel formation and the large area of low-lying land near the river

I am just starting up a conversation with folks involved in a 200-300 acre conservation purchase on the Deschutes River. It is a lovely site. I got to wander around the site, which is diverse large, and complex. But for the absence of willow forage, some channel incision, and old agricultural ditches the entire area would be a vast beaver swamp full of baby coho salmon.

I think I am at a point where I need to expand the team that is thinking about how to increase the number of site stewards and diversity of institutional sponsors, while keeping some kind of coherence around a shared culture, to create the potential for ease and flow. Who is in a position to start thinking of themselves as a site steward?

The group formation aspect is still critical in my mind. If this process doesn’t encourage and lead to the formation of stable coherent groups within strongholds, I am dubious about the efficacy of the pattern. The flow of this experiment has been leading to relaxing the group formation requirement and creating ways for single individuals to join in. However, the group formation process needs to remain the clear directive. I have some work to do to model this within my own little stronghold.

February Camp

We did not have enough groups to have a field station in January, so regrouped on February 17-20. We had a small group brave winter camping.

Part of the first winter camp crew, missing three others, including our Bard.

In terms of schedule, we got lucky that the weather cooperated with the work schedule. Watching hourly weather forecasts will help stewards organize a time to minimize weather exposure. Working in the wet, there is definitely a period of time, after work, and before and during lunch where you just spend time cleaning up from fieldwork and switching to camp life. Cleaning and caring for tools and clothes after wet work is not minor. This all winds up with folks around the fire eating lunch, but this is typically a one-hour period and is not a fast transition.

Infrastructure Notes

Vehicle sleeping was definitely in vogue. If you are going to bring a weatherproof box to a winter camp, you might as well sleep in it. Weather is everything. We didn’t have wind, but that would have involved adding walls to the camp, which would have been critical to the group shelter (the great hall).

As expected, being able to dry clothing in a hot tent will be a useful piece of infrastructure for protracted work. Some form of continuous hot water would also be lovely. Some equivalent of a Russian samovar. I am hoping this will integrate with a rocket stove heater and the clothes drier. Various quick soups make perfect food.

We even had a bard (thank you Jack Jay for your poetry).

We really need to figure out an elegant solution for the floor of the great hall. Boots and dirt are not desirable. A shoes-off area around the fire creates the right vibe. The smokeless pits however focus heat up. Submerging the pit underground so the top is at the ground surface could create a desirable effect. straw could work with individual mats and chairs. Sparks from the fire are inevitable and destroyed two tarps, but the tarps were a reasonable option. The person-to-fire pit ratio is an important part of winter camping. Any more than eight people and a second pit would be necessary. We would benefit from a lot of jacket and hat hooks at the edge of the great hall.

Having dry storage as an annex to the great hall would work well. It was easy for the fire area to become cluttered with things that could have been tucked away when not in use. The clutter makes moving around difficult. As we learn to live well in the woods, we will bring more things than we need, which creates a detritus of modernity. When you multiply this by multiple groups, it can get out of hand.

Kitchen trailer at dusk. An essential piece of infrastructure in addition to the portable composting toilet is a trailer that serves as a kitchen and workshop and unfolds to provide an ample covered area for cooking and tool management.

This was the maiden voyage of the trailer serving as a kitchen and workshop. The hand wash sink also perched on the spare tire nicely. This is clearly the right direction and I have a page of design notes: lots of standing height counters (at just the right height), cubbies for segregating group food and dishes off the counter, hooks to hang food bags, a hanging rack to dry dishes at-hand but out of the way. The concept of a trailer with a large tarp roof adjacent to the great hall was just right.

I am starting to believe that alcohol burners are an elegant and appropriate cooking technology. The fuel is cheap and could be produced locally, there’s no soot from the fire, and they cook fast enough. Fuel is available, they are easy to move don’t take up much space, and are low-stress. Choosing simple one-pot meals with easy cleanup works well. Our traveling Buddhist pastor steadily produced some lovely one-pot soups with noodles–a good choice for a cold-weather lunch.

One of our numbers had just come from Hazel Ward’s Social Forestry Camp and we discussed their strategies for food, which involved collectivizing a pot of grain, but with smaller cooking groups each making their own stuff to go on the grain. Buckwheat (Kasha) is a nice choice for a fast-cooking grain compared to other choices.

A colleague is working on working through the mobile composting toilet challenge. The Omick Toilet is going to be the target. It seems like deposits will be easy and legal, but it is the land disposal after composting that will create challenges. I found a reliable seller of used plastic drums near Shelton, and I hope to do a prototype build in April.

Social Notes

I have been wrestling with the importance of the personal invitation. I am realizing that as a site steward, reaching out and inviting people, compared to broadcasting an opportunity, is an important part of the work. I want each of these wonderful people I have met to join me in this adventure. But they may only feel that desire if I reach out personally to invite them. This is part of what it means to be a host. It is also laborious compared to a mass marketing broadcast. We all lead complicated lives and invitation matters. I am not sure how I will evolve around this in the future.

On a more logistical side hosting a field station too close on the holidays seemed like folly. The only viable possibility would be for all group commitments to be solid back in December. Even then, short daylight hours combined with rain can make the work windows small. That is a good reason to jump on to plant in the fall, wait until Budswell to finish planting, and take a break in Darkness. I need to learn more about how much lead time a typical group or participant feels they need to join a field station. Part of the function of shared infrastructure is to make joining a field station easy. For many, car camping can be a lot of work to get ready, go, return, and unpack. Making that work less and less is part of the trick. When it’s smooth, it’s almost like emergency preparedness–like a go-bag under the bed. By having the core infrastructure well organized, you need only pack a sleeping kit, clothing, and tools, and fill a simple food bag on the way out of town.

It was a pleasure to meet two new colleagues from the Wilderness Awareness School attracted to and committed to the idea of land tending. This community is very close to my vision and hopes. A long while back, when I worked at Starflower Foundation, back in the late 1990s many of my colleagues were part of that diaspora. They brought a “sharing circle” practice to a campfire, which was lovely for me. It could feel intrusive or awkward for others. It opens different spaces for sharing and learning.

It was a boy-heavy event. Does that matter? Is there something to do here?

We noticed lots of jobs for camp tending. One idea would be to create roles on cards and hand them out at the opening circle so that everyone has a domain to tend to. This could be a lovely apprenticeship system as well.

We talked about the core skill sets that make camp stronger and came up with five:

  1. Camp tending – knowing the technologies and their care.
  2. Tool care – tending to metal and wood and sharpness.
  3. Natural history – including plants, animals, soils, and their dynamics.
  4. Environmental horticulture – the design and implementation of vegetation management.
  5. Site stewardship – the ability to establish the relationships necessary to bring a field station into the system.
Field Work Notes

We installed a small ~600 square foot dogwood garden into a blackberry patch and enhanced a few other dogwood patches along the swale with cuttings. We also removed blackberry from a Tulalip Tribes planting at “the old Scots Broom patch” as a courtesy to our host and established a trail from the railroad camp to that patch for future work. More details will go in the field station log.

The old Scotch Broom patch (Patch A2). This site is south-facing sand-bedded Pilchuck soils, resulting in high first-summer mortality, as well as an opportunity for dryland sun-loving species. We have no information about the extent to which high and dry floodplains may have been burned to support habitat diversity.

Doing the site disturbance and preparations in the previous growing season, during fair weather has a lot of value. Having the ability to adjust the fieldwork in response to the rain helps the quality of the experience. Having the site disturbance complete, and just focusing on propagation creates a nimbleness with the weather where you can adjust the work period to match the weather. Not jamming site prep into planting helps avoid the impulse to take shortcuts driven by poor planning or the desire to get out of inclement weather that causes trouble later. We knew that we were going into a design-build situation, so kept expectations low.

Seed-grown dogwood to expand the genetics of our cutting beds.

To be able to plan ahead and commit to doing restoration work as part of a large community of hosts and stewards requires that groups can commit to getting the work done. A strong winter planting is the culmination of a year-long process of site disturbances and procuring the right propagation materials. We won’t be able to do high biodiversity rapidly developing plantings on well-developed sites without this commitment. So the uncertainty of who will show up at a field station creates a lot of tension on the restoration side.

One solution is to have contract crews waiting in the wings to fill any gaps left by volunteers. This is a common strategy and may be important for larger efforts. Alternately, volunteer work planning could include modest propagation goals, while filling any surplus capacity with tending and disturbance work that is not time-critical. Another strategy is to open the field station to volunteer labor through a traditional daytime work party. Two participants came as day participants. The idea of having the field station experience being a charade where commitment is assumed weak and the project is designed on the presumption that contracts and financial capital will be necessary to shore up these shortcomings… this just feels like the wrong evolutionary context. I suspect that having the work scale based on the capacity of the field station makes more sense.

Underlying all this is a pressure that I feel to show performance using the same metrics as the industry: acres restored. My heart tells me there is another larger longer body of work that is not recognized by that metric. Should I just be running volunteer work parties, where I do all the thinking and work, and pre-digest the effort–the plants laid out and the shovels waiting. Should I take all the agency and responsibility away from a community, and treat them like a work party, and in doing so, increase production efficiency?

In the same breath, the proof of maturity is to be able to get the work done. Part of the challenge is that revegetation happens on an annual cycle that requires some planning, and to be done well must occur in specific windows of time. If volunteers decide to not follow through or do something else this month, then the work doesn’t get done, the momentum created by a site steward is lost, work is wasted, and the seasons roll on. So one answer is to develop social structures that use money to impel the commitment necessary to assure production. Am I just reinventing the conservation corps, and will be driven toward this existing model, because that is what the culture can support?

Site Stewardship
Initial zonation of river forest patches at the Skykomish Field Station.

I have a draft stewardship plan to support coordination with our tribal government host, attempting to strike a balance between transparency and not over-specifying all the work, so we can be creative and responsive to the site. It has three parts: a map of vegetation patches, a strategy for each patch under management, and descriptions of treatments that describe what we do.

One dynamic I have noticed is how damaged land becomes a commodity in the restoration industry. Having access to a patch for restoration enables you to “sell” that acre in a grant application as “restoration”. Once thus sold, you are beholden to grant requirements, which may drive how and when you do restoration, regardless of what an optimum strategy might be at a site. Without these new acres to sell, you cannot justify more government funding and sustain your crews. Therefore various institutions are essentially in competition for patches of land to “restore”. After one treatment, the restoration is complete, stewardship ends, and the land is abandoned again. Many of the sites we identified in our site assessment as potential tending sites were unexpectedly adopted by the tribal revegetation crews, and will be the subject of the high-density conifer plantings supported by salmon recovery dollars–as is their right.

Interestingly, we were offered stewardship of a site that was planted with a high-density conifer planting around 15 years ago, that is now packed with conifers, with no understory, and where future forest health will be affected by the dense stocking rate. Some thinning makes sense. The initial proposal was that we would plant the site after a conservation corps chainsaw crew came through. Should we accept the mission, and depending on what the saw crew did, we might find ourselves clambering through slash planting shrubs? Site tending could be very difficult. Nothing but a “random plant and forget” strategy would be feasible if we inherited a hasty slash pile. If we had control of the thinning it could be more incremental and patchy, and we could donate the best greens to a volunteer wreath making effort (like the ho-ho-hobos) and use the poles or slash for camp infrastructure or deer exclusion, leaving the site easier to access for tending over time. Working next to the industry may prove to be a larger challenge than I imagined. The combination of the unpredictable capacity of the field station, the urgency of the grant-driven restoration economy that is clocking acres, and the expectation that professional work results in quick results combine to create a difficult operating environment to build community.

And yet this is the very tendency that I find myself struggling with in my daily work… the industrialization of stewardship comes with a cost.

Future and Needs

The short term is focused on onboarding our VetCorps intern at the Conservation District. We are lucky… I think this fellow will keep us on our toes. Spring and Summer will be spent in fieldwork and design, and hopefully some more sophisticated disturbances for next winter planting. This might be the chance to develop a vegetation ecology study of the Skykomish Valley and start building revegetation templates that consider what remains, and what has been lost. We are “restoring” the valley, and haven’t even assessed the condition and character of the landscape. So hasty. I am using the wiki to start to develop an onboarding self-study curriculum. I suspect this will continue to evolve over time, and into a series of different self-study options that build various skills. Lots to talk about on the wiki front, but that is another update.

We are also going to add the CD headquarters to our site list. This site is camping-ready and can serve as a regional mother garden. It also offers an opportunity to explore biocultural restoration in headwater wetlands. I have started interviews with regulators and immediately discovered that the concept of “disturbance” and “leaving nature undisturbed” is going to be a pivot point of that conversation.

The new Snohomish Conservation District Headquarters is on 14 acres including a headwater wetland complex above the Snohomish Estuary near Lake Stevens, Washington. The site has opportunities to increase groundwater recharge to increase stream health.

I need to continue to identify the roles and needs of site group stewards so that individuals that are cultivating groups have the tools/language/permission to cultivate our culture on their own. In this way, I can make the work easier to see, and make good invitations. In the same way that I have been committed to a particular vision, I need to pledge my loyalty and support to those who would play these roles. They are who will make this vision sink or swim. Without commitment, communication, and consistency from groups, I cannot convince hosts that we are worth the trouble. This will be one of the threshold challenges.

So much more to write about, and lots of unfinished essays. But this update needs to get out the door.

Links

Biocultural Restoration Field Station Wiki Page

Reiner Farm Wiki Page

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Update 11 :: Frost 2022

This is a different kind of update. There is no play-by-play description of activites. Instead here is a snapshot of the emerging system that I have been working on. Heretofore its mostly been in pieces, only part of a living whole in my imagination. Lets see if I can lay it out in brief terms:

I’d like us to invent a bioregional network, capable of doing work together, while minimizing dependencies on hierarchical institutions or industrial currency.

I suspect that to restore our bioregion will require a self-replicating swarm of skilled people to start tending “public trust landscapes”. Public Trust Landscapes are the web of forests, soils, wetlands and streams which creates ecological functions that are shared by all and are held in trust for our children: water quantity, water quality, flood storage, biodiversity, carbon storage, agricultural production capacity, and fish and wildlife populations. Private landowners when left isolated in global markets, have proven to degrade neglect these public trust functions.

We need to rebuild a cultural foundation for stewardship. By working, eating, and telling stories around a fire in cultivated semi-wild forest gardens we grow new relationships among people and with the earth, and are happier. By cultivating our needs locally we reduce our dependency on global colonial-industrial systems and thereby reduce harm, and create new opportunities. Bioregional regeneration is tangible work. Wetlands, streams, rivers and floodplains have been damaged and neglected. If bioregionalism doesn’t naturally tend land through cultural processes, without being instructed to do so by institutions or only when seeking personal income, it reeks of fakery. Landscape regeneration and stewardship must be a lifestyle choice.

Here is my hypothetical model, corresponding with the diagram above, with key elements from the diagram capitalized in text: BIOCULTURAL RESTORATION FIELD STATIONS are the place where LOCAL BIOREGIONAL GROUPS can congregate to tend patches of vegetation. Patches of vegetation make up woods and wetlands, and woods and wetlands make up landscapes. To arrive at any site and work comfortably using local energy sources, we develop FIELD STATION INFRASTRUCTURE–a tool kit of appropriate technology that conveniently also provides education about how to live sustainably, as well as disaster resilience. While stepping away, and living at a field station we are momentarily carbon positive, restoring ecosystems, and among colleagues, close to nature.

SPRING DESIGN CHARRETTES are annual gatherings hosted by a field station where we redesign specific ecosystem patches. These designs inform our work in the landscapes around field stations. These collaborative and iterative design efforts both depends on and generate NATIVE AGROFORESTRY DESIGN RESOURCES–the lists and practices and patterns that inform how we semi-wild vegetation. We can collectively store and retrieve these resources on the SALISH SEA WIKI.

By doing good work, field stations create friendships and trust. Friends expand land access through an increasingly sophisticated LANDS MANAGEMENT PROGRAM. Our institutional stewardship of public trust landscapes is currently a mess of private parcels, regulations and government incoherence. This requires organization and improvement. Only a locally developed program can re-integrate private, local, state, and federal regulations and incentives into a coherent system. Land managers can then enroll in such a program and make friends and gain benefits and freedom, within a system of responsible stewardship.

Design resources and land access organized around management empowers MORE PRIVATE OPERATORS cultivating native agroforestry systems in public trust landscapes–we start to grow food and materials while restoring biodiversity and ecological functions in our damaged and neglected commons. These emerging production systems are incubated by the network of bioregional groups, that support incubation with labor and infrastructure.

Local bioregional groups in turn independently support the development of more groups. We cultivate strength through FALL BIOREGIONAL STUDY COHORTS–offering bioregional integrated social-ecological design parallel to and complementing existing educational institutions. Through these study groups, we cultivate a NETWORK STRATEGY to increase information exchange, and how to cultivate shared knowledge on the SALISH SEA WIKI (including design resources, social and physical infrastructure prototypes, management templates, and networking strategies). We refine a shared map of a social and ecological commons; an expanding public trust landscape. We build our ability to engage in productive local governance, modify local codes to support regenerative lifestyles, and develop more field stations to gather more groups.

I am not suggesting this model as an institutional possession or an authorized effort. I am suggesting a pattern for increasing shared assets and creating new authorities, adjacent to and complementary to existing institutions and authorities. All these components would be open-sourced and designed for collective stewardship by independent but coherent groups. I am investing my imagination, labor and time in this model, because I believe it has potential. I am happy to adapt as I get feedback, I’d like to work with you.

I am encouraging our formation of prototype groups around our first field station on the Lower Skykomish on a hundred acres of riparian forest. We have three gatherings scheduled through winter. Our first hosts are the Tulalip Tribes and the Snohomish Conservation District. We have a functioning risk management model and land access agreement. Many many more sites with neglected vegetation and soils in beautiful and ecologically important locations are waiting. You, my dear reader, are part of a potential bioregional group. With friends of friends you number in the thousands. Our infrastructure is rudimentary but slowly growing: fast group shelters, portable wood fired cooking and heating, mobile composting toilets. We have much to learn and do. We have some incoming resources to help willing groups develop infrastructure. I am personally working on a simple portable high-draft wood burning heater/stove. We anticipate our first design charrette this spring of 2023. I began networking around regulatory and incentive program coordination seven years ago, and we are positioned to launch a more formal venture this spring. A flood of state and federal grant makers are hungry to fund anyone with a coherent solution to our ecological crisis. The Salish Sea Wiki is getting an upgrade and migrating to ownership by the Society for Ecological Restoration. There is work for many hands. I propose we host our first bioregional study cohort this fall.

I would love to hear your thoughts, questions or concerns. Even more, I would love to talk around the campfire at a field station.

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Update 10 :: 2022 Leaf Fall

I thought I was going to publish an update during Harvest, but here we are deep into Leaf Fall. In this update I have left introductory text in green italics to provide an overview of my mega-project for people seeing an update for the first time. It also reminds me of what I am trying to do. Each time around I make changes to update or clarify my evolving strategies.

I am trying to manifest a vision for an “ecosystem guild”. I imagine a network of communities (groups of groups) that are collaborating in the regeneration of our lands and waters, We are guided by values, and learning how to share resources. I am trying to summon this ecosystem guild by creating what I imagine to be its necessary infrastructure.

I envision four pieces of infrastructure: biocultural restoration field stations, watershed maps, an open knowledge network, and local strongholds. These four pieces work together. This framework is a hypotheses, to be “adaptively managed” (read more about my assessment framework). Maps and the wiki provide a shared platform. Strongholds gather at field stations to share resources and prototype.

Since the last update I’ve been heavily focused on building a prototype field station, and on updating and building an institutional platform for the Salish Sea Wiki.

Bio-Cultural Restoration Field Stations

Problem: Camping is the least expensive way to visit a place. It increases our connection to the land. Shared residence builds relationships. Our culture and institutions prevent us from camping in the public commons to restore and study. Commons are neglected and have become the domain of experts and institutions. Gathering to study and work thereby requires lots of preparations and cashflow. We do ecosystem work from desks and offices. In all these ways, our alienation from the living earth and each other is exacerbated. For 300,000 years in human culture we tend places through inhabitation, working, eating, and telling stories around the fire.

Target: Develop a culturally-driven process whereby groups from strongholds can gather on restoration sites for days to weeks to work, build relationships, exchange knowledge and cultivate common pool resources.

Tactics: identify initial willing land managers on public trust lands, host camping events around the restoration process, and prototype customs and infrastructure that enable self-organization and replication. Develop study and design resources that support this work. Build allies by providing a unique and valuable contribution in areas where the existing restoration industry is weak.

Guild Integration: field stations are the central social event around which the Guild develops. Field stations use the wiki to build shared knowledge. Field stations create and use watershed maps for learning, communication and as a knowledge store. Field stations are a crossroads where strongholds build relationships and exchange resources, beliefs and stories. Participating in field stations enables each stronghold to establish their own field stations.

After a hustle (and with special thanks to Carrie and Sarah) we gathered at our first field station on a northern bend in the Skykomish River just outside Monroe. The land is the old 260-acre Reiner Farm, now owned by the Washington Farmland Trust, and leased to the Werkhoven Dairy. A riparian portion is ultimately scheduled to be purchased by the Tulalip Tribes of Washington.

Thirteen people arrived from 6 different social groups: Songaia Cohousing, The Pond Beyond, Portland, Olympia, Lopez Island and Burners Without Borders. We set up camp, spent the night, cleared around a 1/4 acre of knotweed and blackberry. We talked a lot. A fair amount of time was spent telling and framing the vision of the ecosystem guild and biocultural restoration field stations and how they fit into the world as we know it. Then smoke came down the valley from The Bolt Creek Fire, and chased us out.

This update is only a quick overview of the event. I need to spend more time immediately after big events to write down all my thoughts. Interestingly I’ve been reading Susie Wise’s Design for Belonging, and it has been shaping and reframing my memories. More about that later.

The structure and sequence camp was based on our draft Ecosystem Guild Handbook, which outlines roles. I played site steward and many other roles, the conservation district was our institutional sponsor, and we had five protogroups. I issued a invitation and groups arrived Friday, registering as volunteers for SCD. We opened the station over dinner around the fire covering site access details and taboos. We had our full safety training at the beginning of our morning work session, and then, having decided to abandon camp because of worsening smoke, hand a long debriefing before leaving, in lieu of our planned open space. While the camp was shorter than expected, being on site, doing a day of work, and meeting each other was more than worthwhile.

Camp had an entrance tent with the info board, a shoes-off gathering space, paved with tarps. We ended up with a “tool shed” area (made of tarps) on one side of the gathering space for tools, a kitchen on the other (with a table from the Songaia crew, and a fire circle towards the river. People found spaces for tents on the edge of the clearing. In the future we are anticipate tent sites along a circumambulatory trial through the surrounding restoration site, our Skykomish “mother garden”.

One exciting development is that this crew wants to take on winter camps! We will be scheduling a series of camps in January, February and March, and renewing outreach and recruitment. These will take our existing camp formation processes, push us to rapidly develop forest farming strategies, and increase the complexity by throwing in winter weather and earlier than expected plantings. Daily temperature runs 30-45 degrees F, you get measurable rainfall one day in two, and see a patch of blue sky one day in four. We’ll expect around 21 inches of rain in those three months (33 inches in heavy years).

Winter camp is also the time for all propagation (seeds, divisions, cuttings, transplants). Jumping into winter camp is also stimulated by resources secured from the conservation commission to acquire plants. The timing isn’t great, because we really haven’t completed a solid site assessment, and haven’t developed a strong model for vegetation communities in the valley, but we know enough to start work.

Having funding drive the program rather than the other way around is not an uncommon situation in the restoration industry. The kind of restoration I want to explore involves more site preparation and more careful timing, to enable higher biodiversity plantings of smaller stock. Its also very late in the year to procure materials. Supply lines in Puget Sound are already strained and getting plant orders lined up during summer is better practice. In the future I expect we’ll end up contract growing to achieve our desired biodiversity and to leverage seed collecting of local genetics. Now we’ll be coming into a barely cleared site with purchased plants.

We will make the best of it. I anticipate three strategies: 1) experimental seeding of native forbs on cleared bare ground between mulch strips that in the future will be scythe-mowed to suppress knotweed and blackberry regrowth, 2) fast growing trees (alder, willow, cottonwood) in the mulch strips to increase shade and provide mulch and an initial crop of poles, cuttings, bark and oils, and 3) pockets of selected species in selected and intensively prepared mother garden areas to produce divisions and seed for future plantings. In general this all involves acceleration of the management planning process in a way that undermines a nicely paced community design process. That may be OK, because perhaps by me leading the first run, I can prototype processes and resources that will support the leadership of thers, just as I have been doing with the infrastructure. There are plenty of neglected forests in our future for everyone to have a turn at designing experiments. Initial work will essentially translate syntropic agroforestry concepts, into an invasive species conversion setting, experimenting with root exhaustion in alleys and harvesting biomass from alleys into mulch strips at around a 1:4 ratio.

A European scythe with long brush blade and long machete were critical hand tools.

There were also several participants that want to involve youth and children, to make the field station available to families, which is not supported by our institutional sponsor. I think reaching this objective may require self-insurance or coordination with an additional institutional sponsor (perhaps 4H or another group that already works with kids in a community-led setting). In addition, adults working at camp with youth will likely need background checks. This challenge is surmountable, but there are so many other immediate needs, I cannot make this a personal effort right now. I also appreciate not having integration of kids at the start (spoken with the greatest love and extensive experience working with kids). Ultimately however, I think it is very important for families to be able to participate–the segregation and isolation of families from these processes seems unnatural. Part of this work is developing skill with more effective and therefore more dangerous tools. How we think about children and safety and parenting in a group field work environment however will require some careful conversations.

One thing that I do want to note: the commitment and passion of participants was very high. I suspect that for this crew to arrive at some mysterious dead end farm road, prepared to spend a couple nights demanded some effort. Because of this the people that showed up were passionate explorers. “Biocultural restoration” was the right dog whistle. I suspect that rising to challenge and sharing responsibility is an important part of this emerging system. I feel so grateful. If we can learn to continue to build our numbers and pull this halyard together it will be the beginning of something quite extraordinary. I suspect there are a large number of people who would like to spend more time living in the woods, increasing our skills, knowledge, and abilities, and working together to build a culture of stewardship.

The first 13 members of the Skykomish Biocultural Restoration Field Station standing amid cut knotweed and blackberry, to be processed into a strip mulched alley cropping system.

So in short, it feels like we are on the track to a continuous seasonal schedule, with strong morale. I can also feel the pressure to accelerate the work, driven by the industry we are adjacent to. The restoration industry likes acres and miles, and has very little sense of quality or the cultural component. That dynamic will need to be managed. At the same time, my tendency is to rehearse excessively and so opening up the throttle might be a fine thing. I just don’t want us to be used by a industrial system that uses labor like it were a machine rather than a whole person.

With a draft set of dates, I am working on the next invitation to winter camps, a shared calendar, a more streamlined and distributed RSVP and registration system, and thinking through how administrative processes can differentiate between new groups and old groups, and individuals within groups that are registered or unregistered volunteers, and how to manage training and coordination among all these people over time.

So this brings me back long way around to Susie Wise’s Design for Belonging. I’ve been a book group at our cohousing community. She describes the human experience of belonging or not belonging as built from a series of moments. The moments of an experience are a kind of choreography: invite, commit, prepare, arrive, register, set up camp, introduce, explore, work, take responsibility, share ideas, express frustration, hear the needs of others. How do we cultivate a choreography that brings us closer to each other and builds a stronger more complete shared vision?

Each camp is an experiment. At this camp, the process of parking was acceptable, but could have easily gone worse. Dealing with lots of cars during arrival or an event day could be challenging. The tool shed concept worked well, but stewardship was necessary. There are lots of bits of “stuff” involved in a work camp. The sharing of food and kitchen will be a future experiment–I anticipate a tension between fossil fuel convenience and becoming wood-fired and carbon neutral. The creation of spaces was unexpected, lovely, and I think vital (who created an alter of fall offerings in the center pf the shoes off area?!). Creating a clear threshold between the parking area and the camp, including the information board, worked well if for no other reason than it kept me administratively organized and ready at the threshold. The info board is evolving to contain everything necessary in the world of paper. The process of greeting and introducing was compromised by the process of registration. There were awkward moments among people who had never met. Distributing responsibilities among recurring guests will make it all flow more beautifully. I could feel a deep sense of shared care.

Having more than one day of work will be very valuable. We could spend more time after a day revisiting the strategy, the results, walking and talking and comparing different outcomes and how those outcomes affect future choices. There is a lot of value and importance in the nuance of work–how one quick choice, quickly drivers another choice, leading down roads you may or may not want to be on. You can double your work and halve your effectiveness by not seeing the details and implications, or not taking them seriously. The labor management was very challenging at a 1 to 12 ratio over one day. We left a bit of a mess for the next crew, but in all fairness we were hoping for another day. All that said, I can see down the road, when we become more comfortable with our techniques and strategies, how powerful this format will become. When we become a recurring crew with shared knowledge and traditions, we will be so powerful!

Carrie and I are presenting to the Snohomish Conservation District Board of Supervisors, to fill them in on the process we have initiated. They agreed to support the volunteer policy, and want to hear a little more about what we have talked them into. They are an elected body for Snohomish County. I am a little apprehensive if they get preoccupied with the wilder edges of my big picture thinking (my industry tends to prefer the practical outputs of known quantities) but I think they will appreciate the approach.

Another piece of the puzzle that I am excited to test is a work tracking and social feedback mechanism. This is described in The Handbook as the “field station log”, and hasn’t been implemented at the Skykomish Field Station. We need a tool that makes it easy for any individual to contribute to the shared learning and memory of a field station. This tool will need to help us refine our contributions and build over time. I can’t wait to get this piece in motion. The coherence of information flow is so important for experimental restoration work and is so poorly modeled in our existing on-the-ground restoration systems. Our culture is also pretty wrapped in shame and ego, so creating learning environments can be hard. Ultimately one of the special contributions of the field stations will be to support learning. Documenting what we do were is critical for this. We need to learn to set goals and remember.

Needs: The greatest challenge is to start distributing responsibility for the infrastructure. I have one group that has expressed interest in hosting a kitchen. I developed a very detailed breakdown of roles as a way of debriefing myself. I was running a large number of roles in parallel, as well as letting a number of roles go unattended. A strong need is for groups that have participated in one field station to participate in future field stations, to create that continuity and develop our ability to remember and refine systems that serve our shared goals.

Links

Biocultural Restoration Field Station Wiki Page

Reiner Farm Wiki Page

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 social systems in which we live. Without maps we are blind and dependent on others to interpret reality. Abstracted from place, ecological knowledge becomes weak. Maps are a key form of knowledge storage.

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 (see assessment framework).

Tactics –  develop a print-on-demand web store, start producing and distributing prototype maps. Use existing public data to build a series of GIS projects that allow me to rapidly generate useful maps at a site, landscape, and watershed scale.

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. Field stations store knowledge in maps. Maps describe repeated patterns in the landscape that leads to shared strategies.

I have set aside the map making venture a bit in favor of working on field stations and the wiki. Watershed Maps is up and running.

I did crank out a quick set of maps to support education about the Lower Skykomish River Valley, and they are now available on the Wiki. I suspect there is a standard set of assessment tools that can be developed regionally and produced for any landscape unit to support biocultural restoration work.

This first set of maps provides an overview of a floodplain reach that puts the site in a landscape context.

A second set of maps (below) supports site-scale landscape analysis–placing work areas within a local geomorphic context. These maps often require accessing county level analyses. The maps shown below shows hydrology layers I generated through analysis of digital elevation models. These initial maps don’t include new layers I have recently acquired that describe relative flood frequency and depth.

Finally there is a third set of maps that are useful for site documentation work where we can delineate zones to document our work in the context of local vegetation and landform. While google and bing have tiled aerial photo layers, there are higher resolution aerial images that can be had from county-acquired overflights that give us 6-inch pixel resolution. With these higher resolution aerials, trees become landmarks for finding your way on sites. Zone delineation lets us estimate area. Quantifying area helps us project labor, supplies, and productivity to new sites.

Railroad camp site map, with 100 foot grid for scale. No zones delineated.

NEEDS – I would love to create a series of videos that provide everyone with an introduction to the site before arriving at camp, but I won’t have time for that without help. I would love to distribute any ecological maps if you’d like to use the watershedmaps.com site.

LINKS: 

Watershed Maps Website

Ecosystem Maps on The Wiki

Salish Sea Wiki

Problem: knowledge storage and retrieval among ecosystem management institutions is dysfunctional, with critical knowledge of our social-ecological systems alternately hoarded or lost. Only insiders know how ecosystem management works. Existing agencies and their websites are forgetful and shallow, and tell stories to promote institutions and obscure deep knowledge of place.

Target: A mixture of bureaucrats, scientists, students, activists and volunteers tend an open knowledge network that enables cross-institutional knowledge capture, storage and retrieval about social and ecological structures, processes, and dynamics in the Salish Sea. Knowledge is organized around places, efforts and topics. 

Countermeasures –  move salishsearestoration.org to the Society for Ecological Restoration as a bioregional prototype, upgrade the system, and develop a broader community of practice, by finding clients, and integrating wiki use into existing programs and efforts.

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.

We are in position for a major upgrade to the wiki. We have a great vendor in hand. The scope of work and costs are defined, and funding is in hand. The Society for Ecological Restoration has agreed to be the institutional sponsor. We are now grinding through the process of actually getting a contract in place.

This is just in the nick of time too! The wiki is long overdue for a version update. The site is starting to crash with “504 gateway timeouts”. Unfortunately I don’t know what that means and am completely dependent on a volunteer host who has been supporting the wiki for far too long without compensation. It will work out in the end, but it has been so slow.

The wiki upgrade is creating mechanisms for reconsidering and improving our category taxonomy, as well as the motive to start considering the spatial strategy. Ultimately, I would like the wiki to be organized around user-defined places. A place is some geography with a natural ecological and social boundary that means something to someone. All the systems created top-down by regional assessments are great building blocks but they don’t reflect personal or actual social-ecological dynamics. Social-ecological systems have a quality that is not revealed through landscape analysis. It is learned through participation. I think using the wiki to capture this sense of place will be important.

Image shows Two layers of Hydrologic Unit Codes further subdivided by Puget Sound Watershed Characterization assessment units, and coastal drainage units defined by the Puget Sound Nearshore Ecosystem Restoration Project. Counties and Watershed Resource Inventory areas are superimposed. All systems have unique strengths and weaknesses. At what scales do we categorize information?

However, while each place is unique, there are recurring patterns of place that define the kinds of pressures and injuries and responses that similar places may call for. Two places on opposite sites of the Salish Sea may face very similar challenges. Can the wiki be designed to help people in those places find each other and find common cause?

The restructuring of categories will be implemented through use of the Cargo Extension which will allow association of data with specific pages, including a relational database of categories, spatial data, and will support the use a page template for quality assurance. Here is a draft peak at the evolving wiki category schema. I am consulting with agency allies to figure out how the wiki can reflect the way that current institutions think about knowledge and topics, and have been reviewing the DPSIR framework, for all its warts, to support that consideration.

Lots more to come on this front.

LINKS

Salish Sea Restoration Wiki

Operating Agreement

Networks of Strongholds

Problem – The restoration industry is poorly resourced compared to the challenges we face, and we struggle to evolve, corrupted by hierarchical institutions and 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. Create resource sharing systems that let groups self-organize in common cause, and leverage each other’s accomplishments.

Tactics – 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.

At this point in time, my work on local strongholds is necessarily going to slow way down. Olympia Coalition for Ecosystems Preservation is doing exciting work I would love to support. There are exciting grant opportunities emerging out of the Strategic Initiative Leads using federal funds. I have more project concepts than I can build teams and write grants. I want to start looking into a college student mentorship program, but the graduate student lifecycle is mismatched to doing real work.

Two of my cohousing neighbors are excited to start campfires. As we come into the transplanting season I want to get my nursery in the ground, and plant a new wave of seeds, cuttings and divisions. I am starting to talk with some community allies about investing in more fruit trees and forest edge restoration for forage. As a housing cooperative, we have the opportunity to offer housing as part of a relationship with folks. Our community is getting old, because we don’t offer rental group housing. How does this overlap with internship?

More community development and the neighborhood scale will need to wait. All will come in good time. What I do want to do is to strengthen and reach out to friends and colleagues who want to build a Olympia Crew that can regularly participate in field stations. I have been so focused at the regional model development scale, I haven’t spent the time building my own group.

The 2023 city council election will include four of seven seats. Developing a bioregional vision statement around that election may be a useful play to start considering.

Development of a field station on Skookum Creek or on Henderson Inlet, or even at the Cooper Crest community forest are all possibilities that would accelerate group formation. Having somewhere to gather, and something to gather around has value.

Patience. Field Stations first, stabilize the wiki, then strongholds.

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.

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Why Biocultural Restoration Field Stations?

A reflection on philosophical positioning on the eve of Camp Skykomish

The goal of “biocultural restoration field stations” is to create a “generative space” that is capable of exploring and interacting with social-ecological evolution in specific places. This “generative space” is useful because our culture is hurtling towards a forced transformation. Our broad global colonial-industrial social vision of endless consumption and progress is now meeting ecological limits of global carrying capacity, as we encounter the degradation of water, soil and biodiversity accelerated by climate change. I propose that study, experimentation and evolution will require what I would describe as “immersive place-based” education. 

Restoration commonly aims to increase interaction between streams and rivers and forests to undo channelization and simplification from agricultural development.

In the lowland Salish Sea, the “river forest” is a particularly poignant example of a kind of place in the thrall of complex unintended outcomes. The “river forest” is at the intersection of complex social-ecological drivers. In Salish Sea floodplains, rivers historically wrestled with forests within a post glacial geomorphic setting, to create a complex habitat mosaic–the foundation of the salmon nation. In addition to being the foundation of biodiversity and wild flood production, these same floodplain corridors contain core transportation, housing, and energy infrastructure, core food production systems, critical above and below-ground water sources, and are the flashpoint for future flood hazard under climate change. From a bioregional perspective, these river-forest corridors are exceptionally valuable and irreplaceable. Under declining global food security, urban areas will turn to floodplains for survival.

Floodplains offer a powerful experimental and learning space to engage diverse social-ecological drivers. It is this convergence of diverse forces in real places that foils our cognition. We can’t figure out how to survive, unless we learn how to live in actual places. We cannot learn those patterns until we immerse ourselves in those specific places. 

Consider the following social-ecological drivers that are at work in the Skykomish:

  • Marketplace rewards for personal achievement, both through extraction and processing of natural resources, investment in infrastructure, real estate speculation, all positioned within a global and information-based economy in flux.
  • Public infrastructure investments in common pool resources, including capital investment in fishery habitats, management of natural hazards, water quality and quantity, sometimes in conflict with enhancement of transportation and energy infrastructure.
  • The unraveling of ecological systems, including the evolution of rivers, change in climate and hydrology and forest structure interacting over geomorphic time both affecting and affected by shifting keystone populations of salmonids, beaver, ungulates and flora.
  • Cultural dynamics of belonging and separateness, with attempts to join or isolate among interdependent rural, urban, and tribal communities within the United States.
  • The structure of ownership and the control of land, from colonization to the holdings of agricultural and forestry families and conglomerates, to rapid subdivision under population growth.
  • Legal and regulatory systems and constraints, with increasing competition to control county land use zoning and ordinance systems using state and federal law.
  • Risks posed by mass migration, insider-outsider dynamics perhaps best described in Steinbeck’s the Grapes of Wrath.

Many of these drivers evolve as interest groups exercise control and power over large scale socio-economic systems far away from actual places like the Skykomish. These socio-economic systems affecting the Skykomish Valley are both divorced from place and inextricably entwined with places. In short, the local outcomes of these drivers are typically unintended. Places manifest the intersection of drivers, not the intent of individual drivers or the will of those who live in the place. This is why immersive place-based education is so vital as communities wrestle at the unintended confluence of forces beyond their control. We face predicaments without solutions, but which require responses.

The purpose of the field station is to construct a generative educational and experimental environment within a place that can explore and interact with social-ecological systems. These field stations willfully center ecological systems, as the foundation of human existence and the source of all tangible wealth. This ecological focus could be considered a bias, or as a correction to abstracted economies of the colonial-industrial enterprise. Regardless, this shift to starting from an ecological assessment of place is useful, if for no other reason than it asks us to shift perspective, while not losing sight of the essential interactions between social systems and ecological systems.

The construction of a field station is intentionally “industry-adjacent”, such that we aim to create an experimental space that lives very close to existing social-economic systems, but is also relatively independent of any one social-economic system. In the case of the Skykomish Field Station we seek a position that is adjacent to multiple sectors: ecological restoration, food and material production, and flood hazard mitigation–the farm, fish and flood nexus. This is necessary so that experiments can entrain existing resources and engage existing actors, and thus provide opportunities for substantive experimentation and feedback specific to place.

Maps and mapping become much more critical elements of place-based education.

By creating a nomadic residential capability in an industry-adjacent position we create two effects. Attending the field station involves a temporary separation from the existing social-ecological culture. This creates an opportunity to investigate the accouterments of human survival–food, water, shelter and care–in an immediate and tangible way. This experience attracts people that are willing and able to shift their position in ecological systems.  In addition, a nomadic residential experience is extremely inexpensive, reducing operating costs and increasing accessibility. This results in a system that can grow rapidly, and that incidentally supports natural disaster resilience and even explores aspects of our increasingly complicated relationship with homelessness.

At this intersection, we aim to create a novel generative space where individuals can explore the intersection of social-ecological drivers in ways that deconstruct and reintegrate the divergent forces described above. In this setting we can become direct actors, investigators, and reporters of a specific place–the Skykomish Valley–which is representative of tens of thousands of acres of uniquely important social-ecological landscape throughout the Salish Sea bioregion.

Immersive place-based education is a recognition that these divergent and conflicting social and ecological systems have and will have cumulative effects in real places. Meaningful cultivation of a resilient and regenerative culture in real places requires creative work in very entangled spaces. By observing what has happened, what is happening, and what could happen in these real places, and creating experimental spaces for exploration of alternatives, we can better understand the actual systematic environment in which our evolution will unfold.

This is particularly important under ongoing global ecological collapse.  In this way, the development of biocultural restoration fields stations is a carefully constructed open-ended response to a wicked problem.

The “undeveloped” location of the Skykomish Field Station.

Biocultural restoration field stations start with a weekend camping adventure on the banks of a river. People work, eat, sleep and play together. There we ask, “why are we here?” and seek to identify and develop small practical ways we can beneficially interact with a degraded ecological system through the practices of restoration and agroforestry. This serves as our initial topic–agroforestry and restoration in large river floodplain riparian zones and wetlands. The founders of Camp Skykomish suspect that evolution at this nexus may affect the future condition of the river forest corridor, enabling large-scale restoration and stewardship of a productive and resilient ecosystem. However the project does not end there. By establishing the field station as a viable location for groups to gather, we create the opportunity for an inclusive and inexpensive place-based education that can be replicated anywhere in the Salish Sea–the envisioned collaborative work of an “Ecosystem Guild”.

A critical place then becomes: how do we construct an educational context, that supports investigation and experimentation, and that can remain productively industry-adjacent? The educational industry, just like the restoration industry, is another social-ecological construct. In the existing educational system an immersive place-based education is only offered at a post-secondary level and only pursued by a small fraction of the population. How can the operation of a biocultural restoration field station, provide immersive place-based educational experiences that resonate within the education industry, but are also independent of that industry?

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Update 9 :: 2022 Summer Solstice

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: 

Watershed Maps Website

Ecosystem Maps on The Wiki

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

Salish Sea Restoration Wiki

Operating Agreement

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.

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Invitation to Join the Skykomish Field Station

Join Us At A Bio-cultural Restoration Field Station

Join us for a weekend camping on the Lower Skykomish River, near Monroe Washington. We will learn about native plants, environmental horticulture, and river restoration, restore forests, and develop forest gardens in neglected riparian forests. We operate as volunteers of the Snohomish Conservation District, hosted by the Washington Farmland Trust, Werkhoven Dairy, and The Tulalip Tribes of Washington (the future owners of these riparian parcels). But foremost we will be developing a prototype for a bio-cultural restoration field station—a mix of learning, teaching, restoration, and relaxation. We are hoping you might help develop our Ecosystem Guild.

The Next Field Station Is February 23-25!

Join the Skykomish Field Station
Our prototype camp is on a lovely swimming beach on the Skykomish River!

WHAT IS THE ECOSYSTEM GUILD? – The guild is a volunteer network of groups that collaborate to tend our ecological commons. We work to build local groups that can do this work because tending ecosystems will require many many groups of groups motivated by their values and interests and developing their skills and abilities.

WHY MIGHT I BE INTERESTED IN RESTORATION FIELD STATIONS? – You might be a good fit for bio-cultural restoration field stations because you: 1) enjoy building community living outdoors using appropriate technology; 2) are passionate about restoring ecosystems both as human habitat and for the benefit of a greater-than-human community of life; 3) want to explore how to cultivate cultural infrastructure that is more capable of ecosystem stewardship; 4) are interested in developing practical restoration and ecosystem tending skills; 5) are curious about a wide range of viewpoints and want to cultivate a prosocial environment around restoration; and 6) are willing to follow the lead of a site steward and to be a gracious guest.

We are mindful of the whole of nature.

WHAT DOES AN ECOSYSTEM GUILD DO AT A FIELD STATION? – Field stations assess, design, install, tend, and monitor restoration sites. We live on-site while we work, to build a deeper and more nuanced understanding of ecosystems. Field stations aim to be an experiment in a regenerative, place-based, egalitarian culture. Your group is autonomous and self-governing. and responds to an invitation from a site steward with access to a piece of our ecological commons. For the purpose of prototyping on the Skykomish River the Snohomish Conservation District is our first Institutional Sponsor. We imagine our guild as a mix of professional training, crafts festival, skill exchange, rotary club, and conservation corps all with a relaxing work schedule in beautiful places.

We focus our work on riverscapes, the veins of the Salish Sea.

WHY FIELD STATIONS? – We suspect that the root of our ecological problems (and a fair number of social problems) is baked into our culture, which is in ecological overshoot—this is likely to end poorly. We suspect a viable human culture will regenerate and tend ecosystems as part of its lifestyle. We propose to step away from our busy industrial and institutional lives, live simply in public trust landscapes, and restore them. We can then back-engineer the traditions and infrastructures necessary to do the work of biocultural restoration gracefully and pleasurably so that learning ecological restoration in a community becomes a cultural birthright.

WHAT IS BIOCULTURAL RESTORATION? Biocultural restoration is a term coined by the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York and is the science and practice of restoring not only ecosystems but also human and cultural relationships to place, such that cultures are strengthened and revitalized alongside the lands with which they are inextricably linked.

We share our experience with tool selection and maintenance.

WHAT HELP DO YOU NEED? – In 2023 we are doing site assessment, design, and preparation for winter planting, developing our guild culture, and developing infrastructure. Our culture is inclusive and flexible, our infrastructure is bootstrapped, and we will learn by doing. We hope to expand from a small experiment to a large guild at multiple sites, supplied with plants and working under interesting restoration and stewardship agreements. We intend to build a self-replicating system that is self-organizing and that both coexists with and compliments our ecosystem restoration industry.

Part of the winter camp for 2023.

WHAT HAPPENS AT CAMP? We work for around 4 hours in the morning based on a work plan organized by site stewards implementing a stewardship plan in alignment with the seasons. We study plant communities, soils, and hydrology in the Lower Skykomish Riverscape and refine restoration designs while developing places to gather, eat, and sleep on site. In the afternoon we trade ideas and crafts, design camp culture, and take care of ourselves and each other. We explore camping strategies such as the use of renewable fuels and composting waste that minimize both embedded and operating energy use and maximize reliance on local resources. This is a participatory experiment. We want people to feel safe. We have clear agreements and define the responsibilities of all parties before camp as part of an Ecosystem Guild Handbook.

WHAT NEXT? – Think about how you might form a group, and follow the link below to sign up for a field station. Each field station lasts from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon (with an option to camp until Monday morning). During startup, groups are largely self-provisioning, but with access to non-potable water and sanitation. Our goal during these initial events is to make it simple and easy to just show up so we can talk and plan around the campfire, and design an ecosystem guild.

Join the Skykomish Field Station
Join the Skykomish Field Station

Learn more about biocultural restoration field stations and the guild vision

Learn more about our vision for regenerative riverscape agroforestry in this 16-minute video:

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Update 8 :: 2022 Springtime

I am going to switch style and focus on facts, offerings and needs, and ignore the prose. The last update was a messy year in the making.

Guild Infrastructure

I’ve cut out reflections on my day-job, just to be more efficient with updates. Instead I offer this section on what I call “guild infrastructure”. These projects are to build supporting webs that help the formation of a guild around mobile restoration field stations.

Salish Sea Wiki

We have a pool of resources at an agency targeting the wiki, and a draft operating agreement with a non-profit interested in operating. The trick was creating a legal and financial structure to accommodate change, while protecting purpose. The result is to establish a standard operating agreement using sociocratic principles of consent. Funders can contract for deliverables, but the contract references the operating agreement, and the new funder can then take a seat at the table with the consent of the existing circle. The purposes and principles are defined in the operating agreement. This allows new partners to join, while protecting the original intent, while allowing new partners to seek functions that are within the goals of the wiki. I have a “operating agreement” if anyone wants to see it in detail.

I just developed an update for the Snohomish Delta, in the form of the timeline. It is clear that this is a useful wiki page tactic for places to effectively organizes information. I now suspect that at some point, places pages will slip from a collection of factoids, into a chronology as stewardship work begins. Understanding how information piles evolve into curated information will be important for onboarding and training.

Before next update I will be releasing a Request for Qualifications through Society for Ecological Restoration, who has agreed to be the sponsor of the project. I will be looking for a host and maintenance vendor. I am looking for members of a volunteer technical team that have capacity for pro bono professional quality enhancement (for example a computer science program at a university). I hope to quickly move towards spatial data integration so that wiki pages can be associated with georeferenced polygons, and wiki pages attributed, through the position of thier polygon, in spatial relationships with other pages.

NEEDS – I need new institutional sponsors for the wiki that will pay money for services, or finance improvements, while respecting the purposes of the platform. Targets include professional organizations, NGOs, agency programs that struggle with information management within their institution. We always benefit from wiki gardeners that are interested in mapping part of our 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.

Salmon Recovery Revegetation Network

I have been exploring potential mechanisms for further activating the Western Washington Riparian Network started by reveg colleagues in the Skagit. After 20 years, Puget Sound doesn’t have standard revegetation monitoring protocols. With a protocol for survival, you could develop distributed experiments across multiple sites and compile data to better understand factors affecting riparian revegetation effectiveness. We could get a faculty-graduate student team for a summer to set up the protocol and an initial experiment for less than $25k, and could whittle that down. I will explore if coordination among grant programs could generate a pool of resources to support this. More about revegetation on the Field Station update.

I have a set of around 6 field shops that want to participate but don’t have time or resources. My primary strategy here is to encourage funding agencies to pool resources to support monitoring standards. Due to a wide range of issues, this isn’t going to happen over the short term, and I will need to decide if I want to try to bootstrap.

NEED – Volunteer faculty or post-doc with vegetation ecology experience and the ability to develop a randomized block design in collaboration with a field revegetation teams.

Watershed Maps

NW Olympia Map Sheet now available in print-on-demand.

I am now the proud curator of a print on demand on-line store. The initial product line is a series of maps designed to support watershed analysis of NW Olympia–more about that later. I can now sell any high-resolution images along with other swag, and could expand to other transactions if useful. The site integrates Printful, Stripe, and WordPress. I can sell your maps as well as mine. I have a four other map folios started, and that will need to get paired down: 1) An “Estuary City” map of the larger Olympia landscape, 2) A detailed view of South Puget Sound to show detailed shorelines and water place names at the HUC12 scale. 3) A series of watershed-scale maps for the whole Puget Sound, and 4) a series of detailed maps of the San Juan Islands. In addition I want to develop maps of my first Ecological Field Station territory, discussed later.

If you’d like a map to promote your work, we can talk. I have too many ideas on this front, and will need to organize “maps days” to finish specific projects in an order that makes sense. It would be great to have cartographic apprentices to work with, but the ESRI software is expensive so this would be a good opportunity for a college student that wants to develop cartographic skills and assets.

Draft, using global population density raster to create cities connected by highways.

I tend to inefficiently work on a half dozen maps projects at once, and then make a push to get one done. Just as I defined these 4 projects, I got sidetracked on another kick of starting to sketch out the natural bioregions within which the Salish Sea is so central. I wanted to show our position as the northern-most extent of the continental empire. Places like the Spokane-Couer d’Alene city state are clearly perched between Rocky Mountains and the Columbia Plateau. I am starting to feel clearly that Cascadia is many bioregions, and that McCloskey’s vast Cascadia territory is a colonial dream compared to any hope of a future coherent culture of place.

NEED – Cartographers to generate ecological, bioregional, or watershed maps that we can give to their friends through the website.

Restoration Field Stations

I think we are on the path to a first mobile restoration field stations. The client would be the Tulalip Tribes. The site is recently acquired riparian forest along the Lower Skykomish River. The sites are severely damaged and neglected, with 200 to 1000 foot buffers of cottonwood, with some overstocked CREP plantings, patches of blackberry and knotweed, and some native remnants. There are many target opportunities from where the Skykomish drops into the lower valley, which is a critical habitat for Snohomish Chinook salmon. Like all nascent things it is a house of cards, but a particularly beautiful one that could take deep root.

Work in the summer of 2022 would focus on site assessment and culture design. A colleague and I would be the “stewards”, and we would all be guests of the tribe as “host”–and will need to focus on being good guests. As the prototype steward, I am preparing an invitation that meets the needs of the host. In short, I would like to be part of a system built around small coherent local groups of people that form something like “clans/chapters/groups” that are willing to collaborate to sustain restoration field stations. All the capabilities of the guild live in the groups. A “steward” would put out a call for groups after negotiating with a host, describe the situation, and indicate the needs. Groups would respond with availability and capabilities, and the steward would invite a set of groups that meet the needs of the site. Groups can respond to any invitation, any group can become a host or steward. Groups endorse a “guild handbook” which defines standard roles, responsibilities, expectations, and power structures. The existence of the guild depends on a shared handbook.

This follows a long tradition of organizing around small intimate groups that form effective teams. Part of the guild vision is to increase our ability to create flexible “groups of groups” rather than constantly reinventing some variation on corporate institutions because we lack small group integrity.

I expect to put out an initial call of “startup teams”–partnerships interested in group formation, that would like to bootstrap site assessment and handbook development over the summer and fall of 2022. Camp involves a light day of work (mostly inventory of soils, plans, hydrology) skill trading and co-learning in an open-space format, and relaxation by the river. Clans develop capabilities to support the field station: technical skills, camp technology, and teaching capabilities, learning goals. More coming fast.

NEED – Think about who you would partner with to form a group within your personal networks that would become a ecosystem guild group–a restoration-interested social network with a pool of useful skills that are willing to prototype a guild-based restoration field station system to restore public trust resources.

Here is a 16m video describing the concept to restoration industry audience. I anticipate the Guild System lives parallel to and overlapping the industrial-colonial restoration industry.

An Olympia Stronghold

I have initiated a conversation about engaging with Olympia Ecosystems for the purpose of top-of-watershed restoration. My vision is to define a city-endorsed plan to reclaim streets as stormwater treatment systems that also produce useful materials and food, so that we can enable community-led depaving of neighborhoods and water management in a way that creates a public commons, taking the land-base back from cars.

Exisiting stormwater strategies are generally heavy with grey infrastructure, and require government involvement, and don’t create secondary benefits. Such a vision can feed off of and complement the existing West Bay greenbelt restoration and end-of-pipe treatment being proposed for West Bay. Combining a community-based headwaters restoration with surfacing water flow and restoring greenbelts, in a way that empowers neighborhoods to create common assets seems like a good way to get beyond co-housing. These designs and any code revision could serve as transferable prototypes.

This initial work would revolve around money. I suspect the first step is the build a support network for a small group of students, and then secure a grant. I am initiating a series of interviews to figure out who the essential core team could be, to set a price, and identify target funding sources (for example Ecology integrated stormwater programs or the EPA Stormwater Strategic Initiative Lead).

I will be looking for partners to work with on this one, and am focused on defining the big picture, key talking points, and aligning a university sponsor with a support network. This is a good opportunity for someone that wants to learn about project development for a grant writing context. I was going to start with a Kaizen Gemba style A3 summary. The output would be conceptual designs, feasibility, and a couple pilots where we could de-pave city right of way to create stormwater harvesting to to produce willow coppice and blueberries. While this is exciting, this arc is going to get stalled out in favor of field station work.

NEED – This is a major project, and would be difficult to handoff as half-baked as it is–you would need to construct your own feasibility: research funding sources, development of “big picture narrative”, GIS development around flow pathways, outreach to city storm-water staff, ground truthing surface flow maps, identification of high value site, and coordination with Oly Ecosystems on coordinated funding requests. I was going to start with an A3 product, but will not have time to contribute for a while. It would be great to put together a 2-year internship on this one! Anyone want a Master’s degree?

Marshall Middle School Plants for the People

Marshall Middle School is taking off, with a new grant, and matching funds from Thurston County. Bob Barnes is charging ahead with restoration following an industrial model, based on his success in state Department of Transportation. They are expanding the nursery, primarily focused on purchase and growing out Fourth Corner Nurseries bareroot stock, automated irrigation, and contracted site prep with machinery, and heavy mulch import. They are collaborating with GRUB on building demonstration gardens. I am glad this is taking root, but it doesn’t have that self-sufficient, student-led, home-grown style I always dream of. However this is better than it being plowed under. In all the progress I fear less attention is paid to cultivating leadership and skills among students and adults in the community. I fear we collect trophies without having distributed the work.

OPPORTUNITY – Approach Tom Condon at the Citizen Science Institute if you would like to volunteer at the school nursery. There is a tremendous unmet need for curriculum focused on practical restoration skill development, and a huge opportunity at the Middle School level for restoration of school grounds and contribution to local projects through plant production. I would be interested in transplanting a school nursery concept into Monroe Middle School in support of restoration field stations, and will be looking for contacts.

“Ravenwood Neighborhood“

I keep renaming my unnamed neighborhood. A pair of ravens keep coming back every spring to nest in the Schneider Creek Ravine, and they were noisy today. They periodically have to beat up the city crows that harass them.

I harvested my first batch of machete compost, where I took raw yard waste and a machette and built windrows, urinated on them and covered with weed fabric. It is serviceable as part of a mulched planting, and I have just planted an initial 30 foot bed on the forest edge. I would like to work toward syntropic-style mixed native and non-native strip planting, but need a larger collection of more species.

I’ve been adding species, and watching with curiosity what the deer take. There is a family of three does that bed nearby, and this year they are joined by a fourth young-of-the-year. They spend a lot of time foraging in our forest edge, and I am sure they shape species composition.

We are committing to cohousing and selling our old rural house, where we raised our daughter and where I gardened for 14 years. I will do one last photo documentation. So much learned there, and it was barren when we moved there and is now wild in ways that will be hard for the next owner to undo (but I fear they will, because the drive to domesticate runs deep). Me and my plant friends are waiting to see who wants to take possession in the “russian roulette” of the private property system.

I will be putting restoration work on the back burner during field station start up, but hopefully will have lots of new genetics to grow out by next fall. I tried selling some plants on next door, and will need a better system, too much work, but got enough by selling surplus to keep in potting soil.

NEED – Ivy pulling, In summer I will be looking for seeds, and in fall I will be looking for divisions and cuttings if someone in the neighborhood wants to co-op on this project I’d expand the nursery and could split the stock.

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Update 7 :: 2021 Bloom

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.

First seasons of production at the Marshall Native Plant Nursery

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.

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Schneider Creek Forest Tending

Come join in tending the Schneider Creek Forest. I restore wild vegetation for foraging, teach watershed ecology and tell stories about bioregional restoration.

The sixty acres of the Schneider Creek Ravine is the largest and most biodiverse forest remnant in West Olympia–a quiet refuge of cedar, maple, Douglas-fir and hemlock, with a understory of ferns, bleeding heart, waterleaf, vanilla leaf, yew, and lilies, and a vibrant riparian corridor with skunk currant, snowberry, nettle, devil’s club, and a community of cutthroat trout. My community owns a portion of the ravine where I do restoration.

The extent of contiguous forest is shown draped on aerial photography on a digital terrain model. The natural flow of water is in blue. I also do regional ecological cartography. 🙂

The ravine is cut into private lots but lacks stewardship. Ivy and holly encroach in the understory but the forest is still strong. The beaver colony once at the corner of Division and Harrison are gone and the watershed is cut, paved and drained. But the the land is eternally forgiving, and waiting for our friendship. I would like to develop a mutual-aid community to restore the West Bay/Schneider Creek Plateau, its waters, wetlands, soils, biomass and ecological diversity–amid a thriving human settlement rich with fruit and gardens. Through that work, and in partnership with rural strongholds I’d like to restore a regenerative bioregional culture.

There is always work to be done depending on the season. Meet at the end of Woodard Ave NW. I know the plants, and can tell stories about watershed ecology and bioregional restoration. I have 32 years of practical experience in horticulture, ecological sciences, and restoration in the Salish Sea. All ages welcome.

Click on the event title on the calendar below for details. PLEASE CHECK TO VERIFY THE DAY BEFORE A FIELD DAY! We work in varied weather but may avoid rain, and exploring may make you wet!