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. đ
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!
Olympia, Washington is on the southernmost reach of the Salish Sea, near the old glacial terminus. Farther south are the oak savannahs and outwash prairies and the Chehalis Basin floodplains. To the west past the town of Shelton are the vast forestlands of the Olympic Massif.
Olympia is arranged on a glacial plateau around 200 feet above the Deschutes River estuary. In Northwest Olympia streams have carved ravines from the plateau down to the water. That plateau was once heavy with wetlands and beaver ponds, and has since been drained and paved.
The largest ravine in Northwest Olympia was formed by Schneider Creek. Portions of the ravine are overrun with blackberry, holly, and ivy. Large areas are covered in a towering second growth overstory of douglas-fir, maple and cedar, with an understory of ferns, bleeding heart, saxifrage, waterleaf and lilies, and devil’s club, nettles, and stink currant along the stream.
Schneider Ravine is the last and largest reservoir of native forest biodiversity in NW Olympia. There is no coordinated stewardship. The ravine is chopped into a couple hundred private parcels, protected only by steep slope ordinances. The headwaters were an old swamp, now a shopping area at Harrison and Division. The stream has some nice wood, but incision from urban hydrology is visible. With water from the plateau now funneled to the ravine, the stream is cutting into its substrate.
Forest Restoration
We have started a small native plant nursery at Woodard Lane Cohousing. Once a month we work on the edge in the forest. Contact Paul Cereghino (livestake (at) gmail.com) to join.
This is a short update following our first “Ecosystem Guild Murmuration.” It was quite a personal adventure to be so visible, and produce video messages for the universe, and then to have people show up who care about what I am caring about.
This first video lays out my assessment of our situation, as a civilization in overshoot and facing global ecological collapse, and lacking the culture necessary to survive. I end with an invitation to gather together on May Day to explore what it might look like to organize and work on this problem together.
At the meeting, which I called a murmuration, I provided my assessment of the challenges of trying to build a regenerative bioregional culture based on consent, within an existing culture based on hierarchy and colonization. I outline a set of three principles that I think are important, and allow us to work better together. I propose three things we can do before another murmuration for the harvest festival, half way between the solstice and the equinox.
Those three suggestions are to:
Clarify and declare your purpose relative to our predicament, and seek others who share that purpose, and who you trust. Consider focusing your purpose of creating social or ecological infrastructure at the interface of our social systems and ecosystems. Consider if you are located within or want to build a stronghold.
Join the Harvest Murmuration (to be announced) half way between the summer solstice and the equinox and marking the beginning of the Season of Harvest.
It was such a pleasure to have that time together, and I very much look forward to meeting The Guild.
Writing about my efforts and what I am learning is helping me a little with sense making. Itâs also a little bit like a soap opera or una telenovela. You can drop in and follow your favorite plot line, or if you like, binge watch from the beginning. For me it seems a bit like being a circus sideshow plate spinner.
Iâve spent significant effort lately supporting to the extent I can the development of Joe Brewerâs Ecosystem Regenerators Platform. Joe frames a bold vision for a global network of bioregional education centers focused on regenerative culture, and his views on global ecological collapse and the cultural origins of our predicament resonate with me (check out his manuscript). That time interacting with folks from around the English-speaking globe has helped clarify my 30 years of work in the Salish Sea within a global context. We have so much to offer, and so much to learn. The potential to compare notes and strategies with colleagues in other temperate maritime ecosystems is exciting. This digital sojourn has also clarified for me the critical importance of social technology and the unresolved challenge of “group formation”: the art of the yarn, nonviolent communication, prosocial design, and sociocracy (more on all that later.)
I have spent a lot of effort collecting and reading various sources of information, focused on cultural evolution necessary for regenerative bioregional design. That collection of materials is here.
Following that vein, this update tries on a new structure, divided into sections, each section revolving around a spinning plate. My sections follow efforts organized in nested scales from global to neighborhood. I suspect that creating this kind of coherence, so that our local actions make sense in the context of an evolving global ecological collapse will help us see more clearly.
My day job has me focused on the impacts of industrial colonial culture at the scale of our coastal forest ecoregion. Also at this scale, the Salish Sea Restoration Wiki is a tool that straddles public service and private education. We have an undiscovered role within a global bioregional networks. My home is within the NW Olympia watersheds, centered on my cohousing neighborhood where I work with my hands. That work is a local experiment within Olympia-Tumwater, our local estuary city state at the southernmost reach of the Salish Sea. The Ecosystem Guild, and its ability to go restoration camping connects the two scales, linking my neighborhood in my estuary city to other such places within our bioregion. In general I am envisioning a menagerie larger than I can effectively manage, so part of this update is to share this evolving pattern, hoping that someone will jump in if a wobbly plate strikes your fancy.
The Imperial Ecologist
My day job as a federal restoration ecologist is a source of insight, information, capability, and networking, without which I couldn’t do what I am doing. It offers both stability from which to plan and a platform to operate from. I am both grateful for the work, suspicious of its ultimate efficacy, and curious about shaping the governmental platform so that if functions better. In industrial societies like mine, for better or worse, local, state and federal governments capture and distribute a large portion of that collective energy of our civilization that is not focused on private accumulation and instead focused on the public trust. We have left the commons to our bureaucracies. But thankfully at least there remains a significant commons, both in the public landbase and among public trust resources. There are some that would destroy our governments, proclaiming them corrupted and distribute our remaining commons among private interest groups as private properties. Not an improvement of a fragile affair.
One interesting recent event: some colleagues at the Skagit Watershed Council convened a days-worth of presentations on revegetation leaving me with a pile of notes. 180 people from across the Salish Sea showed up, excited to talk and learn. The first half was on climate change and assisted plant migration. The second half was about lessons learned in wetland mitigation. The comments and discussion pointed towards a set of topics that folks are wrestling with. One of these questions was about how the economic and political structures of our restoration industry (driven by state and federal grants) has come to affect how we think about and do restoration (as a capital construction project completed by transient professionals). This is an issue of pivotal importance for the work of our Guild. Contrast this with the emerging vision of biocultural restoration.
Tangentially related, I recently facilitated a workshop on capital programs and climate change using the Three Horizons Framework, and made a video of the introductory presentation. The practice itself is a tool for how complex systems inevitably change, and how we can thinking about human agency within that process of change.
The Salish Sea Restoration Wiki
More than ever, sustaining and building out the Wiki seems to be a multi-scale resource. It contains information about both social and ecological systems. I helped create the wiki back in 2011, and this plate is starting to wobble dangerously. The wiki is parked on an Amazon server, with a volunteer keeping the software alive. Iâm running a MediaWiki installation with circa 2011 plugins, and would like to upgrade the user interface. I have an agency sponsor with perhaps $2,500 a year who is willing to keep it alive, but needs a vision and a plan. A public entity, however, won’t host it because of the legal fears and logistical challenges of distributing documents. I’ve had three dead ends even among university and college centers. I am looking for a network solution to solve the need for hosting, stewardship, contract maintenance and improvement, and ultimately to engineer a MediaWiki/GIS interface. I am thinking this might be a place where I need to come up with a chunk of grant under a coalition to stabilize this plate and get it spinning again. I need a motivated and professional technical partner for this work.
The Ecosystem Guild and Restoration Camping
I met someone new through facebook, who is also growing a portfolio of possibility, but from a different and parallel universe. He has worked for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and been deployed to natural disaster sites (floods, hurricanes, etcâŚ) with a focus on logistics technology. He is also on the board of Burners Without Borders which is a spinoff of Burning Man that uses their desert-earned proficiency in self-contained mobile cities to support disaster victims. This new relationship is deeply involved in the technologies necessary to sustain communications systems under collapse, and is similarly interested in ecological sensor arrays that allow us to observe ecological systems at a watershed scale. For example, Raspberry Pi produces cheap cellular ready computer boards that can be used for a wide range of purposes. We wandered the intersection of community development, disaster resilience, rights of passage for youth, mobile restoration camping, online community, collaborative proposals, and project bootstrapping.
I think a video and primer on The Cynefin Framework might be a useful tool for the guild.
This multi-scale inter-disciplinary weaving is fun, but we agreed that it depends on integrated action, and integrated action (that aims to go deep rather than wide) depends on places. We shared our places of interest and arrived at Lopez Island, the Mainstem Skagit River, Lower Skykomish River, as places where we might overlap most easily.
I had a long conversation with a dear friends on Lopez Island, and they are committed to having their 40 acre wetland-forest-farm as a cornerstone of a Lopez Island guild. This would be the easiest to pull off, because it works outside the logistical friction of working in land management bureaucracy, and I have a love of islands and islanders. Lopez is in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains, with 27â (680mm) of rainfal in winter, compared to our 50â (1270mm) in my Southernmost Salish Sea. That water provides all their well water, groundwater, irrigation water, fish water, pond water, everything. Our host at Midnights Farm is also a heavy equipment operator, and they run an island wide yard debris composting business that is the foundation of their no till vegetable production. They take WWOOFers and interns, and they are part of broader efforts to bring ârights of natureâ into the county charter.
I am contemplating setting aside other site development, and instead focusing on a summer camp on Lopez as a pilot site, for strengthening the bioregional vision of the island and developing an action plan that could be enhanced by seasonal restoration camps, anchoring at Midnightâs Farm. This intention swirls around the sharp unpredictable edges of our evolving global pandemic.
A pandemic also seems to be a time where digital community development may be ripe. Like cold stratification or some other kind of gestation, there may be work to be done that is building structures that can unfold with the spring.
Olympia-Tumwater Estuary City – Local Government Reform
Twice now I’ve met with a new proto-circle and had a long sprawling conversation. Five of us attended, a fascinating blend. I was the only male, which is a subtle shift in dynamics. There was the volunteer for environmental policy at Black Lakes Audubon Society, which is deeply involved in local advocacy. There was a woman who narrowly lost a Port District commissioner position, a historian by training, deeply interested in the bioregional challenge, the third was a friend who is a tireless and aggressive gadfly in the face of local developers and their high-paid teams, working with a self-taught lawyer recluse, and a fourth another ex-bureaucrat distributing copies of essays on The Pluralist Commonwealth.
Hydrologic Model of the Olympia-Tumwater Estuary-City. This area contains a quarter of the population of the county, and sits on top of the historical Deschutes River Estuary, at the head of Budd Inlet.
The short version: fighting development is exhausting, corruption is filling the void in our culture, the culture of environmentalism has been consumed by endless conflict with a tight group power brokers, we need to know what we are trying to create, the laws already exist that state the intention of stewardship, local governments are the arena in which to create bioregional vision and realize the intent of the law. We will meet in late March and revisit our findings.
Most citizens donât understand how local government works. Its nuances have largely been created by a very small number of individuals that are in the business of catalyzing large development projects to make profit. Based on my limited interactions, these individuals see themselves as a kind of caretaker of progress in colonial society, and see their wealth and power as a sign of their righteousness.
At my day job, I am part of a network of scientists, understand how local government systems work, and who are despondent because the fate of our local ecosystems are in the hands of these powerbrokers. But there are no relationships. The activists, scientists, agency bureaucrats, elected officials, developers, and their gun-for-hire consultants (who are often ex-bureaucrats!) are operating in separate enclaves. Meanwhile the citizens of the place feel left out of the whole process, and tend to mistrust everyone who looks and acts like a powerbroker in variable measure.
I think the first step is in clarifying the nature and rhythm of the system by which the fate of the watershed is determined, under the âpolicing powersâ of the local jurisdiction. Once the dance is clear, then we can place each faction clearly in the dance, and we can select where, when and how we intervene to change the dance. Just kicking a dancer, doesnât change the dance, and just exacerbates the mistrust build from isolation.
The dance floor for this experiment is the City of Olympia (our organism of interest) and perhaps by extension the City of Tumwater, which together manage the historical landscape that is the Deschutes River Estuary. However it’s the same dance all over Puget Sound, because the dance is governed by state law. This is another prototype situation. I am seeking colleagues working on other dance floors to increase transfer of knowledge (next scale larger). In addition I am breaking down the details of the dance (which revolves around Shoreline Management Act, Growth Management Act, and Capital Plans (such as drainage and stormwater) which creates enforceable codes like the Zoning, building codes, impact fees, shoreline master program, and critical areas ordinance. There is shockingly little âcomplex systems analysisâ at this level (one scale smaller than the organism of interest). What happens on the dance floor if you switch the key of the music?
The Marshall Nursery Guild (Green Cove Creek Watershed)
Two guildmembers 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 donât 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 using various self-organizing strategies. 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 project seems to be mostly about individual relationships. The team doesnât meet regularly and communications only as much as necessary. It seems to be revolving around the teacher and the nursery. This is unfortunate, since the teacher may be the one person least able to coordinate, not having a surplus of horticultural skills and with their plate full of being a middle school teacher. If there were volunteer network able to recruit and sustain group processes, that would serve the teachers better, and be able 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. Iâd 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 Stâuchub 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 âthe communeâ 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 donât 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 itâs 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 Ostromâs 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.
This is one of a series of essays inspired by a study group hosted by Joe Brewer and Diego Galli on cultivating a culture capable of regenerating the earth. I am grateful for the opportunity to reconsider my work through this lens.
A note on the use of ârestorationâ and âregenerationâ and âstewardshipâ: I use these terms interchangeably to describe cobbling together ecosystem functions lost during colonization or more generally, civilization. This blurry view might bother people invested in a particular philosophy. I suggest we go somewhere and focus on the work.
Enabling Conditions for Restoration
Before I was a restoration ecologist in the Puget Sound I was a laborer. I am grateful for my shovel work because it helps me differentiate between the actual labor of restoring ecosystems, and the efforts to creating the circumstances that enable the work to occur. Good restoration labor is enabled by the coincidence of circumstances–the right resources, knowledge and labor arrive the right place at the right time. That enabling effort is necessary, but is not the work of restoration itself. Right now we struggle to create enabling conditions around each new project. This is because we are attempting restoring outside of a culture of restoration. We not only must do the labor, but we must laboriously build the foundation upon which the laborer must stand. Under these conditions, we spend too many resources to accomplish too little as our damaged earth continues to unravel. However if we can lay a broad enough foundation the regeneration of the earth will be relatively simple.
What is this cultural foundation? We will not know âregenerative cultureâ by the books we read, the music we listen to, or what we post on social media. When we are ready to regenerate the earth, we will take our tools and our short lives, and we will serve plants, deepen soils, and recharge groundwater. We will tend to the fate of each species with our hands. We best know a culture not by its intentions, but by what it does. While this may be obvious, it seems useful to repeat the obvious. Our virtual lives, on this screen in front of you, or in our heads, will not restore ecosystems. Tending the earth happens when we are hands-on and unplugged.
The Japanese have a word âgembaâ which describes the place where the action happens. Reporters report from gemba. Japanese and American industrialists adopted the term to describe the factory floor, where the things we value are actually created. The term is now used ritually across modern manufacturing to refocus management attention to where the value is actually created–the place where laborers make things we want (see Imai 2012). From this perspective, management is waste, and a good system works well with less management. When contemplating ecosystem restoration, and the conditions that support it, we may be served by keeping our mind on gemba.
We can have many conversations about regenerative philosophical frameworks. But if you want to see a culture of restoration, go to gemba. Go to the place where people meet the land and observe what they do. Once there, you will find people struggling to do the labor of restoration. If you ask good questions and listen carefully you can understand what they need. You can start to imagine the tangible form of a culture of stewardship, because that culture would support the work. In turn, if we are wise, our attention to the labor itself will shape our culture.
Design From Where We Are
In my home on the South Salish Sea, if you go to gemba , regenerative work is done by people working for Indian nations, county conservation districts, local public works departments, a handful of non-governmental organizations, and a few adventurous farmers. This work is mostly impelled by taxes that are distributed through state and federal grants. The grants flow into contracts to hire engineers, excavators, foresters, landscape contractors, or conservation corps. There are a few private landowners doing the work, often at a limited scale and in relative isolation.
As a bottom-tier bureaucrat, I now sit in the middle of this system, in front of a computer leveraging legal authorities, financial accounts, paychecks, contracts and stories. I donât do a lick of labor. My partners work as project managers and in turn hire construction crews to take out dams, put bridges over streams, pull rock out of rivers, dig holes and channels, fence cows, and pay landowners to pull back from streams and plant trees. I am not saying that this is the right way or the only way to do the work, but right now, this is our community of practiceâperhaps a couple thousand people in a couple hundred institutions over 13,000 square miles.
Despite the importance of restoration on a damaged earth, the nature of my industry is nearly invisible to the public eye. Our activities only touch a few places at any time. We do small capital projects, within in broader culture that has a limited conception of ecosystems and stewardship. We don’t tell good stories. When I describe my job, people politely act like they understand, but I know they don’t.
Our cash flow is a trickle siphoned off a vast industrial economy. In Washington State over seven million people drive 61 billion miles per year. Twenty million tons of goods flow in and out of ports, and we consume 2 quadrillion British Thermal Units of energy to generate $350 trillion in economic activity in a landscape of pavement, pipes, cables, bridges, and buildings.
By contrast, our ecosystem restoration work is less than one tenth of one percent of this industrial frenzy, and our political benefactors, reading the tea leaves of power, fund this level of work, because that is all their patrons will tolerate. After all the paperwork and planning to create enabling conditions, only a small portion of revenue gets to gemba, to change the ecosystem. This is restoration, without a culture of restoration. If our global state credit rating falters, the restoration industry would convulse. At this moment, however clumsy, it is still a beautiful thing, and it’s what weâve got. It is a situation worthy of study, and rich with opportunity and stories.
The Case Study of Restoring Estuaries
Because we are on the emerald edge of North America we care about Pacific salmon, a 10,000-year-old oceanic blessing on our lands and waters. Because these fish depend on estuaries, one of our earliest efforts has been to restore the marshes and swamps at the mouths of rivers. These are the places where young salmon transform from freshwater to saltwater creatures, and fatten up to survive the ocean. If there is too little estuary, the population is weak. We strengthen spawning and rearing in the rivers where we live, to enable ocean survival, where we have less control.
The easiest way to restore an estuary is to reconnect the rivers to their floodplains and get all our roads and buildings and ditches out of the way. Once unconstrained, the rivers and tides and plants do the rest. This mostly requires enough money to hire excavators and dump trucks for a summerâs-worth of work and getting the many concerned parties to come to agreement. In the case of the Nisqually River Estuary, this required around $22 million over 5 years to initiate restoration of around 1,000 acres–almost nothing compared to one of our road building projects. However unlike road building, our social infrastructure doesn’t support the work. The project teams had to create the enabling conditions.
The refuge phase of Nisqually delta restoration, the largest single estuary action to date, was positioned to captured economic stimulus funds from the collapse of the USA housing market.
In this way, over the last 15 years, the Nisqually, Skokomish, and Little Quilcene deltas have begun to regenerate, at a cost of around fifty thousand US dollars per acre. There are still a few complexities–for example a regional superhighway still cuts across the Nisqually floodplain (as seen above) constraining the flow of water and sediment. However, with rivers and tides free to work, these wild systems will sustain themselves forever. There is still much work to be done. Some smaller estuaries have been obliterated, and restoration would require excavation of vast quantities of soil, sluiced off of hillsides. Other estuaries are laced with roads, drainage ditches, family farms, fire stations, wedding venues, airport flight paths, toxic waste and neighborhoods. By a wicked coincidence, a significant land base for our future food security (including for 50% of the global beet seed supply) is below sea level, in low-lying river deltas on the Salish Sea. The ground is sinking, and the sea is rising.
So this is real work and progress. It is also the tip of an iceberg, and if we plan it right, the point of a spear.  How do we get from a small but passionate sidecar industry that most citizens have never heard of, to a culture of stewardship and regeneration that guides our daily lives. I would propose that we must start with what we are doing, and leverage that into something incomprehensibly larger. I think we can best learn by studying gemba.
In 2015 I had a chance to drive around Puget Sound and ask local restoration teams what it takes to restore an estuary. I met with around sixty project managers and coordinators in nine watersheds, ending with a report (Cereghino 2015). I went to gemba and asked questions. While the title was ârecommendations to accelerate estuary restoration in Puget Soundâ, in those meetings we were talking about something larger. What are the enabling conditions that allow us to restore ecosystems? Each group considered and refined the thoughts of the previous group. They all had similar ideas about the practical barriers they faced across rural and urban project sites. They identified six conditions.
Six Conditions
I am not saying these six conditions are the ingredients of a regenerative culture. I suspect we have no idea of our ultimate cultural destination. It may have something to do with how we think about kinship and our responsibility to other species. It may lead us to reconsider some of our more frantic behaviors. Regardless, if we escape our degenerative culture, it will be through doing the work of restoration. We start where we are.
My examples describe large agency efforts I am familiar with, requiring hydraulic models and millions of dollars in construction contracts. But at its heart we just agree to work together to move some dirt. I bring up these large projects, not to impress or intimidate. I believe they are at their heart no different than what a community could do with shovels (or perhaps a neighborâs backhoe). The enabling conditions are the same.
Around 10 years ago a local colleague described the restoration of Smith Island in the Snohomish Estuary as âfaith-based restoration.â When his team launched the effort in earnest they had no idea what it would take, and how they would get it done. Nisqually was both a lifetime of work by the tribe and allies, and a fluke, with financing driven by panicky stimulus funding after the 2008 real estate market collapse. The mechanisms and precedents for doing those projects didnât exist when they were initiated. They broke trail through doing the work. Ultimately Smith Island required creation of a new state appropriation to support projects like Smith Island–the Puget Sound Acquisition and Restoration Fund for large capital projects. It was the opportunity to restore Smith Island that helped create the ability to restore Smith Island. Here are the six ingredients they needed:
Project Managers – A herd of people does not necessarily do useful work. Someone in the crowd must take the time to envision the future, and to work out the details. They must organize the herd. The critical skills are not ecological, but rather social. Mobilization alone is not enough. Although a related art, rabble-rousing is not project management. A restoration project manager can envision the destination, and work backwards to plot the course. Consistency matters. Good ideas are cheap and plentiful. Events come and go. It may take years or even decades to deliver a complex project. Someone needs to cultivate and nurture large project consistently, to step back and forth between vision and practice, again and again. To have this devotion, most people need some training and tangible support. Usually this comes in the form of a paycheck from an institution and colleagues. Any institution can work, based on any cash flow. You can push-start a project with volunteers, and then an unexpected institution might step up to play a key role. You can create new institutions, or better yet, entrain, empower, or connect existing ones. However, you cannot finish a project without a project manager. It’s the existence of that individual human that counts. It is that individual human that takes responsibility for weaving the threads. The skill sets can be taught, but the motivation and consistency is what matters and may be hard to cultivate. The project manager must pivot and weave with every nuance of context, not be deflected from the goal, speak carefully, and return all phone calls.
Land Tenure – Ecological regeneration must do work on land. Under our global land ownership system just about every square inch of earth is allocated to some owner in some nation. The complete enclosure of the globe is perhaps the great feat of the colonial age. In my home landscape this began with vast imperial claims, allocation of huge blocks among railroads and timber barons, the subdivision for homesteaders, the attempted extermination of Indian sovereignty, the manipulation of value though construction of a spider-work of freeways and roads, and now the aggressive swapping and partitioning under a regulated real estate system designed to serve speculation and capital flow. To rebuild the river corridors of Puget Sound will require organizing thousands of land owners, one at a time. The more finely divided the landscape the more complex this challenge. The mechanisms for building this network are diverse. You might buy, lease, subdivide, file an easement, or work under an agreement, a contract, or a handshake. Land access is created through face-to-face relationships, knocking on doors, browsing county parcel maps, and noticing signs. Land owners talk to their neighbors, and the vital ingredients are trust and motive. In my culture, private land is guarded with a mix of pride and insecurity. A landowner needs a chance to examine a tenant or an offer without feeling unsafe. Governments are poorly positioned to do this work, and land trusts and tribes move quietly and carefully to acquire lands, using state and federal grants. This acquisition system is complex and flawed, and there is no shortage of land needing stewardship. A single Washington State grant database reveals over 2,700 acquisition projects valued at over 2.3 billion US$ over the last three decades. What we lack are the mechanisms for cultivating ecological stewardship. In this work our colonial institutions and allies are equipped to acquire, but ill-equipped to tend or build relationships. Modern conservation tends to see our human communities as a destructive rabble to be kept at bay. Institutions like to work with institutions. That part of the problem deserves another essay.
Knowledge – Once you have people who can envision the destination and access the land, you can get to work. You need enough understanding of the land and its creatures to know what to do. This isnât an abstract knowledge or just knowing the names of things. It is not taught in a university (I know, I was there). One ecologist mentor suggested that to understand a living thing, you must not only know the thing itself, but what is happening around it in its landscape, and within its body–its biology. To make sense of a place, you need to step back far enough so that you can see the forces and processes and evolutionary heritage of a place. And you must also understand each working part, and the small human strategies and tools by which we change landscapes, and how they fit into the choreography of a solar year. This is a deeper knowledge of systems, along with the traditions of wildland tending, agriculture and construction. These tools are unpredictable in practice, requiring the use of intuition informed by experience. Regenerating the living skin of the earth is a craft. It is best accomplished as a creative experiment, with unfiltered information flowing between the hand and the mind and the gut. It also helps to have a healthy pile of high resolution topographic measurements. Unlike cash, knowledge is a resource that builds itself over time and grows through collaboration–a positive feedback loop. It has collective dimensions if we have the infrastructure to store, share and retrieve knowledge within a community. You can buy knowledge into a project. However the cloistering of knowledge in universities, professional societies, and proprietary brands, for the profit and aggrandizement of narcissistic institutions and individuals, is likely part of our problem. Fortunately information flows easily.
Cash Flow – I think Iâve mentioned cash at least twice so far. There are many ways to reduce project dependency on currency, but perhaps no way to completely avoid the industrial marketplace. Industrial machines and resources produced in mines and factories born of bank capital are paid for with bank currency. The easiest way to sustain project managers and craftspeople in their work is to give them a chunk of currency. There are perhaps four mechanisms available to generate cash flow for restoration: public funding to provide public ecosystem services, private payments for mitigation services, sale of marketable products from restored lands, and payments for recreational or educational use of restored lands. By far, my industry currently operates almost entirely on public funding. To move past where we are, will require an integration of the restoration economy into our broader economy. Until then, cash is used to buy project managers, knowledge, land access, and the reports necessary for government permission. Without cash, everything becomes a do-it-yourself project. Now that I have elevated the importance of cash flow, I would also like to lay it low. We use cash to replace culture. We have everything we need to do this work, but we donât do it, because we have been devoured by a social system based on bank debt currency that is destroying the surface of the earth. Cash flow solves many problems except the one that is most important to solve. We should sit with that possibility for a while.
Local Agreement – The act of restoration or regeneration likely involves doing things differently then they were done before. Change can create new winners and losers. Removing rock from a river, may let the river consume a farm field. Surging beaver populations clog drainage channels and blow out culverts. Sometimes a new system just feels wrong to the sensibilities and traditions of neighbors raised to things the way they were. There are both subtle and direct ways that local animosity can derail a project or undermine the next effort. Local disagreement can result in loss of access to land. It can undermine cash flow, as funders and investors avoid controversy and risk. Local conflict consumes the labor of the project manager, a often limited resource. It is easier to avoid conflict then to resolve conflict once lawyers get involved. Interestingly, it is still difficult to buy local agreement. People have pride. Trust is earned, and built on mutual understanding and respect. We live in what academics call a “polycentric natural resource governance system”. The intersections of power can be difficult to locate. The process of building local agreement is the process of revealing hidden power structures. Looking at this from the other side of the equation, a restoration mentor once told me, “if you are not pissing someone off you are probably not doing anything.” So we must also learn to piss people off with respect and compassion.
Government Approval – At some point in time, if you aspire to do something at a meaningful scale, you will run into the apparatus of the bureaucratic nation state. In the Salish Sea, I live in the City of Olympia, incorporated in Thurston County, in Washington State of the United States of America. If I want to modify an estuary, I will need permission from no less than eight local, state and federal agencies and probably two Indian nations. This permission is obtained through the prolonged ritual exchange of documents. Each of these hierarchies is concerned about different things, speaks a different language, and they may contradict each other. Their staff are overworked and are suspicious from being lied to constantly. A complete regulatory process on a large complex project may easily take more than a year. Not one of these institutions has the capacity to improve the system they are locked into, and there is little capacity or incentive for collaborative improvement. An agency may face legal suits if it is either too lenient or if it is too restrictive. You will never understand an institution by looking at their website. To learn how an institution thinks and works you need to talk to insiders. Show them care–its not easy in there. Fortunately citizens can do a great deal of restoration without getting involved in this shit-show, and you might even use it to your advantage. Governments are afraid of community discord, but are equally hungry for community solidarity. Leaders will race to get to the front of a parade that reflects consensus and clear direction. As with land access, government agents often lack the social networks and freedom to do the work of building community vision. Arranging for government approval may seem like a barrier, it may also become a tremendous resource. I would propose that in many situations the inability of governments to support regeneration is more of a symptom then a cause. Our governments are lost in the incoherence and tumult of our colonial culture, just like we are.
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These six enabling conditions: project managers, land access, knowledge, cash flow, local agreement, government approval, are common to all scales and types of restoration. For your home garden these conditions will be easy to sustain. To some this list may seem excessive. When your work becomes easy through practice, then teach your neighbor, and then learn how to do more. As we move from parcel to catchment to watershed to ecoregion, we will need to grow into our vision. When ecoregional regeneration is underway at home, move to the next ecoregion and lend a hand.
The purpose of outlining enabling conditions is to help us see them as a shared operating environment, and a context for design. Small actions can cultivate the enabling conditions for larger actions, but only if we see the enabling environment as part of our shared work. In a culture of stewardship our social infrastructure supports restoration. Regeneration would permeate our social lives, and bind our communities. Schools, neighborhoods, religious communities, clubs, societies, and cities would imagine themselves as custodians of watersheds in a way that shapes their relationships.
A Warning
Iâd like to offer one warning. Right now, these enabling conditions are scarce, and each institutional workgroup is tempted to act like they are alone and competing in procuring these conditions for themselves. We are conditioned to this narcissistic thinking. A project manager may only think of enabling conditions as a checklist necessary to generate a product for which they will be rewarded. We still see cash flow as the solution to most of our deficits. I’d suggest this perspective is deeply flawed, and undermines the very foundations of our work.
Look at each condition again. These conditions are not objects to be possessed. Each is a process that emerges from relationships. The relationships are complex and overlapping. These enabling conditions are in constant flow and flux. One enabling condition can be used to nurture another. If we are each attempting control within our narrow field of vision, we may not see the web we are weaving as a network of relationships that enable regeneration. If we can see this, we can shape a system that enables restoration as a natural outcome of our social processes. If we can see these enabling conditions as a web of relationships, to which we are all contributing, and by which we are all strengthened, then we are building the culture of stewardship together.
Reconsider each condition. What are the individual interactions that enable these conditions to occur? What are the underlying needs that are at work? What are the existing dynamics that feed these needs and enable these conditions to arise? How are they constricted or constrained? Where are we wasting effort? Your role is not defined by you, but rather by where you place yourself within a web of relationships in a landscape of possibilities. You may need to appear a certain way at a certain time to be effective. Your work on one project, may beneficially enable another unrelated effort. It will serve us to slow our frantic pace, and step back, and consider our shared context.
Dave Snowden is a Welsh technologist who defined the Cynefin (ku-âne-vin) Framework. He would observe the conditions that enable restoration of landscapes as a “complex problem”– the challenges are not entirely knowable, and not entirely predictable. You canât plot a course standing on the edge of this uncharted forest. There is no trail. You need to proceed accordingly. Travelling cross country in forest may be a fitting metaphor. You may have a place you are going, but that doesnât mean you travel in a straight line, or always have your destination in clear sight. You make exploratory moves, and look for patterns: how the undergrowth thins under young conifers; you follow the trails of deer. You test, observe the outcome, and learn from your experiments. You might backtrack or you might strike out boldly.
We get to be a new kind of pioneer. We only get to work one project at a time. By doing the work, we become better able to shape the conditions that enable the work. As each setback and barrier comes into view, never assume it is immutable. Never assume you are alone. Continuously revisit your assumptions about where we are going and the actual nature of the opportunities in front of us. Each project, however small at its inception, offers insight into our culture, and its potential evolution. To capture this insight requires that we become fluent in enabling conditions, and recognize them as a product of cultural infrastructure. That reweaving of culture is our shared project, like a collective unconscious, but corporate and accessible only through doing the work of restoration itself. You cannot learn this forest by looking in from the edge.
If you have read this far, I hope you are doomed to become a project manager. Regenerating the earth is a hard learning path. As you explore the complex territory of the place you inhabit, please notice enabling conditions. Stay focused on gemba. Consider how relationships develop. Test, observe, and take a step. Then test again. Restoration advocate John D. Liu once shared with me a Chinese proverb: “you cross the river by feeling the stones with your feet.”
There is no space afforded the wild in public life. There is no zoning for wildness. In our cities, wild plants are scraped poisoned, and trampled, persisting in the margins. Within the core of our settlements, no creature is valued without permit and ownership. Individuals from desirable species are cloned and arranged for our pleasure and discarded if they get too old or damaged.
In the crannies of the parcel grid are neglected wild spaces. This is where we dump old couches and brush. Wild people go there to hide from armed patrols. These wild places are too damaged to be called forest or meadow, and are repopulated with a melange of the most wild of creatures, stowaways beyond our control: ivy, bindweed, holly, rats, laurel, herb robert.
As a landscape management veteran, I was an enforcer in this order. I was a professional supported by the beliefs, stories, rituals and taboos of my clients. I tamed the wild. To be a tender of the wild, we don’t get the benefit of cultural scaffolding. We are given no clear social niche. Restoring wild ecosystems in the midst of a manicured city is provocative and unsettling of this order. It is as if we were suggesting that the endless effort to subjugate all other organisms were not be necessary.
This is a slow rolling essay, where I’ll accumulating short ideas about the psychological dimensions of creating wild spaces amid human settlements: street ends, schools, parks, subdivision greenbelts, drainage ditches, road verge, abandoned lots. Most of our neighbors do not see the wild. We are illiterate and the wild is illegible.
If our work is to regenerate wild plant communities in settled landscapes, half our work is to help them survive the depredations of our neighbors. This is for the hearts and minds.
With Clean Edges and Even Surfaces You Can Get Away With Anything (6/7/20)
Back in 1995 a landscape mentor told me this and it stuck. After doing a job, we would use a blower and clean out the entrance and paths of a garden job, even if we never touched those areas. Walking outside, the client would see everything looking freshly swept and feel good before they even looked at our work. I remember one job I did for a client–we traded landscaping for voice lessons. She was unhappy with her yard and wanted it more “tidy.” I cut an edge between her shrubs and lawn, and raked all the leaves to cover the newly defined beds. She was gleeful.
For people that don’t really see and feel plants as individuals or creatures, but rather as a textured backdrop to our self-absorbed lives, the green world is dominated by surfaces and lines. These even surfaces and lines create order.
If you create a wild space, consider the definition of its edge, and how the orderliness of the edge creates a feeling of comfort and safety for people who might see wild plants as a challenge to order. An edge can be a low fence, a set of bollards, a mowing curb. An edge can serve a double function as a hydrologic feature. But cut it clear and hard. Use a french curve for inspiration. Mark it as claimed by some human force. For some it will signal that the wildness is contained and therefore unthreatening. For others it might signal that someone somehow owns the wildness and therefore they should not interfere. Use the beliefs and rituals of ownership to claim the space.
The same applies to entering the wild space. We do not tromp through another persons garden, but we fee entitled to trample any wild space as if it were our own. Give special attention to trails. Boldly mark entrances. Follow and bend natural flows. Use brush piles and aggressive plants to steer and shape visits by outsiders. These paths also allow for tending, and like all garden paths, becomes a choreography for relationship.
In this school wild garden, small logs were used as bollards, and a small woven fence reinforces a natural entrance. A strip of lawn is maintained between the sidewalk and the edge of the wild to allow paved traffic to spill over without violating the implied barrier.
The character and functions of the Ecosystem Guild is slowly emerging like a blurry Polaroid. Personally its been a crazy summer, with both my daughter heading overseas, and my family joining the Woodard Lane Co-Housing community, on the banks of Schneider Creek, among the West Bay ravines.
Three sections show progress toward our three-part vision of study, restore and protect.
Study
Each motivated citizen has the capability to deeply understand their lands and community
I’ve been building tool kits that let us store information about sites, complete vegetation inventories, use on-line maps to curate places, and continue to write articles. I am working on a reveg framework, expanding on The Cycles of Plant-Soil Work, leading to a revegetation retreat in spring, while continuing to support Citizen Science Institute with study materials, and hosting a Green Cove Open Space at Evergreen.
Salish Sea Wiki – I have established a wiki page for Green Cove Creek, and am starting a page for Grass Lakes Nature Reserve (see restoration), and Sundberg Gravel Pit (see protection). The wiki serves as a curated information archive. At my day job we are re-establishing a contract for management of the wiki to update the skin for mobile use, add some simple google map capabilities and google earth inter-operability, and install a WYSIWYG editor. Then we will start outreach to Western, UW, and Evergreen for long-term stewardship. The wiki is available if anyone wants to find and archive documents and information about their own watershed or places. We are looking for opportunities to teach graduate students about the wiki, as a tool for promoting and sharing their work. If you have a team that would like to learn to use the wiki, contact info@ecosystemguild.org
Google Earth Pro Maps – I set up a prototype for using google maps pro as a platform for linking to the wiki, and for transferring landscape data. There are google earth (KMZ) files or the Green Cove Creek watershed on the Green Cove Creek wikipage. We have a map of South Sound watersheds in the wiki on the Ecosystem Guild Watershed Page. You can download google earth pro for free, which is the easiest GIS platform.
Vegetation Survey Tools – I have published an initial plant list and survey tool on a google sheet. Walking onto a site and documenting species present is a basic practice which supports restoration or protection. These tool kits are being organized on the Ecological Site Assessment page.
Next Step – Reveg Framework Article – I have been invited to write a proposal for a revegetation framework to be published in the Quarterly newsletter of the Society for Ecological Restoration Northwest. I hope this will be a springboard to Revegetation Camp, and signal ongoing collaboration with SERNW. I’ll be soliciting co-authors.
Next Step – Revegetation Camp – I am starting development of a revegetation camp in 2020. This would involve a multi-day open space process, with
Next Step – Middle School Resources – Following a conversation with the Citizen Science Institute, I expect to be generating materials that help Middle School Students study restoration and protection, particularly growing native plants to restore Grass Lakes Reserve. I am guessing that plant identification resources will be a critical foundation. They would benefit from volunteers who could show up and help them with project work during the school day.
Next Step – Green Cove Open Space – I am planning on hosting a Green Cove Open Space event at Evergreen in Spring. If you are interested in learning about open space facilitation, we’ll need a small team to implement.
Restore
Through community we restore water, biomass and biodiversity.
Restoration is the crucible in which we test our understanding of ecological systems. Our initial work focuses on biomass and biodiversity, but ultimately restoration of water systems will be critical. Stewardship of Wangari’s Grove on public land is a natural first step, and connecting to the Marshall Nursery. Expansion could include either the Yogurt Farm site in north Grass Lakes or excursions to work on private lands.
Wangari’s Grove – At our first tree planting with South Sound Green Party we planting into a young forest at the Kaiser Entrance to Grass Lakes, now casually named after Wangari Maathai. The City has data about their work to date on this 5-year-old planting. I would like to set up the ability to have casual tea, tending, and teach-ins there, so we can easily study restoration at Grass Lakes. The City is amenable to leaving a tool trailer on site. From there it will be easier to follow the seasons and learn what Guild Members want to study. The grove was a high biodiversity planting into a blackberry conversion with only a mowing and grubbing, and light mulch, so its somewhat of a mess and needs help. As such, and to justify the labor it will take, it could be developed as a seed collection and nursery site. There is already a nice population of Lupinus rivularis. The limitation is lack of water, but there is an adjacent wetland, so this could be solved with a header tank and a small solar pump, perhaps using existing sewer vaults, constructed and abandoned by the last development attempt before acquisition.
Next Step – Marshall Middle School – I am meeting with the Citizen Science Institute at Marshall to figure out how an Ecosystem Guild could help them (see study). There is a patch of forest on their grounds as well several acres of potential reforestation. They have an existing nursery and want to get into propagation of native plants. They are connected to around 20% of the of the watershed population. They could use volunteers during school hours.
Next Step – Yogurt Farm – There is no restoration plan at the Yogurt Farm. Based on how City staff are talking, I expect this will be a second generation site, focused on successional design. Parks, with well timed advocacy from the Advisory Board, found money to install a trail from Road 65 to allow student pedestrian access. This connects to approximately 11 acres of potential reforestation.
Next Step – Kaiser Wetland NE Shore – We have two landowners who are interested in collaborative stewardship of a couple acres of young alder forest around an old Spruce grove, and next to some Capital Land Trust plantings on private and public lands. This could be The Guilds first foray into private land, once we have enough of a community.
I have not gotten as far along with the private lands on the NE Shore of Kaiser Wetlands. I think we need a source of plants to do the work, and we missed the window for site prep in nice weather.
Grass Lakes has been shaping up, as City Environmental Services
Protect
We shape development so that it regenerates ecosystems as our population grows
I am concerned that we don’t have a strong protection strategy. What I see from my initial surveys, is that we have an opposition strategy, but not a clear direction for what protection looks like as a proactive effort.
Sundberg Mill Site – After preparing a letter criticizing the Green Cove Garden development proposal , I’ve been curating a wiki page, and occasionally meeting with advocates. Esther Kronenberg has been a stalwart leader through this process, gathering and distributing information, coordinating and supporting the efforts of others. The City has provided substantive comments to the developer, requiring a more robust investigation of toxicology, and describing weakness of the storm water plan. The game is still afoot.
Next Step – City Government – The city council election is a little over a month away, and there is very limited focus on ecosystem stewardship as part of the housing crisis. Progressive effort appears to be focused on short game resistance to individual development proposals. The long time City Manager has retired, creating a power vacuum that will be soon filled at City Hall.
Next Step – Watershed Analysis – The last undeveloped tributary into Green Cove Creek is largely owned by developers. There are exceptional restoration opportunities in large parcels along the upper Green Cove main-stem. Our best farm soils are at risk of being chopped into a large lot rural residential landscape. These opportunities, and development pressures has not been well defined. The City and County may not have the tools they need to make decisions. There has been no cumulative effects assessment of development on the stream. Both Wild Fish Conservancy and South Puget Sound Salmon Enhancement Group are working on some habitat assessments in Green Cove Creek. I will be exploring various part of watershed analysis through interviews with Evergreen faculty to understand their interest and internship processes. I will need to work with or create institutions able to support interns.
Next Step – Green Cove Open Space – I am hopeful that a protection discussion will develop through Open Space, so that we can begin to define a watershed protection vision sustains water, biomass, and biodiversity. If you are interested in learning about open space facilitation, we’ll need a small team to implement.
This page is reserved for tactics, resources, and results of site assessments methods we are testing in the Green Cove Watershed.  Site assessment is usually at the scale of a parcel or cluster of parcels (read about systems assessment for stewardship design). It is a form of study in preparation for restoration or protection (read about three capabilities). I prefer to assess in bloom, drying or harvest because of fair weather, full development of leaves and flowers, and the overlap with site preparation (read about the eight seasons in general, or more specifically about cycles of plant-soil work.)
Climate varies predictable nuance across the lowland Salish Sea, and so is more a matter of general education than site specific analysis.
Landform, Soils and Water
Initial assessment of topography, soils, and hydrologic patterns in the Salish Sea benefit from the use of state and local data, with a geographic information system. The Guild can publish watershed scale analyses as KMZ files, which can be viewed using Google Earth Pro. We can develop common data sources and methods for the technical work, and also teach strategies for viewing and interpreting local data, on the desktop and on the ground.
Google Earth Package For Green Cove Watershed – includes DNR streams, waterbodies and soils, LiDAR derived flow pathways and depressions, County wetland and parcels boundaries, Urban Growth Area boundaries, and Ecology wetland probability. We need to further standardize contents and cartography… ideas welcome.
Vegetation Inventory
A starting place for a site assessment is a vegetation inventory–a list of all the plant species present within an area. The overall assemblage and species distribution can tell stories of the site history and condition. We are developing a standard set of tools and protocols for visiting a site, creating and interpreting a professional quality plant list, and sharing that documentation with other guild members.
Lowland Puget Sound Plant List – a working product that includes 445 of the most common lowland plant species you can sort by form, family, or wetland code. We are adding additional non-native species over time, following USDA conventions. This is a “lookup” reference for all subsequent products using 6 letter codes
Vegetation Inventory Sheet – A form I can pull up on my phone using a Google Sheet app, when exploring a new vegetation patch. It lets me produce a professional quality record in a few minutes using six letter codes (PSEMEN = Pseudotsuga menzeisii).
Forest Observation Skill Sheet – our first skill sheet–a condensation of forest ecology topics, to support a “newbie” in making observations of a forest’s structure. We can complete additional skill sheets and other self-study aids.
Vegetation Inventory Atlas
The embedded google map below is a prototype of our data management strategy. Each polygon links to a stable “place page” on the Salish Sea Restoration wiki. From there you can get a site introduction and follow links to relevant documents, including vegetation inventory sheets hosted on the guild’s google drive. The overall structure is both free, and fairly resilient under update. The wiki page and google map remain stable, while the KMZ file and information stored on the wiki page fluctuate.  Thus you can add a new site, or add additional information about sites, without updating the underlying architecture.
Workflow
Below is a proposed standard new site visit protocol that establishes a spatial location and an associated wiki page.  This is roughly similar to the larger scale pattern on the watersheds page.
Research soils, hydrology and canopy from desktop and anticipate vegetation zones.
Arrive at field with data and smart phone (or synced sheet) and paper aerial photo with draft zones.
Use Google Docs App to copy new vegetation inventory sheet to public folder and name appropriately.
Use Google Sheet App to complete vegetation inventory, sketch survey area boundary.
Add any new species to the master plant list, clean up the sheet, and add any notes. Copy a view-only link to the sheet.
Return to desktop, use Google Earth Pro to create and name a new polygon and add to vegetation survey folder.
Create a new sub-section in the wiki-page for your place. Add the view-only link to your vegetation inventory sheet.
Save the wiki page, and copy the wiki page address to your Google Earth polygon.
Save all polygons in your Google Earth Folder (including new survey site) as KMZ (add date to file name).
Open Google Map, and upload the new KMZ into the existing map, and delete the old map (this should update all web based maps.)
The Drying begins with the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, whether midsummer, St. Johns Day, Ukon juhla, Lithia, Kupala, TiregÄn, Klidonas, or Päiväkäändjäne . Whether celebrating “yin” forces, collecting water from the sea, eating pickled herring, or drinking lots of vodka, it is a global holiday, often including a bonfire. The wetting rains are mostly finished. The green world senses this edge, and switches from growth to insuring the survival of future generations. Â
The purpose of growth shifts from expanding foliage to making seed. The first fruits become ripe, and we begin to tap into our stores of water to support our agricultural projects.
Wild Creatures and Wildcraft
Juvenile salmon are heading to the open water. Streams begin their hydrologic decline, increasingly depending on groundwater captured in winter. Flowers are mostly gone, and replaced with green fruits, pods, or capsules. The spring flush seems less succulent, as the whole forest seems to shrink a little. As free water is depleted, every drink takes a little more work.
Berry season comes in a cascade that begins with strawberries and salmonberries, red huckleberries, followed by thimbleberries, amalanchier, evergreen huckleberry, and the vast mother-load of salal. You can follow berries up the mountain slopes culminating in the harvest of high mountain huckleberries, where vast fields were maintained with fire since time before memory. Greens are still present, with lamb’s quarters, young dock, and nipplewort, but selecting the right stock in the right place is increasingly important to avoid excess bitterness.
Revegetation
If you are going to provide water, now might be a good time to offer on last deep drink before hardening of shoots. The growth you see now, is most of what you’ll get this year. Now comes the test of survival. Did roots grow deep enough to make it through the first season? Did the right stock end up in the right place at the right time?
The spring ephemerals are going to seed, and signal the beginning of the seed collection season which will last from now through harvest. A species may yield a few weeks early or late, depending on the pace of the drying, but in an orderly manner, one species after another, plumps, dries, and shatters its genetic life capsules into the soil seed bank. Seed harvesters intercept dry seed, advocates for plant dispersal. For some species the window of opportunity may be only a few days.
At the nursery the endless watering begins. Daily for the exposed pots, or those that were potted in too small of homes. You can wait longer for stock that is heeled in, or in the ground, or even longer in capillary beds. This is where minimizing stock in pots suddenly makes more sense.
Monitoring of vegetation continues, with each plants sexual parts on full display. Grass flowers come into full form, with less familiar parts seldom explored: glumes, lemmas, and paleas. Unwanted weeds put all their energy into shoots and flowers and so pulling will have maximum effect.
The Garden
In the food garden warm season crops are all in the ground and growing. As in the native nursery, the watering begins. Daily for the second wave of seeds every few days for other crops. Perhaps an inch a week, either from sprinklers, or less if dripped under mulch. Watering and weeding becomes most of gardening.
The harvest from spring plantings has arrived: salad, greens, young suculent roots. The earliest vegetable fruits, are watched carefully: squash, cucumbers. The real heat lovers, the tomato family of solanaceae are always lagging.
This is the season for the second major planting in the Maritime garden calendar. In the drying, most of the overwinter foods go in the ground: kale and all the other brassicaceae, including root crops likes turnips and rutabega. Also there are carrots and parsnips, and the spinach clan, including beets and chard. Hardy lettuce relatives like endive and escarole. These plantings may include both fall harvest, as well as overwintering varieties of broccoli or fava beans, that won’t yield until spring, but will precede spring plantings, filling the gap in March and April.
Project Management and Hazards
Earthworks are underway. The ground is dry, and the risk of storms is past. The spring freshet in snow-fed rivers is over. Erosion management is replaced by dust management.
Community Schedules and Recreation
Summer schedules make organizing difficult. Agencies workers with paid time off are are a revolving door of vacation messages. Construction crews are working overtime, saving up for the winter lull. Kids are in programs or daycare or with relatives or on vacations.
During the Drying the high country opens up. Starting with patches of snow, then buggy, and finally glorious with flowers. Drying is a window before the risks of the fire season. Increasingly as climate change and generations of bad forest management come due, periods of smoke in summer will become a constant companion.
Politics and Government
The state budget is complete. If there are new initiatives and programs are ramping up. If there are cuts, managers are shuffling staff and budget around to fill holes and tighten belts.
The election season and the federal budget discussions are in full swing. Of course is just as likely that there will still be no budget by the end of the fiscal year. But the nature of the struggle to govern varies based on whether its an election year. The Drying culminates in August recess, when congress returns to their districts. Much preparation is made for their return, as this is when local lobbies can get access to their elected representative, take them on tours, and guide their thinking, or hold them accountable.
This post is part of a standing body of work to capture the seasonal nature of our social-ecological lives, and how they might apply to the work of the Ecosystem Guild and Restoration Camping. Â
Green Cove Watershed could be the most cherished stream in South Puget Sound. Olympia offers art shows to promote âthe importance of salmon to our community.â The Evergreen State College cultivates âcreative, critical thinkers ⌠for environmental work and leadership.â However, if I want to understand stewardship, I listen to the swampy stream that sits between them.
Image: Wild Fish Conservancy (Glasgow 2018)
Most people I meet donât know Green Cove Creek. We donât see Mud Bay Road as an indistinct saddle marking the Southern divide. We donât notice how our road causeways have walled its headwater swamps into cells, or where our polluted discharge trickles in through glacial swales. We guess at how many different kinds of salamander have survived. They wait for warm night rains to crawl our roads. We donât count the Green Cove chum thwarted at Country Club Road culvert to never make their nests. We donât gather or forage. When we need water, we extract from injected well casing. When we need food we bring it in on trucks. We donât see the land in front of us, and so how can we understand where we are going?
This discordant gap between the social narratives in our heads, and our relationship to the land in front of us, may be the cornerstone of our ecological crisis. Each day we express in miniature, our relationship with the Salish Sea. The most brutal parts of our colonial project are mostly complete, and unremembered. Our new homeland has been tamed, made quiet, marked with deep wounds, drying out slowly with road ditches.
Green Cove Watershed is marked in purple, with surface water flow in blue, regulated wetlands are in Green. Grass Lakes collects runoff from West Olympia (1), which then flows into the Kaiser wetlands to the most frequently used amphibian crossing at Kaiser Road (2) amid forests protected by Capitol Land Trust, before going under Evergreen Parkway and into the Green Cove ravine. In 2018, over 500 chum returned to the creek, struggling to get upstream of two culverts (3). The proposed Green Cove Park subdivision provides an example of poor stewardship (4), while students and teachers at Hansen and Marshall schools (5) are positioned in the middle of the watershed, and want to study where they live.
There is a quiet struggle at Green Cove Creek. Twenty years ago the City was impelled to buy the Grass Lakes, and signed the Green Cove Watershed Plan–another treaty. South Puget Sound Salmon Enhancement Group is just starting to explore the salmon-bearing habitats, a project recommended 20 years ago. Project managers grimace at the fish-barrier culvert buried deep under road fill (have we ever abandoned a road, for the love of a stream?) There is a volunteer that counts salmon redds. The Squaxin Nation struggles at more urgent sites. Between Streamteam, Stormwater and Parks, the City affords a little work here and there. A couple middle school teachers sustain a science and service program, and Native Plant Salvage Foundation lends a hand. Capitol Land Trust stopped buying land in Green Cove when Thurston County started hoarding all our Conservation Futures money to offset prairie development. Sometimes groups of college students wander by and look. Government biologists count mud minnows. Community activism ebbs and flows with each new subdivision proposal. Does this add up to stewardship?
A stig is a old English hall or home; a weard is the ward or guardian. Steward is a verb. If we donât guard the hall of Green Cove Creek, what do we expect for the Salish Sea? The number of institutions dabbling in Green Cove offers an illusion of stewardship. I propose that we fundamentally lack the social infrastructure to be stewards our watershed. Donât take this personally; it could be said for any watershed. Anyone in the ecosystem industry can tell stories. Watershed stewardship depends on three practical capabilities that emerge from culture.
STUDY – First, we must be capable of study. I donât mean sporadic environmental education lectures, but rather that we have the mechanisms by which every citizen can grow to deeply understand their home. This means that we gather and organize evidence and knowledge, and share it with each other constantly. We remember together, and we observe the land and synthesize shared knowledge of where we live. This capability cannot be found in our schools nor our governments. We must become again, our own carriers of knowledge, and we lack the rituals to do the work.
PROTECT – Second, we must be capable of protecting. All our laws, acts, plans, and restoration projects will not defend the watershed. At this moment in the watershed, a Puyallup developer wants to build a monocrop of 181 single family homes on an illegal garbage dump located a five-minute drive from 11 toxic waste sites. We struggle to push our city government to negotiate on our behalf. This is just one of a monotonous series of development proposals grinding away at the last forests and soils of Green Cove Creek; each trying to extract the maximum, and give the least. Do we just wait for the next one to roll in? Protection is more than effective resistance (and our resistance could be much more effective.) We must enforce good planning at the permit counter. We must enforce clear vision at the ballot box. We need the tools for regenerative development, so we donât depend on out-of-town profiteers to tell us how to build our home. Mass migration and climate change are coming. Do we understand what we need to do?
RESTORE – Finally we must be capable of restoring.  We can be allies to beaver clans, infiltrate water, capture carbon in forests and soils, and re-weave the web of life. We need not wait in line for state and federal grants. Restoration can be a community celebration that only requires of us that we understand and take control of our existing shared resources. Restoration is an educational opportunity for our schools. Restoration is employment that builds knowledge, belonging, and wealth. We can restore a watershed with a graduate student, a farmerâs backhoe, and a middle school nursery. What exactly are we waiting for?
In practice, our capabilities to study, protect and restore are interdependent, and will work in synergy. These capabilities will not be given to us. This is a do-it-yourself retrofit that we must earn. We must rebuild the âcommon hallâ. This requires continuous practical effort. I am doubtful that we should build new institutions. We have plenty of institutions. What we need is to lean in and shape the ones we have, to become part of a clearer vision and a stronger effort, more deeply rooted in a culture of stewardship. This requires that we shape how we spend our lives, and nimbly gather in shared work. I hear my professional colleagues say we need more resources to be stewards. I have to laugh. We squander more resources than anywhere on earth! You donât buy a culture. Everything we need is right here.
End Note â Green Cove Watershed are lands of the Squaxin Indian Tribe ceded under duress, cared for by their ancestors since time before memory (probably at least 400 generations). Our stewardship is described through ALL our relationships. We are in a relationship with the Palouse hills, the floodplains of the Mississippi, the Amazon Basin and the coastal peatlands of Borneo. We give away our agency, and then our agents work in our name. There are stewards also struggling in those watersheds, and they also need our help.
Project Managers
Land Tenure
Knowledge 
Cash Flow
Local Agreement 
Government Approval 
Back in 1995 a landscape mentor told me this and it stuck. After doing a job, we would use a blower and clean out the entrance and paths of a garden job, even if we never touched those areas. Walking outside, the client would see everything looking freshly swept and feel good before they even looked at our work. I remember one job I did for a client–we traded landscaping for voice lessons. She was unhappy with her yard and wanted it more “tidy.” I cut an edge between her shrubs and lawn, and raked all the leaves to cover the newly defined beds. She was gleeful.
Salish Sea Wiki – I have established a wiki page for 
Vegetation Survey Tools – I have published an initial plant list and survey tool on a google sheet. Walking onto a site and documenting species present is a basic practice which supports restoration or protection. These tool kits are being organized on the 
Wangari’s Grove – At our first tree planting with South Sound Green Party we planting into a young forest at the Kaiser Entrance to Grass Lakes, now casually named after 
Next Step – Marshall Middle School – I am meeting with the Citizen Science Institute at Marshall to figure out how an Ecosystem Guild could help them (see study). There is a patch of forest on their grounds as well several acres of potential reforestation. They have an existing nursery and want to get into propagation of native plants. They are connected to around 20% of the of the watershed population. They could use volunteers during school hours.
Next Step – Yogurt Farm – There is no restoration plan at the Yogurt Farm. Based on how City staff are talking, I expect this will be a second generation site, focused on successional design. Parks, with well timed advocacy from the Advisory Board, found money to install a trail from Road 65 to allow student pedestrian access. This connects to approximately 11 acres of potential reforestation.
Next Step – Kaiser Wetland NE Shore – We have two landowners who are interested in collaborative stewardship of a couple acres of young alder forest around an old Spruce grove, and next to some Capital Land Trust plantings on private and public lands. This could be The Guilds first foray into private land, once we have enough of a community.
Next Step – Watershed Analysis – The last undeveloped tributary into Green Cove Creek is largely owned by developers. There are exceptional restoration opportunities in large parcels along the upper Green Cove main-stem. Our best farm soils are at risk of being chopped into a large lot rural residential landscape. These opportunities, and development pressures has not been well defined. The City and County may not have the tools they need to make decisions. There has been no cumulative effects assessment of development on the stream. Both Wild Fish Conservancy and South Puget Sound Salmon Enhancement Group are working on some habitat assessments in Green Cove Creek. I will be exploring various part of watershed analysis through interviews with Evergreen faculty to understand their interest and internship processes. I will need to work with or create institutions able to support interns.
This page is reserved for tactics, resources, and results of site assessments methods we are testing in the Green Cove Watershed.  Site assessment is usually at the scale of a parcel or cluster of parcels (read about 
Initial assessment of topography, soils, and hydrologic patterns in the Salish Sea benefit from the use of state and local data, with a geographic information system. The Guild can publish watershed scale analyses as KMZ files, which can be viewed using 
The spring ephemerals are going to seed, and signal the beginning of the seed collection season which will last from now through harvest. A species may yield a few weeks early or late, depending on the pace of the drying, but in an orderly manner, one species after another, plumps, dries, and shatters its genetic life capsules into the soil seed bank. Seed harvesters intercept dry seed, advocates for plant dispersal. For some species the window of opportunity may be only a few days.
In the food garden warm season crops are all in the ground and growing. As in the native nursery, the watering begins. Daily for the second wave of seeds every few days for other crops. Perhaps an inch a week, either from sprinklers, or less if dripped under mulch. Watering and weeding becomes most of gardening.
PROTECT – Second, we must be capable of protecting. All our laws, acts, plans, and restoration projects will not defend the watershed. At this moment in the watershed, a Puyallup developer wants to build a monocrop of 181 single family homes on an illegal garbage dump located a five-minute drive from 11 toxic waste sites. We struggle to push our city government to negotiate on our behalf. This is just one of a monotonous series of development proposals grinding away at the last forests and soils of Green Cove Creek; each trying to extract the maximum, and give the least. Do we just wait for the next one to roll in? Protection is more than effective resistance (and our resistance could be much more effective.) We must enforce good planning at the permit counter. We must enforce clear vision at the ballot box. We need the tools for regenerative development, so we donât depend on out-of-town profiteers to tell us how to build our home. Mass migration and climate change are coming. Do we understand what we need to do?
RESTORE – Finally we must be capable of restoring.  We can be allies to beaver clans, infiltrate water, capture carbon in forests and soils, and re-weave the web of life. We need not wait in line for state and federal grants. Restoration can be a community celebration that only requires of us that we understand and take control of our existing shared resources. Restoration is an educational opportunity for our schools. Restoration is employment that builds knowledge, belonging, and wealth. We can restore a watershed with a graduate student, a farmerâs backhoe, and a middle school nursery. What exactly are we waiting for?