Category: Update

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

—-

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.

—-

I have also been having learning in increments about the “rights of nature” initiatives that now seem popular. Interestingly, because of communication problems, these proposals don’t actually transfer rights to “nature”. But rather are an attempt to reassign trusteeship, from the state or nation to some other entity, more local in nature. The right of a community to protect and restore may already exists in our laws. While existing authorities are constrained by private property rights. We could a much better job of protecting and restoring ecosystems right now. City councils, county commissions, and legislatures are already assigned trustee responsibility. These authorities to protect and restore lie unexercised, in our hands and those of our neighbors. We only need to pick them up and use them. We don’t understand the tools in our hands.

An Olympia Stronghold

The writer philosopher Joanna Macy suggested that what she called the “great turning” back to relationship with the Earth will involve a mix of efforts: resistance, reform and reimagination. Part of reform is recognizing where our conscience lies dormant within existing institutional structures, and how we have been corrupted.

By definition, corruption can arrive both through dishonesty in the pursuit of personal gain, but also through unintended debasement and error. Rediscovering our precious will to love the earth is part of reform. Existing mechanisms for tending the earth are hidden in the labyrinth of the administrative state. The location is known to the construction industry and its lawyers. Use of the administrative state to protect ecological systems is fiercely contested where it constrains privatization of property. This tension between public trust resources and private property resources is a jurisdictional battlefield only known to a small part of society. If proposed “rights of nature” approaches this stronghold they will see us coming a mile away. They don’t look worried. Until we take our agency in hand as a whole community, that won’t change.

The state Shoreline Management Act is one of those places where our conscience lies dormant. Critical Areas under the Growth Management Act is similar. Our building codes control how we create shelter and how we think about energy. The building code constrains how we allow ourselves to live. Our surface and storm water utilities determine the fate of rain. The tools for a regenerative bioregional society already exist, but are organized to encourage and support industrial development.

These authorizes are largely exercised city and county staff, under the guidance of locally elected councilmembers. Often council defers to technical and legal staff, and make that deferral appear magnanimous by calling it “trust”. I regularly hear local elected officials profess how they “trust staff.” In turn, staff face heavy crossfire from different interest groups. If staff have to make hard decisions, they need to know if council will have their back. If you have a mushy council that doesn’t have clear ecological values, the easier path is to avoid risk and conflict.

These days you don’t need a coherent ecological vision to get elected to city or county council. You mostly need to make the right friends, appear legible and comfortable to your audience, and you must play your hand carefully within unspoken social-political rules of normalcy.

In Olympia, our next reckoning comes in 171 days when we elect 4 of 7 Olympia city council members. How do we take the next 171 days and make ecosystems relevant? In strategic planning a goal usually defined as that future condition that we aim for. What would a regenerative bioregional culture be able to do on election day?

• Citizens can visualize and understand the infrastructures that are under the custody of local government.
• Citizens know how they want those infrastructures to perform, and can evaluate their current condition, both ecologically, and socially. We understand what is possible.
• Citizens understand how candidates think about those infrastructures and whether they have a coherent plan for acheiving the ends we can imagine.

The Salish Sea Restoration Wiki

I have been cultivating the Salish Sea Wiki as a public interest shared knowledge exchange for a decade now. Mostly I have been working alone to gather, organize and present knowledge that travels across my desk, under a creative commons license. I have operated under the false assumption that if you work to fill a obvious need, and make that need and solution known, that others will join you.

A mechanism for sharing detailed bioregional knowledge seems like an obvious need. The wiki seems like a strong and lean response to that need. The site gets 500-1500 web hits a month, has a steadily growing facebook page, and dominates a wide range of “Salish Sea” search results. That has not resulted in more contributions.

I suspect this discrepancy between concept and performance is a unintended consequence of the commodification of knowledge. In environmental governance, information is a product that it bought and sold. There are few producers, and mostly consumers. Those who can produce knowledge then sell that capability. Professors sell to schools, and schools sell to students, professors sell their students to funders. Once students become professionals, they sell themselves to institutions. Consultants sell to agencies or developers, technical staff sell to leadership, leadership sells to legislatures. Knowledge is just as valuable as I suspected, but a consequence of its value is that it doesn’t flow freely.

The irony is that it doesn’t take much cash to encourage the flow of knowledge. People who can pay for knowledge do so to achieve an end. In our own vernacular, we are looking for “bang for the buck” or something that will “turn the dial.” The professional class aims to use knowledge for power, not for some ambiguous empowerment. The creators and holders of knowledge do not necessarily hold it tightly. Its just so few people are actually interested in knowledge. Often it seems that a producer of knowledge is grateful that someone is listening.

And at the same time, creators of knowledge often don’t see themselves as distributors of knowledge. If you are professional, and have sold your capabilities to an institutions, it becomes ambiguous what personal agency you have left. Will you institution be happy with you sharing the knowledge that the institution is paying for? If you are a creator of knowledge do you have the authority to share it, or are you out of your “swim lane?”

Why do producers of knowledge not revel in the creation of shared knowledge for empowerment? We go to conferences hungry for the company of peers. And yet for the effort that goes into a conference, so little well organized knowledge appears to remain in its wake?

Some colleagues recently put on a summit about beaches, embayments and deltas. They are now working to assemble a product that can summarize what happened at the summit. Every step of that process is laborious.

What if that community gathered for the conference were empowered and capable of creating meaning on our own. Do we know how to do that? Or have we completely relinquished the agency of knowledge to our institutions?

I am still hunting for a institutional location for the wiki. I have state actors who would contribute. I don’t have an institution that is willing to sell the wiki.

The Ecosystem Guild and Restoration Camping

The work I did preparing for and following the first Murmuration was useful and clarifying. Putting yourself of stage is kind of commitment to perform, and I have always struggled to clarify my vision, but like to perform. The Guild vision is grandiose, complex and heartfelt but blurry. I’ve noticed in my institutional work that we like leaders to tell us what to do, and I am not interested in being a “leader” in this sense–an awkward situation

Through this initial proclamation I told my story about how I imagine an Ecosystem Guild. This about a process of forming groups of groups to build strongholds. I suggested that this will require us to learn how to artfully form groups outside of hierarchies, to organize around patterns in time, and to build new social-ecological infrastructure.

Plant Nursery Work and Forest Cultivation

Growing plants is important, because it is the one component of restoration work beyond the tools that requires cash flow. If you can grow your own plants, you can transform the landscape.

Two guild members from the Marshall Nursery have started up planning to start up nursery work again in anticipation of the fall of 2021. (To be clear, I generally refer to anyone who is voluntarily taking responsibility for bioregional design and stewardship as a “guild member”)

The school nursery system is simple.  At the beginning of the year we show up with pots, compost, seeds and sources of cuttings and divisions. We tell stories about the location of the school grounds in the watershed, the degraded ecosystems, the idea of a commons, and the value of building a commons within the school and watershed.  We teach labor (yes, knowing how to labor effectively is a skill that most industrial youth don’t have and you have to teach them how to labor or most of them are almost useless and feckless–this is a class and subculture phenomena that is interesting and important).  We then organize our collective labor to potting and planting all winter.  By May we have potted stock to sell to families, and the rest is held over summer in beds.  In fall we sell more stock, install restoration projects, and start over again.

The nursery project was my first attempt at facilitating formation of an autonomous volunteer team.  At the end of the day, the coherence of the project seems to be mostly about individual relationships, and individual initiative. Initial vision matters less than the social circles that do the work. Without a strong team vision and effort, the effort revolves around the teacher and the immediate demands of the plants, or the ambitions of individuals with time and energy.  However the teacher may be the one person least able to coordinate, not having a surplus of horticultural skills and with their plate already being full from being a middle school teacher.  If there were volunteer network able to recruit and sustain group processes, that would serve the teachers better, and enable the effort to scale up. I have in the past tried to facilitate more group process, but that is not the natural pattern.  I am left contemplative, and content to let it evolve rather than trying to interfere.

I believe my personal interests in this effort are around replicable system development: I would like to define the minimum technical and social scaffolding necessary to allow any middle to high-school with willing volunteers to initiate plant production as part of science and CTE programming.  I’d like this work to connect the school as a facilitator of local restoration efforts, and lead to the regeneration of the school grounds.  Schools are an under-capacitated commons infrastructure in the center of every community.  Families care about their children.  Children are better able to love the earth. But we need to avoid colonizing schools and making schools carry more burden for a broken society, but rather bringing our community in to gather around schools with a broader and expanded vision of what a school is in a community.

If we can figure out group formation in support of the school, and can develop more group functions, then network among groups could make each school stronger. I would love to cultivate a community that can curate and build out School Nursery Resources, as part of building the replicable social infrastructure.  That plate will need to be spinning by fall of 2021, however new viral variants make the future of public education complex.  I wonder how to engage an Evergreen Student working on bioregional education for an industrial middle school, in a way that supports coherence of the support group, perhaps as part of teaching social technology? I think my pathway here is still in training. I have started playing around with unstructured video resources at my home nursery:

And here’s a more involved exploration of Fireweed:

WoodLaCoHo and St’uchub Ravine Neighborhood

The most significant change since my last update, has been moving into Woodard Lane Cohousing in the NW Neighborhood of Olympia.

Life at “the commune” is a lovely anchor.  I put out a call for a garden flash mob and got three people who helped me pull out infrastructure so I could rehabilitate a large section of our garden.  I am so grateful to live in the constant presence of a helping hand.  The garden infrastructure on the other hand is a classic example of a systems failure triggered by one narrow decision that then drove a cascade of decisions.  This is what Mollison would have called a type #1 error–an initial design mistake after which you spend the rest of your life working to maintain.  I made a quick video describing the failed system, and some of the standard drip irrigation solutions I have come up with over time, based on many mentors.  

It is both a pleasure and a burden to come into a community where I am one of a handful of individuals with a love of laboring and with construction experience.  The community formed around a vision of interpersonal relationships, and some deep skills around sociocracy, mediation and nonviolent communication.  They don’t necessarily dedicate a commensurate effort with buildings or drainage systems or the forest edge.  They do a great job supporting each other and having regular meals together, and pulling together for work parties, and it’s a good place to try to survive a global pandemic.  

Some significant garden improvements are underway, I have established a small native plant nursery, and the tool shed and wood shop are now organized and cleaned out. I set up a potting bench under shelter, and blackberry cleared our sections of our 60 acre Schneider Ravine forest, ivy pulled off trees, and deer trails explored.  There is always work to be done.

This tension between the physical and ecological dimensions of a community and the social dimensions of a community is an interesting play on Ostrom’s rules.  The commons are both physical and social, and there is work to do in both.  However, if in a community, many are busy with social contributions, while the physical work falls on a few people this is a potential source of strife.  Stewardship capability promises to be a long topic.  On the other hand our little community of 18 households has a lot to offer our neighborhood and surrounding community, more than if we were each alone.

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:

1. 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.
2. Check out the Hylo Network and The Salish Sea Restoration Wiki as a potential shared information architecture that can support us in group formation, stronghold development, and for me at least, mobile ecological field stations! I will be providing guided tours between now and the next murmuration.
3. 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.

Took too long to get this update out the door.

Writing about my efforts and what I am learning is helping me a little with sense making.  It’s 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.

I’ve spent significant effort lately supporting to the extent I can the development of Joe Brewer’s 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.  I’m 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, etc…) 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 27” (680mm) of rainfal in winter, compared to our 50” (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 “rights of nature” 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 Midnight’s 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.

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 don’t 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 “policing powers” 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, doesn’t 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 ‘complex systems analysis’ 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 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 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.

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 doesn’t 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.  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.

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.
• Works In Progress – I published a pair of articles in our local progressive monthly:  Camping as a Way To Restore Watersheds, The Green Cove  Estuary – Everything We Need Is Right Here.
• 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.

Time for a deeper update on my exploration of the Ecosystem Guild vision in Green Cove Creek Watershed.  In the last installment (Update – 2018 Harvest) I resolved to temporarily shift focus away from restoration camping, and explore Green Cove Creek, to focus on the missing mechanisms necessary for communities to protect and restore watersheds in Lowland Puget Sound.  I also concluded that restoration camping is all about people, and it seemed like Green Cove was a good place to start building a local community that could ultimately lead restoration camping in South Puget Sound.

This report is long so here is a one paragraph summary:

Summary – Over the last 6 months I produced eight essays, sketched a  framework of restoration skills, contributed research to a fight over a watershed development proposal, developed conceptual design for a field station, developed and ran workshops on amphibians and hardwood cuttings, did a bunch of mapping and research, and supported a park planting.  More importantly I became much more familiar with the Green Cove Watershed–below I briefly describe 24 institutions and sub-cultures in Green Cove.  I initiated work between five watershed partners on a grant proposal that we agreed to postpone.  All the makings of an Ecosystem Guild are present, but not integrated.  We need a more robust systems to educate stewards, and to protect and restore the watershed.  I propose an integrated model for building these capabilities, using a mix of on-line technical content, a project-based “open consultancy” teaching approach, and a flipped classroom model for skill building, based on evolving regional standards for restoration and protection practice.  This allows us to begin on-the-ground work, as we build capabilities. There are many sites where we could begin, but I suggest two open consultancies on a private wetland-forest edge and a school mother-garden.  Collective impact theory offers concepts for developing backbone functions to improve community performance.  As we develop these pilot efforts, we can cultivate and test backbone functions that support future work.  This strategy provides a clearer role for interns, and suggests two workshops, to initiate development of South Puget Sound revegetation standards, and to build community functions among Green Cove Watershed partners.

Report on Past Objectives

In my report last Harvest I set the following objectives, and have made some progress:

1. Publish the eight season year as a framework – Six seasons are drafted–two more to go.  Read more about The Eight Season Year of the Salish Sea and how it defines both ecological and social work.
2. Develop a modular education strategy – I sketched a master list of skills necessary for restoration, and from these picked a core of skills that would allow a community to start restoring vegetation.  I started a species list and recovered teaching aids from a previous school garden project.  To minimize direct instruction I imagine a  Flipped Classroom Model where individuals are able to self study, and we focus time together on learning through applying knowledge through field work.  To support this I imagine organizing knowledge and skill learning around a set of standards for completing field work.  We have concrete opportunities to run and refine standards in Green Cove at the middle school and college level over three sites (a school, a park, and private conservation parcels) where we can implement through a practice I learned from Darren Doherty called “open consultancy”.  Read more below.
3. Develop LLC structure – After investigation, I decided that piggy-backing on existing institutional structures is more efficient for the moment–becoming a volunteer in schools, NGOs, and the City.  This “volunteer” status, done with full disclosure of my ulterior intent of restoring watersheds, also provides a deeper understanding of institutional sub-cultures.  There will come a time, when it will be important to own collective property or manage liability outside the scope of existing institutions, and that will require a new institution.  I have started framing a LLC operating agreement using a “sociocratic governance with planned mitosis” model (some of the possible functions are discussed below as part of Backbone).
4. Develop and test a mobile field station – I have a bunch of sketches, have done some research into materials, but am still short of specifications for an initial build.  My conceptual design is for a 4’x4’x8′ trailer box with a tool shed on one site, and a kitchen/classroom on the other, that unfolds to a 10′ x 24′ tent structure.  Human waste would be managed through a bucket-based composting toilet.  It still seems like a mobile field station may be premature, but will become suddenly relevant if we are ready to spend more time in the field away from infrastructure.  Describing these systems will require another blog entry, and construction will have to be passed to collaborators or would pull me away from other activities.
5. Community weaving in the Green Cove Creek Watershed – Much of my work has been focused on getting to know the watershed communities.  What an incredible community and place!  Perhaps every place is a thing of beauty when fully appreciated.  I’ve established a GIS and document archive.  We’ve had two workshops on amphibians and cuttings, a planting work party with the city, discussions with the city about park access, and conversations around a prospective grant application, along with some social gatherings.  I’ve had a large number of private conversations.  My assessment of this community, and my plan for how to proceed is the bulk of my report below.

To remain organized I like to focused on the desired end state–a social system capable of capturing rain, building biomass in forests and soils, and sustaining biological diversity (see Three Simple Goals), as a collaborative activity where everyone benefits through reciprocity (see System Among Neighbors). To achieve these goals, we need three tangible capabilities:  the ability to restore, the ability to protect, and the ability to educate ourselves.  In practice these three capabilities are intertwined and mutually supporting.

These capabilities largely depend on having the right forms of cultural capital present in the community (See Systems Assessment for Stewardship Design for a more abstract discussion of social flows and forms of capital).  For these reasons, understanding the people in the watershed, and their institutions and sub-cultures is very important.  People are the cradle of vision, investors in resources, and carriers knowledge.  I start by reviewing 24 Green Cove institutions and sub-cultures I have observed.

I am trying to decide where to invest my efforts in developing “backbone functions” that are missing in the existing social system (for a simplistic example: Green Cove has abundant shovels, and students wanting to do work, but lacks a good plant species list, and nursery management knowledge).  This is where an Ecosystem Guild could aim to catalyze community capability.  The critical principle at work is to remain focused on the capability of the local social system to do the work.  We are not colonizing a watershed community to support a new institution.  We are strategically building relationships among existing institutions to create new watershed capabilities.

Institutions in Green Cove

I’ve had conversations with around 20 individuals involved in the watershed.  I describe institutions and sub-cultures, in part to give individuals some privacy.  I am increasingly convinced that our creations are largely built of relationships among individuals.  Some people wield disproportionate creative or adaptive capabilities, or may be skilled at crossing institutional or sub-cultural boundaries.  I believe deep watershed stewardship will depend on a diverse and inclusive network of these people.

Olympia School District – The school district has Career Training and Education (CTE) programs, that provides funds to schools and teachers, to give middle school and high school students work-like experiences.  These programs attract students that are not engaged in sports or music or other extracurricular interests.  There are allies in the watershed that are interested in developing a natural resource management CTE program at the high school level.  CTE programs have access to resources that enable students to do real world work.  Because of the overburden placed on teachers running these programs, they need help engaging professional communities, developing technical resources, and identifying meaningful watershed projects.

Marshall Middle School Citizen Science Institute – In the middle of the watershed two middle school teachers are attempting to fully realize an integrated social and natural science-based education program.  They have 60 students in an integrated half-day program and another 180 students/year involved in CTE programs around natural resource careers and horticulture.  They have an existing garden/nursery, but want a stronger nursery plan.  They are interested in shifting production towards native plants for watershed restoration.  This team is adjacent to an alternative elementary school, and has access to a 19 acre, ecologically underdeveloped school yard located a 10 minute walk from a network of degraded headwater wetlands, but in many cases pedestrian access is limited due to property restrictions.  Schools provide a natural social hub for child-rearing families across the watershed. We introduced Marshall to the Native Plant Salvage Foundation (who is interested in developing a network of school native plan salvage and nursery programs)  This note may be a key target for a future grant, although we agreed that seeking a 2019 No Child Left Inside grant was premature.  We began negotiations with parks and local property owners to support pedestrian access to restoration sites.

The Evergreen State College Programs – There are many faculty at The Evergreen State College that teach programs that consider some elements of watershed restoration.  Evergreen programs are like tourists, in that they may visit the watershed but move on, preoccupied with paper studies and the resulting degrees.  Some faculty are associated with durable campus projects (Natural History Museum, Ethnobotany Gardens, GIS Lab, Organic Farm) but are generally heavily burdened with teaching duties, and it will be difficult to cultivate strong commitments to watershed restoration.  However, even the ephemeral attention of programs is the best way to connect with students.

Evergreen Students (sub-culture) – A 15 minute bike ride from the heart of the watershed, Evergreen students have a variety of opportunities to complete Student Oriented Studies (SOS) and Internships as part of their education, and are seeking practical experiences as an entry point to the job market.  There is an internship database where The Guild could facilitate involvement of students.  Graduate programs have mailing lists of students looking for research projects, and there is a community liaison for undergraduates.  It is otherwise very difficult to communicate with students and faculty directly.  Breaking into social networks will take some persistence.  Interns require solid mentorship and deserve investment.  Development of standard project-based practices can make intern entry into productive work easier for everyone.  A reputation for providing good quality internships can increase the quality of candidates.

Stream Team – Olympia, Lacey, Tumwater and Thurston County are required to sustain a volunteer coordination, education and outreach system, as part of their NPDES permit under the Clean Water Act.  Four stream team staff have varying professional skills and ambitions, but are directly charged with supporting watershed monitoring and restoration.  They are also constrained by their institutional mandates, and shape their work based on personal interests.  Stream Team also manages a regional mailing list of several thousand interested citizens.

City of Olympia Parks – Grass Lakes Nature Reserve is a city owned wetland complex, with restoration potential at the Green Cove headwaters.  Park staff are overburdened with general park management, such as maintaining trails, picking up garbage, responding to people living in the woods, and maintaining infrastructure and gardens.  Parks has a volunteer program that is organized but small.  Many neighbors don’t know that Grass Lakes Reserve even exists, and park staff are poorly positioned to develop networks within the watershed community.  They do have equipment and budget for restoration, and a mandate to support restoration and environmental education, and establish public/private partnerships to maximize the public value of park properties.  Parks is generally focused on their own properties and their own needs.

City of Olympia, Environmental Services – This small shop within Public Works is responsible for managing the hydrology of the City of Olympia.  Each municipality has such a “surface water utility” authority, and raises revenue through a parcel assessment.  These professionals have access to the inner workings of local governments, manage modest public budgets, own tools, and can provide technical assistance and project management.  This team operates a small nursery for growing out bare-root stock, and has been working to accelerate restoration of city parks, but can also work in private greenbelts or public rights-of-way to achieve public benefits.

Agency Scientists (sub-culture) – I am lumping agencies and focusing on technical staff within agencies, because except for a few exceptions most natural resource agencies have no durable direct relationship with Green Cove Watershed.  Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and US Fish and Wildlife Service are the primary natural science agencies for the state and federal government respectively.  They are loaded with expertise in a variety topics, such as amphibian ecology, fisheries.  They have colleagues in USGS, Ecology, NOAA, WDNR and other agencies.  Staff from Stream Team and WDFW supported a lecture on amphibian conservation we set up at the Unitarian Church.  There is a USFWS team monitoring Olympia mud minnow in the Green Cove wetlands.  This inter-agency sub-culture has the ability to put small bits of time into community projects, and can share high quality knowledge and advice, but typically doesn’t develop long-term relationships, and is preoccupied with funded work.

Native Plant Salvage Foundation – A small local volunteer NGO with two paid staff and an active board, has been salvaging and growing native plants.  Native Plant Salvage sometimes serves as a contractor to Capital Land Trust and others doing native plant work.  They offer plant ID training, including winter twigs, and are increasingly supporting school nurseries, and have long term relationships with an assortment of sites.  They are willing to serve as a 501(c)3 fiscal agent if the project is right, but have very limited staff capacity to grow, and don’t have a mechanism for growing a larger staff without grants.

Wild Fish Conservancy – Wild Fish is a regional advocacy, science and restoration NGO, but some of their science staff live in the watershed, and have been tracking the chum salmon run on Green Cove Creek.  This brings fishery knowledge to the watershed.  In addition WFC has supported mud minnow research, and has specialized in using rigorous methods to expand local government protections under existing rules by documenting fisheries.

Capital Land Trust & Partners – There are eight parcels near the north end of the Kaiser Swamp, and abutting Evergreen land, where easements or title owned by CLT.  They have a restoration, stewardship, and outreach staff, working across all CLT holdings, and they are interested in collaborating on watershed stewardship.  In general, they limit public use, but are exploring how to increase public access to some sites.  CLT has a regional donor network, but has not been pursuing acquisition in the watershed lately for a variety of complex reasons. CLT provides a bridge to a population of private conservation land owners, and is exploring increased public access to its holdings.

NIMBYs (sub-culture)– There is a network of individuals with some legal and science experience that come out of the woodwork to fight development proposals.  This includes people active in local neighborhood association.  The latest recurring conflagration has been over a development proposal to build 180 housing units on the old Sundberg Gravel Pit, which is an abandoned gravel mine, used as an unregulated dump site, located a five minute drive from 11 toxic waste sites.  The NIMBYs tend to react to development proposals, don’t have clear objectives for future watershed condition, but are extremely motivated when aroused.  They form an episodic communication network, but are not united in philosophy or methods, and core members, through repeated battle, have developed a warrior ethos.

Homeowners and Neighborhood Associations – Gold Crest and Cooper Crest are two HOAs recognized by the city as neighborhood organisations.  There are several other Neighborhoods on the eastern periphery of the watershed, but much of the urbanized watershed is composed of disorganized sub-divisions, or unincorporated county, without functioning neighborhood organizations.  Some of these institutions own greenbelts or storm water ponds that provide key corridors for water, wildlife, and forest remnants.  Many HOA/Neighborhoods have some kind of internal communication network, but don’t have a clear vision of watershed status or future, and may be preoccupied with internal neighborhood politics.

The Trail Builders (sub-culture) – There is a proposed pedestrian trail network that passes through the southern side of the watershed, being developed by a group of well-connected retired professional advocates, with relationships in state and local government.  These advocates are using their networks to incrementally build a regional pedestrian and bicycle trail system that will connect the State Capital to Capital Forest on the SW edge of the greater Olympia city-state.

Religious Institutions – I have heard bits about four religious communities that reside around the edge of the watershed: a Catholic parish, a LDS Temple, a Baptist Church, and the Unitarian Church.  The LDS and Baptist leadership appear supportive of the trail builders, and the Unitarian Church has an earth stewardship group that has offered their facilities for public meetings to support watershed restoration.  There are other potential religious communities that I have not explored.  Each religious institution manages a communications network within its membership–it is unclear to what extent each of these institutions have a city-wide draw, or represents a more local population.

Olympia Coalition for Ecosystem Preservation – a small alliance of professionals advocating for protection and restoration of ecosystems in the vicinity of Olympia, currently focused on the westside green belts along Budd Inlet, but also interested in continuing to develop their capabilities.  There is some relationship between members of the Coalition and both Evergreen and St. Martins colleges, and other regional restoration workgroups.

Sound Native Plants – A regionally known native plant nursery and restoration contractor lives in the South of the watershed, and has a wealth of experience and skills, but needs to survive through more or less continuous contracting, but has a community-oriented world view and has supported local work in the past.

Thurston County – Under the Hirst Decision a county was sued for allow development without knowing the status of groundwater.  Thurston County is now responsible for evaluating the groundwater status of the watershed under new state requirements, and has regulatory jurisdiction over half the watershed.  The county has a fish passage program that is seeking to avoid inaction in the face of legal liability under tribal treaty rights.  There are two fish passage barriers in the lower watershed that appear to be affecting spawner distribution.  The county led a watershed planning process 20 years ago, that set targets for forest cover, and warned of damage to the watershed from development that has been implemented in some ways, and neglected in others.

Farmers (sub-culture) – We have contacts among a scattering of crop farmers and grazers in the watershed, mostly clustered on the SW corner of the watershed, grazing goats, and running organic community-supported agriculture or intensive vegetable production operations.  They are generally supportive of ecosystem conservation, have knowledge, skills and equipment, and also need to use a large portion of their land and labor for commercial food production to make a living.

Thurston Conservation District – The CD is a county-wide “special purpose district” with a budget based on parcel assessments, and staff that administer technical assistance and cost share programs, particularly to farmers, but also to private land owners, to solve ecological problems.  They also run a environmental education program in schools focused on water quality monitoring (South Sound GREEN), but don’t have a particular presence in Green Cove.  The District has been under assault from politically conservatives that think that the CD should be only be providing farmer subsidies, and not participating in restoration.

Veterans Ecological Trades Collective – A growing network of veterans, now based on a new farm in south Thurston County, organized around permaculture principles, are seeking to develop skills and land access for veterans, in fields related to forestry, farming, and ecosystem management.   They may enjoy practical training opportunities.

Capitol High School – A 15 minute walk from Grass Lakes, the high school has a greenhouse, a horticulture program, and an environmental club.  The cross country program may use trails in the park once access is increased by the Trail Builders.

South Puget Sound Community College – similar to Evergreen, SPSCC has internship opportunities, a horticulture program, and a natural resource science offerings, and may more more organized communications networks than Evergreen, and is located in the adjacent Percival Creek Watershed.

Blue Heron Bakery – A local restaurant and cafe on the south edge of the watershed that has offered using their space for community events.

South Puget Sound Salmon Enhancement Group – a regional fishery enhancement group, SPSSEG has project management capability for in-stream work and assessment, and is completing a habitat assessment of Green Cove Creek using state grants.

Bark and Garden Center – the largest retail ornamental nursery in Olympia,  serves the gourmet gardening community of Olympia.  They don’t have a workshop schedule, and their communications network is unknown.

Master Gardeners Foundation of Thurston County – a network of gardeners that host workshops and provides 40-hours of detailed ornamental garden and integrated pest management training in exchange for 40 hours of volunteer community services.  Master gardener graduates are looking for volunteer opportunities.

A Vision for Three Capabilities

Plainly, an “Ecosystem Guild” of sorts exists in the watershed, but it is fragmented, doesn’t have shared ecological goals, and lacks the capabilities necessary to restore and protect the watershed.  Many individuals are overburdened, or missing specific resources to realize their hopes and visions.  There are multiple social networks, but very little local place-based ecological knowledge in circulation.  There are tangible pools of capital that are underutilized.  Ecological work is limited in scope and fragmented.

I propose a set of three future conditions that describe our ability to achieve an educated community capable of protection and restoration:

EDUCATE!

• Transparent – the state of the watershed is transparent to each resident.  
• Free Knowledge – The knowledge and skills necessary to protect and restore ecosystems are available to anyone in the watershed that is willing to apply effort toward watershed restoration. 
• Self-aware – The watershed community can generate accurate knowledge of watershed condition.

To protect and restore, a watershed community must have knowledge and skills.  When a watershed community can all plainly see the condition of the watershed, and answer its own questions, and has the skills and knowledge to act, then a community can begin to protect and restore in earnest.

PROTECT!

• Proactive – residents anticipate impacts, and can work to increase protection prior to a crisis.
• Efficient – the processes and tools necessary to address threats are ready and at hand and do not excessively drain resources.
• Accountable – the inability of local governments to provide ecosystem protection are remembered and addressed at the ballot box.

When an educated watershed community understands the character of threats, and has proactive strategies and resources in place to either immediately counteract threats, or pursue redress over time, then a community can protect a watershed.

RESTORE!

• Self-reliant – The community has the institutions, knowledge and skills to design and implement restoration of the water, biomass, and diversity.
• Integrated – Restoration efforts are part of the economic and cultural life of the community, and provide multiple benefits.

When a community that is able to protect its resource base has the resources to design and implement restoration, and when that work comes naturally and is socially fulfilling, than a community can restore a watershed.

A Strategy

We need a strategy for developing these three conditions and capabilities.  Of course we can refine our destination over time, but it is important to start heading somewhere if we don’t like where we are.  If we can support meaningful learning through meaningful work we can be very efficient and effective.  I propose a mix of 1) on-line guild-generated educational content, 2) coupled with project-based “open consultancy” teaching, and 3) a flipped classroom model for connecting skill building related to the project work.  This approach will likely require a “collective impact” approach among watershed partners, and the development of some “backbone functions”.  Lets break that down:

The best example of a user-generated content platform is a wiki.  The Salish Sea Restoration Wiki provides a framework in which anyone can contribute and organize content.  This framework can incorporate both open-source content through an archive, and proprietary content through links.  Wiki links are stable over time.  This kind of open-source repository becomes an open archive and reference manual for our work.  Project after project, site after site, watershed after watershed, you can easily refer back to continuously improving wiki content, rather than republishing resources, evidence or materials.

An open consultancy using continuously improved standards is where a professional provides a consultant service to a land owner or manager, to design and implement restoration or protection efforts.  Unlike private work, the open consultancy solves a problem by teaching a group of students and the client to do the work through sharing standard methods (documented in the public domain on the wiki).  The professional builds intellectual and experiential capital in the community, while generating a protection or restoration product, while further refining shared standard methods through the interaction.  The client gets a product, and diverse views of the problem, while learning the methods by which they can adaptively managing the site over time.  The student gets to immediately exercise and test new knowledge and skills in a practical context.  Consultants, students, and clients contribute to improved standards through the process of doing work.

The flipped classroom model is where a student is taught knowledge through on-line reading or video, so that workshop and field time is reserved for experiential skill development and getting the work done.  This allows the student to control the pace of knowledge transfer, and puts responsibility back on the student, for fully engaging in the open consultancy and ecological knowledge.  A flipped model standardizes the knowledge available to students and clients as they enter the open consultancy, regardless of the consultant running the project, and reduces the cost and effort to the consultant, maximizing the value for everyone involved.  By coupling the flipped classroom with continuously improved standards, everyone involved in a project becomes more effective over time.

Needless to say, we are not there yet.  Neither the shared restoration and protection standards, the skill and knowledge base, nor the  self-study resources, exist in the public domain.  In addition, consultants with the technical knowledge to restore and protect, usually lack skill as teachers.   The carriers of knowledge and skill (among agencies, NGOs, and private contractors) have typically not organized knowledge for efficient transfer, nor are they motivated to do so.  This work is delegated to academic settings that typically lack practical experience.  We do have substantial knowledge about the watershed, but lack detail.  The professional restoration system, holds tremendous knowledge in private contractors, who sell knowledge and skill at $100/hour, which watershed residents can never afford.  Institutions that do environmental education, don’t invest in skill development or information storage and retrieval, and depend on a direct instruction model for sharing knowledge (which has a low up-front cost but doesn’t generate a durable and retrievable resource).  Environmental educators working with the general public rarely have the confidence or experience to run an open consultancy.  Researchers typically lack practical experience in manipulating systems.  Public agencies, which have a public benefit mandate, are overburdened or lack a shared strategy, platform, or motive for making knowledge transferable  and empowering residents in protection or restoration.

So we have all the bits and pieces present in Green Cove, along with a huge concentration of industrial resources, but we are not organized into a functioning system.  I believe there is an opportunity to develop a model system in Green Cove, in collaboration with local and regional partners.

To not get lost in discussion, and get to work, we need sites where we can start to experiment with open consultancy.

I am aware of four potential landscape sites at different scales and with different functions that could serve as a test.  There are many other potential sites beyond these, but each of these landscapes has an existing protection and restoration stewardship community, and an immediate opportunity to conduct a consultancy:

1. Kaiser Wetlands private conservation lands (site-scale restoration)
2. The Marshall Middle School (site-scale nursery/mother-garden)
3. The Grass Lakes Nature Refuge (multi-scale restoration)
4. The Olympia urban growth area (landscape scale protection)

The watershed also has a potential student body, including middle school students, college students, neighborhood stewards, and professional and amateur training students. So what kind of situation makes for a good open consultancy pilot site for a startup?

• The land manager is interested and supportive of the model
• There is a discoverable body of students attracted to the work
• The work in not too complex (to reduce the initial burden for standard development and skill training)
• We have guild volunteers willing to serve as consultants

The Guild will need to define an “open consultancy standard” which describes how we coordinate the professionals, interns, and students and bring them into a relationship; and define scope with the land manager, while designing the project to social and ecological context at multiple scales.  We will need to outline standard practices for assessment, design, and implementation of restoration and protection work.  In some cases we’ll be designing standards as we go.  We need to support the consultancy by teaching knowledge and skills, using self-learning materials.  We need to understand and align with the cycles of the 8 seasons.  We’ll need to efficiently develop lessons on video that students can self-study before field work.

This will take more work than just running a “sage on the stage” workshop.  However, I suspect we may be creating much more value over time.  Each open consultancy generates cultural capital that supports the next consultancy.  In this model the processes of learning, teaching, design and implementation are integrated.  You are both doing stewardship and building systems that make stewardship easier.

A Proposal For An Initial Open Consultancy

I believe the best fit to test an open consultancy model would be restoration of private wetland buffers, and development of a mother-garden at Marshall Middle School.  As an example, here is how institutions and sub-cultures within Green Cove might be organized to conduct the Kaiser Wetland Work.

Kaiser Wetlands Buffer Restoration

Subject:  Patch Scale Stewardship in a Wetland Buffer Forest – increasing infiltration, biomass potential and biodiversity support in a degraded young forest stand.

Target Standards: 

• Stormwater Infiltration
• Forest Patch Stewardship

Client:  Capitol Land Trust and Affiliated Private Landowners

Consultant:  Ecosystem Guild and a Restoration Standards Partnership (potentially including City of Olympia Environmental Services, Sound Native Plants, Native Plant Salvage Foundation, Veterans Ecological Trades Collective, Stream Team, Agency Scientists, Thurston Conservation District, or Capitol Land Trust)

Students: Evergreen Students, Marshall Middle School, Homeowners and Neighborhood Associations, NIMBYs, South Puget Sound Community College, Veterans Ecological Trades Collective, or Master Gardeners.

Backbone

Following the Agile development strategy we need to quickly develop a working prototype.  Our first open consultancy will likely be improvised and rough, grabbing resources and methods off the shelf.  As we go we will be developing our skill at defining and evaluating a standard.  Does is embody good design?  Does it integrate multiple scales?  Does it describe the range of variation?  Should the standard be split or lumped?  Also, as we do the work we should be thinking about how each event serves to build the backbone functions that support collective impact in the watershed.  Six principles define backbone organization function under a Collective Impact model.

1. Maintain clarity of purpose (realign, communicate, co-create)
2. Drive long-term momentum and growth (partner raising, build community, strategic partners, recognition, autonomy, ROI narratives, conditions for innovation)
3. Build Partnership Identity (formal launch, rituals, team-building, work in and on partnership)
4. Connect and Align People and Activities (conscious integration, map skills, define domain and role, good meetings, accountability, build memory)
5. Involve the Watershed Community (understand needs, focused co-creation, engagement, agile development,
6. Measure and Learn (critical metrics, data stories, find problems)

Building on these backbone concepts, I propose two workshops.  Timing and location depend on community interest.  To reduce workshop cost, we would test a modified “open space technology” standard, where both the summoning query, and elements of the open space deliverables are more deeply defined in advance.  These two workshops would directly reinforce the open consultancy model, and strengthen the consultant community.

• Regional Revegetation Standards Retreat – NGOs, local governements, Conservation Districts, Tribes and Conservation Corps conduct revegetation all over lowland Puget SOund.  We would benefit from developing shared standards for assessment, design, installation and monitoring of projects so that we can improve our efficiency and effectiveness.  This retreat bring together interested parties to establish a revegetation section of the Salish Sea Wiki, and initiate information sharing among revegetation workgroups.
• Green Cove Watershed Retreat – This workshop would bring together individuals from among the institutions and subcultures described above, to explore the development of backbone functions for the Green Cove Creek Watershed.

But What About Restoration Camping?!

I did want to briefly mention that I have not forgotten in any way about restoration camping.  What I believe that I am described above is the social context for restoration camping, which is essentially a sequence of open consultancies, delivered through a mobile field camp.  One step at a time.