Author: Paul Cereghino

Republished from the Ecosystem Restoration Camps, the inspiration for the Ecosystem Guild, established in the Spanish Altiplano in 2017.

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I have memories of camping in the High Sierra of California as a child with family friends. We carried extra food on a donkey named “pepper”, and the bears left claw marks on tree trunks, and there was lightning. I began backpacking in college. I remember my first pair of good boots. With the right kit I could go farther. I started following deer trails, and lived in the woods over summer vacation on a sheet of plywood, under a tarp and mosquito netting. I learned maps and plants and all of this led me to gardening, design, and restoration ecology.

Camping in the Western United States may have unusual cultural status. My thrice-great grandfather crossed the western desert in an ox drawn wagon to get to a green crescent of land that became home.  There are stretches of untracked land the size of small countries that can only be explored on foot. We live with bears, lions, and wolves. Privileged urbanites shop at REI for fleece, and rural people hunt for meat, and we both camp.

There is a visceral feeling that comes from putting together a kit and walking into the wilderness. The same rules apply to everyone. If you are too cold you’ll die. You need clean water. Fat, protein and carbohydrate each burn differently. Comforts add weight, and so all comfort has a cost. You pay attention to the details and treasure the right tools.

There are social norms that emerge on the trail. Sharing increases as the unspoken pact is that everyone survives together, and you want to be a provider. To be nomadic even temporarily is unsettling. Some of your civilized habits are irrelevant, and are quickly shed. You eat differently, exercise constantly, squat to defecate, bathe less, and spend more time watching rocks and water. As you travel lighter you can go farther.

I now work as a restoration ecologist, and for me there is a resonance between camping and Restoration. I’m not talking about the little restorations–grant funded projects managed by government information workers like myself. I’m talking about the Restoration where our way of life makes the earth stronger with each generation. This common misunderstanding that government projects will fix what ails us is, at best, irrelevant. Our need for Restoration began a long time ago, maybe with the bronze-smelting deforestation of the Mediterranean three millennia ago. Restoration will require that we become unsettled. Some old habits need to be shed. Every comfort has a price. Wilderness camping is a ritual to rediscover what it means to stay alive and Restoration is about choosing how we live.

There are almost 7.5 billion of us now walking into unexplored territory. We are traveling cross country without a map. We will need to build a new kit as we go, and come to terms with all the useless crap we’ve been carrying. We’ll learn as we go. Some of our old habits will be irrelevant, and we will be wise to shed them. You will meet people who act confident and say they know the way. In the end you’ll have to read your own signs, and choose your own trail mates.

Life on the trail is intimate and bonds are personal and built of love. Love takes many forms, but must be cultivated and nurtured. There are special places in my heart for those I have journeyed with on foot. When I am ensconced in modern life, camping helps me regain focus by renewing an understanding of survival and the relationships I value. As we embrace Restoration, I suspect we may live more like we are camping, rather than building some kind of edifice.

I think I’ll find some trail mates and start looking for the quiet small path of restoration. We’ll travel light and navigate by the shape of the land. We’ll have to attend to each other. At the end of my journey, I hope that I can leave a subtle trace, of deeper soil, larger forests, and love.

 

Republished from Ecosystem Restoration Camps, the inspiration for the Ecosystem Guild, established in The Netherlands and Spanish Altiplano in 2017.

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I live in a temperate coastal rainforest on the eastern Pacific Rim. We have more water than most, but it all comes in winter. Our cold inland sea has four thousand kilometers of shoreline, ringed by snow-capped mountains to catch moist ocean wind. Our trees are legendary–an old forest can store 900 metric tons of carbon per acre. Beyond the Cascadian rim are deserts, drylands, tundra and more mountains for a thousand miles in every direction.

People here lived on Salmon for five thousand years. The salmon need streams with steady flows of cold water. Clearing forest, scraping soil, and pumping groundwater have left many streams hot and shallow in summer. Winter floods scour eggs from the gravel. On October 6, 2016 the supreme court of Washington State ruled that Whatcom County could not legally issue another building permit for a new home unless it could show that there is enough water for each new well. Whatcom County couldn’t show the water.

Washington State water rights are a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces and no picture on the box. I suspect that neither the county, the state, nor the plaintiff knows what comes next. There is often less water in the river than is “owned” on paper. With fish and timber gone, the state economy now scrapes forest duff and builds houses. Our population is growing by 100,000 people every two to three years, surging with in-migration from other parts of the country. The market value of thousands of parcels depends on the ability to get a building permit.

In the political chaos following the court decision, the state budget process collapsed. Civil society picked sides or quietly left the room. Propaganda machines lurched into action. Partisan websites started churning out content. Banks, builders, and big real estate lined up against environmentalists, senior water right holders, and 20 sovereign tribal nations, holding broken treaties that promise salmon forever.

In our green crescent, around a billion liters of water falls on every square kilometer of land–it would form a waist-deep lake to the horizon, if it didn’t run to the sea. Up in the mountains, the deluge would cover our heads and is caught in snowfields, glaciers and forests, recharging sixteen montane rivers. The ocean gives us so much to work with. The Salish Sea is a climatic paradise, neither hot nor cold, with an abundant trading culture since time-before-memory. But unlike the Indians, we couldn’t conceive of living without tillage agriculture. We spent our first colonial generations cutting and burning the forests, just to get down to the mineral soil.

It used to be that all the rain went into the ground, bubbling up in springs, or pooling in wetlands and beaver ponds. Our green crescent will likely remain a climate refuge, even with our unmeasured aquifers and declining snowpack. The future is likely to bring us larger floods followed by longer droughts. So even in one of the wettest places on earth, in the home of Microsoft, Amazon, and Starbucks, full of wealthy environmentalists, our mismanagement of forests and soils, combined with mass migration, will lead to a final struggle over water and our ecological heritage. We are in this together.

When I was a child, and less preoccupied with politics and finances, I knew what to do. When the fall comes, and the frogs sing, you can go to the street and the abandoned lots and play in the rain as it tumbles in from the sea. You find trickles of water and you turn them into pools, with sticks and mud. You capture the rain and put it in the ground.

Perhaps because we’ve had it easy, we don’t have a coherent strategy. The forest practically grows itself. Excavation equipment is parked in every rural neighborhood. Our governments and universities curate more data than anywhere on earth. What we lack is a clear sense of shared purpose. If we can embrace the work of forests and beavers, there will be plenty of water, and therefore abundance. But if you read the political tabulation of popular concerns, hydrology is not even on the list. It is as if we live in an imaginary world, full of scarcity and fear, but disconnected from the pulse of the earth.

If we look to the drylands, people have been living with drought for generations. Percival Alfred Yeomans was a Australian mining engineer in the 1950s who had excavators parked in his rural neighborhood, time on his hands, and a sharp mind. He proposed a radically simple approach to landscape management, and an alternative to large scale water projects: first study the topography, understand the flow of water, and then design distributed systems to catch and store water in the ground and in ponds. He developed perhaps the first integrated ecosystem planning strategy written in English.  It is brilliant, somewhat poorly written, and no one in my neighborhood has read it.

Unlike P.A. Yeomans or my child self, we have abundant tools to help us think about water. Digital elevation models give us a mathematically precise grid of the earth’s surface. Water always goes downhill. With a few keystrokes we can predict in detail where water will flow across an entire watershed. Each vein is fed by an easily delineated catchment dressed in a tapestry of forests, fields or parking lots, soils, and shallow geology. First study topography, understand the water, and design the rest to follow. Patterns of slope mark opportunities where water will either soak or seep. Well logs let us look at water levels underground. We can locate every landowner parcel in its hydrologic context. An umbrella walk in winter storms can verify the details. All restoration is local, so knowing each place is required. Could we cultivate a new picture of our rainforest home, door by door? If we can understand our purpose, the topography and water will show us the trail. All good adventure books have maps under the front cover. Hydrology is the foundation of ecological restoration. And so stewardship of water is the great work of our time, not only for its moral or aesthetic merits, but for its contribution to our well-being.

There is a new language to learn so we can think and talk about land and water. Yeomans gave a name to the points in a primary valley where slope changes from steep to gentle; the first places where water can be held efficiently with the cut and fill of earthen dams. Yeomans drew lines falling slightly off contour where stormwater flow might be pulled out to saturate ridges. Even as he dug his earthworks, he designed new tools to incrementally deepen soils across his fields and guide the flow of shallow groundwater. His New South Wales was an ancient landscape of clay hills worn round. My post-glacial plateaus are fresh carved with piles of gravel lying around.  The first Ecosystem Restoration Camp is on an incised semi-arid high plateau. But his vision was not a religion. It is a pragmatic story of personal stewardship, an open-eyed conversation with reality. Topography defines opportunities that we need to train ourselves to see. When knowledge of purpose is coupled with knowledge of place, we are ready to learn this new language.

Our challenge is to create a community in every catchment in every watershed that can remember and teach this work. If we do well, the stewardship of water will become a new story, with hydrological knowledge as a common language. A simple understanding of topography and water may help free us from the well worn ruts of political contestation. Can we be lifted by a visceral impulse toward stewardship? This is not a challenge solved by passive opinionation. Yet it is a work full of joy, because our hearts feel gratitude for an abundant land. All the skills and technologies are in hand, the greater challenge is to learn how to do this thing together, not as special interest groups, or isolated subcultures, but as communities of free people.

 

Imagine a campground that is not a parking spot for rent, where the line between garden and wilderness is unclear and surrounds you, where your neighbors are all there to take care of the land, where you teach and learn old skills, and where you have pleasant work to do. You see people you know, and each day you eat and work together to invest in water and soil.

Both camping and ecosystem restoration are about a relationship with yourself, with others, with the land, and with the unknown. We have been camping for 200,000 years. Now it’s the age of restoration.

I have been working in ecosystem industries for about 30 years. Now I spend my time in meetings or phone calls or typing documents, buying projects, selling strategies, and navigating human systems. I spend shockingly little time actually tending ecosystems, or talking to the people that live in them. It’s a kind of madness.

The first plant I identified from a book was Lamium purpurea. I can still see the alder stand in which it was growing with bedstraw and trailing blackberry, and bark white with lichens. I still remember the smelly smoothness the first time I peeled cedar bark. Picking nettles, cultivating food, building from raw trees; these are the skills that connect us to land since the time before memory.

We have a problem with our relationship with the earth. If we want to care for the earth, we need to care for the earth. It is a simple thing.

What if we all just decided that we were going to tend the earth? We would go into the watershed, and live simply, slow erosion, catch water, build soil, plant trees, and collect seeds. But we’ve made it complicated. The land is all chopped it all up with imaginary lines, into my land and your land. But the rain and the health of the soil and the threads of evolution are not owned. Through an elaborate system of irresponsibility our most valuable heritage is cared for by no one.

We have vast areas of land that have been damaged during colonization, and need work. We use public funds to buy damaged and sensitive lands with no resources for stewardship. We have neighborhoods with no access to land. We have landowners with visions of stewardship, but unable to do the work. We are losing the skills of our ancestors, just as we are destroying wild communities that we have tended for thousands of years. Our meat, our houses, and our education all comes from factories.

I propose that an answer might be camping.

I suspect that the obligation of stewardship comes before money, but does not preclude our humanity. We have a funny idea that conservation is about removing people from land. It doesn’t work because we actually need to change the relationship. Lets build a network of campgrounds throughout the watersheds where we enrich the land with our residence. Lets gather and restore ecosystems and study and hone our skills. We can buy our food from farms and tell stories. We can harvest building materials with respect in a relationship that increases biodiversity and forest health. Come for a weekend or come for a season. We can laugh and play and tell stories over the campfire as we have done for 200,000 years.

To do this we need to create a social and legal system so that we can become a human guild that restores watersheds and lives with the land. It’ll be fun. But we can’t do this alone and it will take work. Isn’t it worth a shot?

I made a website.   I’d like you to read it out and let me know what you think. I’m looking for a good crew that wants to figure out how to go restoration camping.