Maya Khosla: On Fires, Forests & Wild Elders


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Maya Khosla is a biologist and writer. She has spent thousands of hours hiking, backpacking, and documenting forests, including post-fire regeneration.

Image for Sonoma Magazine by Erik Castro

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Time notes:

00:00:00 Introduction

00:01:07 The message of fire

00:02:00 3 types of traditional fire practice in India.

00:03:22 Rebirth after fires

00:08:00 Intimacy and the effect of hand burning versus machine work on land

00:15:00 Main causes of fires in California

00:18:00 Misunderstandings on preparing one’s home in a fire-prone area. Thinking like an ember

00:19:00 Keeping a house safe in a fire and Dr. Jack Cohen

00:21:00 “The Sierra, A History” poem read by Maya Khosla

00:24:00 Decaying forests and close associations

00:29:00 What you see in a newborn forest

00:30:00 Healthy mature forests

00:324:00 Symbiotic elemental collaboration

00:36:00 Wild Elders

00:39:50 Seed places

00:41:04 “The Oak” Poem read by Maya Khosla

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Maya Khosla

Maya Khosla is a biologist and writer with training as a toxicologist.  She is has spent thousands of hours hiking, backpacking, and documenting forests. Working in collaboration with other scientists, she recently investigated the post-fire regeneration of giant sequoias in Nelder Grove and Redwood Mountain Grove. She was Poet Laureate Emerita of Sonoma County and her books include All the Fires of Wind and Light and “Keel Bone”.

https://www.mayakhosla.com/

Rought Transcript

Please excuse all errors

Olivia: [00:00:00] I’m Olivia Clementine, and this is Love and Liberation. Today our guest is Maya Khosla. Maya is a biologist and writer with training as a toxicologist. She has spent thousands of hours hiking, backpacking, and documenting forests. Working in collaboration with other scientists, she recently investigated the post fire regeneration of giant sequoias in Nelder Grove and Redwood Mountain Grove. She was poet laureate Emerita of Sonoma County, and her books include All the Fires of Wind and Light and Keel Bone. Her recent awards include the fund for wild nature grassroots and activist [00:01:00] award The Environmentalist of the Year Award from the Sonoma County Conservation Council and the Penn Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award.

Fire often is used in rituals for purification. And of course, is a powerful element, it also takes a lot of wisdom and presence to relate with it. So I wanted to begin here, just in a general experience of fire. From all these years of exploring fire, what would you say that fire is the messenger of?

Maya: Well, starting in India, fire is a message of, unity because people unite over fire. That’s my first message of fire that I learned was in India. And it’s a message of cleansing, [00:02:00] which is probably why it’s part of wedding rituals. And it is also a message of rebirth. I learned about that studying fire in, in ecosystems, but also in India, where there’s a traditional fire practice, or three different fire practices in the northeast of India. They all have their own names. So there’s cultivation fire, which is the cultivations being burned every year. There’s home safety fire, which is, for, for the protection of homes, burning the, what I’ve seen is bamboo. forests, which have these new leaves that sprout are quite flammable, so they burn these bamboo forests below their home, ridgetop homes, during the late spring, and that’s a very heavily sort of ritualized fire, it’s an old tradition, with [00:03:00] elders, and youngsters joining together and then there’s even songs associated with it.

And then there’s fire in the forests that is used for cultural purposes, but also there’s a recognition of natural fire. There’s a recognition that lightning fires are going to reshape landscapes.

I learned that after coming here and Spending many years around post fire forests and seeing the astonishing regeneration in post fire forests and realizing there’s an order of things coming back during the rebirth after fire. The first that I see is little seedlings coming back and the wildflowers and the tops of trees actually look completely charred, supporting new branches because the trees need their sugars to synthesize their [00:04:00] sugars for photosynthesis.

They just send out new leaves in order to start. producing food. Some trees succumb to the wildfire and they very quickly become homes for wood boring beetle larvae, which is Longhorns and other beetles, woodboring, that go deep into the snags, which is standing dead trees, and also bark beetle larvae.

So there’s just, just beetle larvae coming into the trees, and then woodpeckers coming after the larvae, and then hawks coming after the woodpeckers, and eagles, and then there’s such a bustle on the ground with ground cover, and ground squirrels, and mice, and voles, and shrews. coming back to chew on the new vegetation that you have more raptors such as great grey owls.

coming in, and bobcats, mountain lions, even wolves, [00:05:00] a recent study, even wolves after the post fire habitat starts to thrive. And so there’s these waves of life. And of course, the spring season is the busiest of all with the growth and solitary bees, hive bees, butterflies of all kinds, and everything that It wants to feed on, on the materials available.

So it’s an astonishing biodiversity. The last few years I’ve been focusing on mammals, but it is an astonishing biodiversity of birds as well as, as mammals.

Olivia: Continuing with this thread of traditional relationships with fire, traditional ways of working with fire and land.Will you share what you have come to know in terms of traditional ways of working with fire and land in America and in India?

Maya: From what I understand in America, which I’ve mostly been exposed to just a few places in California [00:06:00] for traditional fire, it’s, it’s a ritual and it seems to be here, cleansing experience.

there’s this idea of cleaning out an area that is gonna support growth or clearing around oak trees clearing in order to plant, clearing so that certain grasses with which, weaving is done so the new shoots coming up are much more supple, and they’re great for, for basket weaving.

So there’s so many uses. So I know more sort of secondhand here in the U. S. Cause. I’m not a tribe member, but I have engaged with, those traditional practices. But in India, I really know it. It’s an annual ritual. It’s, it’s it’s been there for, for generations.

So the first ritual that I was [00:07:00] talking about the homes in a village near Chizami are on the top of ridgelines, the forest surrounding them are all below them because they’re on the top of the ridgelines, and so they ritually burn below, like, 300 meter, 100 meter, there’s just three layers of burning that they do right below the home, in lines, they all work together and set it on fire, and then, you know, and then it sort of goes out on its own, works its way up The hill toward the houses and that is to sort of protect the, the homes up in the village.

Olivia: Yeah, I’m so curious about this because I’ve also heard you speak about how there, there also is misinformation about clearing and thinning. And can you speak about that? Because in one sense I hear, Oh, it sounds like the right thing to do to clear this brush, to clear this vegetation. And then on the other hand, that’s not always the [00:08:00] case.

Maya: Thinning is one word that goes all the way from these beautiful, sensible, protective practices around the home to pure commercial logging in the backcountry. And I’ve worked with, you know, folks, and it’s highly understandable that once they get all the way out into the forest

they would like for large materials to make up for the trouble of going out there. So they’re grabbing largely big trees. They call them small trees and small limbs and trimming and all that, but there’s not much trimming you can do across thousands and thousands of acres, in especially equipment driven thinning.

So what I’m talking about is very hand driven. The work around the home is different because Two Hands is doing a lot of the work, vast majority of it. I don’t [00:09:00] see, well certainly not in India, but I don’t know here even, who’s going to be rushing around a house with the operator driven hardcore machinery like a bulldozer or something.

You can’t because you’ve got beautiful structures, you’ve got trees you want to protect, and you got stairs, you know, you can’t. So it’s primarily by hand. And maybe some tools, right? Some tools. But it’s not the heavy mechanical equipment, now. Now you transpose the concept of thinning to the forests, which are wild.

And it’s all about, my gosh, how are we going to deal with this acreage? Let’s just get big equipment. Big equipment means small on details. Because it’s gonna go big tree, big tree, big tree, okay, a few small trees here, line them up, stockpile them, and a vast majority of small [00:10:00] material can be left there, now if it’s burned, it’s different, but they’re not really doing that scale of burning, it’s What they’re doing is mostly, pile burning.

So it has a commercial element, the dimensions are different, the equipment is different, the mentality is different, and you’re never going to get the fine material, the grasses, the shrubs, and everything in the entire area, because the next year, the next area is being visited, versus your home, the next year, you’re visiting your home again, and the next year, your home again.

So your home is getting that attention, and its surroundings. So burning in your own area, there’s that intimacy of knowledge about what plants are there and which, which are going to be saved because large trees, you know, the flames are not going to go all the way to the top when you’re doing a cultural burn. Whereas, if there’s [00:11:00] 23 million acres in the backcountry, it’s 10, 000 here. 10, 000 there. What’s going to happen to the first 10, 000? Grasses are going to grow, non native primarily. They’re transported in with this equipment or by wind. You know, it’s a lot of disturbance happening with ground equipment.

It goes down to bare soil a lot of times. Room for a lot things, things to grow. And they’re small and they’re flammable. And boom, that fire is going to carry them. So exactly where thinning has occurred on that scale, with equipment driven thinning, or, it should have a different name, because a lot of it is commercial logging.

Exactly there is, Where the fire can travel the fastest and has, and one of the animations that a colleague Brian Baker just put together yesterday of the 2021 Caldor fire, which I can share with you shows how fast the fire, alarmingly fast the fire [00:12:00] traveled through heavily, heavily thinned forests.

It’s just just whipped right through because there’s nothing to block it. It’s only these small materials. It’s just so Yeah, so there’s a lot of fires that travel really quickly once These areas have been cleared, but then left alone because no one’s going to handle them over and over again.

Olivia: Why is it that locals can burn a little bit and it helps the fire slow down. What’s actually happening there? What’s the fire hitting that’s slowing it down?

Maya: So what’s happening is it’s not a hundred mile an hour winds. Like what was happening in LA, a hundred, what was happening in, the Diablo winds in 2017 fires in Sonoma, that was 70, 80 mile an hour winds. No one is going to do these types of fires in those types of winds.

It’s not going to happen. Because really, ultimately, temperature, heat, wind, these are controlling the fire. Because, you know, sure there’s fuel, [00:13:00] but this fire skips over a lot of fuel. There’s areas where in a natural fire, there’ll be a whole swath.

that it’s skipped. It, it’s absolutely unburned. There’s some places where maybe the soil holds moisture. There’s moss. In fact, that tends to be the forests that are in the deep riparian corridors, in the deep canyons, in the valleys, in the around lakes, in old growth. mature trees and logs, downed logs, are like sponges.

And so that’s the other problem with using machinery to move massive amounts of material as it dries out, loses the soil carbon, loses the moisture, that’s is going to be drier and flammable. Whereas in an area where you walk into a forest, and I’m sure you’ve had this experience if you’ve been through some Old forests, you walk in the forest and you, [00:14:00] your feet sink a little bit with every step.

It’s because there’s just so much held carbon, moisture, layers of it, years of it, you know, maybe thousand years of it, it’s all captured there and so when something holds moisture like that, it doesn’t burn as much.

So the fire tends to skip, it’ll, it’ll go in, it might burn some small material and just skip over and because the embers are the ones that are driving the wildfire. There’s so many pieces to it.

Olivia: There are so many pieces. Yeah. And in terms of what we’re seeing these days, you know, since you’re mostly based in California, right?

So you’ve really investigated a lot of the fires there. And what are some of the main causes of the fires we hear about every single year moving through California?

Maya: I would say 80 percent or more of the fires. are human ignitions. So it could be fireworks.

In case of the LA [00:15:00] fires this time, fireworks apparently contributed. This has been documented. And a lot of times it could be power lines. And the power lines in those kinds of winds, they don’t have a, automatic switch off, so they stay on and they blowing in the wind and they’re not protected enough.

If they shut off. Yes, they, that would be great idea if they could just shut themselves off, but where they don’t shut themselves off. It’s going to be a big problem with sparks, and people have actually seen this over and over. , operators with their equipment, a chain dragging on the road, hitting gravel and sparking like flint on a dry, hot day,

If it was only lightning fires, It would be just, just natural fires. the 2020 August complex fire in Mendocino, that was a natural, you know, lightning based fire followed by a lot of [00:16:00] backfires, huge number of backfires, which were deliberately lit, but it started with lightning.

Olivia: Have you studied the history of fire? Like when we started to see a lot more of these totally overwhelming fires for human communities.

Maya: In the thirties and before the 1930s, it was the same hot dry, drought conditions, not as hot, as of course, climate change has changed things right now, but, hot, dry, windy conditions and drought combined created some very, very big fires.

before that time, during those, those drought years that’s historic, and actually there were even bigger fire areas. There was a lot of fire burning across the land, because at that time the control was less. So, It could be more than 10 million acres per year in those times. There’s records.

In between there was sort of a wet period, decades of wet. So people thought [00:17:00] perhaps, we were misled into thinking we can control these fires because when it’s much wetter and cooler and maybe there’s not as much wind, it is easier to control. But it’s not like that now.

It’s hot and dry, especially down in Southern Cal, in Southern, in LA area, and yeah, even San Diego.

Olivia: And going back to misinformation, about, how to take care of land and how to tend to one’s home in fire prone areas.

So what do you see generally as misinformation thrown around ? . I mean, you mentioned already the logging or thinning, there’s misinformation certainly around that.

Maya: I think the problem is that when we prepare homes for fire, we say, Oh, okay, well, we cleared, we cleared a hundred feet, but it’s not just clearing a hundred feet. Do you have a wood fence? Do you have eaves? Do you have leaves in the, in the [00:18:00] gutters?

And is there a place under the porch with gaps where embers can get caught? It’s almost like trying to think like an ember. What’s an ember going to do? Where is it going to house and stay and harbor and grow and become a fire?

Is there a doggie door? in a high wind that’s gonna let embers in. Even if the house is completely protected, is there a cord of wood, up close to the house, is it kindling, you know, It all has to be taken care of. And actually I’ve gone from house to house. looking at houses that were successful in a fire and did not burn in a fire. They have some textbook qualities, they really do. They have that five feet of sacred space around the house, nothing wooden, not even a broom leaning against the house.

there is a series of films featuring Dr. Jack Cohen, one of the best known fire [00:19:00] scientists who established In some ways, that hundred foot distance, which is called defensible space, the five foot distance is sacred.

You just don’t have anything flammable within five feet, if you’re a match and you go, or. five feet around the home, say, with this lit match, what could it light? It should be able to light nothing around the home five feet. And then there’s the 30 foot paying very close attention.

And then there’s a hundred foot like, you know, so there’s these layers of defensible space.

I think that’s what’s happening here is people are paying attention to one thing and getting all excited. I mean, I have a friend that Did that because it’s a lot of time and trouble. He spent a lot of time Trimming this tree that was overhanging and he spent so much time with it.

Then he’s not paying attention to the sagebrush that’s coming up right next to the house .

You know, sadly a friend lost her home in the Redwood forest during the 2020 Walbridge [00:20:00] fire. her neighbors saved their home and they did have sprinklers. It was not sprinklers all the time. It was occasional sprinklers because they had a herb garden. They just turn it around and face the house and it just went off once in a while and apparently that was enough to save their home.

You know, some people feel they don’t have enough water, the water shuts off with power. It’s still possible to save homes from fire with that very clearly demarcated defensible space. In fact, there is a case study where these people lived in the forest and a lot of homes around them, were gone and theirs was saved.

And that’s because they established this sort of moat of safety around their home. There’s also the thinking that some very fire prone areas, if you look at historic fires, they follow the same path over and over again where it’s probably best not to build

Poem:

[00:21:00] The Sierra, a history. Not long after lightning has rushed down the electric staircase of its own making. Not long after fires five stories tall have swept up canyon. A new season the size of pearls. begins. Silence is spread like hands to touch the heads of seedling and fiddlehead nudging out by the hundreds through ceilings of soil and ashy debris.

Hours loose as scree firming up in tender grips. Here a stand of charred oaks unwraps its storage of gangly leaves. There a knot of cones thrown open by [00:22:00] heat. releases seeds ripe for sun. Currents of brightness are charged from within. Sunlight picks at the strings of top branches. Up at the crown, blackened furs begin again their story.

Of vigor, edged with new needles. Irresistible music, tinsel and chime notes. Wind, sending out words. We’ll nose close to the buds to receive all the answers. The burned and crackling world is not in shambles. Not gone to ash and ash alone, sapsucker. Pileated, black backed woodpecker, all join the jig of genetic diversity, all build from scratch.

What do they [00:23:00] crave? Riches. Riches hidden in the wide open arches, rising from gray.

Olivia: Modern culture is certainly a culture that’s very resistant to decay. And, and will you speak also on what happens with decaying matter in forests, both in the terms of fire, but also just wellbeing, for our lands.

Maya: I’m doing a film, so I’m interviewing a lot of people. And so I was traveling in British Columbia. A few times. And Michelle Connolly Conservation North is the name of the organization. Studied how decay just feeds the forest. the processes of decay bring nutrients back, bring moisture in, hold the moisture in for young seedlings and saplings to grow.

Over and over again, in a post fire forest, [00:24:00] where the ground cover has been cleared temporarily, the first shoots I’ve seen are often closely associated with something that has fallen. It’s sort of, sort of like a sentinel, but also holding moisture, and a protective force so that the little seedlings don’t completely dry out and or get, so much scorching on them from sunlight.

from exposure. So there’s so many factors around decay. It’s a process of giving and taking, there’s an exchange going on in a forest, and then dying and dead trees, people have actually studied that the nutrients is going back into the soil and feeding other plants and mycorrhizal fungi.

There’s a big difference in our perception of death and decay in a garden, where we’ve got [00:25:00] isolated. and non interacting plants versus in a forest where the ferns, mosses, lichen and rotting log and a little sapling and lupine maybe They’re all in such close association with each other, they’re going to benefit from each other and the moisture is very tightly held in. There’s a lot of collaboration. Whereas when we look at something that is ornamentally ornamental feature and maybe there’s some flowering shrubs that just look nice, you know.

They’re not necessarily closely associated with each other and there’s not a deep soil based relationship necessarily and the moisture is much less. So it is something you have to be careful of and pay attention to. Where the moisture is really high, you don’t have to actually worry so much about it. Because the moisture will take care of.

this part of the forest. when it’s thinned out and really dry, yes, you have to worry . The soil feels [00:26:00] different.

Olivia: Yeah, I imagine too the chemicals used in some of those processes really impact the rebirth or what you’re seeing or what you’re not seeing at all.

Maya: Yes what’s happening is interesting is that I think it’s There’s a science, which is racing ahead with incredible discoveries all the time. And then there’s the management it’s sort of lag there’s a lag time. There’s papers all over the place saying that these Ceanothus plants they’re putting nutrition in the soil, they’re putting nitrogen where nitrogen is not, and that is benefiting all the other little plants growing there.

So they’re not only physically protective, keeping the moisture in, providing the nutrients and then eventually trees like conifers grow over and above. the height of the highest shrub and, you know, it happens. It’s, it’s happening in particularly [00:27:00] the giant sequoia forests, where we had to wade through the ceanothus in order to count the seedlings and, and some seedlings had turned into saplings.

They were growing above our heads, so it was really easy to see them. But There’s a lot of seedlings in the, in the understory of this, this shrub area. That’s the first thing to grow because it does, it does grow fast. Now, there’s an alarm that goes off in people’s heads in the traditional mindset saying, the conifer seedlings are not going to reestablish.

This is just, Nothing but shrubs here. Nothing else is happening. So let’s kill the shrubs, with Roundup, and plant the seedlings, which is the state of being. It does fail over and over, and it does get repeated over and over, but I think it’s a sense of also impatience, you know, not Waiting long enough, a lot of those little post fire areas or expansive post fire areas are almost immediately salvage [00:28:00] logged.

When you salvage log an area, the seedlings are not going to fare well because they’ve been under heavy equipment. They’ve been, smashed quite a few times. and everything’s dried out. So it’s first roundup, as you said, mentioned first, the roundup and the equipment.

I mean, once they’ve been hammered that many times, a lot of them don’t survive, but it’s this perception that, Oh my gosh, it’s this new growth. that isn’t just this shrub and no conifers, it’s just taking over. Well, that’s because you have to crawl through the shrubs to see the conifers initially.

And then after that, it’s easy because they’re, they’re above everything.

Olivia: When you think of a healthy forest, I’m thinking of somebody walking through the forest. And if they were curious about observing the land and taking note of, Oh, is this a forest that is doing well? Like, what would they see? What would one see? In process or, you know, as you’re saying, like somebody might just see shrubs and [00:29:00] think, Oh, something is wrong with this forest.

And that might not be the case. So, yeah, curious for you when you’re walking through lands, what you notice or what do you try to take notice of?

Maya: If it’s a newborn forest, I am going to see a lot of shrubs and I’m going to see the beginnings of the comeback of wildlife that’s associated with those shrubs, which is a lot of ground nesting and low canopy nesting birds.

A huge swath of birds. I mean, I found, dozens and dozens of different songbirds using that beautiful habitat. So that’s the first beginning phases of a healthy forest is you see incredible variety of wildflowers. There’s just gardens of wildflowers.

There’s an amazing amount of conifer regeneration in, in the forest that I’ve seen. And then there’s, and there’s shrubs that grow faster but also are supportive in one way or another. bringing [00:30:00] nutrients back into the soil and actually feeding everybody else. And then there’s a huge amount of wildlife as well.

So that’s a forest that’s been affected by, beetles. Just a huge number of beetles come in and, prey on the bark or the inside of the trees and, and the trees succumb. And so there’s, a sort of rebirth, a slow rebirth of the forest.

And in a mature forest, the feeling of a healthy forest is a very different look. There’s the lower canopy, there’s under the canopy, there’s where you can walk. And there’s ferns, mosses, lichen everywhere, supported by the moisture and the understory vegetation. And there are some shrubs, there’s definitely understory, and there’s sort of grasses as well, native grasses.

And then there’s the overstory, which is really tall and heavily, there’s heavy shading. which of course feeds [00:31:00] into this concept of moisture saving for, for everything. And there’s a feeling of softness, your shoes sink slightly with every step because it’s just soft. The soil has collected for a long, long time and it’s keeping everything in place. Very tangible feeling. There’s a different smell too. You can, you can really almost smell that moisture in the air in, in an old forest.

And that’s what I think of as a healthy forest. It’s just different age types, you know, not just let’s save only the old oak growth trees and cut everything else, This is a recent trend. There’s different age types. There’s a, you know, escape routes for animals. There’s a witch’s broom in the tops of the trees, and that actually supports fishers and martins, and a lot of animals like to hide in, in those parasitic plants within the tree canopy.

There’s trees with hollows.

The tree [00:32:00] is housing so much life. There’s probably bats using it, flying squirrels using it. If a fisher wants to come in, that’s the big bully. So everyone else is out. You know, Martins use it. there was a big tree with rot where the two branches forked, and, and I left a, a camera there over a year, over winter and into spring, and I didn’t have time to come get it. And when I came back, I saw that sometime in March, a Martin had started digging into that softness, that soft rot. it was a female Martin, she dug right in, and she made a den inside it. And she was in and out of that den for months, you know, and so people don’t realize the rot of trees, are houses.

At the base of the trees, bears use them. There’s, if there’s a rot at the base, they dig down and they want to be real tight and snug. And warm [00:33:00] for, for winter. So , we have such a long way to go to try to bring those images to people. It’s, it’s also hard because, you know, what are the chances of me putting a camera there where Martin’s going to build?

Very low.

Olivia: they knew the camera was there and they wanted, they wanted these stories to be known.

Maya: Yes, I, yes, I believe so. I hope so. Perhaps,

Olivia: perhaps. I guess continuing with what you’re saying here, there is a beautiful version of playing and co creating with the elements.

And I think that is part of what we can do as humans. Like we have that capacity if we choose to move in that direction. Yet what you’re also speaking on is this dangerous quality that we can possess. which is trying to control and being one sided with this play. And certainly a great need of this time is finding a way to collaborate with the elements.

So it’s enlivening for everyone involved, all beings involved. And I’m wondering, since [00:34:00] you’ve explored these lands and have such an intimate relationship, what you can imagine it would be like if we let Earth lead. If we let Earth lead and we were part of the natural cycles of destruction and rebirth, and also still contributed our vision, but more from the soil or the mycelia looking up, what that could be like, because we have so much possibility, right?

We could live this way. So what do you imagine? Like, what would that look like?

Maya: Basically, it would look like a level of collaboration that allowed life to coexist with us. It would look like an ultimate collaborative experience, because

Leaving the wild as wild has a place, keeping ourselves safe has a place, and it’s a different place. It’s not the same place. It’s not just that I [00:35:00] have to control my world, my immediate world around my home, and I have to control the wild. It’s not that. Not the entire wild has to be controlled.

, Traditional burning practice they’re not trying to control millions and millions of acres.

It’s a very targeted approach of this area, which is for hunting, this area which is for basket weaving. There’s an element of collaboration there but we don’t have to control millions of acres and never did. There is no need to control that. And the minute we do, we will see, and we are seeing, unfortunately, life dropping off.

Things going silent. Wherever we choose to manipulate land in a way that involves heavy commercial gain.

Olivia: And what are your thoughts on land preservation or conservation or what is the direction to [00:36:00] move towards? a collaborative world, a world where humans aren’t the center in these choices.

Maya: I think one great direction would be, a sort of live and let live direction, for which there is a model in India and maybe to a very limited extent, a model here is to think about ecotourism because the minute your life depends on what I call the wild elders.

See, we have elders in human, in our human cultures too, and we listen to them, but we also have to listen to the wild elders. So if your life and your livelihood depends on the presence of these wild elders, if you are earning by showing people the intensity and beauty of a forest, an untouched desert that has not been impacted by heavy duty solar energy [00:37:00] projects. That’s the other thing I’m noticing. This is the ultimate way to attain good collaboration because then you start hearing and understanding what’s going, what’s changing. Like you can go out and lead a trip through a thin forest. Not gonna find much.

I saw that happening last year, I, lead trips in Mono Lake annually. And there was a big thinning project going on. I heard one tanager in that thinned area, and it was not like an interactive song, And at my site, where I usually take people for, for birdwatching, there was Blackback Woodpecker, Harry Woodpecker Downey, Clark’s Nutcracker Cassin’s Finch, Townsend Solitaire, hawks like, you know, there was Kestrel and Stella’s Jay.

And people were riveted. It was. a hub for nesting. There were layers and layers of available habitat being [00:38:00] used actively by singing birds and territorial birds and birds feeding their little ones. It was amazing. I mean, the difference was like black and white,

Olivia: If there’s a way for people through ecotourism to have firsthand experience, are you saying like it’s a win win because commercially people will have a way to have economies?

And then at the same time, the economy is based on something that’s actually beneficial?

Maya: Yes, yes. So if you’re thinking about direct relationships with forests. Yes. And the other facet of that is there’s been a study, and I think there’s a second follow up study being done by economists that shows rather clearly that logging produces less jobs than making people safe around their homes, in and around their homes. That’s the big wow [00:39:00] moment for me. We could actually be spending the same amount of money, giving more people jobs, making people safe, than getting out into the back country and wrecking it, which is often called restoration.

It’s got names like restoration.

Olivia: The tie between greed and short term thinking, I think that they go hand in hand. It’s so difficult working with a mind that’s greedy, Because it’s so hard to see beyond that short term thinking for many people making these choices. And how do you remain I wouldn’t say hopeful necessarily, but just open to the possibilities of the future shifting in terms of relationship with land.

Maya: I think of areas that are tucked away that most likely are not going to be touched because they’re unreachable. And that’s my hope because those are the equivalent of seeds. They’re seed places. They’re seed locations. [00:40:00] In terms not of one plant or one set of animals, in terms of everything working together, they are the seeds of everything working together, every element in nature in that place working together.

So what I call seed areas, will stay well mostly because they’re inaccessible. And that we can grow from that. And if we can just get to a point of advancing the management as far as the science has really gone, not the science that is talking about logging, which there’s a big science that defends logging saying that it’ll actually save more trees from fire with no proof if we can just move the management ahead to where the science really is, then I think those seed places can grow and they can expand. And that’s the hope.

Poem

[00:41:00] Meadow ends where all the perpendiculars of a leafy brown river throw themselves up toward blue. The fruits are olive and ochre. Sprays of dark leaves shiver and splash with sun.

Lightning scars show where the mane, Once shaped by flames, was not lost, But reduced to fine fists, Oak tissue under sheets of earth, Sleeping through the storm and teeth of quick heat. Here it is. The world, utterly lovely, despite the anguish, despite endless battles, meanwhile, you have slipped away to yours.

My phone is still again. I could call back. [00:42:00] I could babble about this testimony to resilience. Bent limbs and great elbows of trunk, leaning against granite in gestures of pondering and reconciliation. I could share the looping and fluttering of flycatchers. Grass is fresh with fog drip and shade. Pressed flat, where a fox.

Recently turned dog-like circles round and round. Before settling in, I could hold up my phone among the workings of Xylem and phloem, so you could hear the rustling. The liquid flow scooping minutes out of the hearts, rocky sloping terrain and flowing on as only a river can. Or, I could stand still and [00:43:00] listen.

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