00:06:04.320where you have inroads to greater understanding, to greater meaning, to greater depths of narrative.
00:06:12.780And that's really where I hope to go to with all of this work, where we're sort of bypassing,
00:06:20.120defusing, unplugging all of this divisive political rhetoric with all this agenda making
00:06:27.020that so often dominates our popular discourse, especially in a democratic context, right?
00:06:34.320I'd rather be in the camp of storytelling than argument making, right?
00:06:40.100So that's why I eschew the idea of being like a pundit or a politician, although I'm engaged
00:06:47.100as a citizen on whatever level, whether it be my town, my county, my state, my biosphere,
00:06:52.400whatever it is, I really push back on a couple of core sort of constructs that include commonly
00:07:04.300used phrases such as expert right or even something like politician right one who knows
00:07:13.540one who has an agenda or has claimed an authority over this thing called truth especially in the
00:07:21.740context of this moment in time this this 21st century that we are wrestling with figuring out
00:07:30.520such words as sustainability, for example, or resiliency. What is the nature of human ecology
00:07:40.480and the more than human world? I'm not exactly sure. All I've got is this trajectory, this
00:07:46.380orientation based on this consilience of the physical sciences and the aesthetic world of
00:07:54.960art making so i think that's my little intro to how those two worlds might work
00:08:03.460what do you think of that goodness well there's so much to think about there and i am really
00:08:13.640considering how we as a society seem to have forgotten about the artistry that is so much
00:08:22.700of science. You had kind of mentioned that in the art of the inquiry. And so I'm wondering how
00:08:29.220can we bring back the focus to this idea and bring humanity into, I want to say into data-driven
00:08:39.040pursuits, but that doesn't sound very artistic. And so, yeah, so much of science has become
00:08:47.300godlike in today's progressive communities then i kind of also wonder about this trifecta of art
00:08:55.080god and data-driven pursuits i guess and where do we blend those all together in a way that feels
00:09:03.800balanced and more true where one isn't overtaking the other yes yeah i don't even know if that's
00:09:12.840the actual question, though, either, because there's so much that we can pull from here.
00:09:17.820So much of our culture is built on this trifecta. So gosh, yeah, please, just if any of that's
00:09:25.120poking at you, I'd love to hear what you think.
00:09:28.700Right, right, right. How do we know if we're asking the right questions?
00:09:32.840Especially when we use vocabulary words such as God. I quickly go to a space where we need to
00:09:40.200sort of define the traditions of our cultural context, right? Because it's a place that
00:09:45.280is largely unfamiliar to me. I didn't grow up with any religious tradition. I don't know. Did you?
00:09:52.320No, I was raised quite secularly. So no, but I long to connect with something beyond intellect
00:10:06.440and science for that matter and feel a type of I don't know if it's emptiness but it's definitely
00:10:15.300this feeling that there has to be something more that we really don't understand the whole story
00:10:22.060even with the best of research there's more to it and we may never understand that in a
00:10:31.300data or intellectual driven way and can that be okay and maybe that's where the art comes in it's
00:10:40.160like the art picks up where the science leaves off or maybe it's vice versa that's right that's right
00:10:47.920there is this materialist view of the world which is certainly an ontology right ontology
00:10:58.860Ontology is the study of why matter exists, right?
00:11:02.700There's this ontology that suggests that you can live your whole life thinking that the physical substance of our reality is the whole of it.
00:11:16.740In fact, the scientific method, which, as you said, is so often a substitute for godlike technology, because it is sort of a skeleton key into a particular scale of truth perception and experimental predictability that has worked very well thus far, you know, to do what we wanted it to do.
00:11:39.060But our minds evolved on the African savanna, medium-shaped creatures moving at medium speeds through phenomenological reality.
00:11:53.260And that has worked very well in a Newtonian sense, but over the past 120 years, since the sort of psychological revolution represented by this Einsteinian concept of reality, where energy and mass are equivocal at great speeds,
00:12:20.020we're finding now and i'm i am the son of a astrophysicist my father dr william kaufman
00:12:31.860the third was the uh was the director of the grift observatory for a time and he wrote many
00:12:38.160college textbooks on astronomy and whatnot his books were called the universe or discovering
00:12:45.760the universe was another one or cosmic frontiers of general relativity was another one you know so
00:12:51.360so for i grew up under my in my father's shadow uh and dr kaufman's son was going to be a
00:12:59.380mathematician so i have something in me that is programmed i have a lot of software in in in my
00:13:08.340in my heart, soul, and mind that is oriented towards mathematical models and system thinking
00:13:15.380on that level. And I still find it fascinating. And I find the new physics, right? Here we are
00:13:23.26080 years after the Manhattan Project, you know, since Oppenheimer. Anyway, here we are 80 years
00:13:30.940past that. When we're thinking of post-Einsteinian reality, when we're thinking about freeing
00:13:38.340we're thinking about certain concepts of our universe,
00:13:43.980including the Big Bang, including dark matter,
00:13:46.600that are really open to new mathematical models, perhaps.
00:13:50.860Like these singularities that have just never worked out mathematically.
00:13:55.220And answering those questions might get us to become truly an intergalactic species.
00:14:05.520In fact, this is a roundabout way to getting to a couple of things that I'd love to sort of work out with you here in real time, is the idea, one, that perhaps that's not a good destiny for our species to leave Earth.
00:14:23.680Or even more so, I don't believe that we can because of what you said before, intimated at the godlike aspect to what I ascribe that to be, which is the infinity of life forms that we bodily represent physiologically.
00:14:46.380I mean, as we are sitting here right now, you and I are both breathing in and out hundreds of thousands of fungal spores that have co-evolved with us for hundreds of millions of years into our earliest vertebral forms.
00:15:07.380Even before that, into the very mitochondrial DNA that had a foreign place in our human bodies, in every single cell of us, we are the land, we are the earth, we are physiologically interconnected in a potentially infinite way.
00:15:34.620So how could we understand that? How could we quantify that? How could we leave that? Because that is wholly terrestrial in nature. That is our interconnection to the biosphere process of evolution that there is no removing us from.
00:16:02.060and i don't think that's a gloomy thought at all i think that that is a holy w-h-o-l-l-y
00:16:12.040that is a holy integrating impulse that fuels my creative vocation right it fuels the thing that
00:16:23.500i'm going after this and the thing that i'm going after isn't a thing at all of course it's a process
00:16:28.700it is a trail it is not the destination at the end of the trail and uh and i think that
00:16:36.060by that practice i'm coming almost asymptotically you know it's like they'll never quite get there
00:16:43.980but it'll get there infinitely close and close to what i'm not exactly sure something like
00:16:49.460infinity something like god something like connection something like fearlessness in the
00:16:57.440face of death i you know i think about that a lot in terms of climate change and my own sense of
00:17:02.640activism and community so like you know all of this sort of transcendent yet imminent experience
00:17:08.380that you know is so well expressed by just the flow of watercolor on paper right and which brings
00:17:16.320me to like the zen of the painting experience which is why gosh ayana i guess why i do what i do
00:17:24.760well yeah there's so much there there there is and i don't mean to go completely big or
00:17:34.120completely deep but i absolutely do because no i love it i you know i yeah no i'm i'm totally
00:17:39.460into it why not okay good good why you know yeah i think that one of the great challenges of our
00:17:48.580time of course is climate change or as i sort of less euphemistically call it in my books
00:17:56.160climate breakdown by way of anthropogenic global warming the apt description of what
00:18:02.740is happening in real time across now there's this existential dread this doomful heuristic
00:18:12.120that manifests itself in the real sort of deleterious,
00:18:16.920our mental health suffers from this daily charge.
00:18:21.620What is presented to us is the withering of the biosphere
00:18:24.600because of the choices that we are making,
00:18:29.580which is an okay way of going about it,
00:18:33.460but there are other ways of looking at it
00:18:37.120In order such that we might confront it more holistically from a healthier perspective, as opposed to one that is ungrounded, uncentered, panicked, and, you know, potentially undemocratic because of it as well.
00:19:01.660you know i'm one who really believes in the democratic process uh i mean the subject of
00:19:06.820my work is california which is which is a political entity which is a democratic entity
00:19:12.180doesn't exist except for in political political semiotic conversation we have this symbol of this
00:19:21.160thing called california you know and i use that as a metaphor for greater processes across the land
00:19:27.080and inside of me and it's a capable enough metaphor to do that to hold all of it to hold
00:19:36.720all of my views on how the world society and ecology is glued together you know by way of
00:19:48.500investigation of this these very complex systems within systems
00:20:52.640Gosh, you know, you're up there in Alaska today in Glacier Bay.
00:21:03.900I wonder how you are dealing with climate anxiety up there.
00:21:10.200I mean, I imagine you live in a very rural community out far from, you know, the dense urban populations that I deal with every day, living in downtown Oakland, California.
00:21:22.560Oh, yeah. I think we can't escape the climate anxieties and the climate realities of this moment, no matter where we are. And it impacts us all psychologically, if not, you know, of course, materially.
00:21:40.380And I'm thinking about humans being nature and we're not separate, which of course is something that is, I think most of us know in a rational type of way.
00:21:55.800But what does that really mean or look like today with these ideas of the Anthropocene where it seems like we have become so separate from nature, which is why we're even dealing with the issues of climate change.
00:22:10.380change because we have tried to separate ourselves and think of ourselves as humans as more mighty or
00:22:18.020intelligent than the rest of nature and you know we could totally go down that rabbit hole of how
00:22:22.960and why we separated even though we never can be separate anyways we completely rely on this earth
00:22:29.260right and i really appreciate how much you engage the idea that our human concept of nature is
00:22:39.180constructed and often serves a very specific societal purpose but at the same time you also
00:22:45.340recognize just how important conservation and protecting these so-called you know natural
00:22:50.960spaces can be so it'd be interesting to dive into this tension a bit more deeply
00:22:57.700yeah i'd love to hear what you think now uh i love the point you just made there and if i
00:23:06.420understand it i think that there's great truth there that's presented in paradoxes i love the
00:23:12.920idea of paradox the paradox you know i guess i mean for this conversation we can call paradox
00:23:18.880like any sort of absurd preposition that yields surprising or counterintuitive truths because of
00:23:28.580Right. So one of the paradoxes might be that there's this game of alienation that civilization has played with itself in different forms, in different degrees, on different spectrums since, you know, for 100,000 years since the cognitive revolution.
00:23:55.020Right. When we when we invented the the notion of fiction, when we invented the notion of art, something seems to have switched on in us in a way that we don't really see represented elsewhere in the fossil record.
00:24:14.780anywhere and now we're chasing this self that is manifest psychologically see my mom was a
00:24:25.480psychologist so now you're getting my full family story here i got got my astrophysicist father and
00:24:31.540then i got my clinical psychologist mother and so somehow the you know nature nurture argument
00:24:38.980inside of my own body and self is resolved or entangled therein and i am uh fascinated by
00:24:48.140the the psychological development of the anthropological human what that thing then that
00:24:56.640is as you said nature nature we can call we can call nature maybe this is really pushing the
00:25:03.740limits of what i believe is the english language right uh nature nature with a capital n
00:25:10.700might be what exists inside of you and that you can never separate yourself from right but then
00:25:17.820there's the nature with the little n which is the course of american policy right nature with the
00:25:24.560little n is the thing to be saved i guess and it's also the thing to be sort of fetishized
00:25:30.840economically it's like well we if we just set aside enough of it it's going to be um okay
00:25:39.640yeah which suggests whole realms of intellectual anemia right like it's just like
00:25:49.060the connective tissue that is represented in landscapes across different ecologies
00:25:59.000has a direct through line to the well-being of human communities everywhere at every stage of
00:26:06.160our history across the planet and tracing that through the deep time and space of california
00:26:14.420i have sort of parsed into these different books that i write and explore through this
00:26:20.820consilient theory into this aesthetic space across this you know complex horizon of different
00:26:27.260dancing variables inside of this matrix that is that is land area that is that is human policy
00:26:34.020that is stories being told that is bottlenecks being experienced inside of climatic temporality
00:26:43.240um i find interestingly and this is another paradox i just unpacked that very complex
00:26:52.700sentiment that I just expressed, to unpack and return it to this very simple space.
00:26:58.260Every single one of my books is built on very simple questions that I'm just trying to get
00:27:04.520some good answers. Okay. So my first book in 2017 was the California Field Atlas.
00:27:13.940And that book changed my life. And that was based on a very simple question too. Like what elements
00:27:20.240of california and that's the whole natural world right because i use california as a microcosm
00:27:27.100for greater macrocosm of the natural world or the more than human world what are those aspects that
00:27:34.200have always been at least you know in the past six million years or so since the middle miocene
00:27:39.840the sort of tectonic configuration of the california space began to resemble its current
00:27:46.360self you know you can sort of say that's california what aspects of california have
00:27:51.400always been what aspects continue to be despite the very successfully imposed urban veneer over
00:28:00.560the past 170 years or so since the gold rush of 1850 and what aspects of california will always
00:28:09.740be right so there's this temporal aspect across the spatial aspect which is where the secret of
00:28:18.020the genre that is the field atlas came from right like field atlases don't exist i invented it
00:28:22.840to tell this very specific story uh not about where things are or how to get places or
00:28:30.400you know but to democratize the whole space if you will not just the the marquee things of like
00:28:37.100yosemite or the giant coastal redwoods in it but like the whole of california these watersheds
00:28:42.960across the western slope of the sierra nevada say north america's longest contiguous mountain range
00:28:48.220i need to say it's also its highest these watersheds across the west slope of the sierra
00:28:52.660nevada you know back then they emptied into what geologists call the san pablo sea right which is
00:29:00.380an ocean that doesn't exist anymore and now you go through all my books and you find no roads
00:29:07.300right because i'm much more interested in drawing that blue line of say like the yuba river for
00:29:12.620example not surrounded by these little red lines that will return to the dust from which they are
00:29:18.400made in the next few hundred years right but that blue line of the yuba river will look like that
00:29:24.540for millions of years to come and that sort of exploration of deep time especially in the
00:29:30.540context of now especially in the context of today's bottleneck you know climatic bottleneck
00:29:35.920societal bottleneck whatever it is is a great wellspring of this thing called hope this actionable
00:29:44.840beautiful amorphous thing called hope and and so that was my first book right so
00:29:51.820So there's temporal aspect, and then I sort of organized it in, like, you know, these grand living systems of earth, air, fire, and water.
00:30:00.100How do these big adaptive cycles inform this world-class portfolio of biodiversity that California still enjoys?
00:30:12.360Because although every single one of our landscape types here in California are either threatened, endangered, or critically endangered, we have a very low extinction rate across the state.
00:30:29.600Still, in 2023, we have a less than 1% extinction rate.
00:30:36.860Now, it's a little bit higher with some classifications.
00:30:39.900We've lost 5% to 10% of our freshwater fish species, for example, across the state.
00:30:46.160We've lost some beautiful creatures, including that magnificent creature that we put on our state flag, the California grizzly.
00:30:55.700In 2023, we are commemorating the 100th year since the last California grizzly was killed in Sequoia National Forest, 1923.
00:31:12.200So what I've done in my next books, okay, so I did the state of water, and that was, to go back to these simple questions, okay, so these simple questions, California state of water, state of water, understanding California's most precious resource.
00:31:24.880That book is very simply about water storage, water conveyance, and then water usage in the state.
00:31:34.280And so that book, a thin little book that sort of breaks the format of my larger books, was really just sort of a large math problem that was peppered with my poetic and artistic voice ruminating on California's hydrological future, we can say.
00:31:53.040in terms of surface water and surface water ecology.
00:31:56.300So it's a very, it's a very narrow focus.
00:32:01.800And this is, and Ayanna, this is the big thrust that I'm celebrating here with you today,
00:32:06.540that I've written the third book now in what has become the California Lands Trilogy.
00:32:14.280This is a series of California field atlases that began four years ago
00:32:19.140with the publishing of The Forests of California.
00:32:22.260and then it moves through to the coasts of California and now this year my new book is
00:32:28.000called the deserts of California and that book is arriving in bookstores fall 2023 it is here now
00:32:39.020and it is my baby and I am don't tell the other books but I think it might be my favorite
00:32:46.500so I was telling you before that all my books have like very simple questions behind them
00:32:50.780The Forests of California, the first book in this series, really asks simple questions like, what rivers flow through what national forests in California?
00:33:03.060It's such a simple question, but it's a very difficult answer to get, especially on a popular level.
00:33:11.120I mean, you can go to, you know, the USFS, United States Forest Service site, or USGS, or Department of Energy, and you can kind of find maps of rivers as they go through the political borders that are the Forest Service's designation of the 17 national forests in California.
00:33:28.340But it's very difficult information to find, and it's not really for you.
00:33:32.520It's usually for a researcher or a forester.
00:44:43.100acquiesce somehow into a state of complicity where where it will have seemed as if we we did
00:44:52.220it we saved nature now we have a license to trash the other 70 or what yeah what if we stop wouldn't
00:45:00.600it make so much more sense to to carry on from 30 by 30 to do 50 by 50 which is the half earth
00:45:07.680idea, which is really probably what it's going to take to give these species enough
00:45:15.500buffer zone in order to retain these vectors of resiliency often embedded into the very
00:45:29.300nature of biodiversity itself uh you know in order to to keep that complement that steward
00:45:37.700that miracle if you will of the fact that you know we have an extinction rate of one percent
00:45:42.220so it's tough because what we've got here now hey you're driven across the mojave desert or
00:45:49.740have you done it lately probably about two years ago two years ago okay perhaps perhaps if uh
00:45:57.140But, you know, if you're driving from like San Bernardino to Vegas, you will have passed the Ivanpah solar farm to the north, just just really close to the Nevada border.
00:46:11.260OK, so those are those are springing up all across the desert, these incredibly expensive and by expensive, I'm not talking about economics, I'm talking about ecological expense.
00:46:27.140These are incredibly ecologically expensive contraptions, contrivances, machines.
00:46:36.580We've got across wind farms, solar farms, and geothermal farms across California's deserts.
00:46:43.460We've got about, on any good given day, we've got about seven megawatts of energy that we can draw from the grid.
00:46:52.120And this is necessary in order for our greater goal, which is drawdown, carbon drawdown.
00:47:01.900We need to get away from fossil fuels.
00:58:27.740And what I mean by that is that I want to, for as much as possible, remain non-prescriptive in my political agenda because I'm fascinated by complex systems.
00:58:46.000Whatever system you're talking about, if it's complex, it experiences something called emergent phenomena.
00:58:54.220Emergent phenomena are these unexpected, entirely unpredictable occurrences where good things happen or catastrophic things happen.
00:59:09.820Or catastrophically good things happen.1.00
00:59:11.900And if we can just sort of like stand on the teeter-totter enough that we weight it towards catastrophic success as opposed to catastrophic failure, might we engage these endemic, indigenous systems?0.99
00:59:34.900systems. Might we remember these systems, as Mabel McKay might say, in order such that we leave0.99
00:59:43.100the natural world of California and indeed the biosphere at the end of the 21st century,
00:59:51.660regardless of the injuries of climate change, in better shape than we left it at the end of
00:59:58.020the 20th century i think it's entirely within our scope of work let's say
01:00:06.680so that's probably where i'm going to sort of generally address that question if i did at all
01:00:16.260i mean these questions are not capable of being directly answered
01:00:24.520so i think what you did respond with was interesting and i was following you and
01:00:32.520thinking you know it's hard not to think about old growth forest which is something that i
01:00:38.620have been deeply devoted to for years and i really appreciate how much you engage with
01:00:46.160old growth forest of california which have totally swept me away and i just don't feel
01:00:52.540like this conversation would be complete if we didn't give some time to those just incredible
01:00:58.500spirits and places and in your talk thinking like a watershed in the age of resiliency you say quote
01:01:06.960although no human has yet witnessed the return of old growth conditions we can imagine what such a
01:01:13.500community might look like end quote and so there's a number of questions like one i'm imagining or
01:01:20.440I'm wondering how the power of imagination plays into your work and into your general philosophy of conservation.
01:01:27.720And then, you know, specifically with old growth, it does challenge us to expand our frameworks of time, if that's even something our minds can, you know, or are truly even capable of, which I question, you know, you had mentioned deep time.
01:01:42.780and so yeah just thinking about the beauty in opening ourselves up to input from other forms
01:01:51.260of intelligence you refer to that in the mind of the redwood forest and so yeah can we even
01:01:58.500comprehend deep time enough to imagine an old growth forest returning but there again is the
01:02:07.840re word. And I'm thinking about that from a few comments ago. And so, yeah, it's hard for me to
01:02:15.280really even directly ask you a question about this because I'm being challenged with my thoughts on
01:02:21.120old growth forests, but I know that they call so loudly and they feel so powerful yet so fragile
01:02:29.920at the same time. And so, yeah. So just from one old growth lover to another, wondering what
01:02:37.720your thoughts are uh um this this is all very new science i can hear mabel mckay the kashaya
01:02:45.880dreamer laughing at me when i say this but old growth for successive fire ecology science is a
01:02:53.300new thing in fact across the university system just in the past 20 or 30 years fire ecology
01:02:58.640has become its own thing apart from forestry apart from silviculture we understand now that
01:03:03.980fire is a great creative force in fact the snag forest which is the which is the early forest
01:03:14.100post fire post severe fire is more biodiverse holds more species of songbirds say
01:03:24.080more species of songbird rely on the snag forest than they do on the old growth forest
01:03:30.100right so so a lot of our notions on how valuable one type is to the other
01:03:37.700are beginning to reveal new stories uh and we've got some big conservation challenges
01:03:47.22090 of our endangered species don't exist in protected areas so we've got we've got like
01:03:55.580core challenges and yet yet it's an remembering eye on it if i could sort of close with this
01:04:00.940dreamy story that really is as compelling as it gets you asked me about imagining and where does
01:04:08.760imagination place in my artwork and i i feel like i i like have this like this place of reverie in
01:04:16.820my mind this daydream that's like 200 years ago or maybe it's 200 years from now but like i'm
01:04:24.600Walking up the Sacramento River, which is the largest river in California that runs through the Sacramento Valley there, is fed by the northernmost rivers from the west slope of the Sierra Nevada.
01:04:40.720spring it's may and you can you look across the flooded waters right because one of the things
01:04:51.120that happens in the yearly pulse of water in california is that when the snow pack melts it
01:04:57.460floods the valley to an enormous degree before the system thousands of levees and impoundments
01:05:04.700and dams across the northern sacramento river valley were installed over the past 100 years
01:05:11.660the river could swell to be 15 miles wide and i can imagine walking beside the river
01:05:18.640looking out over the river to the east and you can see the whole surface of the water
01:05:22.940glinting nickels with the return of hundreds of thousands of mature people-sized chinooks
01:05:34.700salmon these were these were four or five foot long imaginous fish returning from their marine
01:05:44.420adult lives to to find their headwaters and and along the shore are are these fat bears
01:05:56.980fat bears and when i say a fat bear i mean weigh in at like 1800 pounds you know but the brown
01:06:03.960bears of california fat off this routinely got upwards of over 2 000 pounds huge bears
01:06:11.080and the the indigenous people of the north bay remind us that that it wasn't until the coming
01:06:20.820of the gun that bears were dangerous to humans because of the abundance because of the
01:06:27.320fecundity of not only the land but the stories that we told about the land for thousands and
01:06:33.120thousands of years in pre-contact California that bears and humans lived peace and so you can
01:06:42.800imagine the the whole landscape dotted with these fat bears across this flooded river valley
01:06:48.180and in every step every step is full of thousands of different flower blooms and little flower
01:06:55.980blooms you know in California we get so many tiny tiny little flowers flowers that are much smaller
01:07:02.040than a pencil eraser and then we have hundreds and hundreds of native bees uh thousands of
01:07:08.580native bee species across across north america and california but close to 2000
01:07:14.360and and it almost seems as if there's a different pollinator for every flower species
01:07:20.600the whole ground is alive in this hum of you know angiosperm magic and angiosperm is a flowering
01:07:28.740plant right so silly so it's a wash with color and then i'm walking up past these terraced this
01:07:36.000terraced landscape which is the the beaver dams okay so so before the fur rush which predated the
01:07:43.020gold rush by about 20 or 30 years there was approximately 15 to 20 million beaver in the
01:07:49.320california floristic province they estimated that there was one or two beaver per kilometer of
01:07:55.200watercourse across the state and when you have beavers doing their thing slowing the water down
01:08:02.200sinking the water spreading it across the landscape you get entire ecologies by the way of their
01:08:08.220ecological engineering we get entire ecologies resistant to mega droughts that lasted
01:08:14.900hundreds of years we know of several of them in the past uh 2000 years 100 year droughts
01:08:23.280In which it seems like California Floristook Province retained its entire complement of biodiversity solely because of the largest of all North American rodents.