Nick Schwanz: [00:00:00] Climate change is terrifying, but the way that we’ve been motivating people to work on climate projects is by making them look at something scary that they’re running from. It’s been a very stick based approach. It’s all about stop doing this, avoid doing that, run from this.
And Solar Punk [Farms] offers a very different approach to that, which is essentially why don’t we give people something to run towards? Why don’t we give them carrots that incentivize them that life could actually be better than it is today? Not just, different permutations of worse. And basically what we’re just trying to do is make the idea of thinking about, caring about, being involved in restoration as something that’s really enjoyable.
Something that you can incorporate with parties. Something that you can dance to. Something that you can laugh about, right? This doesn’t have to be scary work. It can actually be beautiful, healing, fun time. And that’s what we’re trying to foster on the farm with our process and honestly, so many of the people that are surround us in this [00:01:00] area.
Josh Wilder: Welcome to the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. At Mother Earth News, for 50 years and counting, we’ve been dedicated to conserving the planet’s natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources in this podcast. We host conversations with experts in the fields of sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you are in a way that values both people and our Mother Earth.
Kenny Coogan: Good day, everyone. I am Kenny Coogan and joining me on this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends is Nikola Alexandre and Nick Schwantz.
Niko was raised by the deserts of New Mexico and the Alpine Mountains of southern France. Niko holds a Master’s of Forestry and a Master’s of Business Administration from Yale University and founded Conservation International’s Ecosystem Restoration Program.
Nick is the co founder of Solar Punk Farms, [00:02:00] a climate education center in northern California focused on engaging folks in bioregional regeneration and land stewardship. Today, we are talking about rewilding your property. Welcome to the podcast, Niko and Nick.
Nick Schwanz: Thank you for having us.
What is Shelterwood Collective?
Kenny Coogan: Niko, you are also the executive director and co founder of the Shelterwood Collective, a 900 acre forest in Northern California dedicated to landscape restoration, and community healing. So why did you start Shelterwood Collective? And how is the restoration process going as of today?
Niko Alexandre: Thanks, Kenny. Appreciate it. Wonderful to be here with you all today. I grew up outdoors. I was raised by forests and deserts and that was really a place of sanctuary for me growing up as a little black gay kid in these very rural areas. And when I start [00:03:00] to come of age and think about the kind of work they wanted to do in the world, I was bombarded by all the media around environmental destruction that was happening, depletion of fisheries, extraction from our forests pollution by plastics and whatnot. So I was really trying to figure out how I could do work that was focused on term I often use is bringing life back to land, but that had a restorative, a regenerative, a hopeful component to it.
So I spent a lot of time learning about the ecology of land based restoration and how do we go about healing our food webs and whatnot. But a big piece of my interest was also around communities. My identity obviously is a big part of how I move through the world. And when I came into the environmental movement, it was pretty dominated by a very particular demographic of folk, often straight white men had the monopoly of what environmentalists could look like.
So as I thought about how I wanted to show up in this space and as I reflected on the immense amount of safety that I felt growing up, I wanted to create a space that was [00:04:00] also a sanctuary and a refuge for those of us who are not often traditionally represented in the environmental space. And I would say in addition to that through my ecological learnings, I think a topic you’ll hear both pretty, pretty extensively from Nick and I on today is the central role of people and keeping ecosystems healthy and maintaining them for the long term, particularly as we get further and further along into this particular moment of socioecological polycrisis as the term goes. And so as I was trying to weave all these threads together, I came up with what has now become Shelterwood, which is a very intentionally community specific form of large scale restoration. Where we try to bring people in close connection to the outdoors to help them feel safe in the outdoors while also fulfilling the role of humans and managing our wild lands, our wilderness spaces, our ecosystems. And so as you mentioned here again, Shelterwood is about 900 acres. It’s about two and a half hours north of the San Francisco Bay Area, just north of the [00:05:00] Russian River Valley where Nick is based.
And we have been caretakers of this land for a about almost five years now. Sheltered was formed in 2020. We purchased the land. I say we paid ransom on the land in 2021. It’s land that is traditionally owned and managed by the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians and have we’ve been the caretakers for active caretakers, I’d say for about four years.
And so in that capacity, we’ve done, we’ve put about 250 acres of those 900 under restoration. And we can get into the specifics of that later if that feels helpful. And our plan is to get that number all the way up to 900 by the end of this year, through a variety of practices, but primarily looking at controlled burns and fuels reductions.
A lot of that work is led by a black- and women-led cooperative of forest technicians, a small enterprise that is just getting started that is really focused on diversifying the workforce of land stewardship practitioners, really trying to create pathways for folks to make a living out of restoration activities.
And it is guided by the Kashia and by Shelterwood [00:06:00] Collective members. The organization itself is comprised of six people, five of whom are living full time up on the land, up on the forest, so we have our eyes pretty close to what the land needs and we have a variety of partners who help consult and guide the work as well.
Solar Punk Farms and its Goals
Kenny Coogan: And Nick, you and your husband are working to turn optimistic futurism into a tool for a change and help folks find and foster climate positive values that they can bring back to their lives and communities.
So how does Solar Punk Farms accomplish those goals?
Nick Schwanz: Solar Punk Farms is a, we call it a climate demonstration site or a climate values demonstration site. It’s a place that my husband and I started about five ish years ago. Prior to that we both lived in the Bay Area and we both worked in more conventional jobs in certain capacities.
My husband was a scientist, I was a strategy consultant. And after a while we had turned our eyes towards the climate crisis, as many people do. And we had done our best to use the [00:07:00] skills that we had to apply to that crisis in a certain way. So we changed our jobs and climate became sort of everything that we thought and read and talked about.
But at a certain point, we felt like we didn’t have any connection to the reason that the climate, that climate change is a crisis, which is the land. And so we fantasized about trying to find some way that we could foster a closer connection to land by doing some sort of a land regeneration project.
So we found a degraded piece of land in a town called Guerneville, which is on the Russian River, about a half an hour’s drive from Shelterwood. And our we are a much different scale than what Niko and his team are managing. We are just on about 10 acres of land and that land was prior or previously a horse property that was essentially entirely degraded.
They had brought in six inches of lake sand and just poured it over the entire area to basically make it a dead space where horses could run around. And so this was a perfect opportunity for us [00:08:00] to take what we had read in books and start exploring and trying out ways of soil remediation and bringing life back to the land.
So that was the first phase of it. And I think what where we are really different from Niko and his team is Niko has. He has a lot of really good experience and is bringing so much knowledge to his space. What we were trying to show is that we actually didn’t have a ton of knowledge going into this.
And just by the good intentions and a lot of work, we’re trying to learn as the land comes back. And that’s by design. We wanted to show that, you don’t have to be necessarily perfect or skilled or exactly fit for some sort of a regeneration project. you just have to learn on the go and you have to have the intentions to do it and you have to put your heart into it.
And that’s a, that’s the starting of what this is. Over the last four years, we’ve really turned this more into an ecological classroom where we have been trying to bring as many people as we can onto the land to learn with us [00:09:00] and get their hands dirty and feel that spending an afternoon or a weekend doing land stewardship and regeneration is actually an aspirational thing to do, right?
A lot of times people think about going out into the garden. They think about that as like a chore or work. And what we really want to do is redefine that kind of work as the thing you want to be doing. Because it’s something that really humans are built to do. And so to answer the first question that you said is, “How are we really trying to bring optimistic futurism into this fold?”
Optimistic Futurism for the Enviornment
Nick Schwanz: So that’s really where the solar punk piece comes in. Solar punk is a movement that far predates our farm. We borrowed from the equity of that movement. We did not start it. But Solar Punk is a a movement that really started out as a reaction to cyberpunk and steampunk. Both of those are storytelling mechanisms that look at the future as this dystopian wasteland, and they pit technology and nature against each other and say, okay, this is what the future would look like if those two things are opposing forces.
The folks who really got Solar Punk off the ground were like why does it have to be [00:10:00] dystopian? And why does nature and technology have to be opposing forces? What if they were complementary forces? And what if the future actually looked amazing? And so that’s the impetus of what solar punk was.
And it started out as a genre for It’s more of like an aesthetic. There was a lot of architecture that brought solar punk principles into the fold. And there were a lot of artists and some fashion people. And then it became more of a philosophy. And since then it’s become more of like a cultural movement.
And the idea basically is that climate change is terrifying, but the way that we’ve been using, the way that we’ve been motivating people to work on climate projects is by making them look at something scary that they’re running from. It’s been a very stick based approach. It’s all about stop doing this, avoid doing that, run from this.
And Solar Punk offers a very different approach to that, which is essentially why don’t we give people something to run towards? Why don’t we give them carrots that incentivize them that life could actually be better than it is today? [00:11:00] Not just, different permutations of worse. And basically what we’re just trying to do is make the idea of thinking about, caring about, being involved in restoration as something that’s really enjoyable.
Something that you can incorporate with parties. Something that you can dance to. Something that you can laugh about, right? This doesn’t have to be scary work. It can actually be beautiful, healing, fun time. And that’s what we’re trying to foster on the farm with our process and honestly, so many of the people that are surround us in this area.
Kenny Coogan: A lot of that resonates really strong with me, Nick. I have a degree in animal behavior and I was doing a lot of animal shows at zoos and aquariums. And we would always say that you can’t tell the audience what not to do. You have to tell them what to do. So you can’t say don’t stick your hands up in the air and grab the birds as they fly past.
You have to tell them if you keep your hands in your lap, the birds will come closer to you. Or if you’re [00:12:00] talking about recycling, you have to tell them what to do.
Nick Schwanz: Yep. That’s a great example.
Rewilding and Regeneration
Kenny Coogan: So both of you mentioned the word regeneration many times, but the word of the day is rewilding. Niko, can you tell me how rewilding relates to regeneration?
Are they the same? Are they different?
Niko Alexandre: Happy to kick us off here, and it may be a somewhat controversial take for your listeners. I don’t particularly love the term rewilding, and here’s why. Oftentimes I think in the traditional environmental movement, when we think of the wild, we think of an area of a pristine ecosystem that has never been touched, that is you know, full of wild animals and where the human element in particular is completely not present.
And that became the foundation of modern conservation. It’s what is sometimes referred to as fortress conservation. You find an area that is quote unquote untouched from the human element. You put up some sort of fence, whether a physical fence or legislative fence, and then you say it’s conserved, it’s protected.[00:13:00]
But across Turtle Island, across North America, we have, we are now learning, I would say, Western scientists are now learning what a lot of Indigenous people have been saying forever, that in fact, human communities are what keep ecosystems at their most optimum. And when I say optimum, the most biodiverse, the most resilient in this particular part of the world.
So the original sin of degradation from my perspective happened when the indigenous communities and their practices were removed from many parts of North America, and that’s when our ecosystem started to unravel. And when people talk about rewilding, they often think again about how do we bring back this idea of pristine wilderness, but the human element is often absent.
And so when I talk about rewilding, I try to expand it a little bit and say what does it mean to rewild our hearts? What does it mean to rewild our ethos? How do we, as people who have been heavily regulated into a particular kind of sociopolitical system, rewild ourselves and show up in a way that transcends a lot of the pretty [00:14:00] rigid barriers that we have, many of us have been socialized to inhabit.
And that’s also why I really like bringing queerness into my practice. I think queerness is a framework that allows us to blur boundaries. and weave ourselves out of some of those rigid boxes. And that is something that I try to bring to a lot of the folks who come up here is problematizing the conventional concepts that we might have around what is natural, what is wilderness what is queer and using those things to come up with new ways of being that are as Nick was saying, joyful, playful, fun, exciting, and not just as doom and gloom.
When I think about rewilding, it’s mostly about how we orient ourselves to the work and problematize the things that are in front of us, and less about how we bring back the rhinos or the elephants or the cougars, whatever part of the world you might be, because all of that is constantly shifting and evolving and our ecosystems are incredibly dynamic.
And so it’s helpful to think about what does a wild ethic actually look like in your space without trying [00:15:00] to pick a point in time that may be idealized and towards which you will be managing your land.
How Young People React to Climate Change
Kenny Coogan: Nick you both work with young people, but Nick, in your mission statement on your website, you’re talking about an optimistic future. So can you talk about when you work with young people, are they feeling a dread of climate change. Are they feeling the burden on them? Are they blaming the older generations? Are they throwing their hands up in the air? Are they optimistic?
Nick Schwanz: Yes, they’re all of those things. I think that, the unfortunate adage that holds true over the last 30 years right is that if you’re not worried that you’re not paying attention.
And I think that’s just absolutely the case. That being said, we’ve now had basically a full generation like the older part of Gen X and all millennials, their job was to worry about this. And I think younger people are starting to get to the point now where they’re like, worry isn’t working.
[00:16:00] And so much of our future is going to be dominated by what we see as like the climate diluted version of human existence that we have to start finding other tools. And I think climate optimism is becoming a big one of those. It’s very natural to be scared about what you hear in the news, but there are a lot of good folks who are providing the tools and providing the inspiration for the alternative.
We just had a great speaker come up to the farm and do a little talk recently, a woman named Britt Wray. She’s a professor at Stanford University and she also wrote a book called Generation Dread, and it’s all about what does this generation who have, from the very beginning, been told that their future is going to be worse than their present, which is the first time in human or in American history that a generation has been told that.
How do they hold that and what do they do about it? And so managing climate anxiety and turning that into productive optimism is a [00:17:00] hard task, but it’s one that I think young people seem to be up to. It’s going to take a lot of organizing. It’s, again, in the last three months, I think. There’s been a whole nother setback in how people are feeling about the future, but I think in general optimism is a very natural thing that people want to gravitate towards.
And even though our context is not making it the natural thing or the default setting for people we find that People take to it very easily. You just have to give them the right access to what nature can provide, the right access to what community can provide and like the right stimulus of joy and celebration.
I’m gonna echo what Niko said about, this is another great example of how the queer community has a lot that it can bring to this particular crisis. If you say, wow, what community has, had to stare apocalypse in the face and learn how to celebrate and be joyful and find community in the face of that despite the government doing nothing about it like [00:18:00] queer people, like that meme that goes around you know when somebody talks about a problem and it’s that meme going well first time.
That’s I think what a lot of queer people feel about this right. And so there’s a lot that we can take from that community to show how you can create. Rebellion and resistance through joy and celebration. And yeah, young folks I think are just taking to that like absolute naturals.
How Fire Helps Regenerate Land
Kenny Coogan: I have to mention that you’re both in California and obviously earlier this year we are having horrible wildfires.
Niko, can you talk about having a master’s in forestry? I’m really into carnivorous plants and many North American carnivorous plants rely on fire ecology to burn the invasive plants and the taller shrubs and trees, but obviously we don’t want it to go out of hand. So can you talk about how [00:19:00] fire maybe has a beneficial role in regenerating land?
Niko Alexandre: From the 10, 000 foot level, California is a fire adapted ecosystem. Fire, historically, is a natural part of our ecologies. In many ways, our landscapes in California coevolved over 13, 000 years with indigenous communities very intentionally lighting fires to keep ecosystems in a certain kind of state.
That could be burning off the grasses in an area every fall to stimulate regrowth in the spring, which would then bring in various kinds of critters that they would hunt to support their livelihoods. In other areas, it could be burning the understory of a forest to reduce the fuel load meaning the amount of dry flammable material that is in that forest so that if the lightning strike were to happen, we don’t have a giant wildfire that would then completely decimate that, that landscape.
And what the, colonial American approach has been is removing those people and those practices from our landscapes. And so what [00:20:00] then happens is we have a ecosystem that for 10, 000 years coevolved with fire that was able to create a huge amount of biodiversity and resilience because of the role of low intensity regular burns in our ecosystem.
And now that’s completely removed. And so over 150, 200 years, we have the buildup in this particular case of lots of dry vegetation, lots of dry fuels, that are then exacerbated by a dry, a drying climate. Just saw a study this morning on like the climate whiplash effect, where we’re going from lots and lots of rain to complete drying in very unseasonable parts of the year.
And so the fires in L. A., the fires that happened in Northern California a few years ago, are direct byproducts of both the removal of those practices, regular burning, and the indigenous communities who, again, had an extraordinary amount of science and knowledge on how to do this, and a drying climate.
And so I think it’s important to flag something that Nick said at the beginning too we’re all of us who are guests on this land have [00:21:00] really no idea what we’re doing. We’re trying to figure it out to the best of our abilities. Forestry science is in the conventional term, 70 years old, right?
What is 70 years compared to the 10, 000 years of knowledge that Indigenous folks had cultivated, right? So it’s really important for us to approach this work with a huge amount of humility and consequently for our policies. to also reflect that. As we’re developing best practices for managing public and private lands, we have to be prepared to create management regimes that can co evolve and adapt over time.
And I think that is perhaps one of the contributing factors to why we’ve been seeing all these devastating wildfires. We come in with a certainty of how things are supposed to be, and then 10, 15, 20 years later, nature reminds us that we, in fact, don’t know everything.
Rewilding: The Triple Bottom Line
Kenny Coogan: So you mentioned taking a 10, 000 foot view, but if we go even broader, in terms of sustainability, which sometimes is measured as like the triple bottom line, I wanted to talk about [00:22:00] regeneration and rewilding helps people, profit, and the planet. And I think the easiest one is, it helps the planet and of course like numerous ways we can get a carbon sink, we can increase biodiversity of plants and animals, we can have that resiliency to fires or climate change.
But Nick, when you talk about how is rewilding or regeneration good for the landowner? What is that carrot for them? Why would they bother not paving their entire property? Why should they be planting things and encouraging wildlife?
Nick Schwanz: I want to state that I really love the way Niko talked about rewilding as a, it’s a manifestation of humans thinking that they are separate from nature. Like the word wild is a big barrier between natural ecosystems in humans.
And so that, that term doesn’t necessarily [00:23:00] reflect that we are another species of fauna intermingling with this milieu of flora and fauna and fungi and everything else. And so I say that to start this answer to this question, because that is something that I think people need to realize when they live on land, is that they are part of the ecosystem that surrounds them. And I think regeneration is really about building an ecosystem around you that wants to be there. And so that comes with tons of benefits. Not only is it better for your soil and better for your health and all these other things, but it’s also better for your aesthetics.
Plants that are native to a certain place thrive in that place. They look healthier, they’re beautiful. They draw a lot of different critters in. So you’re bringing non-human community onto your land by inviting them in with all of these different strategies.
It’s almost hard to limit this to one topic because it’s better in so many ways, but if you are let’s use an example of us. We have the farm is about 10 [00:24:00] acres. When we started introducing more regenerative strategies we saw animals come back to the space, we saw temperature differentials, which actually made things cooler in the right spots and warmer in the right spots.
We started being able to provide for ourselves with food that we could either harvest or forage. It provided more interesting talking points for people to come over and build community around. It really is about reintroducing you, the human. into the ecosystem that surrounds you, and all of the co benefits that come with that are insane.
Kenny Coogan: When I say triple bottom line, sometimes people think they’re like three separate pillars, but they’re really these overlapping circles, because if it’s going to help with your sociability, it’s also going to help you make friends and business partners, but it’s also going to help the planet all at the same time.
Niko, do you want to add anything to how regeneration [00:25:00] helps with people, profit, or the planet?
Niko Alexandre: Nick pretty much covered all the things that I would add. Maybe I’ll just throw in one stat there since we were talking about the connections between regeneration slash restoration, rewilding and and climate change.
A lot of the work that we’re doing at the landscape level is to create models for restoring the land, creating carbon sinks and protecting standing carbon. And the data is showing that those two practices, restoring landscapes and protecting existing landscapes can contribute about one third of the solution to the climate crisis. And that’s a really meaningful metric. There’s quite a lot of investments and curiosities, I think, flowing towards how we can leverage the health of natural environments to fight climate change. And there’s a direct through line there that I think is really interesting in the climate space.
Getting Neighbors Onboard with Rewilding Aesthetics
Kenny Coogan: A lot of our readers have two acres to 50 acres. And I was wondering, because you guys have 10 to 900 acres [00:26:00] can either of you speak to some of the challenges associated with regeneration? Are we rewilding a property on a smaller scale? Because if you own 900 acres, your neighbors might not care how the aesthetic is.
But I’m thinking of the person who’s living in the suburb who wants to invite the wildlife. What do you guys think about that?
Nick Schwanz: I’ll jump in there. I think there’s a couple of things one and frankly one of the biggest challenges that for some twisted reason, this idea of regeneration is like not socially accepted in our current culture.
And so getting people to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing is honestly, it’s a challenge, but it’s also a really great opportunity to bring more people into the fold. One of the things that we experienced a lot is We had neighbors who, for the first couple of years, we would grow cover crops and green manure things to get more nutrients in the soil.
And we were growing natives that we would just let flower. And then we would let [00:27:00] them sit in the winter. We don’t go and cut them back. And we had neighbors constantly coming over to us and saying, Hey, your yard looks really messy. And even though we do not live in like the, like perfect picket fence lawn type of town, we still had folks basically saying, Hey my definition of what beautiful is contrasting with what you’re doing in this space. And you need to help me reconcile those two things. And was easy to just be like, Hey, screw you this isn’t your place back off. But instead what we tried to do is like, why don’t you come over? And we can talk about what we’ve been doing and why we’re doing it.
And we would go and we’d show Hey, see all this fennel that we didn’t cut down? If we go and look, we can see that there’s bugs sleeping in this fennel over the winter. And us cutting it down means saying that our aesthetic is more important than these guys homes. And so there was a lot of education that we had to do to really explain what our definition of beautiful was and why messiness can actually [00:28:00] be aesthetic in its own way and there’s just a lot of retraining to do that basically says the way that humans build things is not the natural definition of beautiful.
It is a capitalism derived aesthetic that has been dominating our culture for the last hundred years. And there is so much more interesting versions of Beauty and value that we have to bring back to the mainstream and help our neighbors appreciate. And all it really takes is like a neighbor coming over and having a cup of coffee with you and seeing how many hummingbirds are buzzing by for them to finally get it, but I think that biggest challenge that people face right now is changing the paradigm with which people judge land. That they’re on. And that can really just be tackled through lots of open hearted conversation with folks and trying to geek out and bring them into the fold as much as you can.
Kenny Coogan: I wrote that question because I know so many communities, not just HOA, but [00:29:00] communities at large in the U.S. Who get upset when people grow vegetables in their front yard. So I was thinking when people are letting those flower heads keep them on there in the winter for the birds and the insects to eat, they might be equally mad.
Nick Schwanz: Yeah. Yeah. I think we have a huge problem with tidiness. The lawn, the like green lawn is a perfect exemplar of what we’re doing wrong when it comes to managing the land that we’re on. And you’ll see memes all the time nowadays where it’s like you’ll see a green lawn and then you’ll see a lawn filled with all these native flowers. And people are like, this sucks. This is great. But that has to happen at a grand level, right? Not just at the meme level. The flowers and the plants and the animals, they’re doing their work just by existing. They’re creating their charm and casting their spells, but we have to do a lot of work of outreach to our neighbors to not get them to tolerate the us and the work that we’re doing, but actually get them to like, see the [00:30:00] value in it and get them as excited as we are.
How to Start the Regenerative Process of Rewildling
Kenny Coogan: The Mother Earth News community we’re definitely excited about regeneration practices. Nick, could you give us like one or two things? If somebody moves into a new property or they have an existing property that as their non native yard with maybe a small vegetable garden. What is the initial step of regenerating the property?
Nick Schwanz: This was so hard for me, especially because I was an ecological restoration newbie. And I had worked in high paced Silicon Valley for so long. First thing you can do is you really need to go and listen. And like before you start making decisions and putting things in places and, deciding that I’m the boss, you have to go and be a part of the place.
So in permaculture, which is a way of thinking, but it’s very much just based on traditional ecological knowledge. It’s a Oh, it’s a Western packaging of a lot of traditional ecological knowledge. [00:31:00] But one of the terms that they use is something called PATO, which is protracted and thoughtful observation.
And they say, when you first be, or when you first find yourself on land, find a sit spot where you can go to day after day at different times and just listen and smell and look and taste and feel and try to get a sense of exactly what the layers of your space are. And. And, figure out where is the sun the warmest and, where am I seeing life that already exists so that I can make sure I respect that.
So there’s a thousand different ways to do that, but I think the most important thing for you to do is. Go to your space and really listen and understand and research and be an observer for a while. And then the next thing you can do is really do a lot of research on what is native to your space, right?
What was here before you? What has evolved to be here? And then try to bring those two things together before you start designing designing strategies for the space. [00:32:00] But I’m sure Niko has a lot of great thoughts on this as well.
Niko Alexandre: Fabulous. Rewilding small scale properties. I don’t think I have a whole lot to add to what Nick was sharing. I think maybe a unsexy and not often flaunted answer to that has to do with political organizing. Many environmental challenges are in fact not really about nature or ecology at the end of the day. They’re about the relationship between people, meaning, different people to each other, and then between the human community and the rest of our environment. And so one of the ways that we can, I think, just to reiterate what Nick said working closely with neighbors, building collective groups, bringing together folks who traditionally may not be used to working together.
The private property regime has been one of the most damaging things ecosystems because it forces people, it breaks people up. It stops us thinking and working. As a organized unit and then it also creates these very weird artificial lines in the forest that [00:33:00] Really inhibit ecological flows So I think again we many of us myself included don’t necessarily like to think about the ways in which the politics of the city, state, region, country are interfacing with the plants that we want to grow.
Like I got into this because I just want to tend to trees and hide out in the forest. But at the end of the day, for large scale impacts to be achieved, we all have to be partnering and working closely together. And that is true. I think on the local scale of a couple acres to even for us, we’re 900 acres.
We are going to be burning in the fall and doing those small scale controlled burns that I was referencing earlier. And we have a vineyard right next door as one of our neighbors, and what can happen in this part of the world is smoke in the fall can sometimes taint the grapes, so we have to make sure that we’re working really closely with our neighbors to ensure that we know when their grapes are going to be in season so that when we do our burning, which benefits everyone burning is going to directly reduce the wildfire risk, but we don’t want to jeopardize their [00:34:00] livelihood.
So there’s always a need to work closely with the folks who are around you, it just manifests at different scales. I believe those scales should be nested within them. So not the first thing that I think a lot of us want to think of when we just want to open our flower planting books, but showing up to those local meetings is one of the most important things you can do to create that resilience at the local level.
Kenny Coogan: We’re going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor. And when we return, we’ll be focusing on how listeners can rewild and regenerate their property wherever they are.
Kenny Coogan: We are back with Niko Alexandre, co founder of the Shelterwood Collective, and Nick Schwanz, co founder of Solar Punk Farms.
So both of you, before the ad break, we were talking about how people can talk to the communities and get them on board so they can regenerate their land. And I mentioned that many of our listeners have two to fifty acres, but some people do have hundreds and hundreds of acres, and [00:35:00] they have canyons where they’re running sheep and goats and things like that.
Identifying Areas of Land That Need Regenerative Practices
Kenny Coogan: Niko, how does somebody know that they do need to regenerate their land? What are we regenerating?
Niko Alexandre: That’s a great question. I love it. And it goes back to, I think Nick’s earlier point around listening. You want to spend time getting a sense of how’s your, how is your land functioning? How are the different species that are there interrelating?
A couple of examples there. A healthy ecosystem is an ecosystem that overall, not to get into the details, that is fairly resilient to shocks. So if every winter you’re seeing huge amounts of landslides, then maybe there’s something that needs to happen, right? If for us we are in a pretty high wildfire risk area, and so as I was mentioning earlier, as wildfires move through the landscape, If we were to look outside the window and see a really dense forest and imagine it, being lit on fire [00:36:00] and imagining all of that fire consuming all of our forest, and that’s a sign that maybe that forest isn’t incredibly healthy because the shock of a wildfire would then completely decimate it.
And so we then start to think through, okay, what are the things that we could bring into this landscape? What are the activities? What are the species? What are the regular practices that we could do to make this ecosystem more resilient? So I start with that and then I go back and I look to see historically who might have been here when I say who I mean all the little critters that are ecosystems again trying to using language to break down the barrier between wild and human, natural and unnatural.
So we refer to our non human kin as who’s and not what’s. But trying to get a sense of who was here, looking at history, talking to communities that have been here for 10, 20, 30, 100, 10, 000 years, getting a sense from them who was here. And then also thinking about who wants to be here, who is showing up in this moment in time.
And looking at, for us at the landscape level, looking at climate projections, as we [00:37:00] see a shortening and shortening of the rains, we’re also thinking about how the climate of the future is going to impact who wants to be here. So right now, to give a concrete example, we have quite a lot of Douglas fir.
It’s a very water tolerant species, but we think in 50 years, the rain regimes are going to be very different here. So we’re going to be encouraging and planting a lot of oaks because the oaks are happier in a drier type of landscape. So listening, looking back, and thinking forward is how we start to weave together the practices of what a particular place that we are inhabiting should look like.
Kenny Coogan: Nick, can you talk about Solar Punk Farms? It used to be a horse farm. We love our listeners who have horses, but did the former owners do something specific that hurt the land or is it just the normal wear and tear that livestock has on the land?
Nick Schwanz: We love our horse people too for sure and love horses in general, but [00:38:00] I think in this particular space the horse, which was not necessarily supposed to be in the rainforests of Northern California that one species dominated the entire space and the humans were like, this is the most important thing and so we’re building everything around this one thing. Everything was just basically structured around riding a horse, and that was at the sacrifice of every other living thing in the space. It was to the point where pigweed was barely growing, and pigweed can grow anywhere.
And not to knock what the previous person who was on this land thought or wanted, but we just had very different goals. We had talked to our neighbor we were like, what grows well here? And the direct quote from him was a long time ago, my mom or my grandma used to say in this space you have to be really careful because if you drop a seed you have to back up. That’s how fertile this land was. And so to just see the sort of difference between that analogy and where our land was it just [00:39:00] gave us a big wide open palette for what could be. I think what your goals are the most important thing and what we really have to do on a big societal level is making sure people’s goals are a little bit more in line with what nature’s goals are.
Creating a Priority List of Rewilding a Property
Kenny Coogan: It feels to me like a Herculean task, even if you have a city lot or an acre. When you’re looking at it and somebody just has that non native turf grass and you want to rewild something, you want to regenerate it, is there a priority list? Like when you look at a land, a piece of land, do you need to remove the invasives first?
Do you need to plant trees first? Do you need to plant wildflowers first? Do you have to have a water feature first? Do you contact the extension office or your state’s native plant society? How does someone even dip their toes into rewilding a property?
Nick Schwanz: I might start on that one just because I know Niko’s so much better at doing the like broader societal level, and I think that’s a beautiful place [00:40:00] to end, but the more granular in the weeds approach that I think is, we’ve already talked about listening first.
And there is an entire other world going on underneath. And so understanding what the historical soil types are, understanding what the the biodiversity count, the organic matter all of that kind of stuff that represents good soil health. That is your foundation of everything. So really thinking about how you can invest in that in the best way possible is huge. I would say that’s where you start. And then you really need to have a plan, have a vision for the space that is well informed, researched share that vision with other people that you that you know and with other knowledgeable folks, qualified folks, elders in your area, and really make sure that you have a vision of what you’re building towards.
It while it is fun to just like piecemeal things in here and there and make changes willy nilly there’s so much more long term impact, resilience co benefits when you have a bigger vision that you’re [00:41:00] working on bit by bit. And so I think starting in that place is going to have really big cascading effects to everything you do down the road.
The other thing is, it depends. Everybody’s different. And I think it’s really important to know that there’s no right answer. I laugh, one of our mentors who’s an absolutely incredible teacher, always says I’ll ask if I’m doing something right. And she always is that’s not the right question.
These plants have been around for so much longer than you. They don’t really need you. They’re gonna be fine. You’re just here to help out. So don’t put the stress on yourself of messing up and doing things right and wrong. You are one of a billion factors happening on your space. So just be as best of a factor as you can and let, give a little bit of faith and trust to the other living things that are making a difference.
And just contextualize your role really well and respect others.
Kenny Coogan: All right, Niko, where does one start?
Niko Alexandre: I would [00:42:00] fully underscore second everything that Nick just said. Maybe, to add on to it a little bit when I think about starting a restoration or regeneration project, ultimately what you’re restoring are the relationships to place. And that is how humans are relating to the place.
It’s how the different species that are there are relating to each other. And again, echoing Nick, it’s not really about like, how do I get every single puzzle piece right? How do I build the Lego structure using just that color and this color? It’s how am I actually showing up to the work and doing the work in that way?
And there’s one ecological term that I really love. And Nick, I might invite you to talk about this, because I know you all have done such a beautiful job around it, but this idea of ecological succession. You’re coming up to a property, if you’re working with a property that has been really significantly degraded, whether it’s with horses or just there’s been a lawn, a green, monocultural lawn there for 20 years.
You want to start with species that will enrich the species that are coming after, which I think is also a great generational metaphor for how we show up with one [00:43:00] another. You look for species that are going to be pretty hardy, that are going to be quote, pioneer species. Succession is a western term, so we’re going to use western concepts and language there.
But they’re really hardy critters and plants that will make the soil more receptive to the next generation. And then each subsequent generation will make the space richer and richer and more conducive to life. And that goes for the health of the soil, that goes for the health of the waterways, it goes for the pollination aspects of your property.
So I think that’s a concept that could be really interesting for folks who are really trying to figure out where do I start. Just think about the ecological succession dynamics of your property. Again, very particularly ecological term, but there are plenty of resources for pretty much every part of North America, whatever climatic zone you are in, where pictures of what needs to come first to make the environment more fertile are there.
And again, it’s not one particular species. It’s not one particular plan. It’s a group of species that are themselves going to make the next species that come happier and more resilient. But Nick, I know y’all did [00:44:00] this in practice. I don’t know if y’all want to talk about any of that.
Nick Schwanz: I think you described that beautifully. Again I’ll probably give a more high level meta answer to that than you were thinking I would give. But I think that the thing that I learned when I first came here was. My biggest tool was learning how to slow down and give things time and let things do what they wanted to do. I think the reason that, the term pioneer species got thrown out is because they’re going to show up and do their work regardless.
Like they, they love new spaces that need to be regenerated and they know what their work is. And so some of that happens really naturally. So I agree with everything you said. I don’t have anything really to add with when it comes to like succession ecology. The last little bit I would say on top of that is, and this is a silly small one, but learn the names.
It’s really important. I loved what Niko said about like using the proper framework for how you think about other living things, right? Like the animals are not what’s their, who’s [00:45:00] plants are too. And I think it’s really important when you’re in a space to like. Observe things, learn what their name is, do research on them because you’re going to see that the land is generally going to try to heal itself a little bit.
And so observing and knowing what the, what things are called and taking off your plant blindness to, a lot of times people have plant blindness to everything that they didn’t plant themselves. But there are so many other creatures out there that are doing their thing and we have to know them all.
And so I think it’s a really practical, ecological step, but also just a really nice emotional step to really focus on learning what things are and seeing them in the spaces that they’re in.
Kenny Coogan: I’m imagining a lot of the listeners will want to increase biodiversity. When you were just saying the hummingbirds. I have to stop everything I’m doing every time I see a hummingbird in my backyard. And the best spot for [00:46:00] biodiversity are ecotones, which is that transitional space. So if you have your non native lawn and you start having those pioneer species and then you get a forest, that space between the forest and the prairie is a really great place to observe that unique wildlife. So I wish everyone who’s listening to this podcast, good luck on regeneration and restoring their land. And thank you so much, Niko and Nick, for a great conversation today.
Nick Schwanz: Thanks so much for having us.
Josh Wilder: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, visit www.motherearthenews.com/podcast. You can also email us at podcast@ogdenpubs.com with any questions or suggestions. Our podcast production team includes Kenny Coogan, Alyssa Warner, and myself, Josh Wilder.
Music for this [00:47:00] episode is the song Hustle by Kevin MacLeod. The Mother Earth News and Friends podcast is a production of Ogden Publications.
Jessica Anderson: Until next time, don’t forget to love your Mother.
