Forest Restoration, Burning & Dam Removal

<v Speaker 1>Gotta by me. Girl in a b W. She's a
<v Speaker 1>by me Wama, I'm a my w I'm in monnah
<v Speaker 1>she's a Tennessee. Oh Mama said it. If I'm mona content,
<v Speaker 1>I'm my girl. Can't climbing me.
<v Speaker 2>That's why I'm creaming it away, creaming away, creaming away.
<v Speaker 1>Come on to see my babe. I'm coming, Mama, gotta
<v Speaker 1>ten not a tick.
<v Speaker 2>Green almus.
<v Speaker 1>Hold, bring them mold out bad bread us.
<v Speaker 2>I've got two.
<v Speaker 1>Legs and chicken and I have a final ten. I'll
<v Speaker 1>be falling about a time at the first palsy and love.
<v Speaker 1>I'm creaming away, green out away ball mybby, Oh mom,
<v Speaker 1>I'm good for the moment.
<v Speaker 2>All right, welcome to the crime page. But by he
<v Speaker 2>doesn't podcast that was creeping away by swamp day. Listen
<v Speaker 2>to a lot of old blues lately. Anyway, Uh, Today,
<v Speaker 2>I'm here with my friend Bruce Shoemaker, who's a researcher
<v Speaker 2>on natural resource conflict issues. He's an author of a
<v Speaker 2>book called Dead in the Water that was about hydro
<v Speaker 2>power hydro electric projects funded by the World Bank those
<v Speaker 2>kind souls in Southeast Asia that basically wrecked the ecology
<v Speaker 2>over there, and we were highly exploitative. He's got a
<v Speaker 2>land restoration project, or start a land restoration project, turning
<v Speaker 2>monocultures of pine plantations in northern California back at the
<v Speaker 2>biodiverse forest and also restoring fire in those highly fired
<v Speaker 2>dependent ecosystems. So anyway, Bruce, Hello, how's it going. How
<v Speaker 2>you doing?
<v Speaker 1>Hey, Joey, It's nice to be on the show.
<v Speaker 2>So, I guess starting off, let's talk about I want
<v Speaker 2>to talk about the land project you started. It's in
<v Speaker 2>Siskyou County, and I mean there were a number of
<v Speaker 2>people involved in it, but it was really I mean,
<v Speaker 2>I guess you kind of spearheaded it. It was you
<v Speaker 2>that spearheaded it was what was the status with this?
<v Speaker 2>This was forty would you start off with forty acres?
<v Speaker 2>And it was all pine plantation right near Mount Shast,
<v Speaker 2>the beautiful Mount Shast the New Age Spiritual Home. You
<v Speaker 2>were in Weed, just north of the town of Mount Shasta,
<v Speaker 2>which is it's a little weird sometimes, right.
<v Speaker 1>But beautiful area though. Yeah, it's a great area. Siskiou County.
<v Speaker 1>It's the far northernmost county in the in California, up
<v Speaker 1>against the Oregon border. We're about fifty miles south of
<v Speaker 1>the Oregon border. And yeah, started with a thirty five
<v Speaker 1>acres and then I was able to do a boundary
<v Speaker 1>line adjustment with a neighboring landowner, so it brought it
<v Speaker 1>up to fifty acres. It started in two thousand and seven,
<v Speaker 1>so it got a few years behind us now. And
<v Speaker 1>and you know, my original interest in the property was
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I wanted to be in a beautiful natural area,
<v Speaker 1>but it was much more about trains and my you know,
<v Speaker 1>our shared interest in freight trains. And it's right along
<v Speaker 1>the Union Pacific.
<v Speaker 2>We should mention I was I was involved in this
<v Speaker 2>in the early years, but at the time I was
<v Speaker 2>a punk ass through so so. But anyway, so this
<v Speaker 2>is right on the this is around the railroad tracks
<v Speaker 2>in a rather remote area. Yeah, it's twoful mountain air
<v Speaker 2>elevation thirty eight hundred feet.
<v Speaker 1>That's yep, thirty nine hundred feet, yep, yep. And it's
<v Speaker 1>a yeah, on the outskirts of Weed, California, a couple
<v Speaker 1>of miles away from the town and a truck stop area.
<v Speaker 1>So even though you're right right on the edge of
<v Speaker 1>the town, it feels like you're much more remote than that,
<v Speaker 1>and it's Yeah, it's along the old Southern Pacific main
<v Speaker 1>line at a little junction called Black Butte, which is
<v Speaker 1>where a branch line tees off.
<v Speaker 2>And it's called black because the black cinder cone, which
<v Speaker 2>is right, it's just a pramid.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's just a couple of miles from Black Butte,
<v Speaker 1>which is a plug dome volcano that's sort of in
<v Speaker 1>the Mount Shasta area, much much younger than than Mount
<v Speaker 1>Shasta itself. And that Black Beat is sixty three hundred feet,
<v Speaker 1>whereas Mount Shasta's over fourteen thousand.
<v Speaker 2>Mount Shasta is still an active volcano. We should mention too,
<v Speaker 2>the last exploded when of late seventeen hundreds.
<v Speaker 1>That's what they're guessing. Yeah, it's it's dormant, but it's
<v Speaker 1>it's certainly not extinct, and someday it will it will
<v Speaker 1>show us that Yeah, nobbly in spectacular fashion.
<v Speaker 2>Well, there were records of it blowing up from off
<v Speaker 2>the coast right by.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's somewhat controversial on whether that that's it was
<v Speaker 1>an accurate account or not.
<v Speaker 2>But somebody saw some shit blowing up, yeah, ship in
<v Speaker 2>the Pacific Ocean.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and whether that was actually just a big wildfire
<v Speaker 1>in the interior or or the mountain erupting is unclear
<v Speaker 1>at this point.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, So anyway, so how do you end up there?
<v Speaker 2>I mean, how did you find this spot? And what
<v Speaker 2>was it like when you first got there was a
<v Speaker 2>junk yard.
<v Speaker 1>Right, yeah, yeah, it was an it actually the majority
<v Speaker 1>of the land zoned heavy industrial. It was a it
<v Speaker 1>had been a We started going there in the late
<v Speaker 1>nineteen nineties on just trips to far northern California. We
<v Speaker 1>would I would hop trains from Minneapolis and go to
<v Speaker 1>the Dunsmere Railroad Days festival and annual festival in June
<v Speaker 1>in the little town just south of us. And sometimes
<v Speaker 1>the sheriffs didn't like us being there and you know,
<v Speaker 1>cleared us all out. And we had a friend who
<v Speaker 1>lived in Weed North Bank, Fred who you know, who
<v Speaker 1>knew about this spot in this beautiful meadow by a
<v Speaker 1>spring up and so we had a group of us
<v Speaker 1>would go and camp up there after the Dunsmany railroad
<v Speaker 1>Days starting in the late nineteen nineties, so we were
<v Speaker 1>familiar with the property years before the railroad days.
<v Speaker 2>Was like a like a just regular railroad enthusiast nerd
<v Speaker 2>but then mixed with like the homeless, traveling, homeless element too.
<v Speaker 1>Well, it was like a it was like it was
<v Speaker 1>a town festival, you know, like some towns have their
<v Speaker 1>blueberry festival or their you know whatever dunsmyre has railroad days,
<v Speaker 1>being an old railroad town. And uh so, but I
<v Speaker 1>think long before I started coming there, there'd been a
<v Speaker 1>tradition of having train riders come there for associated gathering
<v Speaker 1>down on the river bank, and uh so I had
<v Speaker 1>heard about that and started going there, I think after
<v Speaker 1>I came back from living in Laos in the late
<v Speaker 1>nineteen nineties, and uh and then we discovered the Black
<v Speaker 1>Butt Spot with this just beautiful meadow. There's all these
<v Speaker 1>springs that pop up on the side of Mount Shasta
<v Speaker 1>on all sides, and this was one of them, called
<v Speaker 1>Black beat Springs, and it comes down and creates this
<v Speaker 1>beautiful meadow and really diverse ecosystem right in the middle
<v Speaker 1>of what in general is a super dry, you know,
<v Speaker 1>mixed conifer forest area. Very windy, it can be very windy.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's the the uh kind of juxtaposition of Black
<v Speaker 1>Butte and Mount Shasta and also the Klamath Mountains Mount Eddy,
<v Speaker 1>which is no slouch of a mountain itself. It's over
<v Speaker 1>nine thousand feet and that's that's just on the other
<v Speaker 1>side of the valley there and the I mean back to.
<v Speaker 2>The railroad thing. So they're in the composition, the demographic
<v Speaker 2>composition of people doing this at the time, mostly Anglo
<v Speaker 2>but like you had this old, old contingent of like
<v Speaker 2>Vietnam vet or yeah, alcoholic, but yeah, they're working class background.
<v Speaker 2>And then there was kind of like this younger punk
<v Speaker 2>rocker kid element too. It was like both of those
<v Speaker 2>of the court. But they would come in and like
<v Speaker 2>the sun and the town have like a tramp parade
<v Speaker 2>through the town.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, we would join the Dunsman Railroad Days parade.
<v Speaker 2>And I was accepting of them for the moment pretty
<v Speaker 2>much pretty much.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, not without some controversy, but overall, I'd say
<v Speaker 1>sometimes the police had to be called. Well they or
<v Speaker 1>they took it upon themselves.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's just they We're seeing this photo and it's
<v Speaker 2>just like the quintessential like redneck cop with a little
<v Speaker 2>Hitler mustache. I forget where it was, but he was
<v Speaker 2>I think it was. I don't know. I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>I forget who took it, but it was a picture
<v Speaker 2>of this cop just scowling from the shade of like
<v Speaker 2>inside his car at whoever he was taking it was
<v Speaker 2>fucking hilarious. Yeah, but anyway, sorry.
<v Speaker 1>Go on, But anyway, we our buddy north Bank, Fred
<v Speaker 1>knew about this property. He liked to go up there
<v Speaker 1>and watch trains at the junction. He knew all the
<v Speaker 1>railroad workers and knew about this nice meadow. So we
<v Speaker 1>started having our this after party camp out up in
<v Speaker 1>this meadow. And then right across the tracks from us
<v Speaker 1>was this abandoned junkyard and it still a caretaker who
<v Speaker 1>was an old hobo called Montana Bull who was living
<v Speaker 1>in the little shack.
<v Speaker 2>And how did he How did Montana Bull end up there?
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, you must have just there was a
<v Speaker 1>lot of tramps that would camp up in this area
<v Speaker 1>during the summer.
<v Speaker 2>It's a nice spot.
<v Speaker 1>It's a nice spot, wonderful weather.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's cool for California in the summer because of
<v Speaker 1>the elevation, but it's close to services and people liked it,
<v Speaker 1>so uh. Anyway, Yeah, when we when we purchased the land,
<v Speaker 1>there was actually three or four old tramps that were
<v Speaker 1>kind of already used to camping on the land, and
<v Speaker 1>one of them moved right in as our first caretaker.
<v Speaker 1>Gonzo I think you remember a friend of mine. Yeahah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>he was a great guy. Uh and he had a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of other nefarious friends who would show up for
<v Speaker 1>shorter long.
<v Speaker 2>They were fun, they were different. They you know, carried firearms.
<v Speaker 2>They they were they were alcoholics, but they were they
<v Speaker 2>were also fun people. They were nice people, they were kind.
<v Speaker 2>Gonzo was from Detroit originally. He could play some fucking
<v Speaker 2>mean blues guitar thick Polack accent think Detroit Pollack accent,
<v Speaker 2>and and uh yeah, they were fun people. It was
<v Speaker 2>it was good. It's good to be around. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>And they had lived a hard life outdoors a lot
<v Speaker 1>and and most of them have passed on at this point.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Gonzo had died in two thousand and eight.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was only around for a couple
<v Speaker 1>of years. But any anyway, uh yeah, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>I'd come out with just a couple other people, including
<v Speaker 1>my partner who's a wildlife biologist now, and we found
<v Speaker 1>ourselves with this piece of property which we'd kind of
<v Speaker 1>gotten for the interest in trains. And you know, I
<v Speaker 1>was able to get a caboose onto the property right
<v Speaker 1>away as my little cabin there oars.
<v Speaker 2>Are going like full rail nerd you're just like all
<v Speaker 2>any of.
<v Speaker 1>The totals total darks.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but at the same time you're stealing rides from
<v Speaker 2>the railroad, which explained that to people too, because it's
<v Speaker 2>like a lot of times the workers don't really care
<v Speaker 2>as long as people are behaving, as long as they're
<v Speaker 2>not drunk or doing stupid shit. And then and but
<v Speaker 2>the company does. There's there it's kind of tolerat or
<v Speaker 2>it used to be.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I think it's it's well, it might be more
<v Speaker 1>tolerated now than it has been at some points actually,
<v Speaker 1>but it's it's.
<v Speaker 2>Uh, just because the company doesn't carry they've cut costs
<v Speaker 2>so much, they just don't want Yeah, they.
<v Speaker 1>Just don't want to deal with it, and they don't
<v Speaker 1>want to stop trains, but they they And I think
<v Speaker 1>that worries about liability turned out to that you don't
<v Speaker 1>have any hobos hurting themselves and actually suing the railroad.
<v Speaker 1>That was you know, kind of a myth, but but
<v Speaker 1>uh they Yeah, I mean it's an old tradition that
<v Speaker 1>goes back as long as railroads have existed, and and
<v Speaker 1>uh there's been people that still like like trains and
<v Speaker 1>use it as transportation. Uh. Ever since really you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's gone, it's had its ups and downs in terms
<v Speaker 1>of the number of people.
<v Speaker 2>Great way to get around if you don't want to
<v Speaker 2>spend a lot of money.
<v Speaker 1>Too traveling, Yeah yeah, yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And it's it's you don't mind being uncomfortable.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it can. It can have a good and bad bad. Uh.
<v Speaker 1>I mean I came all the way out here by
<v Speaker 1>to South Texas by train and worked out pretty good
<v Speaker 1>for the most part.
<v Speaker 2>You did. You wrote, okay, so you wrote you wrote
<v Speaker 2>down here and you rode from where were you coming?
<v Speaker 2>You rode from Tucson. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>I came from Dunsmere By my hometown, to up down
<v Speaker 1>to southern California.
<v Speaker 2>So you just left from home.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, whole trip walking distance from my house then, but
<v Speaker 1>most recently you come from Tucson.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>I went to Tucson. I stayed there, visited friends, went
<v Speaker 1>to a Gillian Welsh concert, which was great. She likes
<v Speaker 1>freight trains.
<v Speaker 2>She's liked some of my posts on Instagram for but
<v Speaker 2>she doesn't want to actually be associated with me by
<v Speaker 2>following me, which I totally understand.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's how I feel about you too, anyway, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>so yeah, and then came I blasted over to San
<v Speaker 1>Antonio with a couple buddies on the train.
<v Speaker 2>And do you have any trouble along the border like
<v Speaker 2>Del Rio l Paso?
<v Speaker 1>Well, there are, Yeah. The border patrol is thick as
<v Speaker 1>flies these days, and so while the railroad itself doesn't
<v Speaker 1>have a lot of security, the border patrol sure does.
<v Speaker 1>And then you know, on my way down here, I uh, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I was spotted, which is kind of weird because I
<v Speaker 1>was on a southbound train out of you know, coming
<v Speaker 1>down from Houston through Bloomington to to uh Harlingen, which
<v Speaker 1>is the closest spot I could get to you uh
<v Speaker 1>huh and uh But they yeah, I was asked to
<v Speaker 1>d train by a border patrol and.
<v Speaker 2>They said get off, we're calling the cops. But they weren't.
<v Speaker 2>But at the same time, the neuro citizens said they didn't.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, they weren't too concerned about it. They were almost
<v Speaker 1>apologetic at the moment. They're mostly they're looking for migrants,
<v Speaker 1>but you're going south to well, that was the weird thing.
<v Speaker 1>They didn't even really understand why both a US citizen
<v Speaker 1>was on a train down here and why somebody was
<v Speaker 1>going southbound, because I think it was just kind of
<v Speaker 1>they randomly saw us.
<v Speaker 2>So they trained you in Raymondville.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and then I thumbed a ride down to Harlingen
<v Speaker 1>and then uh, and you picked me up there.
<v Speaker 2>Who gave you a ride the Harlingen.
<v Speaker 1>It was a nice guy. I think he was a plumber.
<v Speaker 1>What was his name. Uh, he was a plumber living
<v Speaker 1>down in Harlingen. And it's nice. Yeah, yep, yep, super hospitable.
<v Speaker 2>Would the would the cops say when he pulled you
<v Speaker 2>off in Raymondville.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, they just said, we're sorry, we have to do this.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. Once once they stopped the train, we
<v Speaker 1>just kind of have to do it. And uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I mean the border patrol they were just looking for migrants,
<v Speaker 1>so that's why they stopped the train. Otherwise they never
<v Speaker 1>would have. So the Redroad wouldn't care enough.
<v Speaker 2>To do But they weren't. They weren't caning you or anything.
<v Speaker 1>Or no, no, they were They were very very very
<v Speaker 1>nice about the whole thing.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Okay, cool, all right. Well, anyway, so I'm here, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>so anyway, you're here. So so this this project, so
<v Speaker 2>what was the So it was a junk yard, this
<v Speaker 2>this parcel of land, It was a junk yard, and
<v Speaker 2>then it was surrounded by what pine plantation or.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the junkyard was about six acres. The whole original
<v Speaker 1>property was thirty five uh, and the rest of it
<v Speaker 1>was I mean, there's there's a beautiful diverse creek area
<v Speaker 1>with riparian habitat that go that bisects it. And then
<v Speaker 1>but to the north and south is had been planted
<v Speaker 1>around plantation, and you know, this would have been a
<v Speaker 1>mixed conifer forest, still Ponderosa pine dominated, but with with
<v Speaker 1>you know, white fur in, incense, cedar, sugar pine, a
<v Speaker 1>few knob cone pine uh and and uh and uh
<v Speaker 1>Quercus cologi California black oak. Ye here, and there dog
<v Speaker 1>woods in the yeah yeah, yeah, willows, cottonwoods, water birch,
<v Speaker 1>and and lots of different lots of different wildflowers and
<v Speaker 1>other stuff in the wetland area. And it was a
<v Speaker 1>nice kind of you know, braided channel creek that runs
<v Speaker 1>through the the center of the property. So so that's
<v Speaker 1>a very different situation than the other parts of it
<v Speaker 1>were were predominantly had been pine plantation, and uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I thought of that as already a discredited form of
<v Speaker 1>forestry and had and had had some experiences with plantations
<v Speaker 1>seeing them get developed in Southeast Asia in Laos and Cambodia,
<v Speaker 1>and already had kind of a negative impression of plantations
<v Speaker 1>from there. I could go into that, but but uh,
<v Speaker 1>the what what I encountered with this property. And you know,
<v Speaker 1>I came from Minnesota, where you know, we've got tons
<v Speaker 1>of water and the forest can grow really thick and
<v Speaker 1>it's just fine. It's it's just how it is. But
<v Speaker 1>it's it's very different from California. And and so it
<v Speaker 1>took and it took me a while to realize how
<v Speaker 1>bad the situation was because I didn't know at first.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it wasn't I just wasn't my world about
<v Speaker 1>what what uh what forests were even supposed to really
<v Speaker 1>be like in a fire dependent region in a Mediterranean
<v Speaker 1>climate like northern California. So it was definitely a real
<v Speaker 1>learning process for me. And you know, I had already
<v Speaker 1>gone to graduate school for something else, but I ended
<v Speaker 1>up taking a couple of courses that are We've got
<v Speaker 1>a great community college College of the Siski's right and
<v Speaker 1>Weed and at the time that a natural resources program
<v Speaker 1>and had you know, I took classes in dendrology and
<v Speaker 1>forest ecology which were really helpful for getting wrapping my
<v Speaker 1>head around our situation.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I think because so a lot of people so
<v Speaker 2>these these pine plantations, they because when I first saw them,
<v Speaker 2>they I mean they're basically orchards. They're planted in evenly
<v Speaker 2>spaced rows. It's it's a monoculture, and I think a
<v Speaker 2>lot of people who don't have a lot of experience
<v Speaker 2>outside are in quote nature gave the living world, wouldn't
<v Speaker 2>know the difference. They just assume it's a forest, but
<v Speaker 2>it's it's not. I mean, at least it's native species,
<v Speaker 2>which is cool. You go to like Chile or New Zealand,
<v Speaker 2>it's totally invasive species that are used. But this is not,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, it's not a forest, and it's lacking the
<v Speaker 2>diversity and all that. And it's also these were planted
<v Speaker 2>and as they grow, the limbs are just left on them.
<v Speaker 2>So that talk about that because I'm interested in that
<v Speaker 2>was I saw that, and that's that's like a fire
<v Speaker 2>waiting to happen.
<v Speaker 1>It was a fire waiting to happen. Yeah, yeah, because
<v Speaker 1>we were dealing with two issues once. One is the
<v Speaker 1>legacy of plantation forestry. The other is the legacy of
<v Speaker 1>fire suppression. There hadn't been a wildfare of any type
<v Speaker 1>in area since that had been allowed to go through
<v Speaker 1>that property since at least the nineteen forties, so maybe
<v Speaker 1>maybe before then. And so the end this plantation that
<v Speaker 1>you know, it had once been a very diverse forest.
<v Speaker 1>I think it had been logged, clear cut pretty much.
<v Speaker 1>It had regrown mostly as brush fields on the side
<v Speaker 1>of Mount Shasta. And then around nineteen seventy they Southern
<v Speaker 1>Pacific Land Company, you know, the railroad had bought the
<v Speaker 1>property from the Abner Weed Logging Company at some point
<v Speaker 1>and had wanted to put a little yard in there,
<v Speaker 1>and they decided not to do that at some point,
<v Speaker 1>so they turned it over to their land management company,
<v Speaker 1>which which was responsible for did a lot of forestry
<v Speaker 1>work all over California. But they around nineteen seventy they
<v Speaker 1>just took big bulldozers and cleared all the brush and
<v Speaker 1>whatever diverse trees there were in these areas and they
<v Speaker 1>planted rows of pine trees on basically eight foot centers,
<v Speaker 1>just as you yeah, much more like an agricultural crop
<v Speaker 1>than a forest. And then they just kind of left it.
<v Speaker 1>And what one of the problems is that they then
<v Speaker 1>sold the property in the nineteen eighties to Land of
<v Speaker 1>Alps who didn't know anything about forestry, and so they
<v Speaker 1>they just kept They were hoping that weed was going
<v Speaker 1>to expand much farther and faster than it has, so
<v Speaker 1>they they just really didn't do anything with this. So
<v Speaker 1>these all these trees on just eight foot centers grew
<v Speaker 1>up and that's not how a ponderosa pine should look.
<v Speaker 1>If you see a ponderosa pine in a wilderness area,
<v Speaker 1>they're incredible beautiful trees with with and their canopy spreads out.
<v Speaker 1>But these were all very suppressed because they were so
<v Speaker 1>they grew up so close together. Their limbs, the lower
<v Speaker 1>limbs all died prematurely because they didn't have any light
<v Speaker 1>reaching them. They were didn't have enough water.
<v Speaker 2>And they're not evenly space to and they're evenly space
<v Speaker 2>they're basically all the only parts of the trees are
<v Speaker 2>the tops, and so they when you see these, when
<v Speaker 2>you see like an old ponderosa pine. It's big as hell,
<v Speaker 2>it's got a beautiful bark to it. It's it's normally
<v Speaker 2>not clustered near any other ones, like one will overtake
<v Speaker 2>the others, and yeah, you'll compete it. We should mention
<v Speaker 2>too that the quote brush species they were getting rid
<v Speaker 2>of where shrub species like the Archostapholis patula, yeah, the
<v Speaker 2>Masia yeah, and Ta roast family, which is a really
<v Speaker 2>important plant ecologically feeds a lot of things. And then
<v Speaker 2>the sea and note this as well.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and and a lot of that. That brush is
<v Speaker 1>really important for deer brows and other other animals. And
<v Speaker 1>but it all got shaded out because the canopy was
<v Speaker 1>so thick. And and so I've heard these type of
<v Speaker 1>plantations referred to as green deserts because they're you know,
<v Speaker 1>the top of the canopy is all green, but but
<v Speaker 1>down on the forest floor there is nothing nothing, there's
<v Speaker 1>no light, there's no sunlight reaching the forest floor, there's
<v Speaker 1>competition for water, and all the brush dies. So it's
<v Speaker 1>both really bad for health overall, but it's also incredibly
<v Speaker 1>dangerous for wildfire. And we dodged a bullet by starting
<v Speaker 1>to address this before, before we had a devastating wildfire,
<v Speaker 1>because if we'd had one in those early days, it
<v Speaker 1>just it would have taken out everything.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, because it's you've got so much debt. And also
<v Speaker 2>as this thing grows, as this this plantation grows, all
<v Speaker 2>the pershey and the man's anita that's below it eventually
<v Speaker 2>gets shaded out and dies and it's just left there
<v Speaker 2>and then covered in pine needles, which you know, the older,
<v Speaker 2>the more proximal to the trunk, pine needles fall every
<v Speaker 2>every autumn, and then just drain. I mean, it's fucking
<v Speaker 2>it's like a tinder box, a complete tinder box.
<v Speaker 1>It's so bad. It's so bad. Yeah, yeah, And and
<v Speaker 1>this was so thick we couldn't walk through big areas
<v Speaker 1>of the property it was. It was so thick. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you had to get a brushcutter or chainsaw just to
<v Speaker 1>cut paths through all the dead brush and the dead limbs,
<v Speaker 1>even to access parts of the property.
<v Speaker 2>So did you did you see did you recognize this
<v Speaker 2>when you first got there that it was a firewood
<v Speaker 2>inhabit or did someone kind of pointed out to you or.
<v Speaker 1>I it didn't look quite right, but I didn't really
<v Speaker 1>know how bad it was until some other friends we
<v Speaker 1>made in the area started looking at this forest and went, man,
<v Speaker 1>you've really got a problem. And then and then, but
<v Speaker 1>even then, it was only much later that I learned
<v Speaker 1>about density of trees and how and how there was
<v Speaker 1>way too many trees on the property. And you know,
<v Speaker 1>I came from being a pretty grassroots environmental activist, you know,
<v Speaker 1>who opposed logging of old growth forests and had been
<v Speaker 1>on the anti logging side, and so you know, I
<v Speaker 1>had to go through a journey of understanding that we
<v Speaker 1>just had way too many trees on our property and
<v Speaker 1>and really learn that the best thing to do for
<v Speaker 1>your forests was to I mean, we cut down probably
<v Speaker 1>over half the trees on that property.
<v Speaker 2>From that man, it was really dense. But I think
<v Speaker 2>what's interesting though, too, is I mean these are native species,
<v Speaker 2>So I mean, for me, that kind of illustrates that
<v Speaker 2>even if you're using, even if it's a native plant,
<v Speaker 2>you wrecked the ecology. So it's not just the species itself,
<v Speaker 2>it's this whole community that's missing exactly.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, yes it is a native specie, but it's also
<v Speaker 1>it's all the other native species have been removed just
<v Speaker 1>to plant this one and so you've got a very
<v Speaker 1>artificial environment, and then just the density is so artificial,
<v Speaker 1>and the fire suppression is artificial. And there were.
<v Speaker 2>Fires that broke out and we in the last what
<v Speaker 2>six seven years too.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, I'd say like in the last fifteen or
<v Speaker 1>especially in about the last twelve years. The first really
<v Speaker 1>big one, the Bulls Fire, was in twenty fourteen, I believe,
<v Speaker 1>and that these were like really weird fires that started
<v Speaker 1>on the edges of the town on a really high
<v Speaker 1>wind days in the early fall when things were really
<v Speaker 1>dried out. And so you know, we lost over one
<v Speaker 1>hundred and fifty homes I think in that first fire.
<v Speaker 1>And then a few years later there was the Lava Fire,
<v Speaker 1>which was upon Mount Shasta, started by lightning that ripped
<v Speaker 1>right above us up on the mountain, and then and
<v Speaker 1>then it ripped north with changing winds and also took
<v Speaker 1>out some friends properties and a lot of homes in
<v Speaker 1>the Shasta Valley.
<v Speaker 2>Twenty fourteen and fifteen were bad drought years in California.
<v Speaker 1>I remember that.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Like it didn't rain. It'sposed to rain in the winter.
<v Speaker 2>It didn't rain in northern California barely at all. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>In January which is that's unheard of.
<v Speaker 1>Yep, yep, you know. And yeah, then there was a
<v Speaker 1>third fire that also affected Weed, that started the Mill fire,
<v Speaker 1>which started at the lumber mill and also ended up
<v Speaker 1>earning over fifty homes in the city of Weed, and
<v Speaker 1>I think another one hundred in the outlying areas. So yeah,
<v Speaker 1>the fire situation area is no joke and it's something
<v Speaker 1>and our properties on the southeast side of Weed, so
<v Speaker 1>making it really especially important as defense for the whole
<v Speaker 1>city of Weed to have good fire management forestry management
<v Speaker 1>practices because most of the way the prevailing winds go
<v Speaker 1>when we get these really strong windstorms, is usually coming
<v Speaker 1>right from Black Butte, which is to our southeast, and
<v Speaker 1>so they're you know, heading right towards the town. So
<v Speaker 1>that's why I in addition for our own as our
<v Speaker 1>own thing, we've just felt like a real responsibility. And boy,
<v Speaker 1>I tell you, what I did not realize is just
<v Speaker 1>how much responsibility land ownership is it. I'm sure you're
<v Speaker 1>starting to understand this too. It's when you own land
<v Speaker 1>in a fire dependent ecology, you really have to be
<v Speaker 1>on your game if you're gonna manage it properly.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, thorn scrub like here in South tex Texas,
<v Speaker 2>like thorn scrub isn't is not really a fire. I mean, god,
<v Speaker 2>it could be it one day. Who knows. We're in
<v Speaker 2>a drought right now, but you know, yeah, we got
<v Speaker 2>one hundred and fifty acres. It's not fire dependent ecology.
<v Speaker 2>I think. I think a lot of people don't understand,
<v Speaker 2>especially from the Midwest or East coast, how much different
<v Speaker 2>it is out west when you don't have the humidity.
<v Speaker 2>There's no humidity out there, and certainly when it's hot
<v Speaker 2>out there's no humidity, you know, which is why things
<v Speaker 2>like you know, chestnut black fungus can't really get established
<v Speaker 2>during the summer out there. But it's also why things
<v Speaker 2>like these fires, like the the ones that just happen
<v Speaker 2>in La can be so bad. I mean, when you've
<v Speaker 2>got wind and it's that fucking dry, it's it's unbelievable, it.
<v Speaker 1>Is, it really is. Yeah. Yeah, and yeah, and we've
<v Speaker 1>now had just friends all over southern and northern California
<v Speaker 1>have been affected by it. Yeah. Yeah. So but anyway, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>we realized we just had a really bad problem. And
<v Speaker 1>I got some really great advice for some uh foresters
<v Speaker 1>that knew these type of forests in in a in
<v Speaker 1>the Mount Shasta area. Shout out to Mike Hupp, a
<v Speaker 1>retired Forest Service guy helped us a lot, uh and
<v Speaker 1>other foresters around the area and some organizations that got
<v Speaker 1>you know, got involved in these type of programs. Uh so.
<v Speaker 1>But we you know, in trying to address the situation,
<v Speaker 1>it was so bad that it's hard to know even
<v Speaker 1>where to start because you can't like have a prescribed
<v Speaker 1>fire in a situation that's gotten this bad. You have
<v Speaker 1>to do a ton of handwork.
<v Speaker 2>First because the fuels have built up so much. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, if you tried to have a prescribe fire, you
<v Speaker 1>would just burn up everything.
<v Speaker 2>So they the thinking for a lot of this is
<v Speaker 2>that it's the wi fire suppression has been so bad,
<v Speaker 2>especially a West, is that it takes a lot of
<v Speaker 2>low burning fires, the regularly spaced intervals, like every five
<v Speaker 2>to fifteen years whatever to remove that fuel, and then
<v Speaker 2>when you don't do it for fifty years, now you've
<v Speaker 2>got this massive build up. Now you're really like sitting
<v Speaker 2>at it taking time. By me, you got to be
<v Speaker 2>really smart about how you go about it. Yeah. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>A forster friend of mine talks about it. It's like
<v Speaker 1>having a tiger by the scruff of its neck. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you can't you can't let it go or it'll turn
<v Speaker 1>and get you, or but you can't keep holding onto
<v Speaker 1>it forever. Either. You've got to do something. And it's
<v Speaker 1>so it's very challenging. And the way we did it,
<v Speaker 1>and luckily with our land project because we're we had
<v Speaker 1>formed as a nonprofit and we're having a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>people come as visitors and volunteers, we were able to
<v Speaker 1>have like huge work parties and then eventually got some grants,
<v Speaker 1>some federal and state forest restoration grants to start addressing
<v Speaker 1>the situation. And we first just had to go in
<v Speaker 1>with chainsaws and teams of friends and cut start just
<v Speaker 1>cutting into all this brush, the dead brush, and and
<v Speaker 1>limbing up the trees.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. And the dead brush, I mean it's like mans
<v Speaker 2>and needles that in some cases are you know, they're
<v Speaker 2>five six feet some are like eight feet tall, right,
<v Speaker 2>oh yeah, but diameter of like a forearm probably at
<v Speaker 2>most like it's still just like completely dead ye snags
<v Speaker 2>everywhere covered in pine needles.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, So we would have to you know, cut out
<v Speaker 1>burn bays, you know, find little openings where we could
<v Speaker 1>uh start piling up all this brush that we're cutting
<v Speaker 1>and burn it.
<v Speaker 2>And to do that, you'd have to remove the pines
<v Speaker 2>to the well a.
<v Speaker 1>Couple strategically just to create some little some little holes.
<v Speaker 1>And sometimes there were just natural holes here and there,
<v Speaker 1>you know, some some trees had die, some had uh
<v Speaker 1>you know, at some point there was a porcupine had
<v Speaker 1>come through and taken off top to a lot of
<v Speaker 1>trees in there. Is he still around now, Well, it's
<v Speaker 1>probably a bunch of them, But I think they really
<v Speaker 1>the lumber companies hated porcupines and they kind of eradicated.
<v Speaker 2>Them from porcupines.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but they made these really interesting. You know, they
<v Speaker 1>would top off the trees and then they regrow and
<v Speaker 1>but it wasn't what the you wanted for merchantable timber.
<v Speaker 1>So the lumber companies don't like that.
<v Speaker 2>So what so it seems like with with a plant,
<v Speaker 2>like a pine farm like that, because this is essentially
<v Speaker 2>a farm, you if you're taking it over and trying
<v Speaker 2>to restore, you'd have to remove at least a quarter
<v Speaker 2>of the pine trees, like thinning the pine trees as
<v Speaker 2>well as what you guys, it was like limbing, limbing
<v Speaker 2>them up to like removing the snags up to a
<v Speaker 2>certain height, like the old dead branches.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah yeah, and and some of them money we had
<v Speaker 1>from CalFire with specifically for that. We got one of
<v Speaker 1>those still pole saws, chain chainsaws, chainsaw and a stick
<v Speaker 1>kind of thing where you can get up about fifteen feet. Uh.
<v Speaker 1>And you know, initially we just did it by you know,
<v Speaker 1>by by the first six feet or something, by just
<v Speaker 1>what a guy could do with a chainsaw without going
<v Speaker 1>over his head, you know, and we do. So we
<v Speaker 1>had to really like get a lot of the brush
<v Speaker 1>and limbs out and then start to take a few
<v Speaker 1>trees out. And then you realize how ugly the forest
<v Speaker 1>was in there because all the trees were just planted
<v Speaker 1>in lines. No, it was just geometrical lines. Yeah, it
<v Speaker 1>was that did not look at all natural. And so
<v Speaker 1>it becomes you know, it's science, but also becomes kind
<v Speaker 1>of an art project. You try to think, how are
<v Speaker 1>we going to make this look better? And part of
<v Speaker 1>it is to try to restore some of the randomness
<v Speaker 1>of nature.
<v Speaker 2>Get rid of the symmetry, right, yeah, the symmetry.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah yeah. And so you're looking at your lines of
<v Speaker 1>trees and trying to take out some and then you know,
<v Speaker 1>eventually replant some and what would have been the middle
<v Speaker 1>of the rows and and really get it to look
<v Speaker 1>you know. Now, I take people out there and I
<v Speaker 1>have to point out to them that all these trees
<v Speaker 1>used to just you know, wear in rows, because it's
<v Speaker 1>not nearly as obvious.
<v Speaker 2>Oh I bet some of the trees have stayed kind
<v Speaker 2>of small. Some have got there, you know, they're uneven
<v Speaker 2>size now, which is cool. I mean, the thing that
<v Speaker 2>kills me about those forests and lines, those plantation forests,
<v Speaker 2>they're not forests, but it's how you know, it's the
<v Speaker 2>same thing that kills me about most human landscaping, Like
<v Speaker 2>everything planted in a line, even lease spaced like it
<v Speaker 2>looks like it's in a fucking video game. It's not.
<v Speaker 2>These aren't You can tell whoever's designing this isn't someone
<v Speaker 2>who spends time in the living world or out in
<v Speaker 2>natural areas. You know, like a lot of them just
<v Speaker 2>landscaping you'd encounter, you know in residential commercial areas. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, And I think part of why it was kartha, uh,
<v Speaker 1>it was just really carothetic for me, was too because
<v Speaker 1>I've been you know, I had seen when I worked
<v Speaker 1>and lived in Laos and Cambodia the opposite thing happening.
<v Speaker 1>These beautiful natural forests uh diptocar forests that that local
<v Speaker 1>villagers really depended on for uh, for their livelihoods. You know,
<v Speaker 1>they would get mushrooms, uh, hunting all sorts of forest products,
<v Speaker 1>resins and stuff, and and that then they basically had
<v Speaker 1>these forests sold out from underneath them through concessions that
<v Speaker 1>the national government made to these foreign plantation companies eucalyptus
<v Speaker 1>or rubber gut or.
<v Speaker 2>Why was the government selling out the I mean was
<v Speaker 2>it owned? Was it just corruption or what? Was it
<v Speaker 2>owned by the companies? Were?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>I think it was this.
<v Speaker 1>Rhetoric of development that we're going to bring development, It's
<v Speaker 1>going to trickle down. Yeah, yeah, it's gonna trick down.
<v Speaker 1>But but that's combined with a very authoritarian political situation
<v Speaker 1>where there is massive corruption, uh and very little accountability
<v Speaker 1>or transparency. And but basically I had seen this process
<v Speaker 1>of villagers a lot you know, a lot of them
<v Speaker 1>were indigenous minority people in Laos and and that were
<v Speaker 1>dependent on on these on natural forests. Who might have
<v Speaker 1>small little farms also, but but also had you know,
<v Speaker 1>large forest areas around their villages, often managed communally. Uh.
<v Speaker 1>They they would just plow these forests over and then
<v Speaker 1>plant eucalyptus, and and they be owned by this company,
<v Speaker 1>and the villagers would end up being workers on these plantations.
<v Speaker 1>So they would go from being independent you know, farmers,
<v Speaker 1>to just being you know, very low paid workers.
<v Speaker 2>It's like indentured servitude. It's like slavery basically.
<v Speaker 1>Well, yeah, they didn't really have any any uh any choice,
<v Speaker 1>so then they were.
<v Speaker 2>Going to take your ship and then force you to
<v Speaker 2>work for us.
<v Speaker 1>It's yeah, yep, yep. And then but but from the
<v Speaker 1>perspective of a national government, that's an increase in GDP.
<v Speaker 2>Because it looks good on paper.
<v Speaker 1>It looked because you've you've monetized things. Before you people
<v Speaker 1>just lived off natural resources in the forest and it
<v Speaker 1>wasn't a cash economy necessarily or mostly a cash economy.
<v Speaker 1>And then once it's a plantation, you've got a big
<v Speaker 1>company paying taxes, You've got people with reportable income that
<v Speaker 1>can be taxed. You you've you've you've monetized the whole
<v Speaker 1>economy for these people.
<v Speaker 2>So the GDPs Johns up. But the quality of life
<v Speaker 2>goes way down, exactly for everybody living there, yep, yep.
<v Speaker 2>And and I had seen that, except the people at
<v Speaker 2>the top who don't actually live there, even they're living
<v Speaker 2>in a state oll.
<v Speaker 1>They're in the cities, in the capital cities. They and
<v Speaker 1>then you know, but it looks good on their World
<v Speaker 1>Bank reports or whatever to say that they've increased the
<v Speaker 1>gross national product. You know that now people have higher
<v Speaker 1>incomes because they're only counting the cash income. When when
<v Speaker 1>somebody got a crop of mushrooms in the forest and
<v Speaker 1>took them home and made them for dinner, or caught
<v Speaker 1>some fish in the river.
<v Speaker 2>So this is a system that only values money, and
<v Speaker 2>it's pathogenic. It's like a virus, it's like a cancer basically.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I had anyway, I
<v Speaker 1>had seen that process, and so I already had this
<v Speaker 1>bias against plantations, and I now find it very ironic.
<v Speaker 1>This is a little bit of a tangent, but a
<v Speaker 1>lot of the the forest, the private lump timberlands around
<v Speaker 1>our area in Weed and Dunsmere are now owned by
<v Speaker 1>the same Australian company that had come to Laos and
<v Speaker 1>was was doing plantations. But is it it's called new forests.
<v Speaker 1>They're based in Australia's.
<v Speaker 2>The sh it's mere new forests. How do you spell that?
<v Speaker 1>You just new like not old?
<v Speaker 2>Oh they didn't They weren't trying to be cute like
<v Speaker 2>and you.
<v Speaker 1>They didn't like make Okay, yeah, yeah, it's some.
<v Speaker 2>Sort of branding. Okay, new forest.
<v Speaker 1>What is it? New forest? What solutions LLC solutions solutions.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe it's new Forest International. It's part of kind of
<v Speaker 1>the I mean, there's a hole. We could talk all
<v Speaker 1>about the financialization of forestry, but it's.
<v Speaker 2>I'm not seeing uh yeah, nature based investments. Oh yes,
<v Speaker 2>that sounds it the nature. Okay, so this is fucking greenwashing.
<v Speaker 2>This is like straight up.
<v Speaker 1>Well they do a lot with if there's a lot
<v Speaker 1>of good rhetoric attached to it. But anyway, healthy forests.
<v Speaker 1>You were planting trees.
<v Speaker 2>This is the thing that that drives me nuts. You
<v Speaker 2>see this this we're planting trees, were planting trees that
<v Speaker 2>with no nothing else mentioned. And for the ignorant if
<v Speaker 2>people just don't know, it's there's no mention of native
<v Speaker 2>or ecology or maybe this wasn't the forest before maybe
<v Speaker 2>this was a grassland or something. It's horrible and it's
<v Speaker 2>going on all over the world. I want to give
<v Speaker 2>a shout out to the dipterocarpaci. By the way, too,
<v Speaker 2>you met mentioned the dipterocarp forest.
<v Speaker 1>What is that, Well there there's uh it's it's basically
<v Speaker 1>there's a these dry forests in in uh Southeast Asia
<v Speaker 1>and and they would be uh.
<v Speaker 2>Dry, I mean seasonally dry, like the rainy season, and
<v Speaker 2>so they're like they're like in the tropics, just tropical.
<v Speaker 1>Forests and uh you know, they would have certain keystone
<v Speaker 1>species and and uh they you know that we would
<v Speaker 1>a lot of my work was around the river, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the seasonally flooded forests also along the Maykong River and
<v Speaker 1>and uh there'd be a lot of uh uh areas
<v Speaker 1>where the yeah, you would have a huge a huge
<v Speaker 1>flooded a flood season on the rainy season in the
<v Speaker 1>Mekong region would would be last for four or five
<v Speaker 1>months and uh so the just an incredible change in
<v Speaker 1>the rivers, the amount of water that would come down.
<v Speaker 2>And then would you'd have a dry season where it
<v Speaker 2>didn't rain at all nearly for like four months.
<v Speaker 1>Or yes, exactly.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, just typical, Okay, same thing we get like
<v Speaker 2>in Brazil or in Mexico, parts of Mexico, So yeah, this,
<v Speaker 2>I mean Mexico's different because it's gotten mountain ranges bounding
<v Speaker 2>on either either side of the center. But uh but yeah,
<v Speaker 2>so it's it's yeah, like a wet and a dry
<v Speaker 2>season like you get in a lot of areas in
<v Speaker 2>the tropic and so dip Tarocarpesi, which is a family
<v Speaker 2>of trees, and the order mal Vayleys, the cotton order.
<v Speaker 2>These are huge members of many Southeast Asian tropical forests.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yep, yep.
<v Speaker 2>I have yet to see them, but I have I
<v Speaker 2>know about them. I would love to check them out.
<v Speaker 2>So anyway, it's on your radar now, so hopefully can
<v Speaker 2>go research it whoever's happens to be listening. But and
<v Speaker 2>these are like these are like lumber valuable trees.
<v Speaker 1>Or well there's a lot of you know, there was
<v Speaker 1>a lot of valuable hardwoods in their teak certainly, and
<v Speaker 1>and rosewood and other tropical species and and and so
<v Speaker 1>so there was Yeah. As part of this the plantations,
<v Speaker 1>they would often first do a concession to these logging
<v Speaker 1>companies and they would take out all the valuable lumber first,
<v Speaker 1>and the villagers would get almost nothing from that, and
<v Speaker 1>then they would and then and then they would do
<v Speaker 1>the clearing and make the plantations. So so it was
<v Speaker 1>a m Yeah, so that was a.
<v Speaker 2>This is horrible. Yeah, this is what But this is
<v Speaker 2>what happens in a lot of places. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and and but I that's where I saw it
<v Speaker 1>up close, was especially in Laos and Cambodia because because
<v Speaker 1>I was I was working there and and uh, and
<v Speaker 1>then we were watching a similar thing happen with the rivers,
<v Speaker 1>where rivers that people had depended on for for you know,
<v Speaker 1>hundreds or thousands of years, all of a sudden, the
<v Speaker 1>national governments were making concessions to hydro power companies to
<v Speaker 1>to uh put in hydropower dams, primarily to generate electricity
<v Speaker 1>for export to the richer neighboring countries.
<v Speaker 2>Most this is just an orgy of predatory capitalism basically. Yeah. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>these pigs just trying to feed at the trough and
<v Speaker 2>rip apart these these places, these communities.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, yeah, that's exactly what it is and say that
<v Speaker 1>they're doing good. Yeah, it's all in the rhetoric of development,
<v Speaker 1>and then all too often what we saw is that
<v Speaker 1>they were able to get the international development institutions, financial
<v Speaker 1>institutions to support this type of a strategy because it's development.
<v Speaker 1>And that you had mentioned the beginning of my book,
<v Speaker 1>which is on the World Bank and Hyder Power and
<v Speaker 1>Laos what's the name of his, Dead in the Water.
<v Speaker 1>It's published in twenty eighteen by University Wisconsin Press, and
<v Speaker 1>I'm the chief editor and wrote some of it, but
<v Speaker 1>it was a multi author collaboration and my co editor
<v Speaker 1>was William Robshaw who lives in Wisconsin now.
<v Speaker 2>And it's about this, I mean, this kind of predatory
<v Speaker 2>vulture pig capitalism.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Well, what I had noticed is that these big
<v Speaker 1>institutions like the World Bank would they would continually try
<v Speaker 1>to reinvent themselves and say, oh, well that okay, that
<v Speaker 1>old project got exposed as a disaster, but we've learned,
<v Speaker 1>we've learned our lessons since then, and so now we're
<v Speaker 1>going to do we've we've learned, and now we're going
<v Speaker 1>to do it better. And then the next the next
<v Speaker 1>project they did would be a failure too, and and
<v Speaker 1>so and then they would try to reinvent it again
<v Speaker 1>and say they had a better model.
<v Speaker 2>And and because all you've got to do is be
<v Speaker 2>able to bullshit the investors, you just have to and
<v Speaker 2>they're not. The investors aren't doing inspections. They're on the ground,
<v Speaker 2>they're not seeing it this, they're just looking at what
<v Speaker 2>like a PowerPoint.
<v Speaker 1>Well then they might be fine for the investors. They're
<v Speaker 1>still get their their their money out. But the thing
<v Speaker 1>is the World Bank and these other these are public
<v Speaker 1>institutions that are supposed to be not just financing something
<v Speaker 1>for the benefit of investors, but for the broader public good.
<v Speaker 1>You know, they're supposed to be. They're they're supported with texts.
<v Speaker 2>So those are the people you have to lie to
<v Speaker 2>and get to believe that what you're doing is actually
<v Speaker 2>good for the people that live there. Exactly, yeah, right,
<v Speaker 2>And so what do they what would they do? They
<v Speaker 2>would just bullshit? I mean with the World Bank, ever
<v Speaker 2>go in and actually inspect these communities that they're ruining
<v Speaker 2>and these forests that they're destroying.
<v Speaker 1>They did you know that the project that I thought,
<v Speaker 1>what I wanted to do was go in and look
<v Speaker 1>at the World Banks project, partly because I followed it
<v Speaker 1>all the way from the you know, over fifteen years basically,
<v Speaker 1>and usually you just look at something at a point
<v Speaker 1>of time. But when I was living in Laos in
<v Speaker 1>the mid nineteen nineties, they had first proposed this big project.
<v Speaker 1>It's called nam Tun Ti. Nomtun is one of the rivers,
<v Speaker 1>and then they had dressed it up that it was
<v Speaker 1>going to have these amazing environmental and social benefits for
<v Speaker 1>the people of the area, and that that was their
<v Speaker 1>main motivation, was that they were going to have a
<v Speaker 1>new model of hydropower that actually worked for the environment
<v Speaker 1>and for the people that you know, the benefits would
<v Speaker 1>be broadly shared. But they did it in a country
<v Speaker 1>that has an authoritarian government, where there's no free press,
<v Speaker 1>no independent nonprofits or human rights groups that could call
<v Speaker 1>out any problems, and so they were able to really
<v Speaker 1>control the narrative for many years, and it was amazing.
<v Speaker 1>It's called a transbasin diversion. It's when you take the
<v Speaker 1>water from one river completely or mostly divert it into
<v Speaker 1>a whole other river basin, So you dewater one river
<v Speaker 1>and then have tons of extra water that outflows past
<v Speaker 1>the turbine.
<v Speaker 2>So these rivers are like in close enough proximity to
<v Speaker 2>each other that you can do that.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it was just a good you know, it's sort
<v Speaker 1>of perfect from a just an engineering perspective. It worked
<v Speaker 1>very well where they could divert the water into a
<v Speaker 1>reservoir and then have that reservoir outflow in a different
<v Speaker 1>direction into a whole different river basin. So it had
<v Speaker 1>really severe impacts on two different rivers and also flooded
<v Speaker 1>a huge upper upper area of very really pristine, beautiful
<v Speaker 1>up you know upland area.
<v Speaker 2>So they built a dam and it floods this huge
<v Speaker 2>valley and the towns obviously have to move, and then
<v Speaker 2>it destroys the forest there. And then they've got this
<v Speaker 2>hydro electric power and they're generating income. How much of
<v Speaker 2>that income actually goes back to the to the people
<v Speaker 2>that live.
<v Speaker 1>Well, that was one of the that was one of
<v Speaker 1>the things we really looked into in the book. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the rhetoric just did not match the reality of what
<v Speaker 1>had been, of what actually happened. And we were able
<v Speaker 1>to get a bunch of people wildlife biologists, economists, all
<v Speaker 1>sorts of people to write chapters on this on the
<v Speaker 1>process of what happened, fish biologists, and and we basically
<v Speaker 1>exposed how it was much less successful than they had claimed.
<v Speaker 1>And and luckily you asked about monitoring. The World Bank
<v Speaker 1>had established a panel of experts to look at the project,
<v Speaker 1>who were initially super supportive of it, and and then
<v Speaker 1>you read through these arcane reports and they become every
<v Speaker 1>year more and more disillusioned with it, until finally one
<v Speaker 1>of the one of the leading members of the panel,
<v Speaker 1>Ted Scudder, who's a anthropologist at cal Poly. He he
<v Speaker 1>denounced it and said it was the whole thing was
<v Speaker 1>a mistake. And but the Bank just kind of don't
<v Speaker 1>they just keep rolling on and try to forget pretend
<v Speaker 1>that that doesn't happen.
<v Speaker 2>And the world So the World Bank funds these and
<v Speaker 2>are they supposed to be subject to more regulation? I mean,
<v Speaker 2>this is what is.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, they have all sorts of operational policies that they're
<v Speaker 1>supposed to follow, and.
<v Speaker 2>Their goal is to assist private companies.
<v Speaker 1>Well, their goal is supposed to be to help people.
<v Speaker 1>But but I think it was at the time when
<v Speaker 1>Laos was emerging from being a strict more of a
<v Speaker 1>communist economy, and they wanted to uh really support the
<v Speaker 1>idea of private enterprise investing in these projects so so
<v Speaker 1>very much. They saw their role is to introduce private
<v Speaker 1>investment into these hydropower projects, so they weren't just being
<v Speaker 1>built by government agencies.
<v Speaker 2>What is the I mean, what's the philosophical rhetoric behind
<v Speaker 2>this that you were hearing? I mean that you were
<v Speaker 2>seeing these people used to justify this horrible shit. I
<v Speaker 2>mean that it just trickled on me. Is it just
<v Speaker 2>were just talking trickled down economics or what?
<v Speaker 1>Well? I it was it was to give the national
<v Speaker 1>government revenues. You know, they would they would have they
<v Speaker 1>have a they retain a share of the of the
<v Speaker 1>overall company. And then there's private investors that have majority
<v Speaker 1>share in this case, but then they it's a way
<v Speaker 1>for the national government to gain revenues so they can
<v Speaker 1>be less dependent on foreign aid. And because most of it,
<v Speaker 1>as I mentioned, it's a it's an export scheme, so
<v Speaker 1>the electricity is being exported to Thailand across.
<v Speaker 2>So the the intent is to make these countries economically
<v Speaker 2>self sufficient. But what it kind of turns into, it
<v Speaker 2>sounds like, is extractive just extractive capitalism for international companies.
<v Speaker 1>Is that well yeah, I would say, no, you're not wrong.
<v Speaker 1>And and but what happens is that the local people
<v Speaker 1>end up paying the price for these projects because they don't.
<v Speaker 1>They're the ones who suffer all the costs that aren't
<v Speaker 1>aren't compensated. And then they they lose their fisheries, they
<v Speaker 1>lose their their a lot of their cultural heritage and
<v Speaker 1>resources and for us and but then the national government
<v Speaker 1>gets money. But but basically this whole you know, and
<v Speaker 1>they called the whole the government called this whole strategy
<v Speaker 1>turning land into capital, that they can take natural resources
<v Speaker 1>and financialize it, monetize it.
<v Speaker 2>Oh my god.
<v Speaker 1>But the problem is that it's it's the all the
<v Speaker 1>benefits have flown to people in cities, and it hasn't
<v Speaker 1>actually worked as a national development strategy either. Laos is
<v Speaker 1>in severe debt at the national it's one of the
<v Speaker 1>most indebted countries for its size in the world now.
<v Speaker 1>So the overall strategy has not been successful. But but
<v Speaker 1>it has enriched a lot of companies and a lot
<v Speaker 1>of a lot of wealthy people.
<v Speaker 2>And so does that money then basically leave the country too.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of it even Yeah, and I'm not saying
<v Speaker 1>there hasn't been there's been certain levels of economic growth
<v Speaker 1>in the country, but it's it's Ah, but I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>Are people happier now? I don't think they are in
<v Speaker 1>those royal areas.
<v Speaker 2>It's certainly destroyed a lot of forest. How much forest?
<v Speaker 2>Have how much forest, ever do you think has been lost?
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I guess I could look up statistics, but
<v Speaker 2>have you seen a lot of You've seen a lot
<v Speaker 2>of destruction, probably.
<v Speaker 1>Oh twenty years. Yeah. I can't quantify it off off
<v Speaker 1>hand without looking at some notes. But it's uh. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I've used when I first went to LuSE, I would
<v Speaker 1>travel for hours and hours through these, you know, these
<v Speaker 1>amazing tropical forests, and they're basically most of them are
<v Speaker 1>gone at this point most are gone. I would say
<v Speaker 1>most are gone.
<v Speaker 2>Not even just about half most well, especially.
<v Speaker 1>Of the ones that had had older growth trees.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Jesus, is anybody in log to hell? Are there
<v Speaker 2>any preserves? I can't imagine a government that's just a.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, yeah, you know. In then in the nineteen nineties,
<v Speaker 1>they had the low government had helped setting up a
<v Speaker 1>system of natural national protected areas and and uh and
<v Speaker 1>those still exist, largely exist. But but there's been huge uh,
<v Speaker 1>depredations inside some of these protected areas. And that's actually
<v Speaker 1>one of the chapters of this book about the hydropower project,
<v Speaker 1>because they had basically said, well, we're going to we're
<v Speaker 1>going to sacrifice this plateau, the Nagui Plateau, but this
<v Speaker 1>is going to give us the funds to do permanent
<v Speaker 1>protection for the upper watershed area, which has you know,
<v Speaker 1>in these areas where there's wild elephants, there were tigers,
<v Speaker 1>all sorts of rare plant species, tree species. Uh. One
<v Speaker 1>of the rarest mammals in the in the world of Soula,
<v Speaker 1>which was only discovered in the in the nineteen nineties.
<v Speaker 2>What is it?
<v Speaker 1>It's it's a it's its own specie. But it's like
<v Speaker 1>it's one of the last larger mammals to have been
<v Speaker 1>discovered anywhere in the world.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, what is it related to?
<v Speaker 1>What does it look like a little bit like an
<v Speaker 1>antelope maybe, but it's it's s Ao l A. And
<v Speaker 1>and my colleague with the book he he actually.
<v Speaker 2>Went to was only discovered in the last when yeah,
<v Speaker 2>maybe late eighties. I think, yeah, this is a large creature. Though, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>how did this go un detective for so long? Wow?
<v Speaker 1>Well it was you know, through it was on the
<v Speaker 1>Laos Vietnam border area. You know, which was engulfed in
<v Speaker 1>warfare for decades and decades and biologists, I mean, some
<v Speaker 1>local villagers knew about it in Vietnam and in Laos,
<v Speaker 1>but but it was never unknown. It was unknown science. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>And actually my colleague and friend Bill Robashaw, who's the
<v Speaker 1>co editor of the book that's been one of his
<v Speaker 1>life works, is working on Cela. He's one of the
<v Speaker 1>only people I know that's actually seen one and uh
<v Speaker 1>and he still is involved in Cela conservation.
<v Speaker 2>It says here over the last thirty years, Laos has
<v Speaker 2>experienced significant deforestation with a notable loss of its native
<v Speaker 2>forest cover. According to various studies of reports, including those
<v Speaker 2>from the Food Never Culture Organization of Global Forest Wash,
<v Speaker 2>Laos lost approximately one point nine million hectares of forest
<v Speaker 2>cover between nineteen ninety and twenty twenty. This represents a
<v Speaker 2>declient of around sixteen to twenty percent. Jesus Man A fifth, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>a fifth of the of the forest has been leveled.
<v Speaker 1>Yep, yeah, I mean a lot of that is for
<v Speaker 1>the types of plantations I was talking.
<v Speaker 2>About, mostly eucalyptus or what else are they planting.
<v Speaker 1>There's palm oil, there's the rubber is big other stuff.
<v Speaker 1>But even in the forests that remain, they've also been
<v Speaker 1>heavily logged of their older growth trees, of the more
<v Speaker 1>valuable tropical herdware.
<v Speaker 2>So it's I mean, this is the same thing going
<v Speaker 2>on all over the world, like little crumbs are left
<v Speaker 2>and they call them, you know, preserves for eco tourism,
<v Speaker 2>but you know, eighty to ninety percent ends up being
<v Speaker 2>denuded and turned into monocultures that just benefit people.
<v Speaker 1>Very much, very much so, and only benefit some people.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so uh, this is this These sound levels are two.
<v Speaker 2>Let me turn this down. Okay, So this was I mean,
<v Speaker 2>obviously this is a good example, like they talking about
<v Speaker 2>this even if someone's not interested, allows it's good because
<v Speaker 2>it's a it's a nice example of what happens all
<v Speaker 2>over the world with some of these projects and these
<v Speaker 2>this you know, vulture pig orgy, extractive capitalism. And it's
<v Speaker 2>I mean to see so much deforestation because everyone thinks
<v Speaker 2>like we when I think, just normal citizens when they
<v Speaker 2>hear who don't know anything about botany or your nature,
<v Speaker 2>et cetera, when they hear deforestation, they automatically think, you know,
<v Speaker 2>the Amazon whatever. But this I mean, this occurs all
<v Speaker 2>over the world, and this is kind of the way
<v Speaker 2>that it happens. It's for catalyts, for palm plantation, it's
<v Speaker 2>for rubber, it's for just mono crop agriculture, hydro electric whatever.
<v Speaker 2>So so you were working, I mean, this is when
<v Speaker 2>were you there? This I mean you're still you still
<v Speaker 2>go back, but this is like two thousands, late nineties.
<v Speaker 1>I actually came to LAOS first in nineteen ninety right
<v Speaker 1>with the American Friends Service Committee. They were one of
<v Speaker 1>the only American groups allowed to work in laus at
<v Speaker 1>that time, and lived there for about eight years and
<v Speaker 1>then have been coming back ever since and doing research.
<v Speaker 1>I worked for a foundation which did grant making over
<v Speaker 1>there for many years and have gone back for various
<v Speaker 1>research projects.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so but you I mean, yeah, but that's just
<v Speaker 2>you regardless, you were seeing a lot of this in
<v Speaker 2>real time as it progressed.
<v Speaker 1>Oh absolutely, yeah, yeah, because you had that statistic of
<v Speaker 1>how much force there was in nineteen ninety that's the
<v Speaker 1>first year I was there.
<v Speaker 2>H That's yeah, that's brutal to think about. Well anyway,
<v Speaker 2>so so coming back to California then when you cause
<v Speaker 2>you're not from California. From Minneapolis, you ended up in
<v Speaker 2>northern California, got this Parcela, and you kind of had
<v Speaker 2>an idea. And I'm sure you were already certainly wary
<v Speaker 2>of large companies and forest plantations, et cetera. How did
<v Speaker 2>you get into in terms of restoring things like going
<v Speaker 2>back to like the burn piles, for instance, in the
<v Speaker 2>natural burning and changing this? So the first steps were
<v Speaker 2>removing some trees, removing the brush, what else.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, I think you know, my interest in all
<v Speaker 1>this came out of I think my all the destruction
<v Speaker 1>I saw in Laos and wanting to at least on
<v Speaker 1>one little piece of land. It's so hard to do
<v Speaker 1>something on those big issues, international issues, wanting to you know,
<v Speaker 1>I think there is something to be said to try
<v Speaker 1>to act locally and at least try to do what
<v Speaker 1>you can in your own, your own area. And so yeah,
<v Speaker 1>the so we were faced, as we were talking earlier,
<v Speaker 1>with this enormous problem. There was so much, so much
<v Speaker 1>brush and dead matter, and so we started having these
<v Speaker 1>burn piles. We had start learning about the seasonality of
<v Speaker 1>doing it. I remember one of our early summers we
<v Speaker 1>cut down a lot, you know, we cut down ponderosas
<v Speaker 1>and cut off a lot of limbs, and we didn't
<v Speaker 1>realize that we shouldn't leave them over summer, you know,
<v Speaker 1>out in the in the woods. And I had to
<v Speaker 1>learn about western pine bark beetles and how if you
<v Speaker 1>have a lot of green slash on the ground, it
<v Speaker 1>can attract these pine bark beetles, uh, and that then
<v Speaker 1>they will they'll munch on all of the green slash
<v Speaker 1>you've just cut because they're they're because of the smell
<v Speaker 1>that they and then they reproduce and then and then
<v Speaker 1>they end up in the trees and you start having
<v Speaker 1>these infestations of pine bark beetles, which are naturally you know, their.
<v Speaker 2>Native insect, but there's still they could still put be
<v Speaker 2>a stress around a forest. And then if that especially during.
<v Speaker 1>Drought, especially during drought, and especially when the trees are
<v Speaker 1>so close together that they're stressed out by just not
<v Speaker 1>having as much space between them, so they're stressed out
<v Speaker 1>for light and for water. So so you know, we've
<v Speaker 1>had periodic bouts with with white western pine bark beetles
<v Speaker 1>during our drought droughts. And but we yeah, we had
<v Speaker 1>to so we first had to get all this brush
<v Speaker 1>out and then start cutting trees. And at first we
<v Speaker 1>tried to do it all by hand, just with friends
<v Speaker 1>who would come and we just cut down a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of trees and make firewood. And and uh, even though
<v Speaker 1>pine is not the best firewood, it's still it's still firewood.
<v Speaker 1>We one year we donated I think twenty five cords
<v Speaker 1>to the our county fire firewood you know, heating assistance program,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and had, but it was it was a
<v Speaker 1>massive amount of And then as we got into the
<v Speaker 1>got this one grant and got our forest or advising us,
<v Speaker 1>we just realized the density of trees was so high.
<v Speaker 1>And we actually had a commercial thineration where I contracted
<v Speaker 1>with a logging company to come in and you know,
<v Speaker 1>they they allowed me to select the trees. So I
<v Speaker 1>went around with spray paint. We figured out what trees
<v Speaker 1>we wanted to cut. And part of it, as I
<v Speaker 1>was talking earlier, was this kind of making it an
<v Speaker 1>art project and trying to reduce how much it looked
<v Speaker 1>like rows of trees and you know, ways you could
<v Speaker 1>have clumps, you know, uh, and and you know, not
<v Speaker 1>just not just take out every other tree, but make
<v Speaker 1>sort of clumps of higher density and and clearings things
<v Speaker 1>like that, which are better for birds and and other
<v Speaker 1>animals to have a little leave little clearings, leaving areas
<v Speaker 1>of where there's some live brush, and and so you
<v Speaker 1>try to you know, do this plan. And then and
<v Speaker 1>then we had, yeah, we had a the trees weren't
<v Speaker 1>big enough to be lumber, but this this company took
<v Speaker 1>them and sold them to our local mill and weed
<v Speaker 1>and it wasn't even really enough to make any money on,
<v Speaker 1>but it was enough to at least cover the costs
<v Speaker 1>of the logging and you know, the work that year.
<v Speaker 1>So so yeah, so we over time and with you know,
<v Speaker 1>and again that was a learning process too about density
<v Speaker 1>of forests. And and I had again had some really
<v Speaker 1>good advice from some local foresters. I had, you know,
<v Speaker 1>one of our county commissioners out there who had a
<v Speaker 1>forestry background. We had I started making contacts with some
<v Speaker 1>local groups like the Sisky Land Trust, which had people that.
<v Speaker 2>Could help with UH and and like at colleges like.
<v Speaker 1>People that Yeah, sometimes there were like other landowners in
<v Speaker 1>the area who'd gone through processes like this, and we're
<v Speaker 1>trying to we're also trying to educate themselves and but
<v Speaker 1>the land Trust put on some talks of some some
<v Speaker 1>people that really knew about forest ecology and and uh
<v Speaker 1>that were very helpful. So and then and then eventually
<v Speaker 1>we got to the point with the whole area south
<v Speaker 1>of our creek, which was about sixteen acres. While we
<v Speaker 1>started actually just with my buddies who worked up at
<v Speaker 1>a restoration company in Oregon, to try to do some
<v Speaker 1>small prescribe burns, you know, pine needle burns, because we
<v Speaker 1>realized once we got down to a certain point we
<v Speaker 1>really needed to you know, we had decades of pine
<v Speaker 1>needles on the ground and we need and still some
<v Speaker 1>brushing areas. And we start experimenting with with a doing
<v Speaker 1>like cutting a line around say, i know, one hundred
<v Speaker 1>yards by one hundred yards or something and just on
<v Speaker 1>the right conditions letting it, letting it go and having
<v Speaker 1>a little prescribed fire, you know at a real small,
<v Speaker 1>small size chili damp days or what. Yeah, yeah, just
<v Speaker 1>not too windy, but just a little windy where it's
<v Speaker 1>dried out just enough. Because you can't do this during
<v Speaker 1>the summer at all, no, no, no, far too dangerous,
<v Speaker 1>yeah yeah, no, you have to be very very strategic
<v Speaker 1>about it. Yeah, but we were doing it one day
<v Speaker 1>and then somebody from the CalFire drove up and said
<v Speaker 1>they'd seen all the smoke from Southweed and said, hey, guys,
<v Speaker 1>you don't have the right permits for this. You can't
<v Speaker 1>just start having broadcast burns without with just a couple
<v Speaker 1>guys out here with the mcclouds and some some bladder packs.
<v Speaker 1>You got to actually, and we weren't really doing that
<v Speaker 1>big of an area, but still it kind of looked
<v Speaker 1>like we were because we'd we'd just been doing We
<v Speaker 1>would take like one maybe we're like a hundred foot
<v Speaker 1>by hundred foot more like you do that, get that
<v Speaker 1>out and then do the next area. And we're trying
<v Speaker 1>to go from area and area. We're having some success.
<v Speaker 2>You would have, I mean, how what would you have
<v Speaker 2>for water for putting it out?
<v Speaker 1>Well, we had like fire extinguishers and some you know
<v Speaker 1>in somewhere as close to our compound. We were close
<v Speaker 1>enough to be wire, but we didn't really have enough.
<v Speaker 1>But it wasn't really super dry conditions either. We felt
<v Speaker 1>that it was safe, but it wasn't safe enough from
<v Speaker 1>the perspective of a fire agency. And again we're kind
<v Speaker 1>of learning as we're going, but they shut us down
<v Speaker 1>and they probably should have, but that luckily the next
<v Speaker 1>year there was this new initiative started up, the Sisku
<v Speaker 1>County Prescribe Burn Association, and they were just trying to
<v Speaker 1>they'd been influenced it was through our local Resource Conservation
<v Speaker 1>District kind of project through them, and they had some
<v Speaker 1>really people that were very committed to the whole idea
<v Speaker 1>of prescribed burning and had been influenced by you know,
<v Speaker 1>traditional Native American practices in northern California of land stewardship.
<v Speaker 1>And so we started talking with them and I explained
<v Speaker 1>how we tried to do this, but we got shut
<v Speaker 1>down and we needed more support. And they their first
<v Speaker 1>year that they had some big state grants to get
<v Speaker 1>started with, and when they got started did we were
<v Speaker 1>ended up being one of their first year pilot projects.
<v Speaker 1>And and we this was three three four years ago now,
<v Speaker 1>and it was in April, I think, four years ago,
<v Speaker 1>and we it was the first prescribed burn that successfully
<v Speaker 1>done in the city limits of Weed. So it was
<v Speaker 1>on private land and.
<v Speaker 2>So this was this was still a new concept.
<v Speaker 1>It's yeah, it's it's growing, you know, it's it's a
<v Speaker 1>new concept, and very few people are doing it on
<v Speaker 1>private property as well.
<v Speaker 2>And do you see it spreading more? I mean, you
<v Speaker 2>see more people realizing what a disaster fire suppression has
<v Speaker 2>been for the West.
<v Speaker 1>There is definitely more acknowledgment of that now, and it's
<v Speaker 1>it's great to see some other counties have prescribed burn
<v Speaker 1>associations and and uh, they're kind of realizing, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you know, we can't just wait for the state agencies
<v Speaker 1>to do everything. They're they're overwhelmed themselves with managing state
<v Speaker 1>lands and national forest lands.
<v Speaker 2>But I mean, do you think because I'm remember when
<v Speaker 2>I was working, you know, for the railroad out of Dunsmere,
<v Speaker 2>I would hear these people talk about like guys I
<v Speaker 2>worked with, just like people who live in rural areas
<v Speaker 2>that they're being like, well, now they're just letting it burn,
<v Speaker 2>which is crazy, and it's like, well, it's not really
<v Speaker 2>about letting it. They were talking about controlled burns, and
<v Speaker 2>it's like, you live in an area where it's going
<v Speaker 2>to happen. It's going to happen no matter what, whether
<v Speaker 2>it's now or twenty years from now, it's going to happen.
<v Speaker 2>You need to get rid of that that brush. You
<v Speaker 2>can't just go in and you know, rake and clean it.
<v Speaker 2>Like Trump says, there has to be burns. It just
<v Speaker 2>makes the most sense. I think. I do think more
<v Speaker 2>people are coming around to that like this, you think
<v Speaker 2>they are.
<v Speaker 1>It's slow, but sure, and it's but it's you know what,
<v Speaker 1>I'm trying not to have it be. I don't think
<v Speaker 1>it's like a red blue issue. It doesn't have to
<v Speaker 1>be that. Ye know, there's lots, but you know, sometimes
<v Speaker 1>people want to make everything that and it doesn't have
<v Speaker 1>to be that. It's there's a lot of very conservative
<v Speaker 1>landowners in our county who have faced terrible wildfare risk
<v Speaker 1>and are coming around to this. And and it's uh,
<v Speaker 1>it's been. It's still controversial. You know. Some people want
<v Speaker 1>to say, well, you just need to log and graze more,
<v Speaker 1>but it actually it's just not it's not you need both.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you need to do the thinning in places,
<v Speaker 1>but you also need you know, like we did. We
<v Speaker 1>took out over half the trees on our property. We
<v Speaker 1>did we logged extensively before we even got to the
<v Speaker 1>point where we do prescribe burning. So it's not always
<v Speaker 1>an easy either or thing, right, Uh, And and Uh,
<v Speaker 1>but but uh, I.
<v Speaker 2>Think we really quick. I want to say the fact
<v Speaker 2>that there's dozens of plant species that won't germinate without fire.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, if you look any you know, you look
<v Speaker 2>at the plant ecology there, it'll tell you fire has
<v Speaker 2>been here for a long time. I mean that alone
<v Speaker 2>should be a wake up call to anybody who's doubtful
<v Speaker 2>about it. It's like, it's it's, it happens, It's inevitable.
<v Speaker 2>So you have to do you want low burning face
<v Speaker 2>you can just choose. Do you want low burning fires
<v Speaker 2>that are easily controlled and that you can you know,
<v Speaker 2>do during the cool season when they're unlikely to spread,
<v Speaker 2>or do you want a massive, you know, inferno that's
<v Speaker 2>gonna take off.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, And and it sometimes bugs me that are you know,
<v Speaker 1>the restrictions put on even pile burning because of air
<v Speaker 1>pollution control district They you know, they want to not
<v Speaker 1>have burning on any days when there's inversions in our area.
<v Speaker 1>But but you actually sometimes it's the safest days to burn.
<v Speaker 1>But what I mean by inversion, well, like a temperature inversion. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>if if there's a if the holding yeah, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>holding the basically it holds the smoke in. Yeah, so
<v Speaker 1>it doesn't disperse as fast. Yeah, but sometimes you just
<v Speaker 1>gotta to me, you just got to roll with a
<v Speaker 1>little bit of that.
<v Speaker 2>You're saying those are better for burning because there's not
<v Speaker 2>as much wind.
<v Speaker 1>Right, it's not as Yeah, it's less risky in some
<v Speaker 1>ways in area anyway. But but uh yeah, but and
<v Speaker 1>and we had to you know, when we were getting ready,
<v Speaker 1>we had to get all these permits for our We
<v Speaker 1>did sixteen acres all in one day, and we had
<v Speaker 1>about fifty people from the Karuk tribe because they've done
<v Speaker 1>it's one of our largest Native American tribes in Sisku
<v Speaker 1>County and they have a prescribed burning cultural burning unit
<v Speaker 1>which helps not only on their own lands, but but
<v Speaker 1>you know, through this this grant funding, they were able
<v Speaker 1>to come over and do and be sort of leaders
<v Speaker 1>on it. You know, we had our local fire department
<v Speaker 1>involved in it. I think we had another Native reservation,
<v Speaker 1>the Courts Valley Indian Reservation, they had some capacity and
<v Speaker 1>and some other restoration groups because there was such a
<v Speaker 1>new thing to do this and so yeah, all but
<v Speaker 1>this is when no, this was just four years ago.
<v Speaker 1>Four years ago. Yeah, and we yeah, and then you know.
<v Speaker 1>So we had and we had to put a fire
<v Speaker 1>water line around half the property, you know, where you
<v Speaker 1>could get hoses anywhere.
<v Speaker 2>And you have installed actual pipes well no, just.
<v Speaker 1>A temporary just you know, on the top of the ground,
<v Speaker 1>but with a big tank, and it's it's a it
<v Speaker 1>was a big thing. And and you know, and I
<v Speaker 1>think because of the Weed Fire Department issued the permit
<v Speaker 1>for it. They wanted they'd never you know, it was
<v Speaker 1>the first time for something like this being done, and.
<v Speaker 2>So they decide what days you can burn, right, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>well they.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, together with the county air control stuff. So so yeah,
<v Speaker 1>we got delayed one day because of weather conditions, and
<v Speaker 1>then we went the next day and get out, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and it's like it's wild because there's so much prep
<v Speaker 1>and then it all happens on one day. And and
<v Speaker 1>then you know, because I'm the landowner, they hand me
<v Speaker 1>the drip torch you know, and say you got to
<v Speaker 1>start it, you know, so it's on your ass, It's
<v Speaker 1>on my ass if we'd burned down the town.
<v Speaker 2>Have you have you since since you guys have been burning,
<v Speaker 2>have you seen diversity come back? Because that's basically what
<v Speaker 2>you guys, did you took a monoculture agriculture and restored
<v Speaker 2>it to native forest and it's much different now after
<v Speaker 2>it's almost been twenty years since you've been there. Did
<v Speaker 2>you see a bunch of stuff start coming back that
<v Speaker 2>wasn't there before?
<v Speaker 1>Absolutely? And you know, I don't have our plant list
<v Speaker 1>at hand, but my partner Andrea, who's a conservation biologist,
<v Speaker 1>she's been keeping really detailed records of all the plant
<v Speaker 1>and different species we see on the property. And we're
<v Speaker 1>discovering new ones, you know, every year now, even after
<v Speaker 1>this long and and there's also I mean existing plants,
<v Speaker 1>but they're there. They've spread a lot by having things
<v Speaker 1>more opened up, more of this dappled sunlight on the forest.
<v Speaker 2>There was probably a seed bank still there because some
<v Speaker 2>of these seeds, like you know Ilim the bakery that
<v Speaker 2>cool mallow said, for a while, they can the seeds
<v Speaker 2>can last for a century or so.
<v Speaker 1>Absolutely.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, once you open things up, you make
<v Speaker 2>it more inviting to wildlife. You get more birds coming in.
<v Speaker 2>They're shitting out seeds all the time of different things.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, and that birds can move around in the forest.
<v Speaker 1>Now there's I think it's sharpshing hawks you know that
<v Speaker 1>can't really go when it's too dense, but they they're
<v Speaker 1>they're Uh. Andrea has definitely seen observed a lot more
<v Speaker 1>bird sightings in the.
<v Speaker 2>Forest getting badgers.
<v Speaker 1>There was a wolf there, Yes, yes, we now have.
<v Speaker 1>We now have wolves in our area. And we've had
<v Speaker 1>two sightings on or directly adjacent to our property. The
<v Speaker 1>nearest pack is not that's been is not super close
<v Speaker 1>to us, but it's it's it's kind of on the
<v Speaker 1>other side of Mount Shasta. But but they're they're dispersing
<v Speaker 1>and and and uh so yeah, first time in one
<v Speaker 1>hundred years that there's been wolves in California since since
<v Speaker 1>twenty twenty.
<v Speaker 2>Two, you had you had many black bears out there.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, yeah, we have lots of black bears. We've had
<v Speaker 1>a mountain lion sightings.
<v Speaker 2>Uh, we've had bobcats, any of the other weasels like
<v Speaker 2>members of a weasel fan uh Pine Pine Martin.
<v Speaker 1>Oh really yeah, yeah, no ship that's cool, yep, yep.
<v Speaker 1>Uh and and uh, there's a lot of like smaller
<v Speaker 1>I'm sorry I'm spacing out the name, but there was
<v Speaker 1>a there's a new our salamander that that we found recently.
<v Speaker 2>That's so you've seen biodiversity of everything, not just plants,
<v Speaker 2>but animals to go up.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, And I think it really helps that we've
<v Speaker 1>got the spring right above our property, you know, so
<v Speaker 1>we've got the wetland, and we've got some you know,
<v Speaker 1>channels of this creek that sort of go through the
<v Speaker 1>area that we did the burn into.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. At the same time, I mean the town near
<v Speaker 2>you is grown too. Now there's like more developments than other.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, there is, there is, it's been slowly. I
<v Speaker 1>mean there's an RV park under development between us and
<v Speaker 1>the truck stop area, which is but it's there's still
<v Speaker 1>a lot of a lot of willerness right across the
<v Speaker 1>tracks from US, which is lumber company land, but it's
<v Speaker 1>now under a conservation easement five thousand acres the Black
<v Speaker 1>Beet working for us that a land trust from there too.
<v Speaker 2>I mean it's uphill up to the mount up to
<v Speaker 2>the volcano. I mean you can see it starts going
<v Speaker 2>up immediately. It's a gentle slope, but it's still But
<v Speaker 2>I remember the first time I went through through Weed,
<v Speaker 2>through the town of Weed, it was.
<v Speaker 1>Near that area.
<v Speaker 2>It was just that truck stop that was run by
<v Speaker 2>some Sikhs and that was there was nothing there. It
<v Speaker 2>was so you know, it felt eerie and cool, but
<v Speaker 2>yeah it was. And then Gonzo had his little camp
<v Speaker 2>over there, tours in with a bunch of tramps and
<v Speaker 2>they were all they're all camped up in the bushes, Silver.
<v Speaker 1>Minor Larry, all these old.
<v Speaker 2>Guys. But but so weed Weed was a company town
<v Speaker 2>though originally and what he was Abner Weed like some
<v Speaker 2>what do you know about a.
<v Speaker 1>Weed was a Yeah, the founder of the town was
<v Speaker 1>a was a lumber baron. I guess you'd say he
<v Speaker 1>had a big he Do.
<v Speaker 2>You think he was a bad man? Possibly, Uh, he wasn't.
<v Speaker 1>He was a man of his times.
<v Speaker 2>He wasn't people.
<v Speaker 1>He was a man of his times.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, let's just put it that way.
<v Speaker 1>But he started he picked weed for his lumber mill
<v Speaker 1>because of the winds that come through there it would
<v Speaker 1>help dry out the green lumber. And then he got
<v Speaker 1>extensive land holdings, you know, right right around us. There
<v Speaker 1>was some of the you know, the land grants that
<v Speaker 1>the Southern Pacific Railroad was given when they built built
<v Speaker 1>the line. You know, there was federal land grants, so
<v Speaker 1>there was these squares that were owned by the railroad,
<v Speaker 1>and then there was private in holdings, and you know
<v Speaker 1>this was of course after the government seized all this
<v Speaker 1>land from Native American tribes and and but then they
<v Speaker 1>they they had Yeah, yeah, they did a lot of
<v Speaker 1>I mean there's old photos of the Weed Lumber company
<v Speaker 1>just taking out these massive ponderas, old growth pines, pines.
<v Speaker 2>What were those forests like I would I would have
<v Speaker 2>loved to Yeah, yeah, I saw diverse massive trees, sugar
<v Speaker 2>pines to our unique species, I mean pine cones a
<v Speaker 2>foot and a half long in some cases.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, they're so beautiful. I'm really we should have more
<v Speaker 1>of them on our property.
<v Speaker 2>I remember I got a few.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if that we've got some that are
<v Speaker 1>six seven feet tall. Now, yeah, they're but they're they've
<v Speaker 1>taken a little they're not growing as fast as some
<v Speaker 1>of the other new stuff. But but yeah, that's the
<v Speaker 1>other thing we've done is is you know, we did
<v Speaker 1>this Prescribe burn just to finish on that. It was amazing,
<v Speaker 1>you know, sixteen acres all in one day. Yeah, it
<v Speaker 1>was a real you felt like you were in a
<v Speaker 1>real forest fire because it burned hot. We torched some trees,
<v Speaker 1>you know, or and that's that's terrifying when you're on
<v Speaker 1>your own property and just all of a sudden you're
<v Speaker 1>watching some some of the trees just completely.
<v Speaker 2>Torch, thirty or forty foot tall. Yeah, just go up
<v Speaker 2>completely flames.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, And and you know it doesn't go exactly
<v Speaker 1>as you planned it. Sometimes you wanted certain trees me
<v Speaker 1>to go and other ones don't. But you know, and
<v Speaker 1>some of the I was trying to preserve the incense
<v Speaker 1>cedars because there's fewer of those, but but they're not
<v Speaker 1>as fire resistant as the ponderosis, so some of them
<v Speaker 1>torched really easily. You know, we miscalculated how much brush
<v Speaker 1>you could leave close to a cedar when the when
<v Speaker 1>the wind came up a little bit, and then it
<v Speaker 1>would just torch the whole tree. But but overall it
<v Speaker 1>was really successful, and you know it the weeks and
<v Speaker 1>even months afterwards, it looked it looked a little harsh.
<v Speaker 1>You know, we scorched a lot of the lower branches
<v Speaker 1>of these of the of the trees, but very good overall.
<v Speaker 2>And it's been a learning process though, and learned a
<v Speaker 2>lot since then. You guys, stuff to burn occasionally or what.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, we've been doing pile burning in other areas. We're
<v Speaker 1>working on a wetland restoration. But you really cleaned up
<v Speaker 1>the forest from what it was. Oh yeah, there's nothing
<v Speaker 1>like you can walk everywhere. It's it's the density is
<v Speaker 1>completely different.
<v Speaker 2>You can walk without getting jabbed with a branch of
<v Speaker 2>a dead man's anita or something and tripping over sea
<v Speaker 2>and the dead sea and note this.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, it's got a totally different feel. And some
<v Speaker 1>of the work we did in the Wetland area more
<v Speaker 1>recently too, it's there was just a decades and decades
<v Speaker 1>of dead willow that even in the Wetland area, you
<v Speaker 1>would have had a low, low level fire at some point,
<v Speaker 1>you know, snake its way through there and take out
<v Speaker 1>a lot of this dead willow. But it's a fire
<v Speaker 1>to scolar willow.
<v Speaker 2>And then you've had Pacific dogwood coming back, which is yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of that what is that cornice natalia exactly?
<v Speaker 1>Yep, yep, yep, and.
<v Speaker 2>Still remember it even though it's been years. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and we we found all this these dogwoods we
<v Speaker 1>didn't even know exists, they'd been so suppressed under all
<v Speaker 1>this dead willow.
<v Speaker 2>Did you find any more calypso orchids very.
<v Speaker 1>Rarely have we seen that. Lots of other other species
<v Speaker 1>and uh and then we've done. We tried to plant
<v Speaker 1>new species too, as you know. Some of that started
<v Speaker 1>on our more open compound area.
<v Speaker 2>Wait really quick, like tero spora, that micoheterotroph the pine
<v Speaker 2>drops that go you get those all the time, right, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>we definitely get those. Ye. No, chlorophyll very sticky.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, those are amazing.
<v Speaker 2>Those are amazing, fucking great. I miss those. So but anyway,
<v Speaker 2>so but so the but the restoration, I mean, in
<v Speaker 2>terms of planting stuff was really fun. I remember being
<v Speaker 2>around for a lot of that, and at this point
<v Speaker 2>I was obsessed with cypresses, So I was planning a
<v Speaker 2>ship ton of cypresses in the more open areas, and
<v Speaker 2>I planted in eric Carria too, which dre hated, and
<v Speaker 2>a lot of sugar pines. Yeah yeah, but yeah, I
<v Speaker 2>haven't been there in like five years. I'd love to
<v Speaker 2>check it out again. But so what did you guys,
<v Speaker 2>what else were you doing deeper in the forest in
<v Speaker 2>terms of restoration, in terms of planting stuff, Well, we.
<v Speaker 1>You know the again, the whole Riparian area has a
<v Speaker 1>lot more diversity, but we still you know, after getting
<v Speaker 1>some of the dead willow and and you know we're
<v Speaker 1>trying to also do you get in like meadows and
<v Speaker 1>wet areas, you get too many conifers, kind of conifer
<v Speaker 1>encroachment coming in again. It's a that's one of the
<v Speaker 1>the uh what happens with fire suppression.
<v Speaker 2>White fur especially? Yeah, well one cone like those seeds Germany,
<v Speaker 2>and you'll get it's unreal. I remember like on Goosenest
<v Speaker 2>Mountain seeing like forty trees in like a twenty foot
<v Speaker 2>by twenty foot area forty ceilings yep.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. But also closer to the creek we get dug
<v Speaker 1>fur a lot in sen cedar that would just get
<v Speaker 1>you know, normally a low level fire would take some
<v Speaker 1>of it out, but it just it gets thick and
<v Speaker 1>then it shades out your grasses and and other wetland
<v Speaker 1>plants eventually. So so we've actually taken out a lot
<v Speaker 1>of those real small, smaller, you know, one two four
<v Speaker 1>foot tall conifers in the wetland zone. I mean we're
<v Speaker 1>still we're still plenty of them in there, but we'll
<v Speaker 1>reduce the density of those, uh. And and a lot
<v Speaker 1>a lot of it's just been releasing the other stuff
<v Speaker 1>that was already there, like like the dogwoods, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>we found some mountain ash and and other species. But
<v Speaker 1>we also have done a limited amount of of introducing
<v Speaker 1>native species, you know, usually from trying to source it
<v Speaker 1>as close as possible. But I've put in some vine
<v Speaker 1>maple acer serenadum in addition to the big leaf maple,
<v Speaker 1>which we're kind of right on the edge of when
<v Speaker 1>we're big leaf.
<v Speaker 2>The they like it a lot more wet though too.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of those yeah, really only in the creek
<v Speaker 1>areas for that. Yeah, some uh uh and a lot
<v Speaker 1>of stuff just comes back on its own. The the
<v Speaker 1>you know, there's a couple of different cherry species, bitter cherry,
<v Speaker 1>uh and and uh the the prunas Virginiana which I
<v Speaker 1>think western choke cherry.
<v Speaker 2>Is it Virginiana?
<v Speaker 1>Is it the Yeah, it's it's weird that it would
<v Speaker 1>be Virginia. It seem far away, but but I'm pretty what.
<v Speaker 2>Was klamath plum? I remember that? What was that? What
<v Speaker 2>was the species on that? I forget? Oh yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I forget the pruna's species out there?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, it's uh or sometimes they'd be. It's very
<v Speaker 1>I think it's related to Sierra plum too, it's very I.
<v Speaker 2>Think it's I mean, I think the local ecotype is good,
<v Speaker 2>but I also if it's like one hundred miles away
<v Speaker 2>to it's not that going to be that bad. And anything.
<v Speaker 2>The environment is still constantly selecting, it's undergoing selections. So
<v Speaker 2>if it's got these, you know, you're not going to
<v Speaker 2>genetically pollute anything too much because natural selection will just
<v Speaker 2>filter it out anyway.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, some Pacific u I replanted, that's oh it's
<v Speaker 1>very slow growing. They like it really what Yeah, yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and uh some you know, it's funny, you'll remember this,
<v Speaker 1>but there's a couple of stands of of uh sequoias.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, I was gonna about those. What happened to those?
<v Speaker 1>They're doing fine? Yeah, and and that maybe uh they
<v Speaker 1>you know, we we did similar limbing them up and tried.
<v Speaker 2>I wonder how they got there because they're not they're
<v Speaker 2>not obviously they're not native, but they're still they're they're
<v Speaker 2>harmless and they're gonna be you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's weird because they're not. Yeah, they're not native.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, they're native to California, but they're not native
<v Speaker 1>to our region, of course, and they they I think
<v Speaker 1>that they must have been the Southern Pacific Land Company
<v Speaker 1>when they when they were just experimenting around with different
<v Speaker 1>they just got a.
<v Speaker 2>Wild hair up there, asked, and we're like, let's plant
<v Speaker 2>some giant sequoias and see how they do.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there's some of the neighboring property to the to
<v Speaker 1>the west of us as well. And and it's just
<v Speaker 1>kind of funny. But I mean, you see them like
<v Speaker 1>in the city of Mount Shasta's ornamentals. Sometimes people have
<v Speaker 1>them in their yards. But but uh, it's yeah, it's
<v Speaker 1>just kind of funny. But I don't know, I've I've
<v Speaker 1>liked just keeping them, I guess for diversity, just because
<v Speaker 1>they're not we're so overstocked.
<v Speaker 2>They're great trees, and they're resistant to the pine beetles.
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure.
<v Speaker 2>And yeah, there's prunas and marginada is that Oh yeah,
<v Speaker 2>you're right, Prunas virginiana, Prunas subcordata that is that.
<v Speaker 1>That's the one.
<v Speaker 2>Ye, Yeah, those were delicious.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, my instructor from dendrology would be disappointed at some
<v Speaker 1>of my loss of scientific terms for plants in our area.
<v Speaker 2>It's I mean, it's still in Texas, so few people
<v Speaker 2>use Latin and I mean just the genus name. And
<v Speaker 2>I try to be like, man, come on, it's not intimidating,
<v Speaker 2>just normalize it. It's it's fine. You know, these common
<v Speaker 2>names are ridiculous and oftentimes you know, harder to remember
<v Speaker 2>than the genus thing. But anyway, so okay, so you
<v Speaker 2>guys are doing this restoration and it's things are starting
<v Speaker 2>to come back. But then recently a few what was
<v Speaker 2>this the crystal guyser thing? I want to talk about that.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, yeah, that's a whole this is and this
<v Speaker 2>kind of ties into more of this extractive predatory capitalism.
<v Speaker 1>Well, I think my interest in this goes back to
<v Speaker 1>Laos and my you know, seeing what happened to the
<v Speaker 1>loss of collective resources that people had, you know, that
<v Speaker 1>had their water, their land, their forests privatized. And then
<v Speaker 1>I'm in Weed and and you know, learned about the
<v Speaker 1>the this. You know, the legacy of Weed was a
<v Speaker 1>company town, like a mining town or you know, you
<v Speaker 1>think of you know, a copper mine town or something,
<v Speaker 1>but there was lumber mine or lumber industry private company
<v Speaker 1>towns as well. McLeod nearby was one at one point
<v Speaker 1>as well. And I didn't realize that company towns existed
<v Speaker 1>as long as they did. But Weed was a company
<v Speaker 1>town up until nineteen sixty and before it was they
<v Speaker 1>gave up on that concept that became a public town.
<v Speaker 1>But they they had been originally a company town of
<v Speaker 1>the Weed Lumber comp Company, and then there was long
<v Speaker 1>Bell Lumber took it over, and then International Paper. After
<v Speaker 1>that International Paper closed down in nineteen eighty two, and
<v Speaker 1>they had, you know, back in nineteen sixty, International Paper,
<v Speaker 1>they made it a public town. They sold five hundred
<v Speaker 1>homes to the residents in the town. They had, you know,
<v Speaker 1>all the infrastructure that had all been owned by the
<v Speaker 1>company went to the City of Weed, the newly incorporated
<v Speaker 1>city of Weed. And then there was the water. The
<v Speaker 1>city of Weed's main water source, Bohan Springs, was up
<v Speaker 1>on the mill property above the town. And they, you know,
<v Speaker 1>at the time the International Paper made this agreement, they
<v Speaker 1>had told the city that they would have the water right,
<v Speaker 1>which they still technically owned at the time, but they
<v Speaker 1>had done a lease for a dollar a year to
<v Speaker 1>the town, which seemed to be you know, a renewable
<v Speaker 1>fifty year agreement and then another company they but then
<v Speaker 1>International Paper was a real blow to the town in
<v Speaker 1>nineteen eighty two. They closed the mill, threw a lot
<v Speaker 1>of people out of work. It was a lot of
<v Speaker 1>good union jobs. And then they wanted to have the
<v Speaker 1>the next year though, and well, and then that's when
<v Speaker 1>they told the city, Okay, no more lease, you can
<v Speaker 1>just we're going to run the paperwork with the water
<v Speaker 1>master to They gave it to them.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and this this water, I mean, this is this
<v Speaker 2>is like this is not I mean, this is this
<v Speaker 2>is really good water this is coming from It's basically
<v Speaker 2>snow melts. It's percolated through volcanic rock higher up up
<v Speaker 2>slope on the mountain over.
<v Speaker 1>So it's pure spring water. It's like as good as
<v Speaker 1>you can get.
<v Speaker 2>How long does all these what is the flow time
<v Speaker 2>that the amount it takes for like snow melt.
<v Speaker 1>Eventually here's some like radioactive isotope testing of it, and
<v Speaker 1>it seems like the springs around Mount Shasta are anywhere
<v Speaker 1>from like twenty five to seventy five years where the
<v Speaker 1>water's underground, just trickling through these these huge underground aquifers
<v Speaker 1>and picking up really good mineral tape, you know, taste
<v Speaker 1>and that, and that's why it's become so coveted to
<v Speaker 1>the water bottling. Water bottling industry, and there's been big
<v Speaker 1>battles over water bottling in McCloud in the city of
<v Speaker 1>Mount Shasta.
<v Speaker 2>Do you remember that, like in the early nineties, bottled
<v Speaker 2>water wasn't even a thing. I know, yeah, it's fucking
<v Speaker 2>preposterous that this is. Yeah, like I just public infrastructure,
<v Speaker 2>just improved with the public infrastructure, so you have good
<v Speaker 2>tap water.
<v Speaker 1>When I got involved in looking at the water international
<v Speaker 1>water bottling industry, I well, I found out, you know,
<v Speaker 1>our plant in Weed Crystal Geyser Roxanne, their main customer
<v Speaker 1>is Japan. They so they send all this drinking water
<v Speaker 1>in little plastic bottles over to Japan in big ocean freighters. Meanwhile,
<v Speaker 1>in Japan, Mount Fuji they bottle spring water there and
<v Speaker 1>then and sell it to other countries and they you know,
<v Speaker 1>And I was asking a friend of New Zealand he said, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>we get Mount Fuji spring water in in New Zealand.
<v Speaker 1>And then I was in Trader Joe's and Redding soon
<v Speaker 1>after that and noticed that their premium brand of you know,
<v Speaker 1>drinking water was from New Zealand.
<v Speaker 2>So this is really just a plastic bottle industry. It's
<v Speaker 2>really like selling people's ship.
<v Speaker 1>Well, selling the brand selling them. It's brand identity. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, you've got so these ocean freighters going from
<v Speaker 1>you know, from California to Japan, Japan.
<v Speaker 2>To New Zealand, New Zealand, and then you go to
<v Speaker 2>Mexico carrying water and it's just normal, like everyone's supposed to,
<v Speaker 2>you know, pay for water a bite there. You can't
<v Speaker 2>drink it out of the tap. It's it's fucking nuts.
<v Speaker 1>It's you know, yeah, yeah it is.
<v Speaker 2>It's so predatory.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's a yeah, brand, it's all brand identity, and
<v Speaker 1>people have been.
<v Speaker 2>Kind of but it's plastic bottles though, I mean, it's
<v Speaker 2>more fucking garbage for the ocean that ends up in
<v Speaker 2>what's the how much plastic is found in fucking human sperm? Now?
<v Speaker 2>I think like it's just it's so.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the microplastics and you know leach you know, this
<v Speaker 1>pure spring water, but the you know, the plastics leach
<v Speaker 1>into it.
<v Speaker 2>I think microplastics are yeah, mostly coming from you know,
<v Speaker 2>uhcrylic clothing, but yeah, probalyester anyway.
<v Speaker 1>But anyways, they so they anyway that you know, Crystal
<v Speaker 1>Geyser came to Weed in I believe nineteen ninety seven
<v Speaker 1>and they wanted to start set up a water bottling plant,
<v Speaker 1>which was attractive to the town, jobs and all that.
<v Speaker 1>But but at that point Roseberg Forest Products in Oregon
<v Speaker 1>company had bought the mill from International Paper and then
<v Speaker 1>they claimed they brought up at that time that wait, no,
<v Speaker 1>we own the water, the water right, it's not the
<v Speaker 1>City of Weeds, and and they the city the paperwork
<v Speaker 1>was unclear of the transfer.
<v Speaker 2>They owned the spring or.
<v Speaker 1>Well, they the spring was on their property, but they
<v Speaker 1>water rights and property are two different concepts in California,
<v Speaker 1>and they claimed that the whole water right, that the
<v Speaker 1>city did not have any water right at all, and
<v Speaker 1>it was basical only at the uh because Roseberg had
<v Speaker 1>been giving it to them and that they wanted them
<v Speaker 1>and that they were interested in having them stop. And
<v Speaker 1>so in around twenty eleven, Roseberg started getting more serious
<v Speaker 1>about this. They'd actually so so Crystal Guyser set up
<v Speaker 1>a plant and Weed in nineteen seven. But they but
<v Speaker 1>they bought water from Roseberg instead of the city, so
<v Speaker 1>the city didn't get any right if.
<v Speaker 2>This, but either way, like what Roseberg was trying to say,
<v Speaker 2>it was like the city was now going to purchase
<v Speaker 2>water from Roseberg.
<v Speaker 1>Well no, well temporarily they said you can. You can
<v Speaker 1>purchase it for at most ten years, but then we
<v Speaker 1>want you off it completely. And it came out there
<v Speaker 1>was because they wanted to sell it to Crystal Geyser Roxanne.
<v Speaker 1>They could make more money bottling more water to send
<v Speaker 1>to Japan, and so they just told the city basically
<v Speaker 1>that they had to start digging some wells. And this
<v Speaker 1>was right during the drought and again in like twenty fourteen,
<v Speaker 1>twenty fifteen. You know how bad the drought was then,
<v Speaker 1>and you know whether you're going to be able to
<v Speaker 1>drill wells at an economical rate is very unclear. And
<v Speaker 1>you've had the spring water come into your people's houses.
<v Speaker 1>There's not even treatment, you know, they just send springwater
<v Speaker 1>off the mountain right into everybody's homes. It's like one
<v Speaker 1>of the great benefits of our region. City. Mountshast and
<v Speaker 1>Dunsmure are the same way. And McLeod A'll get spring
<v Speaker 1>water from the mountain as their municipal water. And they
<v Speaker 1>wanted to take to take this away from the city,
<v Speaker 1>and you know that I think that the city leaders
<v Speaker 1>realized it was not right and that there was a
<v Speaker 1>legal case, but they but they just came in. They
<v Speaker 1>were a wealthy company with you know, seemingly unlimited legal budget.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, by twenty sixteen, this lease was supposed to
<v Speaker 1>go into effect and the city was supposed to start
<v Speaker 1>paying for water temporarily. And a local community group arose
<v Speaker 1>in Weed to try to resist this, and it actually
<v Speaker 1>included several former mayors of the town and a town elders,
<v Speaker 1>people on the planning commission, other really respected members. And
<v Speaker 1>I got involved in it, I think because I just
<v Speaker 1>had been involved in this type of stuff in Southeast Asia.
<v Speaker 1>Just seemed like another resource grab that was really unjust, and.
<v Speaker 2>You could already see it for what it was. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's just like you're taking away this public resource
<v Speaker 1>through some legal shenanigans of this unclear agreement. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it was very clear that in nineteen eighty two international
<v Speaker 1>paper intended to give the water to the city. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>there was maybe some filing problems at the watermaster's office
<v Speaker 1>or something where it was ended up being unclear, But
<v Speaker 1>and they just tried to take advantage of that to
<v Speaker 1>you know, in nineteen eighty two, water wasn't a commodity.
<v Speaker 1>Spring water wasn't a commodity.
<v Speaker 2>Nobody was drinking bottles, but not dollars for ten dollars
<v Speaker 2>in some cases, but in alkaline water.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, it was you know,
<v Speaker 1>when they realized they could make a lot of money
<v Speaker 1>on it.
<v Speaker 2>And so.
<v Speaker 1>Anyway, it became a big controversial issue where our group
<v Speaker 1>started to look into different camp you know, we just
<v Speaker 1>had a campaign to save weeds water and it went
<v Speaker 1>back and forth, and then in twenty seventeen, Roseberg actually
<v Speaker 1>sued both the city for the water and then they
<v Speaker 1>sued our organization and nine of us as individuals, named
<v Speaker 1>us for clouding their title to the water. And know
<v Speaker 1>it was what's it's called a slap suit where you know,
<v Speaker 1>Greenpeace gets us all the time, where where like an
<v Speaker 1>oil company doesn't like what they're they're saying, so they
<v Speaker 1>try to sue them into just to it's like an intimidation, just.
<v Speaker 2>Like slapping them around and scaring that.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it certainly means strategic lawsuit against public participation. It's
<v Speaker 1>a well known corporate technique to shut people up, shut
<v Speaker 1>shut your critics up. And John Oliver has a great
<v Speaker 1>uh segment on that if you watch that show. But
<v Speaker 1>but uh, you know, so luckily there's this whole campaign,
<v Speaker 1>you know, groups that are fighting against slap suits. And
<v Speaker 1>we got some really good support and we beat the
<v Speaker 1>suit in Sisku County court. Uh and then Roseburg appealed
<v Speaker 1>and it took like three years to you know, drag
<v Speaker 1>it out. And the point is to try to exhaust
<v Speaker 1>citizens who are fighting against something and get them to
<v Speaker 1>shut up and give up. And luckily we didn't. And
<v Speaker 1>and even all these old guys that were in our group,
<v Speaker 1>they would not back down, even though people were afraid
<v Speaker 1>of legal costs and losing their homes.
<v Speaker 2>And stuff, because it's bullshit. This is bullshit what they're doing.
<v Speaker 1>It's yeah, yeah. And but unfortunately the city just didn't
<v Speaker 1>have the the uh, the resources to fight it forever,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the legal resources, so they kind of wore
<v Speaker 1>down the city and then the city rallied. They're gonna,
<v Speaker 1>you know, if even if we win when this goes
<v Speaker 1>to court, they're going to appeal and keep dragging it. Uh.
<v Speaker 1>So the city had at first it seemed really bad.
<v Speaker 1>The city conceded, Okay, we don't have the water right Roseberg,
<v Speaker 1>you win. But I think we by that point there's
<v Speaker 1>been so much bad publicity. There's been protests up at
<v Speaker 1>the Roseburg headquarters, a New York Times article, all sorts
<v Speaker 1>of stuff. And then Crystal Geyser just didn't want the
<v Speaker 1>bad publicity of being seen as taking away the town's water.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>So, and and we'd been, you know, looking at trying
<v Speaker 1>to pressure Crystal Geyser. But anyway, they they all came
<v Speaker 1>to the table and Crystal Geyser made a deal with
<v Speaker 1>the city in Roseberg to buy the water from Roseberg
<v Speaker 1>and then donate most of it. Then was just a
<v Speaker 1>donation to the city. They gave up any claim to
<v Speaker 1>that water and said we agree the city should have
<v Speaker 1>this water, and they is it long standing? I mean
<v Speaker 1>now it's the water right has been transferred to the
<v Speaker 1>city of Weed, so it's in perpetuity.
<v Speaker 2>What did Rosberg get out of it? Did they get paid?
<v Speaker 1>Roseberg got paid by Crystal Geyser, and then for a
<v Speaker 1>period of time Weed had to continue paying a certain amount,
<v Speaker 1>the same amount they'd been doing one hundred thousand a year,
<v Speaker 1>but compared to doing anything else, it's still an incredibly
<v Speaker 1>good deal for the city. So they've been buying it
<v Speaker 1>from Roseberg since since that, Yeah, since twenty sixteen, they've
<v Speaker 1>been making a you know, one hundred thousand dollars year payment,
<v Speaker 1>so they have to do I think they are only
<v Speaker 1>doing that for a few more years and then it's
<v Speaker 1>just the city's free and clear. So, you know, it
<v Speaker 1>wasn't the perfect court victory, but it was. But this
<v Speaker 1>was definitely a huge.
<v Speaker 2>Victory, the pain in the ass for Rosebery, and they
<v Speaker 2>probably didn't get the sum that they originally wanted.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, I think it was a huge pain. I think
<v Speaker 1>they never would have done it. They probably paid more
<v Speaker 1>in legal fees suing us and fighting the whole thing than.
<v Speaker 2>They They're still around as a lumber company. Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>they're just making wood chips basically.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, they still run the mill in Weed and they
<v Speaker 1>have larger operations in Oregon and elsewhere. Yeah, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>and actually they you know, there's aspects of you know,
<v Speaker 1>what had changed. It was a family business at once,
<v Speaker 1>and like a lot of family businesses, eventually evolved to
<v Speaker 1>be not a family business and be sold to other investors,
<v Speaker 1>and like a lot of modern companies, they they kind
<v Speaker 1>of lost that maybe personal connection. They stopped caring about
<v Speaker 1>It's Pacific.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, right, they stopped giving a shit about their
<v Speaker 2>employees or the people that live in the regions that they.
<v Speaker 1>And we tried to say we didn't have anything against
<v Speaker 1>the local people at Roseberg Forest Products and Weed. They
<v Speaker 1>were all doing the best they could.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, they're not the company higher up.
<v Speaker 1>No, this was this was just a few corporate executives
<v Speaker 1>up in their corporate headquarters up in Eugene area Springfield
<v Speaker 1>or that's where beef was. It wasn't with the people
<v Speaker 1>for the company.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but it's still fucking dirty. I mean, it's I
<v Speaker 2>don't know, I expect a lot more of that kind
<v Speaker 2>of stuff in the next four years to be succeeding
<v Speaker 2>unless people can fight it, you know. Okay, Well anyway,
<v Speaker 2>moving is sticking with the water issue. What's been going
<v Speaker 2>on because the Klamath River, there's tributaries of the Klamath
<v Speaker 2>River that run very close to your property and the
<v Speaker 2>well region.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the creek, the area that the creek that comes
<v Speaker 1>through our property from the spring up above us Black Creek,
<v Speaker 1>that's a tributary of the Shasta River, which is a
<v Speaker 1>tributary of the Klamath River.
<v Speaker 2>Shasta Rivers, of course, where I dragged you guys to
<v Speaker 2>go look for that rare cactus that'll punt you of fragilis.
<v Speaker 1>That's right, that's yeah. Yeah, we went.
<v Speaker 2>We were deep, we were passing.
<v Speaker 1>We were deep on private property, as I recall, because
<v Speaker 1>you were looking for this cactus.
<v Speaker 2>We met that farm man though. He was so nice.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, he was nice. It's lucky it wasn't the actual
<v Speaker 1>rancher because he might have had a shotguner. Yeah, been
<v Speaker 1>a dick, yeah yeah. And we both had our blue heelers,
<v Speaker 1>and they they they both rolled in fresh cowshit, as
<v Speaker 1>I remember, and we had to we had to throw
<v Speaker 1>them both in the Shasta River right right about the
<v Speaker 1>same time. And the sky rolled up on us and asked,
<v Speaker 1>what the hell are you doing in our.
<v Speaker 2>Cool It's a cool fucking species though, a cactus in
<v Speaker 2>northern California. So but okay, so anyway, so uh in
<v Speaker 2>this that's I mean, the Shasta River, it still does
<v Speaker 2>get I mean, it's salmon spawn there. Oh.
<v Speaker 1>Absolutely. It's a super important tributary of the of the
<v Speaker 1>Klamath for both chinook and for endangered Coho salmon.
<v Speaker 2>And how were they But there's been issues obviously when
<v Speaker 2>the dam was there, they were having trouble. This intercepted
<v Speaker 2>the Sama flow, This fucked up the whole watershed.
<v Speaker 1>What happened, Well, yeah, there's multiple issues going on, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the four hydropower projects on the mainstream of the Klamath River,
<v Speaker 1>the Shasta River actually its mouth is below the now
<v Speaker 1>former dam sites. But the Shasta River has its own
<v Speaker 1>problems with over allocation of water for irrigation in the summer,
<v Speaker 1>where the water was getting almost the river was getting
<v Speaker 1>almost dewatered because of they just I think water rights
<v Speaker 1>in California in general is a mess, but it's it's
<v Speaker 1>been biased towards these big agricultural diverters for a long time,
<v Speaker 1>and the needs of fish have been secondary and are
<v Speaker 1>only more recently being recognized. And and so there have
<v Speaker 1>been big campaigns in recent years just on the Shasta
<v Speaker 1>River to to try to have a minimal flow that
<v Speaker 1>can support salmon to still exist in the river. And
<v Speaker 1>and that's an ongoing battle right now. So it's connected
<v Speaker 1>to but it's not exactly the same as the dam
<v Speaker 1>removal campaign on the means.
<v Speaker 2>How are the how are the salmon getting to the
<v Speaker 2>Shasta River when the dam was.
<v Speaker 1>That it's below the it's below the the confluence of
<v Speaker 1>the Shasta River is below the first so they could
<v Speaker 1>get up there. But the dams are causing a lot
<v Speaker 1>of water quality issues below the dams in the summer
<v Speaker 1>the blue green algae and fish disease and reduced. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so there's less water going through there to dilute everything
<v Speaker 1>else at times. And it was a lot about water
<v Speaker 1>quality too, and these were not huge reservoirs.
<v Speaker 2>Probably water temperatures absolutely, river is not as high. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it's getting heated up yas they're in the hot sun
<v Speaker 2>when it's one hundred degrees.
<v Speaker 1>And salmon want and steel had want they want, uh,
<v Speaker 1>they want cold water and so and that's true dreat
<v Speaker 1>in the Shaftsa River too because if you if you
<v Speaker 1>run a bunch of water, if you divert and do
<v Speaker 1>some flood irrigation, and then the tailwater comes back into
<v Speaker 1>the river, but it's heated up so much, and you
<v Speaker 1>can know how hot it is there on an August
<v Speaker 1>day or something, and and you've got coho salmon are
<v Speaker 1>trying to overwinter or over summer, because they stay up
<v Speaker 1>in the river system for a whole summer. You know.
<v Speaker 1>They don't unlike the Chinook, which just come up and
<v Speaker 1>over over winter and then come back down in the
<v Speaker 1>spring that the new the spun. But the uh, the
<v Speaker 1>Coho are up there for a while, so they're there.
<v Speaker 1>They have to have some cold water refuges.
<v Speaker 2>Uh.
<v Speaker 1>And it's an amazing river. I've with some friends have
<v Speaker 1>actually been able to kayak big chunks of it. Now
<v Speaker 1>it's a it's a it's really fun beautiful river up there,
<v Speaker 1>but it's it's a Yeah, it's surrounded by ranches, and
<v Speaker 1>you know a lot of those ranches are very long
<v Speaker 1>established and and so it's a very it's very controversial
<v Speaker 1>trying to get reductions in their in their their water
<v Speaker 1>use through these ranches and and so that that's definitely
<v Speaker 1>an ongoing battle in our in our region. Uh and
<v Speaker 1>and in the Scott River, which is also in Sisku
<v Speaker 1>County has similar issues as well. But uh, but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's been you know, again, it kind of comes back
<v Speaker 1>to my work I think in Laos before, which was
<v Speaker 1>on hydropower, when I realized that the largest dam removal
<v Speaker 1>campaign ever anywhere in the world was right in my county.
<v Speaker 1>It was a super inspiring thing for me, and I
<v Speaker 1>was able to get, you know, at least somewhat involved
<v Speaker 1>in it. Over the last five years, I did some writing.
<v Speaker 1>I've done some work for a group called International Rivers,
<v Speaker 1>which mostly works on international campaign issues around hydro power.
<v Speaker 1>And then with another group that I'm actually on the
<v Speaker 1>board of called Inclusive Development International, which looks at large
<v Speaker 1>hyder power and you know, resource extraction projects in developing
<v Speaker 1>countries in Southeast Asia, in Africa and elsewhere. And because
<v Speaker 1>I realized that the Klamath dammary will was such a
<v Speaker 1>such a counter narrative, you know, in other parts of
<v Speaker 1>the world, they're still building hyder power dams. And even
<v Speaker 1>though it's kind of you know, we can see all
<v Speaker 1>the negative sides now and you know, and but I
<v Speaker 1>remember being in Cambodia Laos and like officials going, well,
<v Speaker 1>you guys, all these dams, you know, why do you
<v Speaker 1>why don't you want us to develop? You know, and
<v Speaker 1>it's it's a legitimate question, you know, it's you're coming
<v Speaker 1>from a Western countries and saying no, I don't think
<v Speaker 1>maybe you shouldn't build these things. They've got all these
<v Speaker 1>negative impacts, but our own countries had built all these datas.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I think that argument's bullshit though too. I do too,
<v Speaker 2>But it's it's fucking what about is them? And it's
<v Speaker 2>like that already happened, like we weren't around to fight
<v Speaker 2>it back then. And that's not an excuse for you know,
<v Speaker 2>like this is not your country. We all live on
<v Speaker 2>this same global unit. Like I hate the ship that's
<v Speaker 2>here too, you know this, Like again, it's like this
<v Speaker 2>this ownership of like, oh it's our it's our country.
<v Speaker 2>It's you know, I don't know, like you can find
<v Speaker 2>a better way. But again there's no resources or money
<v Speaker 2>or capital behind it. Then they're fucked and they're going
<v Speaker 2>to go towards whatever is easiest and whatever the ship
<v Speaker 2>bag company that's you know, knocking on their door is
<v Speaker 2>willing to offer them exactly.
<v Speaker 1>And but it's still is a good counter narrative because
<v Speaker 1>you say, look, it is true States. You know, we're
<v Speaker 1>spending half a billion dollars taking out these four dams
<v Speaker 1>because of the impacts they've had on fish, on salmon,
<v Speaker 1>on native culture, native livelihoods. You know, that's that's a
<v Speaker 1>real thing, and and it you know, that's something that's
<v Speaker 1>been I've seen already. It's very inspiring to river activists
<v Speaker 1>in other parts of the world to have examples of
<v Speaker 1>of dam removal and and I'm hoping this is going
<v Speaker 1>to be the first. Well it's not the first. There's
<v Speaker 1>dammar removal, smaller damary mobiles have been going on all
<v Speaker 1>over the US.
<v Speaker 2>Also, it looks i mean, if there's a rich company
<v Speaker 2>doing or a rich country doing this, and you know,
<v Speaker 2>and they've had it for this long, it kind of shows, well,
<v Speaker 2>why are they doing it? There's obviously a lesson that
<v Speaker 2>they learned about this, okay, And so this is this
<v Speaker 2>is four dams that were removed from the Klamath River
<v Speaker 2>last last summer exactly.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, a whole cascade of four four large hydro power dams.
<v Speaker 1>So it's it's collectively the largest gammory mobile UH project
<v Speaker 1>in the world today.
<v Speaker 2>Were there were there arguments against it from like like opponents.
<v Speaker 2>What were they saying that's going to impact electricity or something?
<v Speaker 2>I mean, what were they trying to say?
<v Speaker 1>In the end, there was a broad consensus. The power
<v Speaker 1>company was not against it. You know, federal and state
<v Speaker 1>agencies were in favor of it, the tribes were in
<v Speaker 1>favor of it, fishing groups were in favor of it.
<v Speaker 1>It came down to some mostly ideological kind of culture
<v Speaker 1>war opposition from people that just didn't thought it was
<v Speaker 1>just a bad idea to take out dams, imagine that.
<v Speaker 1>And and then landowners that lived along the reservoirs, you.
<v Speaker 2>Know, they weren't going to have their legs anymore.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, yeah, they and you know that's they had
<v Speaker 1>some heartfelt concerns that they'd grown up with these but it's.
<v Speaker 2>I get it. Yeah, but still it's the collective good
<v Speaker 2>versus your own personal Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>I mean they didn't they didn't own that. The reservoirs
<v Speaker 1>they were they were never their reservoirs, and they were
<v Speaker 1>they were controlled Bad Power company and and uh uh
<v Speaker 1>so there was pretty pretty widespread consensus and and uh
<v Speaker 1>not necessarily in Sisku County. You know, there was a
<v Speaker 1>lot more opposition there just because of the overall political
<v Speaker 1>bent and and uh that's where some of the landowners were.
<v Speaker 2>But but uh, it was negligible electricity at this point.
<v Speaker 1>It was not it was not large generators of electricity,
<v Speaker 1>a lot of these dam these reservoirs had partially silted
<v Speaker 1>up at this point. They were two of them were
<v Speaker 1>one hundred years old. Uh, and and so and it's
<v Speaker 1>it's been amazingly watching this this last winter. You know,
<v Speaker 1>six thousand salmon actually breached the above where the lower
<v Speaker 1>dam had been, you know, for the first time in
<v Speaker 1>in uh in many many years. Uh, salmon actually were
<v Speaker 1>observed coming even so even up above the fourth dam
<v Speaker 1>up in which is up in Oregon. So it's a
<v Speaker 1>it's far from the only threat that salmon faced, but
<v Speaker 1>it's it's uh, it's great to have them gone. And
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's it's the it's a basic building block
<v Speaker 1>for for long term restoration of the species. And and
<v Speaker 1>uh and really I went to the Klamath River the
<v Speaker 1>restoration uh celebration last fall, and you know, all the
<v Speaker 1>various tribes from the Klamath tribe's way up in southern
<v Speaker 1>Oregon to to the to the coast where we're all there,
<v Speaker 1>and uh, it was a really inspiring and joyous celebration.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Bet god, it's got to be some nice man yep.
<v Speaker 2>And that those salmon populations are only going to grow too.
<v Speaker 2>They're just going to continue to hopefully get larger. What
<v Speaker 2>are other issues that have flicked the river. I mean it's.
<v Speaker 1>Probably well, yeah, it's it's it's the tributary, like I
<v Speaker 1>had mentioned, the Shasta, and you know, the various tributaries
<v Speaker 1>sometimes have their own agricultural diversions. Uh. And and warmth,
<v Speaker 1>you know, water warmth. This should this should really improve
<v Speaker 1>the water quality a lot, because the the reservoirs were
<v Speaker 1>notorious for being breeding grounds for fish disease and and
<v Speaker 1>for and blue green alga and for and for warming
<v Speaker 1>up the water. So but you know there's i mean,
<v Speaker 1>salmon face, all sorts of issues in the oceans too,
<v Speaker 1>with the warming oceans and pollution and oceans.
<v Speaker 2>I'm sure I'm sure the local water skiing community is
<v Speaker 2>really sad about it. Well yeah, I'm sure that's the
<v Speaker 2>tragic loss anyway. Man, Well, thanks a lot for being
<v Speaker 2>down to do this. I appreciate this, and uh, I
<v Speaker 2>hope people got something out of it. I mean we
<v Speaker 2>were all over the place, which was good, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>really interesting topics. And the fire suppression thing is a mega,
<v Speaker 2>mega issue out west.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and we're real worried right now in our county
<v Speaker 1>and all over about the whether we're going to continue
<v Speaker 1>to have federal support for wildfire resilience and mitigation work
<v Speaker 1>because of the you know, federal budget issues going on
<v Speaker 1>right now.
<v Speaker 2>So I feel like Trump would would just just despite California,
<v Speaker 2>even if it makes sense, he would just you know,
<v Speaker 2>he would he would deny things that make sense, like
<v Speaker 2>he would cut things that make sense, practical things, just
<v Speaker 2>to punish the state because he thinks it's all liberals.
<v Speaker 1>Well that's too bad, because Cisco County's sixty five percent
<v Speaker 1>vote Republican. You know, there's there's probably there's probably a
<v Speaker 1>lot more Republicans in California than there are in Wyoming overall.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, yeah, or a lot of a lot of
<v Speaker 2>Western states. Population of Wyoming's eight hundred.
<v Speaker 1>But nothing like that should be partisan anyway. It's it's
<v Speaker 1>this is something that affects rural, rural communities all over
<v Speaker 1>all over the West, and we're just starting to get
<v Speaker 1>some resources and still need I mean, current levels of
<v Speaker 1>resources are not enough, and so we need more and
<v Speaker 1>not less.
<v Speaker 2>The climate forecast for California is pretty messed up to
<v Speaker 2>I had a climatologist on a few years ago. Meteorologists
<v Speaker 2>and he was saying, it's it's not going to just
<v Speaker 2>be you know, drying or extra water. It's going to
<v Speaker 2>be booming bus cycles like these years where you just
<v Speaker 2>get dumped on abnormally high rain and then you know
<v Speaker 2>three years where it's drought, it's abnormally dry, yep, which
<v Speaker 2>means a lot more fire during those three years, a
<v Speaker 2>lot more regrowth and then a lot more fire too.
<v Speaker 2>So with that, without bringing back low burning fires, there's
<v Speaker 2>going to be a lot more mega infernos. So anyway, right, well,
<v Speaker 2>thanks a lot, Bruce, I appreciate it, and everybody else,
<v Speaker 2>take take take care of yourself, have a good rest.
<v Speaker 2>You have to know, go pug some bay