Episode 1, full transcript

WARREN: Episode One. Southern California Polar Bear.

Hi. Before we get underway. Remember this old joke. “Everybody complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” It was a great line… Mark Twain got the credit, although, he probably never said it. But it was pretty funny, up until now.

I’m Warren Olney. I’ve been a reporter in Los Angeles for a long time. 20 years on TV news, 25 more on public radio. Long enough to realize that my generation has mostly tinkered around with what’s turned out to be the most important development in the world.

We knew about what we called “global warming” for decades… but we ignored it, or we at best played it down despite all those warnings about a force that’s changing…well not just the weather, but everything. Ultimately, the way we go about living our daily lives.

In the news media, we did report that human activity was heating everything up worldwide. But, you know, we “balanced” those warnings with comforting denials, all too often from special interests. And we did that for much too long. 

Climate change is not just disconcerting. It’s scary. It’s stand-on-the-rooftop-and-shout scary.  It can be paralyzing.  But, as a member of the Denial Generation, I’ve gotta do better than that. For my children and their children and generations to come.  It’s too late to prevent climate change, but it’s not too late to help prevent it from being worse than it needs to be. 

Part of the denial process  is to look at a threat as something that’s down the road, that’s far, far away.  But climate change? It’s already here, right now in so many ways, In Our Backyard. And, that’s the name of this series.

[Theme in]

To draw more attention to that local reality. What are we doing, or not doing, about various aspects of Climate Change. How are they affecting real people? I want to begin to confront this worldwide calamity by changing how we think about it, how we talk about it, not as a global phenomenon but as part of the place where we live. 

[Theme out]

Bill: The simple fact is that the planet is warming. 

WARREN: That’s a voice you may have heard many times… It’s Bill Patzert, best known as “The Prophet of California Climate” at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. That’s about 20 minutes from downtown L.A. He’s an oceanographer, he’s a climatologist, and when it comes to Climate Change, he’s a philosopher. 

Bill: The interesting thing about the planet is, is that we had tremendous growth in civilization and population during the 20th century. And our civilization across the planet was built for the climate of the 20th century. But something's happening to the climate. As human population has expanded, we've changed the chemistry of the atmosphere. And that has had a huge impact on our climate. 

WARREN: So, it works both ways. We’ve impacted the climate, now the climate is having an impact on us.

Bill: Climate is fascinating topic because what is climate? It's the long-term usual weather conditions that we expect from day to day, season to season. Year to year and even century to century, and so climate has really been the major determinant of how culture and civilization develops on this planet. 

Bill: You know, we’re a solar powered planet, the amount of radiation coming in from the sun was balanced by the amount of radiation reflected back out into space. But now with CO2, which captures a tremendous amount of heat in the atmosphere. That balance has been changed. So more heat is being retained by the planet, and so we're experiencing something called global warming or as I like to call it, global heating. We're warming up. And so our civilization and our culture were developed in a pretty stable climate, are now spinning out of that balance. 

WARREN: Okay, so if you didn’t believe it before-- and maybe you didn’t want to -- things are changing all the time. 

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres: Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. 

Reporter: The last 10 years were the hottest ever recorded. In 2020, there were deadly heat waves around the world. 

Reporter: Now, what's happening in Australia is unprecedented, the bushfires have killed 18 people, they've killed close to half a billion animals.

Reporter: The lack of rain accompanied by heat waves. This is the worst drought to hit South Africa since 1982. 

Reporter: Up to one million species of plants and animals are at risk of extinction.

WARREN: All that evidence that seemed so far away for so long. We just can’t ignore it anymore. 

Bill: The great ice sheets are dramatically melting in Greenland and Antarctica as well as the terrestrial glaciers. 

Reporter: The Greenland ice sheet //  has lost a whopping three hundred and three gigatons of ice per year over the last decades.

Bill [00:18:38] In the last century sea level have risen more than 10 inches. 

Ari: Historic flooding from three massive tides in just one week has submerged Venice in several feet of water. 

Bill: Most of the great rivers of Asia are fed out of the meltwater from the glaciers in the Himalayas. The Mekong, the Yellow, Yangtze. And those glaciers are dramatically decreased. And so, you know, the whole lifeblood of Southeast Asia and China is really in danger from these glacier melts. 

WARREN: Of course all that stuff is happening all over the world. But, you know, Southern California is part of the planet. Turns out we don’t have to look far away, there is plenty of evidence accumulating all the time, right here. 

Bill: In the 144 year record, this is going to be the sixth driest year. 16 of the last 22 years have been below average. And so we're in a twenty two year drought. 

Reporter: California's drought has led to a historic water crisis. It's gotten so bad that this week the state's governor signed sweeping new legislation on groundwater pumping. 

Bill: More than two hundred million dead trees in the Sierras up and down the spine of California. 

Reporter: Right now, there are nearly 30 major fires burning across the Golden State. Six of the largest 20 fires in California history breaking out this year.

Bill: Today beaches are disappearing in Southern California.

Reporter: Beachgoers are asked to stay away from the bluffs there as another bluff collapses. This is in the Del Mar area.

Bill: So global heating and all its impacts. Those are scientific facts, they're not up for discussion anymore, they're up for action. So it's time for all of us to get off our tuchuses, alright, and change the way we live, the way we treat each other and the way we treat the environment because environmental justice is human justice. 

WARREN: Environmental justice is an important part of this series and so is how we think about the place where we live. And that reminds me of a story. 

My grandfather and my great  grandfather helped John Muir start the Sierra Club, 129 years ago. They were all  conservationists in the Teddy Roosevelt mold -- if you preserve a pristine wilderness, you can develop the rest of the land however you want to. 

But here’s the point. As their efforts at preservation went on, my relatives found themselves divided over one of California’s most important conservation debates of the 20th century. 

When the city of San Francisco wanted to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley, part of the newly created Yosemite National Park. John Muir was horrified and demanded the valley be saved. Towering cliffs, spectacular waterfalls, all that stuff. My grandfather agreed, but my great grandfather, who’d been mayor of Oakland, he wanted to see more urban expansion. So he supported the dam. And, in 1923, the dam was finally completed. It’s been there ever since.

Now, that tradeoff that divided my own family, illustrates how industrial and economic growth have so often won the day in California. And it illustrates more than that. 

The name “Hetch Hetchy” is actually a corruption of a word from the Sierra Miwok tribal language. It refers to a type of wild grass. Now as the waters rose in the Valley while the dam was being filled, those grasses were flooded out. So were the bushes and trees, so were the habitats of deer and other wild animals. And finally, so were the villages of Native American tribes who actually lived there.  And once they were gone from Hetch Hetchy, the tribes were not allowed to live anywhere else in Yosemite National Park.  

It turned out that preserving natural sites “just as they were”, didn’t include the people.

More recent conservationists tried to do better. 

David Brower -- the Sierra Club leader some 50 years after John Muir -- said this: “Native Americans tread so lightly on Earth's surface that they leave no trace.” Well intended, sympathetic, no doubt. But he missed the people for the trees. He failed to recognize that the Native Americans were sophisticated land managers. And we can learn a lot from them in these days of climate change. 

[Mux]

Gerald: Can I tell you a story real quick? 

WARREN: Now, when Gerald Clark asked me that, I had to settle down to listen.  He’s not just an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside, he’s also  a cattle rancher, he’s a sculptor. And he’s a member of the Cahuilla Band of California Indians. That’s what his story’s about.  

Gerald: When I was in third grade, my dad came to talk to my class about Indians because we were studying Indians and I was the only Indian in my school, I think, other than my sister. And so about the time he was supposed to show up, me and my my buddies who played dodgeball together, what have you, we were all at the window waiting for him and my friends who are all non natives. They said, I wonder what color horse he's going to ride up on. And I was like, well, he drives a Ford. You know, I was all confused. And then once he got there, they were asking if you lived in the teepee, has he ever shot a buffalo with a bow and arrow? And so at that young age, I was like, “wow, these kids are idiots and they don't know anything.” And I was shocked. Well, 30 something years later there I am talking to my daughter's third or fourth grade class about Indians. And all the kids were asking the same questions. So in that time span, we think that // we've made movement towards, you know, destroying stereotypes and stuff. But they asked all the same questions. It was, it was kind of funny and depressing at the same time.  

WARREN: Funny and depressing, they may be. But, stereotypes and misconceptions have a long history in California.

Gerald: When the Europeans got here, they saw this pristine wilderness. They thought it was God's gift for them for risking their lives to come halfway across the earth. But it was a garden. They were in the Garden of Eden, but they didn't recognize the gardeners. 

[Beat]

Gerald: You know, when you think of California today, it's not just one state. It could easily be three states or even more. And then in terms of climate, environment, it's even more varied. And so what you had were smaller tribal communities who developed over time these sustainable lifestyles that worked with the environment and with the ecological systems in each place within California. And, so, traditionally, you don't see the, the large civilizations like you saw maybe in the Mississippian cultures of the Midwest or the large indigenous civilizations in Mexico.

[Mux]

Gerald: The indigenous peoples here would we prune, would plant, would burn and took care of the land and indigenous peoples even planted grasses that were inedible to human beings. But it was edible to deer, to elk, to rabbits. And so today, when we think about hunting and fishing, you go out and maybe you're lucky and you get something. But the native people, they kind of had their thumb on the scale. So when they went hunting or fishing, they knew where to go because they had set the groundwork.

WARREN: I just love hearing these stories from a Native American point of view. And, you know, it turns out that policymakers all over the world are interested in knowledge that those white settlers -- my ancestors included -- dismissed as unscientific. But, starting with the Spaniards who arrived in 1542, the white Europeans failed to realize that living in tune with nature was a matter of life and death.

Gerald: By the time the European explorers stumbled their way into the Western Hemisphere, those tribal communities, those indigenous communities that failed to create this, this symbiotic and sustainable relationship with their environments, they had disappeared. They had died out or they merged with other communities. And so when I teach these ideas, what we call it today, is traditional ecological knowledge. And what those were were rules or protocols that were set up by tribes to survive, to sustainably survive in these environments. And this traditional ecological knowledge, what we call TEK. That's thousands of years of knowledge that's been handed down generation to generation. And, you know, sometimes people stereotype or romanticize native culture as simply being spiritual or simply being at one with nature. Almost wild, right? The way I teach in my classes, this is an indigenous intellectual tradition that's been handed down. 

WARREN: Lorene Sisquoc, is a member of the Mountain Cahuilla and Fort  Sill Apache band… 

Lorene: I can mainly speak for Southern California because that's where I've grown up and what I've tried to learn about and been fortunate to be around some of the old timers that were able to pass what they learned from the original old timers. And so it's, it’s bits and pieces. And what they shared or the picture they painted was a beautiful picture.

WARREN: It is a beautiful picture. Native Californians living sustainably for thousands of years by working the land in their own way.             

Lorene: We were different in that most everything that we used was made out of plants from our homes, our tools, our soap, our weapons, clothing, of course, medicines and foods and, you know, that, but also the baskets and utilitarian things. You just about everything was made out of plants. For instance, like on yucca. So the yucca we used to root for the soap. Then next comes up the leaves and that can be used for your, for anything, for making sandals to skirts to sewing material, to paint brushes, to all kinds of things. And then then the stalk comes up and if you get it when it's young, when it's first coming up, that's when all the sweetness is in there, all the juice and the sweetness. We can bake it. And that's just like, oh, my gosh like a sweet potato or something. They, they’re are really good. We also use parts of some of the yucca. They have red strips in there on the root too that you could use in your baskets. So it's like it's like a grocery store out there. Something is available all the time. 

WARREN: Well, the white Europeans, they didn’t see all that. They denigrated the native population as hunter gatherers. They enslaved them Spanish missions, they introduced deadly diseases. And after hundreds of years of that -- after gold was discovered and California became a state -- killing Natives was the law of the land. 

Gerald: There were bounties for Indian people here in California, you could turn in ears. You could turn in hands. But it also led to a secondary industry was you would kill parents, then you would capture the children and you would actually sell the children into indentured servitude for many of the farms and ranches throughout California. Patrick Wolfe, who's a scholar on genocide, he said genocide comes in three ways. And it's not just murder. That's how most of us believe genocide is just murder, but it's also incarceration. And that could be in prisons. But that could also be seclusion of peoples on a specific land basis, like reservations. 

WARREN: Just listen to some numbers that tell the story in all its horror. When the Spanish first arrived in 1542, the Native American population of California was roughly 300,000. By 1900, it was 16,000. Now, there’s murder, there’s incarceration, and there’s another kind of genocide. 

Gerald: Assimilation. Cultural assimilation is part of genocide. And so my grandparents met in boarding school at the Sherman Indian School there in Riverside. And you weren't allowed to speak your language. You weren't allowed to, to sing your songs or dance your dances. That's cultural genocide. 

WARREN: That school is where Lorene Sisquoc is now the curator, and she’s also a teacher there. There were about a hundred of those schools across the US, paid for by the government. Both on and off reservations. And they had an ugly objective.

Lorene: What they called solve the Indian problem. One of the things they wanted to do was totally immerse the children into the mainstream culture and wipe out any any remnants of their culture and language and traditions. So one way of doing that was to take the kids from their families and bring them to the off reservation boarding schools.

WARREN: Not all the Native families were forced to send their kids to boarding schools. To put it mildly they had “limited options,” so some of them did it voluntarily. But either way, they were taught something different from what the tribes had been doing for so very, very long. 

Lorene: It's all agriculture at these schools in the early days. Agriculture was the main push. Everybody was supposed to be learning to be a farmer in the late eighteen hundreds to probably up to the 30s. So there was a lot of propaganda about that, about that that was old and wrong or backwards. 

WARREN: There again is that separation between man and nature. That was part of the European tradition and Gerald sees that as a deeply held religious idea.

Gerald: Even the Christian faith, you go to the very beginning. Eve ate from the tree of Knowledge, and that was seen as being the fall. It wasn't the book. It wasn't the building. Right. It was a tree. So in the very beginning, nature is seen as almost kind of an adversarial relationship to humanity. And so the best thing that humans can do is stay out of nature and let nature take its place. But that worldview puts humanity outside of nature. Right. And many indigenous communities, we don't even have a word for nature. And I've heard once that as soon as you name something, you recognize it as outside of yourself. And this idea that's outside of yourself, then you can leave it alone. But that also means you can, you can abuse it and take advantage of it. Even the idea of natural resources, you know, resources are something to be used. 

WARREN: Even though there’s no word for nature, such a fascinating point. You know, today, Gerald and others have been able to revive that traditional thinking, and even teaching them at the university level, where once native practices were scorned...

Gerald: As being kind of quaint. Fairy tale. Right. But what that's really teaching is that the environment and our climate, every -- all of it, the earth itself is we should be looking at that just like we look at our legs or arms or our hearts. And so I think it's hugely important that we leave this idea that the world is made up of many individuals and we begin to adapt to the environment and see it as part of us. And it takes a community to do that. 

WARREN: Gerald’s not overstating it. When he talks about the conscious revival of Native American traditions that is going on now, he’s very careful about it.

Gerald: So I don't want your listeners to think that all California Indians are practicing these practices. We're still in survival mode a good bit. In fact, some of the classes I've taken have been from non natives, and some people might be surprised to hear that. But, you know, for the last couple of hundred years, our people have been focused simply on survival. And luckily, some scholars, some anthropologists have learned about this stuff. And so, you know, I read books and I go to workshops and I learn about them as well. And, and now I'm teaching my daughters. So it's kind of like some of this knowledge was taken out by necessity, us just trying to survive. And we've kind of gotten it back and now we're promoting it again within our communities.

WARREN: Now, of course, there’s no way to restore Southern California to an earlier time when you could apply all that on a wide scale, but there’s a lot of wisdom in the indigenous relationship to the land. And, it’s increasingly being recognized. But, the current restoration of those traditions by Native Americans themselves, does have important implications for how we deal with climate change. 

Other organizations are discovering new ways of thinking. Along with some hope for the future. 

Alex: Our mission is to safeguard natural and human communities in the face of our changing climate. 

WARREN: Now, that’s Alex Warneke with the Climate Science Alliance based in San Diego.

Alex: We do this in many ways, but primarily through leading activities and creating partnerships which increase awareness of climate impacts and most importantly, promote solutions and also facilitate actions within our community. So this can look differently day to day. Sometimes it looks like bringing together teams of scientists, planners, practitioners to make sure we have the most up to date and relevant climate information. And sometimes it looks like working alongside youth and educators and the public to make sure that they understand what's going on in terms of climate change in our community, and most importantly, that they have the tools for change. 

[Beat]

Alex: We all have different skills, whether you be a teacher or a student or a scientist, everyone has a different gift to give. Right, so we just try to really take this holistic approach.

WARREN: Now, when you think back about the history we’ve learned, the way Native Americans were treated, and the way their practices were disdained, you’ll see that the work of the Climate Science Alliance hasn’t come easy. 

Alex: When we first started this organization, there was just a huge gap of climate education in our region. It wasn't necessarily integrated into the standards yet for formal education. And so when the Next Generation science standards came out and it was a requirement that we had to teach climate change in the classroom, a lot of the teachers kind of panicked, right? There, like, oh, man, we haven't we can't even talk about climate change because who knows what'll happen. Like, parents will come after us. Like, we don't know how to talk about it. We don't even -- there's no information. 

WARREN: New standards. They can lead to panic. They come from various teaching organizations. 

Alex: And so slowly, once we kind of identified that need, we started creating curriculum and resources. We started creating communities of practice right. Where we got this information into the hands of educators. We train them how to use it. We created tools for them. 

WARREN: Remember what I said at the very outset, my kids and their kids and your kids and generations beyond are going to face daunting challenges that we’ve never even considered, so it’s important to start teaching them early. 

Alex: So a lot of times the concept of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere and warming the planet is kind of a hard thing to know, especially if maybe you're like a five year old. And so we use these metaphors like the heat trapping blanket around the Earth. So we bring this big red blanket and a big blowup globe and we talk to the kids about the greenhouse gases are becoming a big blanket around the earth. And we put the blanket around the earth. And what's going to happen if you put a blanket on you, you're going to get warm. Right. And sometimes the students go under the blanket. They love it. It's great. And it really gets across to them like this concept of greenhouse gases // and creating this heat trapping blanket around the earth. And then what does that mean? Then we start to talk about that. 

WARREN: And all that fallout from climate change that seems so far away, the alliance has found ways to bring it all closer to home. 

Alex: Here in San Diego, and then you've gone to the world famous San Diego Zoo. You've never seen a polar bear. Right ?So we're not necessarily going to be talking about polar bears and the ice caps melting because that is not relevant to a student in Southern California. But what we will talk about is the shelled animals in the rocky intertidal off of our coast and how they might be impacted by ocean acidification. Or we might talk about the flora and fauna in the local forests that might be impacted by wildfires. Heck, we don't even have to talk about nature there because many of our students have been impacted by wildfires. And most importantly, on the flip side of it was the 10 things you could do, right, to help protect the earth, to help give wildlife a break. Actions that people could take every day, whether that be recycling, staying on trails when you're out in nature, creating homes for wildlife, all sorts of different actions.

WARREN: Tell me what you would say to somebody who said, oh, yeah, that sounds great, but it's only a small thing and it's not going to make a big difference. 

Alex: It's funny you say that because I actually get that a lot. And what I, what I often say is it took a lot of small decisions and bigger decisions to get us where we are here. So it's going to take a lot of small decisions and big decisions to get where we need to be. Right? And it's not going to, climate change didn't happen overnight. The solution is not going to happen overnight. But we've trained, our students alone, over a hundred thousand students in our region. Right. So maybe one of those kids just recycling. I still think it makes a difference. But one hundred thousand students doing that and then that ripple effects of everyone working to make a difference. And so for me, that is impact. Right. And it's not necessarily like a huge like, “oh, we're joining the Paris Climate Accords.” That's important, too, but it's this really integrated community approach where we can really make a difference and look out for each other.

WARREN: Now, it’s only been six years since the Climate Science Alliance got started. But the ripple effects, they’re already under way, and one example is Audrey Carver. 

Audrey: I was fortunate enough to grow up as a little hippie wild child in the mountains of Idyllewild, so I experienced a lot of the environment there. I was lucky to grow up pretty much entirely without shoes running around in my backyard, which is part of the San Jacinto National Forest, you know, climbing trees building forts and fairy houses and really spending a lot of time just fully immersed in that space. 

WARREN: Pretty idyllic life, but it didn’t last long...

Audrey: So the first time I evacuated from a wildfire, I was eight years old. I remember my parents came into my room, said we had 15 minutes to put all of our stuff into a plastic tub because the firemen had come to our door and told us it was time to leave. And, you know, if you have not experienced wildfire before. It's scary. So there's ashes falling from the sky and it's red outside and, you know, everyone's a little bit, a little bit scared that when they leave their home, they won't come back to it. So my sister protested and our 11 chickens were put into a dog crate in the back of our car because she didn't feel it was fair to leave behind. And, you know, and we left and the Esperanza fire killed five firemen that year. So that was a really hard one. Coming from a town of three thousand people. Not only did we lose a lot of the natural space that we were all so fond of, but we lost some really important members of the community. My friend's dad was one of them. You know, we've evacuated since then. Lost homes, luckily not mine yet or thankfully, but, you know, a lot of the space that I grew up playing in is no longer there. 

WARREN: You’re going to hear more about wildfires in a future episode. The important point here is that’s what got Audrey to start volunteering with the Climate Science Alliance.

Audrey: So, for me, that has meant illustrating impact reports for them, as well as designing curriculums for Climate Kids Outreach Program and basically just kind of whatever artistic help they need.

WARREN: After evacuating from wildfires and graduating from high school, Audrey didn’t mess around, she took a gap year in Ecuador before starting college.

Audrey: And from there since I spoke Spanish and had experience living abroad, I took a job in Costa Rica as a coordinator for like a youth exchange program, basically, just so that I could get paid to kind of backpack around and and bum around rural Costa Rica for a bit. 

WARREN: Now, Audrey is being modest. Here’s Alex again.

Alex: She had mentioned to me that, “oh, I'm going down to Costa Rica to help out. I would love to build a climate kids program there.” And by golly, she did it. So she created a, a bunch of murals at the studio and she taught them all about climate change. So in terms of creating ambassadors, right, it's a really great, it's a really great model. You teach them and then they go and they teach others. It's amazing.

WARREN: Audrey’s now at Tufts University in Massachusetts and she’s studying art and anthropology and the environment. And, I had to ask her what I worry about when I think about what her generation and others, as well, are going to be facing.

Warren: Is it hard for you to be hopeful?

Audrey: It's apocalyptic, right? It's hard to be hopeful when you're looking at the face of a problem that large and realizing that there will be inevitable change to the world that I love right now. Right. That is hard. And it can feel so hopeless and so scary and overwhelming. However, I am hopeful because I think that if humans are really good at anything, it's adapting. You know, I moved from Idlewild to Ecuador when I was 18. I spoke no Spanish. I didn't know anybody in the country. I didn't know how to take the buses. I didn't know how to eat the food. I was lost. And in five months I had a host family. I had a job. I can speak the language, you know, and I felt comfortable there. So like that was a crazy adaptation. And every time I go somewhere new, I find people who are kind and people who are smart and people who are resourceful and people who care a lot. And so I think that as a group, we're very resilient and that in this dramatic change that everybody is experiencing and will continue to experience, the core of our human selves is going to adapt. And it's going to have to do so pretty quickly and I think that we're absolutely capable of doing that. And I've seen that in all of the beautiful, kind, hardworking people that are working on sustainable solutions now and that are building resilient communities now. 

WARREN: You know, I'm very inspired to hear those words from Audrey Carver, and I think you'll be inspired, too, to hear hope in the face of climate change. 

When I started this series, I worried that people would be giving up in the face of doom. Listeners often turn off and tune out when the subject comes up. But we're aiming to bring this global problem, these global problems, down to human scale and to help end the paralysis that's inhabiting public debate and delaying the needed action against wildfires and heat islands and drought and the rising seas. 

You're going to hear about all those challenges in the weeks ahead and how communities are organizing to meet them head on with hope for more thoughtful ways of living in Southern California. After all, we really don't have any choice. It's in our backyard.

Next week, episode two, Power Lines… 

In Our Backyard is an original series from Inside Voices Media and WOCom.

It’s hosted by me, Warren Olney.

Our producer is Julie Carli.

With fact-checking by Alec Cowan.

Sound design was done by Katie McMurran.

This series was made possible through the generous support of Climate Resolve, which addresses global climate change with local action. Learn more about Climate Resolve at climate resolve dot org.

Special thanks to Shasta Gaughen, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Pala Tribe, for recommending Tending the Wild by M. Kat Anderson. This has helped shape our understanding of California and the land that we live on. If you’d want to know more about Traditional Ecological Knowledge check out the book, there’s a link on our show notes. 

Thanks to Risa Johnson and Amanda Uhlrich from the Desert Sun newspaper - you took our calls and were generous with your contacts.

And thanks to Audrey Carver for our cover art.