Climate Stewardship: Taking Collective Action to Protect California 9780520976450

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Climate Stewardship

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Anne G. Lipow Endowment Fund in Social Justice and Human Rights.

Climate Stewardship ta k i ng c ollective action to pro t e c t california

Adina Merenlender with Brendan Buhler Foreword by Greg Sarris Illustrations by Obi Kaufmann

U n i v e r s i t y of c a l i f or n i a pr e ss

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Adina Merenlender and Brendan Buhler Illustrations at chapter starts are by Obi Kaufmann. Illustration p. 235, The Sea Is Rising, is by Janina Larenas. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Merenlender, Adina Maya, 1963– author. | Buhler, Brendan, author. Title: Climate stewardship : taking collective action to protect California / Adina Merenlender with Brendan Buhler. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lc cn 2021005201 (print) | lc cn 2021005202 (ebook) | i s bn 9780520378940 (paperback) | isbn 9780520976450 (ebook) Subjects: lc sh : Climatic changes—California. | Environmental protection—California—Citizen participation. | Environmental management—California. Classification: lc c qc 984.C2 m 47 2021 (print) | lc c qc984.C2 (ebook) | ddc 363.738/74609794—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005201 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005202 Manufactured in the United States of America 30

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This book is dedicated to climate stewards everywhere: the future is in our hands.

Contents

Foreword by Greg Sarris

ix

Preface: United by Nature, Guided by Science xiii Acknowledgments

xvii

1

Extreme Events: Life in the New Normal 1

2

Big Bay to Tech Town

3

A Changing Harvest

4

Keeping Forests Green and Snow White 93

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Climate Canaries

6

Los Angeles Plants Itself

7

Riding the California Current In the End 237 References Index

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127 157 195

Foreword

I’ve told this story a hundred times. Maybe there is no other story worth telling these days. I am driving renowned Pomo basket maker and medicine woman Mabel McKay back to the Yocha Dehe reservation in Yolo County after a talk she gave to a classroom of undergraduates at Stanford University. It is 1988, early autumn. On Highway 80, somewhere near Vacaville, Mabel gazed out the car window to the dry hills. Then she turned back to me. “Everything’s going to burn,” she said. “Everything’s going to go dry. There will be no escaping it. Going to burn, top to bottom. Even the ocean, it will go hot. That’s my latest Dream, what I seen in my Dream. We’re coming to that point.” “What do I do?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do?” Mabel listened, then immediately broke into laughter. She seemed to be making fun of me. “That’s cute: ‘What am I supposed to do?’” “No, Mabel, I’m serious.” She became quiet, and after a moment answered, “You live the best way you know how, what else.” I was used to Mabel’s uncanny interlocutory style, her upending conversation in a way that made you think, wonder. The last

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Dreamer, or prophet, amongst the Pomo nations of Sonoma, Lake, and Mendocino Counties, she was the wisest of teachers. She was the last of many things, the last descendent of the Lolsel Pomo of eastern Lake County and therefore the last to speak her language. She was the last sucking doctor anywhere in California. Indian doctors capable of extracting disease by sucking were considered the most powerful. Her ancestors lived along Clear Lake, the oldest lake in North America, for thousands of years. Arrowheads and other artifacts from the region date back over 14,000 years. But who is counting? These ancestors experienced deep pine forests and sprawling wetlands, and then about 8,000 years ago, with a warming climate, a much drier landscape of grasses and oaks. They adapted, transforming their diet and no doubt patterns and places of social organization. “The people, they knowed what to do,” Mabel said. “They paid attention to their world and their Dreams. The world gives us the Dreams.” What Mabel seemed to be describing was a relationship with the world so intimate that the dichotomy between person and place, spiritual and physical, was collapsed. This intimacy with the environment no doubt was what predicated a culture of reciprocity and responsibility, ensuring continuance for a people and their world over eons. Of course, Mabel, who died in 1993, might tell you that I’m talking too much, too busy trying to explain things. Often, I drove Mabel to visit sacred places she remembered as a child: Clear Lake shore where she danced in a Roundhouse with her grandmother, a cave where a medicine man kept his cloak of white eagle feathers. Many of these places were buried under roads and housing tracts. A creek bed where Mabel gathered sedge root for basketmaking sits under Lake Sonoma. Mabel wasn’t preoccupied with the loss. She kept telling stories. So often the stories wan-

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foreword

dered, or so it seemed to me, and only later, upon reflection, would I make a connection between them and then understand them in a new way, or better said, make meaning. So it is now with a recounting of her apocalyptic Dream of fire. I’ve told that Dream over and over in light of the climate disaster and the associated horrific fires—I’ve told it as proof of a dire prophecy. But I’ve left out the larger context of Mabel’s revelation. I’ve left out other parts of the story, which I’m urgently reminded of. Earlier in the day, while talking to the Stanford students, Mabel described the end of the world as coming in fire and destruction, again as shown to her in her Dream. She told the students that “the world would be renewed again, that people would be planted here again, but we won’t know who those people will be.” I’d heard Mabel before tell of the end of the world, and perhaps influenced by my Catholic upbringing, her description of the end had been reminiscent of the description in the Book of Revelations. I hadn’t thought of the world being renewed, perhaps because the Biblical version had influenced me to think otherwise. Maybe in light of current world events I’d been plain pessimistic, until now. If global warming and horrific fires have come to pass, wouldn’t I also see a renewed world? Wasn’t it possible? In Climate Stewardship: Taking Collective Action to Protect California, authors Adina Merenlender and Brenden Buhler describe the challenges, indeed much of the environmental degradation, in California, but more, they relate stories of hope—stories of individuals banding together in numerous ways to address the destruction that, as they say, “will help stave off climate disruption and make communities and ecosystems more resilient to change.” In seven chapters, the authors focus on particular climate concerns—the wildfires, the compromised San Francisco Bay wetlands, the harmful

foreword

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consequences of large-scale corporate farming, shrinking forests, drier deserts, the Los Angeles metropolis of endless concrete, the rising Pacific Ocean temperature and changing currents—and then relate multiple stories of communities of environmental activists working to address those concerns. What all of them have in mind— whether they’re teachers working with fourth graders to restore Bay Area wetlands, landowners joining with environmental organizations to create habitat corridors, a Native tribe planting an orchard of no-till olives, or a group of “Weed Warriors” removing invasive plants from the Desert Mountains—what all of them are doing by organizing and collecting together is preparing for, and therefore showing the way to, a renewed world. As I see it, they are the part of Mabel’s story that provides hope. Are they not working to make that part of her Dream of a renewed world as true as the dried hills and fires? They are living the best way we know how. Greg Sarris Chairman, Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria September 2020

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foreword

Preface United by Nature, Guided by Science

The solution to climate grief is climate hope, and hope comes from taking action that will help stave off climate disruption and make communities and ecosystems more resilient to change. Collective action, instead of just individual behavior change, is the best way to solve the climate crisis. Individual actions to reduce one’s own carbon footprint have value, but the transformation needed requires long-term, multigenerational societal engagement. In other words, installing solar at home is a help, but advancing community choice clean energy options for everyone is a solution. Connecting with others on actions that transcend self is also a path to joy, and without joy it’s hard to have hope. Communitydriven initiatives, including environmental stewardship, community science, civic action, communication, and education, can create innovative practices and a shared vision that result in collective impact. These are exciting times in which communities are recognizing the status quo is untenable and are adopting novel approaches, from ecological restoration to promoting regenerative  economies focused on thriving rather than infinite growth. Deepening our interconnection with nature and strengthening our interdependence with one another will ensure that resulting

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collective impacts will be just and sustainable and benefit the entire community of life. Diversity abounds in California. There are 10 bioregions that make up a global biodiversity hotspot, a tremendous diversity of Indigenous people, a huge variety of cultures, and places that span small towns to megacities with widely ranging socioeconomic conditions. This leads to a wide variety of contexts and ways of knowing. Local communities are best suited to identify, design, and implement what is needed to improve their community and ecosystem resilience. Therefore, most of the climate actions described throughout this book rely on group efforts and are shaped by place in that they are influenced by local social-ecological context. Climate connects to everything and we hope you will have a chance to take a University of California (UC) Climate Stewards course to connect with others and organizations pursuing collective action in shared places. UC Climate Stewards focuses on climate literacy; field experiences in earth systems, water, energy, and agriculture; as well as communication training, community science, and service opportunities. Correspondingly, this book focuses on nature-based solutions that address impacts to ecosystems, water, agriculture, and energy and can be advanced by local communities. We begin with the urgency to act that often follows extreme events. Then we move on to see how groups are building increased resilience through a variety of approaches, including where people of diverse backgrounds go outdoors to steward the land and the waters. We’ll meet others who are reconnecting the landscape on a large scale through ecosystems management and habitat corridors, as well as farmers and their neighbors who are supporting sustainable agricultural practices that can help to store carbon and

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p r e fac e

save water. We’ll show you how communities living in forestlands are drawing on traditional ecological knowledge for forest health and trying to make the most of wood products while restoring habitat. You’ll learn how protecting unique desert ecosystems while capturing the Sun’s energy requires strategic planning and involves many players. California’s inner-city communities reveal how environmental justice is an essential front in the climate crisis and how local action improves neighborhoods and regenerates urban ecology. On the coast, we’ll meet ocean lovers fighting for intertidal ecosystems. Throughout it all, we’ll share how education and communication lay the foundation for collective actions that can build a more just and sustainable society. Climate stewardship is a social movement that engages science, not a science that engages society. So, while we are proponents of scientific research and evaluation, we didn’t use a critical research lens to assess the project goals or outcomes shared by others; rather, our goal was to listen, interpret, and share in a way that is enjoyable, inspiring, and even amusing at times. There are many different groups leading the way and it’s impossible to cover them all. The stories in this book are but a few examples of the community actions underway in California and attempt to cover a wide range of geographies and voices, as well as a diversity of threats and solutions. These stories present timeless concepts and themes but are also a snapshot in time amid a rapidly changing world. Seeing is believing.

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Acknowledgments

There are many people who helped make this book possible. We owe special thanks to Elizabeth Archer for being our logistical savior, Lou Doucette for her powerful line editing, Linda Gorman for her copyediting, Julie Van Pelt for being the project editor, Thérèse Shere for indexing, and Stacy Eisenstark for her editorial leadership. Russ Di Fiori, Kate Meadows, Greg Ira, Sarah-Mae Nelson, and Christina Sloop provided essential reviews and feedback. And thanks as well to Wendy Bingham, who appreciates the power of UC California Naturalists. An amazing number of people provided insightful interviews, and many of them also provided photographs; others on this list suggested topics, connected us to experts, and provided reference and background material. We could not fit everything into the book, but everyone made an invaluable contribution. We owe a debt of gratitude to Joe Aguilar, Shelly Backlar, Christine Baker, Irvin Barragan, Cameron Barrows, Tracy Bartlett, “BB,” Renata Brillinger, Todd Brockman, Megan Brousseau, Susan Butler-Graham, Dylan Chapple, Jennifer Codron, Marian Coensgen, Alicia Cordero, Jennifer Cover, Ruth Dahlquist-Willard, Jim Danza, Nina Danza, Peter Day, David Diaz Avelar, Sabrina Drill, Alisa Duncan, Claire Elliot, Laura

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Engeman, Farrah Farzaneh, Jora Fogg, Ben Foster, Dora FrietzeArmenta, Brook Gamble, Michael Gillogly, Hilary Glann, Kristen Goodrich, Dave Graves, Morgan Gray, Greg Giusti, Cris Gutierrez, Justin Han, Mary Ellen Hannibal, Margaret Holub, Dan Harper, Susan Harrison, Erica Hart, Katharine Hayhoe, Tanya Henderson, Araceli Hernandez, Lila Higgins, Jaime Jahncke, Katherine JarvisShean, Kevin Joe, Nathalie Johnson, Susie Kocher, Cathy Koehler, Carly Kupka, Janina Larenas, Sue Lebeck, Matthew Lewis, Ellen Lockert, Cindy Looy, Elissa Lynn, Andrew Madrigal, Sofia Maldonado Ramírez, David Mauk, Craig McNamara, Sean McNamara, Candice and Dino Meneghin, Lisa Micheli, Marina Mihailova, Veronica Miranda, Eileen Mitro, Max Moritz, Kirsten Mouradian, Ian Nelson, Sarah-Mae Nelson, James Oliver, Randall Osterhuber, Steve Ostoja, Katie Panarella, Jonathan Parfrey, John Parker, Margiana PetersenRockney, Greg Pierce, Ava Post Koo, Mary Powell, Sasha Rabin, Arjay Raffety, Judith Redmond, Claire Robinson, Laurette Rogers, Sarah Ryan, Russell Scofield, Susan Sher, Whendee Silver, Amy Southern, Erica Spotswood, KC Stover, Charles Striplen, Camille Swezy, Ka Tchieng, Morgan Tingley, Bill Tripp, Valeri Nicol Vasquez, Dave Wahl, Gary Ward, Jeannette Warnert, Laurie Wayburn, Jim Weigand, Lisa White, and Michael Yang. Brendan would like to thank his wife, Stephanie, for her help and expertise, as well as his son, Jim, age four, for washing his grubby hands for 20 full seconds, every time. He would also like to thank his friend Eric Simons, who hates being thanked in books. Adina would like to thank Kerry, Noah, and Ariella Heise for being the light of her life.

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acknowledgments

1

Extreme Events Life in the New Normal

It was late on October 8, 2017, after a long, hot, dry day, when one of California’s greatest disasters struck: I locked my keys in the van. Over a hundred UC California Naturalists had gathered for a Regional Rendezvous at Pepperwood Preserve in Sonoma County to do what people do at Pepperwood: observe nature, catch up on the latest environmental science, and share advice on land and water management. The preparations had started early that morning, with muffins and coffee put out and tall banners set up behind the registration table to direct the naturalists to the day’s activities. Michael Gillogly, Preserve Manager, warned that the banners might be blown down as the winds picked up later in the afternoon. It was a hot but pleasant day. We didn’t finish packing up until late in the evening, which is when I locked the keys in the van. After the tow truck driver retrieved the keys and we were on our way home, we smelled a hint of smoke and it was later still when Gillogly got a call from a neighbor. She smelled smoke, too. Within minutes, Gillogly saw an orange glow in the eastern sky. A wall of fire was quickly approaching. While Gillogly rushed to secure the preserve’s vehicles and property, furious winds were driving the fire west at unprecedented speed. Suddenly an adjacent

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hill burst into flame, a towering inferno reaching into the treetops. It was clear Gillogly had to leave immediately. He and a neighbor drove along the small country road honking their horns to warn others. “If we didn’t see lights turn on or anyone come out, we went up to the door.” After his family departed in another vehicle and the neighbors were warned, Gillogly, along with two other vehicles, quickly departed. “For the entire three miles to Calistoga Road, everything was on fire on both sides of us,” he later recalled in a Pepperwood field note. “All the houses, everything we passed, it was all burning. I could feel the heat inside my cab from the fire. Trees had fallen on the road, and in one stretch, rocks dislodged by the fire had rolled down a steep bank and were in the way. Luckily, we were able to get around all of those. My adrenaline was pumping as I dodged everything, and I had to keep my eyes on the road and go fast, but not so fast that I crashed and lost the opportunity to get out. Pretty soon we were through it.” He rejoined his family in Santa Rosa and fled south on Highway 101, another harrowing experience. “The fire was already on the freeway and jumping over it. People had to get off by going down the on ramp the wrong way; it was the only way you could get out of there. The wind was blowing hard, burning embers were flying across the freeway, and the grass alongside the road was bursting into flames. It was just insane.” Gillogly and his family lost their home on the preserve that night, as did many in the path of the Tubbs fire. Pepperwood’s rangelands were mostly burned over, although the main building was spared. While Gillogly was trying to get himself and many others to safety that night, his boss, Lisa Micheli, president and CEO of Pepperwood Preserve, was sleeping soundly, having recently figured out how to silence her phone during the wee hours of the night.

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The next morning, she awoke to more than 60 messages. The first voicemail she played said that everyone was alive. Once the shock wore off, she was grateful that she got some sleep because she was going to need it. She had to assess the damage at Pepperwood and take care of the staff, neighbors, and larger community demanding information on what to do, from toxic waste to tree removal. This fire was a game changer because many of the thousands of homes and businesses the fire destroyed were within the urban footprint of Santa Rosa. Now every autumn is tinged with dread for most Californians as part of a new normal. Since the fire, Micheli says, everyone in the Sonoma County environmental community has come together to learn what had happened to Pepperwood, other preserves, county and state parks, and many other special places that were devastated by the 2017 fires, and what each organization needed in order to provide the most help. There are many nature lovers in the area who wanted to know what happened to the animals during the fire, and fortunately, Pepperwood stewards maintain a whole slew of wildlife cameras set up in a monitoring grid to record wildlife. Sure enough, the animals were there right after the fire, looking for food. That said, first responders reported seeing significant mortality along fence lines where animals had been trapped against the flames. Animals need safe passage across the landscape, especially when they are on the run. Pepperwood’s important camera monitoring plots provide information about wildlife before the fire. Scientists and volunteers can now use this information to investigate how the wildlife are recovering after the fire and to prepare for the next one, including adjusting fencing so wildlife can escape. What about the livestock that help Pepperwood keep the exotic grasses under control? They needed water and supplemental feed right away—additional

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things that communities need to be prepared to provide after a disaster such as this. “Even though we knew we are living and working in a fireadapted landscape, we were still not prepared for this type of extreme event,” Micheli says. Rural residential development spans across much of Sonoma and the surrounding counties. This type of wildland-urban interface is where 82 percent of damage to structures occurred in California from 1985 to 2013. Currently, a third of the homes in California are in the wildland-urban interface and require more comprehensive approaches to living in these increasingly fire-prone areas. Public preparedness can include towns identifying evacuation routes as well as dedicated safety zones where people can take refuge. Residents living in isolated areas with only one evacuation route can learn about sheltering in place and employ building strategies where life support systems, like water and temperature range, are maintained that allow people to survive. Micheli and the rest of the Pepperwood staff have been pulled this way and that ever since the day after the fire. It started with how to determine how contaminated the surface water was from the huge number of toxins released into the air and across the land and what this meant for health and safety. Basic information like this had to be collected and distributed by Pepperwood and other nonprofit conservation groups in the area to protect the public. A conservation working group came together in the aftermath of the fire to share information. The group did a lot of work, from figuring out how to measure air and water quality to writing guidelines on toxic waste removal and vegetation management. To prevent unnecessary tree loss, they got the word out to residents that it’s best to wait before cutting native trees down unless they pose

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an immediate safety concern. Many oak trees and other hardwoods that seem dead will resprout from the stump in the spring and grow into mature trees again. “What is going to make us the most adapted to climate change is having healthy ecosystems out there,” Gillogly says. At Pepperwood there is ongoing work to promote more resilient landscapes, including forest thinning, grassland management through grazing, and removing unneeded fencing so that wildlife and livestock have a better chance of escaping the next fire. Land management is important because although fire can give native plants an advantage, on some soil types it can promote the establishment of invasive species. Fire can release nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients in forms that can be readily absorbed. This nutrient boost and increased light streaming through burned tree trunks can allow invasive species to spread into areas once dominated by a diverse shaded understory. Volunteers are busy planting native plants to restore some of the burned areas at Pepperwood and monitoring the plant communities that burned to document how the preserve is recovering. They are recording the amount of leaf litter on the ground and how much of the cover is made up of grasses versus woody vegetation. They are measuring tree diameter at breast height, the scorch height of the fire, basal sprouts, the presence of fungus on trunk and leaves, and the amount of light that penetrates the canopy as an estimate of canopy leaf density. They did this on a sample of trees in January after the fire and have been revisiting those trees every summer since. What they’ve seen hasn’t always been what they expected. “Apart from the data, monitoring gets you out and noticing changes,” Gillogly says. In some areas the fire was so hot that even though some stand thinning had been done before the fire came through, all the trees died. In some areas where they did

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not thin the Douglas firs, the trees didn’t serve as ladder fuels, spreading fire from the ground to the tree canopy, as experts would have predicted. Nature can be hard to perfectly predict. Pepperwood is building a new house for Gillogly and his family to return to on the preserve. It won’t have the wall hangings from their trips to Mexico or the family photos, but, he says, “Fire reduces you down to your body and the planet—not you and all your stuff.” “It does my heart good to see the preserve come back—the wildflower displays, the new species, and all the animals that are here and thriving,” Gillogly says. Following the fire, 12 previously unseen native plant species showed up, all known as fire followers because they only germinate after fire. “It just makes me think, how our people-made systems need to be more resilient and fire adapted like nature is, and then we can get through these things a lot easier.” The state’s fire-adapted ecosystems have a long history of frequent, low- to moderate-intensity ground-level fires, and Indigenous people coexisted with fire. More recently, human suppression of fire has greatly influenced the composition and structure of the vegetation observed today. Fire suppression or exclusion results in crowded stands of young trees that serve as fuel, contributing to high-intensity fires at crown height, as was the case in Sonoma County. Historically, lightning was a primary source of ignition, while today humans are responsible for more than half of all fires. Shrubs that dominate California’s chaparral burn at a high intensity, and with the dramatic increase in population in Southern California, ignition rates are much higher now than they were historically. These fires are difficult to control, and with their increased frequency, some of Southern California’s ecosystems are converting to mostly non-native grasslands. Fire did not shape California

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desert plant communities, because historically there was very little biomass; therefore, desert species are not adapted to fire. This means fire management is viewed differently depending on which part of the state and which ecosystem it occurs in—from the need to increase the use of fire as a management tool in the more mesic, conifer-dominated landscapes to the need for more vigilant control of fire in the arid southern ecosystems. There are over 2,000 wildfire starts in California every year, and that number is only going to go up as the population surpasses 40 million and the temperature rises 5.6°F (3.08°C) or up to 8.8°F (4.84°C) by 2100, if we continue business as usual. Recent fires have been far larger than those in the previous century. The extreme fires that we’re seeing more frequently are ones that start when the winds blow from the east and the humidity is extremely low. Fuel loads have changed with fire suppression, logging, and homes scattered throughout the urban wildland interface. As Lisa Micheli put it, for some neighborhoods it’s “not about protecting houses from trees but trees from houses.” Nowhere has fire been more frequent in California over the past decade than in Lake County, northeast of Pepperwood Preserve. That said, fire is a natural ecosystem process throughout most of California’s bioregions, and this is especially true for the vegetation of Lake County. One can think of Lake County as the epicenter of California’s new fire normal. Since 2008, the county has been scorched by eight big fires: Valley, Rocky, Jerusalem, Clayton, Sulphur, Wye-Walker, Scotts, and Pawnee. These fires claimed lives, devoured more than 200,000 acres of terrain, and destroyed nearly 2,600 structures, most of them homes. In the Lake County region, fires can explode after a dry winter or a long hot summer, when winds blow through hilly terrain

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covered by dry chaparral and mixed oak woodlands, making the fire burn hot and fast. Yet the scars quickly fade as shrubs regenerate and blue oaks resprout from their burnt bases, and soon the land is ready to burn again. It is a landscape that is accustomed to fire. But even in this area where fire is common, firefighters are surprised by fires in June and the increasing size of the more recent fires. Future wildfire projections suggest a longer fire season, and an increase in wildfire frequency, across California. In fact, models used in California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment project that the area of land consumed by wildfires in the state each year could increase by 77 percent by 2100 if global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Some residents have lost their homes repeatedly and some have left the area, but many have stayed. So what keeps them there? Lake County is a beautiful, mountainous, natural landscape, so for some it’s a choice to stay and rebuild. However, others simply cannot afford to move. According to the US Census Bureau, 21 percent of people in Lake County live below the poverty line, compared to the national average of 10.5 percent. Climate change exacerbates existing inequalities, both because the places that are more vulnerable to extreme events are often more affordable to live in and because disadvantaged communities don’t have the money to reduce their exposure to extreme events or minimize adverse outcomes from these events. Two weeks before the Valley fire started in 2015 and moved quickly across parts of Lake, Sonoma, and Napa Counties, Greg Giusti, a recently retired UC Cooperative Extension advisor, was at a community fire meeting. At the meeting they examined historical fire maps that revealed a fire in the 1940s had burned down the same canyon that was to burn in the Valley fire; similarly,

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the 2017 Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa had the same footprint as the fire that burned in 1964. This indicates that fire will return, but today Californians have built more—a lot more—in these fire-prone areas. With drier conditions and more expansive development into wildlands, fires will be more devastating, propelling the need to increase ecosystem and community resilience.

A Lake with a Past Lake County connects the past to the present, through its ancient lake, the thriving Pomo culture, and the native plant communities that span the landscape. Clear Lake is the oldest lake in North America. Unlike most lakes, which fill up with sediment from the surrounding landscape over time, Clear Lake is a structural basin and follows a fault line that has made the bottom of the lake sink at the same rate that the sediment fills, keeping the lake in existence over hundreds of thousands of years. The sediment under the lake dates back as far as 500,000 years, and each yard of sediment provides a 1,000-year record full of pollen grains and ash from fires. The sediment has preserved signs of life during periods when it was 5°F–9°F (2.75°C–4.95°C) warmer than it is today. These warm periods, which took place 130,000 years ago and again about 113,000 years ago, are known as interglacial periods, each spanning thousands of years between far colder and icier glacial periods. And while these periods each lasted thousands of years, in deep time they are set in a record of even longer periods of ice. To study the changes in plant communities during these drier periods of time and how the vegetation responded to changing climate in the past, UC Berkeley paleobotanist Cindy Looy and her collaborators needed a drilling rig. They used it to extract 275-yard-

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long soil cores from the bottom of Clear Lake. Each core was carefully marked according to its depth, and samples were divided and sent off for chemistry and pollen analysis. Looy measured the amount of oak pollen relative to that of pines and grasses. With this information, she verified that oaks dominated the landscape during warm dry periods, while pines dominated when global temperatures were cooler. These changes, while considered quick compared to earlier climate changes in the geologic record, were still 10 to 100 times slower than what we are observing today under humandriven climate change. Looy and her colleagues have shown that plant communities in Lake County adapted to the changing climate in the past; however, it’s not all that clear how things will go for today’s flora. There’s geologically fast, and then there’s the speed of humans cooking the planet over a coal fire. Still, this information on how vegetation adapted to climate is the closest analog that we have to help us understand how vegetation may respond under climate change today. Earth’s paleoclimatic history shows some of what we can expect from climate change in the future. With the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere currently over 400 parts per million, the atmosphere will soon resemble what existed back in the Pliocene (about 5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago), when the sediments that Looy and her colleagues are studying were deposited. If we continue to emit CO2 at the current rate, we may reach 500 parts per million of CO2. Earth’s historical equivalent for this level of CO2 is the middle Miocene (about 23 million to 5.3 million years ago), when giant sloths roamed. That much carbon could trigger a series of feedback mechanisms in the climate that result in a “hothouse Earth” scenario. Roughly speaking, a hothouse Earth would mean temperatures 7°F–9°F (3.85°C–4.95°C) hotter

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and sea levels 30–100 feet higher—enough to submerge many of the world’s great cities and also most of Florida.

A Long History of Stewardship In addition to information on paleoclimate, sediments from the bottom of Clear Lake have revealed how often Indigenous people were burning the vegetation to encourage more desirable edible plants and deer for about 20,000 years! Artifacts from Clear Lake, objects made of obsidian, date back as far as 14,500 years ago. John Parker, a retired archaeologist, started exploring these areas as a teen and continues mapping and dating what he finds before sites are subjected to modern development. He recounts that people arrived in the area during the end of the last ice age, when the climate was much wetter, allowing for pine forests and expansive wetlands that were rich with fish and plant food sources. It is likely that the wetlands provided most of the resources needed for the relatively small numbers of people living in the area at the time. Then about 8,000 years ago the climate became much warmer and drier, so people had to transform their diet. About 5,000 years ago, as pines waned and the grasses took hold, the Pomo people selected the best grains to eat, and a type of low-intensity agriculture allowed Indigenous communities to spread across a much larger area, as mapped by Parker. As the number of Indigenous people expanded throughout the area, acorns became the staple food source. Acorns are harder to process and consume than grain but were readily available for the growing population, as oaks tolerate drier conditions. Parker describes Pomo villages expanding and contracting depending on the climate, available resources, and innovations. These innovations

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present us with important knowledge about a place that emerged from living on what nature has to offer. Indigenous people adapted to and stewarded California’s ecosystems through previous climate changes. Increasing our understanding of nature and our connections to it, as Indigenous people do, is an important goal if we are to avoid developing in ways that diminish the Earth systems we all rely on. Clear Lake and the surrounding wetlands offered a wealth of resources for early Pomo people. The people used tule, the tall rushes native to freshwater marshes across North America, for clothing, shelter, and boats, as well as for food and medicine. For at least 100,000 years these rushes provided a buffer that stretched for miles along the lake shoreline, preventing erosion, filtering sediment, and providing a nursery for fish and birds, such as grebes and herons. Tules, beautiful reeds with soft seed stocks reaching six feet tall, can be found today within remnant freshwater marshes across North America. Recent development along the lake for housing and boating has led to a dramatic decline in tule marsh area, to just a few isolated patches. The loss of tules has meant a loss of habitat for fish and birds and has degraded water quality by increasing the flow of nutrients into the lake. Today, there are seven Indigenous tribes living in Lake County. The Big Valley Band of Pomo have lakeside land and a strong multigenerational connection to the lake itself. Sarah Ryan, the environmental director for Big Valley, says the tribe is concerned with water quality and native fish preservation, and to that end they are replanting tules along the lakeshore. Restoring tules and the wetlands around Clear Lake will help improve water quality and native fish survival, making the lake more resilient to the changes to come.

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Community groups are improving lake water quality and the surrounding vegetation in several other ways that will make the lake healthier for generations to come. Some are working to revive the Clear Lake hitch (Lavinia exilicaudachi), a native fish found in the lake and its tributaries. The hitch is a minnow that can grow to over a foot in length. It is thought that the hitch population once numbered in the millions, and it was an important food source for the Pomo. As recently as the 1970s, there were hundreds of thousands of these fish; now the population size ranges around 5,000 to 10,000. In fact, if someone sees a hitch anywhere, an unlikely event outside of spawning, they can report the sighting to the Chi Council (named after the taxonomic subspecies name, chi) to help them survey these fish each year. Thanks to community monitoring for over 10 years and the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians speaking for the fish, the hitch was listed as threatened by the California Fish and Game Commission in 2014. The Big Valley Band of Pomo are actively monitoring stream flow in the tributaries above the lake and documenting the impact of direct withdrawal of water from these creeks on stream flow, which when low threatens young fish survivorship. More water equals more fish in California. A case in point, in 2019, hitch were seen by local observers in tributaries where they had not been seen in over a decade. As the climate changes, the prospect of a drier future is concerning for California’s remaining native fish, so water conservation is of utmost importance in building resilience.

Plants Struggle with Precipitation Whiplash Many of California’s endemic species survive on serpentine soils, which can be found close to Clear Lake. Serpentine is California’s

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state rock, and serpentine soils are important refugia for California native plants. These soils are unusually high in magnesium, as well as heavy metals such as chromium, cobalt, iron, lead, and nickel. The high levels of magnesium cause calcium deficiencies for most plants, resulting in poor growth and low survivorship especially for species not adapted to these conditions. Some plants in California are being outcompeted by invasive species on richer soils but find refuge on serpentine outcrops, because they have adapted to these stressful conditions over millennia and persist where new arrivals from Asia, Europe, and other distant places generally cannot. Naturalists often spot serpentine areas by an amazing variety of native plants that can more readily be found on this soil type—for example, the iconic goldfields (Lasthenia californica) that make up a showy carpet of small yellow daisies throughout much of California. If you’re lucky, you may find some cream cups (Platystemon californicus), soft, light yellow poppies that look as rich as clotted cream— just add a scone and it’s teatime. In the early spring Susan Harrison can be found systematically examining cream cups and other tiny flowering plants in areas with thin, rocky soils at the UC McLaughlin Natural Reserve, just to the south of Clear Lake. Harrison, an ecologist, has been monitoring 80 vegetation plots spanning both serpentine and nonserpentine soil types on the reserve since 1997. Half the plots were subject to cattle grazing and the others were not. While she hasn’t found any evidence of the influence of grazing on the types of species present (perhaps because of the long grazing history in the area), she has shown that the low-productivity serpentine soils are a refuge for native grassland species because the alien grasses so commonly found across California are not well adapted to these depleted soils. Harrison continued to monitor these plots after a wildfire

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The UC Davis–managed McLaughlin Reserve, one day after the Jerusalem wildfire in 2015; the 7,000-acre reserve sits at the intersection of Lake, Napa, and Yolo Counties. Photo by Catherine E. Koehler.

moved through and burned half the plots; after 15 years of monitoring, she started to see a decline in the diversity of species and, particularly, a loss of species that had larger leaves. These large-leaf herbs could be more susceptible to overgrazing, but the ungrazed plots revealed the same long-term trend, so Harrison’s team turned their attention to climate variables and found that, as climate modelers had predicted, the variation in rainfall between years is becoming greater, creating longer periods of drought followed by much wetter years. Having larger leaves makes plants more susceptible to desiccation (moisture loss). This is species loss as a result of climate change. California plants already contend with large differences in rainfall from year to year and this type of “precipitation whiplash,” as Harrison refers to “runs of dry years, followed by an extremely wet year.” This “whiplash” can be attributed in part to years of drought

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followed by an increase in the amount of precipitation arriving from what are called atmospheric rivers. These “rivers in the sky” that come in off the Pacific Ocean carry as much as 20 times the amount of water that is in the Mississippi River! In Northern California, roughly half the rainfall historically comes from atmospheric rivers. As human-induced climate change heats up the Earth, climate scientists are forecasting an increase in the contribution of rainfall from atmospheric rivers, both because atmospheric rivers contain more water and because there will be less of the gentler rainfall associated with low-pressure systems. This is no time to snooze—California is facing a deluge. El Niño years can bring more rainfall to the coast. The Pacific Ocean generates much of California’s weather, which emerges from interactions between the ocean temperature and atmospheric conditions, including air pressure and the trade winds. When ocean temperatures are on the warmer end of the spectrum and the east winds are weaker than average, we have 9–12 months of what we refer to as El Niño and observe them every three to seven years. When ocean temperatures are on the cooler end, we are in the opposite condition called La Niña. In California, El Niño conditions can create more frequent rainstorms, which can be a drought-busting relief. These storms peak in midwinter and take the form of atmospheric rivers, often arriving from the direction of Hawaii (hence the term pineapple express). Scientists have determined that since 1978, all El Niños have formed in the warmer oceans of the central or western Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles west of where they usually formed in the past. This position change is creating “super” El Niños, such as the one that deluged California in the winter of 1997– 98, washing away hillsides and roads and flooding neighborhoods. When these storms ended, 17 Californians were dead, and the state

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had suffered half a billion dollars in damages. This kind of super El Niño is more likely as climate change continues. What in earlier times would have been a welcome wet year in California, now, with the human-induced climate disruption, will more likely consist of calamitous storm surges and flooding. Harrison’s work on serpentine plant communities is proving fundamental to the labors of reserve managers Cathy Koehler and Paul Aigner. The two have spent over 10 years eliminating invasive grasses, and their most notable accomplishment has been eradicating barbed goat grass (Aegilops triuncialis). The barbed seeds easily wedge into the socks of unsuspecting passersby to hitch a ride and invade another location. A nasty invasive weed, barbed goat grass can outcompete native plants on serpentine soils. Koehler and Aigner’s active removal of it and other nonnative annual grasses helps make the reserve more resilient to fire, because these invasive grasses can grow robustly after fire, providing large amounts of dry fuel for future fires. To reduce fuel associated with weeds, some cities have weed abatement ordinances that require property owners to cut weeds and grasses that are over four inches in height prior to the commencement of the fire season. These ordinances fail to address the root of the problem. A far better solution is what Koehler and Aigner are doing, ridding the site of invasive weeds, and replacing them with California native herbs to reduce fire risk and restore biodiversity. Early evidence of ecosystem transformation came in 2015 as Koehler watched a renewal of the entire reserve during the spring after the fires came through. She describes it as “the most rewarding thing I could have ever experienced—so much rejuvenation and opportunity—I mean it was just awesome.” Deer reproduced in large numbers, and they had “ridiculous amounts of quail,”

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Koehler said. “The flora was totally altered as flowering plants had access to wetlands that were once completely absorbed by the transpiration [water uptake] of larger woody vegetation.” Koehler and Aigner have made huge progress protecting native plants on open serpentine areas throughout the UC McLaughlin Natural Reserve. Next steps include converting the oak woodland understory plants from fire-prone invasive grasses to native perennial grasses and forbs. Koehler noted that, given how much woodland there is, they will need help from volunteers. Lots of volunteers! Both Harrison and Koehler mentioned that restoring California native plants may require translocation of some plants from hotter and drier parts of California, or what scientists refer to as assisted migration (human-assisted movement of species in response to climate change). The climate analog for McLaughlin is down in central coast California and Koehler wonders “if it makes sense to set up a few trial plots to see how the same native species from these warmer areas will do at McLaughlin.” They know that this is “a new paradigm” and goes against the tradition of restoration that relies on local seed sources, often from the same watershed, which is in dramatic contrast to using seed sources from elsewhere in the state. Increasingly, ecologists recognize that under rapid climate change, recreating the past may not make sense anymore. Koehler says it’s not practical to try to manipulate entire natural landscapes, but assisted migration may be a good fit for restoration efforts when we are already editing the ecosystem. We don’t want to just “put things out to watch them die,” says Harrison, referring to planting species that are present in today’s ecosystem but will likely die in the near term due to climate change. Though this type of assisted migration remains controversial, it may be the best way to keep pace with human-driven climate change (see more in chapter 4).

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What about animals who can move to more suitable climates? As the climate warms, a habitat may become unsuitable for animals currently there and newly suitable for species from warmer and drier climates. Many species may be able to respond by shifting their ranges. For this adaptive strategy to be successful, animals and plants will need to be able to move across the built environment to reach areas they can live in. As Harrison says, species survival in many cases is “going to depend on things either being able to move or being moved by us.” Alas, species’ ability to roam on a daily basis, disperse seasonally, migrate, or shift to a new location entirely has been constrained by development. We need to think about not only where species need to move to, but which species will be able to replace them so that places like McLaughlin Reserve don’t end up with just barbed goat grass and other noxious invasive species. To allow organisms to adapt and move, we need to change how we think about land conservation. It is not enough to preserve patches of land and treat them as island ecosystems. These landscapes must remain connected so that animals can find new homes that suit them. Habitat corridors are one way conservation biologists have suggested we can protect the movement of organisms. Habitat corridors can range from road under- and overpasses to continent-scale megacorridors. Now that many species, indeed, entire ecosystems, are being forced to move in response to climate changes, identifying where we should conserve habitat corridors and working to protect, enhance, and construct these corridors has never been more important. To some extent, we’ve known this for decades, but in a changing climate, it is much more urgent. Having set the building aflame, it behooves us to provide fire escapes.

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Land managers Michael Gillogly, Lisa Micheli, and Cathy Koehler wanted to ensure Pepperwood Preserve would remain connected to McLaughlin Reserve and other surrounding protected areas. They partnered with other land managers of protected areas in the region to create a network of wildland corridors linking up nearby reserve lands around Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument. The recently designated Berryessa monument is over 330,000 acres that rise from near sea level to 7,000 feet. While this is a large, protected habitat, the neighboring natural areas to the south are increasingly becoming disconnected, and isolated small patches of habitat to the south are at risk of losing species due to inbreeding, disease outbreaks, fire, or extreme weather. Establishing corridors to help animals move between reserves counteracts habitat loss and fragmentation, and the Berryessa monument will be able to support a broad array of species and ensure the protection of a diversity of native species. That is, if we can figure out how to let animals and plants cross the built environment. With this mission in mind, Koehler, Micheli, and others responsible for reserves, land trusts, and parks in the region first wanted to map where existing habitat corridors exist between the protected areas and assemble the Mayacamas to Berryessa Landscape Connectivity Network. The network spans an area from the Mayacamas Mountains in Sonoma County to the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument where numerous bear, elk, mountain lions, and coyotes still roam. The network’s assessment identified existing habitat corridors that can let species move to adapt to a changing climate and expanding human populations. Morgan Gray, a conservation scientist who has a gift for spatial analysis, integrated parcel-scale maps of land use and current and future

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Volunteers work to restore grasslands at 3,200-acre Pepperwood Preserve, northeast of Santa Rosa in the Mayacamas Mountains, after the 2017 Tubbs fire. Photo by Ian A. Nelson.

climate estimates. Her work allowed the land managers in the group to prioritize where protected areas are still connected and determine which corridors are most likely to help species escape rising temperatures. As Gray put it, “The result of our work is a series of high-resolution maps that illustrate corridors—across land and along streams—and measures how much cooler the newly connected area is in the future as compared to if habitat patches remain isolated.” These maps are a tool that the land managers and communities are using to prioritize which corridors to protect first. Maintaining connections between the 580 protected areas that make up the Mayacamas to Berryessa Landscape Connectivity Network will ensure that native plants, animals, and freshwater resources will be around for future generations.

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California versus the Jet Stream Eileen Mitro was at Pepperwood for the Regional Rendezvous of UC California Naturalists on October 8, 2017. If it hadn’t been for the fires that started there, and right up the road from her own property, on that same dreadful day, her next event of the week would have been a meeting about climate change. Instead, Mitro had to flee her neighborhood and help fellow naturalists who lost their homes on that same dreadful night. After the ash settled, Mitro rescheduled the climate change community meeting, and she and the 15 folks in attendance decided to start Climate Action Mendocino (CAM), focused on community-level action. Naturally, fire prevention and preparedness were at the top of everyone’s mind during the first meeting. Mitro knows how impossible it can be to get out of the way of fast-moving fires under windy conditions. She used to teach school in Coffey Park, the dense residential area within the city of Santa Rosa, where most of the homes burned down in the Tubbs fire, and her former house in Fountaingrove burned down that same night. So, she and her husband went right to work removing some of the lower limbs of the blue oaks, manzanita, and other hardwoods to get rid of ladder fuels near their home to make their place easier to defend in the future. Ladder fuels can include live or dead vegetation that facilitates fire to move from the ground up to the tree canopy, creating a hotter and harderto-control fire. While fuel removal is important for Mitro to do as a property owner, CAM is notable because the entire group supports larger-scale community actions that the individual members believe will help their communities be more resilient. On that fateful night of October 8 the winds came fast and furious from the east, and here is how. Recent global warming has

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been more intense in the polar regions, and arctic temperatures have risen 3°C–5°C. One of the consequences of this recent warming is a reduction in winter sea ice in the Arctic, and lessening winter sea ice means a lessening temperature difference between the air north of the polar jet stream and the air south of it, where California sits. Twenty years ago, temperatures above and below the jet stream were more consistently different and this temperature difference constrained the jet stream, a mighty river of air that flows from west to east as it traverses the Northern Hemisphere in a mostly predictable trajectory. Or, at least, it used to. As the temperature warms and the differences diminish, the jet stream becomes wavy and curls downward, bringing in cold polar air and pushing ice and snow as far south as Texas. When the low pressure riding along the jet stream reaches the high mountains, high-pressure zones build up quickly to the north and west over the Great Basin. It’s the extreme difference between the low-pressure and the high-pressure air occurring over such a short distance that generates California’s Diablo and Santa Ana winds, which flow east to west across Northern and Southern California in the fall. The difference in pressure over this relatively short distance starts generating winds that become ever drier, warmer, and faster as they descend California’s highest mountains and reach coastal areas at speeds of 70–100 miles per hour. And when winter rains are delayed along the coast, California is poised for extreme fire events like those in the fall of 2017 and 2019 as the polar express leads to fire distress. With more extreme fire events comes a greater need for defensible space—the herd immunity of firefighting. Defensible space not only makes it easier for firefighters to protect a home during a wildfire, it makes it easier for firefighters to protect neighboring

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homes. Wildlands firefighter Irvin Barragan says he remembers that once, when he was working a fire, his crew came upon a beautiful house and the owners had left a note asking firefighters to save their house because they didn’t have insurance. Barragan’s crew got to work; the homeowners, though, hadn’t prepared. The trees were overgrown, and the ground was covered in brush and leaves, Barragan said. “It took us a while to clear that home, and the whole time, I was thinking, well, if they would have just done their part, we would have saved like three or four more homes during the time that we were there, clearing that house.” When it comes to climate disruption, what seems like small efforts can be some of our best ways to protect ourselves and each other. With the removal of ladder fuel to create more defensible space comes a good deal of downed wood—low limbs and small trees— that if left on the ground can create even hotter fires. Mitro learned from a CAM member how to turn the downed wood into biochar, by slowly and partially burning it into charcoal and then using it as a soil amendment. Adding charcoal to soil provides several big advantages for crop production. It increases water-holding capacity in the soil, which helps as soils continue to get drier under climate change, and reduces the amount of fertilizer needed for good plant growth. The increased water retention also extends the growing season and slows the conversion of vegetation into tinder-dry fuel. Through this and other actions, members of CAM are helping each other and their community become more prepared for a changing climate. Mitro says that what is fun about the group is their focus on action and how each member has something they want to get done. CAM also holds forums where people learn about climate change through films and from experts and participate in discussions.

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Through these educational events the group has learned more about how climate change is influencing the scale and frequency of fire in the area, for example, how global warming and the accompanying errant jet stream are leading to stronger-than-ever hotter windstorms and increasing the threat of fire for their communities.

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In sum, the disruption of California’s climate is heralded by flames. Fire is integral to most California ecosystems and predicting the influence of ecosystems management on fire behavior is difficult because ecosystems are complex systems. All complex systems are made up of interacting factors that influence one another, and the behavior of the entire system can be difficult to predict even with knowledge about each component. For any given fire, we can point to an immediate cause like a lightning strike, a downed power line, or a smoldering campfire. There are also the unintended consequences of fire suppression policies and of building homes adjacent to and amid wildlands. But it is the disruption of our climate that has made California’s fire season longer, drier, and hotter than before. Many California residents are responding with the courage and creativity needed to experiment with new approaches to how to live during this new era. Communities are adopting new building codes that require ignition-resistant eaves without vents, residential fire sprinkler systems, chimneys with spark arrestors, and other protections. These and other steps to mitigate disaster can create more resilient communities and ecosystems.

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2

Big Bay to Tech Town

In the San Francisco Bay Area, dense urban communities are often just minutes away from open spaces with oak woodlands, vineyards, and small farms that produce cheese and other delectables that pair beautifully with wine. The region includes nine counties and 100 cities and towns and has a population of more than seven million people spanning a wide variety of cultures. It’s also a recognized biodiversity hotspot that encompasses 35 major native vegetation types, from oak savannas and shrublands to towering redwoods. The Golden Gate Bridge spans a large gap in California’s coastline where fog and wind and rain funnel in from the Pacific Ocean, through the coastal range and into the Sierra Nevada. Below the bridge is where saltwater mixes with what’s left of the fresh water flowing from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. With some of California’s largest cities along the shoreline, it’s easy to imagine the demand for development that led to expanding the city’s footprint into the bay. Thankfully, the engineering proposals for filling the bay for urban development were stopped by determined residents. In 1961, activists formed an organization now called Save the Bay to prevent these developments. Work to prevent landfills

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on the East Bay continued through the 1980s, and it’s a constant struggle to retain what fresh water does still drain into the bay. Temperatures are rising in the Bay Area, with winter low temperatures increasing faster than summer highs, both of which lead to greater summer aridity even during years with more than average winter rainfall. Sea level in the Bay Area has risen over eight inches in the past 100 years. Looking to the future, scientists have observed accelerating rates of melting from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, and the water from these areas could soon become the dominant source of sea level rise. Moreover, as ocean temperatures rise, water becomes less dense and takes up more volume, further raising the sea level. Ominously, researchers have determined that due to the rotation of the Earth and gravitational effects that influence the distribution of ice and water around the planet, California’s sea level rise is most influenced by loss of ice from West Antarctica— the most vulnerable major ice sheet under a hotter future climate. Any future reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will reduce Antarctic ice loss but not entirely eliminate it, because the process has a momentum of its own and sea levels take a long time to go down. What has started is going to last for thousands of years. It will require Californians to take action to adapt.

The Power of Restoring Wetlands Nowhere are the interactions of climate change and development more visible to the public than along the north side of the bay, where Highway 37 runs from Novato east to Vallejo. The highway runs across the San Pablo Baylands for about 21 miles along a berm that is just above sea level, and the lowest portions of the road are susceptible to flooding. The problem is worse with rising sea level

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associated with warmer global temperatures. The highway is flooding more now than ever, and during the winter of 2016–17, it was closed due to high water levels for 28 days. That was during one of the wettest winter seasons on record. It was also a historical fluke— a normally dry La Niña year made wet by a few atmospheric rivers. The jet stream extended farther to the west as the season proceeded, allowing the atmospheric rivers to arrive. This wet period was accompanied by winter waves that were 50 percent stronger than usual, leading to marked amounts of beach erosion and flooding. Driving along Highway 37 between Vallejo and Novato, one can observe it all—the ebb and flow of the tides, the unexpected weather, and the slow rise of the sea. Behind the highway are vast natural wetlands, but the road and its berm hold back the waters, preventing these wetlands from serving as a buffer for the entire bay under rising sea levels. Wetlands provide flood protection because they soak up water like sponges, absorb high tides, and slow down surface water flow. They act as natural water filters, trapping contaminants running off the land before they can enter the bay, thereby protecting the water quality. Wetlands also harbor endemic plant communities, birds, and other wildlife. For these reasons, habitat restoration is focused on subtidal and tidal marsh found close to the bay’s shoreline. Tidal marshes are important and effective long-term carbon sinks due to their high rates of carbon absorption from the atmosphere; in fact, they sequester more carbon per acre than forests. Marshes sequester carbon from the atmosphere as plants grow and after they die, when their tissues and roots get trapped in the soil as stored carbon. More than half—sometimes up to 90 percent—of the carbon in wetland systems is stored below ground and can

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remain sequestered for millennia. This soil carbon tends to stay put because the soils generally remain wet or submerged in salty water, which reduces the carbon breakdown that microbes would accomplish in terrestrial soils. A vast amount of carbon is stored in deep, rich wetland soils. But when these ecosystems are drained, cleared, and disturbed for development or agriculture, microbial action kicks in and releases carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. That’s not to say wetlands only subtract greenhouse gases. Microorganisms in these waterlogged soils break down biodegradable material in the absence of oxygen, which produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas and the reason behind the distinctive lowtide smell. The amount of methane wetlands emit depends on the amount of water in them, their temperature, and many other factors that can be influenced by the way they are managed. Approaches to reduce the amount of methane generated by restored and created wetlands are important for the climate. However, wetland restoration goals are often more about the many environmental benefits for bird and fish habitat, hydrological connectivity, and water quality than about greenhouse gas mitigation. The past 20 years have seen community-based wetlands restoration efforts along the bay. Teachers and students and other volunteers have been busy planting willows, oaks, coyote brush, and other plants along Highway 37 to restore the wetlands and provide habitat for wildlife. These plants now provide “habitat for rails and salt marsh mice that need cover with the rising tides,” says Laurette Rogers, who founded Point Blue Conservation Science’s Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed program, known as STRAW. Rogers started doing restoration in 1992 with her fourth-grade students to help pull them out of their depression over endangered species. Instead of having them focus on endangered species

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living in far-off places, Rogers took them to their local open spaces to restore wetlands along nearby creeks. With help from a local rancher, they restored habitat for an endangered California freshwater shrimp. Restoration involves more than just getting out and planting, and Rogers developed lessons inside the classroom around the work the kids did outside. The students talked to experts, created a database of species they could use, reached out to policy makers, and talked about their project to anyone who would listen. Much of the land in the North Bay is under private ownership, and so the ranchers in the area are key to the success of this program. This often is the case for wet lowlands, where agriculture can be highly productive. Farmers and ranchers there know the land, and some are interested in improving creek ways and water quality. In the STRAW program, teachers and students get to know the ranchers in their community, and they learn about the food and wildlife that come from these landscapes. Ranchers commit to protecting the restoration sites from livestock and deer, and students make quick work of augering in willow stems to control erosion and provide habitat and cooler water for salmon and steelhead. The willows Rodgers and her students planted in the 1990s are now over 20 feet high and provide shade for the fish and birds, many of which are rare and need all the habitat people can restore and protect for them. This effort continues to this day and includes over 650 restoration projects and over 40 miles of creek bank restoration and wetland restoration in partnership with local landowners, businesses, and government agencies. STRAW now offers an outdoor science and environmental education curriculum that teachers can adopt and enjoy with their students to make a real difference in their local community.

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The plants STRAW uses are all native. The exact species selection for each site is determined by Point Blue scientists who have developed a climate-smart restoration system. Its planning tools and species checklists were designed by ecologists so that anyone can use them to help select California native species that will do well now and into the future. It’s a system that can tell them if they need, say, a madrone or an oak. The California madrone tree, with its peeling red bark and lightning-forked limbs, needs full sunlight, and its bunches of tiny urn-shaped flowers provide nectar for insects. But madrones can’t tolerate wet or saturated soils. For that it might be better to use the wet-soil-tolerating, long-lived, and iconic valley oak, which doesn’t produce nectar and looks like a majestic heap of spaghetti. Checklists that compare species take the struggle out of selecting what goes where and can ensure restoration efforts are climate ready.

Venturing Outdoors Veronica Miranda volunteers as a program coordinator for Latino Outdoors in the San Francisco Bay Area, North Bay, where she teaches preschool. Latino Outdoors embraces cultura y familia in connecting with Latinx communities and strives for an outdoors that is safe and welcoming for all people. Miranda likes to share her curiosity about nature and her commitment to care for the Earth. Before joining Latino Outdoors, Miranda was new to outdoor adventuring and was more comfortable quietly observing the world around her. Camping out and public speaking were new for her, so she can relate to the people who join her on trips into the wildlands for their first time, she says. “The more and more time that I spend outdoors and the more I am involved with Latino

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Outdoors . . . I realize how we as an organization and a community can visualize that if we don’t take care of our planet and our world, where are we going to be in 30 years? What’s my son’s future and the children I work with?” Miranda’s first time out doing ecological restoration involved controlling the spread of invasive species to help restore native plants at Lands End, where parklands hold back the city from the sea on the northwestern tip of the San Francisco peninsula. Miranda says she learned how important it is to avoid introducing invasive species and about the threat they pose to native plants from other volunteers with Park Stewardship San Francisco—a volunteer group that works with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy to ensure that the natural habitat and community members connect and flourish. The group also picked up a lot of trash, including glass bottles, she says, “and there were needles and plastic and so much under the shrubs that you don’t see.” Miranda’s father taught her the importance of recycling at an early age and she says that she is honoring his memory by teaching others the importance of packing out what they pack in. In particular, she worries about the damage microplastics can cause, and she keeps an eye out for twist ties and bag clips. She also teaches her students about recycling, composting, and how to reduce solid waste. “The more I know about climate change and see what is going on, it’s scary, and it’s sad, what we have done to the Earth. I just hope that we are able to help it and preserve it for a long time to come,” Miranda says. But taking what she’s learned and sharing it with members of her group has allowed her to make an impact far larger than she could alone. Miranda connected with people of all ages across the Latino Outdoors network, inviting them to come

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A work weekend in 2019 organized by Latino Outdoors at Richardson Bay Audubon Center & Sanctuary in Tiburon. Photo by Veronica Miranda.

camp out and help improve the Richardson Bay Audubon Center & Sanctuary. She uses social media to invite the public to sign up for her events, which are always free and open to people of all ages and backgrounds. Miranda says that is the key to successful community building: “making sure you create a safe place and inclusion of everyone, regardless of what they’re called or where they come from or their age . . . it’s, ‘You are a human being; come join us.’” The group has a variety of activities to engage individuals in nature in ways that are most comfortable for them. On one outing, a small group, ranging in age from preschoolers to retirees, went out on kayaks—many for the first time—to see waterfowl like the hooded merganser. Others stayed ashore spreading wood chips to reduce erosion along the trails. Most people don’t know what restoration is until they come out and participate, Miranda says. “It

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makes them more aware, ‘maybe I should pay more attention to where garbage goes and care for open space.’” Then outing by outing, bird by bird, plant by plant, the members’ knowledge of and comfort level being outdoors grows. Then they go on to share those experiences and information. They tell community leaders like Miranda about the joy of sharing conservation with their families. “They tell me, ‘Thank you for bringing us out. I didn’t know that there is so much I have to teach our children because it’s important for their future.’”

Islands in the Sky Where Friendships Sprout Alisa Duncan lives in San Francisco and found a way to connect with nature atop a skeleton of steel. Growing up, Duncan would visit her grandparents and work in their garden. Her grandparents were ranchers and berry growers. Now, Duncan puts on her gardening gloves and heads to the top of the California Academy of Sciences building in Golden Gate Park every Wednesday morning to meet a group of other volunteers and tend a living roof. She also gives tours of the roof so visitors can see how the roof was constructed and how thin the soil is—only two to six inches. It’s an engineered growing medium that is much lighter than soil. Living roofs are often referred to as green roofs and have existed for centuries as a way of prolonging the life of a roof by protecting it from the elements and as natural insulation. More recent adaptation of this technique in urban settings originated in Germany. In California, volunteers prefer to call it a living roof, as it’s not so very green in the summer months. Living roofs reduce the amount of rainfall runoff from the roof and provide some carbon sequestration through the plant life they support. They also save energy by

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providing insulation. But the biggest surprise is that living roofs last longer than regular roofs because the plants take the brunt of the sun damage, not the roof. These living roofs also provide habitat for both plants and the animals that visit them. In combination with neighboring open spaces, living roofs can create an urban green network of habitat islands to give animals space to live in and migrate through, as well as attracting beneficial insects for pest control and pollination. Some visitors to the living roof may already recognize that the Bay Area’s average annual maximum temperature has been increasing—by 1.7°F (0.95°C) from 1950 to 2005. The roof is planted with 90 species of plants that tolerate drier conditions and exemplify what types of vegetation will survive as temperatures rise. This gives the volunteers working on the roof something they can point to so visitors can learn about temperature change and its impacts on species. As Duncan says, these are “the plants that take care of themselves.” There are wonderful flowers, and these bring birds and native bees, all of which the visitors enjoy viewing and learning about. Some visitors are so enamored with the garden that they want to know what it takes to start their own. Duncan has some good advice: First, make sure the roof can bear the extra weight. Then, she suggests they “start with potted plants to see if [they] like gardening on the roof.” San Francisco was the first city in the United States to incorporate living roofs in a construction policy passed in early 2017. This policy change was championed by activists from the Green Roof Task Force, which was coordinated by the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. To help those who want to advance the green roof movement, Green Roofs for Healthy Cities offers skill-building courses and networking events.

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The academy’s roof was started with only nine species and a few volunteers, some of whom are still in the group today. Gardening keeps their hands busy and working together allows for time to talk. Taking a coffee break and sharing treats has become the norm. Some have stayed with the group for over 10 years, and Duncan attributes this to the opportunities they have to learn from academy staff about native plants and rooftop gardening, as well the camaraderie of working together—lasting friendships sprouted from garden coffee breaks.

Neighbors Helping Neighbors Stay Cool Sometimes it feels like each of us is floating alone through a bustling city—head down, earbuds in. Even in a dense city, people can feel they are on their own when it comes to improving their neighborhood or, even more daunting, the environment. Sue Lebeck lives in an apartment in a San Francisco neighborhood where some folks have lived a long time on rent control and others are in and out as they climb the ladder in the tech sector, every home bobbing alone in the sea. Lebeck wants to join her neighbors together in a raft. Lebeck works for Cool Block, a public-private program that seeks to lower cities’ carbon emissions, clean up their litter, and improve their disaster preparedness, starting with neighborhood organizations as small as one block. Lebeck says, “The secret sauce that Cool Block has is that people love to get to know their neighbors, which seems so silly because of course people would know their neighbors, but we know in our modern world, they’re the last people that we know.” This is a problem because if we are to fix the world, it’s probably best to learn about the world outside of our phones and in front of our doors.

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The first step that Cool Block leaders take is to knock on their neighbors’ doors and invite everyone to a meeting where folks can meet each other and learn about becoming a Cool Block. Lebeck was shy until her husband suggested she start with just a couple of doors. She did just that and was fine. “The next day,” she says, “I was so relaxed about all that and it was like, ‘It’s fun o’clock; I get to take a break and go knock on some doors and meet my neighbors.’” The first meeting allowed neighbors to get to know each other. Following this a core group of five met every other week, and together they selected several actions under each topic covered by the program. To start, Cool Block teams focus on changing habits at home to improve energy efficiency—such as setting the washing machine to cold water since it works just as well and saves a lot of energy. In the later sessions, the team makes plans that will benefit their whole block. Lebeck and her neighbors held a meeting for the entire apartment building to meet and learn from local community emergency response professionals how to be prepared and what programs they can connect with in San Francisco to help them get ready for an emergency. Part of this is knowing their neighbors and the skills they have that can be helpful, such as who is trained in CPR. Climate change is making California communities more vulnerable to extreme weather events, fire being one type (as detailed in chapter 1). Research covered in California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment estimates extreme wildfires (over 25,000 acres in size) will increase in frequency by 50 percent by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. Extreme heat is an important contributor to fire frequency and area burned, and heat presents its own challenges for residents. San Francisco and the immediate surrounds were not developed to accommodate high summer temperatures. Finding an air condi-

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tioner in San Francisco is about as likely as spotting a fur coat. Higher temperatures combined with the increasing need to stay indoors due to dangerous smoke-filled air presents a challenge. At the start of the program, households involved in Cool Blocks work to change habits within their homes. By the end of the program, they are working together on actions that will help protect their block, neighborhood, city, and planet. Lebeck’s Cool Block team meets once a month and has coffee and shares breakfast out on the street before launching into picking up trash. “In no way does once a month keep those busy streets clean, but it gives us a sense of pride, and one time a woman passing by cried just seeing a group of neighbors taking care of their street.” Lebeck says Cool Block participants “know their daily life is different now because their neighbors are part of their world, and it just changes so many big and small decisions.”

Climate Conviction British environmentalist and author George Marshall says that although climate activists have all the scientific evidence on their side, it isn’t enough. In his book Don’t Even Think about It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, Marshall says facts and figures are not enough to win broad public support because “there is actually no clear dividing line between the rational and the emotional brains, but rather a conversation between the two.” What climate activism needs, Marshall writes, is to convert scientific evidence into a positive moral belief, which he calls “climate conviction.” The way forward, he writes, is not through lecturing, spreading despair, and carbon shaming, but through positive values like protecting our children and the environment. People do

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not make personal sacrifices for rational calculations, Marshall writes, but for moral convictions. And if this sounds wishy-washy, Marshall’s evidence is that major social reforms have been achieved in large part through emotional appeals. Climate activists, Marshall says, would be wise to take a page from religion. Religious communities often engage across generations and address issues of justice. In fact, Marshall says, religious communities have been at the heart of many social justice movements, including abolitionism and civil rights. Conviction needs to be nurtured, and this is done in a caring community where people feel comfortable and supported to face challenges together. People can’t deal with despair and guilt in isolation but rather need a collective way out that includes forgiveness and hope. Reverend Dan Harper is assistant minister of religious education at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto. Like Marshall, he says that the environmental activists need to understand that other people may have different priorities. “Some of these communities might want to use a different language such as ‘creation care.’ It’s not something to be scared of; it’s just something to be aware of,” says Harper. When surveyed, evangelical Christians are divided between those who say climate change is happening and those who say they don’t know or deny it. Katharine Hayhoe is an evangelical Christian climate scientist and dedicated communicator on the subject with a wealth of talks online, as well as “Global Weirding,” a PBS Digital Series on YouTube. Hayhoe suggests that fear and political beliefs about the role of government are at the root of climate change denial among US evangelicals. Politics is one of the strongest determinants of climate skepticism and many people who identify as evangelical Christians are skeptical about climate change for

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nonreligious reasons. Hayhoe cautions against referring to people as deniers because “when you use that word it immediately closes off the conversation and in my experience a lot of people who are cautious get labeled as deniers because they lead with their doubts.” There is a small percentage of people who are dismissive and won’t listen to anything, Hayhoe says, and for the rest we need to “figure out who they are by listening to them” and “for people who truly are theologically Christians but have gotten confused by their politics, you absolutely can reach them through their faith.” When Hayhoe is invited to speak at chapel services she walks through “what we believe about the Earth, what we believe about God’s gifts to us, what we believe about how we’re to care for other people . . . and then I get to here’s what’s happening to the Earth, here’s what’s happening to people, so obviously we care about it because of who we are and what we believe in.” This emphasizes the biblical perspective of Earth stewardship and focuses on helping others, especially those who are less fortunate. Hayhoe says she gets very positive responses because she connects directly to their hearts. Climate disruption is a threat multiplier that will make hunger, poverty, the availability of fresh water, and the refugee crisis worse, and so Hayhoe underscores the importance of working to protect humanity as a shared value. Religious communities such as Harper’s congregation right through to global leadership provided by Pope Francis’s encyclical declaring a global climate emergency, for example, are answering the universal call to action to address humancaused climate change. The Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto runs a course on environmental justice for middle school kids and an eco-justice camp that includes children from across the community. Faithbased organizations are mostly intergenerational and care about

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young people, Harper says. “I have older grandparents and childfree people and all kinds of people all concerned with raising healthy, resilient, happy kids. So that’s a real gift,” Harper says, “and the kids just soak it up.” Harper’s youth programs use rainwater, natural dyes, and fuelefficient, reduced-emission wood-burning “rocket stoves.” They also take field trips to local natural ecosystems to discuss the impacts humans are having. “Education is not a linear process,” Harper says, “but rather trying to build a web of connections in children’s minds and hearts so they can have a greater understanding.” Harper says he knows the young people feel safe in these groups, because they feel comfortable enough to admit their worries and turn to him and ask, “Do you think we’re going to be okay?” Some of these young people are very sensitive to problems in the environment they’re aware of—not just climate change, but problems like plastic pollution. “The children and the teenage counselors articulate these fears, and so, one of the things that we try to do is to create an environment where they feel empowered enough that they can do something,” Harper says. “They are also able to address their fears and anxieties together. I think that’s something that best happens in a group where you can support each other and reinforce each other.”

Re-oaking Silicon Valley Silicon Valley thinks of itself as building the future, but is it prepared for the changes that are coming? The San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) recognizes ecosystems are crucial to social-ecological resilience in Silicon Valley. An important aspect of social-ecological resilience is landscape resilience, defined as the ability to sustain

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native biodiversity, ecological functions, and critical physical processes over time. The first thing that Erica Spotswood, an urban ecologist at SFEI, says she noticed when she started working in the field is that meaningful conservation planning starts with land use planning. If it doesn’t start with land use planning and regulations, Spotswood says, then conservation is just racing to stay one step ahead of the bulldozer. These types of land use decisions tend to be made with a three-to-two vote on a weekday morning in a sparsely attended local government board meeting—and yet, the repercussions of these decisions are long-lasting. Spotswood says she is working to better incorporate land conservation efforts for biodiversity protection with land use planning. This means integrating what is needed for landscape resilience into general plans, area or master plans, and climate adaptation plans. If environmental targets can be tied to clean water or other regulatory obligations that these plans need to address, it’s all the better. Also, land use policies such as zoning, transfer of development rights, and urban growth limits can be used by local governments to minimize loss of natural habitat and agricultural land. With an eye toward enhancing biodiversity at all scales of urban planning—from residential yards to regional open-space protection—Spotswood and her colleagues at SFEI wrote “Making Nature’s City.” This report summarizes scientific findings, principles, and analyses that can support urban biodiversity planning. This includes a focus on nature-based approaches to building resilience, such as tidal marsh restoration to protect shorelines from rising seas rather than sea walls that can have many negative impacts on biodiversity. Spotswood says an example close to her heart is planting oak trees to support biodiversity, reduce water use, store carbon, and provide shade. She helped start SFEI’s focus on “re-oaking” Silicon

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Valley, which was once called Llano de los Robles, or Plain of the Oaks, by early explorers. The robles are mostly gone now, replaced by urban trees that were mostly planted over 50 years ago and are now deteriorating with age. To guide future efforts at creating the next urban forest, community groups are planting new oaks. Christine Baker and her fellow naturalists want to conserve biodiversity by re-oaking Silicon Valley. Many animals live and feed on and in suburban oak trees, including birds such as scrub jays, magpies, warblers, and acorn woodpeckers. Insects also feed on leaves, twigs, acorns, bark, and the wood of oak trees and are themselves food for larger animals. No tree in California supports more life than the oak tree. Baker grew up in and around the Black Forest in southern Germany, raised her children in Palo Alto, and now is an active volunteer where she shares her love of oaks and helps her neighbors see the urban forest for its trees. She volunteers with Canopy, a nonprofit organization that began in the 1990s to encourage Palo Alto city residents to care for trees. The city is named after the redwood tree (literally, “tall stick”), but in the 1990s the city’s trees were in decline. Since then, Canopy has become an independent nonprofit and expanded its work to the neighboring communities of East Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Mountain View. Baker surveys four species of native oaks—blue, black, valley, and live oaks—in all seven zones of the Duveneck–St. Francis neighborhood where she lives, and she helps other neighborhoods as well. She conducts these surveys with another Canopy volunteer. They wear name tags and orange safety vests with Canopy’s logo, to look official. With maps in hand, they look for any oak trees they can find that have not yet been mapped or that need to be resurveyed, and they do their best to spot oaks and get access to these

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trees so they can record the location and type of property, measure the trunk diameter, report the condition of the tree, and take photos. They also have information on the mapping effort and tree care to leave with homeowners so they can readily tap into resources on how to care for oaks and other trees on their property. Baker says that she studied literature when she was a student but that surveying oaks has connected her to the natural sciences. “I have learned so much about oak trees and trees in general, and the more you know about nature, the more happiness you find in nature. It’s very satisfying.” Working with Canopy and another local group, Grassroots Ecology, Baker also teaches high school students how to do oak surveys. “If we do a good job collecting the data, then it can be meaningful for scientists. It just makes you feel really good that you can be part of it.” Baker attended a UC California Naturalist Program course through Grassroots Ecology, a conservation nonprofit. She says she made friends through the program and enjoys field trips and hikes. “It has made me so happy,” she says. “It’s been one of the most meaningful things I have done in a long time.” Baker’s capstone project at the end of the course was to plant a native plant pollinator garden in a schoolyard. Now she works with a friend and her naturalist network in putting in pollinator gardens in other places around the city. “All the news about the climate can be so depressing, and as a person who loves the planet and has kids growing into the future, it can be really, really depressing sometimes,” she says. To fight that feeling, Baker says, she plants trees. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2020 she worked with volunteers from Canopy and Grassroots Ecology to plant over 100 trees along the bay. “It makes you feel great, and it makes you feel like you can do something,

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you are not completely helpless, you can plant trees and they will absorb carbon,” Baker says, “so that is my solution for now.” Kirsten Mouradian is a pediatric nurse practitioner and a volunteer tree-planting leader. Thanks to outreach from Canopy, she attended her first state senate candidates meeting to find out what the candidates had to say about environmental issues and where they stood on climate change. “If I want things to change, I have to do something. I can’t just watch things happen,” Mouradian says. In Canopy she sees a way to create a legacy. “I don’t have kids,” she says, “so how am I going to leave my mark? Planting trees is the next best thing—probably even better.” Planting days involve lots of community volunteers. Each group of planters has a planting leader who is paired with a teen urban forester. These teens are from high schools in East Palo Alto and eastern Menlo Park who work part-time planting and caring for urban trees and helping with events. The program is designed to advance their leadership and communication skills, providing opportunities for public speaking and teamwork through environmental and civic stewardship. “Together, we take our planting kit on wheels, introduce ourselves to the residents, and in no time at all these trees are in the ground, staked, and tagged with the name of the tree—many hands make light work,” Mouradian says. “My impact is still pretty small, but never underestimate the impact you have in sharing with young people.” When Mouradian’s father planted trees, he named them after his kids and family members, to honor them. So now she asks residents, when they agree to participate in tree planting on their property, whom they would like to honor with a tree. “It’s more personal and fun, and it has to help them take better care of the tree,” Mouradian says. The trees hold memories for residents who

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remember their namesakes and provide a cooler future for residents to come.

Coyote Valley: Landscape-Scale Conservation Action Connecting wild spaces helps species adapt to climate change, but is it possible to create wildlife corridors in cities and suburbs amid the persistent march of steel girders and concrete? Consider Coyote Valley, some 7,400 acres of farms, orchards, and, increasingly, people, which today provides passage from the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Diablo Range. The South Bay, the Santa Cruz Mountains, plus the Diablo Range once made up an intact landscape of oak woodlands, grasslands, streamside gallery forest, and wetlands. But as the cities and suburbs of Silicon Valley grew, more and more of the lowlands were paved over with highways, tract homes, and strip malls—resulting in habitat loss and fragmentation. This type of development was avoided on the steeper slopes of the adjacent Santa Cruz Mountains and Diablo Range. The mountains are where an estimated 1.13 million acres of core habitat still persist and support populations of numerous large, wide-ranging mammals such as mountain lions, bobcats, elk, deer, badgers, and coyotes. Coyote Valley is one of the only permeable landscapes left that allows these species to move between the mountain ranges. However, San Jose’s urban growth engine threatens to make passage through the valley increasingly difficult and threatens to isolate Santa Cruz Mountains wildlife populations from the rest of the state. Protecting Coyote Valley offers an opportunity to conserve rare intact wetlands that provide flood protection and freshwater drainage and storage, as well as prime farmland. The valley’s surviving natural ecosystems do more than provide these benefits to

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the local environment; they are also critical for the protection and climate resilience of the surrounding 1.13 million acres. One of the most important ways to preserve and protect a habitat corridor is to first create a common community vision. Mothers Out Front is a national organization that helps create local community action groups based on relationships, kindness, mutual respect, and collaboration to ensure a livable climate. Susan ButlerGraham is a retired elementary school teacher, an artist, and, more recently, a team leader for Mothers Out Front’s South Bay chapter. She says that she used to suffer sleepless nights filled with angst over what climate change means for her children, grandchildren, and all of life on Earth. She fretted over her personal carbon footprint and was happy to start buying her electricity from San Jose Clean Energy. When she learned this clean energy provider had been in part created through the activism of women now involved in Mothers Out Front, it led her to the group and a sense that she could do something. “Before I joined the group, I would get panicked, and then I would go into denial because I could not sustain that level of anger and sadness . . . and worry about what I am going to say to my kids in 10 years.” Now, Butler-Graham says, “I don’t have to go into denial and shut down. I can say yes this is horrible and yes this is scary but I am doing everything I can.” Despair is a common feeling in the face of the climate crises and the slow society response to addressing them. Butler-Graham’s actions exemplify hope, over despair, in taking action with Mothers Out Front to make something happen for good. “I know I’m doing what I can do, like tomorrow night I am speaking at a parent-teacher association meeting for public transit,” Butler-Graham says. A group of four to eight members of

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Mothers Out Front meet regularly and take turns hosting the meeting. Each November, they discuss two main topics or campaigns that they want to take on, based on the interests across the group. They also reflect on how things went the year before, based on how many decision makers and other people they engaged with over the year, and how many letters and opinion editorial pieces they’ve sent off, what effect they’ve had, and what types of training they’ve taken from the national organization or elsewhere. This reflection, Butler-Graham says, helps them recognize their successes and setbacks, as well as set goals for the next year. “People are really passionate about what they want to work on. One mother was talking about pushing for electric school busses and another mom about an anti-idling campaign,” Butler-Graham says. “Last year we had to take a vote because we had so many disparate things that looked like viable campaigns.” The group is excited to advance a campaign on behalf of protecting the Coyote Valley wildlife corridor. Coyote Valley is how species like mountain lions move between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range and the rest of California. ButlerGraham says her group has seen evidence from wildlife cameras across the valley showing that bobcats, coyotes, and mountain lions pass through Coyote Valley. “One of the group members said once this land is gone, it’s gone, and that sealed it for me,” ButlerGraham says. “Yeah, electric buses are great, but protecting Coyote Valley has to happen now.” Mothers Out Front South Bay set a goal to get the San Jose City Council to protect Coyote Valley, with funding from a previously voter-approved bond measure to protect environmental benefits and flood control. “I personally met with Pam Foley, who was a brand-new council member, and she didn’t know much about

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A coyote enters the Coyote Valley wildlife corridor, south of San Jose. Photo by David J. Mauk.

Coyote Valley and the value for open space and agriculture,” Butler-Graham says. She and the other Mothers Out Front members presented the advantages of the project to the councilwoman and answered her questions and worked to convince her and other council members. They also attended council meetings and brought children to talk about Coyote Valley. “It takes a lot for a kid to come speak to the city council . . . about animals and their future,” Butler-Graham says. A big part of the campaign was making postcards to support Coyote Valley, and, at event tables and by going door-to-door, they persuaded over 500 community members to sign those postcards, plus they collected many more signatures on an online petition. On Mother’s Day, they hand-delivered the postcards to city council members. In the end, the San Jose City Council approved a $93

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million deal to protect 937 acres in Coyote Valley as an essential part of the Coyote Valley corridor. The Coyote Valley corridor vision—a partnership with the Peninsula Open Space Trust and the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority—is on its way to becoming a reality thanks to local community action. Butler-Graham says that people who want to help fight climate change but are paralyzed by the enormity of it all should “start small, just doing one action, attending one rally, writing one letter to the editor.” But eventually, she says, joining a group is essential. “Then you get fortified,” says Butler-Graham, “hearing about what other moms are doing, it’s contagious.”

Providing Clean Energy and Much More Thanks in part to advocacy by Mothers Out Front, the San Jose City Council voted in 2017 to create a Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) electricity provider to generate, buy, and sell clean power through the existing investor-owned utility monopoly. Or, to put it more simply, the city came up with its own green power solution. The popularity of community choice energy across California is one of the main reasons that wind and solar provide close to half of California’s power. Thanks to a state law passed in 2002, local governments can form their own miniature power companies so their residents can choose where their electricity comes from rather than having that choice made for them by PG&E, SoCal Edison, or San Diego Gas and Electric. Cities or counties can form CCAs individually, or they can join together to form regional CCAs. So far, more than 10 million Californians get their power through CCAs. San Jose Clean Energy is overseen by the city council and offers a total-green option for those able and willing to pay,

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on average, an additional five dollars per month for 100 percent renewable electricity from carbon-free wind and solar farms. Some of this electricity comes from San Jose residents with solar panels. Once landowners install solar panels, the amount of power generated at each site is metered, along with the amount of electricity used at each site, and the difference is calculated during each billing cycle. When customers generate more power than they use, San Jose Clean Energy pays them for the extra power that the utility has sent on to its other customers. Ben Foster is a clean-energy consultant who is the volunteer chair of a nine-person advisory committee that reports to San Jose’s city council and city manager on San Jose Clean Energy’s operations. The committee identifies any problems, looks for ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and examines new energy developments. It is also a liaison between the electricity supplier and the community. Foster says the main focus for CCAs is on identifying and providing clean energy locally. For example, rather than just relying on individuals who decide to put solar on their property, CCAs can plan at the regional or city scale and do things like site solar power generation near commuter rail. Foster says a district or neighborhood is the right scale for setting up a microgrid, and CCAs can offer incentives and other options that will help California meet its goal of using 100 percent renewable and zero-carbon energy by 2045. Investor-owned utilities like PG&E cannot customize their services for local communities as easily as CCAs can, Foster says, but a “CCA is really a platform for innovation.” Those who went through the planned power outages during 2019’s fire season know how hard it is to live—even temporarily— without electricity in the modern world. Power outages affect

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everyone’s health and safety but are even more challenging for people with health issues. Electricity also lies at the heart of our local economies. “The [Public Safety Power Shutoffs] were a crystalizing event that happened to make the cities more aware of potential risk,” Foster says, and they left San Jose Clean Energy wondering “Can we have more control?” So, San Jose Clean Energy is looking into offering customers battery storage, on-site generation, and emergency shelters. The shutoffs also left the advisory committee wondering what their CCA can do to make the broader grid more stable. “There are complex and sometimes competing demands on a local green energy provider,” Foster says. “How should it divide its time and resources? Should it focus on local resilience, power generation, grid stabilization, encouraging electric vehicle use, or keeping power bills low?” It’s a complex balance with no single right answer and one that he wishes more people would take an interest in. The advisory committee’s monthly meetings are open to the public but sparsely attended. Foster says the committee is “hungry for input and open for input, [but] I just don’t think we get much input, other than a super small handful of passionate people that have probably just one issue that they’re most interested in.” What this means is there is plenty of opportunity to direct one’s energy toward lowering the community carbon footprint by shining a light on the agenda that CCA electricity provides. The Clean Power Exchange is a project of the Climate Center in California that provides extensive resources on how community members can start their own CCA or participate in ones that already exist. For those who already have a local CCA, there are opportunities to serve on advisory boards, as Foster does, or provide public input to prioritize new green power generation, subsidize clean power for

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those who can’t afford it, or increase the use of clean electricity in the transportation sector. It’s a chance to seize power— benevolently, of course.

·

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In sum, community and ecosystem resilience are intertwined—for example, planting native oaks in town provides both shade for people and habitat for birds and other species. Improving social connections among community members and supporting local organizations is essential to be able to survive disruption and to anticipate, adapt, and flourish in the face of change—the very definition of resilience. Assessing vulnerabilities and potential hazards followed by investigating options and making a plan that can be implemented and revised over time are all important steps to increasing resilience. Working at the community scale—such as by providing a local clean power option—is climate action that can be taken by and for the public. Local energy, water, and food security are interconnected and essential for community resilience.

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3

A Changing Harvest

We all depend on a thin layer of soil to sustain us. dav i d gr av e s, Saintsbury Winery

For a century, most farms in the United States have depleted the carbon stock of their soils through agricultural practices that made a lot of food but, in the process, stripped the soil of nutrients and released carbon and other greenhouse gases into the air. Many farmers today are trying to reverse that trend for the sake of the planet and their farms. Reducing or eliminating the need for tilling the soil, maintaining cover crops, and applying compost are all part of a new approach called “carbon farming.” Compost can reduce crops’ need for synthetic fertilizers, which contribute significant amounts of nitrous oxide—a very potent greenhouse gas. Compost also keeps excess nitrogen from leaching into rivers and coastlines downstream from agricultural areas, killing corals and creating dead zones in important fisheries. Composting organic waste also helps reduce the amount of waste that goes into landfills, where it contributes to the release of methane. So, when we combine reductions to the waste stream,

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decreased use of synthetic fertilizer, carbon sequestration, and less nitrogen leaching, we get a win-win-win-win for the climate and food production. The goal is to decrease the amount of carbon lost to the atmosphere and increase the absorption of carbon from the atmosphere through sequestration by growing plants in and among the crops and then leaving them in place to store this carbon into the future, deep in the soil. Plants absorb carbon, but when tilled under, most of that carbon is released into the air. But if the plants are left alone to decompose in place—or if they keep growing, as is the case with perennial crops or grasses—this carbon can be stored in the soil instead. The deeper the carbon goes, the more likely it is to stay there. In addition to reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air, building and maintaining carbon-rich soils provides more organic nutrients for farmers’ crops and better water retention in the soil, reducing irrigation demands and improving drought resilience— mitigating climate impacts and ensuring the future food supply. Across much of California’s Central Valley bioregions, “the soil is amazing but the main challenge is water,” says Ka Tchieng, whose family grows Asian vegetables in the Fresno area. Less than 1 percent of all water on Earth is fresh water, including all lakes and rivers, groundwater, and the water contained in living things. About 2 percent of Earth’s water is frozen in glaciers, even accounting for recent global warming. It is no wonder that securing enough fresh water can be a challenge. The future is predicted to be even more water-stressed due to higher temperatures, declines in mountain snowpack, and changes in rainfall patterns. The California Central Valley water system is made up of reservoirs and transport systems designed to store and move water that originates in the Sierras and flows through the

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Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta. This system provides water to approximately two-thirds of the state, including Central Valley farmers. Due to increased warming and changes in precipitation patterns, this system will not deliver the same level of water into the future, unless precipitation increases enough to compensate for the impacts of higher temperatures. Therefore, as scientists reported in California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment, reductions in the amount of available water are expected by the middle of the century. Under one set of assumptions, the scientists say, delta water exports may decrease by 15 percent under low-flow conditions and 7 percent under high-flow conditions. The Fourth Assessment also reported that average daily high temperatures could rise by as much as 8.8°F (4.84°C) by the end of the century. This change could lead to 43 more days per year with highs exceeding 106°F (41°C) degrees in Fresno. These higher temperatures mean a higher demand for water by the plants to produce the food we love to eat and avoid an accidental production of sun-dried tomatoes, so it is critical to improve water use efficiencies as the soils become drier.

Carbon Farming Leads to a Full Belly Clear Lake may be in Lake County, but thanks to accidents of geology and incidents of legality, the water flows about an hour’s drive to the east, to Yolo County. Some 10,000 years ago, the water drained west into the Russian River, but tectonic instability and landslides cut off those tributaries and forced the water toward the Sacramento River. Much later, the miners of the 19th century and the farmers of the 20th created California’s “first in time, first in line” water laws, ensuring that the water in Clear Lake belonged

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not to Lake County but to Yolo County. The Mediterranean climate of California translates into a need for water during the dry season that can often only be found some distance away from the point of use. Having water owned by distant interests is common in California and is the case here where it is a windy drive from Clear Lake to the farms along Cache Creek. Californians are bound together by the water they share and often argue over. Twenty-first century farmers in Yolo County are finding ways to reduce the amount of water they use and better manage their groundwater, especially after the persistent drought of 2011–17. Judith Redmond is one of the co-owners of Full Belly Farm, a 400acre organic farm in the Capay Valley. Redmond remembers the drought years when Cache Creek was low because there wasn’t enough water to release from Clear Lake or Indian Valley Reservoir, up on the north fork. Without that water in the creek, the farms along it couldn’t remove water for irrigation. They were lucky that at the time the groundwater aquifer had what they needed, but the levels of the aquifer have yet to recover from the amount farmers used during the drought. Like other farmers in Capay Valley, Redmond relies on the aquifer for food production and worries about competing with future development that seems bound to come up the valley as the city of Davis expands. To make the most of the water they do have, Full Belly Farm builds up their soil with high levels of organic matter that comes from cover crops and composted sheep manure. In addition to reducing their water needs, Full Belly Farm is trying to both minimize the greenhouse gases they emit producing food and increase on-farm carbon sequestration and storage. Redmond points out that they are especially keen on “not giving off as much nitrous oxide.” Nitrous oxide is 300 times more powerful

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than carbon dioxide in its ability to trap heat, and it also depletes the ozone layer. While the need to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions is often focused on reducing tail-pipe emissions from cars and trucks, agriculture produces an estimated 58–74 percent of the nitrous oxide released in the United States. Nitrogen pollution coming from industrial agricultural fields is also a major problem for water quality, impacting freshwater and marine systems. Methane, another potent greenhouse gas, is also primarily produced by agriculture. When soils are left undisturbed, they are a sink for methane, but when disturbed through tilling, soil releases a lot of methane. Emerging scientific studies suggest that in addition to improving overall soil health, conservation tillage systems, which reduce the frequency or intensity of soil disturbance, reduce both nitrous oxide and methane emissions. Their influence on carbon dioxide is less clear. While carbon dioxide does not trap as much heat as methane and some other gases, it is still the most worrying greenhouse gas because it can remain in the atmosphere for 200 years, twice as long as nitrous oxide and almost 17 times longer than methane. Therefore, nitrous oxide and methane are sometimes referred to as short-lived climate pollutants. Carbon dioxide also accounts for 82 percent of the United States’ current greenhouse gas emissions. There is a lot of carbon stored in the soil, thanks mostly to plant roots and exudates. Roots take in the nutrients and water from the soil that are essential for plants to grow. The role that exudates play, on the other hand, is not so familiar. Exudates are made up of organic compounds that are passively leaked into the soil from plant roots along with mucilage (which is what it sounds like: plant snot). Exudates stimulate microbial activity. Aerobic microbes, which require oxygen, digest and exhale some of this carbon as

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CO2 as they grow. When the soil aggregates or clods are broken up through tilling, the carbon in the soil becomes easy for the microbes to access and a feeding frenzy begins. Carbon farmers are managing their soil to prevent this and the resulting release of CO2. The application of compost can help. Whendee Silver, an ecosystem scientist at UC Berkeley, conducted research on the consequences of adding compost to a variety of California rangeland conditions and measured a significant net increase in soil carbon storage as compared with control plots after one season. Models by Silver and her colleagues forecasting outcomes over a 30-year time horizon reveal that increased plant production and carbon sequestration will result from these treatments, and carbon sequestration potential will be maximized approximately 15 years following a single application of compost. Plants grown in soil amended with compost grow vigorously, absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for photosynthesis, and produce more food. In addition to tending the soil, Redmond and her partners are farmscaping by planting native plants in hedgerows along the farm margins, providing habitat for beneficial insects and protecting riparian corridors. Fast-growing streamside plants sequester carbon out of the atmosphere, filter sediment to improve water quality, and create habitat for animals, including pollinators. Bees are essential to pollinate and produce cucumbers, melons, almonds, and other crops California is known for. Honeybee colonies have been declining worldwide due to disease, pesticide use, and floral food scarcity, so they need all the help they can get from additional nectar-filled flowers. Many farms in Yolo County and beyond are dealing with the honeybee crisis by working to attract and support some of

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California’s 1,600 native bee species—unstung heroes of the California Floristic Province. Native bumble, sweat, and carpenter bees and others are efficient pollinators and ensure crops that require insect pollination can produce fruit. Native bees need diverse habitats with different floral resources available throughout  the year. They are attracted to Full Belly Farm because of the diversity of plants in and around the farm. The farm has about two acres of flowers; these, plus native shrubs in hedgerows along the fields, provide bees with food year-round. Diversified farming and farmscaping are strategies that Full Belly Farm employs to manage both pollination and climate uncertainty. Full Belly Farm produces 54 kinds of fruits, nuts, and vegetables and it’s this diversity that the subscribers to the farm’s produce boxes love when they receive their weekly shipments. Apricots and other stone fruits date back to the 1700s in Yolo County, but a changing climate makes them hard to rely on, compared with almonds and apples. Cool-weather crops of greens and root vegetables complement hot-weather peppers and tomatoes to produce a year-round harvest. Instead of worrying about the peaches that didn’t have enough cool nights to produce a full crop, Redmond and the other owners of the farm can make the most of the evergreen Meyer lemons, pomegranates, and grapefruits. Thanks to diversified farming and the support of devoted customers, the owners of Full Belly Farm are confident that they can keep farming and making money even as the climate changes.

Nutritious, Delicious, Carbonaceous Walnuts The native Northern California black walnut tree (Juglans californica var. hindsii) was a widespread food source for people and

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wildlife throughout California. For more than a hundred years, it was assumed that genetically pure Northern California black walnuts were limited to just three remaining locations where these trees were identified and named by Willis Linn Jepson in 1908. Believed to be on the brink of extinction, this species faces threats from hybridization with orchard trees (Persian or English walnut) and habitat conversion for urban expansion and agriculture. More recently, Daniel Potter and his colleagues looked at the genetics of over 158 seemingly native Northern California black walnut trees living in mostly wildland settings in 10 different counties. This work confirmed that at least 71.5 percent of these trees appear to be purebred without any sign of intermixing with orchard walnut trees. This is good news, as the Northern California black walnut seems to have dodged extinction despite our best attempts to pave and farm it out of existence. With our help these beautiful shade trees could return to their former status as a widespread tree across California. They grow more quickly than many other native trees and are a good choice for preserving a bit of history, conserving biodiversity, and sequestering carbon—a trifecta. California’s native walnut trees and remnants of old walnut orchards still line many neighborhood streets and are the namesake for roads and towns up and down the state—and of course, a favorite food source for marauding squirrels. Katherine JarvisShean wrote a PhD dissertation on tree crops and climate change at UC Davis and holds a special place in her heart for walnuts. She points out that they have a unique taste, unlike almonds, which are a blank canvas one can paint with chili and lime. The walnut remains an important commodity and production has nearly tripled since 2000. California is the only US state with commercial production and accounts for two-thirds of the world trade.

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Walnut trees stay in the ground for 25–35 years and don’t require tilling, and cover crops can be used in between the rows, if water is not too scarce. This means the trees, along with the cover crops, are locking carbon away in the soil. However, the future for these nuts is uncertain. Walnuts are vulnerable to rising winter temperatures. Deciduous trees drop their leaves and go dormant in the winter. Counterintuitively, it’s not warm temperatures that wake trees up, but, rather, cool nights. Hormones keep fruit and nut trees dormant, and these hormones only break down under chilling temperatures between 32°F (0°C) and 45°F (7.22°C). Think of a tree’s dormancy hormones as a countdown clock, but one that only ticks when it’s cool. Only by experiencing a certain amount of time at lower temperatures will the plant’s dormancy hormones break down and allow buds to develop in response to warmer temperatures in spring. But if there are fewer chill hours, the timer ticks erratically. Things get even more complicated with warmer winter temperatures that exceed 60°F, because these periods can negate the chill hours logged during cooler nights preceding these warmer spells. The increase in winter minimum temperatures is worrisome for fruit and nut growers and makes it difficult for them to remain chill. Judith Redmond and other farmers have noticed that their stone fruits and nut crops are blooming earlier and the flowers often don’t bloom all at the same time. When a tree does not receive the required chill hours to detect the onset of spring as a signal for bud break, the buds appear at different times. Asynchronous blooming can strongly affect plant-pollinator interactions, elongate the blooming period, and impact the overall fitness of the plants, making them more susceptible to disease. To ensure future successful fruit and nut production, more research is being done on chill hours across California than ever before, because chill

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hours have already fallen by about 2 per year over the past 105 years. Based on recent historical climate data for California, the increase in winter temperatures has an even stronger upward trend than annual maximum temperatures. If current levels of greenhouse gas emissions continue relatively unabated, the chill hours are expected to fall from the current annual average of 882 hours to 712 hours by the end of the century. Just 40 miles south from Full Belly Farm, down I-5 in Winters, Craig McNamara grows organic walnuts on roughly 450 acres. McNamara’s family first moved to California during the Civil War, though he himself was born in Michigan and grew up in Washington, DC, before moving back to California for school and starting Sierra Orchards in 1980. McNamara is a leader in sustainable farming and the former president of the state Board of Food and Agriculture. His son Sean McNamara has also taken to farming and is bringing new innovations to the orchard. Like most farmers, McNamara starts his day by checking the weather. During the winter he gets excited when he sees that there have been a few more chill hours. “If we don’t get the hours, then we get walnuts maturing at different times,” he says. The ideal is for all the walnuts to ripen at the same time and be ready to drop in one pass of the mechanical shaker—the best possible outcome both in terms of carbon emissions and gas money. But chill hours aren’t the only factor. “There is a whole host of climate-related things that we have to think about and be resilient about every day,” McNamara says. The Chandler variety of walnuts that he grows is “the queen of the ball” with its light color and large nut-to-shell ratio, but it was cultivated for the California climate of the past. The Chandler blooms later than most walnuts, to avoid spring rains and bacterial blight. In June, the nuts are still green

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and soft inside. This is when McNamara hears from people who want to make nocino, a bitter Italian liqueur made with green walnuts. (If only the world would develop an insatiable thirst for nocino, walnut farmers wouldn’t have to worry about the nuts surviving increasingly hot summer temperatures.) But the biggest danger to the late-blooming Chandler walnut is extreme heat; when the weather warms to over 108°F (42.2°C), McNamara says, the stillgreen fruit can sunburn, damaging the nut meat. The conventional wisdom is that it’s not cost-effective to protect walnuts from sunburn, but McNamara applies white clay and other organic materials as sunscreen a couple of times each summer. Under models that include business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, Winters is expected to have 20–40 extremely hot days (over 108°F) a year by the middle of the century that could damage walnuts, as compared to an average of 10 such days observed before 2000. Changes in the amount and timing of precipitation is what Jarvis-Shean worries about the most for growing tree crops in California. Climate change influences the availability of water for plant growth in several ways. The models that are designed to predict exactly how much rainfall California will get do not all agree. But what is clear is that greenhouse gas emissions have already led to hotter average air temperatures, and as warming continues, the Sierra snowpack will decline and melt sooner. With decreases in the magnitude and duration of the snowpack, there will be an increasing demand to store more water from rainfall in the winter to use during the hotter, longer dry season, especially to allow tree crops to thrive. New reservoirs to replace snowpack water will be expensive and hard to build and manage, in part because reservoirs can have environmental impacts on native fish and other stream life.

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Between a clear trend toward warmer winter minimum or nighttime temperatures, less fresh water, and the observed 76 percent decline in fog over the past 35 winters, these crops are likely to fail 10 percent or more of the time by 2050, and by 2100 walnut growers will need to either use new varieties or switch crops entirely. As for new varieties, plant breeders could try to develop new varieties that might require fewer chill hours and be more drought-tolerant, but the time required could run longer than 30 years. Even with walnut sunscreen, there will be burned nuts that are discarded at the nut huller where the outer hull is removed. Through a series of recent innovations, Sierra Orchards composts its heaps of discarded nuts, hulls, and deadwood and puts them back onto the land. This saves significant energy compared with the more conventional method for converting an old orchard, which, McNamara says, “is to clear-cut the trees, grind the wood, and take it to a co-generation energy plant.” Farmers also burn wood from downed orchard trees, which releases black carbon into the atmosphere and presents problems for air quality in neighboring communities. Black carbon is a solid particle or aerosol, not a gas, but it contributes to global warming because if it reaches the atmosphere it absorbs sunlight and if it is deposited on snow or ice it can accelerate melting (see more in chapter 4). One characteristic of black carbon is that it stays in the atmosphere for weeks and not years like CO2, so the benefits of reducing this pollutant for mitigating climate change are nearly immediate. Craig McNamara has found another, cathartic use for his excess walnut wood. Like many members of his generation, Craig protested against the Vietnam War. But for Craig, the war without was also a war within: his father was Robert McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense and architect of the war. The chair that Robert McNamara sat in while he discussed the war with John F. Kennedy

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A Sierra Orchards worker uses a tractor to shift walnut hulls in a compost pile. Photo by Sean McNamara.

was deconstructed for an exhibit in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by the artist Danh Vo, whose South Vietnamese parents fled the war for Denmark. After seeing the show, Craig contacted Vo and gave him the wood from one of his retired walnut groves, which Vo used to create an exhibition featuring the raw walnut lumber as well as furniture and gun stocks fashioned from the wood. Vo deconstructed a painful history using wood with its own story and unique qualities.

Paying the Water Deficit Forward Warmer winters and hotter summers will also result in higher rates of climatic water deficit. The climatic water deficit is simply

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the difference between how much water plants would use if they had as much as they wanted and the amount of water naturally available to them. Or, to put it another way, climatic water deficit defines how much water farmers need to irrigate their crops. This measure is based on estimates of current and future precipitation, temperature, solar radiation, and potential evapotranspiration (the process by which water is absorbed from the land by plants and then transferred to the atmosphere). Climatic water deficit will result in lower soil moisture due to warming air temperature and associated increases in plant transpiration, increasing the demand for water by the plants and further drying the soil. Think of how much water indoor tropical house plants require when the heater is on in the winter. Under current rates of emissions, climatic water deficit in the Central Valley is estimated to increase 10–25 percent by the middle of the century. Spring is also arriving sooner, and the dry seasons may continue longer into the fall. With more water shortages on the horizon, it’s no wonder that farmers stay tuned to the weather, not just to log chill hours but in the hopes rain will come—but not too much at one time. California’s Mediterranean climate means rainfall is concentrated over a few months in the winter (November–March), and there is often little to no rain from late spring to early fall. The exact amount and timing of precipitation within the wet season is highly variable, leading to an uncertain renewable supply of fresh water for farmers. McNamara has dubbed the swings from drenching atmospheric rivers to droughts “agro-chaos,” as in “we deal with agro-chaos on the farm every day, one way or the other.” In addition to the high variation in rainfall year to year and the timing of rains, freshwater lakes and permanent rivers are rare across most of the state, so agriculture relies on ephemeral rivers

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and streams, which frequently dry out in the summer, when farmers need water most. This asynchronous timing of water supply and demand motivated California’s large-scale water storage and irrigation projects, built to maintain dependable supply during the dry season. In areas not served by large reservoirs, small water projects are common, including surface water diversions and groundwater pumping. Direct withdrawal of water from streams can result in decreased flows by more than 90 percent locally and can produce significant cumulative downstream effects for fish and other aquatic life. As an alternative to taking water directly from stream surface water or pumping groundwater, small water storage basins (also known as farm ponds) are often built and filled with surface water diversions and runoff in the winter to recharge groundwater for the growing season. These small off-stream storage ponds are far less likely to significantly impact downstream flows. The key to capturing stormwater from the fast and heavy storms of winter is to slow it down so it can soak into the land and provide water during the dry season. At Sierra Orchards, the McNamaras use a farm pond as a “water bank.” When Putah Creek is at peak flow, they pump water from the creek to fill this small pond and the ditches that lead to the pond to recharge the groundwater aquifer. McNamara says, “The pond does a great job of catching rain runoff and sediment.” Groundwater banking is taking off in California as an adaptation strategy, and like most activities done on a small scale, it presents little risk; however, before we bank water on a large scale, a good deal of information is needed to determine capacity, the fate of the stored water, and how best to distribute it. There is no doubt, however, that groundwater banking is an important way to recharge groundwater resources that have been depleted in the Central Valley and other agricultural areas.

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The McNamaras have continued to improve their irrigation systems to reduce overall water and energy use, thanks in part to a grant from the State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP). The funding for this program comes from the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, raised from cap-and-trade allowance revenue, as well as Propositions 1 and 68. These types of programs can help farmers transition to more climate-resilient agriculture. This grant helped finance a new water delivery system for a 105-acre block of mature walnut trees, replacing an aged drip system with efficient, hanging micro sprinklers. The McNamaras also purchased a Davis weather station that, in combination with soil moisture probes, provides real-time information on how much more water the trees need than they can get out of the soil. This system allows the McNamaras to irrigate on an as-needed basis, saving water and energy. Like the folks at Full Belly Farm, McNamara plants a mix of clover, which sheep love to eat, along with vetch and daikon radish as cover crops. In addition to being a great complement to any sushi platter, the daikon radish roots reach two to three feet deep and are two to three inches in diameter, creating a deep pathway into the soil for air, water, and organic matter, allowing water to percolate down farther. The McNamaras also plant hedgerows and have done a great deal of riparian restoration to reduce erosion and foster a diversified farm that supports biodiversity and the best terroir for walnuts and other crops. Sean McNamara introduced sheep grazing under the orchard to help manage the cover crops and any weeds that sneak in. They use mob style grazing, with around 3,500 sheep on a 100-acre field, and this may only take two to three days before they move the sheep to the next part of the orchard. They remove the animals at least 90

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days before harvest, to avoid any contamination of the crop. These sheep take care of the weeds and, as sheep will do, provide natural fertilizer, but Craig points out that they don’t use goats because “they will get on each other’s backs to get at the walnuts.”

Wine in the Woods Just over the hills from Yolo County is the famed wine country of Napa Valley, which put California on the map for sommeliers around the world. After Napa won recognition in the wine world, other regions with New World Mediterranean climate went through a wine boom, and California, Australia, and Chile giving the French a run for their money. The complex flavors in wine are influenced by terroir—the land and climate where the grapes are grown. “Wine is a poster child for the influence of climate,” says David Graves, cofounder of Saintsbury Winery and recipient of a climate champion award from Napa Climate NOW! “When they put the year on the bottle, this reflects the growing season. And even the most casual wine enthusiasts have an interest in climate as it relates to what is in the bottle.” With average annual maximum temperatures likely to increase by 5°F–9°F (2.75°C–4.95°C) throughout California’s North Coast region through the end of the 21st century, wine grape growers there need to be ready for warmer weather. This means they are likely to be changing the varietals they grow, exploring new, more drought-tolerant genetic lines, and improving on water conservation. Winegrowers are a creative lot and are developing ways to protect their enterprise for the future by reducing their carbon footprint and increasing the carbon-sequestering capacity of the vineyards.

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“We can figure out a way to keep farming, but the way we do it now may go away, and we need to make room for the natural environment to coexist with the vineyards,” Graves says. He is a naturalist and his curiosity about nature takes him in creative directions, including making space for solitary bees to nest in the vineyard soil—another benefit of reducing regular disturbance associated with tilling soil. Oak trees are a haven for insects and provide a critical food resource for birds and mammals as well. Graves has planted oak trees across his property and is proud that Napa Valley has a re-oaking effort to restore valley (Quercus lobata) and live oaks (Q. agrifolia). Graves is also working on protecting the banks of Carneros Creek as a wildlife corridor with help from his neighbors who have joined him in the Carneros Creek Stewardship Group. These landowners are dedicated to recovering an endangered freshwater shrimp that lives in the creek and are proud to help steelhead trout, lampreys, and other aquatic life survive the long, hot summer. Graves says, “Climate change is a threat to agriculture, but it is also a threat to the natural systems that surround our vineyards.” Graves puts up boxes for bluebirds because they are beautiful birds and doing this type of stewardship lifts his spirit: “It’s a lot more fun to look at bluebirds than calculate carbon emissions on wine shipping from California to Illinois.” Watching vine shoots elongate, smelling the aroma of a vineyard and flowering cover crops blooming, hearing the buzz of pollinators, and noticing when the soil starts to dry and fruit starts to ripen is the way Graves observes climate on the farm. He knows the soil has remained drier for longer in the past couple of years and the importance of husbanding water for the vines to survive longer and hotter dry periods. The Carneros Wine Alliance—of which Graves is a founding

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member—is interested in embracing older practices, but they also keep a close eye on 11 modern climate sensors set up across Napa Valley as part of a climate study. The sensors allow members to track differences in microclimates and changes that have occurred since 1993. Graves may be even more sensitive to climate change because he grows pinot noir. The pinot noir grape is sensitive to hot weather; hence, areas where it grows well can be thought of as climate refugia. Once the movie Sideways cast aside merlot for the elusive pinot noir, vineyards have gone through a rapid expansion into the cooler climates of redwood country. The same foggy conditions that allow coastal redwoods to grow also provide shelter from extreme heat that can ruin a good pinot noir. Shifting heat-sensitive crops, like pinot noir grapes, to cooler latitudes or to higher elevations is one way that farmers are adapting to climate change already. Places once too cold for vines are now producing some decent wines. This is a global phenomenon, with fine sparkling wines being grown in England for the first time and wine grapes being moved farther south to avoid the heat in the Southern Hemisphere. Winegrowers in sunny parts of California are planting vineyards on cooler north-facing slopes and at higher altitudes to prevent overripening due to longer and hotter dry seasons. In fact, California can now lay claim to having the highest vineyard in the United States and maybe even in the Northern Hemisphere: Stone Summit Vineyard in Big Bear sits at 6,750 feet! There is also a budding wine industry springing up in Humboldt County, where pinot noir can grow in the redwood belt protected from extreme heat by coastal fog. As lovely as a good pinot noir wine is, replacing redwoods with wine grapes isn’t climate smart. Towering redwoods—and most of

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the plants found below them, including madrone, tan oak, and Douglas fir trees, as well as sword ferns and shrubs—can take up fog water directly through their leaves. This extra water source allows redwoods to actively respire and grow throughout the summer, when plants generally shut down across the interior part of California due to extreme heat, and during drought. These rapidly growing redwood trees not only capture water from fog but also capture atmospheric carbon increasingly being emitted by industry, cars, and more frequent and intense wildfires. With billions of tiny leaves and massive trunks, northern coast redwoods grow throughout the year and even during drought years, thanks to summer fog. As part of the photosynthesis required to promote their growth, they suck up the carbon in the atmosphere and can store 2,600 metric tons of carbon per hectare—more than double the carbon density of other trees found in the region—making northern coast redwoods one of our most important tools to combat climate change. Wine grapes can grow in many places, but redwoods have only one home—California.

Walking through Olive Groves In northern San Diego County, the Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians received a SWEEP grant to help them plant a no-till olive orchard that includes the use of cover crops to better capture carbon. Farmers often grow what their neighbors are growing and selling successfully. The Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians went in a different direction and decided to grow olives because no one else in the area was doing it. Olives grow well in drier, hotter conditions, sequester carbon, and don’t require tilling. As farmers adapt to a warmer and less predictable climate, diversifying crops is important. The Pauma

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chose olives in part because they don’t require as much water as the 15,000 citrus and avocado trees that the tribe already grows. Olive trees have a long history in the Mediterranean regions, and they grow well in California’s Mediterranean climate. The tribe purchased an organic farm a couple of miles down the road from the Pauma Indian Reservation, and they are in the process of planting 53,000 olive trees from 10 different varieties across 35 acres, which will make this the largest olive orchard in San Diego County. Temecula Olive Oil Company is scheduled to buy the olives when the trees produce in five years’ time. Ultimately, the tribe plans to press their own olive oil. Joe Aguilar and Andrew Madrigal manage the olive orchard, and they receive advice on how to best grow olives from the Temecula Olive Oil Company. “It’s always been organic, and we wanted to keep it that way,” Aguilar says. This farm is in the middle of Pauma Valley in a sandy wash along a riparian corridor. The sandy soil limits what types of plants they can grow, but the olive is a hardy tree that can thrive here. Still, though olives grow well in warmer temperatures, they are not immune to spikes in heat. Erratic weather and drought have depressed olive production in the Mediterranean Basin, and the areas suitable for production are forecast to shrink with increased temperature and decreased precipitation. Italy’s production fell by 57 percent when a late frost was followed by high winds and extended periods above 105°F (40.55°C), and a drought across Spain caused an estimated 44 percent decline in production. Aguilar and Madrigal are working to make the olive orchard more resilient in a drier future. Aguilar says each piece of the land across the 35 acres is different, so they have soil moisture probes in different locations, and they can check a phone app to see which parts of the orchard need more or less water. This system to

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Nya Qwen Aguilar helps plant an organic olive orchard in northern San Diego County in 2019. Photo by Joe Aguilar.

monitor soil moisture in real time was funded by the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service to promote water conservation. They also planted a windbreak of drought-tolerant native plants to keep erosion down. Windbreaks protect the olive trees from wind damage and reduce desiccation, and native plants provide a refuge for beneficial insects and other biodiversity. The tribe’s youth and adults have helped plant hedgerows using native plants around the orchard. There is a school right across the

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street from the farm, and the kids come over to help. Tribal members are putting up signs with the Luiseño, English, and Latin species names so that everyone can learn about the plants while they enjoy being outdoors on the farm. “We always encourage our tribe to come down and take a walk,” Madrigal says. “We have a walking path the whole community can use.”

Fresh Local Vegetables Don’t Need Sauce Some Climate Smart Agriculture methods can cost tens of thousands of dollars to implement and not show returns for a decade or more. Programs like those operated by the California Department of Food and Agriculture provide technical assistance and funds to offset the cost to farmers of implementing these new measures. But it’s not easy for farmers to receive this funding and technical support. It entails mountains of paperwork to ensure public funds are properly spent. So public and private efforts are providing agents on the ground to assist farmers with the necessary paperwork and technical advice and sometimes help get the projects off the ground. The University of California (UC) Cooperative Extension staff help with the documentation, reporting requirements, and technical expertise. They also help get out the word to farmers about carbon farming and other programs. Every week for 19 years, Michael Yang has hosted “The Hmong Agriculture Radio Show” on KBIF 900 AM out of Fresno. Yang is a Small Farms and Specialty Crops Hmong Agricultural Assistant with UC Cooperative Extension. Good news spreads quickly, especially among the close-knit Hmong community farming in and around Fresno, so when they heard from Yang that there were state grants to improve irrigation systems and energy efficiency, they

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showed up asking for help. Groundwater is the primary source of water for irrigating row crops in this part of California during the drought years. Hmong farmers were water starved, causing a good deal of strife among the community. Survey data collected by UC researchers Jennifer Sowerwine and Ruth Dahlquist-Willard from 68 Hmong farmers during the drought revealed 22 percent of them had wells that were completely dry, and 51 percent reported a decrease in water flow. Not only did this force them to scale back their operations, but it also increased their energy consumption— impacting both their bottom line and the climate. This is a small window into the future for the Central Valley. Tapan Pathak and collaborators at the University of California report in the journal Agronomy that climate change is expected to impact yields of almonds, walnuts, oranges, grapes, strawberries, cherries, and apricots. Just when avocado toast is all the rage, our beloved avocados are expected to plummet by half by the middle of this century. Temperature changes are an issue, as is water availability. For too long the Central Valley has been relying on groundwater to make up for shortfalls in rainfall and Sierra snowpack, and now regulations on this limited resource are tightening under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. The application of the act could result in a more exact allocation to farms that will shrink with time, in an attempt to make the groundwater aquifers selfsustaining by 2040. In some places the allocation will shrink to 25 percent of the amount of groundwater used today. This will require tremendous water conservation, as well as a reduction in acres farmed. With help to run the required calculations of how much energy and water could be saved with the requested irrigation system

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improvements, the farmers applied to the Climate Smart Agriculture program successfully. In addition to improving water use, the program allows the farmers to continue to produce a huge variety of fruits and vegetables. Southeast Asian farmers grow a diversity of crops in California, including many Asian vegetables and those more commonly found in North American cuisine: a wide variety of squashes such as luffa, winter melon, bitter melon, wax gourd, kabocha, and snake gourd; green brassicas such as bok choy, yu choy, gai lan, tatsoi, Chinese cabbage, and mustard greens; and other crops, including malabar spinach, water spinach, yam leaves, okra leaves, long beans, daikon, lemongrass, sugarcane, taro, three varieties of peas, and many herbs used in Asian cooking. Ka Tchieng and her family grow over 50 varieties of Asian vegetables in the Fresno area. This type of diversified farming will allow these farmers to adapt to change more readily. Just like Judith Redmond and the farmers at Full Belly Farm, the Hmong farmers in California spread their risk with diversified farming practices. A big challenge to managing diversified agriculture is that farmers have to pay a lot of attention to the different needs of each crop type. As Tchieng puts it, “We need to cater to each plant, to its own water usage, and if it doesn’t like too much sun, you might have to move the plant next to another for shading.” Tchieng’s parents have been farming since before she was born, and she says they have experience with “many water and climate challenges, but we are willing to adapt and it keeps us interested in the new challenges.” Tchieng and her siblings went off to college and have jobs off the farm, but they still help keep the farm going. Tchieng says that having “the opportunity to go to school in

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the United States opened so many doors.” She points out that these doors can be indoors and that many children who grew up on the farm and went off to get an education are choosing to work in other professions. After all, it’s a lot of work for long hours to grow many varieties of vegetables. Tchieng sees the small farms around her starting to decline as farmers age and their kids become educated in other fields. She says that “working on the farm offers a different hands-on experience.” The Tchieng family is part of a farming community who help each other make decisions and this is particularly important in times of change. Tchieng appreciates this connection: “I think we are very fortunate for everyone nearby us to help each other and have a voice for each other.” Specifically, she says, “We help each other with planting advice, how to grow vegetables better.” For example, she says, “My dad ordered moringa seeds online, but it wasn’t growing. We asked another farmer, and he gave us some of his seeds and it grew perfectly.” New state groundwater policies are scary for the Tchieng family because well depth will be regulated and they may not have access to water under new regulations. California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act depends on local control with oversight by the State Water Resources Control Board. Local Groundwater Sustainability Agencies are charged with developing plans to achieve sustainable groundwater management within 20 years. This is generally done by reducing groundwater withdrawals and recharging the aquifer with stormwater, recycled water, or imported water to make up for what is taken out. Groundwater Sustainability Agencies are required to engage a diverse public, including social, cultural, and economic diversity. Creating an inclusive process, including public meetings with opportunities for

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meaningful contributions by different interest groups, will help improve the planning process, implementation, and compliance. This new act puts forth a major challenge for local decisionmaking—to improve the local ecology while balancing demands among different users and uses of groundwater and surface water. “Water is the main challenge we will be facing,” Tchieng says. “We are willing to comply and change things.” During the 2012–16 drought, their plants were not productive, and so they had less food to sell. With help from Michael Yang at UC Cooperative Extension, Tchieng’s father received a SWEEP grant that Tchieng says, “has really helped us a lot.” They are using water more efficiently now that they have a t-tape drip irrigation system to replace flood irrigation. The old system required a lot more water and work to manage. “It took my four siblings and my parents to move those old pipes,” Tchieng says. “We stopped flooding the rows and we don’t use as much water anymore, and we know that the plants are getting the water that they need.” Tchieng says that when they flooded, they were also watering weeds, which were stealing water from their crops, shading them out, and making it difficult to harvest the crops. The new irrigation system saves water, energy, and labor, as well as increasing the amount of food the farm grows. The Tchiengs sell their crops on Saturdays in Saratoga and on Sundays in Moraga. “Farmers’ market feels like a family to us,” Tchieng says. “Everyone is there helping each other.” They always give out free samples to shoppers at the market and tell customers how to cook the vegetables. Tchieng says, “You can taste the difference of fresh vegetables at the farmers’ market. The flavor is amazing! You don’t need to add sauce because you will want to taste the vegetable for what it tastes like.”

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The Tchieng family shows off produce grown on their Central Valley farm (top to bottom, left to right: Fong, Siong, and Ka Tchieng). Photo by Ka Tchieng.

Lost Harvests, Forgotten People Agriculture contributes 10 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions. Energy is expended in transportation, storage, marketing, and preparation of food. Production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, in particular, requires large amounts of energy and can account for more than 50 percent of total energy use in commercial agriculture, and it directly contributes to nitrous oxide emissions from the soil after it’s applied. Water delivery is the next biggest draw on agriculture’s energy budget, and then on-farm operations, which are heavily mechanized, and packaging and transportation. Because of the considerable energy use and pollution by California

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agriculture, the state passed the Short-Lived Climate Pollutants Act to reduce methane. It is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by instituting a 75 percent reduction in organic waste disposal from 2014 levels by 2025. It also requires that not less than 20 percent of otherwise wasted edible food be distributed for human consumption. “So much water and labor has gone into producing that fruit or vegetable, and there are so many people hungry in our community. It is important to nurture the health of the entire community,” says Jennifer Codron, who is a recycling specialist with a background in environmental science. In 2019, nearly seven million Californians went without enough food to lead active and healthy lives. Two million of those Californians were children. And yet, here in the most lucrative agricultural state in the country, there is surely enough food to go around. “I see what goes into the compost bins, and it sometimes amazes me about how much food is wasted and it looks perfectly fine,” says Codron, who has a devotion to growing, cooking, and preserving food. Her parents always had a garden in Michigan, where she was born and raised, and she has fond memories of picking wild strawberries. While raising kids of her own, she started SLO Grown Kids, dedicated to improving community health and sustainability in San Luis Obispo County through school gardens and farm experiences, and integrating these into the core academic curricula. After noticing all the food dripping off the trees in her neighborhood, Codron also helped start GleanSLO—a program that connects farmers and backyard growers with volunteers to harvest fruits and vegetables that would otherwise go to waste and to distribute them, mostly through the Food Bank Coalition of San Luis Obispo County. Codron also helps the food bank compost their

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food waste because, she says, “composting is giving back to the earth.” It was easy to recruit volunteers to GleanSLO, because “people were hungry to get in touch with produce and where it comes from and just be out in farms and gardens and orchards,” Codron says. According to the SLO Food Bank, more than 58 million pounds of food rot in the county’s fields—SLO gleaners to the rescue. Volunteers working with GleanSLO get training on how to pick different types of crops. Then they get to choose what they want to help with, such as blueberries, lettuce, and even avocados. When “you’re using an avocado picker on a ladder, that’s hard work,” says Codron. “If there is extra or blemished fruit, they are sometimes able to go home with a bag of their own.” “People that glean don’t like to see waste whatsoever,” says Codron. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 22 percent of our municipal solid waste landfills are filled with food waste. These landfills are the third-biggest source of humanrelated methane emissions nationwide, according to the EPA. However, in San Luis Obispo most of the food waste is going to power about 600 farms, thanks to a high-heat, dry anaerobic facility that converts organic waste into carbon-neutral biogas and produces high-grade natural compost for sale as a byproduct. “We have specialty crops like Blenheim apricots, and who doesn’t want apricot jam?” says Codron, who is also a member of the UC Master Food Preservers program, whose motto is Preserve Today, Relish Tomorrow. The master food preservers meet regularly, and now everyone is into fermentation, so they teach classes that include how to make sourdough bread, sauerkraut, kombucha, and of course pickles. Education is at the heart of the program. The SLO master food preservers set up tables at

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the food bank and other distribution sites, with information on how to preserve food, prevent waste, and save money. This includes ways to freeze kale and make fruit leathers and jerky, for example. Codron sums it up: “I think the common thread that is woven through these volunteer outreach programs is connecting with others while in service to the greater community. From post-garden workday snacks to harvesting fruits with GleanSLO volunteers to the end of the year potluck with master food preservers, we are sharing knowledge around the common experience of eating.” In some urban areas, smartphone applications are increasingly being used to help connect producers, sellers, and those who serve prepared foods with consumers and charities who can take advantage of extra food—following big events, for example—to help prevent waste. In big cities like Los Angeles, volunteer gleaners focus more on redistributing food, as is the case for Food Forward, a large urban gleaners organization in Southern California. “In Watts, for example, people don’t have a lot of access to fresh fruit and vegetables—what is available is an old banana or orange at a corner store,” says Ava Post Koo. “Everybody is suffering from health problems that are caused by the food environment.” Post Koo runs the MudTown farmers market in partnership with Food Forward. She and a group of volunteers collect most food donations from the largest fresh food distributors in the city. Together, they sort and transport 10–12 pallets of quality fresh fruits and vegetables to the Watts Labor Community Action Committee Family Source Center, where people can pick them up for free every other week. “Food waste and hunger is not a supply issue as it’s normally framed; it’s really a distribution issue,” says Post Koo (see more on Watts Rising in chapter 6).

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·

·

·

In sum, California’s agricultural landscape can be managed to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and provide the biophysical conditions for increased carbon storage. Carbon farming, diversified cultivation, and water conservation make for more resilient agroecosystems in the face of climate disruption. Moreover, these sustainable agricultural techniques can maintain crop yields for increased food security and nutrition. Communities can build resilience by moving away from imported water and investing in small-scale stormwater capture and recycled water. Everyone can help by buying directly from local farmers, supporting their efforts to improve water and land management, and preventing the food they grow from going to waste. It’s a tasty way to address the climate crises.

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4 Keeping Forests Green and Snow White

The peaks of the Sierra Nevada form the spine of California. The mountains trap precipitation that runs into the San Joaquin Valley, watering much of the nation’s produce. The forests here, so frequently ablaze in ever-larger wildfires, are key to California’s climate resilience because of the water and carbon sequestration and storage opportunities they provide. How we manage the forests and water will be critical for almost all residents and the many species these mountain wildlands support. The changing climate can be readily observed at higher elevations, in the form of long-term warming trends, dwindling snowpack, and shifts in the timing and amount of streamflow. In the past century, summer and winter temperatures in the Sierras have increased an average of 1.8°F–3.6°F (1°C–2°C). Yosemite warmed the most—average temperatures increased by 5.4°F (3°C)—while parts of Lassen got colder and wetter. These temperature changes have not gone unnoticed by the birds at least. Some bird species in Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, Lassen Volcanic National Park, and several national forests have moved to cooler climates since the early 1900s. These include the Savannah sparrow, which shifted upward by 8,212 feet, and other meadow species, such as

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the red-winged blackbird and western meadowlark. Other species shifted their ranges downslope, like the ash-throated flycatcher, western scrub-jay, Cassin’s finch, and red-breasted nuthatch. One of the scientists tracking these movements was Morgan Tingley. “Moving is a sign of adaptation, which is good from a conservation standpoint,” Tingley says. “More worrisome are the species that have not shifted. How are they adapting?” Tingley has some evidence now that species that stay put seem to be adapting to the climate somewhat by laying eggs and hatching chicks earlier in the year, when the weather resembles what it once was. Temperatures in the Sierra Nevada are projected to warm by 6°F–9°F (3.3°C–4.95°C) on average by the end of the 21st century, which could raise the altitude of the transition line between rain and snow by about 1,500 to 3,000 feet. It will become increasingly unlikely to find snow below 6,000 feet elevation, and higher up the snowpack may be reduced by 60 percent—meaning a longer trek for a shorter ski season. Changes to the snowpack result in differences in the timing and magnitude of streamflows and flooding. Warmer temperatures, loss of snowpack, and changes in fresh water availability will lead to drier soils; they will have 15–40 percent less moisture than the historical average.

Snowpack as California’s Reservoir “It varies, year to year, but roughly half of the usable surface water in California originates as snowmelt. So, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is a substantial water reservoir,” says Randall Osterhuber. Osterhuber has worked for years at the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab located at Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada. The lab is home to researchers specializing in snow physics, snow

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hydrology, meteorology, climatology, and instrument design. Osterhuber’s group of snow surveyors ski from cabin to cabin in the winter, relying on food left for them during the summer. This work is not for the fainthearted, and the expert backcountry skiers who work with Osterhuber in the cooperative snow survey program of the Department of Water Resources have done the surveys for a long, long time. Every winter they go to 260 predetermined snow courses and measure the snow depth and water content to calculate the snowpack as compared to a multiyear average. Great work if you can get it or get there. From 2010 to 2020, California had both three of the smallest and three of the largest snowpacks ever measured. This reflects California’s high year-to-year variability in precipitation and means in some years on April 1, when the Sierra snowpack typically contains the most water, surveyors stand in grassy fields and report no detectable snow, while in other years they stand on top of eight feet of snow. “The swing is pretty dramatic,” Osterhuber says. For the downstream water managers and those who rely on the Sierra snowpack as a reservoir, this type of variation presents enormous challenges. Climate change complicates it further. Osterhuber has measured the changes firsthand and says Donner Summit now receives more precipitation as rain than snow, leading to earlier runoff and flooding and less snowmelt in spring and summer, when California needs the water most. Snow’s albedo, or reflectivity, influences the rate and timing of snowmelt as well. Black carbon and other particles can fall on the snow surface and change its color. Dark surfaces absorb light and white reflects it—think black shirt on a hot day. A darker snow surface makes the snow melt faster and earlier in the year, which reduces the effectiveness of the Sierra snowpack as a reservoir for

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water use in the dry season. Black carbon that remains in the atmosphere, meanwhile, can change the distribution of precipitation. Black carbon can come from many sources, including openburning agricultural waste, wildfires, and vehicle tailpipes, as well as heavy industry across California and as far away as Asia. Another influence on snow’s albedo is dust, which often blows in with east winds from the Great Basin and settles on the Sierra snowpack. “Just a few years ago, if you could envision the amount of dirt you can hold in the palm of your hand—that was the amount that was distributed across every square meter of the snow surface,” Osterhuber said. “And when you see pictures of these mountain ranges [from then], there’s just red and brown in color, and you know that this will spike the melt in some instances months early and [at] a much higher rate.” “Albedo is everything when it comes to snowmelt,” Osterhuber says. A snow crystal or snowflake begins with a small particle of dust, which could be a speck of black carbon. This particle picks up water, which grows into a crystal because water molecules are attracted to each other through hydrogen bonds. These bonds form due to an attraction between the slight positive charges on hydrogen atoms in a water molecule and the slight negative charges on the oxygen atoms of other water molecules. The size and the shape of a snow crystal depends on roughness, which increases with temperature, so temperature influences crystal characteristics. The rougher the stickier, and the easier it is for more water molecules to adhere to the crystal and grow as it drifts and falls. If it’s cold, the water molecules stay firmly in place, stuck to one another, and adjacent water molecules easily slip past like skate blades gliding along a frozen pond.

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Citizen scientists collect data for Stories in the Snow, a participatory project helping scientists understand the atmospheric conditions in the Reno-Tahoe region. Photo by Peter Day.

The amount of water in the air also affects crystal formation. The more water molecules, the more chance for them to stick together and grow together to form crystals. The air must be supersaturated with water for crystals to form. As a snow crystal grows and moves, it is exposed to more water molecules that, if the temperature is right, will stick on to the crystal’s corners, leading to branches, which form their own corners, and the branching pattern continues to grow like a tree. While snow crystals grow symmetrically because the branches or faces of a crystal experience the same conditions, each individual snow crystal is unique because of the microclimate conditions it is exposed to. Snowflakes tell a climate story that can be documented by the public. Students in the Tahoe Basin are contributing to snow science by photographing ice crystals and using a smartphone

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application that uploads a photo, along with time and location information, to climate scientists at the Desert Research Institute. Combined with local weather information, the form of the snow crystals reveals the temperature and water content of the clouds in which they formed. Such real-time data collected by the public can help meteorologists validate precipitation data collected by instruments, such as radar and satellites, used to better manage limited water resources.

Mending and Tending the Forest An estimated 129 million trees have died in California since 2012. The poor condition of the state’s forest land is a result of years of fire suppression and logging practices that ultimately increased fire risk. Recent droughts and pests such as bark beetles delivered the final nail in the coffin. What’s left in many cases are small trees with little value in traditional timber markets. New approaches are underway that can improve forest health, process a huge excess of small trees, and address the jobless rates in once-thriving timber towns. The focus is on making the forests more resilient and protecting forest residents against increasingly frequent catastrophic wildfires, as well as stimulating local economies that historically relied on timber products. The state developed a California Forest Carbon Plan in 2018 to provide forest-related carbon storage and emission estimates, as well as strategies designed to improve forest management and resilience. The plan calls for reducing fuels by prescribed burning and thinning across 60,000 acres of nonfederal land by 2030. The state also supports plans by the US Forest Service, which manages

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57 percent of the forest land in California, to reduce tree density across 500,000 acres per year. The state established a Forest Management Task Force to help implement the California Forest Carbon Plan and “increase the rate of forest treatments and expand state wood product markets through innovation, assistance, and investment.” The task force coordinates investments in forest health, minimizes regulatory barriers for prescribed fire and fuel reduction projects, incentivizes the use of wood removed through mechanical thinning, increases public education about forest health and climate change, and helps forested communities thrive. The monumental task of forest thinning is underway, thanks in part to $195 million allocated to CAL FIRE from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (California cap-andtrade auction revenue), because healthy forests sequester more carbon and avoiding severe wildfires will reduce carbon emissions. There are many barriers to implementing widespread forest thinning, and Steve Ostoja knows the vast challenge ahead. He is the director of the USDA’s California Climate Hub, the mission of which is to “help California land users (farmers, ranchers, forest landowners, and tribes) and land managers maintain sustainable communities and ecosystems by adapting to climate variability and change.” Referring to California’s forested ecosystems, Ostoja says, “We know what the problem is, and we know what to do about it, but we can’t do it!” Some of the approaches that Ostoja is referring to include mechanical thinning, prescribed burning, and restoration after fire and disease infestation. There are also areas where habitats, including freshwater ecosystems, should be protected or restored. In the case of restoration, Ostoja recognizes that planting should

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be done with an eye toward a diversity of species that are likely to adapt to future climate conditions. The problem, as Ostoja says, is that right now the state forest carbon management planning is addressed by four large regional groups—coastal, northern, southern, and Sierra and eastern. These regions are too big and unwieldy, Ostoja says. Instead, he says, it should be more like the approach to the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, in which local agencies work together to develop area plans. This more localscale approach would make it easier for landowners, stakeholders, and communities to come up with plans that make sense for them, rather than a one-size-fits-all regional plan that’s harder to negotiate, less targeted to local conditions, and trickier to enact. If California does successfully implement forest thinning and dead tree removal on the landscape scale, then getting rid of the plant material removed will be a huge challenge. Ostoja was working with the US Forest Service after more than 147 million trees died in the prolonged 2011–16 drought and recalls, “We’ve got to get this stuff off the land, and the response was that we can’t because we have nowhere to put it.” Probably less than 2 percent of these dead trees have been removed, while the rest are decaying, dry, and starting to fall down in windstorms, which makes them a more dangerous fuel source for the next fire season. Fuel modeling suggests that having this much fuel in the forest will be catastrophic for fire intensity.

Build a Marketplace Not a Fireplace What to do with all the wood? At Pepperwood Preserve (see chapter 1), forest thinning produces slash piles—heaps of tree trunks, limbs, and tops too small to process into sawlogs—that can contribute to

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hotter, more damaging fires if left in place. Burning this excess wood biomass in open piles is the most common and cost-effective way to prevent fuels from building up after thinning. However, the climate downside to open burning of forest slash piles or agricultural waste is black carbon and other greenhouse gases such as carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides, and toxins such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and aldehydes. Camille Swezy studies market forces and the potential for new market pathways to revitalize a wood products economy in towns that formerly relied on a more lucrative timber industry. She favors setting up wood product “campuses” that can receive excess wood biomass, especially from pine trees in the Sierra, and turn it into products such as firewood, posts and poles, wood chips, and biochar as a soil amendment for agriculture. However, it is not easy to develop effective markets for these products. The campus idea, where a variety of products can be produced at one location, makes a lot of sense. For example, posts and poles used for fences and other purposes are derived from certain size logs and are easier to produce from lodgepole pine than ponderosa pine. Other products, like wood chips for animal bedding and other uses, can be made from even smaller pieces and from a variety of species. At the Sierra Institute, Swezy worked on a project in Plumas County implementing small-scale approaches to using woody biomass locally for energy and heating. With a grant from the California Energy Commission, Plumas County’s Health and Human Services Center receives 400 kW of thermal energy and 30 kW of electrical energy from a biomass-fired system. The wood chips that fuel this biomass-fired heating system come from nearby sustainable forest management treatments focused on improving forest health in Plumas County.

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From a field study comparing open-pit burning and a boiler, researchers observed air emission reductions of 98–99 percent for particulate matter less than 2.5 microns, including carbon monoxide and nonmethane organic compounds methane and black carbon. The center’s biomass-fired system demonstrates how to generate local self-sustaining energy from the biomass by-product of forest restoration designed to prevent catastrophic fires and improve carbon sequestration. “It’s not just about finding inexpensive renewable energy,” Swezy says, “but it’s about the other benefits for forest health and rural economies.”

Building Up with Wood “What if we could grow a material with solar energy that removes carbon dioxide from our atmosphere and is entirely renewable?” asks Jennifer Cover, who is, of course, talking about wood. Cover is president and CEO of WoodWorks Wood Products Council, a nonprofit funded by the timber industry and the US Forest Service. WoodWorks is staffed with structural engineers and other building professionals who provide education and resources for building with wood and making it big—think commercial structures and apartment buildings. Cover says modern wood structures are as strong as those built with metal and concrete and can be constructed more quickly and safely for an equivalent cost. In the early age of the environmental movement, people understandably focused on trying to prevent unsustainable logging practices by not using wood for pencils, paper, and other daily products. But in California today, with the focus on forest health and sustainable timber extraction, using local wood products

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can be climate smart. Building with wood “is a major component of climate mitigation and forest restoration, if harvested sustainably,” Cover says. The building sector accounts for 49 percent of US CO2 emissions per year, Cover says, and concrete alone makes up 4–8 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions. Research shows that the net greenhouse gas emissions associated with wood-based houses are 20–50 percent lower than similarly insulated houses made of steel- or concrete-based materials, and the emissions reductions associated with wood construction really add up for larger buildings. Unfortunately, Cover says, engineers aren’t trained in how to use wood. “Pretty much 100 percent of the universities that offer a structural engineering degree, you have to take a course on steel and concrete. Less than 50 percent even offer a timber design course. And if they do, it’s typically an elective. So, right out of the gate engineers that are moving into the practice and professional world just don’t have a level of familiarity with using wood as they do with other materials.” WoodWorks offers continuing education in wood design and construction to professionals, with a focus on commercial-scale projects such as retail space, office buildings, and recreational facilities. To facilitate commercial-scale building with wood, the new 2021 California building codes include regulations for using mass timber design to construct structures up to 18 stories high. Plumas County’s Health and Human Services Center is California’s first public cross-laminated timber (CLT) building. This type of mass timber uses 2x4 and 2x6 boards in a layer, covered by another layer oriented in the other direction so that the boards cross each other and make for strong multilayered panels.

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Other approaches to making mass timber products include the use of nails, dowels, and tongue and groove to join multiple pieces of timber for increased strength. These techniques create a strong building material from smaller-diameter material and can use logs with insect damage or from land restoration, with the goal of creating a larger market for these materials and underutilized species such as ponderosa pine. In addition to the structural and sustainability advantages of cross-laminated timber, the material provides added aesthetic warmth and reduces the need for applied finishes such as paint, which have their own environmental cost. The full spectrum of carbon associated with a building includes embodied carbon, operational carbon, and the carbon emissions from decommissioning the building. Most of the attention in green building has been on operational carbon, which describes the emissions of carbon dioxide during the operation or use of a building, exemplified by the San Bernardino Community College District office retrofit to zero net energy use (see chapter 5). “Embodied carbon,” on the other hand, considers the greenhouse gases emitted to generate the building materials and during their entire life cycle. This is sometimes referred to as embedded emissions—in other words, making building materials can create greenhouse gas emissions through mining, manufacturing materials, construction, transportation, and final disposal. To actually achieve zero net energy buildings, the embedded carbon, which can make up over half of a building’s lifelong carbon budget, needs to be offset. To reduce embedded emissions, public works projects in California consider Global Warming Potential ratings for structural steel, carbon steel rebar, flat glass, and mineral wool board insulation prior to procurement, thanks to the Buy Clean California Act.

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A Plumas County public building is constructed using CLT. Photo by Sierra Institute for Community and Environment.

Tending the Forest with Fire Wood products and wood energy provide economic returns for local economies, but they will be able to consume only some of the excess wood out there. The widespread need for forest restoration requires approaches that can be implemented on a large scale, especially in areas that are too steep and remote to get people into, let alone heavy equipment, and require too much energy to remove slash. Fire might be the answer. Historical fire regimes generally killed smaller trees and other vegetation but left the largest trees unharmed. Fire presents a natural disturbance regime and is a primary tool that Indigenous Californians use to the advantage of many ecosystems and their own livelihoods.

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Traditional burning produces a variation of species and plant age classes that provide food, medicine, and materials. For over 100 years now, US legal systems have prevented fire and regulated it almost out of existence. Many tribes want to use their traditional knowledge to restore the use of fire today to address concerns over fuel management and the wildland fires that have soared as a result of fire suppression policies. Bill Tripp took a job at the Chinook salmon hatchery on Camp Creek in the Lower Klamath River Basin near Orleans right out of high school, but he transitioned quickly to working full time for the Karuk (meaning “upriver” and pronounced KAR-uck) Tribe. As the deputy director of ecocultural revitalization and a member of the tribe, Tripp continues to advance an idea he first recalls developing when he was four years old: “Great grandmother caught me playing with fire in the stove and said if I was going to play with fire, I better do something good with it. And so I have been brought up with this concept my entire life, because in Karuk tradition that is the time that people make these decisions, and then they move on to work with adults to do such things.” Tripp connects fire to water resources and salmon survival in the Klamath River Basin. After an intensive training program decades ago, Tripp launched into grant writing for fuels reduction projects and has been a champion for the return of traditional burning practices ever since. “Karuk people never believed in the ownership of land but hold the responsibility to steward the land because they owe animals a debt for teaching us how to live in this place,” Tripp says. The Karuk Aboriginal Territory covers more than a million acres, and the relevant treaties for the land were signed but not ratified by the US government. From the Karuk people’s point of view, the tribe has complete jurisdiction of their Aboriginal Territory, 98 percent of

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which overlaps with US Forest Service land. The rest is a complex topography of federal, county, and private jurisdictions, and before using fire, the tribe reaches agreements with each, partnering with NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and watershed councils in the area to protect the tribe’s sovereignty. “For years, we just didn’t do large-scale burns, because we didn’t want to have to ask permission,” says Tripp. Tribal members continue to burn small forest plots, but the broader-scale burning required for forest health and fire prevention, Tripp says, is going to require “pulling those practices back out of those [tribal] families and building them into programs that can support those families to do this at a larger scale, and to do it in a professional environment with agency, NGO, and private-sector groups because none of us are going to be able to do it alone.” Public agencies increasingly use traditional ecological knowledge in decision-making. For example, traditional ecological knowledge is now considered along with Western scientific data collection as the basis for decision-making under the National Environmental Quality Act review process. Tripp points out the advantages of new state laws that have broader definitions around cultural practices and says there are tribal historical practices with a focus on preserving Indigenous cultural heritage through oversight by tribes. “We have some solid foundational principles in our World Renewal Ceremonies that we know we are responsible to uphold, and we want to demonstrate these so we can replicate them [on a broader scale],” Tripp says. These practices and beliefs, led by the Faatayeenan (world renewal priest), are generally not shared outside of the tribe, but one ritual he described connects the time salmon are called up the river to the time for igniting fire at the top

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of the mountains, around the full moon in August. When the Faatayeenan lands facedown in the river, it initiates a ripple effect connecting Indigenous people with the salmon that return to this river year after year and the burning of the watershed that holds the source of flow for the river. These summer fires “burn off all the small stuff that was using surface water, reducing the competition for water that the bigger trees need, and put particulates in the air, which shades the river so the sun can’t warm up the water as much, and the particulates clog the stomata in the leaves and needles, reducing the water they can use during the day,” Tripp says. “Then the streams don’t drop down as much during the day. . . . What you are effectively doing is to modify a 24-hour ripple across the landscape so that the water that comes from Black Mountain and flows out of Camp Creek is now pulsing a little differently.” After the summer fires, the Karuk burned for food and fiber resources into the fall. “People don’t really understand how much fire was used historically in this area,” Tripp says, “but we do.” Fires affect water supply by reducing forest tree density, which decreases the demand for water by the vegetation. The net change in evapotranspiration after a stand is treated depends on how the vegetation, snow, temperature, and soil all interact at the stand scale. At the watershed scale, geology and topography also influence the entire system. According to a review of the ecohydrology literature (studies of ecological processes associated with hydrology) by researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, forest disturbances, including burning and forest thinning, prompt a range of short-term hydrologic responses. There is considerable uncertainty, but it seems that forest thinning will be

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particularly helpful for streamflow in seasonally dry forests where plants use a substantial fraction (greater than 80 percent) of the local precipitation. In these cases, even small reductions in evapotranspiration can result in substantial increases in groundwater recharge and streamflow. However, it can be hard to generalize, because reducing forest density can also promote subsequent increases in fast-growing vegetation that ultimately reduce streamflow. Today the Karuk Tribe conducts only small-scale (10- to 70-acre) burns, and the landscape is dominated by conifers, most of which are only about 115 years old. Before then, between burning and harvesting young conifers as a source of vitamin C, the Karuk people controlled the expansion of conifers, making it easier on oaks and other hardwoods. The Karuk Tribe’s observations across multiple generations for thousands of years suggest a way of knowing that may provide greater confidence in the likely outcomes than shorter-term field research can. Building trust between tribal members and public land managers will be required for the necessary exchanging of information and implementation of traditional practices on a larger scale. There’s still a time disconnect between when Karuk people know to burn and when the California Air Resources Board and other resource agencies recommend prescribed burning—often constrained to several days in the spring. One analysis from the Sierra revealed that most permissible burn days, from an air quality perspective, fell in April, May, and June. The Karuk burn time reflects concern for and responsibility for the entire community of life. “When you look at Karuk traditional laws around fire, . . . when you can’t see Pleiades in the sky [April], we were absolutely not to use fire for anything but heating and cooking, because that is when everything is reproducing,” Tripp says. “We need to be looking at

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doing what we owe the animals—if we are burning in April, May, and early June, we are burning flowers and scorching bird nests, and who knows how much is being damaged before the reproductive cycle can take place.” Tripp works with the Western Klamath Restoration Partnership, which is putting together the Somes Bar Integrated Fire Management Project along the Klamath River in Karuk Aboriginal Territory. The Somes Bar project involves an agreement between the US Forest Service and the Karuk Tribe to restore the burning of Offield Mountain, the tribe’s mother mountain, as part of the Pikyavish, the World Renewal Ceremony at Katimiin held each September. The project meets the tribe’s goals of reinstating frequent fire cycles to foster a variety of forest and riparian habitats, improve streamflow, and conserve species and Karuk cultural traditions. It also establishes strategic ridgetop fuel breaks and defensible space, as well as landscape fuels reduction within the project areas. Still, Tripp says tribal members have been jailed or harassed for starting cultural fires, leading many to remain uncomfortable with the agreement. “One of the things that really haunts me about all this . . . is that those folks [tribal members] aren’t going to get anything back out of this, and then in a way sharing too much information just perpetuates the colonial forces that keep driving them down.” Tripp says land managers should involve tribal members early and empower them to set the course for land care. If this isn’t done, he warns, “it’s just going to turn into another ‘we’re just doing this for fire protection and we are the authority and we’re going to tell you that you cannot do it.’” The Yurok-Hupa-Karuk leadership group is part of the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network dedicated to revitalizing

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cultural burns in a way that protects tribal rights and provides intertribal support to share traditional ecological knowledge. The group advances youth and adult leaders and engages in the use of fire in ceremonies and family-based burning. Reviewing policy and National Forest Management plans with respect to their sovereign rights to burn is a vital part of what the network does. They also hold training in prescribed burning and other community- and youth-focused education. Tripp says, “We are starting to see people be more inclusive, but it’s very, very slow.”

Communities Take Up the Torch We are terrified of fire, but we don’t have to be; fire can be a good friend or your worst enemy. bb

Outside of tribal lands, prescribed burn associations (PBAs) can bring back fire in a way that is safe and affordable while they build community. PBAs are made up of landowners, volunteer firefighters, agencies, and nonprofit organizations that pool their resources to conduct controlled burns to improve forest health and safety. In 2018, Lenya Quinn-Davidson and Jeff Stackhouse, UC Cooperative Extension county advisors, helped start the first PBA in the western United States, working mostly with Humboldt County ranchers. The PBA provides equipment, labor, and training to safely use fire and meet permit requirements. After each burn, the volunteers enjoy a meal and some well-deserved downtime together. Quinn-Davidson’s presentation at a Northern California Prescribed Fire Council meeting inspired landowner “BB” and

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Plumas County Fire Safe Council Coordinator Hannah Hepner to start the Plumas Underburn Cooperative. BB was already using fire, but he wanted to help get a PBA started so he could tap into a pool of labor. He now has a list of almost 120 people—20 landowners plus others who are trained in fire—who reliably show up to help. “It’s been a godsend,” BB says. The only way that BB can keep his rangeland productive and prevent it from becoming one big thicket is to meticulously underburn it. An underburn is a controlled burn that stays on the ground and consumes the fuels on the ground with flames less than about two feet high. Underburning also helps remove competition with the oaks and ensures there will be plenty of acorns. “I call them plankton of the earth. . . . The squirrels, robins, and blue jays eat some, and then the carnivores eat them, so acorns are at the base of the food chain,” BB says. In more arid parts of California, larger oak trees can enhance forage yields of rangeland. “Almost all my thinning is to liberate the oaks. I call it the oak liberation front.” To get started using fire for land management, BB received grant funds through the Natural Resources Conservation Service, CAL FIRE, the US Forest Service, and other sources to cut down small pines (10–12 inches in diameter at breast height) and burn them in the winter. His property then provided a showcase of fire safety and productivity for other land managers to visit and learn from. BB hires retired and experienced US Forest Service employees as burn bosses, and they share their knowledge with the volunteers. A burn boss decides if it’s safe to burn, and then the volunteers get their orders on how to manage the drip torch from the crew leaders. The approach to burning changes through the day,

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Coleby Langston is an underburn volunteer in Plumas County. Photo by “BB.”

and day to day, depending on temperature and wind. BB says, “I love Ben [burn boss] because he just throws a match on the ground, watches it burn for a bit, and then stomps it out and says 20 more minutes and we will be ready [to start the burn].” Those who burn their land are liable if the fire escapes, so having a group to help keep the fire under control and ensure proper permitting and good communication across resource agencies helps. Permitting fees paid to state agencies such as CAL FIRE and the California Air Resources Board can add up, creating a financial barrier for landowners who want to use fire. They also get frustrated when it becomes hard to find a day when they can legally burn. Even with all the permits and volunteers in place, BB sometimes can only burn two to eight acres, because the permissible burn days are too few and far between. The “fuel moisture has to

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be right, and you can’t burn on a windy day or on a no-burn day unless you have an expensive permit to pollute,” he says. When it comes to smoke, Camille Swezy says, “How do you want your smoke? In a managed, small, prescribed fire or thick and intolerable from a massive fire?” California forests are “always growing and growing and growing, and if we don’t have a way of dealing with that growth, we are going to have a catastrophe on our hands, which we do,” BB says. There are thousands of little towns with houses on 5–10 acres that are all susceptible to fire. “When everybody up here saw the whole town [Paradise] vaporized in a few hours, it got people’s attention,” says BB. But now with help from the Fire Safe Council, BB says, there are more areas than before that are fire safe. Prescribed burn associations, while still in their infancy, are bringing neighbors together to employ fire as an important tool for forest restoration and to leverage the power of the group to get the job done. BB says, “We come together for a common shared goal, and it’s a chance for me to get to know people. I get to spend a couple of days working together, and it deepens my relationships.”

Sawyers Protect Forests and Access to Them Trees always die and fall, and the more we live and recreate in the forest, the more we need people to help minimize the risk posed by these trees. In no time in history was this more true than after the epic four-year drought of 2012–15, when California experienced historically low rainfall and high temperatures, resulting in very little snowpack in the Sierra. The stress on the trees mounted over time, especially for ponderosa and sugar pines and white fir, and left them susceptible to bark beetles, mainly mountain pine

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beetles and western pine beetles, whose populations took off. An estimated 147 million trees were lost, and 90 percent of these were in Southern California where drought stress was much higher. This reduces the forest’s ability to sequester carbon and increases carbon emissions to the atmosphere as dead trees decompose. Dead trees are also a major source of fuel for future fires and pose a risk of falling on structures and anyone living in, working in, or visiting these forests. At the same time, maintaining some large dead trees or snags is essential for cavity-nesting birds and other animal habitat. Growing up in Carmel Valley, Todd Brockman spent a lot of time in the surrounding natural areas, and he has observed changes. “From my perspective things are radically different from when I was younger, and that is what I call climate change—the fires, the water resources getting depleted,” Brockman says. Brockman was recruited to the Sierra to be a volunteer wilderness ranger and he seized the opportunity. His introduction to the Sierra bioregion involved hiking and tree cutting as well as natural history lessons from Mike Nolan at the Sierra National Forest. Taking advantage of his computer technology background, wilderness skills, emergency training, and most important, his desire to be of service to others, Brockman started a virtual nonprofit called Wilderness Corps in 2013. Since its inception this all-volunteer organization has involved about 150 people in helping keep trails open and safe. Training and organizing volunteers is not an easy job, and many of our public agencies need help but don’t have the proper resources to support their volunteers. For Brockman, “it’s about the volunteers, and without them we couldn’t do any of this work . . . so we built Wilderness Corps so it’s safe.”

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Many of the Wilderness Corps volunteers are essentially backcountry loggers who are US Forest Service crosscut-certified sawyers and trained in first aid. They gather at 7 a.m. at a set location with the gear required, depending on where they are headed and how long they will be out. They begin by stretching together, and then they turn their two-way radios on so they can adjust their plans as needed. They head out, often carrying six- or eight-foot crosscut saws. When they arrive at a tree that needs to be felled, they first assess to the best of their ability what caused the tree’s decline. Was it bark beetles, or does it look like the tree was able to spit those beetles out and heal itself and it was the wind or a big snow load that damaged the tree? Many people assume dead trees will blow down, but “the little dead trees are small and thin, and the wind flies by them like they don’t exist,” says Brockman. Instead, large trees with expansive branches are more susceptible to blowing down. Then the sawyers do an overhead assessment: they observe what is 360 degrees around the tree and agree on how to best execute the job. Their work often continues through nightfall when they find themselves helping people who are lost or sick and need attention or they sometimes intervene to encourage campers and day-trippers to take more care. Visitors can cause damage by driving nails or screws into trees, removing forest duff, or breaking new trails. When trees fall across a trail and nobody fixes the problem, people start going around the downed tree and shrubs nearby, and an informal trail takes off, often in the wrong direction, causing erosion and creating safety hazards for hikers. Fixing the trail doesn’t require much environmental review, but if trails are neglected for too long, then new trails need to be established, triggering more federal environmental review at a great expense to the public.

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Retaining experienced volunteers is important to Wilderness Corps. “We keep track of each other; they become part of your extended family,” says Brockman. Wilderness stewards make sure everyone can visit the wilderness safely, so hopefully wilderness stewardship will become as popular as wilderness adventure. Wilderness Connect, with a mission focused on connecting agencies, educators, and the public with their wilderness heritage, offers additional resources to those interested in wilderness stewardship. There is a wilderness stewardship academy and certification program run by the Society for Wilderness Stewardship, for a good way to get started.

Replanting with Climate in Mind With all the tree mortality in Southern California after the drought and wildland fires, there is a need to restore the areas where the forest overstory has been lost. As discussed in chapter 1, people are rethinking how restoration should be done with the future climate in mind, including considering assisted migration. Foresters are ahead of the game when it comes to assisted migration—they have been selecting new seeds based on favorable seed zones for over 80 years. It helps that conifer seeds can be kept in cold storage to replant at a much later date. Typically, after a harvest, fire, or other disturbance, replanting is done with seedlings from the same seed zone or sourced from within a short distance. This worked well when the climate was expected to be relatively stable into the future, but it is changing at a faster pace than ever before, and that means today’s genetic stocks may not thrive well under future climatic conditions. A better approach, increasingly employed today for forest restoration, uses climate data to identify where trees

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exist today that may be better suited to the expected future climatic conditions and uses them as a seed source instead of the local trees. Essentially this is like using climate analogs (see chapter 1) to decide where to collect seed. California has a seed bank at the Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center managed by CAL FIRE, located in Davis—a freezer full of bags of seeds with information identifying the species and where and when the seeds were collected. This collection provides a wide variety of seeds from different forest tree species from various locations, providing a multitude of genotypes to choose from. This is an important repository for forest restoration after wildfire or damage from insects or disease. This diversity of seeds from different zones across California offers an opportunity to address the uncertainties associated with assisted migration. Jessica Wright, a research geneticist at the USDA Pacific Southwest Research Station, and James Thorne, a research scientist at UC Davis, have worked to develop tools to explore which California seed sources may be best to use for what Thorne calls “anticipatory planting” that considers what climates can be expected in the future. There are three things to consider for anticipatory planting: species, tree density, and genetics. A resilient forest has multiple species, so more than one species should be used as a source of seed. A stand with trees that are more spaced out and allowed to mature into an older age class is also climate smart. As for where the seeds should come from, restoration professionals agree the seeds should be from the California Floristic Province. Wright and Thorne’s selection tool considers current climate information associated with the seeds readily available at the Reforestation Center and how these may be suited to future drier and hotter conditions. The tool also suggests not moving popula-

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tions from too far away, which might increase the risk that the trees will be maladapted to their new home. After all, these new approaches for climate adaptation are based on models, which have some uncertainty in them, especially around what actions might be taken to mitigate climate change in the next 10–20 years. So, even if they’re a climate match, seedlings from New Mexico shouldn’t be planted in California. Several empirical studies are underway to help reduce the uncertainty in estimating what to plant where. Scientists from UC Davis and the Pacific Southwest Research Station, including Wright, established experimental tree plantations to measure the survivorship, amount of damage, and overall growth of seedlings originating from lower or warmer sites and compared them to the measurements for locally sourced seedlings. The growth and survivorship of the planted seedlings from lower or warmer sites were significantly better for incense cedar at the Klamath plantation and for Jeffrey pine at the San Bernardino site. However, in most of the other cases, the differences were not significant for a particular species at a given site. Whether seedlings are from local stocks or from warmer locales in California, planting volunteer opportunities abound through the US Forest Service, CAL FIRE, and local wilderness organizations, especially following the many recent wildfires. CAL FIRE is recruiting volunteers interested in helping to seed and grow 30,000 seedlings to be used in reforestation of fire-damaged landscapes and tree-mortality areas in the southern Sierra. Seed sowing generally takes place in spring after snowmelt, which is also the best time to be out among the wildflowers. Foresters are not the only ones changing what they plant to adapt to global warming. Gardeners often rely on the USDA Plant

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Hardiness Zone map to determine which plants will do best in their area. The USDA shifted these zone boundaries northward to accommodate an increase in average coldest temperatures, which were on average more than 3°F (1.65°C) warmer across US cities from 1989 to 2018 as compared to 1951 to 1980. It may be time for some folks to pull out the strawberries and put in drought-tolerant watermelon.

Saving Working Forestlands for Conservation, Livelihoods, and Climate Resilience California’s cap-and-trade program has invested about $4 billion so far in conserving climate-resilient landscapes. The program started in 2013 as a result of Assembly Bill 32, which focused on returning to 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Renewed legislation was passed in 2017 with some modifications to cut emissions to not more than 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2030. The fact that the “cap” on emissions is getting more stringent over time is part of how cap and trade works. The “trade” part involves setting up a market for companies to buy and sell allowances. If a company reduces its emissions faster, it can sell or bank allowances, providing an incentive to stop polluting sooner rather than later. These allowances are split into units of one metric ton of CO2. A metric ton is 1,000 kilograms (about 2,200 pounds) of carbon dioxide; by volume, this would fill a cube that is 27' × 27' × 27' and is equivalent to the emissions generated from consuming 113 gallons of gasoline. Another way to look at it is as the amount of carbon sequestered by 16.5 tree seedlings grown for 10 years or by 1.3 acres of US forest over one year. Large-scale polluters can meet up to 8 percent of their required reductions through “offset” credits. Offset credits can only be

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obtained by investing in a project that follows protocols approved by the California Air Resources Board to ensure that the reductions resulting from the project are verified. The estimated price for carbon offsets is $21 per metric ton, which may be higher than the cost of directly reducing emissions through improving energy efficiency. When California eliminates greenhouse gas emissions altogether, offsets will be a thing of the past. There can be many cobenefits of offset projects for the environment or local communities. The California Air Resources Board keeps a list of approved projects designed to offset greenhouse gas emissions, and these include a number of forest projects. California’s carbon marketplace is linked to carbon markets in Ontario and Quebec so that more businesses are involved in meeting the desired targets. Investing in California’s forests can protect carbon stocks and maintain and increase carbon sequestration, but there is more to climate-resilient landscapes. “Think about land as a strategic climate reserve. Everyone is familiar with our strategic petroleum reserves, but this is the opposite. Land is where we can reduce and absorb excess carbon dioxide and keep it there for the long term,” says Laurie Wayburn. In 1993, after working in conservation and development with the United Nations, Wayburn founded Pacific Forest Trust with Connie Best from a small office in Boonville. This little town is in Mendocino County, surrounded by beautiful redwood and mixed conifer-hardwood forests, where folks were once so isolated they have their own argot called Boontling. Today the valley is known for fine frati and a colored-wool breggos—that’s wine and sheep for those who don’t speak Boontling. Pacific Forest Trust has grown from these humble roots to a highly impactful land trust operating across California and Oregon, where they have contributed to the protection of 270,000 acres of forested land.

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When a mature forest is cut, only one-third of the carbon remains stored as forest products while two-thirds is lost. It takes a long time for young forests to make up for all the lost stored carbon. With high global deforestation rates, we desperately need to conserve and promote mature forests so there will be opportunity to reabsorb carbon dioxide. As it relates to forest management, for example, “one 90-year rotation [cutting trees every 90 years] stores more carbon than three 30-year rotations,” Wayburn says. Older trees are more resistant to fire and pests and can survive a drought more easily. “There will always be young forests, but what we don’t have enough of are older, more mature forests that have huge benefits for fire, drought, pest resistance, carbon, and wildlife habitat, and they produce better timber,” says Wayburn. Pacific Forest Trust now holds a conservation easement on the Black Butte working forest owned by Michigan-California Timber Company. The forest covers 5,006 acres of timberland on the north and east sides of Black Butte, a protruding cinder cone near the city of Weed close to Mount Shasta. The money for the easement came from California Climate Investments, which relies on cap-andtrade funds, and is intended to help protect the forest from development and offset the losses associated with slower rotations and some of the costs of ecosystem management. The method used to facilitate these changes is a conservation easement, which in this case prevents subdivision of the land but permits timber harvest with a new approach to management that will reduce tree densities and grow older trees from a mix of species. There are incentives for landowners to adopt conservation easements and forgo some of their rights to the land in exchange for payment (typically less than 50 percent of the full value of the land) and/or tax relief. Land ownership consists of a bundle of

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rights, which means that different rights can be owned separately by different parties. For most conservation easements, the management of the property remains the responsibility of the landowner, thereby saving the public long-term management costs, which can be high. Conservation easements are typically held by public or private land trusts with their own set of priorities and approach to setting and monitoring the terms of the easement. The Black Butte property is contiguous with the Shasta-Trinity National Forest and wilderness areas, thereby providing habitat connectivity across the larger forested landscape so that the forest species can persist and possibly shift upslope to adapt to a changing climate. Black Butte Spring is also designated for protection. The spring is part of a network of seeps that support threatened salmonids downstream by providing an important source of cold water— a resource that is going to be harder to come by in a drier future. The goal for protecting this area is to help the surrounding public forestland and communities be safer from wildland fire, improve carbon sequestration, and maintain habitat connectivity in perpetuity. The Black Butte easement also protects access to and scenic views from Black Butte Trail, a steep, well-used trail to the top of the cinder cone. An estimated 235 species of wildlife, including federally listed and state-listed species such as the Cascade frog (Rana cascadae), Sierra Nevada red fox (Vulpes vulpes necator), northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina), silver-haired bat (Lasionycteris noctivagans), gray-headed pika (Ochotona princeps schisticeps), and Pacific fisher (Martes pennanti), are thought to occupy these lands. These species may be seen as “cobenefits” in the marketplace, but what they really are is a vital part of the community of life. Black Butte is a working forest and, thanks to Pacific Forest Trust and its state partners, is now working for conservation.

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Working-lands conservation is an important way to maintain biodiversity. Working lands can provide goods and services for humanity and support functioning ecosystems necessary for resilience. These lands complement protected areas by providing habitats and resources for some species while facilitating dispersal and climate change adaptation for others.

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In sum, forests are some of California’s critical working lands for conservation. There are 33 million acres of forested land in California, one-third of the entire state. Climate change poses many threats to forests, including drought and fires that reduce their ability to absorb carbon. At the same time, forests support tremendous biodiversity and are the key to many local rural economies. California’s forests can be regenerated with help from Indigenous knowledge and philosophies established from a long history of interaction with forested ecosystems. We can honor these ways of knowing and the sovereignty of Indigenous people, and in return, California’s forests will sequester and store carbon, protect species, and provide fresh water for many years to come.

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5

Climate Canaries

The desert is the canary in the coal mine for climate change because a lot of the species that are out here are well adapted to heat and wildly fluctuating temperatures between day and night, and as we lose these highly adapted species, we see the upper threshold of what animals can live at. ta n ya he n de r s on, Executive Director, Amargosa Conservancy

Rising over 10,000 feet above the Los Angeles basin are the San Bernardino Mountains, which cast a rain shadow and create deserts to their east. The Mojave and Colorado/Sonoran Desert bioregions in southeastern California are home to unique plant and wildlife species. These days lots of people live and spend time in the desert because they love outdoor recreation and enjoy the natural wonders that abound. The desert cities and towns continue to grow thanks to the weather, which attracts retirees from across the country, and lower housing prices, which attract workers from nearby cities. The high desert towns of Hesperia and Victorville grew from less than 10,000 people in the 1970s to 95,274 and 122,312, respectively, in 2019. Many people think of deserts as hard and unchanging wastelands, impervious to human forces. But desert ecosystems are

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some of the most precariously balanced in the world, and other than the Earth’s poles, they are the places that are and will be suffering the most extreme temperature fluctuations with advancing climate disruption. If the current growth in the rate of fossil fuel use continues, extreme temperatures are projected to increase up to 8°F (4.4°C) by the end of the century across the Inland Desert valleys and the number of extreme heat days per year (greater than 112°F [44.4°C]) are predicted to increase from about 10 to over 80. Instead of winter “snowbirds”—seasonal residents escaping icy northern winters—desert communities could see their own residents becoming sunbirds, with those who can afford to do so fleeing to cooler climes in the summer. These high temperatures, combined with many senior residents, show that desert dwellers are the Californians most vulnerable to climate change. But while these communities face grave challenges, they also have an opportunity to use renewable energy to meet the needs of their residents and the tourism that their economy depends on. Desert ecosystems, meanwhile, face challenges. Biologists have recently documented dramatic species declines associated with global warming. For example, the Grinnell Resurvey Project tracks how native species have responded to climate change by retracing the steps of Joseph Grinnell, the original director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley. Between 1904 and 1940, Grinnell and his colleagues conducted inventories of terrestrial vertebrates in more than 700 locations throughout California and elsewhere in the western United States. When scientists connected to the museum revisited Grinnell’s sites in the Mojave Desert, they were looking for 135 different bird species scattered over 61 sites. Each site had lost nearly half of the species it used

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to support. No species of bird benefited from the change in climate. While we tend to think of desert species as the toughest of the tough, there are limits. There is a fine line in the desert between habitable and inhabitable. Many desert species live on that line, where they make the most of the least. Move the line a little? When least becomes less, fewer species will survive.

A Park Losing Its Namesake Joshua “trees” are not trees—they are long-lived succulents. And by 2100, there may not be any left in the park named after them, Joshua Tree National Park. Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) belong to the yucca family. The tallest trees can grow to be 70 feet tall, although few trees ever grow taller than 40 feet. With their long trunks and branches ending in poofs of pointy leaves, they resemble, as much as anything, a bouquet of Dr. Seuss’s truffula trees. They are fast-growing (by the slow standards of the desert) and long-lived—the trees we admire today may be 150 years old, possibly older. They are found mostly in the Mojave Desert. Here, rising temperatures, increased aridity, and prolonged drought are threatening the species, and persistence models designed to forecast their future distribution suggest these iconic plants will no longer be able to survive in Joshua Tree National Park. Species distribution modeling can be used to forecast how species ranges may change under future climatic conditions. Fortunately, there are areas that provide a buffer against the effects of a warming and drier climate. Knowing where these areas are is important for park managers so they can ensure the trees’ protection. These potential islands of survival, called

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microrefugia, have local temperature or moisture conditions that may allow Joshua trees to persist even as the surrounding landscape becomes unsuitable. But where are these places? The problem is that the desert is a huge landscape and microrefugia are, as the name implies, small. To find them, you need hiking boots on the ground. Lots of them. Happily, as Cameron Barrows says, “there are a lot of people around here who love hiking and love being outside and would like to contribute to something.” Barrows is an ecologist who does research on biodiversity conservation at the UC Riverside’s Palm Desert Center. He works with volunteers and other scientists to monitor change at study plots spanning a wide elevation range and different temperature and moisture conditions. The volunteers come from groups like Earthwatch and UC California Naturalist and local conservation organizations such as Friends of the Desert Mountains. These folks provide more eyes on the ground, and there is a lot of ground to cover. Joshua Tree National Park spans the Sonoran Desert and the Mojave. The Sonoran Desert is at a low elevation, ranging from below sea level to 3,000 feet above it, and spans Southern California, southwestern Arizona, and into Mexico. The Mojave Desert, despite containing the lowest point in North America, is generally above 3,000 feet and runs from Southern California east into Nevada and parts of Arizona and Utah. Having this elevation range within the park helps scientists like Barrows examine climate gradients and how animal and plant populations respond to different microclimates. Barrows and other collaborators published a paper in 2019 that relied on volunteer monitoring data in conjunction with historical climate data to determine where Joshua trees are more likely to successfully reproduce and persist. They then looked at climate

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models to predict where similar conditions are likely to exist in the future and therefore offer the best chance for continued Joshua tree recruitment. Fortunately, when scientists and volunteers arrived at the sites the models predicted would have the cooler climates required, they did indeed find more young Joshua trees. These areas have lower climatic water deficit (see chapter 3), higher precipitation, and lower maximum temperatures than the surrounding landscape. Barrows’s group showed that Joshua trees are persisting in small refugia and moving to higher elevations and latitudes. Outside of these areas, Joshua trees have not reproduced for a couple of decades. If stewards can protect these refugia—and if people greatly reduce carbon emissions—we could save almost 20 percent of Joshua Tree National Park for Joshua trees. Barrows says the work with the volunteers has also yielded important insights about what the future holds for creosote bushes, pinyon pines, and junipers. Desert refugia are important to conserve for mammals and songbirds as well. In 2016, a survey of birds and mammals across the Mojave Desert by Lindsey Rich, working as a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, found that the occupancy rate of birds and mammals decreased as temperature increased. The mammals that showed this trend include coyotes, bobcats, and badgers. The birds that decreased were blue-gray gnatcatchers; Bewick’s, cactus, and canyon wrens; and several other species. These refugia might provide certain species some time as temperatures rise, but we need to act now to curb emissions so that these cooler areas can persist over time. Also, the authors revealed that up to 43 percent of areas identified as climate refugia are at risk of being converted for renewable energy development, 24 percent are at risk of conversion for recreation, and 27 percent are at risk of use for military

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activities. Identifying and protecting climate refugia offers benefits that go beyond the protection from temperature change. These areas show volunteers and professionals where they should focus their efforts on weed and fire control, as well as protecting freshwater resources, to increase the resiliency of desert ecosystems.

Ascending Lizards Examining a longer time horizon allows scientists like Barrows to understand the long-term trends in wildlife communities. Longterm data sets can help researchers parse out how climate and other stressors are impacting ecosystems. As Barrows puts it, “If I only had data that showed what was going on before climate change, I’d be able to really document what’s going on here.” For example, he remarks, “What really made me jealous is what Thoreau put together for Walden Pond for plant phenology.” These early (1845–47) detailed accounts of Walden Pond allowed researchers to reveal startling changes in flower bloom and other life history details between Thoreau’s time and our own. Barrows’s lucky day came when he got a call from the biology department at California State University Long Beach saying, “We found a bunch of data in the basement, and we are going to throw it out unless you want it. It’s written ‘Joshua Tree’ on the boxes, and they’re filled with data cards.” The cards contain over 1,000 data records for 17 species of lizards, 19 snakes, a tortoise, and four amphibians collected by faculty and students from California State University Long Beach from repeated field visits to Joshua Tree National Park (then Joshua Tree National Monument). The records include the species observed and the location, based on mileage from a road landmark. Barrows and his colleagues are now able to compare

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what species were detected over 50 years ago (1958–72) with what they are finding today. Using the historical lizard observation data and comparing it to current lizard distributions, Barrows has been able to analyze shifts in how lizard populations have expanded, stabilized, or declined for seven lizard species. The analyses from this data set reveals that while no species appears to have been extirpated (become locally extinct) in Joshua Tree National Park, there has been a clear shift to higher elevations for four species, with whiptail and horned lizards increasing elevation by more than 15 percent. One species showed no clear change in elevation, and two species had already been occupying the highest sites. This shift to higher elevations is what scientists predict for the species to escape the rising temperatures of global warming. Desert horned lizards and zebra-tailed lizards are still found at lower elevations, although at lower densities, which suggests that they may be more efficient thermoregulators. The trick for these ectotherms (or so-called cold-blooded animals) is to be able to maintain the optimal body temperature during the summer, when overheating is a threat, and in the cooler part of the year, when staying warm is essential and can be harder to do at higher elevations. Another barrier to moving to the highest elevations may be the lower oxygen levels found there. Barrows also works with naturalist volunteers to survey desert reptile communities. In a comparison of data collected by trained biologists and volunteers, his team found that the number of species and individuals detected increased with the help from community members and that the results found by these volunteers were repeatable. The research they did together revealed several species were missing from the lowest-elevation desert plots, including side-blotched lizards (Uta stansburiana), western (tiger)

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whiptails (Aspidoscelis tigris), and chuckwallas (Sauromalus ater), which were once common in these areas. Side-blotched lizards are small insectivores that generally live just one or two years and span from Washington State to Baja, Mexico. Western whiptails are nearly as widespread but are larger and live longer than the sideblotched, and Barrows has observed them preying upon sideblotched lizards. Chuckwallas are large-bodied and long-lived vegetarians generally found across a broad elevation range and thought to be less sensitive to temperature. (We could learn a thing or two from the mighty chuckwalla and eat a wider array of veggies.) The researchers propose that these changes may result from recent warming and drying in these low-elevation areas. In fact, the areas where these lizards could not be readily found are the same areas predicted to be unsuitable for these species by climate scientists due to increases in aridity. One of the community scientists collecting data for Barrows is Tracy Bartlett. When Bartlett moved from the Midwest to the desert, she decided to learn about her new home. She enrolled in a UC California Naturalist course taught by Barrows and became an avid observer of desert fauna. After conducting lizard surveys out in the wilds with Barrows, Bartlett started doing her own observations of lizards and birds in her neighborhood. She lives along a golf course not far from the fabulous wilderness area that makes up the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument. She saw a number of lizards and other species in her neighborhood: “We see desert spinys on the walls!” Bartlett says she wondered if suburban areas are refuges for some species: “Could the animals live in the neighborhoods where there is water and food?” This led to the research question “What are we seeing and is it pos-

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Volunteers monitor plants and herpetofauna in the Mojave Desert. Photo by Cameron Barrows.

sible for animals to travel between neighborhoods, as wildlife corridors?” Bartlett and a few fellow local residents record data on all the lizards they see, noting whether they are adults or juveniles, what surface they were spotted on, and the exact GPS location, and send the data to Barrows. In the emerging field of public participatory scientific research (often referred to as citizen science), there are several levels of engagement: amateur or nonprofessional scientists who contribute data to a research study, collaborative efforts where communities or stakeholders help develop projects and contribute data, and finally those who are doing what Tracy Bartlett is doing by cocreating a project with Cameron Barrows to answer a new issue or question. Bartlett says that she wants to involve as many of her neighbors as possible because “with the way that the climate is impacting all of us, it helps to actually be a part of a project that measures it.”

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Weed Warriors California’s deserts might be most famous for their iconic native plants and the occasional amazing superblooms of wildflowers. However, due to the way people live, work, and play in the desert, several exotic plants have invaded desert ecosystems and threaten the native plants. Air pollution pouring onto the desert landscape, mostly from the Los Angeles basin, comes laden with nitrogen oxides, which are deposited on the desert soils. This added nitrogen gives the invasive weeds a competitive advantage over native plants, which are adapted to sandy soils low in nitrogen and organic matter. Invasive weeds such as Sahara mustard, tamarisk, and fountain grass can develop dense single-species stands and spread rapidly into new areas where they outcompete native species. These invasives efficiently absorb moisture from the soil, leaving less water and less space for native plants. The invasive plants also produce a lot of dry thatch and litter material that readily ignites and spreads fire across a landscape not adapted to fire, further damaging the native flora and impacting wildlife and desert communities. Most desert species, like Joshua trees, have little evolutionary history of adapting to fire. The drying and fire caused by the spread of the invasive species degrades desert ecosystems. Moving to clean energy for transportation and other sectors will help eliminate nitrogen deposition and thus help prevent invasive species and unnatural fires from spreading across the desert. Gary Ward is a volunteer for Friends of the Desert Mountains and chairperson for its “Weed Warriors” program. Ward coordinates groups of volunteers to remove invasive plants like fountain grass, Sahara mustard, London rocket, mustard, tamarisk, and more. Ward regularly pulls weeds with 8–10 other volunteers and

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says he enjoys being outside and seeing the native plants return to the sites after the worst of the invasive plants are removed. “The more we eliminate the invasives, the more the wildflowers can grow back in,” Ward says. About one particular site, he says, “We have done years of removal of fountain grass, and as a result the last time we went there, we saw just 10 fountain grass plants to remove. And the wildflowers are out and healthy.” In another effort to remove invasive tamarisk (Tamarix ramosissima) that started in 1986, volunteers and members of the California Conservation Corps logged more than 5,000 hours of work over five years getting rid of tamarisk at China Ranch. Tamarisk thickets ignite easily, and the plant recovers quickly after fire compared with the native species. As it grows it draws down shallow groundwater resources and covers the desert floor with salty leaves, preventing native species from growing. With tamarisk mostly gone from China Ranch, native willows and mesquite support least Bell’s vireos and southwestern willow flycatchers, both of which are endangered species. As a leader of the Weed Warriors, Ward says he takes time to explain to new volunteers the importance of removing invasive plants to allow the native plants the space and water they need. Ward shows others how to best remove the unwanted plants. He says that if the weeds are small, they use a hula hoe with a dull blade that pulls up the small plants with their roots. But if something like mustard is taller, pulling by hand is best, and if there are flowers and seeds, then they have to bag those up so they don’t hit the ground and germinate when the rains come. “You can count on the same people time in and time out, but I have actually picked up a few people I haven’t worked with before, and that keeps it interesting,” Ward says. “We talk on the trail getting out there, and you learn a lot about everyone; it’s almost like a family.”

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By the end of the 21st century, the daily highs in the desert are projected to rise by at least 6°F (3.3°C), and up to 9°F (4.95°C) on average, depending on the amount of greenhouse gases we continue to emit. With these higher temperatures, the soil will dry out. Decreases in soil moisture will greatly influence future ecological systems in the desert, making it even more important to reduce the amount of competition for fresh water that the native plants face. Ward and the other volunteers talk to members of the public who pass them along the trail. “You are being visibly seen by others who have no idea about the problems until they see and hear from you,” Ward says. “They ask, ‘What are you doing?’ and ‘Why are you doing it?’ And we explain. . . . So, these are small education moments.”

The Biggest Environmental Dilemma under the Sun It is hard to miss the expansive solar farms in California’s desert landscape—a signal of change in our energy sector. The cost of generating solar power from photovoltaic (PV) installations has dramatically dropped in recent years. This is, in part, due to the reduced cost of solar panels; in fact, there has been a 74 percent drop globally in solar development costs since 2010. Today, solar is the most competitive form of renewable energy and can be less expensive than conventional use of fossil fuel even without subsidies. While the cost of installing solar panels has dramatically declined, there are still challenges to meeting future energy demands by using large-scale PV solar development. Energy from the sun needs to be transmitted, and this can be costly as well as inefficient because 30–40 percent of it can be lost in transmission. So solar developments not only need to be in sunny and flat places

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but also need to be near either cities or high-voltage transmission lines. Building near cities can be expensive, so that leaves many solar developers looking to remote, less costly land with plenty of unobstructed sun—the desert. Solar PV panels in the desert are exposed to plenty of dust. Dust reduces the efficiency of the panels, so they must be washed regularly, which can consume large amounts of water. Water is scarce in the desert, so these solar farms can deplete limited groundwater reserves. (Alternative approaches to keeping panels clean are on the horizon—in the meantime, get out your feather duster.) For an extra layer of complexity, most of the good, sunny, flat land near high-voltage transmission lines is also near washes and rivers. And in the desert, water is life. So, the best places to build solar farms are often also the best habitat. Roofing the desert with solar panels and building access and maintenance roads to them can dramatically change the ecological conditions on the desert floor, creating shadier microclimates and changing airflow. These changes can destroy the microbiome of the topsoil. Largescale development results in habitat loss and fragmentation, which can have significant impacts on the flora and fauna. Solar farms also contribute to light pollution and have been shown to interfere with bird migration patterns. In fact, there are accounts of migrating birds that end up crashing into the sea of solar installations, possibly mistaking them for large bodies of water. A summary of bird fatalities detected at seven desert solar energy facilities collected in 2011–14 includes 1,384 dead birds spanning across 139 species, with passerines (sometimes called songbirds) the taxonomic group most frequently found killed or injured at all six California solar energy facilities, ranging from 39.6 percent to 62.5 percent of the avian mortalities; and 20 species detected are

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listed species of conservation concern. Efforts to lessen the problem for birds and bats include retrofitting panels and clearing habitat nearby to reduce their attraction to the area, but this expands the impact zone. Utility-scale solar PV installations are large—sometimes extremely so. Most solar farms are 1–100 acres, but the 579megawatt Solar Star installation completed near Rosamond in 2015 covers over 3,000 noncontiguous acres. Hydrologically speaking, a solar farm functions similarly to a very large building. Grading the natural contours flat and covering the land with solar panels keeps the rain from hitting the soil and traveling in its normal pattern, which can lead to concentrated flows off of solar farms—even flooding. But, barring a miraculous leap forward in perpetual motion technology, renewable energy development is our best path forward to save birds and the rest of the community of life. And in California, large-scale solar development is the easiest choice—for both new companies that want to make money and existing utilities that want to avoid the expense of upgrading their grid to handle the distributed generation of rooftop solar. The challenge for California desert ecologists is determining where to prioritize conservation over solar farms and mineral mining.

A Tortoise with a Plan When solar developers first proposed building gigantic arrays in the California desert, tortoise lovers and desert ecologists were terrified that these new developments would negatively impact the tortoise and all the other species dependent on the desert ecosystem. They had good reason to worry—the first solar arrays in the

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Kimberleigh Field (left), a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, and Terry Christopher, associate director of the Great Basin Institute, prepare to release a desert tortoise into the wild in 2016. Photo by USFWS.

neighborhood were built on federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land just across the state line in Nevada, with little regard for the habitat or migration routes of tortoises or other species. The Agassiz’s desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii), now threatened at the federal level, is beloved by desert wildlife enthusiasts. These tortoises are the ecosystem’s original engineers: they’ve manipulated their environment in ways that have impacted other species’ survival for millions of years. They use their strong legs to dig burrows where they can hide from extreme heat and cold, conserve water, and protect their eggs. A single tortoise can dig over 12 burrows across its home range. Dozens of other species also use these burrows, including desert woodrats (Neotoma lepida) and burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia). The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP) is a management plan intended to protect the most critical desert

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ecosystems, along with unique species like the tortoise that live there, and streamline the permitting process for proposed development on public lands. Technically, it’s an amendment to the California Desert Conservation Area plan, which was first adopted in 1980. The California Energy Commission, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, BLM, and US Fish and Wildlife Service developed the DRECP during an eight-year planning process. This process included numerous meetings involving “everyone and their brother that was a stakeholder,” says Russell Scofield, the DRECP Implementation Coordinator for BLM. They capitalized on the collective experience of the entire renewable energy industry, the electric utilities, recreation enthusiasts, and numerous environmental groups, with several federal and state agencies thrown in for good measure. There was also an independent science panel and more than 100 public meetings, according to Scofield. One of the key stakeholders at the table was Jora Fogg, public lands policy lead for Friends of the Inyo. Friends of the Inyo advances ecosystem resilience by engaging in public land policy involving land use and management. The group also organizes stewardship activities such as weed removal, planting of native plants, and trash pickups. Finally, and equally importantly, they help the public explore wild places that need protection and enjoy the birds and other desert life. The goal for Friends of the Inyo, as Fogg says, is to “create awareness around how ecologically diverse the desert is, and how important the desert is for species protection and climate resiliency.” Friends of the Inyo was able to marshal support from their county board of supervisors and the local community to protect places that they viewed as important in Inyo County. “We did a lot of field trips and outreach so we could communicate the important

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places, cultural resources, biological resources, and recreation values worth protecting,” Fogg says. As more people heard about the DRECP, other sensitive areas were identified for protection. A community science project organized by the California Native Plant Society of Conglomerate Mesa demonstrated that Conglomerate Mesa works as a natural nursery for Joshua tree seedlings—a rare site across the Mojave these days. This information, coupled with well-documented cultural resources, helped justify the protection of Conglomerate Mesa under the DRECP. Desert ecologists and soil scientists nearby in southern Nevada showed that the Mojave Desert is also an important carbon sink. Desert soils contain a lot of stored inorganic carbon in the form of caliche, also known as hardpan, which is a sedimentary rock made up of calcium carbonate. If there is no vegetation covering the soil, then the existing inorganic carbon can readily be dissolved by water and released as carbon dioxide. So, disturbing vegetation and soil can increase the potential for carbon loss. The scientists have shown that a working Mojave ecosystem can store even more carbon in the soil as carbon in the atmosphere rises. Shrubs like creosote not only are the major contributors to organic carbon storage in desert ecosystems, but they also help ensure that the inorganic carbon in the soil remains there. “All over the desert there are creosote plants sequestering carbon in the ground, and that is super important for climate mitigation,” Fogg says. So, protecting the desert landscape not only preserves the historic carbon sink below the desert but also preserves its ability to ramp up carbon sequestration. “When we transform the desert for development of housing or solar farms or just disturb the desert, scientists believe this will be consequential for carbon sequestration,” Fogg says. In response to these concerns, some

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conservation areas designated in the DRECP entirely limit ground disturbance. The DRECP was finalized in 2016. It covers 10 million acres of land managed by the BLM in California. The plan focuses renewable energy development on specific lower-impact areas while protecting other areas to conserve rare and endangered species and preserve natural habitat, recreational areas, and scenic values. Remarkably, it has never been challenged in court—a feat its supporters attribute to the collaborative process used to create the plan. “This plan was ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’ in a lot of ways, and that strengthens any management decision because people feel they were part of the process and it wasn’t imposed on them,” says Tanya Henderson, Executive Director of the Amargosa Conservancy. “The whole collaborative planning process for DRECP was exemplary in a lot of ways; a lot of groundwork was done with many community meetings and grassroots support.” Under the current DRECP, 388,000 acres of public lands managed by the BLM are available for solar, wind, and geothermal development; permit applications to install such developments in these areas are streamlined, if they meet predictable survey requirements and simplified mitigation measures. An additional 40,000 acres of public lands managed by the BLM could be developed for renewable energy but would require a comprehensive review process. A further 3.5 million acres of public lands managed by the BLM are designated by the DRECP as Special Recreation Management Areas and Extensive Recreation Management Areas. This land is generally closed to renewable energy development. Another 4.2 million acres of public lands managed by the BLM are designated as California Desert National Conservation Lands, Areas of Critical Environmental Concern for wildlife protection,

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and National Scenic and Historic Trails. Here, development is limited to protect habitat quality and connectivity and to conserve biological, cultural, and other values. Finally, there are 400,000 acres of public lands managed by BLM that are not covered by any of the above designations. However, while these lands—known, fittingly, as General Public Lands—are potentially available for renewable energy development, the DRECP contains management prescriptions for these areas. Examples of General Public Lands include land with existing development, such as mines and highways, and scattered parcels surrounded by privately owned land. With this patchwork of designation areas, you could end up with habitat fragmentation and disruption of migration routes that undermine the good intentions of the DRECP. Luckily, maintaining connectivity across desert natural areas, including corridors through developed areas, is part of the desert renewable energy plan for California. Habitat connectivity “is basically BLM’s primary tool for mitigation for climate change, allowing for migration and refugia,” Scofield says. It’s something Fogg says she fought hard for, talking to “anyone that would listen.” She showed them maps of protected areas like the White Mountains and the Inyo Mountains and how they were connected to the China Lake naval base and the wilderness areas extending south from there. She was able to show that Conglomerate Mesa is “the last remaining piece” of this vital corridor. The DRECP is perhaps most notable because it protects backwater places like Conglomerate Mesa and Silurian Valley. Silurian Valley isn’t home to any known endangered species. It’s not a site of national prominence. What it does offer is intact wilderness, beautiful scenery, and historical resources. The DRECP spared

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Silurian Valley from large-scale solar development because the BLM concluded that the environmental damage from solar development could not be mitigated and that no project here would be in the public interest.

It Takes More Than a Plan Friends of the Inyo is leading community efforts to protect places like Conglomerate Mesa, where plans to mine gold are underway— not just by watching the public notices and preparing to comment, but by visiting, gathering data, and monitoring the use and condition of the area. “The benefit of having a conservation group that is place-based and community-based is that we have easier access to talk to people and talk to the businesses that can be difficult to see hundreds of miles away [from the BLM office],” says Henderson. Public lands in the West span vast areas, and it’s hard for the limited number of BLM land managers to get to know the far-flung communities they serve. The Amargosa Valley, for example, straddles the California-Nevada border and is a 2.5-hour drive from the Barstow BLM office, and even farther from the Needles office. Some off-the-beaten-path places, like Silurian Valley and Charleston View, may not ever come up on a BLM staffer’s radar. But these obscure places can be among the most important to save. These relatively pristine places in the Amargosa basin, in the eastern Mojave, are well worth protecting. The Amargosa River mostly flows underground, providing water to plant life through their roots and surfacing in a few places to create spectacular lush oases in one of the hottest and driest places in the world. Here, extremely rare endemic species, such as the desert pupfish, have

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evolved to live in its warm waters. The river runs on the surface only during heavy summer rainstorms, mostly around Beatty and in the Amargosa Canyon, south of Tecopa. The desert is vast and BLM staffers are relatively few, so community groups are the most important sentinels these lands have. The Amargosa Conservancy collected letters from local businesses in support of designating these areas as conservation lands as a “natural stronghold, as opposed to an area for high development,” Henderson says. “Even four or five letters from a place like ours to the county supervisors and commissioners shows that the community is supportive of conservation actions.” That, in turn, gives their elected leaders the political backing they need to push for stronger conservation. The DRECP helped protect much of the Amargosa basin as California Desert Conservation lands, and this is good news for the environment and the economies of Death Valley Junction, Shoshone, and Tecopa, which rely on tourists who come to watch birds, enjoy the scenery, and ride off-road vehicles. However, plan revisions are a constant threat, especially when there is a change in the federal administration that influences priorities for public lands. So public watchdog organizations like Friends of the Inyo work to stay vigilant. “Essentially, we are looking at [proposed] changes to DRECP that could open everything up,” Fogg says. Gold, copper, and lithium mining are particular threats, she says. Just west of Death Valley, exploration is under way to determine whether lithium can be extracted from Panamint Valley. Lithium is a very light silverywhite metal used in the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that electric and hybrid vehicles rely on. As the country begins to transition to a more renewable and green economy, lithium is expected

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to power the batteries that power our green tech. It’s a challenge for conservation organizations like Friends of the Inyo to explain to the public why they are concerned about local mining for a critical component of these “green” technologies that are at the heart of important climate solutions. Friends of the Inyo believe that while we undoubtedly need lithium to power a renewable future and local extraction is better than relying solely on lithium from South America, mining should be restricted to deposits that don’t pose high environmental impacts. Fogg is advocating for congressional designation of protection areas, rather than the less permanent administrative designation provided under DRECP. Special-status lands could be designated as Wilderness areas or National Scenic Areas, which are more difficult to overturn and convert to intensive land use. Advocates are also looking for ways to develop lasting community support for protection of the most at-risk lands. For example, volunteers help school kids and their families learn about desert natural history while inspiring environmental stewardship at the BLM Desert Discovery Center in Barstow. By local communities staying vigilant and speaking up, the (Agassiz’s desert) tortoise and the (American desert) hare both win the race.

In-Town Solar Solutions With the challenges associated with large solar farms, and the desire to shore up our local grids by generating power where it is used, many people are advocating for integrating solar into the built environment rather than installing it across the dwindling supply of natural open space. One study has estimated that, nationwide, small rooftop solar installations could generate up to

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39 percent of our electricity needs—a sunny proposition. This estimate was based on mapping individual roofs across the United States and assessing their suitability for solar installation in combination with photovoltaic performance simulation tools. “Local is definitely the way to go,” says Ellen Lockert, founder of Climate Action PS. “Part of the challenge is getting people to believe we have the power to make a difference.” Lockert lives half the year in Palm Springs (PS), and she started her group after realizing there was little citizen advocacy going on around climate change. “Climate change seems abstract to most people, as does what they can do about it,” she says. Lockert’s group focuses on policy surrounding greenhouse gas reduction where they can influence it most: at the local level. “Basically, it’s a website and me and whomever I could get to show up for things,” she says. Some of their positions seemed counterintuitive—at least at first. “[Some thought] the concept of building new houses that need more fossil fuels is crazy,” Lockert says. But she was able to show people that the new houses (which were being built anyway) were more energy and water efficient than older homes and, with a little extra effort, could be considerably better for the environment. Climate Action PS worked to convince the Palm Springs City Council to pass a policy that prefers solar on all new construction. “The burden of proof is on the developers to say if and why they can’t install solar,” she says. The city’s ordinances were modeled on those from other cities with similar policies, including Culver City, Santa Monica, and San Mateo. Palm Springs has committed to an ambitious list of actions to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address climate change impacts. Changes in building codes and building envelope requirements will improve energy efficiency, and requiring solar

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on all new residential projects will help. Also, they are requiring all commercial businesses to use the 100 percent carbon-free option offered by Desert Community Energy, their Community Choice Aggregation program (see chapter 2). But what about existing residents? What else can they do? The Palm Springs Sustainability Commission has a new program that gives residents a rebate for conducting a home energy review as part of a labeling program. These labeling programs are intended to help reduce the energy used by existing residents. The city of Berkeley has a similar program—the Building Energy Saving Ordinance—which gives building owners and homeowners a comprehensive energy assessment to uncover energy saving opportunities, which they can act on and publicly report. These energy efficiency opportunities are voluntary up until the building is sold, by which point they must have been implemented. Information from home energy labeling programs helps homeowners, buyers, sellers, and renters make informed decisions about upgrades they can make to help meet greenhouse gas reduction goals. The US Department of Energy’s Better Buildings program has resources to help communities start home energy labeling programs. After some success in Palm Springs, Lockert created a road map for other cities to enact similar policies. She says her group’s success came down to finding dedicated, like-minded people— even just a few—and then building relationships with elected officials and fighting for what they knew was right. “I don’t think it’s rocket science; anyone can do it,” Lockert says. “It’s about persistence and tenacity. Being a presence and a voice for policies that may not be popular.” Lockert is right when she says that solar installation and carbonneutral buildings are easier to implement for new construction.

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When the San Bernardino Community College District received a grant to convert their existing district offices to zero net energy, Farrah Farzaneh, Director of Facilities Planning & Construction, had to draw on some creative innovations. Zero net energy buildings generate enough renewable energy to meet the remaining energy load required to maintain the activities that take place within the buildings. “It’s much simpler to build a new building to zero net energy because you put in systems that are efficient,” Farzaneh says. To get to zero net in an existing building, as the district did, you first have to retrofit the existing building to reduce energy consumption, and then find space to install enough solar generation to offset the energy use you couldn’t avoid. Farzaneh and her team at the district were under a tight timeline, trying to retrofit three buildings to zero net energy—all on the weekends, so that regular district functions weren’t impacted. The project was made easier by their close partnership with their electric utility provider, Southern California Edison (SoCal Edison), which wanted to make the project a pilot demonstration of different methods that could be used to convert a conventional building to zero net energy. “Working with SoCal Edison made a difference,” Farzaneh says. “They were a great partner and worked with me hand in hand.” Because this was a pilot program, Farzaneh and her team got to try a lot of new passive and active technologies that they had never used before. Passive strategies reduce energy use by modifying the building. One passive strategy that they employed was advanced solar shading. The shades remain open—and the lights in the area remain off—until the incoming heat reaches a certain temperature. Then the blinds close and the electric lights turn on. The level of

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light is determined by whether sensors detect anyone in the building. This technology takes full advantage of available natural light while ensuring the rooms don’t overheat, saving electricity that would have been used on lights and air conditioning. Another passive approach that they employed to light the building naturally was the use of solar tubes. The solar tubes are paired with light-emitting diode (LED) lights, so when there is enough ambient light in the room coming from outside, the lights automatically dim down. “It’s like a dance with the way the solar tubes work with LED,” Farzaneh says. “When one opens up, the other steps back. It’s beautiful.” Active strategies rely on energy but are more efficient than conventional approaches. For this project all the lighting was changed to LED, which uses 75 percent less energy than traditional incandescent bulbs and lasts 25 times longer. Unfortunately, not all older fixtures will take LED lights. The district buildings had 480 light fixtures that were not LED compatible and could not be replaced with conventional fixtures, so custom LED light fixtures were commissioned to fit in the space. “Every member of the project team, from manufacturers to contractors to the engineers and architects, they really were all passionate about climate,” Farzaneh says. They also installed ultra-high-efficiency heating, ventilation, and air conditioning rooftop systems, and tankless water heaters were installed to reduce energy use overall. The final step for getting to net zero is to generate renewable energy on-site. The district offices are powered by a 174-kilowatt photovoltaic array erected on shade structures in the parking lot. Like most urban photovoltaic systems, the district’s array is plugged into the grid so that when the array generates more electricity than the buildings use—like on sunny weekends—that excess power is

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sent into the power grid. The buildings also remain tied to the grid so that if the solar array is not producing enough power at any moment to supply the buildings’ needs, they can draw from the grid. Because the buildings are not drawing more energy from the grid than the array produces over the course of the year, it is considered net zero, also referred to as zero net. It’s something the district can measure in real time, so they can adjust their behavior as needed. “You can see electricity, gas, water, cost summary, solar production, and a comparison of how much solar we produce and how much we are taking from the grid,” Farzaneh says. The information is on the internet, so everyone in the organization can see and feel the rewards of this amazing zero net energy effort. Farzaneh says the difference isn’t lost on her employees. The solar tube prisms create rainbows on the walls. Custom light levels have improved people’s moods—when the light is right, people are happier. The space is more comfortable, and knowing that it’s tailored to their needs makes them feel special. “The head of payroll said, ‘When I walk into the office, I feel like a princess; as I walk into the lobby, the lights go on like I am on a stage,’” Farzaneh says. People in the building are also proud of what the district is doing for the environment. “They are reminded on a daily basis that climate matters, that you need to be a good steward of climate,” Farzaneh says. Farzaneh is dedicated to sharing the lessons learned in implementing this pilot project. She presented the project details at an Emerging Technologies conference, a Green Schools Summit, and other venues across the state. Southern California Edison is putting together the information to share with others so they can reduce energy use at similar facilities. It’s a timely effort: the community colleges are working toward the state goal of being carbon neutral by 2045. “If that is the goal, we have to get engaged,” Farzaneh says.

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“Honestly, it’s a good thing; we have to be responsible for the world we are leaving behind for the younger generation. . . . We cannot just think about ourselves; we have to think about the future.”

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In sum, the Inland Deserts of California are vast, including expanses of arid lands, uninhabited mountain ranges, growing cities and rural towns, and agricultural and solar farms. Whether in the Colorado or the Mojave bioregion, these deserts—from dark, cold winter nights to hot, dry summer days—shape the lives of all species that live there. Scientists have documented changes in the desert flora and fauna in response to recent changes in the climate and stress the immediate threat global warming poses to these ecosystems. Estimates of community vulnerability, related to socioeconomic metrics and climate forecasts, reveal that residents of the Inland Deserts are extremely vulnerable to climate disruption due to the extreme heat predicted and the older population. There is no such thing as completely “clean” energy, so the focus remains on solar, wind, and other renewable sources to mitigate climate change while minimizing societal and ecological damage in their production. Public participation in scientific research and civic action are essential to help prevent the degradation of this vast landscape. While most people just pass through the desert for a visit, thankfully there are dedicated desert dwellers who are pulling weeds, tracking animals, employing solar energy, and protecting the natural landscape from continued development— preconfiguring their communities to help prevent and adapt to a hotter future.

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6 Los Angeles Plants Itself

Sunshine and blue skies have been the calling cards of Los Angeles since the 19th century as generations of real estate developers, filmmakers, songwriters, and other mythmakers have said, “Come to LA; the weather’s great.” Climate change will challenge that identity. Average annual temperatures are projected to increase by 5°F–8°F (2.75°C–4.4°C) later in this century, and without emissions curbs, the hottest day of the year might be up to 10°F (5.5°C) warmer than now for many places across the LA region. Heat also exacerbates environmental injustices such as poor air quality, little access to green space, and lack of food sovereignty. LA has a long history with smog and many residents still recall not being able to see the mountains due to thick smog. Even before LA became the city of the car, the basin’s shape trapped wildfire smoke. Thanks to regulations imposed to reduce auto and other types of emissions, the visibility is much better than it was 50 years ago, although poor air quality still harms public health, especially in low-income neighborhoods. Now, unhealthy ozone days are on the rise in conjunction with extreme and humid heat. Ground-level ozone comes from nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds emitted from cars, refineries, and other sources of chemicals that

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react with sunlight. Unlike the high-altitude ozone layer that protects the Earth from ultraviolet light, ground-level ozone is detrimental to human health. It can reach higher concentrations for longer periods of time when the air is stagnant. The air becomes more stagnant when temperatures rise. Urban heat island effects can raise temperatures by 5.4°F (2.97°C) or more above those of surrounding rural areas. Communities across the Los Angeles region are working to reduce heat impacts by improving neighborhood design and air quality, by cooling roofs and streets, and by enhancing local ecosystems and the urban ecology they support. When a community comes together with a shared vision, the transformation of urban ecosystems is possible. Urban ecosystems are a hybrid of natural and manufactured elements whose interactions are greatly affected by culture, social organization, politics, economics, and human behavior that influence land and water use.

Cooling Down Tinseltown As a city develops, it clears vegetation and paves surfaces. Buildings and the cars that follow limit airflow and pollute, which causes neighborhoods to heat up. Very hot days can create a spike in energy use to keep air conditioners going—further increasing exterior heat. This urban heat island effect yields higher temperatures in central business districts and other intensely developed or industrial areas, compared with adjacent rural places. The differences increase at night when the city releases heat. Some urban heat islands can be 15°F (8.25°C) warmer at night than adjacent rural areas. Cities can take action to remain livable. Vegetation absorbs carbon dioxide and shields heat-absorbing pavement, as well as pro-

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viding shade for residents. Light-colored building materials reflect heat away from urban spaces. Designing with airflow and outdoor cooling in mind, as with misters, can make it easier for people to get out of the car and walk or ride a bicycle. Jonathan Parfrey founded and now directs Climate Resolve, a member of the Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability (LARC), which advances policy and action to reduce the impacts associated with urban heat islands, including increasing the number of reflective roofs and trees. LARC is one of seven regional public/private collaboratives that make up the Alliance of Regional Collaboratives for Climate Adaptation, focused on building regional resilience to climate impacts across California. Climate Resolve helps to bring cool roofs and other climate solutions to low-income communities. Dark roofs absorb light energy and heat up, raising the temperature in the buildings. Many dark roofs together can heat up an entire neighborhood. Cool roofs mostly rely on titanium dioxide extracted from minerals such as ilmenite, rutile, and anatase. In its pure extracted form, titanium dioxide has been safely used for 90 years in household items from paint to cosmetics. It scatters light and thereby reflects the sun’s heat as compared to darker material that absorbs heat. Roofing materials with titanium dioxide have high solar reflectance (and are effective at emitting energy as thermal radiation), making them cool, and they display outstanding weather resistance, making them ideal for outdoor use. “The difference in cost between a cool roof and a regular roof is pennies on the dollar when it comes to residential, and the payback in energy savings is within months, not years,” Parfrey says. “With a [large] commercial roof the payback is even sooner because of the higher solar reflectance and the cooling properties.

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So, it’s a no brainer . . . for the vast majority of California.” Los Angeles adopted one of the first cool roof ordinances, and there are now more than 30,000 cool roofs in the city. The reflectivity requirement for new and replaced residential roofs can be found in LA’s green building code. Cool roofs are a gateway to cool streets, and eventually cool neighborhoods. Climate Resolve is also interested in possible advantages of another climate adaptation strategy—cool paving materials. Cool pavement options include relatively inexpensive sealants that can be applied to existing blacktop. However, since white pavement reflects heat, pedestrians can experience higher temperatures on them in the daytime compared with black asphalt, which draws heat in and then slowly releases it into the air over time at night. Cool coatings can increase the light reflected from the road onto objects, including people, at a rate equivalent to about 10 percent more sunlight. Between the increased glare and heat, walking these streets could be uncomfortable during certain hours of the day or just another excuse to sport stylish sunglasses while in LA. Cooler paving alternatives are likely to spread as LA tries to meet a climate adaptation plan target of 10 percent total covered land area using cool surfaces by 2025, and 30 percent by 2045. In addition to requiring new roofs to be cool, Los Angeles building codes require mitigation of the heat contributed by other hardscaping surrounding residences, such as pathways and patios. Mitigation can be done by planting vegetation, switching to permeable surfaces, using building materials with high albedo, and installing solar shade canopies. “It’s this mix of vegetation and high-albedo materials that is critical to helping reduce the urban heat island,” Parfrey says. “We like to have both the engineered

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solution through cool roofs and pavements in combination with the enhanced tree canopy.”

Riding to a Cooler, Healthier Future The San Gabriel Valley (SGV) Bike Train started in 2011 as a Facebook meetup for family friendly bike rides one Sunday morning every month. Families head off together for a 15- to 19-mile ride, led by experienced volunteers, at a family friendly pace along protected paths adjacent to the Rio Honda and San Gabriel River. The informal connections forged on these rides led to a nonprofit bike coalition, which evolved into an organization called Active San Gabriel Valley, aka Active SGV. “The riders’ response to these events was extremely positive, and folks came from all over and started to wonder why they didn’t all have access to safe bicycle paths and be able to have community rides every weekend,” says the group’s executive director, David Diaz Avelar. Active SGV, based in the city of El Monte, works on community health and climate resilience. Diaz Avelar first volunteered for Active SGV “to be able to give back and provide opportunities for young people and all the people that I grew up with,” he says. Born in Ensenada, Mexico, Diaz Avelar grew up in South El Monte, an area with some of the highest childhood asthma rates. Diaz Avelar says that environmental justice for SGV residents starts with a simple conversation: “‘Raise your hand if you know someone with asthma,’ and almost everyone’s hand goes up. Why is that?” Parts of South El Monte fall into the top 1 percent among all California census tracts for pollution burden, according to CalEnviroScreen. The analysis looks at 20 indicators, including health and socioeconomic statistics, exposure to air pollutants,

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hazardous waste, and groundwater contamination. It yields a series of maps and a combined score across all available indicators. The analysis is conducted by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment to guide funding and support regulatory and other actions designed to protect and enhance the health of Californians and the state’s environment. “The economy and the climate are both political. One of the ways people can make their voice heard is through civic engagement,” Diaz Avelar says, “so we need to have our communities at the table and make sure we are counted and our voices are heard.” Transportation is the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in California and to pollution locally. In fact, passenger vehicles account for about 30 percent of the state’s total emissions, and in some counties, vehicles are responsible for 75 percent of total emissions. The California Air Resources Board concluded that electrification of vehicles will not occur quickly enough to meet the state’s goal for greenhouse gas emissions reductions by 2030, increasing the importance of immediately reducing vehicle miles traveled by 25 percent or more. “Shifting behavior by built environment design is what we want to see,” Diaz Avelar says. “We feel that with infrastructure improvements people will bike more, will walk more.” To improve environmental design for bicyclists, Active San Gabriel Valley created regional bicycle master plans for five cities: Monterey Park, San Gabriel, Baldwin Park, El Monte, and South El Monte. Though federal funds for the project were cut short, the group completed regional bicycle master plans designating a network of bicycle infrastructure, including recommendations on the best types of bike pathways to employ throughout the area. These plans were adopted in 2014/15 to provide an accessible network of

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bicycle infrastructure connecting the participating San Gabriel Valley cities to one another and to greater Los Angeles County. It’s a big initiative. The San Gabriel Valley greenway network takes advantage of 151 miles of service roads and other rights-ofway adjacent to creeks that feed into the San Gabriel River and Rio Hondo. “We are focusing piece by piece, and then piecing them together to create regional connectivity,” Diaz Avelar says. One of the biggest pieces runs for 19 miles along San Jose Creek and connects multiple cities, parks, and communities. Implementation requires multiple funding sources, one being the California Active Transportation Program, which consolidates several state sources of funding to increase the proportion of trips Californians take by walking and biking. The program also maintains an online resource center for active transportation, with training and technical support. In this part of Los Angeles, walking and biking are necessary ways of commuting, so the goal is to make it easier to walk/bike through the city safely. Active SGV sponsors some paid interns and also has volunteers to support their programs, which include fostering community engagement and outreach. They also collect data on the number of people walking or riding, and their direction, plus demographic data, all of which is critical to inform active transportation planning, because cities don’t generally count bicycles and pedestrians. Single-day outdoor events, such as the famed CicLAvia, which involves car-free streets for communities to bike, walk, skate, roll, and dance together, require hundreds of volunteers. These volunteers help with all aspects of the event, including keeping the participants safe while minimizing disruption to adjacent traffic flow. In South El Monte, the community envisioned the Merced Avenue Greenway Project, a street reconfigured for friendly walking

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and bicycling through town that connects to the Rio Honda River Trail. Funded by the Coastal Conservancy, Active SGV documented  limitations such as a lack of shade trees, a dearth of lighting, and other barriers to safety and enjoyment. Active SGV went door to door along Merced Avenue to collect design and landscaping preferences, attended community and school events, hosted workshops, and set up a demonstration project with different options for residents to explore. About 80 percent of the participants preferred protected bikeway options over a painted road lane. “We were able to collect 70 percent participation from the entire corridor . . . multifamily homes, businesses . . . community engagement isn’t just oneway direction, but it’s an ongoing conversation,” says Diaz Avelar. Active SGV also took the city council and other decision makers on a tour to another community that implemented some of these options so they could see the possibilities for Merced Avenue. Through public participation they came up with a plan that put a bike path at grade with the sidewalk, created more public parking, added permeable surfaces to improve stormwater capture, and planned for more trees. They garnered strong community support for the Merced Avenue Greenway Project plan and prevented future bikelash (hostile reaction to cyclists, mostly from motorists). It will take time to build the project, but they have the key to success—a common community vision and relationships with local people ready to advocate and take action. Cycling or walking to work or play is a lot easier if you live close by. In the past, California’s solution for more housing was to sprawl away from city centers and create new suburban neighborhoods and permit exurban development (low-density unorganized scattering of homes outside of urban service boundaries). This type of low-density development threatens farmland, creates habitat

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fragmentation, requires extensive road networks, and adds additional fire risk. Local governments can ease restrictions on higher-density residential development and incentivize infill by strategically developing land and repurposing existing urban real estate to increase the density of development close to workplaces and services. At the same time, demand for housing close to city centers can lead to higher prices and the displacement of lower-income people from urban communities. Statewide legislation can counteract local constraints that often fall subject to sentiments focused on “not in my backyard.” For example, the state passed legislation to make it possible for homeowners to add an accessory dwelling unit, commonly referred to as a granny unit. Newer legislation proposes increasing the number of homes allowed on a single lot to four primary residences. Local jurisdictions could also adopt land use policies to address this problem.

Mothers Come Knocking Twenty-five years ago, five relentless mothers from the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Pacoima started Pacoima Beautiful, a nonprofit community organization focused on environmental justice. Pacoima ranks among the most impacted communities in California, according to CalEnviroScreen, because of surrounding freeways, factories, and garbage dumps. These moms and their neighbors got to work fighting for amenities like open space and safe streets. “I think we can do things on an individual basis, but it’s a lot stronger when we work as a group,” says Dora Frietze-Armenta.

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The Bradley Avenue green plaza started with a small park to provide open space and a safe place for kids to play near lowincome housing. After the planting of 46 trees and other vegetation, the area now provides pedestrians with a cooler, shaded green thoroughfare with decorative pavement coating. Frietze-Armenta grew up in Porterville in the Central Valley. She moved to Los Angeles for graduate school and now leads projects at Pacoima Beautiful. Frietze-Armenta focuses on implementing a new transformative communities grant funded through the Strategic Growth Council with funds from California’s greenhouse gas cap-and-trade marketplace (see chapter 4). The proposed actions within Pacoima, in the San Fernando Valley, include planting 2,000 trees, improving the greenery of the David M. Gonzales Recreation Center, and adding a learning garden that will also improve stormwater capture. New solar energy systems on residential buildings will mitigate climate change. A new electric DASH bus will provide frequent, inexpensive, and convenient bus service. The neighborhood will also add car-sharing opportunities and additional charging stations and help for residents to purchase more energy-efficient cars. Active transportation projects will result in 2.4 miles of streets and 900 feet of new sidewalks that will improve pedestrian and bike safety. Part of the requirement for this funding is to do a displacement avoidance plan, and Pacoima Beautiful is building partnerships with academics and other organizations to assess what they need, to make sure that the businesses and people living in Pacoima now can remain and enjoy the new green infrastructure. “While we are getting funding . . . when we look at Pacoima, we want to make sure it’s a healthy and safe community for people who live there, including less pollutants, so what would make a dif-

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ference is shutting down some of the polluting industries and clean up the toxic waste,” says Frietze-Armenta. A group of about 15–20 dedicated volunteer community inspectors participates in community organizing, outreach and education, work days, and civic engagement to draw attention to the needs of the community, thanks in part to one member of the group, Sofia Maldonado Ramírez. She invites them because, she says through translator Elizabeth Archer, “This is work for more than just one person.” At their meetings they share information about resources available to the community, like a program that replaces old refrigerators for free, saving energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Maldonado Ramírez has lived in the neighborhood for 29 years. She raised three children there, a daughter and two sons, one of whom suffered from asthma like many children in the area. Maldonado Ramírez got involved with Pacoima Beautiful in 2011 to join a successful fight to prevent Whiteman Airport from permitting more airplanes. In addition to concerns about air quality, she says, “We were scared because planes had crashed before, and they would circle just above Pacoima, so we feared that they would crash into us.” After many community meetings, the number of people in opposition to increased plane traffic grew and prevented the expansion. “We’re surrounded by so much contamination, by freeways, by garbage dumps, by electricity plants, by the airport . . . of course we want to see more change,” says Maldonado Ramírez. It takes more than meetings to galvanize support for community action. “There are negative people who don’t want you knocking on their door, but that never stopped me—I keep knocking on doors, I keep gathering signatures . . . I always explain that these are benefits for them, for their kids, for their grandkids.” The group has successfully lobbied

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for many meaningful changes in the community over the years— says Maldonado Ramírez, “At first I was nervous, but Pacoima Beautiful prepared us for how to talk to politicians”—and she continues to volunteer every week. “I have knocked on a lot of doors so that people could hear our voices and hear the information and resources Pacoima Beautiful has to share. I ask them to support me, to support us. I explain that this isn’t work for just one person; this is work for all of us to do.”

Youth-Led Conversations City decision makers know that Santa Monica can’t get to carbon neutral if everyone keeps relying on gas-guzzling cars and private planes, so the city is investing in improving public buses, bike/walk infrastructure, and links from downtown Santa Monica to the LA Metro Rail system. Climate Action Santa Monica (CASM) decided the best way “to activate the climate message and get more riders was to do it with youth,” says Cris Gutierrez. Gutierrez helps lead CASM and thanks to a small grant from the city started Climate Corps. Gutierrez worked for many years as an educator and drew on her interdisciplinary studies major at Stanford to approach climate change, an inherently interdisciplinary field. Now she is a community educator-activist with CASM, successfully bridging the gap between education and action. CASM builds on a history of sustainability planning that dates back 30 years in Santa Monica. It was the first West Coast city to pass a Sustainability Rights Ordinance, which recognizes that natural communities and ecosystems possess fundamental and inalienable rights to exist and flourish. It also asserts that corporate rights can no longer be allowed to take precedence over human and

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environmental health and well-being. With a strong commitment to sustainability already in place, Santa Monica was ready to jump on the importance of mitigating climate change, advancing community choice energy (see chapter 2), and setting up climate action and adaptation plans. The first Climate Corps consisted of 15 high school and college students who received training from local climate professionals and city government staff and learned how to engage the public in climate conversations. These young people and their successors have had thousands of conversations about climate change. National surveys conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication reveal that people living in the United States rarely hear or talk about climate change. In the spring of 2020, for example, 64 percent of the respondents said they rarely or never discuss global warming with family and friends and only 22 percent said people they know talk about it at least once a month. There is a strong connection between discussing global warming and feeling empowered to do something about the problem, so the need for more climate conversations is widespread. Climate Corps members discuss climate change with the public and show them how to take positive action and inform them about city or regional programs and resources. Alumni from the program are starting to serve as mentors, and participants are taking the lead on new projects to find local climate solutions. Harkening back to the first year of the program, Gutierrez says, “To be able to tap into the love, the excitement, the urgency that young people had—it was a natural.” To engage youth, she says, “Go to the students first, find out who is stirring their passions. . . . They are valuable human beings and leaders. Too many of us say, ‘Yeah,

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yeah, when you graduate from college, not now!’ If Greta Thunberg and other young climate leaders haven’t proven this, what’s it going to take?” Thunberg reminds us that young people are paying attention, demanding action, and holding the world accountable. Gutierrez is working to bring alumni together. This includes Marina Mihailova and James Oliver, who were in the first Climate Corps cohort. Mihailova was already interested in human rights when she moved to California from Istanbul. Through her studies at Santa Monica College she realized the urgency of the climate crisis and that “it is going to worsen the number of refugees we are going to have in the upcoming decades,” she says. When Oliver joined Climate Corps, he was working as a tutor and studying permaculture and has since gone on to work on all things fungi, including their use in bioremediation. Oliver says their focus was to “teach people how to use public transportation systems, while also teaching them about the carbon footprint, and taking surveys to gauge their knowledge and how much they care about climate change.” A person’s carbon footprint can be significantly decreased by reducing air travel and driving less, improving home energy efficiencies, eating mostly plants that are locally produced, and conserving water. The California Air Resources Board has online carbon calculators for households, small businesses, and schools to measure their footprints that are easy to use for anyone interested. When first asked to speak about climate change to the public, working for Climate Corps, “it was exciting and scary at the same time, and then as we did it, we got more comfortable and started to take more initiative, and Cris Gutierrez was a huge support,” says Mihailova. Their first shift was on the Third Street Promenade where people walk, shop, dine, and just hang out. They approached

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Santa Monica Climate Corps volunteer Amy L. Southern hands out buttons at a Fourth of July parade in 2018. Photo by Justin Han.

people in teams of two and surveyed them about the climate crisis and what they were willing to do to reduce their own carbon footprint. “By the end of the shift, we were both so defeated, what can we do, there must be a better way,” says Mihailova. “The worst is when people don’t acknowledge that you exist. . . . You have to be bravely okay with rejection,” says Oliver. They quickly realized that they had to first convince people that they were not asking for money and that city government wanted them to gather public input to inform their decisions. Later that summer they had more success at parks and at the farmers market where they were able to have conversations with people. In reflecting on the experience, Oliver says, “It’s important to engage people about their carbon footprint, solar energy, and how carbon emissions, energy, and consumption are leading

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toward mass extinction and climate change.” He also experienced a well-known phenomenon that “oftentimes being more informed can lead to a deeper spiral of helplessness without tangible and accessible actions.” But Mihailova says, “Each of us figured out . . . how to best communicate the message.” As CASM’s slogan says, there is “empowerment through knowledge.”

Right to Shelter Sasha Rabin says she “truly believes that we should be able to shelter ourselves and our family without having to spend thousands of dollars, and do it safely.” Rabin runs her own natural building organization called Earthen Shelter. She began her building career at the Cob Cottage Company. Since then she has taught natural building extensively in the United States and abroad. She shares her passion for natural building with others while living at Quail Springs Permaculture near New Cuyama. Natural building methods offer a solution to the hotter, drier, fire-prone future. Also, as described in chapter 4, the building sector contributes a huge amount to greenhouse gas emissions, especially through the use of concrete and steel, driving global warming. Natural building techniques that have been around for thousands of years can be carbon sinks rather than sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The value of wood for building is highlighted in chapter 4. Now add clay, sand, and straw for a mix of great local building materials. “The more we are connected to the materials we are using to build shelter, the more we are inherently able to make better choices,” Rabin says. Rabin runs workshops on natural building that combine methods from early human traditions and modern construc-

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tion practices, using materials such as cob, monolithic adobe, light straw, clay, wood, and natural plasters. The preferred natural materials depend on what can be readily found locally while minimizing the adverse effects of procuring these materials. The goal is to build superinsulated structures that fit a purpose. Building code requirements and permitting processes can present barriers to implementing natural building methods. An approach to cob construction was approved for inclusion in the International Residential Code that can be applied in the United States and a number of other countries. Getting local jurisdictions to adopt these newly approved codes is a logical next step. It’s also easier now for Californians to add an accessory dwelling unit to their own property, so it’s great to take advantage of less expensive and climate-smart ways to build a small living unit that takes less energy to heat and cool. Even with existing regulations, today’s widely used conventional building materials are not necessarily safe. Toxic materials and lack of thermal insulation can make people sick. As discussed in chapter 4, builders often ignore embodied carbon and the end of life for building materials. This means building materials like foam products that reduce energy use in running the building are energy intensive to make and raise health safety concerns due to high levels of toxicity. When a modern building burns in a fire, toxic smoke and ash can result from the synthetic materials used. These burned-over sites require hazardous waste cleanup prior to rebuilding. Natural materials do not put off noxious pollutants in a fire and, equally important, resist fire. Adobe and other high-mass, earth-based systems are inherently fire resistant, but builders still need to pay attention to fire-resistant roofs and windows and to design

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the venting carefully in fire-prone areas. Encapsulated straw bale walls have been shown to be extremely fire resistant, and there are examples of these types of walls still standing in the wake of some of California’s worst wildfires. With more devastating wildfires on the horizon, residents can learn how to build their own fire-resilient outbuildings that not even the big bad wolf can blow down. Continued testing of cob and other mass adobe walls is underway to determine their ASTM E119 fire-resistant rating, which is required for construction materials to pass code. These tests involve a timed period of ignition followed by exposure to a fire hose. Rabin and collaborators at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo are also getting some official seismic testing done that will help meet building codes. Rabin and her colleagues at Quail Springs are working with Ventura County on preapproved building plans to help streamline the permitting process. Though adobe was commonly used before and during California’s mission period—the Santa Barbara courthouse is an example—modern demonstration projects help people see adobe can be used today. Rabin and collaborators are working for the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden on a project called “Garden Casitas: Playhouses Designed with Nature in Mind,” which features natural building playhouses designed by local architects, design-build firms, students, and volunteers. The labor required to work with natural building materials lends itself to involvement of volunteer groups. All ages can participate; while 15 adults work on lifting up a ridge beam, kids can make adobe bricks. In New Cuyama, volunteers helped the family resource center build a cob wood-fire oven for community pizza parties. “We have the ability to create more-inviting neighborhoods by creating more artwork and fun, beautiful garden walls

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Students build a cob wood-fired oven at the Cuyama Valley Family Resource Center in northeastern Santa Barbara County. Photo by Ryan Spaulding.

and creating space where we want to be in our front yards more and meet our neighbors,” Rabin says.

One Garden Plot at a Time Growing and providing fresh food locally builds community resilience, reduces reliance on fossil fuels and petrochemicals, and reduces food waste (see chapter 3). Urban gardening in particular offers climate mitigation by reducing reliance on transported food and through the carbon captured in the plants themselves, especially tree crops. These green open spaces improve stormwater infiltration and can help cool urban areas suffering from heat island effects. They are also gathering places where sustainable practices can be shared, resulting in tangible benefits and enjoyment.

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In underserved urban communities the lack of food sovereignty is a public health crisis. As part of the Watts Rising effort, Ava Post Koo works to create neighborhood gardens on an impressive scale. The Watts Rising Collaborative was awarded a large Transformative Climate Communities Grant from the state of California’s Strategic Growth Council and also draws on local funding to improve the environment, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on fossil fuel, improve public health, and promote economic development in Watts. An estimated 41,000 people (62 percent Latinx and 37 percent Black) live in 2.12 square miles, making the neighborhood among the most dense within the city of Los Angeles. Residents also have some of the lowest income levels in the city. Funding will support many of the solutions for the densely built environment in Watts, such as affordable housing, rooftop solar, school rain gardens, planting of over 2,500 trees in Jordan Downs and on public school campuses, and creation of small parks and shaded public spaces. Walk/bike and other green transportation options, including a DASH electric bus line, will be brought online. The list of improvements funded by local agencies and the state should result in far more greenery across the neighborhood. “There is not a lot of greenery out here, and every little bit counts,” Post Koo says. Watts Rising has an antidisplacement working group, but Post Koo says that’s no guarantee: “Will the people here be able to enjoy the benefits, or does it just increase the rent and push people out? Nobody has a real answer to these things, and I don’t have an answer either.” Engaging community members in growing their own local fresh food ties all three focal areas of Watts Rising together (environmental, economic, and health). Growing food and other plants

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are two of the goals of MudTown Farms, a program of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, which is next to the Jordan Downs housing complex. Post Koo is the MudTown Farms program coordinator. She grew up in New York with two cultures, Chinese and North American. “Being biracial, I feel like I am stuck in two worlds, so I see racism around me, and it happens to me, but I also pass because people don’t know what ethnicity I am, so that makes people feel they have a pass to be racist around me,” Post Koo says. “I am not seen as fully one or the other, but I’m both—I’m me and I am an American just trying to do what’s best for everyone.” As a traveling musician, Post Koo says, “I saw all of these messed up environmental situations everywhere and how it affected people.” She returned to New York and completed an associate’s degree in ornamental horticulture, then went on to complete her bachelor’s in plant sciences at Cornell University. “There has got to be some way to make people’s environment better, and I just always enjoy being outside and being around nature and plants,” Post Koo says. She moved to Los Angeles and got involved in local politics, urban agriculture, and designing and building aquaponic systems (where plants are grown in the water that has nutrients from aquatic organisms). Working with the Jordan Downs Environmental Justice Coalition, she helped with soil testing at a construction site that revealed 37 different soil contaminants from a former steel refinery. She fought alongside the Watts Labor Community Action Committee to get the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles to do more to protect the residents of Jordan Downs from toxic dust and contamination coming from the construction area. “We got signs up and a hotline . . . and made the argument to protect people living there,” Post Koo says.

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Post Koo is a certified UC California Naturalist and brings her knowledge of environmental science, organic farming, soil remediation, and community organizing to help expand urban agriculture and access to healthy organic produce in Watts. Soil remediation is particularly critical, given high levels of soil contaminants in the area, including lead and other toxins from industrial operations, such as steel manufacturing, as well as the arsenic used in the past to keep weeds down. These heavy metals and other toxic chemicals, including oil from fuel tank leaks, have been found in Jordan Downs and on the high school campus. Contaminated soil must be removed before redevelopment of the area, and this means that gardening education includes lessons about which foods absorb lead and other toxins and can present a health hazard if not grown in clean soil. Post Koo says fish bone meal reacts with the lead in the soil to make it inert and not biologically available to humans and plants. She says you can till in a pound of fish bone meal per square foot of soil, cover, hold your nose, and let it do its thing for two weeks. If soil remediation is not possible, then lined raised beds filled with clean soil have to be established. She is skeptical that a mass cleanup will happen, so she is going to do whatever she can to make the environment safer and healthier. Growing food in Watts builds on a long history of agriculture in the area that older residents still remember. From the early 1900s through 1949, Los Angeles was one of the most productive agricultural counties in the country, with a little bit of everything, including vegetables, berries, flowers, and citrus. Even vineyards were commonplace, and cattle ranching was widespread, along with lesser-known honeybee ranches. MudTown Farms offers free gardening courses for those who have the time and interest. Participants explore their dreams for

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their own gardens and get help with the design and gardening tips. With help from the Transformative Climate Communities Grant and more local funding, MudTown Farms is being created to provide recreation, education, and healthy produce as well as an indoor community center and green space. Post Koo described a fruit orchard, plots for gardening and growing vines, fitness equipment, and an aquaponics system that converts waste to plant food. Gardeners will receive help with soil toxicity testing and with designing their gardens in a way that addresses potential mobility issues. They will have the opportunity to select plants according to their preferences, based on a fixed planting budget, from options including pollinator plants, fruit trees, and other perennials. Most sites are likely to need a cleanup day, followed by time to build the garden and finally plant it out. Young adults interested in learning more about gardening and landscaping will be recruited as paid interns. These interns along with volunteers will help Post Koo clean up, build, and plant 50 residents’ yards—“transforming them into edible growing spaces,” she says. Post Koo’s earlier research in Watts revealed that residents face many justice and environmental issues, including contaminated drinking water and high asthma rates due to poor air quality. “We’re not fixing the problems in Watts by doing this; we’re making it more comfortable,” she says. “Maybe if I can remediate 50 yards, other people will want to do the same thing—I think it starts with one plot at a time.”

Meeting Together for Better River Management The Santa Clara River drains a 1,600-square-mile watershed with headwaters in the Los Padres National Forest and runs to the

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Pacific through mostly natural channels. Endangered species, including the California steelhead, could recover in the river with projects to improve fish passage and instream flows, riparian restoration, invasive species removal, and land protection. Jim Danza teaches geography and environmental science and provides opportunities for his students at Oxnard College to participate in watershed stewardship. He also chairs the board of Friends of the Santa Clara River. His wife, Nina Danza, is a former flood control engineer and longtime volunteer with the Sierra Club and chairs the Ventura group of the Los Padres Chapter. Together, they can easily talk shop with the staff at the Ventura County Watershed Protection District, including County Stormwater Program Manager Ewelina Mutkowska. This program focuses on reducing pollutants from entering stormwater. A storm drain in the town of Piru collects stormwater from neighborhoods not far from some groundwater recharge basins that a local wholesale water purveyor controls. Connecting the storm drain to the recharge basins by rerouting stormwater from the creek was straightforward and inexpensive. While this is a very small project, Nina Danza says the Sierra Club was glad to lend it support, as it made good sense and “it builds goodwill.” Groundwater recharges through overland flow of rainwater and streamflow that seeps into the ground and—depending on the geology, amount of absorption by plants, and topography—moves down the watershed or accumulates in underground aquifers. Groundwater is a critical source of fresh water for agricultural, residential, and commercial activities, especially during California’s long dry season, and is accessed by wells and pumps. Depleted aquifers can result in water shortages, especially during drought, and along the coast saltwater intrusion can occur,

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preventing water use. Groundwater depletion is also the leading cause of land subsidence—the gradual sinking of an area of land. Subsidence occurs when rocks, along with fine-grained sediment, compact downward and fill in the space once occupied by the water removed by pumping. Subsidence is widespread across California, particularly throughout the San Joaquin Valley, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. A method commonly used in Southern California to prevent depletion of aquifers is to restore groundwater by intentionally facilitating recharge, using floodwater and recycled water. The Piru project, while small, illustrates how communities can improve the use of existing infrastructure to facilitate more recharge. A sufficient budget is essential to address the challenges of stormwater pollution. For this reason, places like Bellevue, Washington, have set up a stormwater utility. This utility, or enterprise fund, as it is referred to in California, collects money from residential and commercial property owners for stormwater management. The rates in Bellevue take into account property size and percentage of impervious surface, which together provide an estimate of likely amounts of stormwater runoff from each property. The funds collected allow the utility to pay for public stormwater system operations, maintenance expenses, and capital improvement projects and contribute to long-term capital reserves for the eventual replacement of aging infrastructure—all required to prevent pollution of stormwater. In California, stormwater utility fees are defined under Proposition 218 as property-related fees similar to user fees for water, sewer, and trash collection services. Under California law, municipalities can adopt or increase stormwater utility fees, but only if their proposals are submitted to property owners for a vote. This is perceived as a barrier to adoption, but

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perhaps voters can learn to understand the benefits of clean stormwater, for community and ecosystem health, and of stormwater capture for water security. As is, people who manage county stormwater programs and are charged with reducing pollution levels, like Ewelina Mutkowska in Ventura County, have very little to work with. Nina Danza wrote a river story for the Sierra Club that expresses her desire to protect the Santa Clara River; she wrote that she wants to see horned lizards and native bees living there, and to smell the sage. The river provides a place for quiet contemplation to restore her mind, and she likes to bring others to the riverbank to discover the value of the Santa Clara River. She and other volunteers work hard to remove trash and invasive species along a somewhat neglected stretch of the river. She was shocked by a proposal to protect the city of Oxnard by restoring an uncertified steep, cementcovered soil levee. Concrete walls destroy habitat, so Nina proposed more natural solutions that involved cobble and gravel, along with angled banks planted with willows to help stabilize the structure and provide habitat. She also organized site visits and got various environmental organizations to submit comments on the proposed action. Things really started to shift when the Danzas noticed, during their visits to the Ventura County Watershed Protection District office, that developers and other industry representatives know the staff working there, simply because they spend time there getting permits. So, to build better relationships, the Danzas set up meetings between the district staff and various environmental groups. Volunteers are often disadvantaged by time constraints and can’t attend meetings and provide input, but the Danzas have made a lot of progress.

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Volunteers Candice and Dino Meneghin help pick up trash along the Santa Clara River. Photo by Nina Danza.

These more regular meetings with district staff resulted in plans to provide amenities along the river for natural and human communities. These include covering the proposed soil-cement levee with native plants, a new bike path, and an observation deck for outdoor education about the river. This also led to participation by a local school district interested in using the river for science education. It was frustrating when the volunteers were asked to come up with project implementation funding, and then there is the question of who will be responsible for operating the desired amenities. Sierra Club and Friends of the Santa Clara River plan to work with other community groups, like bicycle coalitions, to increase public engagement in the river and build a common vision for river revitalization among local organizations and community members.

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The LA River, Much More Than Flood Control The headwaters of the Los Angeles River begin in the San Gabriel and Santa Monica Mountains, pass through several dams, and run for 51 miles through the San Fernando Valley and the heart of Los Angeles before emptying into San Pedro Bay in Long Beach. The river once meandered across a large alluvial floodplain with low flow most of the year and probably no summer flow and periodic winter flooding. It has since been paved over, allowing for the development of 88 cities within the watershed. Tongva villages with connections to Chumash, Tataviam, Serrano, Cahuilla, Juaneno, and Luiseño tribes persisted along the LA River for thousands of years. Until 1913 the river was the sole source of water for about 200,000 people living in Los Angeles. In 1934 and then again in 1938 the city flooded, so the US Army Corps of Engineers arrived to direct the water away from the city as quickly as possible. Today the river runs through a mostly concrete channel to prevent a repeat of the early 20th-century floods. Tertiary-treated wastewater effluent now creates a more constant flow in the LA River and allows warmwater exotic fish to thrive and year-round swimming and kayaking from a few safe entry/exit points. Because the river is channelized, the flow can be dangerously fast immediately following storms, which generally span two to three weeks a year. During these times of high flow velocity, “once you fall in that water, because it is channelized without any break points, you can’t get out until you get to Long Beach, some 30 miles downstream, unless you are rescued,” says Sabrina Drill. Drill is an urban ecologist with a strong background in freshwater ecology, working as a University Cooperative Extension advisor

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in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. She has been lending her expertise to a wide variety of efforts to revitalize the LA River. “I don’t think we are ever going to restore the LA River to the ecosystem that it was,” she says. “Millions and millions of people live within two miles of the LA River, so I think one of the highest uses for the LA River is to increase access to nature, where people can become more aware of the value of biodiversity, and I think we can restore some ecosystem function that can increase climate resilience.” The Los Angeles State Historic Park, one of the newest state parks, improves public access to the river. Bird watching and picnics now happen riverside and those with adventurous spirits can kayak in the LA River. Revitalization also includes habitat restoration and rewilding. Restoring native vegetation along the river will help provide shaded refugia during high-heat days, and it will also mitigate LA’s urban heat island effect. Islands of habitat that support willows, birds, and other species have formed in the Sepulveda Basin and the Glendale Narrows and along Willow Street in Long Beach. Due to a high water table in a few areas, the Army Corps of Engineers could only pave the banks and not the bottom, so these parts of the river have a natural soft bottom. Drill has been a part of several fish surveys within the LA River and says, “What we found in the natural bottom sections of the LA River is that we do still have pools, riffles, and runs, and we have a really interesting fish population.” Historically, the LA River was a cold-water fishery with native California salmonids, albeit adapted to the warmer temperatures of Southern California. Today the main stem supports a warmwater perennial fish community consisting mostly of carp, mosquito fish, tilapia, and green sunfish along with a few other exotic

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species. The public can fish along the river and sometimes help scientists survey the fishery. “It’s a great place to learn how to fly fish, because there is nothing to catch your fly or lure on when you cast back,” says Drill. As for eating the fish they catch, “I can’t say it’s 100 percent safe, and the state regulators say no,” says Drill. But some people living along the river do eat the fish. Urban stormwater runoff can contaminate the fish with oil, pet waste, and other nutrient-rich pollution. When nutrients mix into warm water, mosquito populations increase. Aedes mosquitoes originally from Southeast Asia have increased and are capable of transmitting tropical diseases such as Zika, dengue fever, and West Nile virus. Riparian and wetland restoration needs to consider protecting human populations from disease. Where the water in the river was once a nuisance that needed to be contained and moved off-site, it is starting to be a resource that different interests compete over. For example, plans to use the water for landscaping and other municipal uses might impact opportunities to kayak. Friends of the Los Angeles River (FOLAR) helps mobilize Angelenos to secure their rights to a healthy, thriving, and equitably accessible LA River. FOLAR offers opportunities for river stewardship, including organizing the largest public trash pickup along the river each year, as well as providing educational opportunities, including supporting the fish survey work that Drill has conducted. Art, as well as science, has helped to revitalize the LA River. Some call Lewis MacAdams the godfather of the LA River. MacAdams was an artist, poet, and, for 30 years, the founder and leader of FOLAR. In 1986, MacAdams went with two friends and cut a hole in the fence near First Street downtown. They walked in the river channel upstream to where the Arroyo Seco and the LA

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River meet. They asked the river if they could speak for it, and since it didn’t say no, MacAdams created a performance called Friends of the LA River. Channeling LA’s pioneering water engineer, William Mulholland, he painted his face green and blue. MacAdams’s work was provocative, but he thought that people needed to know that there was a river there and it could be a better place. It took a great deal of insistence by MacAdams and others to switch the paradigm from Angelenos referencing a “flood control channel” to acknowledging the “river.” Today, the art culture around the river is alive and well through organizations such as the LA River Public Art Project, which integrates art into the river revitalization. There are various plans to revitalize the LA River, including the ARBOR plan started by the Army Corps of Engineers, which focuses on 11 miles from Griffith Park to First Street. “The plan includes ways habitat can be improved, storm drains can be daylighted [exposed to the surface], or concrete can be removed,” says Shelly Backlar, VP of programs at FOLAR. These projects solve multiple issues that are linked to community health and resilience, including providing much-needed open space for the millions of people who live near the river. It’s not easy to create parks and natural habitat in and around the LA River, given the number of agencies involved, planning required, and toxic soil remediation usually needed. When she shares information about the river, Backlar focuses on the interconnectedness of nature, including the importance of maintaining ecosystem function and the relationship to our public health. For example, FOLAR’s Source to Sea education program tries to get students to know and care about their local environment, understanding that we are all connected to nature, through

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the LA River as a focal point. Included are lessons on what a watershed is and the biodiversity that can be found within it. The program is taught partly in the classroom and partly out in the field, but the best part is when the River Rover comes for a visit. The River Rover, a mobile classroom covered with riverinspired art, provides kids with an aquatic ecology laboratory. Here they can access equipment to observe nature more closely and develop a deeper understanding by recording which bugs and birds they see and by testing water quality. Students learn about the whole watershed, food webs, and the consequences of altered habitat and impacts to other species from pollution, trash, and plastics. The students are asked to think about what the future could be for the river, based on what they learn, and some write haiku poems to express that the LA River can be a place for animals and a place for community—channeling MacAdams, the poet. When Next Generation Science Standards hit California teachers, Source to Sea was already providing the necessary approach. The LA River provides a focal system, and the learning modules use science to understand natural phenomena through concepts that cut across biophysical and social science disciplines. Through experiential learning the students explore how nature works, examine the influence of human actions, and learn that they can make the world a better place. FOLAR provides learning and service opportunities for adults as well, including river cleanups and birding classes. Together with volunteers, FOLAR is working in the Sepulveda Basin to remove invasive plants, so native species can reestablish, and to monitor birds and map the spatial data being collected. Support for this effort comes from California’s Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act, approved by the voters in 2014, which provides

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funding to improve the provisioning of freshwater resources and restore habitat. Drill says bond money is crucial to the watershed efforts underway, but even with funding, it can’t get done without community volunteers. “A little elbow grease is so important, and you really can spend a morning and contribute to something bigger,” she says, “and connect people to place.”

City Nature Challenge The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is a place where urban ecology comes alive and residents observe nature and collect valuable data. It is an informal science education institution with curators who do research, exhibits to experience and learn from, and staff and volunteer interpreters. The museum also engages in community science that spans far beyond the confinements of the building. Lila Higgins is a senior manager at the museum and a nationally recognized leader in community science, with formal training in entomology and environmental education. Higgins works with the museum curators to explore opportunities for the LA public to contribute to scientific research. She notes that urban areas are grayed out of habitat and biodiversity maps as if there is no habitat value within urban areas. “Scientists have only started in the last couple of decades to really survey urban spaces,” Higgins says. One of those scientists is Greg Pauly, who works on the impacts of urbanization on wildlife, and herpetofauna in particular. Pauly started RASCals (Reptiles and Amphibians of Southern California) to observe herpetofauna in the city today and compare observations to historical museum records, including documenting the

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introduction of non-native species. In the first six years of the project, more than 6,000 community scientists recorded 48,000 observations. These records include five new state records and 21 new county records documenting the introduction and spread of non-native species in California, all now documented in the scientific literature. Insect records reveal 43 insect species previously unknown to science, and observations have shown several species that were not expected to reside in the LA area. Pauly and Higgins work with others at the museum as part of the Urban Nature Research Center, with a mission to promote urban biodiversity and make LA hospitable for wildlife and humans. To do this, they engage with Angelenos to collect data on animal and plant observations from their backyards, courtyards, pocket parks, and schoolyards. In an attempt to fill in data from parts of the city where little to no biodiversity information exists, the center launched the SuperProject. Volunteers conduct surveys in their own neighborhoods and provide information on the ecological condition of each site. Over a 12-month period, the SuperProject contributed more than 26,000 urban species occurrence records from southern Los Angeles, a heavily urbanized region for which there was previously very little biodiversity data available. “There is data now, finally, and there is habitat value,” Higgins says. “So LA is not just a big gray box on the map.” In 2016 Higgins and her counterparts at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco started a competition, the City Nature Challenge, which now has over 200 cities around the world participating. Participants use the iNaturalist phone app to document plants, animals, and other organisms for several days to see which area can find the most wildlife. The iNaturalist app is more than an organism occurrence recording tool. It records the

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location, date, and time of any observation and allows for crowdsourced species identifications. The app makes it easy for the user to record and share scientifically valuable biodiversity data and to have it verified by experts so it can become research-grade data, which is shared with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and other data repositories used by scientists. Higgins observes that people better understand the conservation benefits of picking up trash and other stewardship activities than the value of collecting data. For this reason, she tries to pair these activities so that everyone can see and discuss the interaction between our actions and the ecosystems they influence both negatively and positively. Higgins appreciates the value of the data collected by dedicated community members for science, management, and policy. “They love being part of a group or community that is collectively helping to fill in the data gaps in the LA region,” says Higgins. Los Angeles city and county sustainability offices are using this newly collected biodiversity data in their planning processes, and it is featured in the LA River master plan update. Knowing where the biodiversity hotspots are makes it possible to maintain and restore these places, and finding invasive species focuses control efforts. This is real-time urban ecology.

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In sum, reviving green open spaces and planting trees that increase carbon sequestration and cool down heat islands is all part of advancing urban ecosystem resilience. At the same time, addressing the climate crises in a way that improves the livelihoods of frontline communities is vital to fully realize resilience. Climate justice recognizes that climate disruption impacts underprivileged

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communities sooner and to a greater extent—putting these communities on the frontline of this crisis. The drivers of climate disruption, the public health crises, and systemic racism emerge from a societal history of exploitation. While there is no single solution to addressing climate justice, ensuring clean water, clean air, food, shelter, and access to green spaces for the most vulnerable communities offers opportunities to deliver climate justice.

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7

Riding the California Current

Just off California’s sandy shores is the California Current Ecosystem. All along the West Coast the seasonal upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water supports this ecosystem and its forests of kelp, krill, invertebrates, sardines, and other species that are food for larger fishes, seabirds, marine mammals, and humans. Yet with climate change causing warmer waters, sea level expected to rise three feet or more by 2100, and storm surges threatening the California Current Ecosystem and nearshore environments, coastal communities will be required to adapt sooner rather than later. Earth’s largest carbon sink is the ocean, which exchanges CO2 with the atmosphere and has absorbed more than 25 percent of our carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution—buffering us from experiencing the full impact of their heat-trapping potential. California’s coast is on the eastern cusp of the largest ecosystem on Earth—the Pacific Ocean—covering more than one-third of the planet’s surface. The North Pacific Gyre is a clockwise swirl of the sea from the Philippines to Japan to southern British Columbia to the tip of Baja California. The run south from Canada to Mexico is called the California Current, and the cool waters it carries with it

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from the north are why the West Coast’s waves are literally cooler than those of the East Coast. During the spring and summer, a prevailing northwestern wind helps drive the California Current south. At the same time, the rotation of the Earth produces the Coriolis effect, which deflects the surface water to the right of the wind, that is, to the west, offshore. As this water moves offshore, it is replaced by water that moves up to the surface from below the continental shelf. This colder water is rich in nutrients from the decaying remains of plants and animals. The nutrients that accompany this upwelling support the growth of algae, plankton, zooplankton, and kelp, enriching a tremendously productive food web, including fish. Rapid changes are already taking place in the Pacific Ocean that are affecting the California Current Ecosystem, yet they are difficult for most people to observe. This means people must share the ocean’s story.

Climate Conversations Informal education happens every day in aquariums and museums, except during a pandemic. Institutions such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium communicate climate change to the public and foster networks among docents and others to advance meaningful climate communication. The aquarium’s goal is to have a conversation about climate change that is positive, civic-minded, and focused on solutions. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s volunteer training promotes the use of evidence-based metaphors tested and disseminated by the National Network for Ocean and Ocean Change Interpretation to communicate climate science to the public. For example, there are

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two developed metaphors to help people understand climate and ocean change. One compares ocean circulation to blood circulation and refers to the role of the ocean as a heart that helps regulate the Earth’s climate. The idea is to help people recognize that the ocean plays a vital role and must be protected, something they already know about their own heart and personal health. Mary Powell, an interpretive climate volunteer at the aquarium, likes another metaphor that also centers on the human body: “These barnacles need carbonate in the water to keep their shells strong, just like you do to build your bones, so we need to figure out how to reduce the amount of CO2 in the air.” Powell is referring to the fact that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changes water chemistry when it is absorbed by the ocean. Carbon dioxide and water combine to make carbonic acid, which breaks down to bicarbonate and carbonate and releases hydrogen ions. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has led to a large increase in hydrogen ions in the ocean, lowering the pH of the water and causing the ocean to become more acidic, and this process of ocean acidification impacts ocean ecosystems. Organisms at the base of the food chain, like single-celled foraminifera and coccolithophores, have hard exteriors made of calcium carbonate, and larger animals with shells, like mollusks, crabs, and corals, depend on calcium carbonate to grow. To make shells of calcium carbonate, these organisms combine calcium with carbonate from seawater. But hydrogen ions combine quickly with carbonate, and together they form bicarbonate. Then organisms have less carbonate to use, and they cannot readily use bicarbonate to make their shell. At the same time, ocean water that is more acidic dissolves shells, which weakens them. Scientists are just beginning to discover the ocean’s response to increased

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greenhouse gas levels. For example, calcification in foraminifera is not well understood, but recent studies reveal that they are able to regulate acidity at the micro level and that may help them persist in more-acidic environments. This level of detail can be complicated to explain in a quick chat with someone enjoying a tank full of mollusks. Making an analogy between ocean acidification and osteoporosis—the loss of calcium in bones that affects many people as they age—helps people understand how changes in ocean water chemistry influence the availability of carbonate needed to build shells. Perhaps more important than learning these precise metaphors is the focus on developing and practicing an interpretive story that resonates with others and has personal meaning to them. “If you don’t feel in your heart what comes out of your mouth, then you are not delivering a particularly strong message,” Powell says. “You have to believe what you are saying.” Powell spent her childhood summers in Yosemite communing with nature and fishing with her dad. She observed the impacts visitors could have on the park and says, “I think that was my first awakening of the necessity to talk to people about nature and our environment and about our planet.” Powell starts by trying to find out a little bit about her audience so she can tailor her message in a way that might resonate with them. “Climates have changed,” she says, “and trying to reach people where they are and live is a better segue to getting them to talk about climate change.” Scientists at the aquarium and its affiliated research institution are working to discover the effects of climate change on the Monterey Canyon and beyond. The Monterey Canyon lies 6.4 miles from Monterey Bay and is one of the deepest submarine canyons on the West Coast that funnels the upwelling of cold, nutrient-

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rich water from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to the surface to support a myriad of life-forms. The extreme underwater topography of the canyon provides many different ocean habitats for a myriad of species. Powell says conservation colleagues and volunteer guides get together regularly to learn new ways to communicate research findings to the aquarium’s visitors. “Some of these folks have turned into unbelievable, amazing, energetic people who make a difference with our guests,” Powell says. And there is always more to learn, she says. “I will never get to the point where I know it all.”

STEMing the Tide Lisa White is the director of education and outreach at the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP). As part of her outreach efforts, she provides firsthand research experiences to students of color and collaborates with other scientists who want to broaden participation in Earth science. White’s own research is on marine fossils that reveal what Earth was like during warmer periods in its history. Her career trajectory while an undergraduate student was influenced by taking geology field trip courses organized by San Francisco State faculty and also by being mentored as an intern at the US Geological Survey. She went on to earn her PhD at UC Santa Cruz and study fossil diatoms, microfossils found in ocean core samples that must be collected by drilling ships. These core samples, and the fossils within, provide a record of how Earth’s climate has changed and how life-forms have evolved. White designed Ambassadors for STEM Training to Enhance Participation (A-STEP), a UCMP program that includes opportunities

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primarily for undergraduates from diverse backgrounds aboard research vessels funded by the National Science Foundation. Students and educators join scientists for 7–10 days on research ships, participate in coastal field trips, and create products and presentations related to climate and environmental change. This program allows young people to experience the type of transformative seagoing experiences that influenced White’s career trajectory. “It is life changing when you are able to get a student out on a ship,” says White. “I’ll never forget my first big trip outside of California to Alaska in the 1980s, before there was any kind of anti-harassment training, and there was a lot of bad behavior by men and the stereotypical expectations of women in the field, not to mention low expectations of scientists of color, so that’s always rooted in my training,” says White, who is a Black woman. She points out the misinformation and lack of knowledge about African American history, which includes knowledge of and a connection to the land through farming and other activities. “There’s so many fascinating kinds of conversations around folks of color in the outdoors, some of the most stereotypical things—we’re scared of the outdoors, we’re just so unfamiliar with the woods and what animals might be lurking there,” says White. Some people respond that “we’re not afraid of the animals, we’re afraid of the white people that are there—they could be more harmful to us than a bear,” says White. Barriers exist in all of White’s workspaces—not just out in the field, but across the board as a Black paleontologist working in geosciences, one of the least diverse areas of science. Less than 10 percent of paleontology doctoral degrees are awarded to people of color. The lack of diversity and inclusion is the largest cultural problem facing geosciences. Environmental education as a

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profession has also been called out for lacking diversity, and this affects the institutions dedicated to reconnecting people to nature in their attempts to reach communities of color. “There were dark days, and I often thought, this is crazy, why did I choose this science? . . . I stuck with it even in times when I felt really isolated; I knew I liked the subject,” says White. To make things better for others, White leads the FIELD (Fieldwork Inspiring Expanded Leadership and Diversity) project with social scientists and field science instructors working together to make field activities in the geosciences more accessible, culturally sensitive, and inclusive. Together they are trying to reset the fieldwork norms and reduce barriers faced by individuals underrepresented in STEM, including people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, women, and LGBTQ individuals. The fieldwork cultural norms often include an emphasis on physical ability, mental toughness, assertive behavior, and one-upmanship. The barriers can involve economic exclusion, anxiety about outdoor experiences, attitudes of ableism, and accessibility. Research into this area focuses on understanding field research culture, identifying ways to improve instructors’ skills, and developing new approaches to reduce the exclusionary nature of field work culture. White’s work has taken her to 35 different countries so far, and more and more organizations globally are devoting attention and resources to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in STEM. This work is critical in addressing climate change. Because of socioeconomic inequalities and the impact of environmental racism on land use, people of color are more impacted by extreme weather events, particularly along coastal areas. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s national surveys show that 69 percent of Hispanic/Latinx people

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and 57 percent of African American/Black people are alarmed or concerned about climate change, compared with 49 percent of white people. In the midst of 2020’s global Black Lives Matter protests, the institutions that once simply sanctioned work on diversity, equity, and inclusion are now looking to White for leadership. “This is the right thing to do right now, and it’s the right time to step up,” says White. As a recognized leader in the field, White is the chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee for the American Geophysical Union—the largest scientific society focused on Earth, atmospheric, ocean, hydrologic, space, and planetary science. White’s father was a psychology professor who helped define the field of Black psychology, and she says, “I really find myself drawing on his work, actually, in cross-cultural psychology and understanding the resilience of Black people.” White’s parents were committed to civil rights, so, she says, “it’s fitting that I do this kind of work in my own discipline.”

Clearing a Path Forward for the Tijuana River The Tijuana watershed includes a portion of the United States– Mexico border and covers 1,750 square miles, three-quarters of which falls within Mexico and includes the city of Tijuana. Pollution from the Tijuana River contaminates coastal ecosystems, affecting the estuary and marine ecosystems, as well as forcing beach closures near the mouth of the river for as much as one-third of the year. Flash flooding occurs when it rains, transporting large debris, and the floodwaters contain bacterial, chemical, and heavy metal levels that exceed water quality standards. “Anytime it rains we get cross-border sewage spills,” says Kristen Goodrich. Wastewater

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treatment plants and garbage diversion structures attempt to clean the water runoff before it reaches the ocean, but these systems are inadequate for the amount of flow during periods of heavy rainfall. Goodrich is the Coastal Training Program coordinator for the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve. She provides training and technical assistance to coastal decision makers, including local governments and natural resource managers. Sedimentation basins divert and trap excessive amounts of sediment coming down the watershed before it buries habitat within the Tijuana River Reserve. Culverts sometimes need to be cleared to prevent debris jams. “We have seen up to five thousand tires a year cleared from these sedimentation basins,” Goodrich says. When large debris—like furniture and tires—block the flow, contaminated water can overflow the flood channels, presenting health and safety concerns for residents in Tijuana’s canyon communities. Rivers in Mediterranean-climate regions, like the Tijuana, do not naturally flow year-round, and the connectivity between these rivers and the ocean depends on rainfall patterns, watershed size, and other characteristics. Today, though, urban areas exude fresh water year-round, which some refer to as urban drool. It comes down, even in the summer, from residential, landscaping, and industrial uses, resulting in 25–40 million gallons per day of wastewater, often of substandard quality, flowing down the Tijuana River and into the Pacific Ocean. “We have an environmental security issue and a human security issue where individuals who are living in these canyons are extremely vulnerable to landslides and flooding,” Goodrich says. The Tijuana River Reserve runs along the north side of the border wall, and much of the work Goodrich and her colleagues do involves working with key decision makers in the local governments

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of Tijuana and Tecate and with agencies like Protección Civil in Mexico to address the social-ecological risks communities in the watershed face. Goodrich says that many of the challenges associated with this binational system are “tied to social-ecological connections.” Goodrich got a PhD at the School of Social Ecology at UC Irvine, which focuses on science-based solutions to social and environmental problems. Her doctoral research examined flood risk and resilience in the urban canyons that flow into the Tijuana estuary. With increased global warming, more intense rainfall (see atmospheric rivers in chapter 1) and stormwater runoff is expected, causing flooding and erosion within cities. The built environment exacerbates flooding by rerouting water, consolidating and accelerating the amount of water and debris coming down the watershed and causing landslides and other damage. Fixing flooding involves working from the top of the watershed on down to intercept problems such as sediment, garbage, other debris, and pollution before they reach the reserve and the ocean. For example, Goodrich and colleagues brought together engineers and social scientists to listen to the experiences of people living with flood risks in the upper and lower watershed to develop a better understanding of flood hazards. This public participation depicted the flooding in canyons as more severe and less predictable than scientists and decision makers had appreciated based on existing models. For example, a resident observed flooding caused by a mattress blocking a culvert. Understanding the risks from the residents’ perspective improved the decision makers’ modeling efforts and overall understanding around the urgency to reduce solid waste at the source. The work at the bottom of the watershed involves restoring the wetlands and the tidal prism—the volume and distribution of water

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in an estuary between mean high tide and mean low tide—to improve ecosystem function. The Tijuana Estuary Model Marsh restoration effort included excavating approximately 135,000 cubic yards of sediment to restore approximately 20 acres of intertidal salt marsh. More work is underway to restore approximately 80 acres of salt marsh, mudflats, tidal channels, and transitions to upland habitats to recover the tidal prism and increase the function of the estuary. Goodrich says from working with planners that “we know models are helpful but can be overwhelming and don’t tell us a precise pathway forward.” The hope is that with help from Goodrich and her colleagues the path forward will regenerate the marsh and upland habitat to protect human communities and other species, including threatened and endangered birds holding on by a thread in the reserve and elsewhere, such as the California gnatcatcher, least Bell’s vireo, western snowy plover, California least tern, and light-footed clapper rail.

Living Shorelines The Tijuana Estuary is a prime example of the importance of living shorelines. Living shorelines are preferable to engineered solutions, like seawalls, in protecting against sea level because they provide ecological benefits, fewer perverse impacts, and more lasting resolutions. Passive and active approaches can be used to create or enhance living shorelines. Laura Engeman says, “It’s about creating living, thriving, resilient systems that evolve over time . . . no one size fits all and that’s a challenge.” Living shorelines are made of natural materials that provide habitat, increase resilience for nearshore communities, and grow over time.

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Engeman previously served as director of the San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative and now works at the Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. She also holds a joint appointment with the California Sea Grant extension program, so, like Goodrich, she uses research-based knowledge to guide climate change policies and investments to improve coastal resilience. Scripps Institute is a leader in climate science and education, and where Professor Veerabhadran Ramanathan and colleagues developed the Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions course and free online text. One living-shoreline strategy described by Engeman is dune restoration, which focuses on recovering an ecosystem that supports endemic rare flora and fauna and helps retain beach sand for visitors to enjoy. Sand fencing allows sand to collect in the area and build a dune over time. In some cases, native plants help with ecological restoration, as well as retaining sand on the beach as a first barrier against flooding from wave energy. The more sand retained on the beach, the less exposure beach communities have to flooding. Sandy beaches also protect against undercutting of coastal cliffs, which can endanger development along the cliff ’s edge. California’s beaches are eroding over the long term due to global sea level rise and shorter-term phenomena experienced during El Niño years (see chapter 1): king tides, storm surges, and wavedriven events. California’s coastline has suffered the most damage when storm waves and high tides occur together during El Niño years. High tides result from the gravitational attraction between the Moon, the Sun, and the Earth’s oceans. At certain times of year, when tides are especially high, they are referred to as king tides. Storm surges can occur during winter storms and add three feet to the sea level locally. A sudden set of big waves, even if they only last

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a few minutes, can raise the water level by four to five feet, resulting in runup events that cause extensive erosion and put nearby infrastructure at risk. Wave runup refers to the maximum elevation of the sea level produced by waves at the shoreline and is an important measure for predicting coastal erosion and inundation. Sea level rise resulting from global warming is increasing the height of ocean tidal events. Some older coastal residents have seen beaches shrink over their lifetime. Understandably, coastal communities are seeking ways to reduce wave runup to protect the beaches and adjacent towns and neighborhoods. As far back as 1992, the famed Surfers Point in Ventura was in trouble. “The trail and the parking lot were just falling into the ocean, and the beach was completely gone on that corner and totally eroded,” Engeman says. After a decade of negotiations among stakeholders, including Surfrider Foundation and the California Coastal Commission, the city of Ventura began to rehabilitate the beach at Surfers Point. Bike paths and parking lots once regularly inundated with water and sand were moved back, and stormwater filtration systems were installed to improve water quality in the neighboring estuary. Cobble was used along the back of the beach, and sand from further south was used to create sand dunes habitat. Volunteers tended native dune plants to reduce competition from invasive species. Cardiff State Beach in Encinitas has also successfully restored dune habitat between the beach and Highway 1 as an adaptive management solution to help retain sand on the beach and prevent wave runup onto the highway, while recognizing that increased sea level rise will require additional interventions. Managed retreat of existing development can be more challenging than moving a bike

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path and parking lot but must be considered in places with repeated flooding. Cities within the coastal zone are required by the state to do an assessment of where they’re vulnerable and come up with a menu of solutions to address risks associated with sea level rise for their land use plans. “This has been extremely helpful and been a driver for all of this work, because once they do an assessment and have public meetings to show where they’re vulnerable and come up with a menu of solutions, then it sparks a conversation in the community about, ‘What would those solutions be?’” Engeman says. “What would you like to see our community look like in the future?” The public can readily access these assessments online at https:// ResilientCA.org/ and work with local decision makers on moving these solutions forward.

Ocean Lovers Plunge into Civic Engagement The Surfrider Foundation is an activist network “dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of the world’s ocean, waves, and beaches,” so it’s not surprising that they had a lot to do with making Surfers Point more accessible and resilient. The largest US chapter is in San Diego and has a volunteer-led climate change committee focused on beaches, coastal zones, and the ocean coled by Carly Kupka. Kupka enjoys paddle boarding and loves the ocean. “You don’t have to surf—it’s more a common love of the ocean, love of the beaches, and we attract all kinds of people—but you definitely get the surf vibe because a lot of people do surf,” says Kupka about San Diego Surfriders. Regarding her work with the climate change committee, she says, “We focus on local policy. It’s not the most sexy thing in the world, but we go to our local city

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council meetings and advocate for climate friendly legislation such as securing community choice energy” (see chapter 2). Having successfully advocated for community choice energy, they are now working to ensure full electrification for all new development in San Diego, to reduce the use of natural gas. Beginning with Berkeley in 2019, several cities in California have banned natural gas in new low-rise buildings and homes. Natural gas contributes about 12 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, and this includes small leaks of methane in many homes and buildings. One large leak at the Aliso Canyon storage field lasted months. California will have to move toward eliminating natural gas to meet its climate mandate of 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. The change to all-electric new construction also makes new buildings less expensive. The Surfrider climate committee also heads a campaign to convince San Diego and surrounding cities to remove their investments, including public pension funds, from publicly traded fossil fuel companies. These types of campaigns define Surfrider as an activist organization, and victories protect the ocean and coastal places. To protect the ocean, Surfrider works upstream to stop the burning of fossil fuels that ultimately affects ocean and coastal ecosystems through warming of water temperatures, acidification, and sea level rise. “Education is first and foremost what we are, and then everything builds on that,” Kupka says. Getting all of their members and partners to support their campaigns involves a lot of education and outreach, Kupka says, but pays off because “when you say Surfrider, people listen—you are grassroots but you are powerful grassroots.” Surfrider’s victories include pollution prevention, water quality protection, and prevention of offshore drilling. “You come up with

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an idea of what you want to see changed, write it down, speak at a city council meeting, and,” says Kupka, “these lawmakers are listening to you directly.”

No Bird Food in the Blob In fall 2014 a marine heat wave, following the warmest California winter to date, raised water temperatures by 7°F (3.85°C) above normal and resulted in the starvation of upward of 1.2 million seabirds. Thousands of starving sea lion pups also washed ashore along the west coast as a result of what was commonly called the blob. The blob refers to an expansive pool of warm water that reached over a thousand miles long and wide that year. High-pressure weather (see explanation of the jet stream in chapter 1) creates the conditions for marine heat waves by blocking storms and windy weather, which normally would force the mixing of surface water with deeper, cooler water. The nutrient-poor blob of stagnant warm water forced many California fish species to move north seeking cooler waters, caused toxic algae blooms affecting the entire food web, and changed marine life throughout the California Current Ecosystem. Based on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s records, the Northeast Pacific Marine Heatwave of 2019 lasted 239 days and, at its peak, covered approximately 3.3 million square miles—making it the second-largest and longest event recorded. Scientists fear that such heat waves will become more frequent and have a profound effect on ocean environments in California and globally. But it is “hard to document the impact of warm water [on birds], because every year has been low productivity since we started studying them,” says Daniel Robinette, a senior scientist at Point Blue Conservation Science.

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Marine protected areas and maintaining ocean connectivity are essential strategies to lessen the negative ecological consequences of climate impacts on marine life. Ocean currents carry away the majority of offspring produced by adult fishes and invertebrates, and the arrival of offspring produced elsewhere replenishes local populations and influences their size, as well as the community species composition. Most of the long-distance movements of species in the coastal ocean is associated with pelagic larval dispersal. This means that connectivity between discontinuous habitat patches, sometimes separated by no more than a few miles, is critical to achieve larval dispersal. Connectivity and corridors are mostly thought of as essential for fragmented terrestrial habitats, but they are also important for marine conservation. In the ocean, corridors are made of stepping stones or patches of suitable habitat, plus the currents that transport offspring from one habitat patch to another. The Marine Life Protection Act of 1999 directs the state to redesign California’s system of marine protected areas (MPAs) to function as a network to protect ecosystems and natural heritage, as well as to improve recreational, educational, and research opportunities. Establishing marine protected area networks is critical for protecting fish recruitment and rebuilding fisheries. Prior to the act, there were about 80 small MPAs in California that allowed a variety of fishing activities and were managed in an ad hoc fashion. In 2012, California implemented a network that includes 124 MPAs below the mean high tide line along the California Current Ecosystem. Though part of the network, their designation and associated regulations vary across state marine reserves, parks, conservation areas, recreational management areas, and special closure areas for some shorebird colonies and sea mammal haul-out sites.

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Concern for coastal ecosystems is widespread in California. Ornithologists and volunteers working with Point Blue monitor seabirds as possible indicators of changes in fish recruitment within and outside of marine protected areas. Baby fish in the coastal zone are a primary food source for seabirds, so both fish and birds need core areas for fish reproduction as well as connected refuges. “The way that the juvenile recruitment works in coastal waters is that a lot of young fish start off as eggs and larvae that are just floating around in the water being redistributed by currents,” says Robinette. “There are areas along the coast where currents concentrate these drifters and areas where currents push things away from the protected habitat.” If an MPA is within an area where the current retains drifters, researchers expect more rapid recovery for fish and birds as a result of protection of the area from fishing and disturbance. Even as they approach 10 years of data collection, Robinette warns that it’s too early to expect a full picture of their effectiveness. “The ocean is so variable. Some years have strong upwelling, making for very productive years, and other years where we don’t get upwelling that are less productive . . . and rockfish can live for decades,” he says. It’s well documented that warmer sea surface temperatures mean fewer fledglings. However, Robinette says, it is “hard to tease the direct influence of climate change on birds.” In part, this is because seabirds are long-lived, so it is difficult to document the consequences of climate change on the population size over time. It’s easier to examine the effect of ocean temperatures on one breeding year. The source of warm water influences the prey base for the birds. El Niño Southern Oscillation variability can lead to dramatic changes in the strength of the undercurrents and, in turn, in upwelling productivity along the California coast. During El

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Niño events, the north equatorial undercurrent weakens and surface waters warm, resulting in mostly eastward flow. In La Niña events, the north equatorial undercurrent strengthens, increasing westward flow and upwelling of nutrients to the productive surface layer that receives light and where algae, including kelp, grows. These interannual temperature changes can both influence local productivity and affect currents, resulting in changes to marine corridors and the movement of organisms. For example, in Southern California pelagic red or tuna crabs (Pleuroncodes planipes), which primarily inhabit the west coast from Baja California to Chile, sometimes wash up on San Diego beaches. This is an indicator of warmwater conditions due to shifting currents coming from the south, often due to El Niño. Point Blue researchers also study the impact of human disturbance on bird behavior. Even quiet recreation by people can affect wildlife populations. A global meta-analysis of research papers shows that recreational activities are associated with reduced vertebrate abundance, and the effects are stronger for ground-nesting birds. Seabirds face many challenges along the California coast, Robinette says, but human disturbance “is one that we could probably do something about relatively easily by educating the public.” To document these effects, Point Blue volunteers visit the shorelines where birds nest to count the birds at least once a week and record roosting information and any potential or actual human disturbance. An example of potential disturbance is people near the birds but no observed reaction by the birds, and an example of actual disturbance is if the birds do react to the visitors. It will be useful to know if the birds nesting on rocky areas within the protected marine zone experience less human activity interrupting their nesting behavior, or if it’s the opposite and

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wildlife enthusiasts are more attracted to reserve areas for tide pooling and wildlife viewing. California least terns breed in Southern California and are in danger of extinction, with chronically low productivity recorded since the mid-1990s. “There doesn’t seem to be prey for them,” Robinette says. “They eat young-of-year anchovies and rockfishes, species that tend to be impacted by warmwater events.” Point Blue and others monitor these terns during the breeding season to identify and count their nests and keep track of the eggs and resulting fledglings each week. Terns are long-lived species, so one year of data can’t predict population trends, but reproductive success has been low for about 25 years. Camp Pendleton, which harbors the largest known population—over 1,000 pairs—had only 15 nests in 2020, indicating that most birds probably will not breed. Protecting threatened western snowy plovers has required beach closures. Naturally, this can be unpopular with locals and visitors alike. “People know that birds breed on the beach, but they don’t really get how vulnerable that way of nesting is until they see this bird sitting out in the open, that they never would have seen before because they’re so cryptic,” Robinette says. Volunteers at Vandenberg Air Force Base share the birds with the public and provide information. “We just went out to Surf Beach as beach ecosystem stewards, with orange vests and A-frame signs that said, ‘Ask me questions,’” says Robinette. “When they understand what is at stake, why you need to conserve, and why certain management decisions are being made, they at least understand and get it. They might not agree and still want the beaches to be open, but they’re less vocal about it.” Marine protected areas continue to be the go-to solution for recovering marine ecosystems, but we need to give them some space and time to work.

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Counting Abalone until There Were None “We have observed ‘graveyards’ of shells on the bottom where once dense populations of abalone sustained for years on end,” says Arjay Raffety, volunteer diver for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). Raffety has been tide pooling since he was a kid with his dad, who studied invertebrate biology in college at UC Berkeley. Though he took a break to work as an aerospace engineer, for 20 years, tide pooling stuck with Raffety, and he has since returned to the intertidal zone as a supervolunteer. Raffety is an experienced diver and fisherman, and after hearing complaints about the regulations from some abalone harvesters, he asked, “How do they set the regulations?” After eight years of extensive CDFW training, which included physical tests as well as learning ecological monitoring protocols, especially for abalone surveys, he is now one of the people who collects the data that determines harvest limits. Surveying for abalone involves getting to a predetermined location in the ocean using GPS and then diving down with all kinds of equipment to count abalone, urchins, sea stars, and other invertebrates along a measuring tape and, when the numbers are manageable, measuring them. Raffety and the other divers record the data while they are underwater, using a pencil on waterproof paper. The divers also deploy sensors to measure oxygen and temperature to help track changes in the physical conditions over time, which Raffety says is “crucial for climate change science, to learn what is going on out there.” The data goes to the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory, where scientists aggregate, summarize, and analyze the data and send it to the California Fish and Game Commission, which revises the harvest regulations accordingly.

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Raffety spent time diving off the coast of Los Angeles and San Diego Counties and along the Channel Islands “desperately looking for the white abalone, which is endangered,” says Raffety. “White abalone are probably more sensitive to pollution and disease . . . and are also known to be the most delicious.” All abalone were legally commercially harvested in the 1970s, but then the take started to drop off. Also, in the 1980s a withering syndrome caused by an intracellular bacterium impacted the abalone populations. “When the water temperature rises, it triggers this pathogen, and the abalone cannot digest their food and they shrink and die. . . . If the water is cool enough, they are not susceptible to it even though they have the pathogen,” says Raffety. Abalone are extremely slow growing. For example, red abalone takes 12–15 years to get to the legal harvest size of seven inches. For this reason, once abalone get overharvested or the population crashes due to environmental change or disease, it can take a long time for the fishery to recover. So, by 1997 the state had to put a moratorium on any harvesting of abalone south of San Francisco. The white abalone was placed on the US Endangered Species List. Later the black abalone was listed, in part because it lives in shallow warmer waters and was gravely afflicted with withering syndrome. Abalone broadcast their eggs and sperm in the water in response to environmental cues such as season, food availability, and water temperature. Usually when one abalone spawns in an area, the others will as well, but spawning synchronously isn’t enough to ensure fertilization. A lot of serendipity is still needed for egg and sperm to unite, and of course males and females need to be close together for any of it to work. This is another life history

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trait that makes abalone susceptible to going locally extinct. “If you harvest too many, clean out an area, and there aren’t enough adults left in close proximity to one another, they may not come back,” says Raffety. In other words, it’s not just how many abalone people take; if the ones left behind end up isolated from one another, they can’t reproduce and replace the ones taken. Counting the take doesn’t guarantee information on what really counts. To determine where to look for white abalone, CDFW talked to old-timers who remembered where they had once been abundant. The plan was to find and retrieve some and breed them in captivity at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory for ultimate reintroduction into the wild. Raffety and the other CDFW divers were permitted to remove white abalone with no neighbors within 10 yards, which were very unlikely to ever reproduce again in the wild, and whisk them right off to the lab, where biologists are now producing thousands of offspring. In a few dives Raffety and his dive buddies were able to change the destiny of these lone white abalone—from the last of their species to the parents of all the future progeny. White abalone raised in the lab are a precious commodity. For that reason, farmed red abalone are used to test the effectiveness of reintroducing abalone before the white abalone are returned to the wild. Raffety put out one- and two-inch red abalone and returned later to see how they had fared. “All these little reds seem to have been eaten in the first week, we just saw the shells. Octopus love baby abalone!” says Raffety. The bigger the abalone, the safer it is from predators, and this is critical information for restoration efforts. In the mid-1980s, Raffety says, when he started free diving off the Mendocino coast, the abalone “were plentiful and well within

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your breath-holding range [less than about 25 feet deep].” Kelp is the primary food for abalone, and it grows in shallow water where light penetrates the ocean, so this is where the source population for north coast abalone is likely to be found. In 2012, while Raffety was doing some of his first volunteer monitoring transects, the kelp and abalone appeared to be plentiful. In 2013 he first noticed “sea stars started melting” in Half Moon Bay and later up north. Sea star wasting is also referred to as “asteroid idiopathic wasting syndrome,” and it has devastated sea star populations along the California coast. “The sunflower stars went away in a heartbeat,” says Raffety. Sunflower stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides) prey on sea urchins. Without the stars, purple urchins started to proliferate, and “so whatever kelp was growing they started just mowing down. . . . So, we watched as the kelp got all munched down by the urchins. Some of the bottom is just bare rocks,” says Raffety. Some estimate that about 90 percent of bull kelp died off in 2014 when the marine heat wave hit and the blob of warm stagnant water persisted off the coast. In addition to providing food for abalone, humans, and other animals, kelp provides important shelter for young fish. Like forests on land, kelp also sequesters carbon. “From roughly 2013 to 2018 or so, the bottom of the ocean changed so much,” says Raffety. “The rocks which are usually covered with all kinds of life became a moonscape down there. Nowadays in some of the areas I have been diving for years, all you see is a bunch of urchins, and you might have some abalone but they’re starving, and some areas there is a field of abalone shells,” Raffety says. All abalone harvesting is prohibited across all of California through 2021, but the CDFW doesn’t expect a quick

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return to the fishery that once existed in Northern California. “Climate change is happening, we are seeing it,” Raffety says. “Weird things are happening.” Some fishers, like Jon Holcombe, have used their newfound free time to try to help the abalone recover. Holcombe is trying to vacuum up thousands of purple urchins in one dive. California Ocean Protection Council provided funding for Holcombe to vacuum urchins along the Sonoma and Mendocino coast, in the hopes it will help the kelp forest rebound. Volunteer groups such as the Watermen’s Alliance are applying for permits to destroy urchins. A partnership among these organizations has formed in Northern California called KELPRR (Kelp Ecosystem and Landscape Partnership for Research on Resilience) to support rapid broadscale kelp recovery, conduct research on the dynamics between kelp and urchins, and engage communities in helping out. Raffety warns that urchin removal doesn’t always produce the desired effect because there are so many out there during periods of abundance that more just come in to replace those that are removed. Biologists are working on breeding and outplanting sunflower sea stars, and there are conservation efforts to recover sea otters. If successful, both will help, as both sea stars and sea otters prey on urchins. Though they occupy less than 20 percent of their former distribution, sea otters still persist in the central coast and helped prevent urchin barrens in the areas where they feed. So far, most fishermen will not consider otter reintroduction, viewing them as competitors, and perhaps not seeing the value of otters as a keystone species that helps maintain more resilient coastal ecosystems. “The root problem is that we need kelp,” Raffety says. “Until you restore the kelp, everything is going to keep starving.”

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Arjay Raffety measures a red abalone in an urchin barren off the Mendocino coast in 2016. Photo by Kevin Joe.

Holding Fast to Kelp Forests The California Current Ecosystem depends on nutrient-rich cold water from upwelling. Here kelp forests grow and support one of the most productive marine ecosystems in the world, providing shelter and food for more than 1,000 species. Kelp is macroalgae that has its own particular habitat requirements, including a rocky substrate, cold ocean water containing a high density of nutrients, and shallow areas with sunlight. Under the right conditions, kelp grows from holdfasts attached to rocks along the ocean floor and extends stipes and blades toward the surface. California’s kelp forests are dominated by two canopy-forming, brown macroalgae species: giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), more common in Southern

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California, and bull kelp (Nereocystis leutkeana), along the north coast. Giant kelp is a perennial alga that lives up to seven years, and depending on conditions, grows one to two feet per day in the spring. In contrast, bull kelp completes its entire life cycle within a year, growing only four inches per day in the spring. For this reason, bull kelp has a harder time recovering from widespread mortality and its population size is more variable year to year. Kelp is used in thousands of ways. Kombu, which is Japanese for the dried kelp used in food, is the primary ingredient in dashi, a broth used in many Japanese dishes. Kelp and many other edible seaweeds are harvested both commercially and noncommercially. Wild seaweed can be harvested using a regenerative approach, rather than extraction. For example, in Northern California, nori is harvested by pulling it gently from the rocks by hand, leaving a ruffled mat and the holdfast, which may regrow blades every few weeks during mid-season (May–June). In addition to being eaten in dashi and sushi, kelp is used for its algin, an emulsifying and bonding agent used in toothpastes, shampoos, salad dressings, puddings, cakes, dairy products, frozen foods, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. Kelp used to be a primary source for fertilizer, prior to the widespread use of less expensive petrochemical byproducts, and remains a preferred source among organic growers. “I grew up gardening with my grandparents, and every spring we would go down to the beach and pick up seaweed and put it in our garden,” says Katharine Stover. Stover grew up in New England and has been scuba diving since she was 12. She worked at the New England Aquarium, where the National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation got started, and from there went on to work for other conservation organizations. She completed a master of advanced studies in

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climate science and policy, focusing on kelp for climate adaptation, mitigation, local economic development, and species conservation. Kelp absorbs wave energy into its huge mass, grows rapidly, has a myriad of uses, and is the base for one of the world’s most diverse habitat types. Global sea level rise and extreme storm events will jeopardize existing coastal infrastructure and ecosystems with increasing frequency in the second half of this century. “In the winter, we get big storms with big surges because you get these big rollers, waves that have been moving across the Pacific, and the kelp helps to break some of that energy; they act as a kind of buffer,” Stover says. Seaweed aquaculture is practiced around the world, but an emerging industry in California is ocean kelp farming—as an adjunct to oyster farming—to produce biofuel and to improve climate resilience. Seagrasses and kelp aid the growth of oysters by absorbing large amounts of carbon dioxide that would otherwise react with seawater to make carbonic acid, which retards shell growth (see discussion earlier in this chapter). Kelp surrounding more intensive aquaculture operations can also help keep the water cleaner by absorbing some of the nitrogen and phosphorus released as waste from the aquaculture pens. “Oysters clean the water and the kelp helps prevent impacts from acidification,” Stover says. Growing kelp in the ocean along the California coast presents its own set of challenges. USC’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, on Catalina Island, and Marine BioEnergy Inc. are working to grow giant kelp in the open ocean, as a source for biofuel production. Their method for moving kelp deeper for nutrient absorption and then shallower for sunlight relies on what some have termed kelp elevators. These elevators include a platform for kelp holdfasts to attach to and submersible drones to move the

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elevators. “My fantasy is to have a line of kelp farms just outside of our existing kelp communities. That way you get your big rollers in and the kelp farm takes a hit before the native kelp forests do,” Stover says. “And where you are sequestering carbon, harvesting commercial products, and providing jobs for local economies. And leave the native kelp protected.” Kelp grows on rocky substrate, anchored by holdfasts, and one approach to increasing kelp is to create new habitat. The largest artificial reef off the California coast is the Wheeler North Reef created by Southern California Edison. It is made from quarry rocks, which are dropped from a barge into water about 38 feet deep. An expansion of this reef is underway to increase its size to 374 acres, making it one of the largest artificial reefs in the world. This effort is intended to offset adverse impacts to marine life from the ocean-water cooling system associated with the installation of the San Onofre power plant. The hope is to restore 4,800 acres of kelp habitat, which estimates suggest could support 896 tons of fish. According to the 2019 Wheeler North Reef monitoring report, adult giant kelp increased dramatically to 174 acres in 2010 and remained high until 2016, when it declined precipitously following an extended period of unusually warm water. The report claims, “The number of species and production of fish biomass at Wheeler North Reef have consistently been within or above the range of nearby natural reefs,” which according to a review of California’s artificial reefs would be about 14 tons of residential fish in the original 174.5 acres of reef. Approximately one-quarter of the carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels has been absorbed by the ocean and the term blue carbon refers to the carbon sequestered by coastal ocean ecosystems. Funding associated with carbon offsets—actions taken to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions (see chapter 4)—can be

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used to restore these ecosystems, mostly mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrasses. Researchers study the potential for macroalgae to absorb and sequester carbon as well. Stover says, “Once you eliminate the substrate constraint, we can grow a lot of seaweed as compared to protecting coastal lands for wetlands and mangroves.” “The giant kelp can grow up to several feet a day, but the big question is where does that carbon go?” asks Stover. Animals consume some kelp, while perhaps one-quarter likely ends up as inert biomass in deep marine canyons, never to return to the atmosphere. The California coast has deep canyons not far offshore, with Monterey Canyon the deepest, that might be repositories for kelp. A good deal of kelp also washes ashore as wrack, which is the foundation of its own beach ecosystem. Sadly, many beach visitors are not familiar with the wonders of wrack and prefer “clean” sand. “I live in Huntington Beach now, and they scrape the beach clean,” Stover says. “No! I need my creatures.” Naturalists have their job cut out for them explaining that wrack is part of the food web for the rich sandy beach ecosystem of Southern California. It provides nutrients for kelp crabs, bivalves, beach hoppers, and other invertebrates, which are consumed by shorebirds. “Kelp forests provide the nursery for a lot of our species,” Stover says. This is true from the many organisms that live around the holdfast up to the small fish that find protection within the kelp forest, and finally to the insects that forage on the broken pieces of kelp that wash ashore as wrack.

Cultural Keystones of the Central Coast Indigenous Chumash communities spend a lot of time interacting with their homelands, observing and collecting acorns, lemonade

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berry (Rhus integrifolia), blue dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum), islay cherries (Prunus ilicifolia), and elderberry (Sambucus nigra). Rather than referring to these species as resources, Alicia Cordero calls them relatives that Chumash peoples have been interacting with for thousands of years, revealing her culture’s strong, placebased interconnectedness with nature. Cordero is the First Nations programs officer at the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation and a member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation. Wishtoyo works to preserve Chumash culture and heritage and the environment everyone depends upon. It offers education and cultural preservation programs, mobilizes the larger community, does scientific research and restoration projects, and, when necessary, takes legal action to support its mission. These activities foster a greater awareness of humanity’s relationship to and dependence on the natural environment. Cordero is Wishtoyo’s lead instructor for its unique UC California Naturalist program, which is tailored specifically for California’s Native Nations and their communities, serving to facilitate community capacity building that incorporates and elevates Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) alongside conventional natural history. Cordero recounts that while working as a graduate student at UC Berkeley in integrative biology and as a curatorial assistant at the California Academy of Sciences, she was treated respectfully and valued as a peer. However, now that she is more visible as an Indigenous person working for a Native-led nonprofit, her conventional scientific expertise is often dismissed as suspect coming from a Native person. About some encounters with colonial agencies, she says, “As soon as they know I am Native, suddenly they act like there must be something wrong with the way I think.”

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Sovereignty requires authority, and yet garnering the required respect within colonial institutions is an uphill battle. Indigenous community members across California make seasonal visits to the same natural areas to gather native species for food, rushes for basketry, and other important cultural materials that further their collective knowledge about native plant phenology. Cordero says Indigenous communities hold invaluable insights into local responses to global climate change. Informal discussions are happening regularly between TEK practitioners on social media platforms, with posts like, “My acorns are dropping like crazy this year and are about a month earlier than usual. Is anyone else seeing that with their acorns?” says Cordero. Tribal communities around the country recognize the value in these observations and are beginning to work together to gather formal data on the timing of blooming, fruiting, and other life history characteristics as part of the Indigenous Phenology Network. The network focuses on valuing Indigenous ecological knowledge alongside Western knowledge systems, with a relational doctrine that recognizes that “everything in the natural world is family, with inherent rights.” One of the main areas of concern is how elevated temperatures may affect plant-pollinator mutualisms. “These relatives that we’ve been interacting with for thousands of years, are they going to be able to live through this change that is coming, and if not, what should we be doing?” Cordero asks. Wishtoyo facilitates conversations among scientists and TEK practitioners about assisted migration (see chapter 1), especially for restoration projects, including oak plantings. “By the time these oaks are adults, they are going to be living in a really different situation, and we need to accept that in the same way we talk about our own children,” Cordero says.

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Cordero grew up in Santa Barbara, in the center of the Chumash homelands that extend from the Channel Islands to the Malibu/ Topanga areas to the south, throughout San Luis Obispo County to the north, and inland into the San Joaquin Valley. “When my dad was young, Chumash families still relied on subsistence gathering. . . . Back then, the kids would just hop on the train while it was moving slowly and ride it in closer to the beach where they would collect abalone, and that is how they fed their 13-person family, and that was just normal,” Cordero says. But in Southern California especially, abalone have all but disappeared. Cordero has never seen one living in the wild. Cordero refers to abalone as a cultural keystone species. When they are removed, the parts of the culture organized around them break down. The idea of a cultural keystone is analogous to the ecological concept of keystone species as critical for the overall structure and function of an ecosystem. Black abalone were particularly important to the Chumash because they were widely available and easy to gather from shallow waters. Red abalone, the most common as well as the largest of the seven native California abalone species, mattered too. “In addition to food, abalone shell is a really important part of our material culture,” Cordero says. “Our regalia is just one example of where we highlight abalone culturally. We call it our bling, and it’s beautiful to be covered in it . . . it’s really important to our hearts, to our ceremony, and to our food systems.” To try to keep something like the abalone disappearance from happening again, Cordero gets Chumash families and community members to fill in data gaps about the plants and animals of the central coast by participating in community-science programs like Snapshot Cal Coast, an annual statewide effort to document coastal biodiversity, started by the California Academy of Sciences.

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In addition to organizing conventional data collection and Indigenous-driven research programs, Wishtoyo fosters continued participation in community science by engaging the larger Chumash community in advocacy for their traditional homelands. The US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network helps ensure that Indigenous people have control over the data, information, and research collected by, with, or about them. Securing the data rights and interests, a long-standing challenge, plays a role in the sovereignty of Indigenous governance and self-determination. While serving as a Chumash community representative on the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary advisory council, Cordero coauthored a chapter of its 2016 Condition Report entitled “Chumash Ecosystem Services Assessment,” which includes a detailed explanation of social role strain and chronic community stress that can result from denying access to traditional places and opportunities to manage them. Cordero says that when Indigenous Californians cannot participate in traditional ecosystem management, it creates an ongoing sense of displacement, erasure, and cultural loss that leads to negative mental health outcomes and decreased community well-being. This argues for the importance of supporting California Indigenous people practicing traditional management and participating in decision-making that impacts their ancestral homelands. Cordero is thinking about the future and how to pass leadership positions to younger community members interested in conservation. This type of work can be time-consuming and is a big load for volunteers, she says, so it helps to have Wishtoyo and other sources of support to ensure Indigenous representation. “It is a cultural mandate to do what we can to take care of our unceded homelands that our ancestors have cared for since time immemorial.”

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UC California Naturalists and members of the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation collect data on wrack. Photo by the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation.

Reef Check Motivates Reef Art Reef Check is a conservation nonprofit headquartered in Southern California that works with divers and ocean enthusiasts to improve the conservation and management of California’s rocky reefs, as well as tropical coral reefs all over the world. A big part of their effort involves underwater monitoring and research that engages volunteers in surveying rocky reef ecosystems along the California coast. These volunteers are trained in scientific dive protocols, data management, and search and rescue. Janina Larenas got certified as a scientific diver at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories the same year she became a certified UC California Naturalist at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum—both transformed her life. Nature

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journaling is a shared practice among California Naturalists, and Larenas has a jam-packed journal of underwater taxa that she uses to recount her underwater explorations, learn about the taxa and their life history, and record observed changes over time. “The first thing I do when I come home is to sit down and go through my books and try to recall all of the different things that I saw and write everything out. . . . The practice itself reinforces the knowledge,” says Larenas. Larenas joined Reef Check as a volunteer for the love of science and to connect with a group of folks that she could go diving with. She studied art at UC Santa Cruz, so drawing some of her observations comes naturally. Yet, considering the past few years, she says, “I come from a family of scientists, I studied art, and I feel like I have kind of flipped it around because most people have art as a hobby, but art is my main practice of being in the world, and I am more of a science voyeur so I love nerdy science stuff, but it’s not the thing I wanted my career to be based on.” When Larenas and the other volunteers reach a dive site where Reef Check monitoring transects are located, they run through the plan for the day. After a debrief and required consideration of the site conditions, review of emergency plans, and equipment checks, they split up into teams and join up with a buddy. Buddies take a minute to check their communication signals and decide which type of data each person is going to collect. A standard Reef Check California survey includes surveying fish density and size by species. An invertebrate count is done within one meter to each side of a 30-meter-long transect. Kelp and invasive algal species are listed along that same transect. Finally, a sampling of the different substrate types and what is covering the substrate, along with relief/

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topography, are recorded. “We used to count urchins until you reach 50, but with the urchin barrens forming, that sometimes happens within a half-meter, so that is not enough data. So now we count urchins for five meters [5.47 yards], counting every urchin no matter what,” says Larenas. The other invertebrates they record are anemones over 10 centimeters, keyhole limpets, snails, abalone, rock crab, sea hares, bat stars, rock scallops, and sunflower stars. In reference to sunflower stars, Larenas says, “There aren’t any, but we look just in case.” Larenas has a good feeling for different genera of kelp: “The stipes and the tops [of Laminaria and Pterygophora] feel different. One has a woody blade and pieces that come off it, and the other is flimsy and fan like, so when you run your hand up you know immediately which one it is,” says Larenas. They end up counting the number of total stipes, not the number of plants. Some plants have so many stipes, you can’t wrap your arms around them all. Larenas started diving during the onset of sea star wasting and the arrival of the blob. “My first year, when I would go out diving, we would go places that were pretty barren, and people would just be devastated and talk about how just a year or two [ago] it was dark underwater because of the dense kelp canopy,” says Larenas. “I did the transects pretty regularly in Sonoma, and I remember the first time going out there and really excited to see so many abalone. But it was really depressing because there was so little kelp, and what was there was completely covered all the way to the top with urchins. . . . All the abalone were out, which is crazy to see, and you would see abalone crawling up the sides of the algae, and there would be abalone on top of abalone. And then the next year when I went out, there was no kelp,” says Larenas.

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Larenas experienced the blob herself: “I remember that the ocean was so warm in Santa Cruz that you could swim in the water comfortably, and we were in the water every day because it was so warm.” About what she’s seen, Larenas says, “While it seems like an unlikely series of events, the more research people are doing, the more they are starting to realize that it is all related to climate change.” Larenas has found a way to mix her experience underwater into her work and into helping Reef Check scientists produce an exhibition called “The Sea Is Rising: Reflections on the State of California Kelp Forests.” It frames the loss of kelp and the diversity of life it supports not simply as the consequence of human action, but as inextricably tied to the imperatives of capitalist development. “The intervention I’m making isn’t telling them that bottled water is bad. It’s really to talk about how we need systemic change and not just individual actions,” says Larenas. Larenas runs Print Organize Protest, focused on collaborating with artists at the community level to advance social justice movements. “We do these big community events, where we invite the public to come and print these designs with us, and we have done a lot of those around climate change,” says Larenas. “The Sea Is Rising, So Must We” and her companion piece “Capitalism Is Killing Us” are used to engage the public in connecting with the topic. “It always comes back to talking to people about capitalism, and it’s important for me to talk about how capitalism as a system is structurally opposed to the type of changes that we need to be making if we are going to have a sustainable future,” says Larenas. While the public are printmaking, Larenas and her collaborators ask them about what drew them to the print and what they think about the message. They try to “get people to think about the way

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that climate change isn’t a product of individual actions, but of a larger systemic problem,” Larenas says.

·

·

·

In sum, marine heat waves and the resulting loss of kelp and emergence of urchin barrens along the California coast signal the cascading impacts of climate disruption for ocean life and all that depend on it. It is going to take an all-hands-on-deck approach to bring greenhouse gas emissions down and prevent near-constant heat-wave conditions at the end of this century. Society’s fear of economic pain has been a long-time barrier to mitigating anthropogenic causes of global warming. The economy underlies almost every aspect of our societies, and the US economy is based on growth. Regardless of any one economic theory, a societal model that requires endless growth conflicts with the finite resources of Earth and its biosphere. The rate and way goods and services are produced and consumed to meet the

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demand for growth is pushing Earth’s systems beyond their tipping point (see chapter 1). The impacts of exceeding these limits on Earth systems are becoming more visible, like rocks emerging out of a fogbank on the sea. At the same time, there are minimum thresholds below which humans suffer unjustly due to a shortfall in basic rights to freedom, food, health, housing, clean water, and other necessities for their livelihoods. As we have changed the climate, we must change course to regenerative economies that address environmental justice and involve reusing material, preventing food waste, water conservation, and carbon neutrality, exemplified in the stewardship stories found in this book, so that we can continue to exist and thrive on Earth, the only home we have ever known.

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In the End

In 2020, the world—well, “ended” is probably too strong. By the summer of 2020, as we write this, the number of reported COVID19 deaths in the United States has reached 150,000 at the rate of 1,000 dead each day. (As we prepare for print in the winter of 2021, sadly, more than half a million people have died.) Cities and states are lurching back into various stages of shutdowns, in-person instruction in the fall looks unlikely, the economy is walking in circles with foam on its lips, and who knows what fall and winter will bring? Best-case scenario, you’re reading this book while recovering from a live concert or using the treadmill at the gym. Worst case, you’re reading these pages as you feed them into a small fire in a cave. We don’t bring this up to say that it’s hard to write stories of climate optimism during a global pandemic—although, it can feel like trying to floss your teeth while standing behind an incontinent hippopotamus. We bring it up because climate change and a global pandemic have much in common. We were warned about both well in advance, and with both crises, experts said that it was not a matter of if they’d happen, but rather a question of how bad they’d be. And the answer to that question is up to us.

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These two global phenomena reveal societal vulnerabilities, the value of investing in prevention, and the power of behavioral changes. They also both bring up similar challenges for sciencebased decision-making under high levels uncertainty. Science is inherently uncertain, but not knowing the exact magnitude of future temperature increases or rates of precipitation isn’t stopping communities from identifying what needs to be done to become more resilient and implementing local solutions. Climate change and COVID-19 are both global issues originating from changes in human activity. COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease that likely originated in a bat species from southern China and was probably amplified within a nonbat intermediary host and then passed on to humans. Approximately 60 percent of all human diseases are zoonotic diseases, including Ebola and SARS. Viruses can evolve very rapidly, require a host to multiply and spread, and take every opportunity to proliferate. Capturing wild animals for food and trade, raising livestock, and continuing the deforestation and degradation of ecosystems all increase the chances for viruses to spill over into humans—and we are in many ways the ideal host: there are billions of us, and we travel around the world very quickly. This means diseases carried by humans can quickly spread from the most remote parts of the world to large population centers far from the point of origin of a disease. If the old quip is that war exists to teach people geography, maybe a new one is that pandemics exist to teach us science. Surrounded by the news of COVID-19, Americans are learning to think about bending growth curves and lagging indicators. Perhaps more importantly, the world is, all at once, paying attention to the processes of science—questions, hypotheses, sampling, randomization, error bars, uncertainties, and the slow accumulation of

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evidence driving consensus. Various possible outcomes from models predicting the spread of COVID-19 are in the news, sometimes including the concept of an ensemble model that aggregates findings from multiple models into an average prediction. This is also done to communicate findings across multiple global circulation models for climate forecasting. Now that dinner conversations include statistical modeling methods and the resulting forecasts for continued spread of coronavirus, climate change forecasting and likely consequences for extreme weather events should be easier for the public to digest. One way to imagine a happy ending to this story is to think that people and policy makers will no longer find science mysterious and that we will use data-informed models to make better choices and save each other. Maybe the awful scare and cost of the pandemic will shock us into considering how we might avert other disasters. Living through this is making it clear how high the price can be when we don’t do our best to prevent and prepare for catastrophes. Some argue that switching to renewable energy is too costly, when in reality those costs are coming down and preventing these problems ahead of time will be far less expensive than dealing with them once they are already upon us. Everyone on planet Earth is learning how vulnerable societies are to planet-wide threats. Extreme events, such as destructive wildfires, magnified by climate disruption are causing loss of life and damage that exceed our capacity to cope. Climate change is a threat to humanity that, much like COVID-19, disproportionately hurts the poor and marginalized. Inner-city communities exposed to high levels of particulate matter from pollution are known to be at higher risk of mortality from COVID-19. Similarly, for climate change, those living within inner-city heat islands or in areas with

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poorly constructed infrastructure are more impacted. The same is true for poorer nations. Eliminating systemic racism and its hold on science and society and ensuring fair treatment, access, and opportunity for all is going to require a lot more listening and committed work. This work is critical to address climate change. People of color are more concerned about climate change and, because of socioeconomic inequalities, will be more impacted by extreme weather and events. Many people have noticed that the pandemic has brought clearer skies (until the fires and accompanying smoke came early). Bending the curve for COVID-19 for many regions has required sheltering in place, and due to a decline in driving, flying, and industrial processes, it is estimated the 2020 annual greenhouse gas emissions will be about 7 percent less than those for 2019. While this would be the largest annual percentage drop observed since WWII, it would still only reduce emissions to the level of 2006—far too high to limit global warming to 2°C, especially if annual increases return after the pandemic. It is a grim irony that it took a lockdown to clear the air, but maybe it’s also a hopeful sign. As millions of people have been wrenched from normal life, we’re all learning how contingent our “normal” was on our choices and how we can make different ones. It is possible to imagine the world anew. Surely this is a skill we will need to stave off climate disruption and adapt to coming changes. Environmental and social contexts vary widely across California, and so too the actions shared in this book. Local communities are best suited to identify, design, and implement what is needed to improve community and ecosystem resilience. The actors in the book draw on different life experiences and perspectives and express different ways of knowing their environment

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and society. They bring their whole person to the effort and come up with personal touches based on what sticks and helps people stay engaged, such as naming trees as they’re planted, or making it fun, like fishing in the Los Angeles River. The actions they take together span ecological restoration, civic engagement, environmental justice, conservation, communication, and participation in research. Hands-on stewardship, such as restoring tule marsh, removing invasive species, and planting oaks, makes ecosystems and those that tend them healthier. Advocating for walk/bike paths, infill housing, and carbon neutrality at city and county planning meetings produces results that change lives and mitigate climate change. Redistributing food and gardening provide fresh local produce where it’s needed and save precious carbon and water. Conserving core wildlands and connecting critical remnants will help species be able to move and adapt to climate change. Informal education, whether inside a museum or on the streets with Climate Corps, demonstrates how to talk about climate change and engage the public in a common vision about what can be done. Climate science requires long-term data from a multitude of locations that scientists alone cannot cover, but a willing public can help crowdsource the necessary data. Most of the climate actions described throughout this book rely on group efforts. What we do together matters, like wearing a mask to stop the spread of a novel disease. We can help our neighbors, and they can help us. Communities are adopting novel approaches embedded within nature, from ecosystem restoration to promoting regenerative economies, that stay within planetary boundaries and are focused on thriving rather than infinite growth. While physically distancing, we are mobilizing for racial justice, standing up for science, and calling for an end to climate

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disruption. Climate education and engagement is a key social intervention to help stabilize the climate, and momentum is building through the COVID-19 crises. Together, we can reinvent “normal” life to be regenerative and strengthen our interconnection with nature and interdependence with each other. Joy comes from connecting with others in a purposeful way that transcends self. Working together, we can make California resilient and experience lasting joy. That joy can help give hope to the larger challenge climate change presents. Maybe the most important lesson the present catastrophes can teach us is this: we are not powerless, and we must work together to save the Earth, our only home.

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References

Chapter 1: Extreme Events CAL FIRE. 2019. “Top 20 Most Destructive California Wildfires.” Accessed July 15, 2020. https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/t1rdhizr/top20_destruction.pdf. Data USA. 2021. “Lake County, CA.” Accessed February 18, 2021. https:// datausa.io/profile/geo/lake-county-ca. Fitzpatrick, Matthew C., and Robert R. Dunn. 2020. “What Will Climate Feel Like in 60 Years?” University of Maryland, Center for Environmental Science. Accessed July 15, 2020. https://fitzlab.shinyapps.io/cityapp/. Forest Genetics, Government of British Columbia. 2020. “Assisted Migration Adaptation Trial.” Accessed July 15, 2020. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov /content/industry/forestry/managing-our-forest-resources/tree-seed /forest-genetics/seed-transfer-climate-change/assisted-migration -adaptation-trial. Frazell, Julie, Toby O’Geen, and Robert Reynolds. 2009. “Trees and Shrubs for Northern California Serpentine Landscapes.” University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Accessed July 15, 2020. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8168794p. Goss, Michael, Daniel L. Swain, John T. Abatzoglou, Ali Sarhadi, Crystal A. Kolden, A. Park Williams, and Noah S. Diffenbaugh. 2020. “Climate Change Is Increasing the Likelihood of Extreme Autumn Wildfire Conditions across California.” Environmental Research Letters 15 (9). https://doi.org/10.1088 /1748-9326/ab83a7.

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Harrison, Susan P., Elise S. Gornish, and Stella Copeland. 2015. “ClimateDriven Diversity Loss in a Grassland Community.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 112 (28): 8672–77. https://doi.org /10.1073/pnas.1502074112. Keeley, Jon E., and Hugh D. Safford. 2016. “Fire as an Ecosystem Process.” In Ecosystems of California, edited by Harold Mooney and Erika Zavaleta, 27–46. Oakland: University of California Press. Kramer, Heather Anu, Miranda H. Mockrin, Patricia M. Alexandre, and Volker C. Radeloff. 2019. “High Wildfire Damage in Interface Communities in California.” International Journal of Wildland Fire 28 (9). https:// doi.org/10.1071/wf18108. Lawton, Rebecca. 2017. “Through the Flames: Michael Gillogly, Pepperwood’s Preserve Manager and Longtime Resident, Shares His Story about the Tubbs Fire.” Pepperwood Preserve. Accessed July 15, 2020. https:// www.pepperwoodpreserve.org/2017/11/08/through-the-flames/. Rossmann, Randi, and Hannah Beausang. 2018. “Wildfire a Frequent and Familiar Foe in Lake County.” Press Democrat, June 27, 2018. https:// www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8475008–181/wildfire-a-frequent-and -familiar?sba=AAS. Steffen, Will, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes, et al. 2018. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 115 (33): 8252–59. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas .1810141115.

Chapter 2: Big Bay to Tech Town Ackerly, David, Andrew Jones, Mark Stacey, and Bruce Riordan. 2018. San Francisco Bay Area Region Summary Report. California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment. Sacramento: California Natural Resources Agency. https://www.energy.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2019-11/Reg_Report-SUM -CCCA4-2018-005_SanFranciscoBayArea_ADA.pdf. California Community Choice Association. 2020. “California Community Choice Aggregation: Advancing Local Energy Choice.” Accessed July 17, 2020. https://cal-cca.org/.

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Canopy. 2019. “2019 Impact Report: Resilient Trees, Resilient Communities.” Accessed July 15, 2020. https://canopy.org/about-us/impact/. Climate Center. 2020. “Clean Power Exchange.” Accessed July 16, 2020. https://cleanpowerexchange.org/. Green Roofs for Healthy Cities. Home page. Accessed July 21, 2020. https:// greenroofs.org/. Leiserowitz, Anthony, Edward Maibach, Connie Roser-Renouf, Geoff Feinberg, and Seth Rosenthal. 2015. Climate Change in the American Christian Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University and George Mason University. Living Architecture Monitor. 2018. “Portland’s Eco-Roof Requirement for Central District Adopted.” October 8. Marshall, George. 2014. Don’t Even Think about It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. New York: Bloomsbury. Orr, David. 2011. Hope Is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr. Washington, DC: Island Press. Schuur, Edward, A. David McGuire, Christina Schädel, Guido Grosse, Jennifer W. Harden, Daniel J. Hayes, Gustaf Hugelius, et al. 2015. “Climate Change and the Permafrost Carbon Feedback.” Nature 520 (7546): 171–79. https:// doi.org/10.1038/nature14338. Singh, Deepti, Mingfang Ting, Adam A. Scaife, and Nicola Martin. 2018. “California Winter Precipitation Predictability: Insights from the Anomalous 2015–2016 and 2016–2017 Seasons.” Geophysical Research Letters 45 (18): 9972–80. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018gl078844.

Chapter 3: A Changing Harvest Arenas-Castro, Salvador, João F. Gonçalves, Manuel Moreno, and Rafael Villar. 2019. “Projected Climate Changes Are Expected to Decrease the Suitability and Production of Olive Varieties in Southern Spain.” Science of the Total Environment 709:136161. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016 /j.scitotenv.2019.136161. Bedsworth, Louise, Dan Cayan, Guido Franco, Leah Fisher, and Sonya Ziaja. 2018. Statewide Summary Report. California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment. Sacramento: California Natural Resources Agency. https://

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Chapter 7: Riding the California Current Arafeh-Dalmau, Nur, David S. Schoeman, Gabriela Montaño-Moctezuma, Fiorenza Micheli, Laura Rogers-Bennett, Carolina Olguin-Jacobson, and Hugh P. Possingham. 2020. “Marine Heat Waves Threaten Kelp Forests.” Science 367 (6478): 635. https://doi.org/10.1126/science .aba5244. Dutt, Kuheli. 2019. “Race and Racism in the Geosciences.” Nature Geoscience 13 (1): 2–3. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0519-z. Elliott, Meredith L., Dennis Jongsomjit, Sam Veloz, and Jaime Jahncke. 2020. Ocean Research and Management Priorities off the U.S. West Coast. Petaluma, CA: Point Blue.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to photographs and illustrations. abalone, 217–21, 229, 233 accessory dwelling units, 167 access to nature: access-promoting programs, 36–39, 116–19; in Los Angeles, 159, 187 acorns, as staple food, 13 Active SGV, 163–66 adobe construction, 175, 176 ADUs (accessory dwelling units), 167 Agassiz’s desert tortoise, 143 agriculture, 61–92; the carbon farming approach, 61–62, 64–66; the challenge of declining water availability, 62–63, 64, 71–72, 73–76, 78, 84–87; crop and farmscape diversification, 66–67, 76–77, 80–81, 82, 85; emissions from, 61, 64–65, 88–89; farmers and ranchers as restoration partners, 35; Full Belly Farm, 64–65, 66–67; the future of California winegrowing, 77–80; gleaning and food waste reduction

programs, 89–91; Hmong farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, 83–87, 88; incorporating grazing animals, 76–77; Indigenous agriculture, 13; kelp farming, 224–26; Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians olive orchard, 80–83; technical and cost assistance to farmers, 83–84, 87; tree crops and climate change, 67, 69–72, 81, 84; urban farming in Los Angeles, 178–81; walnut production, 68–69, 70–72. See also soils Aguilar, Joe, 81–82 Aigner, Paul, 19–20 air quality: biomass-fueled energy generation and, 104; black carbon and the snowpack, 97–98; invasive plants and, 138; in the Los Angeles region, 159–60, 163–64; particulates from burning of forest slash, 103, 104; prescribed burning and, 111–12, 116; wildfire smoke, 43, 116

[ 257 ]

albedo: high-albedo building materials, 162–63; of the Sierra snowpack, 97–98 algae: kelp and other seaweeds, 220–26, 232, 233; toxic algal blooms, 212 Alliance of Regional Collaboratives for Climate Adaptation, 161 Amargosa Conservancy, 148–49 Amargosa River, 148–49 Amargosa Valley, 148–50 Ambassadors for STEM Training to Enhance Participation (A-STEP), 201–2 American Geophysical Union Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee, 204 anticipatory planting, 119–22, 228 aquaculture, 224–25 aquarium docent programs, 198–200, 201, 223 aquifer depletion. See groundwater supply and management ARBOR plan (LA River), 189 Archer, Elizabeth, 169 artificial reefs, 225 art projects and organizations, 189, 234–35; nature journaling practices, 231–32 Assembly Bill 32, 122 assisted migration, 20, 119–22, 228 A-STEP, 201–2 atmospheric rivers, 18, 33, 74, 206 Backlar, Shelly, 189 Baker, Christine, 48–50 barbed goat grass, 19 Barragan, Irvin, 26

[ 258 ]

Barrows, Cameron, 132–33 Bartlett, Tracy, 136–37 beach ecosystems, 226; beach erosion and restoration, 208–10. See also ocean and coast bees, 66–67 Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions course, 208 Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, 22; Mayacamas to Berryessa Landscape Connectivity Network, 22–23 Best, Connie, 123 bicycle-friendly community advocacy, 163–66 Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, 14, 15 biochar, 26 biodiversity, xiv; diversified farmscapes, 66–67, 76–77; forest restoration efforts and, 101–2; invasive species eradication and, 19–20; in the San Francisco Bay Area, 31 biofuels: kelp for, 224–25; waste wood for, 104 birds: desert solar installations and, 141–42; desert species declines and range shifts, 130–31, 133; forest species range shifts, 95–96; impacts of warming and human disturbance on seabirds, 212, 213–16 black abalone, 218, 229 Black Americans: diversity and inclusion barriers, 202–3; views on climate change, 204. See also climate justice; cultural diversity

index

Black Butte timberlands conservation, 124–25 black carbon, 97–98, 103 black walnut, native, 67–68 BLM (Bureau of Lands Management), 144, 146–47 the blob, 212, 233, 234 blue carbon, 225 Brockman, Todd, 117, 118, 119 building requirements and technologies: building codes, 105, 162, 175, 176, 211; for cooling, 161–63; energy efficiency/emissions reduction initiatives in desert communities, 150–56; living roofs, 39–41; natural/fire-resistant building methods and materials, 174–77; natural gas bans, 211; on-site solar energy systems, 151, 154–55, 168; using sustainable wood products, 104–6 bull kelp, 220, 223. See also kelp Bureau of Land Management (BLM), 144, 146–47 Butler-Graham, Susan, 52–55 Buy Clean California Act, 106 Cache Creek, 63–64 CalEnviroScreen, 163–64 CAL FIRE, 101, 114, 115, 120, 121 caliche, 145 California Academy of Sciences, 39–41, 192–93, 227, 229 California Air Resources Board, 115, 123, 164, 172 California cap-and-trade program, 122–23; program funding from, 76, 101, 124, 168, 225–26

index

California Coastal Conservancy, 166 California Conservation Corps, 139 California Current Ecosystem, 197–98, 214–15, 222. See also ocean and coast California Department of Fish and Wildlife, 144, 217, 219, 220–21 California Desert Conservation Area plan, 144. See also Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan California Energy Commission, 103, 144 California Forest Carbon Plan, 100, 101, 102 California Fourth Climate Change Assessment, 10, 42, 63 California least tern, 216 California Native Plant Society, 145 California Ocean Protection Council, 221 CAM (Climate Action Mendocino), 24, 26–27 Canopy (Palo Alto), 48–51 Capay Valley farms, 64–67 capitalism, 234, 236 carbon absorption/sequestration: carbon farming, 61–62, 65–66; in desert ecosystems, 145–46; by forestlands, 80, 95, 101, 122, 123–24, 126; living roofs for, 39; in marine ecosystems, 197, 224, 225–26; by wetland and riparian plants, 33–34, 66 carbon dioxide: potential future atmospheric levels, 12

[ 259 ]

carbon emissions: from the building industry, 105, 106; California’s cap-and-trade program, 122–23; impacts on ocean chemistry and food web, 199–200; from soil disturbance, 34, 61, 65–66, 145. See also greenhouse gas emissions carbon farming, 61–62, 64–66 carbon footprint calculators, 172 carbon offset credits, 122–23, 225–26. See also California cap-and-trade program Cardiff State Beach, 209–10 Carneros Wine Alliance, 78–79 CASM (Climate Action Santa Monica), 170, 171–74 CCA (Community Choice Aggregation) electricity, 55–58, 152, 211 CDFW (California Department of Fish and Wildlife), 144, 217, 219, 220–21 Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary advisory council, 230 chaparral, fire and, 8 chill hours, 69–70 chuckwalla, 136 Chumash people: ecological knowledge and practices, 226–27; Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation programs, 227–30, 231 citizen science. See community science initiatives City Nature Challenge, 192–93 civic engagement, 152, 164; Canopy, 50; green energy advocacy, 57–58, 152; by Indigenous communities, 230; Mothers Out Front, 53–55; Pacoima Beautiful, 169–70; Surfrider Foundation, 210–12

[ 260 ]

Clean Power Exchange, 57–58 Clear Lake, x, 11–15, 63–64 Clear Lake hitch, 15 climate action/activism, xiii–xv, 43–44, 55, 237–42. See also specific organizations, locations, and types of actions Climate Action Mendocino (CAM), 24, 26–27 Climate Action PS (Palm Springs), 151 Climate Action Santa Monica (CASM), 170, 174 climate adaptability, 7, 20–21; in the past, 12, 13–14. See also climate resilience; habitat connectivity and corridors; range shifts climate anxiety, 46, 49–50 Climate Center Clean Power Exchange, 57 Climate Change Assessment (Fourth), 10, 42, 63 climate communication, 241–42; the Monterey Bay Aquarium docent program, 198–201; in religious communities, 44–45; Santa Monica’s Climate Corps, 171–74. See also educational initiatives Climate Corps (Santa Monica), 170, 171–74 climate grief, xiii climate history, 11–13 climate hope/optimism, xi–xii, xiii, 52–53, 237 climate justice, 193–94; displacement avoidance planning, 168–69, 178; diversity-promoting outreach programs, 36–39, 201–4; inequitable impacts of climate disruption, 10, 159, 193–94, 239–40; inequita-

index

ble pollution burdens, 163–64, 239; justice-focused youth program, 45–46; Pacoima Beautiful and its work, 167–70; Watts Rising and its work, 178–81 climate refugia, 131–34 climate resilience, 58; diversified farming and, 67, 76–77; ecosystem health and, 7, 58; integrating with land use policy and planning, 46–47; nature-based resiliencebuilding approaches, 47–48, 51–52. See also climate adaptability Climate Resolve, 161–63 climate skepticism/denial, 44–45 Climate Smart Agriculture programs, 83; SWEEP grants, 76, 80, 87 climate stewardship, xv; religious perspectives on, 45 climatic variation: past, 11–12, 13–14; precipitation variability, 17–19, 74, 97. See also extreme events climatic water deficit, 73–74. See also water availability and supply CLT (cross-laminated timber), 105, 107 CO2: potential future atmospheric levels, 12. See also carbon entries coastal communities and ecosystems. See ocean and coast; specific regions and communities cob construction, 174, 175 Codron, Jennifer, 89–91 collective action, xiii, 55, 241–42. See also climate action/activism; specific groups Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) electricity, 55–58, 152, 211

index

community engagement, 169–70. See also civic engagement; educational initiatives community-level action, xiv, 240–42; community choice energy, 55–58, 152, 211; local forest management planning, 102; local groundwater agencies, 86–87. See also building requirements and technologies; civic engagement; land use planning and regulation; specific regions and communities community science initiatives: CDFW volunteer divers, 217, 219; the City Nature Challenge, 192–93; desert reptile monitoring, 135–37; FOLAR programs in Los Angeles, 190–91; Indigenousdriven programs, 228–30, 231; Joshua tree monitoring, 132–33; in the Los Angeles region, 190–93; Point Blue seabird monitoring programs, 214, 215–16; Reef Check monitoring program, 231, 232–34; Stories in the Snow, 99–100, 99 compost and composting, 61, 66, 72, 73, 90–91 Conglomerate Mesa, 145, 147 conservation easements, 124–25 controlled burning. See prescribed burning Cool Block, 41–43 cooling initiatives, 160–63, 178, 187, 193 Cordero, Alicia, 227–30 Cover, Jennifer, 104, 105 COVID-19 pandemic, 237–40 Coyote Valley wildlife corridor protection, 51–55

[ 261 ]

cream cups, 16 creosote bush, 145 cross-laminated timber (CLT), 105, 107 cultural burning, 107–13 cultural diversity, xiv, 240; diversityfocused outreach programs, 36–39, 201–4. See also climate justice; Indigenous Californians; traditional ecological knowledge cultural keystone species, 229 Cuyama Valley Family Resource Center, 176, 177 Danza, Jim, 182, 184 Danza, Nina, 182, 184 data collection initiatives. See community science initiatives data sovereignty, 230 Delta water system, 62–63 desert lands, 129–56; BLM land management and the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, 143–50; the desert tortoise, 143; federal protective designations, 150; fire and, 8–9, 138; fragility of desert ecosystems, 129–30; green building and energy efficiency programs in desert communities, 150–56; identifying and protecting climate refugia and other sensitive areas, 131–34, 144–45, 146–47, 148–49; invasive plant removal programs, 138–40; Joshua tree declines, 131–33; projected temperature increases, 130, 140; renewable energy development, 140–43, 146; residential growth and commu-

[ 262 ]

nity climate disruption vulnerability, 129, 130, 156; wildlife declines and range shifts, 130–31, 133, 134–37. See also specific desert communities desert pupfish, 148–49 Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP), 143–50 desert tortoise, 143 development: in California’s deserts, 129, 130, 140–43, 145–46; greenhouse gas emissions from building, 105, 106, 174; habitat connectivity losses and, 21, 51; impacts of low-density development, 166–67; in the San Francisco Bay Area, 31–32, 51; wetlands losses and, 14; in the wildland-urban interface, 6, 11, 116. See also building requirements and technologies Diablo winds, 25 Diaz Avelar, David, 163, 164, 166 disease: the COVID-19 pandemic, 237–40; environmental degradation and, 238; mosquito-borne illness and wetlands/riparian restoration, 188 displacement avoidance planning, 168–69, 178 diversified agriculture and farmscapes, 66–67, 76–77, 80–81, 82, 85 diversity. See biodiversity; cultural diversity Don’t Even Think about It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (Marshall), 43–44 DRECP (Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan), 143–50

index

Drill, Sabrina, 186–87, 188, 191 drought: the 2012–15 drought, 116–17; precipitation whiplash, 17–18, 74, 97 Duncan, Alisa, 39, 40, 41 dune restoration, 208, 209–10 Earthen Shelter, 174, 176–77 economic context and transition, xiii, 234, 235–36 ecosystem management: assisted migration and anticipatory planting, 20, 119–22, 228; for fire preparedness/resilience, 7–8, 19–21. See also traditional ecological knowledge; specific ecosystem types and organizations ecosystem restoration. See specific ecosystem types and locations educational initiatives, 241–42; Bending the Curve course, 208; Climate Action Mendocino, 24, 26–27; diversity-focused programs, 36–39, 201–4; FOLAR programs in Los Angeles, 189–91; Latino Outdoors, 36–39; in Mojave Desert communities, 150; ocean-focused programs, 198–204, 215–16; San Francisco neighborhood-based program, 41–43; San Luis Obispo food preservation and waste reduction programs, 90–91; Santa Clara River outreach, 185; school-based programs, 34–36, 49, 50, 189–90; Surfrider Foundation, 211; UC California Naturalist programs, 49, 136, 227; UC Climate Stewards, xiv; Wishtoyo Chumash

index

Foundation programs, 227–30, 231; wood design/construction for professionals, 105. See also climate communication electric power and utilities: all-electric construction requirements, 211; community choice electricity, 55–58, 152, 211; vehicle electrification and infrastructure, 164, 168. See also biofuels; energy El Niños and super El Niños, 18–19, 208, 214–15 embedded emissions, 106 embodied carbon, 106 emissions reductions: AB 32 goal and cap-and-trade program, 122–23; California public works projects, 106; during the COVID-19 pandemic, 240; goals for, 56, 122, 155, 164, 211; vehicle emissions and, 164 endangered species. See threatened and endangered species energy: community choice electricity, 55–58, 152, 211; desert energy development, 140–43, 146; energy efficiency/zero net energy initiatives and technologies, 151–52, 153–56, 161–63; new construction natural gas bans, 211; rooftop/on-site solar, 151, 154–55, 168. See also biofuels; electric power and utilities energy use, in agriculture and the food chain, 88 Engeman, Laura, 207–8 environmental education. See climate communication; educational initiatives

[ 263 ]

environmental intimacy, x, xiii, 226–27 environmental justice. See climate justice extreme events, 239; atmospheric rivers and flooding, 18–19, 33, 74, 206; impacts on coastal infrastructure and ecosystems, 208–9, 224; impacts on disadvantaged communities, 10; increasing likelihood of, 19, 42–43; precipitation whiplash, 17–18, 74, 97. See also fire; flooding and flood hazards faith communities and faith-based programs, 44–46 Farzaneh, Farrah, 153–56 fertilizers: kelp-based, 223; synthetic, 61, 88 FIELD (Fieldwork Inspiring Expanded Leadership and Diversity), 203 fire, 3–27; desert ecosystems and, 8–9, 138; ecological benefits of, 107–8, 110, 114; fire preparedness/ resilience planning and education, 5–6, 11, 24–27; fire-resistant building methods and materials, 175–76; fuels reduction/vegetation management needs and approaches, 19, 24, 100–102, 116–19; growing frequency and intensity of, 8–9, 10, 25, 27, 42; Indigenous Californians and traditional burning practices, 8, 13, 107–13; invasive plant species and, 138, 139; in Lake County, 9–11; local prescribed burn associations

[ 264 ]

(PBAs), 113–16; Mabel McKay’s dream, ix–xi; planned power outages and, 56–57; plant community impacts and recovery, 6–7, 8, 9, 16–17, 19; residential development in the WUI and, 6, 10–11, 116; smoke impacts, 43, 116; the Tubbs fire, 3–8, 11, 24–25; wildlife impacts and recovery, 5, 19–20 firefighting, 25–26 fire suppression/exclusion, 8, 108 fish and fisheries: abalone fishery and declines, 217–21, 229, 233; artificial reefs and, 225; Clear Lake hitch, 15; desert pupfish, 148–49; kelp forests and, 226; Los Angeles River, 186, 187–88; marine heat wave impacts, 212, 214–15, 216; marine protected areas and, 213, 214; salmonids, 35, 108, 109–10, 125, 187 flooding and flood hazards, 18–19, 97; coastal community risk assessment requirement, 210; Highway 37 corridor, 32–33; living shorelines and, 208; Los Angeles River, 186; Tijuana River, 204–5, 206 fog and fog declines, 72, 79–80 Fogg, Jora, 144–45, 147, 149 FOLAR (Friends of the Los Angeles River), 188–91 Foley, Pam, 53–54 food security and food sovereignty, 58, 159, 178; growing food in Watts, 178–81 food waste and waste reduction programs, 89–91

index

forestlands, 95–126; dealing with wood waste, 102–4; economic revitalization efforts, 103–4; fuels reduction needs and approaches, 100–102, 116–19; implementing traditional burning practices, 107–13; local prescribed burn associations (PBAs), 113–16; management for forest health and community resilience, 100–102, 103–4; the Pacific Forest Trust, 123–26; paleoclimatic variation and, 12; poor forest health and recent tree mortality, 100, 116–17, 119; redwood forests, 79–80; residential development and fire risk, 116; restoration/reforestation needs and considerations, 101–2, 119–21; the Sierra snowpack and California’s water supply, 62–63, 71, 84, 96–100; sustainable logging and wood products, 104–6; the Wilderness Corps volunteer stewardship program, 117–19 Forest Management Task Force, 101 fossil fuels divestment campaigns, 211 Foster, Ben, 56 Fourth Climate Change Assessment (California), 10, 42, 63 Francis, Pope, 45 Friends of the Desert Mountains Weed Warriors, 138–40 Friends of the Inyo, 144–45, 147, 149–50 Friends of the Los Angeles River (FOLAR), 188–91 Friends of the Santa Clara River, 182–85

index

Frietze-Armenta, Dora, 167–69 frontline communities, 193–94; Pacoima Beautiful and its work, 167–70; Watts Rising and MudTown Farms, 177–81. See also climate justice fuel removal, 24 Full Belly Farm, 64–65, 66–67, 69 giant kelp, 222–23, 225. See also kelp Gillogly, Michael, 3–4, 7, 8, 22 GleanSLO and other gleaning programs, 89–91 Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, 37 goldfields, 16 gold mining, 148, 149 Goodrich, Kristen, 204, 205–6, 207 grasslands, 12, 13. See also rangelands Grassroots Ecology, 49 Graves, David, 61, 77–79 Gray, Morgan, 22–23 grazing animals, 76–77. See also rangelands greenhouse gas emissions: from agriculture, 61, 64–65, 88–89; from the building sector, 105, 106, 174; from burning of forest slash piles or other waste, 103; the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts, 240; emissions reduction goals, 56, 122, 155, 164, 211; from the transportation sector, 164 Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, 40 Green Roof Task Force, 40 Grinnell Resurvey Project, 130–31 groundwater supply and management: agricultural users and, 64, 75, 84–87; desert solar farms and,

[ 265 ]

groundwater supply (continued) 141, 142; fire’s impacts on, 110–11; invasive plant species and, 139; stormwater management and recharge projects, 182–84; Sustainable Groundwater Management Act and local GSAs, 84, 85–87, 102 Groundwater Sustainability Agencies, 86–87 Gutierrez, Cris, 170, 171–72 habitat connectivity and corridors, 21; Coyote Valley effort, 51–55; in the desert, 147; marine habitats, 213, 219; Mayacamas to Berryessa Landscape Connectivity Network, 22–23 Harper, Dan, 44 Harrison, Susan, 16–17, 20 Hayhoe, Katharine, 44–45 heat: community cooling initiatives, 160–63, 178, 187, 193; heat island effects, 160; impacts in urban communities, 42–43, 159, 160; inequitable impacts of, 159; marine heat waves and their impacts, 212–16, 220, 233–34, 235. See also warming Henderson, Tanya, 129, 146, 148 Hepner, Hannah, 114 Higgins, Lila, 191, 192, 193 Highway 37 corridor, 32–33 Hmong farmers, 83–87, 88 Holcombe, Jon, 221 home energy labeling programs, 152 honeybees, 66–67 horned lizards, 135

[ 266 ]

iNaturalist, 192–93 inclusion. See access to nature; cultural diversity Indigenous Californians: in the Clear Lake area, x, 13–15; coastal Chumash cultural preservation and community science programs, 227–30, 231; and fire/traditional burning practices, 8, 13, 107–13; along the Los Angeles River, 186; Mabel McKay’s dream, ix–xii; Native-focused UC California Naturalist program, 227; Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians carbon farming project, 80–83; traditional ecological knowledge and environmental intimacy, x, 13–14, 226–27, 228. See also climate justice; traditional ecological knowledge; specific tribal groups Indigenous Peoples Burning Network, 112–13 Inland Deserts. See desert lands insects: beneficial, 66–67, 228; mosquitoes, 188 invasive plant species: controlling/ eliminating, 19–20, 37, 138–40, 184, 190; fire and, 7, 19; serpentine soils and, 16, 19 Jarvis-Shean, Katherine, 68 Jepson, Willis Linn, 68 jet stream, 25, 212 Jordan Downs Environmental Justice Coalition, 179 Joshua tree, 131–33, 138, 145 Joshua Tree National Park, 131, 133; historical wildlife data, 134–36

index

Karuk Tribe: traditional burning advocacy, 108–13 kelp, 220–26, 232, 233 KELPRR (Kelp Ecosystem and Landscape Partnership for Research on Resilience), 221 keystone species: cultural keystones, 229 king tides, 208 Klamath Basin, Karuk traditional burning in, 108–13 Koehler, Cathy, 19–20, 22 Kupka, Carly, 210–12 Lake County: Indigenous presence in, 13–15; paleoclimate and vegetation, 11–12; wildfire in, 9–11 landscape connectivity. See habitat connectivity and corridors land trusts and conservation easement programs, 123–26 land use planning and regulation, 46–47; enouraging high-density development, 166–67. See also building requirements and technologies; habitat connectivity and corridors LARC (Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability), 161 Larenas, Janina, 231–35 Latino Outdoors, 36–39 Latinx Americans: Latino Outdoors, 36–39; views on climate change, 203–4. See also climate justice Lebeck, Sue, 41–42, 43 LED lighting, 154 lithium mining, 149–50

index

livestock: wildfire and, 5–6. See also grazing animals; rangelands living roofs, 39–41 living shorelines, 207–10 lizard populations, at Joshua Tree National Park, 134–36 local action. See community-level action local law: Santa Monica Sustainability Rights Ordinance, 170–71; stormwater utility fees and, 183–84; weed abatement ordinances, 19. See also building requirements and technologies; land use planning and regulation Lockert, Ellen, 151, 152 logging. See forestlands Looy, Cindy, 11–12 Los Angeles region: Active SGV’s bicycle and greenway advocacy, 163–67; air quality in, 159–60, 163–64; community science initiatives, 190–93; Earthen Shelter’s natural building advocacy, 174–77; food production and distribution programs, 91; heat impacts and cooling initiatives, 159, 160–63, 178, 187, 193; Los Angeles River revitalization efforts, 186–91; Pacoima Beautiful and its work, 167–70; Santa Clara River conservation advocacy, 181–85; Santa Monica’s youth Climate Corps, 170–74; Watts Rising’s urban gardening initiatives, 177–81 Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability (LARC), 161

[ 267 ]

Los Angeles River, 186–91 Los Angeles State Historic Park, 187 MacAdams, Lewis, 188–89, 190 Madrigal, Andrew, 81, 83 madrone, 36 Maldonado Ramírez, Sofia, 169–70 mapping and surveys: Canopy’s oak mapping effort, 48–49; the Mayacamas to Berryessa Landscape Connectivity Network, 22–23. See also community science initiatives Marine BioEnergy Inc., 224 marine heat waves and their impacts, 212–16, 220, 233–34, 235 marine life: kelp health and farming, 220–26, 232, 233; marine invertebrate declines, 217–21, 229; ocean acidification’s impacts, 199–200, 224; ocean warming and its impacts, 212, 213–16, 233–34; Reef Check surveys, 231, 232–34; urchins and urchin removal efforts, 221, 233 marine protected areas (MPAs), 213, 214, 216 Marshall, George, 43–44 Mayacamas to Berryessa Landscape Connectivity Network, 22–23 McKay, Mabel, ix–xi McLaughlin Natural Reserve, 16–17, 17, 19–20; Mayacamas to Berryessa Landscape Connectivity Network, 22–23 McNamara, Craig, 70–71, 72–73, 77 McNamara, Robert, 72 McNamara, Sean, 70, 76

[ 268 ]

Mendocino County: Climate Action Mendocino, 24, 26–27 Merced Avenue Greenway Project (South El Monte), 165–66 methane emissions, 34, 61, 65, 89, 90 Micheli, Lisa, 4–5, 6, 9, 22 Michigan-California Timber Company, 124 microrefugia, 131–33 Mihailova, Marina, 172–73, 174 mining, 148, 149–50 Miranda, Veronica, 36–39 Mitro, Eileen, 24, 26–27 Mojave Desert, 130, 131–33; the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, 143–50. See also desert lands monitoring programs. See community science initiatives Monterey Bay Aquarium, 198–201 Monterey Canyon, 200–201, 226 Moran Reforestation Center, 120–21 mosquitoes, 188 Mothers Out Front, 52–55 mountain ecosystems: warming impacts in, 95–96. See also forestlands; Sierra Nevada Mouradian, Kirsten, 50 MPAs (marine protected areas), 213, 214, 216 MudTown Farms, 179–81 Mutkowska, Ewelina, 182, 184 Napa: the future of California winegrowing, 77–80; re-oaking efforts, 78 National Environmental Quality Act reviews, 109

index

National Network for Ocean and Ocean Change Interpretation, 198–99, 223 National Science Foundation, 202 Native Californians. See Indigenous Californians native plants and plant communities: assisted migration and anticipatory planting, 20, 119–22, 228; California’s native black walnut, 67–68; community-based restoration efforts, 34–36, 37–39, 47–51, 78; fire impacts and recovery, 6–7, 8, 9, 16–17, 19; impacts of past climate change on, 11–13; natives for fire resilience, 19–20; natives in agricultural settings, 66, 67, 82; riparian conservation/restoration projects, 34–36, 66, 76, 187, 188, 190; on serpentine soils, 15–17, 19, 20. See also desert lands; forestlands; oaks and oak woodlands; specific plants Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 191–93 Natural Resources Conservation Service, 114 nature journaling, 231–32 New England Aquarium, 223 nitrogen leaching and pollution, 61, 65 nitrous oxide emissions, 61, 64–65, 88 nocino, 71 Nolan, Mike, 117 Northeast Pacific Marine Heatwave (2019), 212 North Pacific Gyre, 197

index

oaks and oak woodlands: acorns as staple food source, 13; fire and, 7, 9–10, 114; oak restoration programs, 47–51, 78, 228; paleoclimatic variation and, 12 ocean and coast, 197–236; abalone and sea star declines, 217–21, 229; the California Current Ecosystem, 197–98, 214–15, 222; coastal Chumash cultural preservation and community science programs, 227–30, 231; kelp health and farming, 220–26, 232, 233; marine carbon absorption, 197, 224, 225–26; the marine/intertidal food web, 199, 213, 214–15, 226; marine protected areas, 213, 214, 216; marine warming/heat waves and their impacts, 212–16, 220, 233–34, 235; metaphors for understanding ocean functions and change, 199–200; ocean acidification, 199–200, 224; ocean-focused outreach initiatives, 198–204, 215–16; San Diego Surfriders’ work, 210–12; sea level rise and living shorelines, 207–10, 224; the Tijuana River Estuary, 204–7; urchins and urchin removal efforts, 221, 233 Oliver, James, 172, 173–74 olives, 80–83 Osterhuber, Randall, 96–97, 98 Ostoja, Steve, 101–2 oyster farming, 224 ozone, ground-level, 159–60 Pacific Forest Trust, 123–26 Pacoima Beautiful and its work, 167–70

[ 269 ]

paleoclimate, 11–14 Palm Springs building code changes, 151–52 Palo Alto community initiatives, 45–46, 48–51 Panamint Valley, 149–50 Parfrey, Jonathan, 161–63 Parker, John, 13 Park Stewardship San Francisco, 37 Pauly, Greg, 191–92 Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians, 80–83 pavement and paving materials, 160, 162–63 PBAs (prescribed burn associations), 113–16 pedestrian-friendly communities, planning/advocacy for, 164–67 Pepperwood Preserve, 3–8, 23, 102–3; Mayacamas to Berryessa Landscape Connectivity Network, 22–23 pine woodlands, 12, 13 Piru stormwater collection project, 182, 183 Plumas County: CLT building construction in, 105, 107; the Plumas Underburn Cooperative, 114–16; waste wood–fueled energy production, 103–4 Plumas County Fire Safe Council, 114, 116 Point Blue Conservation Science, 34, 36, 212, 214, 215–16 political engagement. See civic engagement pollinators, 66–67, 228 pollution: inequitable pollution burdens, 163–64, 239; soil

[ 270 ]

contamination and remediation, 179–80; stormwater runoff in the Los Angeles River, 188; Tijuana River Estuary, 204–5, 206. See also air quality Pomo people: in the Clear Lake area, 13–15; Mabel McKay’s dream, ix– xii Post Koo, Ava, 91, 178–81 Potter, Daniel, 68 Powell, Mary, 199, 200, 201 precipitation patterns: El Niños and super El Niños, 18–19, 208, 214–15; and our water supply future, 62–63, 71–72; snowpack declines and water availability, 62–63, 71, 84, 96–100; year-to-year variability, 17–19, 74, 97. See also drought; water availability and supply prescribed burn associations (PBAs), 113–16 prescribed burning: implementing traditional burning practices, 108–13; local prescribed burn associations (PBAs), 113–16 Print Organize Protest, 234–35 public health: CalEnviroScreen, 163–64; mosquitoes and riparian/ wetland restoration efforts, 188 public policy: consideration of traditional ecological knowledge in, 109, 113; wildfire preparedness planning, 6. See also building requirements and technologies; civic engagement; land use planning and regulation; local law; state law

index

Quail Springs Permaculture, 174, 176 Quinn-Davidson, Lenya, 113 Rabin, Sasha, 174, 176–77 Raffety, Arjay, 217–21, 222 rainfall. See precipitation patterns Ramanathan, Veerabhadran, 208 rangelands: carbon sequestration potential of, 66; prescribed burning programs for, 11, 113–14 range shifts: assisted migration and anticipatory planting, 20, 119–22, 228; Joshua trees and the refugia concept, 131–34; wildlife, 21, 95–96, 135–36; wine grapes, 79–80. See also habitat connectivity and corridors RASCals (Reptiles and Amphibians of Southern California), 191–92 red abalone, 218 red crab, 215 Redmond, Judith, 64, 66, 67, 69 redwoods, 79–80 reefs: artificial reefs, 225; Reef Check monitoring program, 231, 232–34 religious communities and faithbased programs, 44–46 renewable energy. See energy reptiles: range shifts and community monitoring initiatives, 135–37, 191–92 Rich, Lindsey, 133 riparian conservation/restoration: by farmers, 66, 76; along the Los Angeles River, 187, 188, 190; STRAW (Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed), 34–36

index

river revitalization initiatives: Los Angeles River, 186–91; Santa Clara River, 181–85; Tijuana River, 204–7 Robinette, Daniel, 212, 214, 216 Rogers, Laurette, 34–35 roofs: cool roofs, 161–62; living roofs, 39–41; rooftop solar installations, 151, 154–55, 168 Russian River, 63 Ryan, Sarah, 14 Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta water system, 62–63 Saintsbury Winery. See Graves, David salmonids, 35, 108, 109–10, 125, 187 San Bernardino Community College District carbon-neutral building conversion, 153–56 San Diego County: Pauma Band of Luiseño Indians olive orchard project, 80–83 San Diego Surfriders, 210–12 San Fernando Valley: Pacoima Beautiful and its work, 167–70 San Francisco Bay Area, 31–58; Bay wetlands and restoration efforts, 32–36; California Academy of Sciences living roof, 39–41; Cool Block’s neighborhood-based program, 41–43; Coyote Valley wildlife protection efforts, 51–55; diversity of, 31; impacts of sea level rise, 32–33; land use planning for climate resilience, 46–47; Latino Outdoors and its work, 36–39; Palo Alto church-based

[ 271 ]

San Francisco Bay Area (continued) youth programs, 45–46; re-oaking Silicon Valley, 47–51; urban development in, 31–32, 51 San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, 40 San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI), 46–48 San Gabriel Valley bicycle and greenway advocacy, 163, 164–66 San Jose: community choice electricity program, 55–58; and the Coyote Valley protection partnership, 53–55 San Luis Obispo County: community health and sustainability programs, 89–91 San Onofre power plant, 225 San Pablo Baylands, 32–33 Santa Ana winds, 25 Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, 176 Santa Clara River, 181–85 Savannah sparrow, 95 Save the Bay, 31 school-based programs, 34–36, 49, 50, 189–90 science, public attitudes about, 238–39 Scofield, Russell, 144, 147 Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 208 seabirds, 212, 213–16 “The Sea Is Rising, So Must We,” 234–35, 236 sea level rise: living shorelines and, 207–10, 224; potential, 12–13, 197; in the San Francisco Bay Area, 32–33

[ 272 ]

sea otter reintroduction, 221 sea stars, 220, 233 seaweeds, 223–26, 233 serpentine soils, 15–17, 19, 20 SFEI (San Francisco Estuary Institute), 46–48 sheep, 76–77 Short-Lived Climate Pollutants Act, 89 side-blotched lizard, 135, 136 Sierra Club Los Padres Chapter, 182 Sierra Institute, 103 Sierra Nevada: snowpack changes and water availability, 62–63, 71, 84, 96–100; warming projections and impacts, 95–96 Sierra Orchards, 70–71, 72–73, 73, 75–77 Silicon Valley: Coyote Valley conservation, 51–55; re-oaking initiative, 47–51. See also San Francisco Bay Area; specific communities Silurian Valley, 147–48 Silver, Whendee, 66 SLO Grown Kids, 89 smoke, 43, 116 Snapshot Cal Coast, 229 snow and snowpack, 62, 71, 84, 96–100 social ecology, 206 Society for Wilderness Stewardship, 119 soils: biochar additions, 26; carbon farming’s benefits, 62, 65; the mechanics of soil carbon storage, 65–66; soil contamination and remediation, 179–80, 189; soil

index

moisture losses, 74, 78, 96, 140; wetlands soils, 33–34 solar energy development, 140–42, 151 Somes Bar Integrated Fire Management Project, 112 Sonoma County: fire recovery/ preparedness work, 5–6; rural residential development in, 6. See also Pepperwood Preserve; Tubbs fire Sonoran Desert, 132. See also desert lands Source to Sea program (LA River), 189–90 South El Monte, 163–64, 165–66 Southern California Edison, 153 Spotswood, Erica, 47–48 Stackhouse, Jeff, 113 state Climate Smart Agriculture programs, 83; State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP) grants, 76, 80, 87 state law: housing legislation, 167; Marine Life Protection Act of 1999, 213; Short-Lived Climate Pollutants Act, 89; Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, 84, 85–86, 102; Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act, 190–91 State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program (SWEEP) grants, 76, 80, 87 State Water Resources Control Board, 86 STEM diversity and inclusion programs, 201–4

index

storm surges, 19, 197, 208–9 stormwater runoff and management, 182, 183–84, 188 Stover, Katharine, 223–24, 226 Strategic Growth Council grants, 168, 178, 181 STRAW (Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed), 34–36 suburban communities. See urban/ suburban communities sunflower star, 220, 233 Surfers Point, 209 Surfrider Foundation, 209, 210–12 Sustainability Rights Ordinance (Santa Monica), 170–71 sustainable agriculture. See agriculture Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, 84, 85–86, 102 SWEEP (State Water Efficiency and Enhancement Program) grants, 76, 80, 87 Swezy, Camille, 103–4, 116 tamarisk, 139 Tchieng, Ka, 62, 85–87, 88 TEK. See traditional ecological knowledge Temecula Olive Oil Company, 81 temperatures: paleoclimatic variation and native vegetation, 11–12; projected increases, 63, 77, 96, 130, 140, 159; winter temperatures and tree crops, 69–70, 72. See also heat; warming terns, 216 Thoreau, Henry David, 134 Thorne, James, 120–21

[ 273 ]

threatened and endangered species: abalone species and declines, 217–21, 229, 233; California least tern, 216; Clear Lake hitch, 15; desert pupfish, 148–49; desert tortoise, 143; Joshua tree, 131–33, 138, 145 Thunberg, Greta, 172 tidal marshes, 33–34, 47; Tijuana Estuary restoration effort, 206–7 tides, beach erosion and, 208–9 Tijuana River and Estuary, 204–7 Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve, 205 Tingley, Morgan, 96 toxic algal blooms, 212 toxic cleanup efforts, 179–80, 189 traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and practices, x, 13–14, 226–30; public policy consideration of, 109, 113; traditional burning, 107–13 Transformative Climate Communities Grants, 168, 178, 181 transportation: alternative transportation–focused initiatives, 163–67, 168, 170, 172–74, 178; vehicle electrification and infrastructure, 164, 168; vehicle emissions in California, 164 tree-planting initiatives: forest restoration, 121; in urban communities, 47–51, 168, 178, 193 tribal projects and programs. See Indigenous Californians; traditional ecological knowledge; specific tribal groups Tripp, Bill, 108–13

[ 274 ]

Tubbs fire (2017), 3–5, 8, 11, 24–25; planning and land management in the aftermath of, 5–8 tules, 14 tuna crab, 215 UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab, 96–97 UC California Naturalist Program, 136; naturalists’ experiences, 49, 231–32; Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation program, 227 UC Climate Stewards program, xiv UC Cooperative Extension, 83–84, 87, 113, 186–87 UC Davis: Bodega Marine Laboratory, 217, 219; forest restoration tools development, 120–21 UC Master Food Preservers, 90–91 UC McLaughlin Natural Reserve, 16–17, 17, 19–20 UC Riverside Palm Desert Center, 132 Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, 44, 45–46 University of California Museum of Paleontology, 201–2 Urban Nature Research Center (Los Angeles), 192 urban/suburban communities: coastal communities and sea level rise, 209–10; in the deserts, 129, 130, 150–56; the growing threat of fire to, 5; heat island effects, 160; impacts of low-density development, 166–67; increasing climate change impacts in, 42–43; neighborhood-based outreach programs, 41–43; in the Tijuana

index

River watershed, 205–6; wildlandurban interface (WUI) development, 6, 11, 116; wildlife corridors and, 51; as wildlife refugia, 136–37. See also building requirements and technologies; Los Angeles region; San Francisco Bay Area; transportation; wastewater; specific communities urchins and urchin removal efforts, 221, 233 US Army Corps of Engineers, 186, 187, 189 USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, 224 USDA: forest restoration tools, 120–21; Hardiness Zone map changes, 121–22. See also US Forest Service US Forest Service: ex-employees as burn bosses, 114–15; forest management plans and programs, 100–101, 102, 114; Somes Bar tribal burning project, 112 US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network, 230 Valley fire, 9, 10 vehicle electrification, 164, 168 vehicle emissions, 164 Ventura County: stormwater and Santa Clara River management, 181–85; Surfers Point beach rehabilitation, 209 Vo, Danh, 73 Walden Pond phenology data, 134 walnuts: California’s Persian walnut orchards, 68–69, 70–73; native

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black walnut, 67–68 Ward, Gary, 138–40 warming: extreme precipitation events and, 18; future water availability and, 62–63, 71–72, 73–74, 96; the “hothouse Earth” scenario, 12–13; impacts at high elevations, 95–96; impacts on tree crops, 67, 69–72, 81, 84; jet stream changes and, 25; projected temperature increases, 63, 77, 96, 130, 140, 159; San Francisco Bay Area temperatures, 40; threats to coastal communities and marine ecosystems, 197, 218; USDA Hardiness Zone map changes, 121–22; wine grapes and, 77–80. See also heat waste and waste reduction, 61; dealing with wood waste, 26, 102–4; food waste reduction programs, 89–91; Tijuana River flood hazards and, 206. See also pollution wastewater, 186, 204–5 wasting syndrome (sea stars), 220 water availability and supply: agricultural supply and management, 62–63, 64, 71–72, 73–76, 78, 84–87; California’s water storage and distribution systems, 62–63, 71, 75; desert solar farms and, 141, 142; fire and, 110–11; fog-watered redwood forests, 79–80; groundwater depletion and, 182–83; invasive plant species and, 138, 139, 140; precipitation whiplash and its impacts, 17–19, 74, 97;

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water availability (continued) Sierra snowpack’s role in, 62–63, 71, 84, 96–97. See also drought; groundwater supply and management; precipitation patterns water law, 63–64 Watermen’s Alliance, 221 water quality, 6, 15, 61, 65 Watts Labor Community Action Committee, 91, 179 Watts Rising Collaborative, 91, 178–81 Wayburn, Laurie, 123, 124 weed abatement ordinances, 19 weeds. See invasive plant species Weed Warriors, 138–40 Western Klamath Restoration Partnership, 112 western snowy plover, 216 wetlands, 14–15, 20, 33–36, 47, 206–7 Wheeler North Reef project, 225 whiptail lizards, 135, 136 White, Lisa, 201–4 Wilderness Connect, 119 Wilderness Corps, 117–19 wildfire. See fire entries wildland-urban interface (WUI) development, 6, 11, 116 wildlife: climate adaptability of, 21; as cultural keystones, 229; desert solar installations and, 141–43; desert wildlife declines and range shifts, 130–31, 133, 134–37; freshwater marshes and, 14; Grinnell Resurvey Project, 130–31; invasive plant removal benefits for, 139; oaks and, 78; wildfire and,

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5, 19–20; wildlife-human disease transmission, 238. See also community science initiatives; habitat connectivity and corridors; marine life; pollinators; specific types of wildlife winds, wildfire and, 26, 27 wine grape growing, 77–80 winter temperature increases, 69–70, 72 Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation programs, 227–30, 231 withering syndrome (abalone), 218 wood products, sustainable, 104–5 wood waste, 26, 102–4 WoodWorks Wood Products Council, 104–5 working-lands conservation, 126. See also agriculture; forestlands; rangelands Wright, Jessica, 120–21 WUI (wildland-urban interface) development, 6, 11, 116 Yang, Michael, 83–84, 87 Yolo County: Full Belly and other Capay Valley farms, 64–67; Sierra Orchards, 70–71, 72–73, 73, 75–77 youth programs: Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, 45–46. See also school-based programs zebra-tailed lizards, 135 zoning. See land use planning and regulation zoonotic diseases, 238

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About the Authors

Adina Merenlender is a cooperative extension specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an internationally recognized conservation biologist. She has published over 100 scientific research articles on landscape ecology, habitat connectivity, and environmental education. She is the founding director of UC California Naturalist. Brendan Buhler is an award-winning science writer whose work has been featured in Sierra magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and California magazine. His story on biologist Rob Knight was selected for the 2012 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing.

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