Speaker 1: All right, welcome to another episode of a crime page.
But Bodany doesn't podcast. I'm here with Somitra kel Car,
who is a former public educator, former biology teacher, and
also runs the Oakland Bio Instagram page, which is how
I learned about you. And I lived in Oakland for
twenty years, so a lot of the stuff you cover
is very near and dear to my heart. And yeah, man,
I'm really excited to just shoot the shit with you.
Speaker 2: So how you doing.
Speaker 3: Thanks, I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: So the thing, a couple of things I wanted to
start off talking about. First, was this this dude cut
down a bunch of trees on this hillside. Where was
it like Claremont District or something, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was right across the street from Garber Park
if you know where that is.
Speaker 1: Okay, I remember just driving through there. I used to
drive through there to get to UC Berkeley Botanic Garden,
which I would go to like religiously, like twice a week.
Speaker 2: So in Tilden too.
Speaker 1: The Native Yeah, the Native Garden of Tilden where they
got Ornithos Stafflos, they got a bunch of cool shit,
like the whole California, Floristic province. It's not just California.
And they going to bah too, so so I would
drive through there and you know, they got the fucking
all the you know, fancy shit. There's fancy lads. You know,
it's a fancy lad neighborhood. They got the what is
that fance the big building it's like a was it
a golf course or something?
Speaker 3: I think there's like the the Claremont Hotel, that big
white castle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you ever been in there?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I have been there.
Speaker 2: I've never been in there. I want to. I should go.
Speaker 1: I should have gone and loitered in there and seen
if they had nice bathrooms before I left. I never
did that twenty years in Oakland. Never fucking went in anyway.
So this guy, he's a rich guy. He bought this
piece of property and the coast live Oaks, got the
beautiful trees, these massive just fucking they weigh tons right
like they were like, you know, as much as a
box car, and and they're everywhere, and they've got this
whole I mean, they're the base of the ecosystem there.
Speaker 2: That's what Oakland is.
Speaker 1: It's like Oakland, you know, California Bay Laurel Madrone, toy On,
et cetera. And so this guy, why he cut all
these trees? Give us the loan on what happened? Why
the fuck they cut all these trees down?
Speaker 3: Yeah, great question. There's a San Francisco Chronicle article about
it that came out in December that has probably more
accurate details than I can recount on my own. But
as far as I understand, he and his partner purchased
the property in twenty twenty. It was zoned for residential housing,
like one of those I think. The City of Oakland
has a designation called Hillside Residential, which basically means like
single family homes on these gigantic, sprawling parcels. But the
City of Oakland also has a Protected Tree Ordinance, which
protects all of the trees in the urban forest, including
trees on private property. And the reason that policy exists
is that the policy explicitly states that trees protect the
public good by providing benefits like wildfire prevention by creating
natural shaded fuel breaks, which these trees were definitely doing,
and then also pervying landslides by holding hillsides together, and
then other benefits that are more typical for trees planted
in urban environments, like providing shade, cooling the air, trapping
some amount of particulate pollution, damping noise pollution, sustaining biodiversity,
and urban habitats. So these public benefits that don't end
at property boundaries are the reason that these trees are
protected under the Protect a Tree Ordinance. So if you
purchase a property in Oakland that has trees on it
that you want to remove to develop, you have to
go through the process of applying for a permit, and honestly,
I think the Protect a Tree Ordinance could do a
better job of protecting trees. The ordinance basically says that
once you apply for a permit, if you want to
remove trees, you first have to figure out if you
can redesign your development proposal to minimize the amount of
trees you remove, and then part of the permit approval
process is making sure that you are accountable to replanting
trees to restore or to replace the amount of canopy
that you lost, So you don't necessarily have to replant
them on same site, but you are responsible for replacing
some amount of tree canopy, which you know. I think
it could be modified to be like, okay, it should
be native trees, which currently that's not really a requirement.
But anyways, but what this property owner did is tried
to apply for the permit, didn't hear back in like
a couple of weeks, which is not long enough to
to get a permit from the government agency, and then
went ahead and cut down like thirty eight trees, basically
deforested the entire property and the parts of the neighboring properties,
one of which launch shitty, one of which belonged to
a neighbor.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 1: So this this guy went, this guy went big. So wait,
first off, I want to say that that tree ordinance
that I mean, for anybody listening in so many other
states right now, that sounds like a very reasonable ordnance.
Speaker 2: It sounds like the way it should be.
Speaker 1: Just because you buy something, you know, where these semi
conscious primates with eighty ninety year lifespans max. These trees
live for hundreds of years, you shouldn't be able to
just whimsically go in and cut these things down. Their
community assets. They belong to everybody, And this go this
is like this ideology is what you know. You get
all these right wing motherfuckers complaining of I just you know,
I'm sorry, I'm not trying to I'm trying to not
sound you know, you can hear the indignation of my voice.
But you get these people complaining about regulations that prevent
them from these arrogant rich fucks, you know, and this
is what they're complaining of, about these very well reasonable,
you know, well reasoned laws that benefit everybody, and that
should you know, should one hundred percent be in every state,
like this should be a that should be a state law.
And so anyway, So so I mean that alone. I
mean because in Texas, you buy it, you know, Texas
is where I live now for family reason, you buy it.
You can do whatever you want. It doesn't matter if
it's a critically endangered plant. It doesn't matter if you
want to, like, you know, make a festival that's all
about destroying it. You know, you get a little festive,
make it like a joyous occasion, you know, kind of
just like you know, I mean, you could do whatever,
you could do whatever. I mean, it's it's it's yours.
It's it's seen as being yours, which is totally insane
to me. And if you go across the border to Mexico.
That's not the case either. They've got the AHIDO system.
It's publicly owned land. It's literally community owned land that
was set up after the Mexican Revolution.
Speaker 2: It's awesome. Yeah, so this is a reason.
Speaker 1: So why did this guy, I don't understand why did
he think he could get away with it? Like, what
have you been able to glean from? Why he didn't? Wait,
he surely had the new they know they were going
to fuck him. Which didn't they just give him like
a million dollar fine or something or I don't know
what the uh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they ended up giving him a million dollar fine.
And the valuation of that million dollars was based on
I forget which organization, but it's one of those organizations
that deals with urban forest canopy. So the valuation of
each tree he cut down was based on the size
of the tree and the amount of benefit that it
provides in the context of being planted like in a
tree well as a single standalone street tree. So the
value of the ecosystem that he completely destroyed is just
immeasurable and way beyond the find that he was charged.
But you know, that's that's the protected tree policy. I
think he thought he was going to get away with
it because number one, the family isn't from Oakland. They
don't currently live in Oakland as far as I can tell.
They split their time in the US and Russia, and
they currently live in Emoryville, which is the next city
over from Oakland. So they purchased this parcel that they
didn't actually live in the city yet, and I think
they thought they were going to be able to get
away with it because the dude is apparently rich. According
to one of the neighbors, he basically said that he
has deep pockets and connections and high places, so he's
not afraid of what the neighbors are going to do
if they try to cite him for cutting the trees.
So she ended up getting a restraining order against the neighbor,
which I can't say I blame him. After hearing the
neighbors speak at the city council meeting, I was like, this,
this is you know, it's not an ideal issue or
not an ideal situation.
Speaker 1: So wait, wait, wait, I listen, I lived there for
twenty years. I know what it's like. Was the person
the neighbor would, I mean, what's a nice way to
say they were nuts? Or they were just like over
the top or what I mean, like what exactly, I'm
just curious.
Speaker 2: We don't need to even so.
Speaker 3: One of the things that was stated in the city
council meeting that I don't doubt that this is real.
Apparently at least one of the neighbors threatened to call
ICE on him because he's an immigrant from Nigeria.
Speaker 1: Oh shit, that's pretty feel Yeah, so this is like, yeah,
oh my god, but ICE is only for poor people too,
I mean that's the thing, right, yeah, So because and
then this is the other like funny element too, is
like there were arguments right at first that like, well,
he's a point, he's like a marginalized They're like the
full identity politics class deaf identity politics. They were like, well,
maybe we should let him off the hook because he's
a POC or something too. I mean, you had like
both both sides of the nut job spectrum.
Speaker 3: Correct. Yeah. I was quite disappointed by that argument because
it was very clear that the Protector Tory Ordnance in
Oakland is supposed to protect the public good, especially with
all of the benefits that come from having trees and
to hear city council members saying that it would be
racially just to not allow a black man to commit
the same injustice that white people have committed in the past.
I was like, I think you're I think you're missing
the point of why injustice is bad. It's like people
think that we saw racial injustice by allowing people with
all you know, chas and colors to commit the same plastenses. Yes, right, right,
That's how I was. I was very disappointed by.
Speaker 2: That's fucking amazing.
Speaker 1: That is like such a I gotta like recite that
because that sums up like just the total class deaf
like identity politics of the last six years that like
I think turned a lot of people over to trump Ism.
But but anyway, anyway, that's a whole other argument. I
just find it fucking amusing. But so anyway, so this guy,
he's wealthy as hell, he does this. A million bucks
is nothing because this is like I mean, yeah, these
are not only is it that's gonna how much is
it going to cost the city? Because this is on
a slope too, right, So when you remove the roots
that hold the soil together and you get torrential rains
in the winter, how much is that going to cost?
The city and anybody down below him to uh, yeah,
you know I've done. It's not a million bucks. It's
going to be a lot more money than that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm betting it's going to be a lot more
money than that, because if there's a major landslide, then
like half of Claremont Avenue is going to be unusable,
maybe more until all that soil gets cleared out. And
the other big issue is that now that all the
trees are gone, basically the entire hillside is just as
like full on thicket of Italian dicile card you with picnocephalus,
And when that stuff dries out, it's it's difficult to
remove because it's got these like nasty spines, so it's
hard for workers to work in it, it's hard for
livestock to graize it down. And you know they do
clear this side every year, but it's like in the
time between when that this will dries out and when
the hillside gets cleared, it can carry fire much much
more quickly than any like healthy oak understory plants. Yeah,
so that that I think is a and there's like
multiple multimillion dollar homes around, So if that catches on
fire and does serious property damage to the area. I
wonder if he would be held liable. I think he
should be, but we'll see.
Speaker 1: A million bucks is nothing. I mean, he should It
shouldn't even be about like finding him just to take
the money for the city. It should be like, you
have to spend money to completely restore this right like.
Speaker 3: You Yeah, and that's that. The kind of infuriating part
to me about all of this is that since he
didn't go through the permit process. The Tree Protection Ordinance
lays out the fines that you're supposed to get for
violate it, but the fines don't include remedying any damage
you've done. So if he went through the proper permit process,
he probably would have been allowed to remove eleven out
of those thirty eight trees, and he would have been
required to leave the rest. But since he didn't go
through the permit process, he got rid of all the trees,
and since he violated the permit process, there is no
requirement for him to replant any kind of trees. So basically,
he'll pay the fine and he's still allowed to own
the property. He's still allowed to develop on the property.
Speaker 2: Thirty eight trees is insane.
Speaker 1: Man especially coast live oaks, porkis agrafolia, those get super,
they get big, they get it.
Speaker 3: Oh norm Yeah, there's some big oaks on that property.
Speaker 1: So how big is the area he cleared? Like a
football field size there in or what.
Speaker 3: I would say a bit smaller than that. It was
a like a pretty large parcel, the kind of parcel
that you'd normally see like kind of a big mansion
sitting on on a hillside in Oakland. Yeah, since maybe
like an acre or two.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, God, I've gotten so since living in Texas, I've
gotten so callous to that. I mean I just from
that kind of shit, just from seeing it so much.
I mean the amount of dis I mean we were
like we were digging up astrophytem this extremely like critically
endangered cactus species and a site that was being demolished
to put in like you know, suburbs you would see
in like the Fort Worth area, but down here in
the desert, and they're gonna go they're gonna like try
to grow grass and shit. It's just like completely shit
for brand I mean, you know, completely Yeah. I can't
wait to see it all abandoned and dead, dead lawns
and ten years. Texas should be putting in water restrictions soon,
I think, not like, you know, I feel like they
should be.
Speaker 2: Uh, that's what they should be doing. They're probably going
to be doing it like any day now. They're already,
you know, because the water situation here is just so
so fucked.
Speaker 1: But so yeah, like it would be ideal with that
guy instead of like find a million bucks, like you
have to.
Speaker 2: You have to completely restore this.
Speaker 1: You have to plant natives, and you have to pay
for maintenance to keep weed whacking the invasives. Until the
seed bank is exhausted and the natives are able to
they get big enough to outcompete it, it's not an
issue anymore.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, man, damn.
Speaker 1: Well that brings up speaking of the invasives though, there
was a I saw another clip you did which was
really really struck me. I mean I was just so like, god,
damn man, I'm glad someone's saying this. It was the
you know, people always say nature is resilient and and
it's you know, the planet's going to be fine. So
it's not really going to be fine, Like we're in
a mass extinction. It's not resilient. And then you pointed
out everything growing in this patch of in the Oakland Hills.
Everything there is invasive. It's it's not it doesn't benefit
the ecology. It's not didn't evolve here. It's it's important
somewhere else, five thousand miles away. But you know, everything
that's so integral to this, this machine, this ecological machine
that is the local ecosystem here is getting smothered by
by these you know, mostly Mediterranean weeds, which I think
is really exactly you know, for anybody who does ecology
or pays an attention to plants in California. I mean,
there's that moment when it dawns on you and you
see those Golden Hills and you realize all that shit
is is invasive. It's it's wasn't here a hundred years ago,
you know, yep, yeah, So what is it? What has
it been like for you? I mean getting because when
I was living and I lived in Oakland, but I
was always traveling to get you know, I would go
on little like day trips and stuff they like clear
my head. But when I wanted to look at Bonnie,
I go to the desert's up the Ciscu County or something.
What's it been like for you getting to, you know,
familiarize yourself with the actual East Bay.
Speaker 2: Native plant biome. You know, and how has it changed
your outlook?
Speaker 3: Oh man, It's been such an eye opening experience. I
think a lot of what I've been able to learn
has come from other people who have also been doing
this a lot longer than I have. I know, you've
had Damon Taie on your show before, and he's been
so generous with his knowledge and show me so many
things that I never even would have thought existed, especially
in a place like Oakland and so well. I started
getting into it because I, I mean, I've always been
really interested in living things. I grew up in this
super vanilla cookie cutter suburb in southern California where there
was literally no trace of the native ecology except for
if you read on Wikipedia that the concrete ditch in
your neighborhood is actually used to be a river. That's
pretty much the closest thing I ever got to like
my local ecology. So I was interested in native plants,
but I didn't really like understand the point. I just
thought it was cool that there's like plants from here.
I had no real understanding of all the symbiotic interactions
that allow native plants to sustain life in ways that
other plants cannot. So when I was high school, I
was planting a lot of non native stuff because I
was just like, oh, cool flowers, it'll attract hummingbirds or whatever,
you know. And then I went to college and started
studying forestry, and in one of the courses in the
forestry program at UC Berkeley is this thing called Forestry
Field Camp or Forestry Camp, and the UC has this
campus in the Plumus National Forest that they're operating on
a special use permit, and they've been in that campus
for like over one hundred years now, so it's a
very long running program. And one of the earlier things
you're required to learn in that course while you live
in the forest for two months is you have to
learn pretty much all of the trees and the woody plants,
and a lot of the non woody plants as well.
We were required to learn I think fifty some species, which,
now that I know a lot more plants, fifty some
does not feel like a lot of species, But at
the time it felt like so much to have to
learn in three weeks. But once we learned it. It
was just such an eye opening experience to exist in
this fully living environment and actually know what the majority
of the species in front of me were like. That
is when I stopped seeing the world as just like
different shades and textures of green and started understanding that
every living creature is part of a unique lineage that
has its unique evolutionary history and circumstances and all that.
And then getting back to the Bay Area, I was like,
wait a minute, now that I'm out of the Plumus
National Forest, I don't recognize any of the plants anymore.
And that feeling of having that deep familiarity with your
surroundings went away all of a sudden, And that's what
kind of got me to start learning Bay Area species.
But I don't think I was really serious about it
until twenty twenty one. I was teaching biology at Skyline
High School, which is it's an Oakland public school. It's
part of Oakland Unified School District, and it serves the
same populations as the other Oakland Public schools, but unlike
the other Oakland Public schools, it is located at the
crest of the Oakland Hills along Skyline Boulevard. So it
gets a ton of fog drip, and it's just this
really really unique, fog driven mixed evergreen forest that kind
of acts like a rainforest in some places, a really
cool place. And there's all these like rings of redwoods
on and around the campus that are, you know, ten
twenty feet wide, and it just kind of makes you
think of what it would have been like to see
this gigantic pillar of redwood stand here, and that people
did see it there for like thousands of years until
just one hundred and fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: There used to be three hundred and fifty foot tall trees,
maybe three hundred I think in the in fucking Oakland.
Speaker 2: That's insane. That's crazy.
Speaker 3: It's insane. Yeah. And the other advantage to teaching at
that school, besides you know, seeing the echoes of the
giant forest that used to be there, was that. So
my background is in mycology. I got into studying by
diversity pretty serios through mushroom forging after I came back
from forestry camp. That was one of the things that
connected me so strongly to the locally college in the
Bay Area, and especially connected me very strongly to Coast
Live oak because Coast live oak is the main micro
risle host for most of the edible mushrooms you want
to find anyway. So because of my back of the
mushroom forging, and because of the school's location in this
mixed ever green forest, I was able to take the
kids out mushroom foraging all the time. And then as
I learned more about the plants, we went foraging for
you know, different plant parts, and I ended up finding
like a three acre grove of huckleberries right behind the
schools campus, and the huckleberries tasted uniquely good, which leads
me to believe that that grove was tended and selectively
bred over centuries by indigenous people. And the other bit
of evidence I have that supports that idea is that
we also found quite a few gooseberry bushes Riby's menzzi,
the canyon gooseberry or hillside brewsberry. I don't know what's
the common name of Ribby's menzzi. Do you know? If
the top of your head.
Speaker 2: No, I haven't, I don't.
Speaker 1: I pri arily pay attention to common names, and a
crowd of plants have fallen out of my vocabulary like
genera gotcha?
Speaker 3: Gotcha? Anyway, So we were finding these ribies men zizi I,
and as soon as they started producing berries, I was like,
wait a minute, these berries are enormous, first of all,
compared to all of the other ribbies I've seen. Second
of all, they don't have thorns on the outside that
they have these like sticky glandular hairs, but not thorns,
And I found that very strange. I tried to key
it out in jetson. There's only two varieties, and it
wasn't either of them. Yeah, And then I posted it
on a naturalists and someone I think here Morse commented
and said that it was riby's men'sizii bar faustom, which
is a variety I had never heard of.
Speaker 2: Man, that's fucking crazy to think.
Speaker 3: About, exactly. Yeah, and it's a variety that seems to
only be found in the Berkeley and Oakland Hills. So
that's another piece of evidence that that place was probably
heavily tended by indigenous people and the plants there were
selectly bred. Yeah, And that place is just it's amazing.
It's so rich in huckleberries and hazelnuts and these interesting
gooseberries and just like everything in that part of the
woods is edible. All the oaks are coppae, So you've
got these like massive old oaks with these like gnarled
like and covered trunks. That's just like four to six
trunks straight out of the ground.
Speaker 2: That was That was aloney, right, that was all alone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, god man, can you imagine that? That must
have been a fucking what an. I just like it
because it's such an easy place to live because it's
the only bummer I think that they had was grizzlies.
I heard they didn't like grizzlies very much, and I
can understand. I cannot understand that because grizzlies would fuck
your shit up. They'd come raid your food, and then
when you try to fight back, they try to eat you.
Speaker 3: But yeah, that sounds terrifying.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean, I mean it's pretty ideal.
Speaker 1: The human select I mean, that's such a good example.
Why can't we do that now? Like, why can't we
do that with natives?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: You know, like the foraging or the permaculture thing is
so you know, because people are really into permaculture a lot.
That's kind of like a gateway to the plants whatever.
And there's like some weird shit that comes out of
that sometimes, like you know, the invasion, the denial of invasion, biology, whatever.
But it's cool that it gets people into plants. But like, man,
when you start the thing with permaculture is like you know,
in the US, there there are a lot of the
permaculture knowledge is based on Eurasian plants, And why don't
you take that that you know, that selective breeding, because
it's all it is and humans have been doing it
for thousands of years. Do it on natives, you know,
like like you know, native people in the US were
doing they were doing that with commas camasia, which is
you know, agaves, it's a gave relative. They were doing
Like where I live, there's there's a gave. There's disjunct
populations of a gave where they shouldn't be a gave.
It's too fucking hot. It's it's like deep thorn scrub.
But then you go south across the border two hours
into Mexico where you get elevation, and those agaves are everywhere.
You're like, okay, well, these aregaves are now way out,
they're stressed out, they're like barely hanging on, and they
were obviously planted here in a place that seemed like
would be an ideal place to live, right above the
Rio Grande River on.
Speaker 2: These beautiful bluffs.
Speaker 1: That's if you're you know, that's where you're gonna be.
You're gonna be posted up near the water stores and
they're you know, you can tell where they were brought.
They were brought from the mountain to the Sierra Madre,
two or three hours south.
Speaker 2: You know. It's it's that. But that thing with the
the rivies, man, that's fucking cool.
Speaker 1: I didn't know about that. Is anybody did you? Did
you try to grow them?
Speaker 3: I have not yet. I should probably drop a location
to one of my friends is interested in that stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that would be really cool man, to get like,
get that into cultivation and then I don't know, just
you know, bring it back. What is the thing.
Speaker 1: The thing I love about some of the Bay Area
ridges too, is like, yeah, you've got the redwood force,
but then you've.
Speaker 2: Got those exposures of I.
Speaker 1: Believe it's like Miocene Miocene shales and sandsungs and stuff,
and you go up there and it's.
Speaker 2: Like total chaparral, Like, uh, yeah, what is that little.
Speaker 1: Cuddy town that all the hippies lived in? Canyon, right,
you go up there. We used to go up there
to look at like there's disjunc there's a disjunct stand
of a species of knob cone pine, and there's arctos
aphalos up there and a bunch of.
Speaker 3: I've seen the I've seen the knobcone pine population on
I naturalists, and I was wondering if it was just
like people had planted it. But I guess maybe like
indigenous people planted it or something.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's it's probably just I mean, I
think it probably just occurs there because it's a different
do the geology, it's a different stet you know, it's
a little bit drier and so like Redwood's it's not
going to be redwood forest, but it's it's drier, so
you've got more manzanitas. And I remember we used to
always go up there and park and like this this.
I don't know what he was, man. He was like
some bearded guy who was always angry, and he'd be like.
Speaker 2: That's just that's just private property. You got parking. Fuck you,
old man.
Speaker 1: We always like fighting. We're just looking at stuff. Why
are you being a dick? Leave us alone? You know,
But it's a cool it's a fire road that goes
through there, and yeah, it's it's a really cool and
unique habitat Pete Pete vay lou at uh East Bay Wilds.
Speaker 2: I think showed me that spot.
Speaker 3: Oh that's cool.
Speaker 2: I know. Do you ever go to that nursery I have?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think it's really cool. Oh.
Speaker 2: He's fucking such a sweet man. I love him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, he was telling me about Oh nice. He
was telling me about a client that he had who
wanted him to do like a native plant garden for them.
And they lived in the Cresmont neighborhood on the Serpentine
outcrop that I've been really interested in lately, And thank goodness,
he was the person they asked to do their garden
design because he was basically like, I'm not going to
put any plants that aren't from here, because this is
one of the rarest and most unique botanical habitats that
we have left, and everything that is here is the
stuff that's supposed to be here. Yeah, And I think
a lot of people just don't realize how special and
unique each place on Earth is. They've been convinced that,
you know, biodiversity exists, somewhere else, and that for us
to create biodiversity, we have to wipe out all the
you know, not biodiversity that's there so we can create
something better. And I'm like, no, like learn, learn the
plants that are already there.
Speaker 1: No, it's fucked, it's and well I think the whole there,
you know, I don't know what the fuck if I
was like yeah, coffin, I was like sucking goblin dick
early Todam. Sorry anyway, But there's a you know, there's
there's nature, and then there's u there's gardening, there's horticulture.
And this is where the problem runs into is that
you've got you know, horticulture is rooted in this European bullshit,
the Victorian gardens and Spanish colonial shit, and and nature
is something separate. So like, if you're gonna garden, you
don't want to plant the natives, right, you want to plant?
You don't want to plant this the weeds that are
around you. You want you want you know, bogain V's
and all this corny shit from wherever from the garden center, right,
you don't want you don't why not just like a like, no,
this is the habitat that you you know, you're whether
you're in you know, Madrone Oak Forest and that's a
really cool habitat and so get to know all the
cool species there and so just restore that and around
your house. So now you're just living in the habitat
that's been there for hundreds of thousands of years, and
you're gonna have all the cool insects, the salamanders, the
scrub jays, all the cool you know, like and all
the all the animals that come back. Like that's what
I think needs to change. But it's again, it's this mindset.
You know, it's like, oh, we're parting a new housing development,
and so we've got to go out and you've got to.
Speaker 2: Clear everything like that.
Speaker 1: Kyle Liberger in Alabama Native Habitat Project, He's always talking
about that they go in. There's these beautiful Alabama prairies
that developers fucking bulldoze everything. Why not just leave some
of the native plant They're fucking great plants, Like why
are you You're bulldozing all this shit and then you're
planting the dumbest shit possible that's from somewhere else and
doesn't have any connection to the land.
Speaker 2: And I have hope because I think this can change.
I see it changing.
Speaker 1: You point out a fucking stupidness is in a nicer
way than I'm describing it to you. But you know
we're buddy buddying right here. I can voice my contempt.
I would code switch if I was talking, but you know,
you say it here.
Speaker 3: No, I have to do a lot of I have
to do a lot of myself.
Speaker 2: It's hard, though, it's hard.
Speaker 3: It is hard.
Speaker 2: You're like, what the fuck are you doing? What are
you doing? What do you do?
Speaker 1: Like just stop and think about this, like you're part
of everything. But what you were talking about that part
when you you know, you realize, like everything stops being
green weeds and now it's part of a lineage and
an ecosystem and a literal living machine, a living puzzle
that is. That's like a kin to psychedelics. That's a
kin to Maybe I shouldn't say this for the squares
in Texas because people are still afraid of psychedelics here.
You know, it's a result of the Nickstonian drug warn Ivan.
But but it's like it's like waking up. It's like realizing, yes,
I am part of this, like living with the human
world is infantesmally small all, you know, and we're all
part of this this complex web of species, you know,
all equally valuable, and we don't own this land. We're
just stewarding it and caring for it. So it's yeah,
and then you go to a new place, you agree,
You're like, fuck, I don't know anything. I want to
know what these are, you know what these plants are?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I really I really resonate with that,
I think, I mean, number one, just the idea that
a human can own land and not the other way
around is just so what an absurd fantasy that the
literal surface of the earth that has been here for
billions of years can just be carved up with imaginary
lines on a map and then commodified like any manufactured
product that you can know by use and dispose of.
And the idea that the laws that govern what you
can do with you know, this ancient living land are
the same as the laws that govern what you can
do with a piece of plastic that was, you know,
manufactured in the factory. That's just insane to me, and
that needs to change. But you know, people don't want
to give up the power that they already have and
the other thing I think that struck me, especially learning
about plants and learning how to see the evolutionary history
and the lineage and understanding that these are creatures that
are along this very long line of generations upon generations
of creatures that have lived and died and reproduced based
on their traits. To realize that, you know, I've always
been interested in human evolution, but to me it was
always about like, Oh, there's these cool fossils, and like
structures in these fossils that tell us like when we
evolve to walk up right, and when we have all
to use fire and all that stuff. And after teaching
high school, especially at a school like Skyline, where I
could take kids out into the woods and they're actually
in a natural environment that's not designed for their safety
and comfort versus when I lost my job at Skyline
because the school distriction and agains and I had to
move to a different school in the same district, being
on a campus where kids don't have any kind of
access to any environment that's not deliberately built and designed
by humans, that really made me realize that just like
these lineages of plants that are so specifically adapted to
these specific conditions, and that they grow fundamentally differently or
not successfully if they're outside of those conditions. We have
forgotten the conditions under which we as a species evolved.
And I think a lot about what it's like. Yeah,
And I think about this a lot with kids too,
because kids are so much like you know, kids are
not born with preconceived notions about how society is supposed
to work. So I think the younger kid kids are,
the closer they are to this kind of I don't
want to say primal, but like the true nature of
what it is to be a human.
Speaker 1: They haven't been soiled, their spirit hasn't been soiled yet
exactly consumer society and stupid rules and all this, you
know what I mean, it's uh yep.
Speaker 3: And I think in any ways, when we force kids
to grow up in environments that we have entirely designed
for their safety and comfort because we're afraid of like
lawsuits or like we don't want our kids to get
hurt or whatever we are deliberately withholding, we are taking
them away from the environment that they evolved to thrive in.
Like kids evolved to thrive by running around and hitting
each other with sticks and falling down and getting hurt
and getting scratches and splinters and bruises and poisono crashes,
and then getting up and getting over it and being okay.
And when kids don't have those experiences, especially when all
of their experiences take place either in the context of
organized sports or organized academics or indoors in a rectangular
room or on their phone scrolling an algorithm that's design
to give them pleasure and nothing else. We just it's
so maladaptive. It's like we're trying to grow plants outside
of their habitat and conditions that are so wildly unnatural
and then wondering why they're not doing it.
Speaker 2: It's like watering your plants with Brondo. That's what it's like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if I can make an Idiocracy reference, but very
after the times, but you know, yeah, that's one of
the things that I want to start doing more is
working with schools. Because someone invited me to speak at
a junior high here in South Texas like two months ago.
I was like, all right, I mean, because I fucking
cursed out whatever, but I can you know again, I
could code switch. It was just whatever. I worked for
a fucking rail for fifteen years.
Speaker 2: It's hard.
Speaker 1: But but so I went and spoke to these junior
high kids. It was like, how many of you know
what a native plant is? How many of you know
any of the plants that are here? And then I
was like, this is your heritage, man, this is the
land that you you grew up on, right, Like you
want to know what's here like we and I always
bring this up. I'm like, if you humans have been
a species somewhere between three hundred thousand and a million
years so that we've been in the state that the
exact you know, our genome has been what it is now,
a right slight alterations, but and so for most of
that time, a good ninety nine point nine percent of
that we were around the plants that you know they were.
They were everywhere, like not just farming, but like wild plants,
right because there wasn't sprawl everywhere. Our kids would go
run and play in forests or chaparral or scrub or
gt meadows, grasslands, whatever. And it's only been the last
few centuries that we've been alienated from that. And so
how do you think that affects the human psyche when
you go from you know, this thing that you basically
were born in and nurtured in, and suddenly you're completely
cut off and you spend most of your day in
a car, at a desk, or in you know, or
or just at home staring at a screen, Like do
you think that has any effect in your mental and
emotional wellbeing? And if you don't think so, that like
that's why not? Like that seems crazy to me, right,
Like we evolve to run, same thing. We evolve to
run and chase things and get physical activity. And then
now you know, so many of us spend most of
our time sitting down, Like how do you think that
that's why we have all these metabolic diseases that we
come down with the same thing for the psyche, it's
this exact same thing.
Speaker 2: And so I wanted, you know, just getting people more.
Speaker 1: I think nature education should be one hundred percent mandatory
for elementary school. It really should, like not just like
go go like germinate some cantalopes, you know, for a garden,
Like it's like, no know the native plants. We're gonna
go hang out, We're gonna look at the birds. We're
gonna give the kids binoculars. We're gonna go we're gonna
learn plant names. We're gonna learn like what a flower is.
It's a reproductive structure and it makes seeds, which you
know are then a current of fruit, like all that
stuff should be like before fifth grade, man, before fifth grade. Oh,
it gets them outside too, for fox's sake. It gets
them outside. And it's you know, it's that's for kids, man,
Because I've got a six year old daughter and we
love she's she gets, you know, enough of it from
me because my yard is just you know, all thorn scrub.
We'll go look at lizards and bugs, and so she
picks up spiders. Man, I'm so fucking proud of her,
Like how many kids, you know, so many kids are
afraid of spiders. Like I have to tell her some
of the spiders you can't pick up, right, You gotta
be careful. But you know, that's I just it's it's
such a part well part of it's such a good
part of a well rounded childhood.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: So when you were teaching, you taught high school.
Speaker 3: You said, yep, ninth grade, So I guess Inkland.
Speaker 1: So most of the kids, you know, most of the
kids in Oakland are probably I mean, there's still everyone's
addicted to screens and video games and ship but a
lot of them probably were, you know, would have more
experience with nature than maybe say where I live right
or we're more appreciative of it, what was your experience.
Speaker 3: I think many of them were appreciative of it. I
also think many of them were very fearful of it,
especially because even in Oakland, you know, you're never more
than seven miles away from an undeveloped open space. But
also there's certain parts of Oakland where if you live
there and you don't really you know, prioritize getting out
in nature because you know who's going to tell you
how great it is. If it's just never been part
of of what your parents have taken you out to
do when you were a kid. Yeah, just a lot
of people in Oakland are so disconnected from nature, especially
because all of these all of these open spaces, like
in the East Bare Regional Parks for instance, all of
these places are kind of hidden behind neighborhoods that are
these big, sprawling developments of windy roads. So for the
most part, even though nature is physically nearby, it's still
not that accessible to the majority of people, especially like
low income people and people of color, and people living
formerly redline neighborhoods and Oakland. So I think we still
have a long way to go in terms of creating
natural ecosystems for kids to actually experience. Because when I
was at Skyline, like at the beginning of the school year,
when I was first taking kids into the woods, there's
a very clear difference in how kids felt about being
out there because for a lot of these kids, like, like,
we're not on a trail, there's no signs, there's no rangers,
there's no bathrooms, there's no trash cans, there's no Wi Fi,
there's no phone reception. So when you're out there, you're
out there. You're like in the wilderness, even though you're
you know, stones throw from the school campus. So for
a lot of these kids, especially kids who had not
really spent time like backpacking with their families for instance,
which you know most kids haven't done that, it's a
very fearful experience at first. And I think only through
understanding the ecosystem and the way things work and how
things actually live, do kids slowly begin to gain that
comfort and familiarity. And then by the end of the year.
So many of these kids who were like terrified and
extremely adverse to going outdoors in this environment, by the
end of the year they love this place. Like they'll
go out on supervised and like go pick a bunch
of mushrooms and come back, or like collect a bunch
of firewood and then make a campfire with their friends
and Brozemuschmellows or whatever. It's just a complete change in
their relationship with the unknown and their relationship with the
rest of the world, and their ability to just like
handle discomfort and and do things that they want to do.
Whereas a lot of the kids at the school that
I ended up teaching at Oakland Tech, it was really
hard for me to create those experiences for students, So
by the end of the year there was still a
pretty big divide in those respects between kids who had
access to the outdoors through what their families did for
fun versus kids who didn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, got it makes me.
Speaker 1: It makes me so sad when I see kids who
are afraid of of like bugs and and snakes and
nature and all that stuff.
Speaker 2: It's such a fucking bumber man. I'm like, oh, really,
you know, and you see that too, Like you see that.
Speaker 1: Like if you go the like if you're in a
hood like hood to Chicago, wherever people are, you know,
people like, oh hell no, they like they don't want
any part of you know, and I get it because
there's it's not around they have no experience with it.
But it's you know in like Oakland too. That was
the thing because I lived in West Oakland. I live
in the bottoms and which god, I think they got
like a climbing engine. I don't know what the fuck
it's like done, and I don't want to see it. Man,
it's probably it's it's so expensive there, you know, like
the favorite cafe I used to go to Hungover back
when I used to drink seven dollars breakfast song. The
Korean lady ran it and she was sweet as hell,
and there'd be like, you know, just working class dudes
arguing and like now there's like lines for avocado toast
around the block and shit, like fucking anyway, whatever, I
get districted because it still hurts, you know, I'm still
working through the tramo see what happened to my neighbor. Anyway,
but like in the low, you know, that's all low
elevation then you go the rich neighborhoods, that's where all
like the actual leftover nature is. So you got to
go up there and it's it's uphill and then there's
it's you know, kind of like a stiff area depending
on and where you are, and so yeah, it's hard
to access, man, And so you know you got to
drive all the time too, like to get to the Redwoods.
So that was that was like when I was planting
on Mendela, like, I was like, I just want to
have like this shit around. I want to have like
a place to go hang out with plants, like in
the in like the lower elevations, like in the bottoms.
You know, there's that dude official Trap. He's a black
dude who's like always handling snakes and stuff, and fuck
I love what he does, man.
Speaker 2: I love that he's like, I don't know, it's cool.
Speaker 3: It's really important.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really it really is, man, Just getting people,
just getting people exposed to it, especially now since there's
such a threat of just being addicted to screens. I mean,
the smartphone. I feel like it can be good, but
it can obviously be a threat to mental health too, right,
because you don't know because it's highly addictive and if
you don't know how to how to manage your time
or have self discipline around it.
Speaker 2: But uh yeah, what.
Speaker 1: About so the serpentine We should talk about serpentine too,
because it's a really cool all the ultramafic habitats, you know, which,
of course like causes speciation of plants. It's a stressful
geologic substrate. Most plants can't grow on it, but over time,
seeds from plants nearby that are growing in quote regular
soil will drift into the serpentine and every once in
a while most so then we'll be able to handle
the excess you know, nickel and iron and et cetera.
So what the serpentine habitats in Oakland? You spend a
lot of time there, What are they like? There's serpentine grasslands,
but there's some invasion by there. Actually, maybe there's not
invasion by invasives. What do you tell me about this?
Speaker 3: I would say it's mostly invaded. I think on my
Instagram page, I do a lot of highlighting the areas
that aren't totally invaded, And I wonder if maybe that
is giving people the impression of more more natural ecosystem
that actually exists because a lot of my videos I'm
realizing I'm like, oh, I'm in the only patch of
this particular plant community in Oakland, but like all of
my videos are like that. But also it's like I've
got like seven videos like that, and there's like seven
of these grass line patches within the city limits of
Oakland's that's like pretty much you know, Yeah, it's the
these patches of intact serpentine habitat are very small and
very isolated and are still missing a lot of species
that should be there, particularly things that bloom in like May, June,
and July, because and the city comes through and mows
down all the vegetation for wildfire mitigation. They're mowing down
all the stuff that's going to be blooming in May, June,
and July, and then it doesn't get to reproduced and
then it gets extricated. So one of our rarest species
Oakland the presidio Clarkia Clarkia franciscana. It's only found in
two locations. It was first discovered in the serpentine out
crop in the per city of San Francisco, and then
a few decades later, in the nineteen eighties, it was
discovered in the Serpentine Prairie habitat in Redwood Regional Park,
which is kind of the top of the hill where
that serpentine out crop is in Oakland. And then in
the following years people actually started finding populations of this
Presidio Clarkia throughout the Cresmont neighborhood, which is this It's
a pretty large neighborhood, but the houses are pretty far
apart because serpentine tends to be very steep and very
unstable in earthquakes, so there's a lot of like open
serpentine space between these houses. That's where a lot of
these rare plants still cling to existence. Unfortunately, the Presidio
Clarkia populations since they were discovered in the late nineteen hundreds,
so you know, forty years ago ish in that time,
most of the populations had been extravated. At this point,
I'm only aware of one surviving population outside of the
protected area of the park.
Speaker 1: So this is an annual, right, like a lot of
a lot of the plants out there, and that is
you know, unique to a Mediterranean climate too. You get
a lot of annuals because the hottest season is also
the driest season. You get dry summers, wet winsors, and
so it's that's a really unique thing for California, like
abundance of annuals, and so these things die back and
then you've just got the seed bank and that's you
know sometimes you know, at different parts of the year,
the only plants that will be alive of that species
exist in seed form in the seed bank. And it's
really because it's just living there in the seed bank,
you know, dormant, waiting for rains. It's very very very
fragile and prone to disturbance. So what are some of
the like what are some of the disturbance factors that
are I mean, is there still a lot of development
going on? Like are there are there are these parcels
that are not developed, or this thing grows protected at all.
Speaker 3: The places where it grows are protected because it's protected
in the California and Dangered Species Act. So that's kind
of because it's a one B one species, it's state
listed endangered. It's also federally endangered, so it has decent protections.
But I think my issue overall with this model of
like single species conservation is that even when these things
are protected, if there's nobody making a big fuss about it.
The protections aren't strongly enforced, and when they're not strongly enforced,
especially for an annual species, it's pretty easy to just
extirpay the entire population. And then once the population of
that one super endangered species is extirpated, it doesn't matter
how many other rare species or how rare the plant
community that's left behind. Still is that plant community, that
whole habitat is no longer protected because it's missing the
one protected species. And I think that is the situation
in most of these remaining serpentine patches in the Cresmont neighborhood.
I don't think most of them are at imminent risk
of development, especially because, like I said, these serpentine slopes
tend to be very steep and very unstable in earthquakes.
So I think a lot of people just aren't really
building anymore in this area. But every time there's like
a little construction project, like somebody you know installs a
solar panel not on a rooftop or a parking lot,
which I don't know why people do that, but they do.
Or if someone like you know, redes part of the
driveway and ends up you know, shoving a bunch of
dirt down the slope or whatever. Those things tend to
disrupt the plant community and allow in bass to encroach
very quickly. I also think there's something to be said
about excess nutrients, So whatever nutrients are running off from
people's gardens up the hill, or nutrients that are being
deposited by you know, dogs being on the side of
the road, or just like cars driving by and then
the car exhaust deposits nitrogen compounds. I think that extra
nutrient deposition is making it a lot easier for these
really fast growing and basive annual grasses to grow, especially
slender oat of enobarbada, italian rye grass, lowly A multiflorum,
and then purple falseprone bracypodium distachion. Those three invasive grasses
are really doing a number on this ecosystem, and I
think most of the area of the ecosystem has been
completely overtaken by those grasses. Ironically, especially in that protected
area in the in the regional park, Redwood Regional Park,
because the East Bay Regional Park folks man, I really
appreciate the work they've done to protect land from development,
but I really don't think they are doing enough to
protect their land from invasive species. I think the idea
that they should be doing landscape scale vegetation treatments to
prevent invasive species from totally wiping out the natives that
is just not a priority for them right now. So
even though the serpentine habitat is like fenced off and
there's all these informational signs about how important you nique
this plant community is most of the protected fenced off
area like hasn't really been managed since like twenty fifteen.
I think they ended a study on Yeah, they wouldn't
now manage people.
Speaker 1: That's it's the hard It's that's the hard part is
finding knowledgeable people to do it. So when you say
vegie treatment, you're talking about herbicide spring or what because
that would be another thing that would send people shit
in the brick there if they don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I don't think they're using herb size actually,
which for some plants maybe it would be a good idea,
but I don't think in this habitat that would be
necessary because I think the most aggressive invader in this
habitat would be like yellowstar at this will actually know
there's a caseum Milana's eylon, which keeps re sprouting because
pople keep cutting it down without rbsides. Anyways, the treatments
that they're doing, mostly within Redwood Regional Park in that
protected area, are goat grazing, but only after the invasive
annuals have already dropped their seats. So they're using grazing
only as a method of fire prevention, not as a
method of habitat restoration. And of all you're trying to
do is reduce fuels. That's all you're going to get done.
And then on the medians which are owned by the city,
and then in the rest of the neighborhood, which is
mostly private property. Again people are just clearing vegetation for
wildfire prevention. They're not really paying attention to. Number one,
the thickets of invasive grasses are a much higher wildfire
risk than that serpentine prairie ecosystem. Serpenteine prairie ecosystem, the
plants tend to be a lot smaller and a lot
farther aparts. They just don't carry fire as well. And
number two, the more people mow down these ecosystems indiscriminately,
especially during the growing season, the more they are favoring
those fast growing fire hazards invasive plants over those slower
growing data plants. So I think mowing and grazing for
fuel reduction without considering how that's affecting the plant populations
has been I think the major, the major force wiping
out a lot of these plant populations.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, I mean if you're not if you're not
mowing or grazing before these before the invasies produce.
Speaker 2: Seed, you're not doing anything. It's just exactly be there, right.
Speaker 1: I was like, I was cutting back buffal grass at
our conservation property yesterdays. I was like, fuck, man, this
is this is like half gonna work because half of
these have already gone to seed. So I'm just going
to have to keep coming back like at the right time,
right after a rain and weed whacking, unless I want
to spray, which I don't really want to do because
it's a pain in the ass and it's you know,
I'd rather just not use it if I don't have to.
I only really use glyc estate for like bermuda, which
is you know, really hard to get rid of this
bermuda do well and oakland I forget I wasn't really
paying attention.
Speaker 3: Oh it does. Yeah, it likes to have a little
bit more moisture. So if you're in like a really hot,
dry exposed location, it doesn't do too great. But if
you're in a hot, dry exposed location near a spring,
it does fantastic. And there's a lot of spring snow plods,
so it is. It is pretty evasive, but not everywhere.
Speaker 1: I'm still just blown away, like remembering a state that
had environmental regulations Texas doesn't have. There's nothing here. I
mean there's like again like no, you know, there's no
protected plants. But California has just got so much diversity.
I mean it's yeah, and it's just such a different culture.
Speaker 2: You know, thank god.
Speaker 1: I wish I wish we had more of that, you know,
more of that here because it just it just makes sense.
It shouldn't be a political thing, but Texas is so
right wing that it's like, oh, that's all that's been politicized.
Like the like to admit that, like climate change is
real is controversial in some areas. Yeah, it's fucking nuts,
but yeah, man, do you do you uh so with
with like with I want to look talk about the
gorilla gardening stuff you did a little bit, so like
with because I know you were doing some of that,
Like how did how did all that start?
Speaker 2: How did you start just I mean just near where
you live.
Speaker 1: You just wanted to start seeing nice things around, like
cool native plants or how do you start doing it?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Pretty much. I mean I think I really started doing
it when I was teaching high school. It was you
know uldee. It's a pretty bureaucratic system. It's it's a
district of like more than seventy school campuses, so it's
a it can be pretty difficult to like get permission
to get stuff done. So if you really want to
get stuff done, as long as it's not totally illegal,
you just kind of go do it and hope for
the best. So I was doing a lot of like
I was trying to restore the native grassland habitat in
the space behind the building that I was teaching in
at Skyline, And to some extent it actually worked very
well because I was there for three years, so I
was able to like, you know, teach the students that
different species. We'd go out there and weed stuff. We'd
go out there and like or I'd go out there
with the weed whacker after school during the early spring
and hack things down when when the invasive grasses were
about to bloom. So that really got things going. And
then I lost my job at the campus, and the
school district basically just like went back to treating it
as just an empty space to just mow once a year. So,
you know, the native grassline plants I still landed, They're
probably still alive, but they probably will get out computed
by the weeds eventually. So after I lost that job,
I was like, Okay, I don't really want to be
like investing very much in gorilla gardening on school campuses.
In context, that's going to take many years to be
successful because in OUSD your job isn't really that stable.
So that's when I started deciding to try to plant
stuff around my neighborhood. So I actually only really started
doing that seriously this past year. I wanted to get
a bunch of stuff in the ground before the rains came,
and that worked out really well because we got a
really nice, heavy, early rainy season. Yeah, I guess I
just wanted to see more native stuff in my neighborhood
and see what that did for the local pollinators, especially
because I do have a lot of native bees in
that neighborhood. I live in Longfellow, kind of near the
Children's hospital along West Street, so yeah, and then because
I live so close to the Emoryville border, Emoryville also
has a bunch of spaces next to their next to
their roads where they've made like little bull abouts and
things to control traffic flow. But in those bullbouts, some
of them have like curb cuts in them so they
can drain drain the road. But honestly, hydrologically they're not
that well designed, so I think the extra runoff they
get from the road isn't contributing that much water. But
it is a lot of space to just plant plants in,
and there weren't already a lot of plants established, because
I think the city actually tried to plant a bunch
of well native ish stuff. They planted some like man's
need to cultivars and see you know this cultivars. Some
of them survived, some of them did not. And I
think the soil that they put in those roadside areas
was mostly just like construction sand or something. It's very sandy,
but it doesn't feel like natural sand or the native
sand that would be there, I guess because it's mostly
like you know, infill from what used to be wetlands. Yeah, yeah,
so I think I I think if I were to
do it again, I would be more deliberate about picking
locally specific speed. She's I think With this one, I
was just like, all right, I've got some space. It's
completely unnatural soil. So I just want to throw stuff
in the ground and see what sticks. So I got
a bunch of plants from Watershed Nursery, which is my
favorite local native plant nursery in the East Bay. And yeah,
some stuff did really well, some stuff didn't do well.
I learned that aerophylum stick catafolium does fantastic in sandy
roadside habitats, and I also learned about what doesn't necessarily
do fantastic and sandy roadside habitats.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of nuts to see what natives become rutural,
like what natives can tolerate growing in in you know,
the disturbed human environment. I always love seeing that. Like
where I live, most the most of the quote weeds
are native like.
Speaker 2: Are only real.
Speaker 1: The only real non native shit we get is all
the grasses, which is like guinea grass and buffalo grass,
you know, Penacetum silly air. But everything else, like all
the other stuff is like native euphorbias and you know
verbena species and Tritas procumbins, which is an aster. It's
like a it's invasive everywhere else in the world, but
it's native here. There's a bunch of cool bunch a
bunch of cool Mexican species of tritax, like a gypsum
endemic too.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But uh, but one of my.
Speaker 1: Favorite things when I lived out there was I had
all my spots that I would like try to walk to,
Like I'd be like, all right, I got the day off.
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna go on a long walk.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go walk eight miles, bring a backpack, little sketsbook,
and go sit in a coffee shop lerk for a while,
drawshoot the shit whatever, and.
Speaker 2: I'll walk around.
Speaker 1: And I had all my spots, like you know, the
Median Strip where I'd planted some shit illegally, or where
somebody else had or the you know, someone had a
cool front yard with cool plants, and I'm like, ah,
I want to go check on that plant, and uh,
you know, see if it's put you know, putting out fruit,
yet I can get seeds or whatever. And so, you know,
it was always fun though. It's like, you know, I
have my just having your spots like where there's actually
like cool plants growing in a city, like cool shit
that somethings put out. And then you start when you
do that enough, you start realizing all little nooks and crannies.
You're like, I might be able to get something in
here without it being hacked back, you know, like I
might be able to at the foot of this you know,
hard escaped boulder, or on this fence line, or a
place that looks like it's not being maintained where some
landscape is not going to come hack.
Speaker 2: Away at it.
Speaker 1: You know, I love doing that stuff. It was always fun.
Another thing I used to love was I worked this job.
We worked like a switch job, right, like a locally
take box cars out to a loading dock all the
way out at the end of this this industrial track
on next to International. Was it International or was it
the I forget the name of the street. It was
the street that's not It wasn't International. It was a
street that's under the the bar treks in East Oakland.
It was Sand's I can't remember, man, it's.
Speaker 2: Been too long.
Speaker 1: In East Oakland, yeah, San Leandro, Yeah, it was San Leandro. Yeah,
And so we would take this in. The fucking tracks
were sketchy, man, they were like barely raided, Like the
FRA shut them down a couple of times because you'd
be out there and they were so wildly the local
motive would be like wobbling like a boat.
Speaker 2: It was fucking hilarious, Okay, but but we.
Speaker 1: Would cross over these creeks and there'd be like ducks
hanging out in these creeks and like, but it was
like nasty, like nasty, post industrial. They were like homeless
camps out there, like garbage everywhere, and you know people
live in I mean everyone I met down there, like
when all the homeless dudes I've met were really nice,
but it was, you know, it was just a fucked
up area, needles and shit everywhere, garbage, the garbage pile
got the garbage scene got really bad and like twenty eighteen,
twenty nineteen, just massive garbage piles. And so but I
remember seeing these creeks and being like, man, these drain
the hills, like you could see the body of water,
like it goes up into the hills they've been that
probably been there for millennia, Like what and then just
thinking about what did that look like?
Speaker 2: Like what did that look like? Five hundred years ago?
Speaker 1: They were fucking grizzlies hanging out here, you know, and
the alone like probably had villages scattered throughout here, and
and now.
Speaker 2: It's like it's just weird. But like you could go
back too, Like that's the.
Speaker 1: Thing you think about, Like, well, we could go back
to that if like enough people came together and we
got our shit together and we started prioritizing this and
we had a knowledge of it, like we had a
culture that had a knowledge of this, we could go
back to that. You could bring that back. This fucking
bleak dystopia that we live in. It doesn't have to
be like this. And that's like that's the big part
of making the connection between plants and people. You know,
you're like, it doesn't have to be like this. But
this fucking you know, late stage capitalist dystopia healthscape that
we live in. You know, you's got to change the culture, man.
You got to put the knowledge out there and once
people tap into it, you put out there in the
right way. They start getting the same dopamine shot that
you got when you were learning about all this, and
it becomes addictive, and it becomes something that you know
is easier to do than before. It doesn't seem impossible.
Speaker 3: You know, Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's there's two
things I think about with respect to that number one
I got, So how do I put it? I think
the thing that changed my perspective on biodiversity the most
was getting into foraging kind of at the same time
that I was getting into species ide Because as soon
as I really started trying hard to understand where to
find the species that I was looking for, or under
what circumstances I could expect to find certain species, that
is what suddenly I think created a bridge between knowledge
of species and identification and actually being able to perceive
how all those species kind of fit together in the
environment and create the conditions that sustain the rest of life.
So I do think that legalizing foraging and regulating foraging
in ways that can make it sustainable and accessible for
people on more public lands throughout the East Bay, especially
in the more heavily populated areas, I think that would
go a long way towards making people feel that they
actually are connected to the well being of the environment itself.
And you know, I think there's something to be said
about the risk of getting people to only become familiar
with the invasive species, because unlike what you described in Texas,
almost all, almost all of our urban weeds and almost
all of our plant biomass is invasive species. In the
East Bay, Yeah, and I think people cling to what
they're familiar with. So I think getting people into foraging
would also in some ways have to come with getting
people into understanding the differences between native and invasive species
and feeling motivated to maintain populations of native species to
sustain themselves. For example, like I mentioned earlier, foraging for
mushrooms like candy caps and chantraill's and things like that,
especially candy caps is why I felt, is why I
continue to feel so closely attached to coast Live oak
And then also one of the other things about the
serpentine habitat that I really love in the hills of
East Oakland is that there is so much Calichordis in
that area. Like that is some of the densest populations
of Calicordis lutias I've ever seen, and somebody in the
comments of one of my Instagram posts told me that
that is probably because Skyline Boulevard was a travel corridor.
It was a very heavily traffic walkway for Indigenous people,
and because calichordas had edible bulk even though they grow
really slowly, Indigenous people over many generations have been cultivating
calichordas along that walkway, and then since Skyland Boulevard was
paved over the walkway, the calichortas that they planted as
basically trail snacks are still there. And I think to
really maintain the kind of abundance of these plants that
are supposed to be much more abundant than they are now,
we also have to normalize people relying on these plants
for food and then choosing to sustain those plants to
sustain themselves. And another thing is, yeah.
Speaker 1: I hold on to that thought for a second because
I want to just I think it's really important to
get people that incentivizes learning about it, you know, and
hopefully my hope of course though too, is it like, yeah,
people are gonna not just be taking, They're going to
be trying to give back too, like taking. But then
trying to grow from seed and plant more in their
yards and get them out there and make these plants
more abundant because they're edible and tasty and all that.
Speaker 2: There's that Robin Wall.
Speaker 1: Chimera quote where she's talking about some garden where it
is like, you know, they had hands off the flowers,
don't you know, don't touch them all that, and she's like, no,
we need a sign. What we need like a garden
where you're like a native a botanical garden where that's
that's the whole purpose. Like you get in there and
touch these things and eat the fruits and pick the seeds,
and like, man, I totally agree, Like this is what
it should be. You should that you should be. You
have to people have to be able to engage with
the plants or else they're not gonna appreciate them. And
also that ship, I mean you see what happens. Yeah,
Like people start selecting for this, you know, for certain
traits over time and effectively breeding cultivars of native plants.
And that's that's the relationship. That's the human plant mutualism
that's been going on for for millennia. It's it's it's
fucking nuts to just be like, don't you know? But
of course, I mean I was always breaking rules anyway
to go pick the huckleberries, pick the mushrooms whatever. But
it's so it's so crazy to me that those are rules,
especially with mushrooms, because you're not hurting the organism at all.
The mushrooms literally the fruit you know it's going to
die and whether or it's going to you know, the
tissue is going to die and shrivel anyway, right, it's
just out there to.
Speaker 2: Is that a thing though?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: What like the anti foraging rules in the Bay Area?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, definitely. And that's something I had to teach
my students explicitly because I was like, what, we are
going foraging in this land that is technically owned by
the EASTPA Regional Parks. We're forging is illegal, So you
got to know that, Like, we're doing this because we
know we're not going to get caught, and even if
we do get caught, we're not going to get in
trouble because the East our Origional Park isn't going to
make a political issue out of stopping public school students
from forging. But you got to know that it's like
super heavily criminalized everywhere in the East Bay besides a
select few city parks where it's just like they don't
really have parks bycinic rules. Yeah, and that's you know,
it was such a powerful way to get kids to
connect and feel a sense of belonging to and with
the ecosystem. And also I feel kind of bad knowing that,
you know, I've given them this experience that they really value,
and now they're going to have to live most of
the rest of their lives knowing that they're not allowed
to have that experience anymore. And I think number one,
that risks kind of set resevering that connection that we've
worked so hard to build. And number two, we've just
normalized living in a society where we think of nature
as you know, this thing that's fundamentally useless except to
gaze upon and admire and think it's beautiful and nothing else.
So if you don't think it's beautiful, it is literally
nothing for you.
Speaker 2: And that's more like a big state.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's more like weird Victorian European ship, Like I
just go sit out and enjoy it and it's beautiful.
It's no man, it's got a function more a part.
Speaker 3: Of it, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's another thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to me, the beauty of ecosystems comes from their
ability to sustain life and knowing just how much more
life gets to exist because of what's in front of me,
not just because of you know, the shapes and colors.
Speaker 2: Did I did I fuck up? You're training of thought though?
What was the what was the one you're about?
Speaker 3: The stay not at all thing?
Speaker 2: Okay? Cool? All right?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah. The other thing was that we already maintain
so much vegetation in the built environment, and the built
environment is kind of the only place where we are
effectively controlling invasive species such that we can actually grow
the plants that we want to grow. So I think
it's we're really not that far away from meaningfully restoring
habitats on the landscapes where we already live, even to
maybe a higher quality than the habitats that are on
undeveloped landscapes, just because, like I said, most of these
public lands agencies are not devoting the resources necessary to
actually control invasive species and actually restore the ecosystems that
they do have on their properties. Yeah, I think I
think we're not that far away. I think we just
need we need it to be a shared understanding in
every individual location that the plant communities and the ecosystems
and the species in that location are unique and special
and unlike anywhere else in the world and deserving of existence,
Like they deserve to remain in existence right right, And
it's not up.
Speaker 1: To us to decide whether they have a right to
exist or not. You know, it's like, that's that's such
a crazy thought, man, and it is. But again, I
think it can change. It's just but that's you know,
I tell people people are what can I do? Like,
I don't even have a yar, what can I do?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 1: I'm like, just learn about it, man, Just go out
there and spend time in these places and look at
these species, look at these pieces of a living machine.
Use an app like I naturalists. Just learn about it.
You know, learning about something is a way to show
that you have respect for it. You know, it's indicative
of having a respect and by that doing that, you're
creating a culture and you might influence other people that
would also care about it and know what this thing
is and then be willing to speak up for it
when it's under threat. And also, you know, engage with
it and try to care for it and nurture it,
and it becomes exactly, it becomes addictive too. Just it's
a way to take care of yourself. I see so
many people, Yeah, so many people that I've you know,
planted native plant gardens for or or have told me
I got them in a native plants, and they're they're
all so excited about it, like they're obviously it's really
making them feel good, Like plants make people feel good.
Speaker 2: That's just like, of course they do. That's where we
came from.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I think that's one of those human evolution
things that I was kind of alluding to earlier, which
is that this is another thing that I often tell
my students, especially when I'm trying to get them into
foraging for species that they've never eaten before, is that
we are the most generalist omnivore that has ever existed
on Earth. No other species ever in the history of
Earth has come close to being able to eat the
variety of species that we can and do routinely consume.
So part of what makes humans human is our ability
to learn how to identify species and learn to understand
their ecology and learn how to maintain their long term
populations so that we as long living creatures, can sustain
our lives in the long run in conjunction with these ecosystems.
And I think once people understand that familiarity with the
living world isn't some scary thing that's hard to memorize,
and it's just once you treat it as a dissimilar
to get it to know your neighbors rather than some
academic subject that you study, I think the relationship changes
a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, total, I mean totally. The memori the just
memorizing names thing is the wrong way to approach it.
It's like, don't you have to go out there and
you have to look at these things and to start associating,
you know, and think about what you're looking at.
Speaker 2: What's the flower look like, what are the statements, what's
the pistol? What is this doing? Does it? How does
it feel?
Speaker 1: How does this stem feel? That kind of thing, and
then and then associate a name with that afterwards, just
like the same way, like you give me a lineup
of twenty people and you're like, this is you know
so and so and so and so and so and
so and Ricardo and and you know Ernesto and fucking
John and but whatever, I'm not I'm not gonna remember
their names. But if I spend time five minutes with
each one of those persons talking about some real shit,
not just small talk, you know, then I'm gonna send
a lot better chance of remembering their name, right, like exactly.
And that's what you have to do with plants, right,
So it's not but school. American education teaches us just
to memorize, which again is like that's the wrong approach,
you know. And I see people stress out sometimes they're like,
I can't remember this name. I just know the common name. Well,
how do you remember the common name? You remember the
common name because you obviously have an interest in this plant.
So just learn the genus. Don't worry about the whole
genus and species of it that. Just just learn the
genus name, you know, and always ask what family it's in.
Speaker 2: And you could do it.
Speaker 1: You could totally do this, but you have to go
out there and spend time on this. Don't make it
something that is like intimidating, you know, just just the
you know, find what plants you like, and then just
learn the genus name of those. There's got to be
a dopamine drip attached to it, you know, totally.
Speaker 3: And I also think part of what makes it easier
than people think is that when people are first getting
into identifying plants, as soon as they start paying attention
for the first time, they're like, oh my god, every
plant is different. How am I ever going to figure
out what's what? There's like too many different species. But
then once you start really paying attention, you begin to realize,
wait a minute, there's a few species that are overwhelmingly common,
and if I learned those first, I'm going to know
the identity of the majority of individual plants that I see.
So you learn what ten twenty of the most common
weeds around you. Takes like a couple of weeks. You
learn two or three plants a day, and then all
of a sudden, you know like ninety five percent of
the plant biomass around you, and then the bits that
you don't know suddenly stick out much more to you,
and it's much easier to build that familiarity. So I
think my advice to people is always, you know, download
our naturalist, let it generate the you know, AI suggestions
for what species it is. It'll be wrong sometimes but
it'll be right most of the time if you're in
an urban area and just start learning the most common
stuff and maybe just like one to two species a day,
or like every time you take a walk or whatever.
And I think that gets people to familiarize with their
local ecosystem a lot faster than they expect.
Speaker 2: Well, you got you guys.
Speaker 1: At California, you have cal Flora too, Calflora dot org,
which is that's like the fucking best you know. I
wish ininat was more like Calflora dot org, you know,
cause it's the first off. Whoever selects the thumbnail photos
for each species really nails it because they're really easy
to identify, whereas like the inf photos are all over
the place.
Speaker 3: But then you know, it's kind of talking about the
caul Flora app or the caul Flora website or the.
Speaker 2: Cal Flora website.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have never tried the app, but I used
to use the website all the time and it was
you know, it's it's really helpful because it's just like Inina,
you can type in a family and like Shasta County,
you know, or Kern County and see all the members
of the family. That have been recorded there and each
one's you know, it's got links to like herbarium records.
Speaker 2: You know, it's it's just so helpful.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 2: It's such a great it's such a great tool.
Speaker 1: I wish fuck, I wish Texas had one, I wish
Illinois had one, I wish Arizona had one.
Speaker 2: And it's really good.
Speaker 1: And then they've got that what Grows Here thing where
you can literally place a spot on a place, a
point on a map and see what like all the invasives,
the natives, all that stuff.
Speaker 2: It's such a useful tool. Yeah.
Speaker 3: That was actually how I was able to figure out
a lot of the plants that I've been finding in
the Surpentine areas that Cresmont neighborhood and Oakland. I've been
finding species that are either you know, used to be
common and now they're really rare, but nobody figured out
that they were rare because nobody has paid that much
attention recently, or species that were thought to be extra
paid from the East Bay, like Era Tranti Grandis for instance.
On cal Flora, I was able to see that there's
a bunch of really old Bavarian records of Ara Trante Grandis,
but nothing after like nineteen fifty. And then I also
later learned about CCH two Consortium of California Orbaria or something. Yeah,
and basically looking through those records, I was able to
figure out that actually, yeah, like Ara Trante Grandis has
not been seen in Oakland since you know, at least
the last fifty years, and the place where I found
it in Oakland, it's never been seen within five miles
off there. But it was in a spring that's emerging
from a serpentine area, and it's like very open and sunny,
and most of the open sunny spring habitats in Oakland
have already been completely paved over and developed. So this
is a plant that was probably common and widespread throughout
the flatlands no Oak, that was probably found along most
of the major creeks, probably found it every spring, and
now it's only found in one location behind a shopping center.
And then I found one small population in Peralta Hacienda Parkway.
Speaker 2: Anyways, when did you do this?
Speaker 1: When did you found an earth rante species that was
thought to be wiped out from the area.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't think it was ever like declared to
be wiped out from the area. I think people just
like forgot that it existed and started calling it ra
tranti gatata because I looked on a Naturalists and I
was like, okay, people have found these plants before, they
just called them gatata. And then my friend and I
keyed it out using the jets and key and it
definitely keys out to Grandis. And then somebody on Ainat
who was like, Grandis doesn't occur except on the very coast.
Here's a webpage on it. We checked the web page
and according to every single feature listed on the web
page that distinguishes Katata from Grandis, our specimen was definitely Grandis.
And then Diane Lake, who is the chair of the
East Bay sorry she's the Rare Plant chair for the
East Bay Chapter of the California Native Plants Society, she
chimed in on a Naturalist and said that it seems
to check out for Grandis as well.
Speaker 2: Damn, that's cool. Where did you find it in? Behind
the shopping center and where?
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, you know Lincoln Heights shopping center, like the
big Safeway and then the Pats coffee and stuff on
Redwood Road.
Speaker 2: No, not off hand, where is that East Oakland or something.
Speaker 3: Like that was like, yeah, up hill of Sparky's drive Burgers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: So it's like there's a there's a spring that just
pops out of the bottom of an old landslide. That
happened when they were developing the Cresmont neighborhood, so they
stopped developing in that area, thank goodness. And the spring
that pops out from the bottom of the landslide, it's
this like big patch of green with a lot of
yellow flowers that you can see from the long distance
and you get close and the yellow flowers are like
these gigantic blossoms that look like aer trantiakatata, except they're
absolutely enormous. So when I first found it, I didn't
know that Ara trante grandis existed, but I saw it
and I was like, oh my god, there's a version
of aer trantiqatata that's like ginormous that I don't know
about yet. I got to look this up. So I
looked it up and I was like, oh, er tranthy
grandis is the species that exists. That must be what
this is. So I posted on ininat and then somebody
media was like, no, Ara Trini Grandiz doesn't occur in Oakland.
That was like, oh, okay, it's just a big gatata.
And then two years later I finally keped it out
and that's how I figured out that it's granted Dam.
Speaker 2: That's crazy man. And it's only known from there on
one other.
Speaker 3: Spot in Oakland. Yeah, there's one calflora observation of one
specimen found in Wildcat Canyon Regional Park in twenty twenty four.
And then I found this relatively large population at that
Serpentine Spring in Oakland, and I found it in twenty
twenty two but didn't identify it until this year. And
then there's one more population that I found after looking
through ininat records, I was like, wait a minute. People
are photographing this like really big air tarnity gatata in
Peralta Hacienda Park, which is in East Oakland, and it
has Peralta Creek running through it. And if I understand correctly,
that property was developed very early in Oakland's history, so
I would bet that the native vegetation was mostly wiped
out during that development. But since it happened so early
in Oakland's history, a lot of the native plants that
were still there kind of had priority effects and were
able to re establish. Whereas if that were happened now,
native plants are sorry, invasive plants are so much more
abundant that the native plants would not come back if
that habitat was Yeah.
Speaker 2: They would get in there and smother everything.
Speaker 3: Damn.
Speaker 2: That's man.
Speaker 1: Is anybody collecting seed and growing that? That'd be a
cool thing to just grow it in mass in a
backyard basically farm seed and then go scatter seed around creeks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great idea. I'm actually growing it from
cuttings right now because it is super easy. My friend
just like grabbed a gigantic branch so we could take
it home and key it out. And once we were
done keying it out, I just snapped the branch of
the nodes and buried them in wet dirt and most
of them are currently growing in bluing on my balcony
right now.
Speaker 1: That's dope, man, that's cool. Yeah, that's basically what I
do in my yard. I just I'm farming seed, like, yeah,
it's a native plant garden, but all the seeds like
off the guahio and other stuff that I collect horse
crippler cact i, collect it and then I give it
to like three or four different nurseries for free. I'm
not trying to sell shit. I just want to get
them out. They're just fucking grow these so I don't
have to look anymore crape myrtles, you know.
Speaker 3: Ye. So yeah, like trying to get a bunch of
seeds to watershed industry this week because I've been collecting
mostly annuals. I think annuals I think are a harder
sell for for people getting into native plant gardening than perennials,
because annuals, I think require a lot more maintenance in
terms of like, oh, you have to pick out all
the non native weeds. Then you have to do that,
you have to be able to identify your seedlings, which
I think is great. I think it's super fun and
super rewarding in one of those you know, dopamine hit activities.
But again, I worry sometimes that maybe some of these
rare annuals are not as palatable to the average native
plant gardener as some of the perennials. So we'll see,
we'll see if that works out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Clarkias are so dope, man, There's so many
there's so many cool clerky as I miss those.
Speaker 3: What is it?
Speaker 2: Are crepe myrtles big in Oakland? I haven't. I didn't
hate them, oh, just living out there, they still know.
Speaker 3: I kind of hate them. They're Yeah, I think the
majority of new trees being planned in Oakland right now
are crepe myrtles, because everybody wants to like check the
box if I planted a tree, but nobody actually wants
a tree that those tree things. They just want a
tree that's going to like stay small and have thick
flowers or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I didn't come to hate them until I moved out
to Texas and I was like, what are these fucking
stupid things that are everywhere? They're pointless, They're like they
they just you know, and and they're way overdone. And
then I was like I was learning about all the
native Texas plants like when I first moved out there,
and I was like, fuck, these are so cool and
why are these not getting planted? Why is it these
stupid crape myrtles you know again, and just because because
they flower all the time. Like lowest common denominator metric
of whether a plant's worth planting, How does it look?
How does it look to human eye, It's like the
dumb as shit and so. But I faintly remember seeing
them in Oakland, but they'd be you know, it's yeah,
I would smell like urine because they were piss wells,
I mean, I would piss on the thing, you know.
And then the of course, due to the dry Mediterranean summers,
the leaves were always covered in like, uh, you know,
aphid dew and particulate exhaust, you know, from all the
trucks and shit. It's like, I wonder, I'll never forget
the sides of the MacArthur Freeway sloped and covered in
English ivy and like you know, used rigs, used fucking
dope needles and urine and then all the like particulate
The particular exhaust gets really bad there. But again that's
another benefit of planting trees. You plant the trees that
particulates fall on the leaves instead of your you know,
steps and your windowsill, and then gets washed off when
the winter rains and then fleshed out to the bay
where it goes and pollutes the bay. But you know,
still it's better than it being you know, directly on
your because how would get man especially when I live
in West Oakland. THEESEL particulates on everything, you know, like
it was just man gnarly man from.
Speaker 2: The freeways and shit, and yeah, those dry summers, you.
Speaker 3: Know, yep. And it's hard to get trees planted in
Oakland too, because you know, we have a protected Tree Ordinance,
so trees that are there and are over four inches
dbhr all protected. But the issue is that the City
of Oakland defunded their street tree care program in two
thousand and eight with the financial crisis and has never
restored funding to it. So basically there's all these like
low income neighborhoods in places like West Oakland and East
Oakland them like the bottom Lands, and there are people
who do own the home that they live in, but
they're still really struggling to afford it and really struggling
to afford the cost of living. And then on top
of that, you know, maintaining a tree is free until
suddenly it's not, and then it cost thousands of dollars.
And the city technically does cover emergency tree care, so
like if a tree is imminently in danger of harming
somebody or harming property or whatever, the city will come
take care of it. But because they don't fund routine
maintenance of street trees, they have a much higher like
workload for that emergency tree care, and often they're not
able to prevent problems before they start. So a lot
of these homeowners feel very resentful about the idea of
planting trees because in their experience, trees have done nothing
but cause them expense that they feel like the city
should be responsible for. Ye and out here here's the
city mandating that they keep the trees on their property
without the city doing anything to actually help them maintain
those stress. So I think that's another big issue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And you've got to go around the city. Man.
You need like a neighborhood group or a cool neighbor
or whatever. You live in a neighbor hood.
Speaker 1: You got to be the one to do that, especially
because most people don't know shit about trees. They're like,
I don't you know, they don't know, Like, oh, you
can prune it. You can cut off these branches that
are growing laterally, so the thing will grow taller if
you need it to, you know, or you know, how
can it whatever? Right and so but and so it's
but it's up to individuals. Yeah, because the city is
not going to come through the city does and give
a shit.
Speaker 2: They don't know. You know, have you ever seen the
what's the level of passion of your average city employee?
Are they passionate about their job? Right?
Speaker 3: Not? Like some are and some aren't. And I think
that's another thing I've been learning is that like, if
you find the right people in the right positions who
care about the right things, it is actually possible to
get a lot of It's possible.
Speaker 1: Example, I made it, Yeah, but they don't give a
fuck a lot of the time. I guess what I'm saying.
I keep hold that thought because I do want to hear.
But I'm just saying, like they just come out, they
don't give a shit, They do the bare minimum whatever,
and versus having someone who's just like a neighbor that's
really into fucking maintaining trees and making the neighborhood look good. Okay, sorry,
go ahead, were sick, We're sick?
Speaker 3: Oh no, not at all. I was actually to follow
upon you just said. I've also one of my experiences,
especially like trying to get Oakland Unified School District to
implement a native planting policy, which did not end up
being successful is that you know, a lot of the
people who work in vegetation maintenance for institutions like OUSD,
they care about doing a good job from what their
perspective of doing a good job is, but they don't
think a lot about how I guess they see all
these areas as like gardens to tend. They don't see
all land as part of the living skin of the
earth that is now part of their duty to the earth.
Does that make sense?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Mean yeah, they're really Yeah, And I can't blame someone
for not giving a shit about their job because I mean,
you know, I don't know that the inner politics of
whatever the workplace might be. I'm sure there's you know,
there's everyone's had a boss that like you're like, damn,
this motherfucker. Like I'm not that smart, but I'm smarter
than this guy.
Speaker 2: What the fuck?
Speaker 1: Like, I know that, I know how disheartening it can be.
But that's why it's like, yeah, I don't even rely
on the say we do it ourselves, you know, Like
for my I'm maintaining trees all around my neighborhood now,
and it gets my ass to go outside and take
a walk and I'm doing it unofficially. I don't want
anything for it. If someone fucks with the tree, I
start fucking with them, you know. I make sure that
these things are the grass around them doesn't encroach. I'll
go out there and weed whack shit sometimes, you know.
I think that's just the best way that it's like
just doing it yourself for your people, your neighborhood. You know,
your your people around you, your friends and neighbors whatever.
Because the city, because man, the city city Oakland doesn't
even I get to. They got like one native tree
on their their street tree list. The ship they plan
is whack man.
Speaker 2: It sucks.
Speaker 1: I planted when I live in West Oakland. I planted
a TAKaD cypress across the street from my house on
sixteenth in Peralta, and I think it's still there, but
it's fucking dope. But I would also I had to
like go maintain it and prune lateral branches and make
sure because I knew that if I didn't do that,
it would make it hot. And now the city's gonna
come fuck with it and they're just gonna cut it down.
So I had to maintain it. But I was like,
why why are they you know, they're planning like African
sumacs and cinemonium or yeah what it would cinnamon camphor trees.
Speaker 3: And yeah, cinnamonum camp for and just god, just.
Speaker 2: Like lame shit, you know, like strip mall stuff.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, yeah, I don't get what. I can't play
more Coast live oaks. There's this like perception among people
who do like landscaping in cities for some reason that
like native trees aren't or there's not always going to
be an appropriate native tree for a particular situation. And
I'm like, in a city like Oakland that has such
an astounding diversity of habitat types, you are not going
to be able to manufacture an environment in any condition
that is outdoors that cannot have a native plant community
right on it.
Speaker 2: God, And they would come nowhere.
Speaker 1: Toy ons, you know, heteromelees would volunteer everywhere. That's a
fucking dope small tree. Yeah, that would volunteer. Great to
coyote bush is fucking awesome, right, or like you know,
the scrub jays plant all the coast live oaks. There
were Coast live oaks. This presentation, I give right, give right,
nice show these Coast live oaks that were planted by
scrub chase in the fucking trainer. They're growing out of
railroad ballast. They're fucking awesome, man.
Speaker 3: You know that's cool.
Speaker 2: It's just the ship, I tell you.
Speaker 1: The more I just landscapers, man, they just fucking bumm
me out, so many of them, right, just like this
traditional horticulture mentality. And then the way they talk about things.
Speaker 2: Like so arrogant. You know, like, well, actually that's not
you know, it's a man, Shut up. You don't know
what the fuck you're talking about, Like you know what
I mean.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's so many people in the comments of my
recent post talking about how like, oh, there's actually the
study where like this one bird is increasing in abundance
because of an invasive species. And I'm like, dude, if
you think one generalist species increasing in abundance while you're
not even paying attention to all of the specialist species
that are already vanishing, I'm just like.
Speaker 2: You're a fucking at college.
Speaker 3: Get you to understand what you don't understand. If you're
in my comments trying to explain things to me that
I know more than you're.
Speaker 1: You're in a collegist now you you know you cited
a paper and you've just it's it's it's nuts, man,
It's crazy. The invasive species denial. I never really understood.
It just seems I don't I don't know why that's
so threatening to some people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just don't think it's I think it's because
people just cling to what they're familiar with, and when
all people are familiar with is these aggressive, generalist, non
native species, that's what they cling to, and then they
feel very threatened when that stuff gets Because I also
something that I realized from teaching plant id to high schoolers.
In a society that does not value the ability to
identify species at all, I begin to understand a lot
more about plant blindness, which I'm sure you've thought a
lot about, which is for those for those listening who don't,
who haven't heard this term before, it's it's the phenomenon
of just like not being able to see the diversity
of plants in front of you. You just perceive it
all as this like amorphous blob of green. And that's
kind of how most people walk through the world. It's
how I often walk through the world, even now that
I know plants. If I'm walking past a bunch of
plants that I don't know, not like heeing out every
little Euphorbia growing in the sidewalk cracks. I am actively
experiencing plant blindness even now. But I think for a
lot of people that plant blindness, which I guess extends
to all biodiversity, maybe we should call it biodiversity blindness,
or like bioblindness. It's not that they don't think the
native species are valuable. It's that in their minds, in
their mental construction of the reality of the world, those
valuable native species don't actually exist. Like in their mind,
if we are taking out the species that they're already
familiar with and already care about, if we're removing those species,
they think that means just destruction and nothing, no value
at it. They think that the land will now be
completely empty with the loss of the species that they're
familiar with. They don't see the return of native species
as the return to life on land. They see it
as the return of emptiness.
Speaker 2: That's yeah, it's so weird.
Speaker 1: And I think the thing I've been thinking about more too,
which is why I've been attacking modern horticulture in my rhetoric. Morris,
I think that that you know, in a lot of
ways landscapers and landscaping and modern ornamental horticulture, it actively
works against you know, the ecosystem, like the in the
human mind, because if you grow up expecting that and
you want everything to look like orderly and hedge shrubs
that are planted in uniform lines with variegated leaves or
some other quote redeeming quality about it, that ooh wow,
it makes it interesting. Then you see nature and you're like, hey,
it's fucking boring. It's just weeds, man, it's all you know,
It's just it's it's that's look that things not even flowering.
It's just a green weed. You don't know what to
look for. Yeah, And I just I think about that
all the time. I mean, it's just it's something I accepted,
you know, a decade and a half ago. Kind of
was like, yeah, most people just don't care, like this
is not on their radar at all.
Speaker 2: And I don't fault them for it, but I'm gonna
like aggressively push it, and I'm gonna make sure to
make sure they see it right because it's so fucking cool,
you know. I'm like gonna aggressively and.
Speaker 1: Benevolently, you know, and enthusiastically make sure they see this right,
and because it's it's so fucking yeah, it's just it
cleanses the mental pellet.
Speaker 3: I agree, And I also think on that note, there's
great potential to really tip the scales on this one, because,
you know, because people are so attached to the things
that they've been conditioned to think gardens are supposed to look.
Like if everybody who cares about native plants already just
like make sure that their yard, at their front yard
facing the street is just like loaded with native species
that represent the local natural environments. Like here in Oakland,
that would probably be a mix of like monkey flower, sagebrush,
coyote brush, maybe some California b plants or whatever. And
you know, when that's all in full bloom, it looks
really spectacular. And I think if that was more of
a norm, if that was a look that people recognized
when they walked up and down the street, there would
be a lot more. There'd be a lot more like
casual gardeners being like, hmm, what's that about. Maybe I
should plant that in my yard, you know, Yeah, they're
just snowballs.
Speaker 2: From the Yeah. More exposure to it. Yeah, exactly, man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then you know, and of course, if you
plant a lot of monkey flower in the day area,
you're gonna get a lot of checker spot butterflies, and
you don't really get checker spot butterflies otherwise. So I
think that adds another layer of like, oh, my garden
is actually sustaining life that I can see with my
eyes instead of me you know, reading on the internet
that dandy lions are good for bide diversity, Right, I
assu think that's what's going on in my lawn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that that's Yeah, that was the other thing
I mean, just that I used to not have any
clue on I mean, part of what did it for
me actually was when I was still living in Oakland
and I had that old whole illegal garden on Mendela,
which like a little bit of it is still there.
Speaker 2: The realtor lady that had a beef with me, she
like went and annihilated a bunch of it. It was
really weird. It was like territorial, but some of it's
still there.
Speaker 1: And Dame when it was like at its peak and
I was going out there every other day to maintain
it because I was always walking my dogs. I'd go
like do exercises there, like go jump rope, do push
ups there at like ten o'clock at night, looking like
crackhead in West localand just fucking you know, on the
Mendela Parkway like it was.
Speaker 2: It was shameless of me.
Speaker 1: It was totally I looked like in eccentric, but I'd
go hang out there all the time, and so it
looked really good because I was always maintaining it. And
Damon Tyn went and did a survey just of insects,
spent like an hour or two there and kind of
like fifty six insects, most of which were native or
most of the piece of which were native on that
fucking car like on all the stuff that I had planted,
and a lot of it wasn't even native. It was
like lineages that were native. But it was like a
cloud forest species, you know, because you get those Bay
area mild climates, you know, you can grow cloud forest stuff.
And that when he when he showed that to me,
and he made a little collage of pictures of all
the bugs he saw, and he sent it to me,
and he's like, good work, Joey, this is it must
have been like eight years ago, and I was like, damn,
you saw that out there, and he's like yeah. I
was like, fuck, man, that's amazing, Like that's kind of
cool because that's that's just been like shitty dyeing roses.
And yeah, they were like they were like European buckeyes
planted there. Man, you had a native buckeye, California buckeye,
and they were planning the oakland was planting European buckeys.
Speaker 2: It was crazy.
Speaker 1: And then yeah, I went, yeah, that was the big
wake up call. And now it's like that's part of
what I'm doing. I'm like, okay, well, what's what's its
ecological function?
Speaker 2: Oh and oak tree?
Speaker 1: You know, it's a big tree and it doesn't produce
showy flowers, but it's feeding like, you know, three dozen
different species of caterpillars, which then feed birds. And that's
an incentive and I want to see all that, you know,
So that's that's another incentive to plant this thing, you
know exactly.
Speaker 3: But uh yeah, and I think like you said, it
wouldn't it wouldn't take much like it really, I mean,
I guess, tying back to what I was saying earlier,
if you can find the right people in the city
who do want to support stuff like that. Basically, their
main concern usually is like legal liability, so like if
you plant something that ends up causing problems for like
infrastructure later down the road, they don't want to deal
with that. But if you can plant stuff that isn't
going to cause infrastructure issues and isn't going to cost
the city money, generally, you can find people who are
going to be pretty supportive of it, and then you
can work with them to be like, hey, when the
city crews come through and like mow down all the vegetation,
can you not mow all the vegetation that I've marked
with pink flags? And that it can often work really well.
That's that's what I've been doing to protect some of
the rare plant populations up on Skyline Boulevard in that
Serpentine area, because I've also found that, like you know,
even though the city's annual mowing has wiped out a
lot of the later blooming annual natives that are quite rare,
the fact that the city is doing any management at
all has actually maintained the populations of some of the
early blooming annuals. And then some of the really late
blooming perennials that are pretty much wiped out in that
protected serpentine habitat where they're not really doing much management.
So like agaceras hersuda, for example, is really common on
that medium in the Serpentine area. And I looked it
up on Calplora, I looked at up on Ainat, I
looked it up in cch two. Most of the are
barrier markets for that species are really old, and it
seems like there's really not a lot of populations of
agaceris hersuda left at all. There's like two populations Alameda County,
two populations in Modera County, and like a couple scattered
populations and a few other Bay Are counties, and like
that's it. I think it might be extirpated from Cinoma
County in the Santa Rose area and stuff like that.
But that's a plant that you know, marking out with
flags and then getting permission from the city staff member
who oversees the vegetation cruise that has worked really well
to protect that population.
Speaker 1: That's a chickory, right, It's it's a corioidy. Yes, subfamily,
asked Tracy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, it's a dandelion thing or dandylion relatives.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, it's well, you're doing a lot of good
for the city of Oakland. You're an asset, so I
hope they appreciate you, because you know, we need more
people like that in every city, like monitoring their their
native plants and stewarding it and caring for it, right
and like just paying attention to it, man, because if
people aren't doing it, then then who is right the
city is not incentivized to sou Yeah, man, it's really
it's I really appreciate what you do, and thanks for
doing more to connect plants and people. Is there anything
before we dip out? Is there anything you want to
say and then you want to get out there?
Speaker 3: Hmm? Actually yeah. I think the more I've been thinking
about it lately, the more I think that some of
the most effective things that people can actually accomplish on
an individual level to protect the environment do have to
do with planting your locally common native species in more
of the built environment. So like in Oakland, for example,
I think if you have a couple people in every neighborhood,
just like planting coyote bush in the empty spaces between
the sidewalking the road. Every now and again, you know
you'll end up with a couple dozen coyote bushes on
each block, and then a couple dozen kyote bushes on
each block can actually sustain quite a lot of wildlife.
And if it's happening on each block, you can actually
create a good habitat connectivity from the undeveloped natural areas
throughout the entire built environment. So, like I said, we
already grow so much plant biomass intentionally in the urban areas.
If we just decide to make that plant biomass native species,
especially the locally common native species that already grow easily
like kyote bush, monkey flower, stage brush like that, I
think a much much better world with much more life
living on it is not that far away. And then
I think the converse to that is that the amount
of time that we have been driving life on Earth
to extinction has been so incredibly short that I think
a lot of people don't realize that the declines in
wildlife populations that we are currently seeing are just the
exponential decay in populations that are taking time to occur
because of habitat destruction that we did. You know, seventy
eighty years ago, like back in the fifties when when
the city was expanding really rapidly. So even if we
stop all development now and don't develop any more natural ecosystems,
those populations of you know, birds and amphibians and insects
and things, they're still going to decline to extinction for
most species. So I think the urgency of needing to
both protect remaining natural habitats but also restore and expand
natural habitats while the species that use them still exist
is a very urgent need that I think more people
need to need to feel. The urgency of it really is.
Speaker 1: It's you're using the tools that came with the land.
Those plants all they came with the land, They evolved
with the land, They were built by the land, they
were naturally selected for by that environment. All the all
the pollinators, all the antagonistic insects, the climate, the soils,
all that. It's it's nuts to you know, live in
a place. And I'm not saying don't have a couple
of non native plants if you like the way they look,
or if you're using them as crops, whatever, But like
to live in a place and plant fucking crape myrtles,
which you really don't need to do. It doesn't benefit
you in any way.
Speaker 2: You can't eat it. It's a non usable crap like.
That's fucking nuts, man. That stuff needs to stop.
Speaker 1: And you do it again by teaching kids what the
native plants are, creating a culture around it, hyping it up,
getting people to engage with them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so it's so important.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: So anyway, man, well, thanks a lot, and people could
check you out at the Oakland is it Oakland dot bio.
Speaker 3: Or what is it Oakland dot bio on Instagram that's
the only platform on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, all right, son, thro thanks so much, man,
appreciate your time.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Likewise, thanks so much for chatting with you. This
has been great.
Speaker 2: All right man, I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3: Yeah, see you later. Take care,