In April I wrote Brock Dolman with some difficult questions about Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s new Fuels to Flows Campaign:
“Hey Brock, I'm curious what you think about the whole ‘thinning’ concept to begin with. The film Elemental showed research that seemed to clearly discourage that as a way of reducing fire risk. It also would tend to reduce the amount of rainfall, and lessen the biotic pump effect, especially if we are talking about diverse forests rather than monoculture plantations.”
I invited him to a Zoom conversation, which I’m now seeing I showed up for with my wool shirt on inside-out and backwards (and didn’t notice till I watched the recording)—but there isn’t a more perfect partner for a wild and wooly inside-out and backwards conversation. Brock is a serious scientist who absolutely loves to play.
He’s known for poetic plays on words when giving presentations, and now he has turned the kind of play my brother and I used to do in the forest (and that he clearly never stopped playing) into a serious regenerative technique with a ridiculous name: Gully Stuffing.
Our conversation gave me new—more subtle—questions about forest management, and whetted my appetite to hear the whole long story of the (many years of) power mapping and relationship building that he, Kate Lundquist, and others did to shift policy and perceptions in order to bring beavers back to the Western US.
This Wednesday (May 7th at 9am Pacific) I will be hosting Brock for a mini-workshop on Gully Stuffing as part of the “Can we Rehydrate California?” series. You can sign up here to join us live, and to get access to the recording. (You will also get access to the recordings of the first five workshops.) Later this summer we will do another mini workshop on beavers and power mapping.
Enjoy!
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