 Welcome everyone. I'm Lauren Sheppin, Director of Events here at the Mechanics Institute. And I want to thank you for joining us here for our program with Obi-Wan for his new book, The Deserts of California. I see a lot of new faces in the audience tonight, so if you're new to Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature our General Interest Library, an international chess club, ongoing author and literary programs, our pseudo film series every Friday night, and many other offerings for you all under one roof. So please, visit our website and see what's going on here in seven days. After our talk, we will have a Q&A with you, our audience, and of course, folks will be here for sale and Obi will be here to sign your book personally. I'd also like to remind you that in the next few weeks we have some great events coming up. The important event, of course, is our annual five-annual members meeting on December 7th, next Thursday. And then following that on Thursday, December 14th, we have our annual holiday gathering, which is a party not to be missed. So please make your reservations now in advance and join us for some celebrations. Also, after this program, Alyssa Stone, our senior director of programming, who's in the back, will give a tour of the library and our institute for those who would like to join. So, she's right in the back and she's like, let's say hello. So, San Francisco Chronicles, number one best-selling author, Obi-Claude, of the Conoco California Field Atlas returns with an epic forward-looking exploration of the state's narrowed eastern regions. The deserts of California, of California Field Atlas, blend science and art in Kaufman's signature style to throw into these ecological insights greater than either might yield alone. Through expressionistic map-making, wildlife renderings, and geographic conservation guides, Conflict explores the marvels and the threats to these resilient, yet sensitive ecosystems. Obi-Claude is the author of the California Field Atlas, number one of San Francisco Chronicles best-seller, the state of water, the forests of California, and the coasts of California that are all published by Hay Day. When he's not backpacking, you can find him, the painter poet, at home in the East Bay, posting trail paintings at his handle, Coyote Thunder, on Instagram and also on his website CoyoteandThunder.com. I call Obi a modern John Muir, with a little touch of wool equipment in there as well. But basically, he's got the heart of a philosopher. So please welcome back to McCann's Distinctions of the Conflict. Hello, friends. Are we good? We're not on yet, are we? Let's see how this goes. Okay, so I've got this device in front of my face. We're going to see how this goes here. I tend to just stick to it with my hands and stuff, so I might knock everything over. We'll see how it goes. I appreciate your patience with me because of that. I so appreciate you being here tonight, and I'm so glad to be back at San Francisco's oldest lending library. Has anybody seen me here talk before? Okay, tonight I have something different in store. I'd like to lower a step very much. Thank you, Laura, for that warm introduction. At least she's got the word philosopher in there, which is a word that means something, like a philosophy. In fact, I'd like to deputize you all here tonight as ecological philosophers. When you have a relationship to nature, you think about yourself in terms of that greater context. Whether you are a cellular being or a network being, yourself is not just contained in this vehicle, but rather spread out over this infinity of relationships, which is this big... When I start talking, I need to start with, I mean this non-sarcastically, but there is a twitch of a particular kind of my ideology that needs to be confronted, especially in this most modern context that we find ourselves in in the 21st century regarding all things true or epistemological use of some kind of frankly trigger warning. I've been criticized recently for a couple of things that I want to take seriously. Recently, the information, the values attached to the facts, where you have the conciliate knowledge, the unity of all knowledge between the facts, most and best derived from the physical sciences, and then we have the values, which are most and best derived from the humanities. These two great centers of human knowledge and tradition in that regard, and how do we bring those together? In fact, I have been observed to potentially be patriarchically rehearsed and I appreciate that, but I really want to not deny a worldview in your own psychology in this tortured psychological landscape of disorders, personal or those nefarious and virulent algorithms that we have so bought into day in and day out as we throw chemistry in our mind for these computers that we all carry around in our pocket we have. We have these algorithms that are feeding us this thing which is really having a serious effect on it. So this is a function, ontological conclusions, ontology is the study of how do we interpret this stuff, this stuff of the world, this stuff of the world. My father, Dr. William Kauffman, the third astrophysicist when I was born in Hollywood, and I came here, he was the director of the conservatory throughout high school. It was a, it was, it was calculus homework every day after school. I was going to be a mathematician. And he said to me, he said, Bill, he was my name at the time in high school, he said, mathematics, the language of reality. And I would run away from that, sometimes quite literally up to Mount Diablo, my sacred lonely peak over there in the East Bay that, I'm wearing my, you know, cut my teeth as a young naturalist playing with tarantulas, climbing waterfalls and matting seas, maybe this is teaching myself how to draw a bird. Thinking, okay, so it's the language of reality, I am also feeling this, it's only half the equation. The other piece of the variable there is my mother. My mother, my father married a clinical psychologist. So that's the stew, right? That's the stew in the mind. So I, we let that simmer, we let that, we let that, I remember one particular moment, I've both been about ten years old, I was in the backseat of a car, my father was driving, my mother was passing, receiving some, it's a particularly inquisitive moment I asked, I wonder where truth is hidden in the universe? Like I was, you know, asking a question that could be answered. But, you know, just like that, my father answered, and my mother answered at the same time, my father said physics, my mother said psychology. Thank you. Yeah, I still am, I'm still not about it at this day. But I think that I have been sitting there as my adult self, and I could have answered two, two, you know, the very sprained question that I posed. I would have said, story. What is it about the story? In fact, my second book here, the State of Water of Understanding California's Most Precious Resource, the intimation that being that, that the liquid stuff itself is our most precious resource here in this political entity, in this California society, touring that book across the state of San Diego, the president of the state of Vegas, the president of San Bernardino County, you know wherever, all shades of blue, purple, red, rural and urban, poor and rich, I find that no, our most precious resource to be building, deal, I'm getting at, but probably be the second part of the trigger warning that I need to wade through here, which is this idea of toxic positivity, that somehow I am not suggesting, but I'm suggesting that the solutions are largely technical in origin and in solution, not unlike what Wendell Berry describes, which would be solving for patterns, you don't know that name, Wendell Berry, please get on that. Just a bit of quotes that I use regularly. And a fantastic way of thinking as well. In regard to land ethics, certainly the inheritor of something like the Aldo and Xio Colt, I appreciate it more in the comparison to John Muir, of course, I mean, what a great writer, I mean, quote John Muir about the mountains of California, but his legacy is largely one of, well, certainly sparking the modern conservation movement at least on a popular sense, which is nice, but there are certain armed indigenous people, and those ideas he had were largely based on theological ignorance, given what we know now. He didn't know what he was looking for. And it could be that I don't know what I'm looking at here. These stories are both very old and very old. Okay, so as the publishing cycle goes in the construction of these books, I tell you what I suggest for a man, I am running from one book to the next, and I am thinking, I'm putting a book out about once in 18 months or so, and it's all day every day, but it's such a dance, I feel like I've sort of essentialized my life down to these four things, right, which is like walking, reading, painting, and writing. If I can just keep doing that, I live in a guy's life after having spent most of my years so far walking this week, and that's the pedestrian ethic of what the field atlas is. There are no roads in these books. I'm not really concerned about the red lines on those roads, for example, that tell you how to get to a place. I'm much more concerned with the how of these big systems, how the earth, air, and the living systems coalesce to make this. When I'm drinking this water out of this California and the more water I drink, the more water I find out today for the rest of my life, and I have to tell the whole story. It's so hard to do this grand path to know how to be from a place. It's not a destination. I'm not going to wake up someday like a dreading that we do in 2030 after the 30 by 30 successfully protects which is our state law now. You all know about 30 by 30 yet? I'll go into 30 by 30. The now state law originally passed as an executive order for the Newsom administration and now a state law just three weeks old that by 2030 you will protect 30% of California's lands and California's local waters for the expressed purpose of biodiversity conservation and for habitat, connectivity and for not extractive development. But my university is in the center of the whole thing, in the center of a whole vision. Now, I have a lot of criticism about this. For example, like I'm saying, it's not a destination. We're not going to wake up on January, January 1st, 2013 and be like, oh, right, nature's saved. That's not, this is a stepping stone and I applaud the policy makers that have recommended that. For such efforts. You know, tonight's Newsom is taking on the census and the debate. Thank you all for being here right now. You know, I don't know what democracy is, but it feels like this right now. You know, when I'm presenting my work at the Pharmacist Association of Residents, and I have a seat at the table with respect and nobody wants it. So what then is the common story? How do we begin to tell this democratically born apples? So I got these books coming out every 18 months. The Deserts book I finished well over a year ago. And now I'm working on my sixth book, which will sort of complete this round of field apples as they were and are. And that book will be entitled The State of Fire, Understanding How, Where, and What, How, What. It's been all building up to this. Getting right with this idea, this process, this key aspect of the landscape's adaptive cycle. What fire is in the California story? Those three books together make the California land trilogy. And so there is a temporal component in that the forest's first book represents what can be the evolutionary past of California. Certainly within the past six million years or so since the middle late minus-ean period when California's adaptive patterns began to coalesce into something that resembles today's ecology, certainly California in that time period began to resemble its modern, tectonic configuration. You can sort of look at a map from six million years ago and say, oh yeah, that's California. It's the first time we were able to do that. And then ultimately up towards the last place, so maximum in the coming of humanity at the beginning of the Holocene across California when California was a much different place than that. There were at least two dozen species of herbivorous mammal that weighed more than a ton than the California fluristic province at that time at least. This was a time when carbon dioxide concentrated in the atmosphere was about 185 and it was so much ocean water, it was so locked up into ice that you could walk from here to the Farallon ice. And if you were to walk across the Farallon step, you would be walking across something that became a place to see the San Reggae, sharing the step with not only the herbivores, like for extant, but the predators that came along with the bears that ever lived, the short-faced bear that puts the grizzly bear to shame in all manner of dimension and aggressiveness or stand by the fossil record. In any case, the weather, the climate began to show. And it was about this time that humanity showed up and we saw the Holocene extinction. And there was, you couldn't hire a fluristic province here that all of those species of herbivores were doing a lot of grazing. They used fire in a way, agricultural processes that, this is a very interesting theory, consciously avoiding agricultural technologies that have been used by the Occident across Western Asia and Europe since Babylon 5,000 years ago. There is this bias, I think, that still very much persists as it exists today of this ascension, if you will, of culture to finally brewing out as if there isn't any other way to extract nutrient wealth from the soil. When in fact, the technology was not agriculture. That in pre-Columbian California, we had between 6 and 10 first gigafire in the Mendocino Republic. There was history in megafire in pre-Columbian California, but nothing like... So this kind of ties back in the dirt, I want to present something like this. I think these thoughts are gluing it up. I think that we also need to approach some ethical, moral choices too. And so we have the forest and so what happened? What happened over the past several thousand years that Native California technology began to anthropogenically human-caused design, design this landscape. So that's something like a modern ecology in California and how those particular vegetational alliances began was only about the same time, something about the same age as San Francisco Bay these thousand years or so. I do this podcast every month with Greg Starris, who's the chairman of the Federated Indians of the Creighton Ranchry and professor of literature in UCLA in Stanford. We talk a lot about the stories that he stewards in his book. He's a payday author as well. And most of the podcasts are kind of like, it's almost like Shakespearean character analysis of Coyote or chicken pock or Coyote's very frog woman. Discussing what sacred time is and anyway, talking to Greg about the end of the world, he'll say things like people just standing out far from the spot where we are right now looking out at San Francisco Estuary and it's estimated that at that time that they filled up with, as being, the Bay was created with sea level rise that was equivalent to about three quarters of an inch a year. So you just basically watch the peace of the landscape and the physiology of it. It must have felt like the end of the world. Or you think of, or you think of, you know, Greg and the Southern Fomal and the Coastal Beewa the beginning of the 20th century those 14 Southern Fomal lands. They were all living. Now there's a great resurgence of native people across California and finally now even within the past five years getting a seat at the table of Sacramento the way that they've never had before. Escaping, escaping the genocide of the enslavement and ultimately the process of California. We're still in the process of recovering but the trend is good. I think the trend is good across a great many things in California. Certainly in the biosphere, certainly since they wrote that first book when they filled Atlas in 2015 when they wrote that book thinking, hey, we're about to have a female president and she's got some semblance of an environmental policy and that kind of thing. And so all the mom is saying, okay, okay, great. I was out for a long eight years ago. But my attitude has shifted so much since I wrote that. So much has happened over the past eight months. So much regeneration. So much. I'll go toe to toe with you all night. Every point to despair there's a counterpoint to hope. Don't bet, don't. It is my intention that's so complete as this vision for what can be given by what has just been better shaped in the 21st century that we've left in the end. And the devil's in the details and you have to give the devil his due. But this is the course of this exploration. Human story. The forest is the past. The coasts is the present. My second book in the California land trilogy. The first language that this is a time valuable. The coasts of California are not theologically what they were one to 300 years ago. And they are not what they will be. This is a dynamic place that is shifting and changing all the time. It is our charge. Our moral show up to this adaptive capacity I didn't have any religious tradition. In fact, I think the faith is the best of life outside the world is a distrilled extraction of linear economies where we build a thing, we use it for a little bit and then we transform it into our minds and call it garbage and then put it back. Linear. It created great wealth. But what is happening now is we decouple the carbon economy from the gross domestic product. And we're seeing a post carbon economy forming deeply into the way that this fourth largest economy in the world is California having just taken over Germany. Most of which, if not all of it, how about this or a grand leap from back to this is my contention that the encroaching isn't going to be a geologic era. This extinction or not is still on the table. Do not condemn to die that which is not dead. We are very good at saving endangered species and we're getting better. Three times biodiversity. There's genetic biodiversity. There's land-state biodiversity and there's species biodiversity. All this biodiversity. Why do I care if it tells us to melt, feel extinct or not? It's just a minnow forms together this network of vectors of resilience and form this architecture of resilience. And there's a straight mathematical equation based on the transitive property. One thing equals another thing equals another thing. Biodiverse, that's how ecosystem is playing. See, any ecosystem is towards any disturbance effect. Ecosystems supply regulated and normalized regimes of ecological services. Whether they be ecological services have supplied, fueled and funded every human society since the beginning of time and they always, you know, everywhere. So remember in all things, we're still learning a lot. Oh, this story is so new. There are people in this room who are, who were born before we understood the theory of island and biogeography. MacArthur and Wilson wrote 1968 the theory of island and biogeography. And this is the first mathematical, theoretical, scientific analysis of how speciation actually occurs in a Darwinian context. It turns out that Darwin's book in 1958 on the origin of species does not actually do with the title of the words. It's not actually something that the title of the word says it's supposed to do. It doesn't describe the origin of species, it describes. We didn't understand that and we didn't have a Darwinian philosophy on the landscape until the sixth, until 15 years after we understood ferroxene and nucleic acid. You know, like after the human, human genetics were, the code was cracked, the helix was found almost 15 to 20 years before we had it. And this is like, this is what he is, is trying its best to keep up five years after that book, the Golden Age of Environmental Legislation from 1971 to 1975, when he had the Clean Water Act, the Air Act, the Species Act, the Convention of the Environmental Protection Agency, all under the Nixon administration, passing in both houses of Congress 90% of the time, was the telling of a better story, not the making of a better article, maneuver that we must get back to. And in the future, faith is not some sort of proclamation into the belief of something that may or may not be absurd. Right? There's stuff on any of these toes here. But you know, like, I don't get, I don't get spirituality. I don't see that place. But I'm trying to figure it out all the time. I certainly believe this thing called beauty and yet this aesthetic philosophy that's infused in all my work, is challenging my father all the time about what the language is. But I understand faith as a type of, faith is a posture towards the future, being the thing that makes tomorrow possible. In the future, the last book in the California Land Trilogy, the Desert in California, which really sends a lot of time thinking about the difference between a mature desert ecosystem and desertification, given, you know, climate models are all over the place. I tend to not use the term climate chain to think it's a little anesthetized in a short time. I really like the idea of, like, something like climate breakdown by alien and organic global warming. That's very specific. But I think that I'm really concerned about scientific literacy and mathematical literacy. You know, you hear in the media, a ton of carbon. Like, a ton of carbon is a meaningless statement. Okay, are we talking about as an American? We're talking about just 2,000 pounds. We're talking about a metric, which is 1,000 kilograms. We're talking about carbon, which is 3.3, well, a ton of carbon dioxide is 3.3 times as heavy as a ton of carbon. Are we talking about carbon dioxide? I mean, can we at least, like, get them back straight? I mean, we can try. We end up writing huge 708 books. But, you know, I didn't even mind that shot. So, the future, what is the future in the deserts of California? The deserts of California are doing a lot of... Remember, I talked about 30 by 30. It's a lot of discussion on 30 by 30. You stay a lot. 26% lands now, that qualify on the dissipating very strict guidelines. Most, you know, half the state is locked up into... is locked up under federal protection of the US Forest Service, right? But that doesn't qualify. You've heard of the lay of the many uses, right? There's still so much utility. So, so much... Utilitarian value extracted from those resources that come on a timber sale. But, in the desert, it has almost half. This is another one of my criticism. Protecting 30% doesn't mean trapping 70%. We've got a lot of debate to have about net carbon neutrality. We're not going to drive our way out of this. I don't know. I mean, here in the deserts, I don't know if I've got some car people in here. The electric car is not a panacea towards the climate. As we are now working towards that goal, we are going to be 1,000 acres of desert habitat and environment to put up solar panels. Solar panels. Most of which, at this point, there's a lot of technology that we don't have yet. Just look out at the panels there. They have a lifespan of about 40 years. They have rare elements like coal, all of which comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. We have problems. These are technical problems. And I don't want, especially in the Democratic context, I don't want great to be the enemy of coal. We have to receive the idea of, okay, we're going to figure it out. And I want to go there with the administration of this faith-based thing. And yet, I'm also seeing and having faith in different things. Remember, we're also having faith. The idea of your watch is a complicated system. It's not a complex system. The complex system exists across a matrix of dancing variables if you will, whatever we're talking about. But we know one of the common, but not the, complex systems is emerging back loops. It's related to cascading systems of effects. And one of the things we see, for example, now that the United States is emitting less than it did in 19, the switch from what that first book, 8 years ago, that was not the algorithm that was going to tear us apart. So, just to be good, faith in the future, hope, you know, I'm so inspired, even more so than the environmental movement. So, in West Coast, that's right, he said, never be surprised by evil. What is beautiful, what is to be celebrated. So, if you guys want to talk about anything specific, I really believe that, you know, working on my core competence gives me this great experience for the, right, or, you know, what, what are we to do? I'm sort of like in general prescription, but if you guys want to talk about anything, if you guys want to talk about, you know, specifics or anything that I just sparked, please, please, let me know. I'm going to turn around the microphone, but I have a first question. Because where the climate conference has now started in Dubai, we hope that some of these ideas are being discussed along the way, but I wanted to ask you about, on the micro look, you were doing your research and your explorations. What did you discover about the biodiversity of the desert that you maybe didn't know before? I'm constantly bewildered by how rich it is. In California, there's only 4% of the North American continent. And actually, the four deserts that I've discussed in the book, the Great Basin, the Malhave, the Sonoran, that's different floristic products than the California floristic products, but taken as a whole, the biodiversity on where the planetary level is among the great places of the map. Species numbers in terms of habitat variety and in terms of genetic diversity as well. You know, I didn't think about how much, as we've heard now, we've got this narrative out of the one. It's not made in North America for 100 miles. Forming what is essentially an ecological wall to the other floristic products in the ecological island, as Ellen Bakker called it, but then I think of the regular conveyance of the San Jose faulty for the next 10 billion years as it rips the peninsula of Aja off the off of Mexico and drags it up to to sort of realize San Luis as a suburb of the archipelago of the San Francisco 10 or 20 years from now. And you think about island speciation reforms, you think maybe the world will then be recovering from the 6th NASA extension already imagining the 7th NASA extension will be like a nice shoe time the diversity of which will contain species that leave because that is what is going to live there. We have no way of being able to predict if even the central mammal will be something, you know, 10 million years to work its other. And the interest of that in terms of deserts is that as we talk about spending nature and save nature in this terrible paradox of carbon zero and 30 by 30 assuming that there is an essential habitat connectivity that we're attempting to save. We're assuming that that's going to save many continued precious that are endemic to the desert environment. Every single one of the 72 maps of desert wilderness things I have in the book here are, every single one has two animals in two planes that have been documented to live in that wilderness area and I source all that information to my net folks. So I love that there's this like democratic moment to sort of like crowd sourcing the information, sort of the citizen scientists are like, hey, does that butterfly exist in this wilderness area? And then I made like a chart to make sure that I get as we overlapped. But it's just demonstrated incredible diversity. How can you flex and help? Questions? A couple in the back here. We've had a very nearer as you said the countries are meeting in the past three to three years although it was very complicated in how to deal with it. Can you mention some of these quotes about this is not a parallel to what you're saying. I'm kind of hung up on being parallel to what you're saying. Hope as agency right? Hope also as a factor as a having a temporal factor. As long as there is time there is hope. The end of hope is the end of time. I'm brought about to something like one of the reasons why painting this as a project and engaging creatively using all of me next to me somehow to give you some advice, that's it. Take care of your own mental health. Your own mental health is not a thing that is just in here. It's not like an object you carry around. It's about connecting to a whole wider world. Get like the land trust perhaps the most and the greatest harm of the environmental movement in the past 20 years the Congress has sort of stalled out of the passing of real national legislation or whatever. The land trust who are all over the state now and there weren't 20 years ago. And I volunteered to plan trust from Joshua Tree to Crescent City and I'm just amazed all the time when I go and I hang out with them and it's not red and blue you know it's just like people who love this painting. When I look at it often in the mouth line, with the desert do you have a favorite and was there one that you favorite picture paintings in there and was there one that didn't make the book that you are remiss that you're a man in a chair of so many paintings? I mean you're probably seeing one set of paintings that I made because most of my paintings take like 10-15 minutes to make. If I find myself 40 minutes talking it's going to suck. I've been overworking when it's like a dance or sword night or something. There will be a couple of markets over the next couple of weeks selling to the originals actually. Up in St. Helena next week many of y'all are moving back. The Winter Market and Carter Company. So did you have a favorite inside? Oh I wish I could answer you. You know if I were to pick up the book now and go hey this one's pretty good you'll go to my Instagram and that's a pretty good daily reading of what I'm thinking is alright that's possible I've decided pretty much that Instagram is where it's at for me I like that there's creative decisions that are entered in the platform and that's my social media question in the back Hi, thank you Thank you Talk about the importance of stories Could you tell us a story from the last year of you and nature if it was particularly special to you You're going to see a lot of order walls there too going down and seeing this order wall these great constructs of world do come down because it has happened in history I'll take that Sean make a short I'd like you to just get down from loneliness there's 97 million people for schools ranging in communities It's interesting the artist what can I do as a singular individual to promote this landscape I don't make tour guides this is a very serious investigation about how to be this is my own investigation keeping it on that level keeping that sort of deconstruction unpacking the idea of expert at all I'm inviting you to come along with me on this journey of press my affection for this place all of this place this isn't about the superlatives the oldest trees and the tallest trees I'm asking you a question like what's your favorite place in California it's like where are you and I'm so happy to have you very curious about what's inside of chemtrails that are big shots from the stratosphere they create creepy clouds they blow in the opposite direction to the wind it's cluttering it gets to the other eyes and you're breath drying out and catching fire more easily what's in it, why are they doing this nobody's talking about it I know but the stratosphere I've seen clouds that are much higher I do also understand and we're going to take this off afterwards I appreciate that well I want to thank Obi for an incredibly educational opportunity to go around today and to protect the future and our environment for the future for those of you who want to get connected join the Sierra Club or take a take a walk around your neighborhood or join a walking tour get connected and also be active and host so thank you