By Jess Reilly

When I landed in Kansas in 2009 as part of a Visioning committee for the Kansas Scenic Byways, I was brought there to help the state develop nature, cultural, and active travel along their scenic backroads. I conducted nine stakeholder meetings throughout the state and was privileged to be part of a process of input and evaluation with hundreds of people committed to sustainable development of their communities.

Gene and Mary are fifth generation farmers in Kansas. All five of their kids have returned to work on the farm.

However, in 2013, Kansas representative Dennis Hedke has proposed legislation to remove all language of “sustainable development” from any Kansas projects.

It would be easy to assume that Hedke’s views represented the rural populations in Kansas. When I asked my peers, I realized that very few young people from the coasts spend much time in the physical heart of the U.S., and rarely had anyone strayed from the interstate. But I was also among the ranks of cross-country drivers who had gripped the wheel and prayed to not fall asleep traversing the state. Working in Kansas changed my impressions of a landscape that is neither homogenous in politics nor terrain. I had a hard time imagining the draw of Kansas for a traveler seeking adventure, but I could not have been more wrong.

Yes, this is Kansas!

Kansas is quite magical, with or without sparkly red shoes. The nostalgia is palpable, the beauty is nonchalant, and the past whistles in the tall (switch)grass. For example, I stood in a cave where Dull Knife hid with 100 women and children when the Cheyenne tribe fled from their reservation in Oklahoma and tried to reach Canada. The view is hauntingly the same as in 1878.

In Alma, Kansas, I walked into a bakery and bought cookies on the honor system. I laughed over the best coconut cream pie on earth (this is confirmed) in Dover, and sat at a long community table and ate brownies with a feisty group of elder ladies at the weekly quilting bee in Ellinwood. On the 60,000 acres of wetlands along the Wetlands and Wildlife Byway, more than half of all the shorebirds that migrate east of the Rocky Mountains pass through annually, not to mention endangered whooping cranes. Here, Kansas pioneers shot the waterfowl out of the sky with a cannon, back when birds used to “blacken the sky.”

Just sit back and enjoy the homemade brownies, dearie.

Barry Jones searches the endless skies and wetlands for some of the most rare birds on earth.

A Kansas farmer on the Smoky Valley byway identified all the grasses and dried flowers on the roadside while native switchgrass swooshed at our feet, soon to be harvested for biofuel. He also showed me ground that had never been plowed—too much limestone. As a result, bison wallows remain. These shallow dishes in the rocky earth are all that linger of the millions of buffalo that roamed freely over the short-grass prairie and slept on the plains. Standing in a hole carved by generations of resting bison was eerie and deeply moving.

David shows me the fuel of the future.

Kansas’ new political “redness” contrasts with the tough, practical, and resilient people I met with throughout its rural communities. Consequently, I find it difficult to reconcile Hedke’s legislation with all of the voices I heard throughout the state. The sky is huge in Kansas and I met many people with the vision to match it.

The same grit needed to build a life on the frontier is required in the new battle for sustaining rural communities in a changing world—and we are now more connected and are able to amass our voices in dissent. Even as our population in the US becomes increasingly urban, we can support rural communities with our individual actions, such as low-impact tourism, signing petitions, keeping a watchful and active eye on our representatives, and giving time, energy, and action to organizations that fight to support rural communities and their economic viability.

I can promise you, the people of Kansas are worth standing with.

Walking strong with Kansas.

You can read about Jess’ research, living on a sailboat, and all her adventures in between at jessreilly.com.

By Patrick Donnelly-Shores

This article originally appeared on the Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative blog on 8 May 2013

“I love water,” said Dick Norgaard, the legendary Energy and Resources professor, beginning his last class at UC Berkeley, and reflecting on a lifetime of water policy work.  “We need water, and I’ve been obsessed with water since I was a small child.”

For his last class, or as he put it, his “last, last, last class,” he was taking his California Water Policy & Society students out to the sun-dappled porch behind the Graduate Assembly.  His final class, “or at least the last class on payroll,” was to be a combination nuts-and-bolts review for the final and set of ruminations on his career and the future.

Norgaard in Glen Canyon, one of many river haunts

Professor Norgaard has taught at Cal for over forty years, beginning his career in Agricultural and Resource Economics, but transitioning to the interdisciplinary Energy and Resource Group starting in the 1980s.  He actually went to Berkeley for his bachelors (in economics), and, surprising given his fairly left-wing views on environmental economics and policy, received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1971.  He’s also a veteran river-runner, having piloted rafts down some of the roughest rapids in rivers all across the Western United States.

Perhaps the most prominent name at UC Berkeley in the realm of water policy, Professor Norgaard has served on a “what’s-what” of important scientific advisory boards over the past few decades, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, to name two.  Having authored or co-authored four books and over a hundred journal articles, he’s amongst the most cited economists in the world, and was elected as a Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.

His role as the Chair of the Independent Science Board for the Delta Stewardship Council seems to be most dear to his heart.  This role is perhaps where he made his greatest mark late in his career, overseeing the State of California’s official effort at determining the scientific basis for any future San Joaquin – Sacramento Rivers Delta plans.  He becomes animated when speaking about the Delta, his eyes lighting up behind his tinted indoor glasses, his upper body lurching forward when he wants to emphasize a point.  He led his class on two field trips this semester, wild sprawling road voyages through the levees and farmland of the Delta, examining dredges, levee breaks, land subsidence, and all the other tangible realities that lie behind the abstract policy that was the focus of the class.

As he was grilling his class for the review, however, it became clear that the same topic could send him into despair, wringing his hands as he describes the painfully slow machinations of the politics-science nexus.  “We’re setting up windmills that we’re then fencing with,” he said in a moment of frustration over the roundabout policy battles fought in the institutions of resource management.

Professor Norgaard is a humble man, almost to a fault: when described as the leading expert in California water policy (an difficult to debate statement), blushes and looks at the ground, clearly uncomfortable with the praise.  He wears, every day, without fail, a black button down shirt and black jeans, a custom he adopted when George W. Bush was elected to a second term in office in 2004.  “That election made me think that we live in a dark, dark world, and I wanted to dress to reflect that,” he ribbed when a student inquired about his ever-constant wardrobe earlier in the semester.

The final exam review slowly turned into broader, more philosophical questions, as students tried to take advantage of one last opportunity to get in a question.  His somewhat brooding personality came through in his answers, particularly about the ecological mess that his generation is passing off to the next.  “We’ve so disturbed the system that we need to constantly be counter-disturbing it just to keep things afloat.”  A frightening prognosis from a man who should know.  And yet, when asked to reflect on his own career, he sounded an inspirational note, citing passion, determination, hard work, and a deep and abiding love for the environment as the sources of his success.  He encouraged his students to fight for what they believe in doggedly, a heartening directive to a room full of future policy-makers.

Professor Norgaard is retiring this spring, taking time to finish a few books and maybe run a river or two.  But while he may be done teaching at Cal, he will continue his environmental career with the many scientific boards he sits on.  His voice will be missed in the halls of the Energy and Resources Group at Cal, but will continue to be important to the ongoing work of water policy in California.

Written by Justin West

A couple of years ago, and just prior to my coming to ERG, I made a decision to hike the Pacific Crest Trail.  Being a botanist and naturalist my first bit of research was to find out what kind of field guides exist for the trail.  My research into the subject, however, quickly revealed that there is no field guide yet written.  What started as a plan to hike quickly turned into (and continues to be) a saga to write that book.  I thought it a shame that even though several hundred people hike the entire way each year, and untold thousands more hike portions of it, that there exists no field guide for the route.  There is a two volume guidebook series which will walk you through the route itself and provides basic information on the geology and wildlife, but offers nothing in the way of actually enabling ecoliteracy to any great depth.  Because my background is in plants, and because they are a relatively easy entry point into ecoliteracy (they don’t run away or only come out at night), I decided to focus the guidebook on the vegetation of the PCT.

After all, the landscape patterns, temporally and spatially scaled from geologic events to microscopic plant/fungi symbioses, are a veritable biophilic feast laid out along this 2,660 mile long banquet hall table extending from Mexico to Canada and passing through desert, chaparral, montane forests, temperate rain forests, alpine peaks, wetlands, high meadows, and snow fields.  To document the botanical diversity along the trail from El Campo, California to Manning Park at the Canadian border, I spent the last two summers walking the trail and collecting over 1,900 specimens, 18,000 photographs, and approximately 80 hours of audio notes (wasn’t that a joy to transcribe this winter!)  

Using an early version of the second edition of The Jepson Manual, I made determinations along the way and have since followed up with something like a couple hundred hours in the Jepson herbarium as well as in consultation with botanists at UC/JEPS (John L. Strother, Margreit Wetherwax, Bruce G. Baldwin, and Alan Smith) and botanists around the state, Andy Sanders (UCR), Lawrence Janeway (CSU Chico), Debra Trock (CAS), and John Bair (riparian specialist, Humboldt Co.)  The draft species list is currently at about 1,450 taxa. 

In order to carry out research of this kind I gladly borrowed from several schools of thought. I combined my knowledge of long distance hiking (gained in 1999 during a 5 month thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail), my background in vegetation ecology and field botany, as well as recent developments in ultra-light gear manufacturing. I ended up modifying some traditional field research methods in order to accommodate what became a 20-30 mile/day pace. Along the way I went through several iterations on a design for a lightweight plant press, eventually coming up with something I can imagine myself using for the rest of my life.  

I was never able to go ‘ultralight’ per se, as the project required that I carry certain otherwise unnecessary pieces of gear.  However, there were ways to make even that load lighter such as finagling an electronic beta version of the new Jepson Manual onto my kindle and thereby reducing a 5+lb book down to 8 ounces.  Ultimately I had my pack weight down to about 10lbs of core gear, 10lbs of project/research gear, and about 12lbs of food and water.  

In order to fuel myself I needed to consume about 4-5,000 calories a day of energy bars, nuts, dried fruit, and home prepared venison…as well as basically anything I could get my hands on whenever I got into a town.  I wore through five pairs of trail runners, a couple shirts, a tent, and a pack.  The shoe bill alone put me at about $.23/ mile.  Compare that to the roughly $.01/ mile we currently spend on tires (all four of them).  As for my fuel I was probably spending about $.30/mile or $10.50/gallon if I were a fuel “efficient” (let’s pretend we even know what that word means in this country) midsize car getting 35 mpg.  Put another way, I figure I’m about as fuel efficient as a 1986 Ford Econoline Van riding on bologna skins and sagging in the rear from shot struts and too much gear.  There’s nothing like a good long walk to get you reconsidering the value of what you have at your disposal when you finally get home.

In order to fund this project I raised money through the online platform Kickstarter as well as through generous gear sponsorship from several companies including Gossamer Gear, Cliff Bar, and Salomon. If you’d like to find out more about the trip check out my blog.

Written by Diego Ponce de León Baridó, Lindsay Holiday and Rebekah Shirley

This winter, Ranjit, Sasha, Felix, Ana, Grace, Sharada and ourselves (Diego, Lindsay, and Rebekah) traveled to the Yucatan state of Mexico to enjoy the warm water and sunshine of Central America and to work with Alex Eaton, Ranjit’s long-time friend and social entrepreneur. Alex is the CEO of Sistema Biobolsa and our aim was to help install five biogas-digesters that we helped fund in the Mayan community of Mani. The Mayan people of Mani continue to speak their indigenous language, eat traditional foods, use their traditional medicine, and seemed to hold unique, communal values that have lasted through time and seem to bind the community together.

It was incredible to work as a team, to travel with other ERGies and to see the components of a fantastic trip unfold: nature, sustainable development, friendship, love and adventure go hand in hand! For instance, the group spent the first three days of our time in Tulum, a quaint coastal town that is part of the karst landscape of the peninsula. Here water flowing through the limestone over hundreds of years has led to the formation of many connected underground caverns, called cenotes, along the Riviera Maya. The three of us had the opportunity to scuba dive through two cenotes. Down in the deep, quiet depths of the cave, the mystery of nature imposes itself on you. The ivory stalagmites like crumbling, ancient Grecian pillars were almost a stage for some Shakespearean tragedy. The eerie scene demands your attention, and your awe. It reminded us that even here, in the forgotten darkness, nature is beautiful, bold, teeming and alive. We were inspired by the sheer weight of that experience and it geared us up for the work ahead. In our own ways, all of us experienced new things through photography, diving, snorkeling, swimming, language, food, and culture. Indeed, the novelty in life blooms when surrounded by a positive and challenging environment, and new friendships.

Diving in the deep blue waters of Cenote ‘Dos Ojos’ was a ‘one in a life time’ opportunity for several of us! It is amazing to know that there is a lot in the world that is yet to be experienced and seen with our own eyes, development work and friendships from all over the world make this not only meaningful, but possible as well! Photo Credit: expertvagabond.com

Diego, Rebekah and Lindsay after the dive in ‘Dos Ojos’. After we finished our work in Yucatan and Quintana Roo we traveled to Mexico City to continue discovering the country and held stakeholder meetings for another ERGie project measuring the energy embedded in household water consumption in Mexico.

While in Mani we were hosted by a local agriculture and ecology training center (Mayan: ‘U Yits Ka’an, Escuela de Agricultura Ecologica). Being in this peaceful, gorgeous oasis of warm smiles, lush green forest and amazing home cooked Mexican meals was worth a trip in itself. In a matter of only five days, our ERG group managed to learn the mechanics of the biogas-digester system, inspected four households where they were currently installed, and installed five new systems. We also designed and built a hot water heating system for the school’s shower. We created a routine of helping and working together with each other and the community, and were immersed in a supportive space for collaboration and boundless ideation. Lindsay, often reflected on the similarities to existing social, political, cultural and infrastructural challenges that exist in her own Navajo reservation in Arizona. Diego, a Mexican himself, was blown away by a Mexico that he was only beginning to discover, and Rebekah, who hails from the Caribbean was touched by the friendships she formed with strangers of the village. It was a reminder that our differences do not divide us. Rather, the glue of curiosity binds us together. Needless to say, we had an amazing time of revelation and learning and we hope to have many more experiences like this again in the future together. 

Grace with women involved in the BioBolsa project, Woman Power in Mexico! ☺

Written by Diego Ponce de León Baridó

Growing up in Mexico City, and everyday on our way to school, my sister and I would stare at the two highest mountains in the country: Pico de Orizaba (5,600 meters) and Iztaccihuatl (5,200 meters). At sunrise, and after a hard rain, the mountains would rise over a thick layer of smog, would fade throughout the day, but would always return at dawn. Omnipresent, yet taken for granted, these mountains and their glaciers go largely unexplored by most Mexicans, including myself, as it took me more than 20 years to break away from the urban jungle. 

On the glacier at the top of ‘Pico de Orizaba’ with my uncle Hector and Kat. Spending time with family in challenging adventures makes long lasting bonds (Kat still smiling despite breathing less than 50% her usual oxygen intake!)

Urbanization, the unstoppable force driving the future of human settlements, is high (>80%) in the developed world, but urbanization growth rates are much higher in rising and developing economies. Where urbanization has a positive effect (mainly rich countries with strong environmental policies), society benefits: increased investments in public transport, less vehicle miles traveled, more localized health and education services, and a gradually smaller environmental footprint. In the developing world, however, urbanization is a force that has not come accompanied with better services, particularly because of inequality in the distribution of services and a strong focus on unconstrained growth.  More important however, and despite the benefits of urbanization, is our losing touch with nature. One cannot expect an urbanite, struggling to make ends meet (rich and poor), to worry about the forest or the groundwater that is being cut and depleted to grow food, or to worry about the glaciers that are melting, risking water availability for millions throughout the world. The connection between our immediate reality and the services provided by nature are lost in the city.

There are few experiences in my life that have been as enriching as mountaineering. Up there, time passes slowly, nature challenges you in a positive way, and the unmoving power of the mountain humbles you down to your feet, and to a few deep breathes.  You see water melting away, trickling its way to a river, unto a pipe, and to a city.  You see water making its way to a dam. Out there the connection is obvious, but only if your privileged enough to spend time outside, or poor enough to live off the land in some of the most isolated areas of the world. The space in between these two extremes is massive.

To me, being outside fills me with purpose and reminds of the interconnectedness of nature and society. The experience is unparalleled. But how can more people enjoy this? How can we bring nature, and these raw experiences, to the city? Making these linkages will be crucial in communicating climate change for an increasingly urban population, that doesn’t go outside. For now, I’ll keep exploring California, spending time outside with friends, and in the near future, begin volunteering with Bay Area Wilderness Training  (BAWT), an NGO focused on taking urban youth outside. I hope some of you will join me there!

 At the summit of White Mountain (4,300 m) in California, with Carlos, one of my best friends who works at PG&E and with a new found interest on the relationship between energy and the environment.

Written by Tanya Dimitrova

Last weekend I went to Point Reyes National Seashore with a group of ERGies. The field trip was organized by John Harte – one of the most charismatic professors in ERG. There was supposed to be an education objective to it – something about bird watching and identification, coastal geomorphology or who-knows-what else. But of course the trip ultimately turned out to be a bonding long walk on the beach, where each of us ended up talking about our fears, formative experiences, aspirations and dreams.

John himself is a real inspiration. Not only is he a wealth of knowledge, but one usually finds uncommon wisdom in his words. You could pick any topic and he will have something to say about it. (Usually something along the lines of “Yes, I wrote a book about this…”) But as humbling as I find talking to him, he himself is a humble person. When I mentioned this to him, he played it down by saying “Whenever you are 73, you will probably have a similar amount of experience!”. (Nice to say, but unlikely!)

After hours of walking and chatting about life, the universe and everything else, I asked him for advice on one of my personal greatest struggles: how do you maintain a positive outlook for our future as a society while facing issues such as climate change, food insecurities, overpopulation and religious conflicts. How can one remain optimistic in the face of a sobering reality while maintaining intellectual integrity.

He sighted and said “Each of us has a moral imperative to keep a positive attitude. What would happen if all people despaired?...” Later on he added, that having a strong and meaningful family support helps “more than any number could express”, nodding towards his wife a few meters down the beach, who is frequently a co-author in his written work.

We went on asking him about which projects he found worth dedicating our time to and what does he regret not having done in his life. He replied (paraphrasing) “Pick a project where you could apply your skills most effectively, something that you feel passionate about. It doesn’t have to be the ‘most important issue’ out there. I used to work in ERG with John Holdren. I focused on ecosystems, biodiversity, macroecology, while he was dedicated to nuclear non-proliferation. From time to time I would feel bad about my chosen field: I could work all I wanted on understanding and protecting biodiversity when in just a single moment a nuclear war could wipe it all off the map! Put in that perspective, my work was meaningless. But then I realized that if we destroyed all of the natural world while focusing on ‘more important’ issues, in the end there wouldn’t be anything left worth living for with or without a nuclear war.”

I am not sure what it is about the sea. But on a beach people inevitably speak with more sincerity and candor than in any other setting. Thank you all for sharing an inspirational day!