California's Watershed Healing

The Sierra Nevada are very much at a turning point right now, where we have a century of land management and forest management that has fundamentally altered these mountains from what the first settlers saw When we talk about trying to address the problem we already know what works.

We just have to go out and implement it.

<Music> People don't often think of water, watershed as a security issue, but when you back up the bus and you look at what are the foundational principles that are safety and security are reliant upon, it's climate security, water security food security, and, you know, ensuring that those things are adequately taken into account and planned for is an unmet challenge, I would say, in the United State The impact or the relationship between snow, snowpack, rain, rainfall, the health of the forests and then wildfire is direct and it's caused loss of life and loss of property in California.

For so many people in California they don't know where their water comes from.

Every developed region of California depends on an ability to import from distant regions of the state.

The watershed.

The Sierra Nevada are very much at a turning point right now, where we have a century of land management and forest management that has fundamentally altered these mountains from what the first settlers saw California wasn't really settled by Europeans until the 1850s, when gold was found in California.

California actually had a thriving Native American population, and they actually managed the landscape from planting grasses to maintaining the forests by controlled burning.

It was a very carefully managed So when the Europeans came they totally they could not imagine that the Native Americans were actually managing the landscape.

They thought it was just a paradise.

California has changed so much as we came and we kind of conquered the landscape.

California is a mediterranean climate.

We don't get any rain in the summertime, but that's when we grow our crop So immediately, not only did people dam waters to use for gold prospecting, they also started damming streams so they could have agriculture over the summer so they could actually irrigate the lands.

So we changed California tremendously and that was in a relatively short period of time.

Think about going from 1850 to 2021.

That's a short period of time to totally transform the landscape.

California's one of only five large scale Mediterranean climates that can grow the level of healthy fruits and vegetables and vegetables and nuts that we can grow.

There are some crops where we supply 90% of the nation's avocados, 90% of the nation's salad certain times of year.

Certainly 90% of the of the nuts almonds and pistachios in particular, as well as for export.

I mean, it's a very rich thing that we have to value and treasure.

There are limits to it.

So we're going to have to figure out how do we how do we manage what the system can bear in more constrained times.

And in light of the fact that the ecosystem also needs water and that people need all of this we need healthy communities, we need healthy ecosystem, we need healthy agricultural economies.

And it requires, I think, people coming together, which is the piece that is always been elusive in the California water dynamic.

The food that is produced here is produced by farmers who have a social compact with the people of this state.

They produce food in the most environmentally benign way possible.

They produce it, and it's incredibly inexpensive.

They feed the country, they produce food that people can afford to buy.

If we want to be food independent, it's critically important that we continue to produce food in California because the conditions here are are just remarkable in terms of being able to produce food for the nation and the world.

I firmly believe that we have a national treasure here in the San Joaquin Valley and our capability to grow safe, affordable, nutritious food.

And if we don't have a domestic supply capability, our society will suffer.

It's a foundational need, and it something we should all be able to agree on that that providing a nourishable meal to our our friends and family and neighbors is an honorable and noble thing to do.

When you look at it, you know the aerospace, the technical work, the Silicon Valley, you know, entertainment, California, you know, leads the nation in almost all of those areas.

And so California, with that fifth largest economy in the world, if we were a standalone nation, basically drives the United States.

California is California because we've been able to grow into a state of 40 million people and attract so much economic activity.

And that's only been made possible from the abundance of water that we have.

Now that water actually travels long distances in our state to actually provide the livelihoods and and the resources for our coastal population.

But 80% of California lives on the coast, and most of our water is actually found in the mountainous headwaters.

And so over time, you know, for almost a century, our our forefathers, the leaders of our state, invested heavily in human made infrastructure to move that water think reservoirs and aqueducts.

And those are those are all important in many that's the backbone of our water system.

However, we didn't invest enough We didn't think enough about the green infrastructure.

The beginning of our water conveyance system, which is those headwaters in the Sierra Nevada and our other mountain ranges.

And they're beautiful and they're part of our environmental legacy and we have to do a lot more to protect them and to restore their health.

And so an investment into our headwaters is not only a wildfire resilience investment it's a water investment.

A healthy forest is a healthy watershed.

A healthy watershed is a healthy water system.

Forests are about 20% of California.

They're they're part of what makes California what it is And you can say the same of forests around the world.

When we think of forests, I think of sustainability.

We're trying to get forests to a more sustainable state in a warming climate, which is a challenge itself.

We say, well, what's the new normal?

Well, there really is a new normal.

The new normal is warming.

Not addressing climate change and climate chaos is a recipe for national security disasters.

I mean, we don't want to be in an environment that is so vulnerable to these really catastrophic wildfires, that's so vulnerable to these catastrophic droughts.

We've just lived through one in 2012, 2016, not having our water supplies and our projection of water being off it all starts with the Sierra Nevada basically being the backbone of California, where a lot of snow falls in the winter.

That, of course, becomes the water and that goes through the watersheds.

So it is a huge issue.

If we're not addressing climate change, that means we're not getting the most ecosystem services and the most benefit from this really vast system that we have at our disposal.

This Mediterranean climate, this really good agricultural soil, these forests that help us store water, all these things work in tandem.

And so if we don't address climate chaos, we are now threatening each of those really big sectors in California that provide a lot of the wealth and a lot of the jobs for Californians.

To construct solutions, you first have to identify the problem and where water and watershed are concerned, you need to have good modeling.

Modeling both in terms of the near-term term and the long term What is the water supply likely to look like under different climatic conditions?

You need to have a good inventory of what the water assets are in California.

And by assets I mean not just water, but also the infrastructure that goes with moving water from one location to another.

And then you need a good planning process to determine what additional or new infrastructure needs to be constructed and then how you're going to adequately and fairly move water to where it's needed most.

And and also then you're going to have to do in conjunction with all of that, you have to do some disaster planning because a lack of water results in drought.

But as forest lands dry out, you get wildfire.

And that's been a growing and devastating problem in California.

We get a lot of our water supply from the forests of of the state's mountains because in the higher elevation of the forests, that's where the precipitation is higher than the water used by the forest.

The water use follows the amount of vegetation that's there.

So when you have more trees and higher biomass out there, you're using more water to keep the forest green.

So the amount of water used by the forest is really proportional to how many trees and shrubs are out there.

The mountains have a limited amount of water available and it's hard to remember that in the middle of winter when people look up and see this beautiful snowcapped vista that really this is a water limited system.

There's only a certain amount of water available to these trees in the hydrology of these soils that these trees are growing in.

And when that water runs out, that's when the trees start to die.

And so what we saw in the five year drought that California had from 2012 to 2017 was that the water ran out and a lot of these old big trees and particularly pine trees, ponderosa pines, they started dying, you know, first in the dozens, then in the hundreds, and then in the thousands and tens of thousands.

And so we had this massive die off of trees across this landscape.

And even with that die off, there are still too many trees for the water resources that are available.

And that has pretty much produced this situation where the forest is unhealthy.

And that is what people like me and other ecologists see when we drive up into the mountains is that we see an unhealthy forest.

There's a lot of dead and downed timber.

The trees are far too close together.

In many places you can't see very far into the forest and you don't realize how abnormal that is until you see places that are much healthier, where there's been more fire, where there's been a little bit more management, and where you have more of the historical density of the forest, there's a lot fewer trees on the landscape.

It's really been converted to a system that is unnatural.

In fact, we talk a lot about, you know, the forest is needing to be restored right now, but now the reason for that is because these forests where fire was a major structuring force within the ecosystem and typically in the mixed conifer zone, which is kind of the sweet spot of the Sierra Nevada forest region, it you know, fires and burned on average every decade or so.

And that was really important because the nature of the fire was different than the kind of fires and conflagrations that we're having now.

So by taking fire out of these ecosystems, which was part of their evolutionary history, we've resulted in this buildup of not just fuel dead fuel, but live fuel too overstock forests that have densities that are orders of magnitude higher than they were before Europeans settled the West.

So now we have now the problem of trying to solve a issue that's been developing, you know actively for the last sixty years since modern methods of fire suppression in a very short period of time.

And or we're going to have another fire season like we just had this past year.

September of 2000, of 2020.

And that's when the Creek Fire broke out.

We fortunately got quite a few things out and I think one of the things that made me the saddest was when we were getting ready to leave my son, my nine year old was asking was asking me, Mom, what's the likelihood that our house is going to burn down?

Highway Patrol had put up a roadblock, and I went and conferred with them.

They said, You can't go back in.

I said, Well, I got family back there and we need to get them out.

The fuel load is just tremendous And we've all said this could be a disaster.

The smoke was so thick and the ash and stuff, it was really hard to breathe.

And and it was it was choking.

A cow can't survive that.

And what happens to these cattle as they walk through the hot ash hot coals, hot ground and their feet get so burned that their hooves will actually detach from their feet.

Out of the 81 head, only 12 were healthy enough to survive.

That's probably when the tears flowed the most.

It's called wildfire for a reason.

You don't decide to control the fire at, let's say, 20,000 acres and then go out and control it.

You basically chase the fire around until the wind changes.

The wind dies down, you get the upper handand you put it out.

It's an interesting thing.

Every fire we go to, we put it out eventually.

The question is just how much damage is the fire going to do between the time it starts and the time to put it out?

And that's where the issue of life and property comes in, as illustrated by the tragic Camp Fire in Paradise a couple of years ago.

And that really was a wake up call.

I think the the challenge really is how do we essentially reprogram our thinking away from protecting forests by setting them aside as wilderness reserves to grow without management versus thinning them and still maintaining large trees, but making them more fire resilient.

And I think it's really a new way of thinking where the the battle over forest management and timber harvesting, whether you should do clear cutting or single tree selection harvesting in a sense that's really yesterday's battle It's no longer our primary challenge.

Our primary challenge today is whether we're going to have a forest for our grandchildren to enjoy.

We need to do something, and that something while it may not be ideal, is really tending the forest, reducing the fuels and making these forests that we have now that are really too dense, more fire resilient.

We have very productive forests in California, but in a fire regime that they evolved under, we had frequent low severity fire typically on these landscapes that kept the fuel loads, by which I mean the things on the ground, the leaf litter, the duff, the small sticks and logs that was cleared out.

And so you had a landscape that was much more open, much more park like, much more visibility when you looked around.

That's what the forest was before we stopped fires and had fire suppression.

That I think is a huge problem, that we're still dealing with.

I'm wary of using the term new norm because this is how it's been for thousands of years having fire in the landscape.

We think actually that, you know, upwards of maybe 7 million acres in California were burning every year.

But again, it was at this lower intensity level.

We were not seeing catastrophic with, you know, super severe effects of huge mortality of these trees If the forest is not super dense when you have a fire come through, you're not going to see that massive mortality.

So the fact of the matter is we're in a really overdense precarious situation because of because of fire suppression.

And that is causing a lot of these catastrophic wildfires.

Business as usual is dangerous.

Business as usual with mean catastrophic wildfires.

It will mean very likely the conversion of forest land into shrub land or, you know, other vegetation mixtures we may not want.

A lot of what California is about are these beautiful forest landscapes, these vast forest landscapes.

And it's not just about recreation and beauty, it's also about mitigating future climate change by keeping carbon, which is a key part of what climate warming is about keeping that carbon in the forests, in the trees themselves.

If they burn up that carbon is now rereleased to the atmosphere and we've now compounded the problem of climate change.

So keeping the carbon in the forests and keeping that in a long term space in those forests is really important as well.

We've got to remove a lot of that small biomass and really the most effective way to do that is by reintroducing fire wherever we can.

And in California, we do not use even remotely enough prescribed or cultural fire.

And there's a difference between those two.

Prescribed fires is sort of our our method of reducing the wildfire hazard and sort of prescribing fire for certain areas to meet specific objectives that federal and state agencies have.

Cultural fire is is an indigenous practice that has gone on for millennia in these forests and it is much more holistic in many ways than prescribed fire is.

But they both ultimately achieve this very natural process that these forests evolved with, right.

That they're adapted to.

And it is removing a lot of that biomass.

It's returning that biomass to the soil in the form of ash, which which is a great fertilizer.

And it is doing so in a way that is sustainable.

Right.

And that can cover large areas.

You know, prescribed fire is something that in some parts of the U.S. you know, in the southeastern U.S. Florida, Georgia, a couple of the other southern states, they burn almost 5 million acres a year with prescribed fire.

In California, we burn somewhere between 50 and 100,000 acres a year that it's two orders of magnitude difference.

And we're not even getting close to what we need to be doing in these forests to restore forest health.

And there's a lot of reasons for that.

Right.

People don't people don't want to see fire on these landscapes because they're scared of it.

They're scared of the potential that prescribed burns will escape, become wildfires.

They don't like smoke, you know, And there's this sort of dislike of blackened land that we have developed where, you know, esthetically when we see black land because we haven't had fire on these landscapes in a century because it was all suppressed, most Westerners, if they see a piece of blackened land, they assume it was a wildfire and it was bad.

And, you know, that is very different from the way that we should be thinking about it, which is, oh, great, blackened land that is going to renew and regenerate this landscape.

Right.

Whether it's a grassy hill, whether it's oak woodlands, whether it's the Sierra Nevada forest, it's going to renew and regenerate.

And we should see that blackened land as a good thing.

Thankfully, what scientists are telling us and what research has shown is that some of the treatments that we do in the forest, some of the management activities we take in the forest do help reduce the probability of large scale disturbance events and improves the ability of the forest to be resilient through those events.

So to to go through fire, to go through drought and come out on the other side, still healthy.

When I say treatments and management activities, I'm talking about largely thinning trees out, creating stands of trees that have fewer trees, a species mix of trees that's more similar to what might have existed here 200 years ago.

I'm talking about adding back into the ecosystem fire through controlled prescribed means as well as allowing natural fire in places where it's not threatening humans.

And those kinds of activities if done properly, create a healthier and more resilient forest to withstand some of these stressors that are impacting them.

Stressors like increased temperatures, sometimes reduced precipitation, things like that.

Well, restoring the watershed and restoring, you know, the meadows is an important part of the watershed.

Yet it's the hub of the forest.

It is the sponge.

We have over 8200 meadows that are recorded in the Sierra Sierra Nevadas.

70% are in need of maintenance or repair, 25% are nonexistent and 5% are considered healthy.

These meadows restore water and hold that water so they can be released throughout the year.

That continually feeds our system.

When you don't have that, the drainages, the little creeks they all dry up.

Those plants dry up, they die.

Everything else and associated with it dies.

This meadow here was a nonexistent meadow.

So we restarted restoring this in 2003 and removing everything that didn't belong on the meadow When you got a nice meadow like this and the plants and and everything is growing the way it's supposed to the carbon sequestration is kept lower down here on the meadow.

When you develop the meadow, our medicines are growing here now.

Our foods are growing here.

The animals come back.

I use a term that is, you know, kind of a bad cliche in a sense that you build it they will come.

The thing that I think is little understood is how you pencil out biomass projects or, you know, fuel reduction project fire safe projects in the Sierra If you only look at how much it costs in terms of paying a decent wage and transporting the stuff, extracting it and putting it into some good use, it's a pretty expensive thing.

You got to move just the moving of of logs alone and and biomass is a daunting project because sometimes these things are in deep canyons and remote roads and far away from infrastructure So how to fix that includes putting the infrastructure where it belongs in these small communities, not having to traipse it into urban areas, but actually having it be part of an economic plan and restructuring a retooling of a rural economy.

But there's other benefits that happen in this that are not valued at all.

The benefits to watersheds, especially in water starved Western United States, the forest water connection is little understood by people, but your dams silt up in half the time.

If if the watershed burns and it's that and the runoff is is chocolate brown mud because the trees hold the soil in place.

But you also have the kind of carbon sequestration issues of California.

Everybody thinks about cars being your your big polluter.

But how many years of breathing smoke all summer long and now in spring, summer and fall, do we have to end with with plumes, fire plumes going 38,000 feet in the air?

How long will that be before we start valuing the ability to lower the risk of these huge and the work that's being done in the forest.

What's the what's the value of that?

What's the value of water?

What's the value of clean air?

What's the value of a meadow that's restored, that provides a longer season and a more amortize flow of water for for people downstream.

Do water interests, power interests, air quality interests, economic interests, environmental interests converge here with an understanding that some of the value in what we're doing is an avoided cost.

In a fire in our county we had 60,000 acres burned in two days, and there was a one day fire last year That was 90,000 acres in one day In our county those two days burned 1800 power poles from PG&E.

It burned down seven, 800 homes.

It destroyed communities that have been cohesive for years.

And the environment is now converting from unattended, is converting from a wonderful forest and mixed conifer forest and oak woodland to chaparral.

These are all things that involve, to some extent climate change and certainly to some extent are reflective of the way we logged the forest and then proceeded to shut down all the mills.

So everything grew up even aged and in a extremely unhealthy condition just by the number of straws in the drink.

But at the same time, with drought and climate change happening.

it's the perfect storm for the kinds of catastrophic events that we've seen in California.

Any time you have something like the Camp Fire that burned 80 some people to death trying to escape it and in a day's conflagration should be pause for all of us to think about let's look out for each other better.

Let's understand that all these things are connected and that the cost of doing something about it.

While it may seem in a linear thinking way expensive, in the end the avoided costs of doing this on a larger scale will be more than making up for for the difference.

One of the things that we're finding in a lot of forest stands in the Sierra Nevada is an overabundance of fir trees, white fir trees, because as over the last 100, 150 years as humans suppressed naturally occurring wildfires, certain tree species grew up in an abundance that was not how those forests evolved over time.

And so those overabundance of certain tree species stresses the rest of the forest stands.

So if we remove some of those trees, that perhaps would not have been here under a naturally functioning ecosystem, we're recreating, redesigning the form of the forest that what types of trees are there, how big they are, so that the forest then can function more properly.

So when you get right down to it choosing those trees to remove going to a forest stand and finding the trees that perhaps shouldn't be there and removing them either by by hand, by machine or by fire.

It's that easy.

So it's it's not a complicated process, but it's very time consuming and it takes a fair amount of of resources in order to extract or remove these these trees that that don't, we don't want there.

The types of machinery that we need to do this type of work.

There's not a lot of them around these days.

The trucks to haul trees out, the machines to cut them down and move them.

At one point in time when the forestry industry was bigger, there were more of those types of machines.

And then once you cut the trees down, what do you do with them?

If they are of a certain size, they might be worth creating timber or lumber out of.

A lot of the trees that we're talking about are too small for that.

So we need to either haul them to a biomass facility or chip them in the woods, meaning kind of grind them up.

It's not complicated.

However, there are just not enough people and machines to do that type of work right now.

The Tahoe National Forest in the central Sierra has been particularly innovative, and in this vein, one is the North Yuba Partnership, where an outside nonprofit company, Blue Forest, is is a is a broker to bring in investor capital.

The local utility Yuba Water, they have signed an agreement to pay off the the investment over over time.

They'll get more hydropower revenue.

They lower the risks to their hydropower assets if they can reduce the risk of high severity wildfire.

And that's what the forest restoration does.

Our water comes from the Sierra Nevada forest, in particular the Yuba River watershed.

And so we want that watershed to be resilient and be able to withstand fire as it naturally occurs.

And well, what is natural fire today?

Well, it's changing, right?

But we know based on fires and surrounding watersheds, that our watershed is currently poised to be devastated by wildfire at this point.

We have done some work.

We've done some work, you know, the past handful of years.

We've thinned it.

We're getting it to a point where it needs to be.

But we're just now starting to talk about working on the scale that needs to be discussed.

Watershed wide forest restoration.

It's going to take years to get there, but our goal is to have a healthy, resilient watershed for our system.

And so what does that mean?

Well, a healthy watershed is a watershed that that can withstand a fire.

It can withstand fire, not a wildfire, not a catastrophic wildfire.

That's what would occur today if we had a major fire start in our watershed.

But we want it to be able to withstand just the occurrence of fire.

And we want to be able to manage fire as it comes through our watershed naturally or manmade.

And we want to be able to use prescribed fire as a management tool, which the majority of the time we can't do that right now because our forests are currently overstocked.

What does that mean?

There's just too much vegetation per acre in our forests in the Yuba watershed.

As a water agency, we're sort of interested in the additional benefits of this work.

So the primary reason we've invested in this work is to avoid the cost and the damage of a catastrophic fire.

But the other benefit is improve watershed function.

So an overstocked watershed, a watershed that's full of brushy packed forest, holds too much water.

And so that water goes into that vegetation and it's lost to evapotranspiration.

That's the process, you know, where the plants respire.

So by reducing that biomass and creating a much more thinned forest and a lot more open meadow areas you change the water dynamics.

And so our streams and creeks, our little tiny headwaters should have increased flow after this work's implemented and then that flows into our rivers and ultimately our reservoirs.

So we expect not just a benefit from the avoided cost, although that's the main driver, but we expect an increase in water quantity that's associated with this work What we've done at Blue Forest in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and the World Resources Institute is to create a public private partnership called the Forest Resilience Bond.

And the idea behind this is to bring in private capital from investors like insurance companies, impact investors and even foundations to provide the upfront capital for forest restoration projects, ecological restoration projects.

And the goal of those projects, is to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire.

But they create a number of additional co-benefits.

They provide us with clean air, forested watersheds do, clean water.

They create rural jobs in a lot of cases.

They sequester quite a bit of carbon.

And when we have these big fires they release quite a bit of carbon.

So we worked with all the beneficiaries of these projects, which obviously includes the US Forest Service, but also state agencies, water and electric utilities, flood control districts and even private companies in some cases to sign contracts or agreements, whatever authorities they have.

And all of that together is what ultimately repays those initial investors.

When we put all that cash flow together.

It's working right now.

We've got our first project up and running on the Tahoe National Forest, and we're actually looking to expand that project now, which is really exciting.

I think it's not just enthusiasm If we want to see these projects work and we want to see them scale up we need social license from the communities that this work is happening in.

We should be hiring local to the that we can.

These communities need to be a part of the discussion making, the deliberation, what's going to happen in their forest.

And that's why we've been really lucky with groups like the North Yuba Forest Partnership, and we have federal, state, county, tribal government signed on to the M.O.U.

there.

But we also have really small local nonprofits and ones as big as the Nature Conservancy, and those small local ones are in fact the most important groups in a lot of ways.

In the Yuba work it's the South Yuba River Citizens League and they bring the community in and they build that local support.

And the more support that they can build and the more capacity they have as an organization, the better we all will be at implementing these projects and doing this on a larger scale The other piece of this that I think is important is that this is a system overall If we just start throwing more money at one part of a system and the other parts of a system aren't able to work at capacity, the system overall isn't going to work.

There's not yet enough infrastructure to handle all the small diameter timber.

These aren't big saw logs coming out of the project.

They're small diameter trees that are non-merchantable.

And there's not enough people in many cases to go out and do the work, whether that's ax or chainsaw work or operating heavy equipment or doing the really important prescribed fire work.

And all of those take a varying degree of skill, right?

You can learn how to get chainsaw certified in a weekend.

Heavy equipment takes vocational training and apprenticeship.

Fire takes years and years of training and they all pay different things.

So we really have a wide variety of people needed and there's a lot of people in these communities that could play those roles in a more sustainable way.

And that's what we hope for.

So Yuba College, we're looking at a watershed management program that will both encompass associates degrees for transfer as well as certificates for directly to work.

The program is really looking at how we can optimize our natural resources in the watershed region near the Yuba College service area, as well as up higher north, even up to the Feather River Watershed Lake Tahoe Basin.

We did a labor market analysis for our watershed program and it was for our region as well as further up north, up toward past Sacramento.

And it was discovered that there's going be a significant number of middle skills jobs, jobs that require more than a high school degree, but less than the bachelor's jobs that need to be filled, such as watershed technician, such as a forestry technician to work in the watershed regions work in our forest to reduce biomass fuel.

And these trainings, they need to be part of a career technical education, which is really at the heart and soul of a community college to to deal directly with the workforce needs that our employers, agencies that deal with natural resources are asking for and need to make this a robust and healthy community and region There's a one year certificate program that we have at Reedley College.

It established specifically to teach young people how to work in the forest.

Our program, what we've done is created a forestry and natural resources program that teaches young people how to work in the forest, but it also teaches them the utilization of the natural resources.

We specifically focus on how to use logs that were taken in wildfire mitigation and then turn them into usable structures and furniture without adding any metal or any connective things to them, just using geometry as a way to do it.

It's very important to utilize the resources of the forest.

And the fact is that the wood is renewable, the forest is indeed sacred.

All of what we have comes from trees.

All of life on this planet in one way or another comes from trees.

If we're looking at the State of California and the U.S. Forest Service meeting, their goal to treat a million acres per year in order to reduce fire risk, that's likely going to generate several millions of tons of low value biomass.

These are the tops of trees.

These are the branches of trees.

These are small diameter trees.

And what is typically done with this biomass, if it's not pulled out of the forest and sent to a biomass power plant, is that it's just piled and left there.

Getting the revenues from that wood and connecting them to products markets is going to be a key driver of whether or not we can do what we need to do.

What the State of California nee is to find profitable and also climatically beneficial uses of this wood to align what I see as a climate change adaptation need the threat of catastrophic wildfire in California with the climate change mitigation need which is the need to create low carbon products to substitute for fossil fuels and reduce our fuel use in the state and ultimately encourage carbon sequestration across the state of California.

So that's where I think innovative wood products come in We're excited about a few different kinds of i wood products in the State of California.

The first one is broadly known as mass timber, and this involves essentially engineered wood products that are engineered to have very high strength characteristics such that you can use them to build taller and safer buildings.

For example, the state of Oregon and Washington and now just recently, the state of California has adopted changes to its building codes that allows you to build wood buildings that are up to 18 stories tall.

Now, typically these things are out of steel and cement.

You go into an urban core of a city and you see these big giant structures.

They are built using steel, cement, and that requires fossil fuels and that puts CO2 into the atmosphere.

If you could instead use wood to build those buildings, you'd be not only displacing tha steel and cement causing emissions benefits, but also locking up that wood and a long live structure.

So rather than that wood decaying in the forest or being sent to a landfill or being burned and putting its carbon back into the atmosphere, it is locking up that carbon in temporary carbon storage.

Another example might be to make transportation fuels from this biomass.

So instead of burning the biomas to make electricity, we can chemically convert it to make things like hydrogen or drop-in gasoline or diesel or ethanol or renewable natural gas.

And these are low carbon sources of energy derived from low value wood.

So you're again, you're getting that benefit of not only displacing fossil fuels, but also encouraging carbon storage and carbon sequestration in the State of California.

One product that people are real about is bio char.

This is a relatively easy thing to make.

It's essentially charcoal and you can get it by heating biomass in a low oxygen environment.

This bio char has a number of different uses.

You can use it for water filtration, you can apply it to agricultural soils to increase the water holding capacity of these soils, as well as have related agronomic benefits and yield increases.

Other things that people are really excited about include things like chemicals or nanomaterials.

We think that the nanomaterials derived from wood can be used as relatively strong building materials and be a replacement for things like asphalt or concrete as we're building bridges and roads and other parts of the built infrastructure in California.

If we want to keep forests as forests, the best thing we can do is make forests valuable and that involves using wood.

And so I think there's actually a really key economic driver associated with these innovative wood products that can be brought to bear for forest restoration.

One of our problems in rural America, and this is not just places that have had their timber mills closed, but if you look at West Virginia and it's coal miners or Pennsylvania, Ohio and steel, all these places have shut down and left people out of work and communities, very proud communities, shells of their former self and an angry populace feeling betrayed and abandoned.

For us, this is part of an economic conversion that has to happen in rural places, places that used to be based on resource extraction and manufacturing, but in technologies that are no longer really helpful as we try to save the planet, we've got to figure out how to get the benefits of the technological miracles that are taking place all over in science.

How do we get those applied to rural places that have no no economic sway, don't have the numbers.

We're two and a half percent of the population of California, but we're providing 80% of the water and we're most of the timber.

And and it seems to me that people need to be good stewards of these resource places.

And the way forward is going to be embrace the technologies that are healing, restorative in nature and get the people who have always been proud and done good work back doing what they know how to do.

But it takes good public policy and in relation to native people 10,000 years of good stewardship of the Sierra, and then what we've managed to wreck in a short couple of hundred years should be a lesson for all of us to look at.

There are techniques and approaches that Native people have used in California, in the Sierra, forever putting fire back on the landsca in a good way, making sure that T.E.K.

traditional ecological knowledge includes a holistic view of the world of nature that we've messed with for so long we can't even recognize what would be natural and appropriate in it's healing.

You have communities with a number of people that don't have large incomes.

They can't afford to pay for the forest restoration and there aren't many jobs up there.

You know, ranching was a good one.

Timber was a good one when they cutting, cutting timber down.

It's fantastic we're talking about forest restoration because now maybe there are jobs that are opening up for them.

The forests that we see today were designed.

There's no part of California that is untouched by our management of lands.

And, you know, sometimes designs have unintended consequences and we are now experiencing the unintended consequences of decisions that were made decades ago about how we're going to manage forests.

There are things that can be done to to restore the ecological systems in headwaters.

And it really is not only to forests, it relates to it relates to meadows, it relates to streams.

And again, all of these issues are interrelated.

I'm really thankful that many environmental conservation groups have looked at the science and just understood that proactive forest management, prescribed burns, ecologically based vegetation thinning is the answer to restoring the health of those of those forests, those watersheds, their nature and and protecting ourselves from these large wildfires.

And so there's just no alternative to actually doing everything we need to because we're protecting people and protecting communities.

Ultimately, we're protecting the environment and the time is now to work as we've never had before, to actually fully confront this crisis.

When we talk about trying to address the problem in terms of forest health, in terms of fire, and in terms of holistically, you know, restoring a sustainable forest system, we already know what works.

We just have to go out and implement it.

I think we're in an era where there's a moment to be seized and the possibilities are tremendous, which is just in time, because the the freight train of pain coming at us with climate change, we don't have any time to waste and quibble amongst ourselves or try to gain one up on someone else.

We've got to get over ourselves and figure out how do we manage these watersheds with the best technology that's now on the ground and in the air and manage that water from the top of the watershed all the way down, while also managing our forests and protecting biodiversity and creating livable spaces for people.

So it's all completely possible if we get over ourselves and figure out how to have working together for the common good prevail as a political good, which it can, and which great leaders and statesmen have you know, since time immemorial.

If California doesn't adequately address climate and then the related domino effects of water supply and food security and so forth, that will have a ripple effect across the United States, because California is such a major player, it's so dominant.

It's the number one agricultural producer in the country.

It's over 10% of the population of the country standing by itself it's the fifth largest economy in the world.

If California doesn't lead here, it's hard to say where else will find leadership in the United States.

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