[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Temperate zones and tropic climbs and merge through currents and thriving seas Winds blowing through breathing trees and strongholds on safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Hello, K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly case Good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. The Santa Cruz Mountains range over more than a thousand square miles of the central California coast, running from just south of San Francisco all the way down to the Salinas Valley. The region has been actively stewarded for thousands of years by indigenous people, and it's a place of significant cultural, biological and environmental diversity which supports many native plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth. There are too many conservation organizations engaged in protecting the area to list, but all are dedicated to the proposition that effective stewardship of a large landscape or region requires an approach that promotes a wide range of beneficial uses or values, including, but not limited to, ecological, recreational, aesthetic, spiritual, cultural and economic.
My guest today on Sustainability now to talk about stewardship of the Santa Cruz Mountains is Dylan Skybrook, manager of the Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network. That's a collaboration of 26 organizations engaged in land stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
And the organization's mission is to help cultivate a resilient, vibrant region where human and natural systems thrive for generations to come.
Dylan Skybrook, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:02:12] Speaker C: Thanks so much. Glad to be here.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Why don't we begin with. You're giving us a broad description of the Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network. You know, what is it? Who belongs to it? How does it operate?
[00:02:26] Speaker C: Yeah, sure.
So the Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network is a collaborative of 26 organizations that all own or manage or in some way steward land in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Each of them has some kind of significant responsibility for land. And even though they do really different things, we have a lot of different organizations. They all want the Santa Cruz Mountains region to thrive.
We have land trusts, public agencies, the Amam, Mutsun Tribe, some water utilities, some timber companies, universities, a lot of different kind of folks.
The network is a vehicle by which they can work together on different issues and it helps them think at a regional scale instead of everyone just only thinking property by property, we cover San Mateo County, Santa Cruz county, and the western forested part of Santa Clara County.
But that boundary is loose. Some of our projects have gone beyond those boundaries and certainly some of our members have Project projects beyond those boundaries.
But essentially we are oriented toward the Santa Cruz Mountains bioregion.
And while I think networks are very useful in lots of different places, they're especially useful in the Santa Cruz Mountains because there's such a patchwork quilt of ownership. There's a lot of small properties, 500 acres, 1,000 acres, 5,000 acres. It's not like up in the Sierras where the US Forest Service might own a couple hundred thousand acres altogether. And they can just decide what to do.
Here in the Santa Cruz Mountains. If you want to deal with the pressing issues, fire resilience, climate change, invasive species, biodiversity, you really have to do that together so that you can cross property lines, cross jurisdictions, cross county lines, that kind of thing. And the network is a vehicle to allow that to happen.
The network uses an emergent strategy by which I mean we don't all get together and come up with a management plan for that entire million acre region. We could never do that with all the organizations that we have that are doing such different things.
Instead, we get everybody together, we talk about issues that are of importance to them, and then different clusters of network members decide to work on different things, depending on whether they have the interest capacity.
And in that way we're able to get a lot done without everybody having to agree.
And we've. It's been a successful way of working over the past decade.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Well, I know you've written about collaborative networks. We'll come back to that. What exactly are the Santa Cruz Mountains? I mean, it covers a lot of area and why don't you, you know, give us a, give us an overview of that?
[00:05:40] Speaker C: Sure, sure. So the Santa Cruz Mountains are the range of mountains just south of San Francisco and west of Silicon Valley. It's a really spectacular region. It's one of the biodiversity hotspots in North America.
And if your listeners are not familiar, it's pretty amazing. I mean, the incredible redwood forests, grasslands, oak woodlands, truly spectacular coastline.
There are mountain lions, badgers, newts, kangaroo rats, red legged frogs, San Francisco garter snakes.
It's quite amazing.
It's also an interesting spot in that it's this island of an important natural landscape that's absolutely surrounded by urban areas.
There's the San Francisco Bay area, there's all of the cities of Silicon Valley, there's Santa Cruz, there's. And so that makes it a little bit difficult because in many places the wildlife are hemmed in and not able to move as freely as they would like. It also means there's an incredible amount of real estate pressure on the land because there's a lot of very wealthy people in the area too and everybody wants to own land.
And so that can lead to some of what I was saying earlier about there being a patchwork quilt of ownership in which, you know, mountain lions, they need 75 mile ranges, you know, badgers like to wander around and so on. There's. There's lots of ways in which there's not connectivity. It's was the, the term people use to make sure that animals can move around as they need to.
That said, that isn't. That's an issue that many of the network members are, are paying attention to. A lot of the land trusts, especially like Peninsula Open Space Trust, Land Trust to Santa Cruz County, Semperviren, Save the Redwoods Leak. They're, they're trying to buy the appropriate chunks of land to make sure that there is connectivity both within the range, but also to other ranges like the Diablo and Gabalon and so on.
So, you know, we want the places for wildlife to go. But also there's a lot of really amazing places for people to be in the Santa Cruz Mountains too. A lot of people live here and there's amazing hiking and mountain biking through the redwoods, you know, horseback riding and so on. I feel quite privileged to be able to work in, in the region because it's pretty gorgeous.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: Yeah. My last guest was David Schmidt who just recently published a. What I called a magisterial tome on the environmental history of the San Francisco Bay region, which included, which included the Peninsula and Santa Cruz County.
And you know, one of the interesting things about the region in a historical sense is this sort of way in which it has been developed. Right. Industrialized, you might say.
Almost civilized, although that's not a really acceptable term. Right. And the settlement patterns are quite interesting as I think. Right. Mostly in the flat areas and in the valleys.
[00:08:53] Speaker C: Right.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: Of course, you know, is what happens all over the world. San Francisco is an exception in many ways. You know. That's right.
All the high and low spots were occupied.
[00:09:05] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: And then, and then the better off people want to live in the mountains. Right. So.
[00:09:10] Speaker C: Yeah, that's right.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: Right. But the fact that so much of it has been, you know, is, is, has not been denuded is pretty interesting, you know, Absolutely. Something about that.
[00:09:23] Speaker C: Yeah. No, I mean. Well, one thing that's interesting is if you look at the area right outside of Santa Cruz, for instance, you know, near where Wilder Ranch State park is, a lot of that was going to be condos at one point. It was slated for that. And people rose up and fought against that.
Mid Peninsula Regional Open Space District. They're one of our members. They're a public agency. They're a special district of California.
They were formed, I think, 50 years ago now to try and create a green belt, so to speak, between the cities of Silicon Valley and the mountain range to kind of stop development from continuing up into the mountains. So I think what you see is at some point, as all that development pressure starts to happen, people are like, wait a minute, we don't want to lose this place. And so I think there are various kinds of efforts that have happened over the last 50 years or so to, to try and preserve what was left, which lucky for us, because it, you know, it could have all been paved over at some point.
[00:10:36] Speaker B: Right, right. Well, what's your background in history? How did you end up at the network? And, you know, what, what are your responsibilities?
[00:10:46] Speaker C: Yeah, sure. So at the network, I am the network manager. I am the only staff person for the network.
And my job is to create the conditions in which people can best collaborate to care for the Santa Cruz Mountains.
You know, you've probably seen job descriptions that say other duties as required.
That's like 90% of my job description is that a lot of what I do is facilitating conversation between network members. We have three convenings per year in which we get everybody together.
We also form teams. We have a fire and forest health team, a wildlife team, trails team, biomass team, et cetera.
So I'm usually leading those.
There's many different kinds of events that we're doing, and so I'm making sure all those happens happen. We have different kinds of projects, collaborative projects that are going on at any different time. And so I usually try not to be the person who's doing those project, but I have a kind of shepherding role to make sure that they're happening. So I'm just kind of paying attention at, you know, a little bit from above, just creating the conditions for people to work together and then making sure that all the things that people want to do are moving forward in some way or another.
I myself do not have a land stewardship background.
I have a master's degree in leadership towards sustainability.
I have focused in the past a ton on systems thinking and complexity science and network theory as just like kind of the sciences of interconnectedness, which for me are really important in understanding why we should be sustainable or why we should take care of land, is, you know, understanding all that, that interconnectedness. And I just have ended up doing a lot of facilitation, a lot of helping people move through processes to get to where they want to go. And so this job ended up being something that was a pretty natural fit, even though it's kind of a weird job. Like, they, you know, they.
They came with, you know, five or six different skill sets that they wanted. And I was like, oh, hey, those are my skill sets. Which is great because I think I'm otherwise kind of unemployable. You know what I mean? It's like I don't have, like, a normal background. The other thing is that I started off as a dancer and choreographer. That was what I did the whole first part of my life until I was like, hey, wait a minute, my body hurts and I'm very poor. I should probably do a different thing.
Of course, you know, I went into sustainability, so I. I didn't exactly go where, like, the big dollars are or anything, but pretty happy with.
With that, that career change, because my job is very cool. I get to do very cool work. And. And so I'm pretty happy about that.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: I'm. I'm just curious. You said you got into sustainability. When did that happen?
How long?
[00:13:59] Speaker C: I went and got a master's degree. I guess I graduated in 2010.
[00:14:05] Speaker B: Huh.
So sort of. Sort of at the peak of the term.
[00:14:11] Speaker C: Indeed, indeed.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: You know, since.
[00:14:14] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: Now it's much more. A much more contentious one.
[00:14:18] Speaker C: That's right. That's right.
[00:14:19] Speaker B: I've discovered. Well, let's shift ground here. So what exactly does the term stewardship mean?
And, you know, tell. You know, I mean, it's. It's broad covers. A lot of different activities could give us examples as well.
[00:14:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, for us, stewardship simply means caring for the land, especially over time.
And because we have all these different organizations doing different kinds of things, it's really. What are all the things we have to do to care for the Santa Cruz Mountains to be in relationship to it?
For us, that includes everything from buying land. I mentioned that before. Buying the appropriate land to create connectivity, to regular maintenance of culverts, say, or road maintenance, to thinking carefully about the design of trails so as not to negatively impact, impact wildlife, to massive restoration projects that reintroduce ecosystem processes. You know, all these things, I think are stewardship.
And as I said, we don't. We purposefully don't have a cut and dry definition because we wanted to embrace this kind of larger, multifaceted approach to caring for the land.
You know, when the network started, one of the Things that says in the memorandum of understanding that all the organizations sign is that we would affirm a mosaic approach.
Because one of the things we understood from the past is that really, well meaning people did various things in other points in time. You can see things that people did to, you know, conserve the land back in the 60s that were pretty bad choices that were, that were not great from an ecosystemic perspective.
And so now we want to go, okay, well, let's have some humility and understand that like maybe different kinds of approaches in different parts of the land are going to be okay. And we're not going to assume that just one organization or one approach is the absolute best.
[00:16:40] Speaker B: Well, in the MOU and on your website you emphasize multi use values.
[00:16:47] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:48] Speaker B: Right.
Maybe you could say something about that and how those can be reconciled. I mean, this is the nature culture argument, right?
[00:16:57] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
So I'm. Gosh, it's such a complex issue, but I think. Yeah, one thing I think to keep in mind because we have, of course, had a kind of leave nature alone ethic in the environmental movement for a long time.
And one thing to keep in mind in the Santa Cruz Mountains and many other places is that people have been here for many thousands of years.
Indigenous people were in this region.
They stewarded the land very muscularly. They did a lot of burning to keep both the forest and grasslands healthy. They encouraged specific food and medicine plants that they found useful.
They didn't at all just leave things alone.
They were really trying to make it the way that they wanted. So just to set that as a kind of set stage there, that the model of leave nature alone is not appropriate for this region. Unless you go way, way back, a couple hundred thousand years or something.
Then we fast forward to now after European settlement and so on. And there's a ton of people who live in the region, you know, like all dotted through the forest.
There's lots of places where there's trails that, where people hike or mountain bike, there's towns dotted through.
And so they generally cannot afford to be pure about these things.
So a lot of folks instead, you know, when they do restoration projects, they're not necessarily trying to do, you know, turning the clock back to some ideal time in the past.
Instead, these days, a lot of the folks in the network have adopted more of a trying to reintroduce ecosystem process into the landscape and to be able to do that wherever possible.
And of course, you know, sometimes there are very special or rare habitats.
And so some of the organizations will have places, you know, Properties that they own where they won't put any trails, they won't allow people there, they'll really try to keep people away so that, you know, rare plants or rare species, endangered species can thrive.
But many of the public agencies, for instance, they have as part of their mission to provide access to the public.
And so everyone's kind of grappling with this all the time, you know, that like, all right, you know, like, how much should we put a trail in here to allow the public? Because the public want to come here and it's part of our mission. And how much should we, you know, fence some of this stuff off to make sure no one can go there?
The other piece, of course, is that we have in our network some timber companies and they do a fantastic job of stewarding the land. And you know, some of the processes that they provide for the land are really important. And so we also want to affirm that that is one way to take care of the land too.
You know, not every timber industry everywhere in the world is great, but in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the timber industry is great. Like their, their land is often in good shape. They, they do wonderful things for the land.
So it's, you know, with 26 organizations in already this complex landscape, you know, we have to kind of affirm a multi use approach that there's both going to be working lands, there's going to be places where there's recreation and there's going to be places that are just preserved for whatever's there. And we're going to not let too many people in there and so on.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Dylan Skybrook, who is manager of the Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network.
And we have been talking about a range of issues having to do with various kinds of conserved and protected lands in the Santa Cruz mountain range, which covers about a thousand square miles, as I understand it, or more, and is literally in everyone's backyard.
Let's continue a little bit about know, talking about the stewardship conservation theme.
And, and I'm particularly interested you mentioned timber companies. I know that Big Creek is one of your members and people in Santa Cruz at least will be familiar with Big Creek.
Do they still, are they still cutting down trees or are they basically engaged in, you know, what sort of conservation activities do they engage in?
[00:21:52] Speaker C: Sure.
Big Creek does selective sustainable harvesting.
Your listeners may know this, but when redwoods get cut down, they send up sprouts, they, they stump sprout and The Santa Cruz Mountains were essentially clear cut in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
And so like all the trees were cut down, except for just a very small percentage. And so when that happened, all of the trees sent up sprouts. And so we end up with a new, younger forest with many, many more trees than in an old growth forest. In an old growth forest, you maybe have 35 or 40 trees per acre, but in a second growth forest you could have hundreds.
And they end up being thinner, spindly compared to old growth because they're all competing for resources.
So one of the things Big Creek figured out when they started back in the 40s is that it made more sense to do selective sustainable harvesting.
Both so they would still have trees to cut, but also because they knew that this was an important region for people. People lived everywhere. There's a static concerns and that kind of stuff.
So one of the things that's sort of interesting is that from a scientific perspective now, if you want to move a forest toward an old growth state, you do need to cut down a few of the trees to release the rest of them to get enough sunlight and water to grow bigger.
And so the difference between what Big Creek does to harvest redwoods to turn into timber and what an organization like Sempervirens or say the Redwoods League would do to try and move forests toward old growth, pretty similar, right? Like cut down some of those trees.
I've. I've heard the folks from Big Creek talk about how much they think about the forest that is left, that they're not just thinking about what trees they can get, they're really thinking about the forest that they're leaving behind as well and how it's going to grow.
And they do that both, you know, for their own commercial purposes because in 15 or 20 years they'll want to go back to that area, maybe in harvest again, but also because they want to, they care about the forests too. You know, Big Creek is a family owned company. They lived in the region for several generations.
So they care about this land.
So one of the things that's interesting is if you tour some of the land that's been harvested around here that's had timber harvest, it actually looks pretty good. Like it looks like a good healthy forest. And they also, because they're a commercial enterprise like they, they have the resources to do the kind of stewardship that is required.
And sometimes public agencies, for instance, don't. You know, there are years when government budgets are lean and they might not have enough money to do all the things that they should be doing that they know they should be doing. And so sometimes big creek lands actually looks better than some of the public agencies land.
So they do harvest trees, but it's often beneficial to the forest and it's certainly beneficial from fire resilience perspective.
So that's the basic, I think about that sort of selective sustainable harvesting approach. And those are the forest practice rules for the Santa Cruz mountains. You know, clear cuts are not allowed in our region. Thank goodness.
[00:25:41] Speaker B: I have a, I guess it's a biological question. I'm not sure whether you can answer it. But you mentioned in old growth forests, you know, there are, what did you say, 30 or 40 trees per acre, something like that?
[00:25:54] Speaker C: I've heard different numbers, but it's around there. Yeah.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: And in second growth forests there, there are many more now.
[00:26:00] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:26:01] Speaker B: Why are old growth forests, relatively speaking so thin? Is it because of competition or because of fire or, you know, do you know the answer to that question?
[00:26:15] Speaker C: Well, yeah, the reason that the, there's hundreds of trees and they're all smaller is because they don't get enough sunlight and water. So as soon as you cut down some of them, they start to get bigger. They get. So like the redwood trees natural state is to be big. Like we see the grand old growth trees and the newer forest is just not reaching that state because they're not getting the resources they need. Now it may also be that, you know, like, I'm not a forest ecologist, so you should definitely get a forest ecologist here to get the exact, exact answer. So fire coming through and, and clearing away the understory may also, you know, be a factor. But I, I can't speak to that super specifically.
[00:26:58] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean there was no one to cut down to thin out the old growth forests. Right. I mean they, the, the, the Native Americans didn't go around, you know, specifically doing that, I imagine.
So that's why I was asking the question.
[00:27:11] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, so like it's, I think it's the difference between, you know, if we can use the word natural, like the natural state of a redwood forest is that old growth state where there's 35 or 40 trees. The only reason you have the hundreds of trees per acre is because they were all cut down at once. Otherwise you wouldn't see that occurring quite that way.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
You know how much of the land within the, the notional boundaries of the Santa Cruz Mountains is under some kind of stewardship, conservation or protection arrangement? You've got a map on your website, and it's a pretty impressive one in terms of, you know, the various areas that are covered. And I'm just wondering whether you have any sense of that or whether you, you know, census.
[00:28:04] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a great question, and I definitely do not know the exact answer. Back In, I think, 2017, we did a kind of back of the envelope count, and Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network members then owned something like 250,000 acres in the region, which is approximately like one fourth of the land.
We've added members since then. And more acres have been purchased, too, by land trust and public agencies and that kind of stuff.
I do want to be careful.
You know, you mentioned, you know, protection arrangement. And you know, one thing it's term that we're a little sensitive about in the network because we have working lands folks, and public agencies and land trusts sometimes protected, which generally means it's like shorthand for protected from development. And it often means owned by a public agency or a land trust so that it can't be turned into like a strip mall or something like that.
But when it gets used as a shorthand, it can imply that land owned by public agencies is protected and land owned privately is not protected and is in danger of being exploited or something like that.
And I just want to say kind of with that, like the Big Creek example, not always the case. You know, sometimes public agencies don't have the resources to care for the land as much as they. They would like.
And sometimes, you know, privately owned land is really well cared for.
And we have in the network two public agencies, the San Mateo and Santa Cruz Resource Conservation Districts. They do a ton of work helping private landowners steward their land too.
And I just want to call that out because one reason the network was formed is because in the past, there was a. There was a while where it was like, oh, gosh, we should buy as much land as we can so that it doesn't get turned into condos or whatever. But then a lot of times it would just get fenced off and no one would touch it and we'd call that protected. But it wasn't really being stewarded, it wasn't really being cared for. And people started to understand that we had to be in ongoing relationship with the land.
And that's one reason why the. The network was formed and why it's called the stewardship network is to make sure that we're not just putting a fence around it and saying it's protected, because that can, you know, it can give a sort of false sense of security then when in fact, we want to be in this, you know, this ongoing relationship, always caring for the land as it cares for us as well.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: I, I didn't use the term, you know, with any offensive intent.
[00:30:53] Speaker C: No, no, no. I, I'm, I'm only calling it out because it's, it's a thing that we think about in the, in the network.
[00:31:00] Speaker B: What was the impetus for, for, you know, starting the network? I mean, how did the network get started?
You know, who.
[00:31:06] Speaker C: Yeah, great question.
Yeah, it was back In, I think 2014 was the first meeting, and it was actually somebody at Sempervirens who was like, wait a minute, we do want to start thinking about stewarding our land, not just buying it, putting a fence around it.
And the original thought was, could there be some kind of shared stewardship corps, you know, so that, you know, one group could go around doing all the, the work that needs to be done on all this land and that that particular idea didn't exactly work out.
But there was a meeting that a bunch of organizations were invited to to talk about whether everyone wanted to work together or not. And people were really interested. And one thing that Sempervirens did is that is amazing is they did not maintain control of it. They had this idea and then they just let it be a collective project. So it's never been Sempervirons project. It's always been a collective project of all of the members.
And at first they were like, okay, you know, let's create some kind of mou about how we were going to work together. And they hired a consultancy to help them kind of shape that. And the consultancy was like, okay, but then what?
And really convinced them that they should form a network structure and that that would be a way to work together over time and that that could. A network structure allows people to work together on different issues, not just one issue.
And then that's it. Right.
So I was hired then and we went from there and, you know, it took the first couple of years to kind of learn how to be a network. You know, I had to learn how to, to manage it and everyone else had to kind of learn how to participate in it. And, and we've, you know, kind of kind of got our wings as we went and, and have been pretty successful over the last decade, I imagine.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: I imagine it's. It's not an easy task to, to keep some of the organizations from trying to throw their weight around or at least at, at the beginning it Was that a problem?
[00:33:24] Speaker C: You know, this is part of the
[00:33:25] Speaker B: collaborative question and maybe we should get back to that. But I'm just curious.
Sure.
[00:33:31] Speaker C: No, I'll be happy to, Happy to speak to it.
I think that the consultancy that helped us network form was called Converge.
And I think, well, they did a bunch of things that were great, but one thing they did that was, that was really great is I think they really explained what a healthy network would be like.
And I think they did a great job of helping people understand that if people were to throw their weight around, that would actually be detrimental to the long term success of collaborating.
So I actually have not seen that a ton. Sometimes you just have organizations that are big and they have big budgets and so they're able to do a lot. That actually usually is helpful rather than harmful. But it does mean they can make certain things happen that they want, you know. But the other thing I would say is, you know, people are always asking me because we have land Trust dedicated to saving redwoods and we have timber companies that are cutting them down, like, do we have, you know, conflicts and so on. And I have to say that we don't have nearly as many conflicts as you might think.
One reason is that the people who are in these organizations are really in a service disposition. They are dedicated to helping the land and they really understand that they can come together and they can make things happen. And so there are so many things that they're just. They let it go by. It's just water off a duck's back. They're just looking to understand, like, how can we make something good happen?
Like, they're just consummate professionals. So I feel quite lucky to be able to work with folks like that because it's not always like that. You know, sometimes people are more likely to be having arguments and, and, and that kind of thing.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: Well, strictly speaking, the different organizations have lands their own sort of, they're. They're stewarding their own lands. Right. The Semper Var Fund is not stewarding the same land as Big Creek.
[00:35:39] Speaker C: Correct, Correct.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: If somehow, yeah, they were mushed together.
Right. And they had to reconcile, that might be a little bit more difficult, I imagine.
[00:35:49] Speaker C: Yeah, it might be. On the other hand, one of the things that's been pretty fantastic about the network is we've done a lot of sharing of information.
And so, you know, I spoke earlier about the need to sometimes thin the forest to bring the redwoods forest more toward an old growth stage.
That's not something everyone was necessarily thinking about prior to the network being formed. But, but pretty much everyone has come along to that point of view that that's actually a good thing to do.
So there's, you know, they're not exactly the same what Central Veterans and Brigg Creek would want to do for sure. On the other hand, there's more overlap than you might expect because there's a similar scientific understanding of what is healthy for the forest.
[00:36:42] Speaker B: Take our second. Oh, go ahead. Did you.
[00:36:45] Speaker C: Well, I, I was just going to say one other thing which is I focus a lot on building relationship between the network members. I want to make sure that they know each other well, they know each other beyond what might be in a professional setting. We spend time together, we have meals together.
We also do a lot of information sharing where people are sharing, you know, giving updates on their projects and their programs, their goals and, and that kind of thing which both allows them to self organize collaborative projects, but it also means they're friendly, you know, so it's, it's easier in that context. That's one of the ways that I try to create the conditions for collaboration so that as we're talking through things, it's just easier to keep things on a friendly basis, you know, when people are in good relationship.
[00:37:39] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschutz and my guest today is Dylan Skybrook, manager of the Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network. And we've been talking a bit about organizational and network dynamics, which again is another thing that actually fascinates me.
But I wanted to, to actually move to a different, slightly different topic, which is you mentioned that the network has a number of different projects and that your role is to more or less ensure that things are getting done.
I'm curious, how does the network decide on those projects and what roles do different organizations then play in those projects?
[00:38:23] Speaker C: We have three convenings per year where we bring everybody together at those convenings, you know, to even to set the agenda. I'm talking to folks to see what's up for people.
You know, we discuss those issues and then we see what emerges.
And so we might form a team.
You know, I mentioned earlier that we have several different now, fire and forest health team, wildlife team, et cetera. And so those teams might just be information sharing that that's one thing that they do or they might move into doing some kind of project.
So for instance, after the CZU fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 2020 where nearly 90,000 acres burned, people were really worried about all the dead trees.
You Know, a couple of dead trees in a forest are really helpful. Home for bugs, home for woodpeckers, that kind of stuff.
But millions of them are not great. They can be tender for the next fire.
And when people are already doing forest thinning work or, you know, shaded fuel breaks, you know, get, you know, masticating understory and that kind of stuff, there's a lot of woody biomass to take care of.
So we formed a team and when we were talking about it, one of the things that was crazy is that everyone was having a really different kind of problem depending on where people's property were or which air district they were in. Because the, they have different kinds of rules for permitting and so on. If they were close to roads, if they were not close to, you know, there was just all these different things. And so we were trying to figure out, like, what is the shared challenge here?
And we, we finally kind of came to the conclusion that we needed to have the bigger picture.
At the time, there was a guy named Desert Waters who was working for Peninsula Open Space Trust. He and I just came up with the idea of doing a regional woody biomass utilization study to try and get that big picture of the region so we could contextualize everyone's specific challenges within that larger picture.
So we hired this guy, David Featherman from wildefor Consulting, to do a study, and Peninsula Open Space Trust post they put up the money for it.
And that took like a year and a half to do the study. We used our biomass team as a stakeholder group so that all the people who are owning property and managing could be giving information.
And we recently got this study, which is fantastic. He did, David Featherman did an amazing job.
It contains a feedstock analysis so how much woody biomass would be available if, for instance, we wanted to make, say, an energy plant, you know, that's one of the, the possibilities.
There's others as well.
It identified several sites where that kind of processing facility could occur. And it looked at different pathways, like an energy plant or biochar or other things and analyzed those.
Now we have that, and we can move it forward and do some coordination and see if we can figure out which organizations want to work together, you know, how all that might work.
We haven't gotten to that stage yet, but even already, like what I've described so far, is a pretty good example of how we work together. Where it's like, all right, this disaster happened. We try to understand how it's affecting people. What do we need? What resource do we need to move things Forward. We got this study post, put up the money for that. That's how we got the money in that case for other projects that we've done that are similar. We've gotten grants from various folks. And so it's kind of like, you know, each thing that comes up, there's a different cluster of network members that if it's relevant for them, they work on it. And then we try to find money or staff time or whatever, however we can. If one of the organizations has money, that's great. Otherwise we go look for a grant or something like that and we just keep moving stuff forward until hopefully it works. And in this case it's been working so far and hopefully it'll keep working and actually help us create some kind of facility and which will really help for fire resilience in the region and for forest health because people will be able to do these projects and take care of all this woody biomass.
No promises, but it may actually help save taxpayer dollars too, because it's expensive to truck this kind of stuff out of the region if we can't process it here.
So, yeah, that's just one example. But that's kind of how things work, is we just listen and then move things forward and try to find a way.
[00:43:20] Speaker B: Well, I have, I have lots of questions about this potential plant, but I'm not going to ask you about that because that would take quite a lot of time.
You've written a lot about the process of collaboration, right? And you mentioned earlier that, you know, your, your area was in leadership, sustainability, I suppose, certain amount of, of systems and complexity thinking.
Tell us, you know, tell us about collaboration.
[00:43:52] Speaker C: It's useful in, in the case of a network to have some kind of overall shared purpose.
Otherwise, why do people want to work together? Right? Like collaboration is just, you know, people wanting to work together.
In the case of the Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network, people, all the organizations really want the network to thrive, you know, whatever else, whatever kind of work they're doing, whether they're a timber company, water utility, whatever they want their region to do well. So that's what brings everybody together.
But then, you know, like when I was just describing this biomass project, not like at the action level, people are engaged by different things. You know, the, there are folks who are really focusing on the wildlife. Our wildlife team, for instance, for a while was just working with badgers, looking at regional badger conservation.
And so that's what was engaging that team. And we had a different set of people working on the biomass project.
And so to find Those things means that I'm helping people do their jobs right, like this is their work and they can do it better if they do it together.
At the same time, I'm generally trying to create the conditions by which collaboration can happen. So I already mentioned trying to help people develop relationship with one another because that's the foundation of it all. If people have relationships together, then they trust each other and want to work together.
You know, there's this phrase the speed of trust, right? You can only go as fast as you, as you, as you trust one another.
So we really try to make sure that everyone knows each other well.
Whenever I can, I try to make sure if there's hard issues that we get them out there so that people feel good about coming to the network and sharing information and that kind of stuff.
I've also worked a lot at just cultivating like what is a useful disposition to have or a useful disposition to bring to participating in the network.
And one of them is listening.
You know, if you have 26 organizations, you know, a lot of organizations have a kind of command and control hierarchy where someone's in charge.
You know, you have a work plan. You know, everybody, you know, everyone's work plan is sort of oriented toward their strategic plan, you know, that kind of stuff. But if you get 26 organizations in the room that we don't have that right. So you have to spend a lot of time listening to everybody's opinion, which can be challenging. It's a different way of working.
So you really have to bring your patience also, especially in the beginning, you know, as people were going around and talking about what they were interested in, it's not like immediately, you know, what is the thing that you're going to work on. So there's a little bit of an ambiguity there. And so you have to have that tolerance for ambiguity where you just let things be like, okay, we're hearing a bunch of different opinions. We're going to have to sift through those. We listen to everyone, we have some patience, and as we sift through, we will start to find things that emerge that are useful for people to work on together.
That's a little bit of a different process than we created a strategic plan. We already know what the goals on the goals are. And when we go into this meeting, we know we're working toward those goals.
And it did take us a little while to kind of build that culture and the network, but, but it really not that long, like a year or two. And now that culture is just there. So even when people, new people come into the network, they fit in pretty easily and they see what we're doing. And people are used to talking in this way and sharing information in this way.
I think it's like a, it's a nice experience for people. Like people have a good time coming to network meetings.
One of the things I do, speaking of creating the conditions for collaboration, every time I try to make sure we have good food, I try to make sure we have good food, I try to make sure we're meeting in beautiful places. I try to make sure that the meetings are positive experiences.
And so if you get the kind of, the right, so called right people in the room, meaning like who are the people who have significant responsibility for the land, you build trust.
We do basic things like sharing information so people can see where their different projects are intersecting.
And you just keep doing that. Over time you start to see what are the good things to do.
The other thing, I'll say one of the most important things about my role.
So you can imagine if you got all these folks together and you had a meeting and people came up with ideas and then just nothing happened.
That's really demoralizing is you came up with all these ideas and it doesn't go anywhere. My job is always to ask the next question.
Kind of like I was talking about with the, the biomass project, which is like, okay, you want to work on this?
What should we do? All right, how are we going to do that? Do, does one of you have a staff person who can take this on? Is this something we can do within the team?
Does your organization have money to give in? Do we need to write a grant? Should we hire a contract? You know, like there's all these, we need to keep asking questions until we figure out what is the container for action.
I don't have to be the one that does that. Like I don't have to do the biomass study, for instance, but I do have to make sure that we're pushing forward until the questions are answered so that it's a useful endeavor that we're not wasting people's time by having ideas that don't go anywhere.
So I think those are the ingredients. It's like bring everyone together, listen, come up with ideas, figure out ways to move them forward.
And, and you know, there's this kind of like, you know, this emergent process means we have a little bit of a loose handle on what we're going to do.
So I'll, I'll give you an example of a, of a project that didn't work that well. You know, it's a collaboration that didn't work.
At one point, some people in the network came up with the idea that we should be focusing on workforce development, which is a, you know, a challenge in California generally is to get all the people that we need into the field to do all the work that needs to happen.
So I formed a team. Not that many people wanted to sign up for it. As we started meeting, people started to drop out. I was left with just one person from Mid Peninsula Open Space District. She was really committed. We worked together for a little bit. We created a survey to send out to everybody to ask, what are your workforce development needs?
What would you want to do? Do you want to join this team? Would you want to do a one day workforce development forum where we all get together?
And I had some people fill out the survey, but not as many as I like, as I would have liked. And then no one wanted to join the team. And not many people were interested in doing a one day forum. So I went back to them and I was like, we're not going to move forward on this.
And this happens in the network every once in a while where someone comes up with an idea that is important, but they just don't have the time or capacity to work on it. In our network, we have all the stewardship people, we have all the people who are going out and doing restoration projects. And so even though they know that workforce development is important, it actually doesn't necessarily make sense for them to fit it into their work plan.
So, you know, that, that just didn't go forward.
But for me, this is actually a good sign, not a bad sign. Like if, if we never had anything fizzle like that, I would think we are not trying enough things.
You know, I want to keep listening to everyone, keep trying to move things forward. Some of the things work and some of them don't. That's how we find out what we can do.
But in that way we can keep making a lot happen. That's, that's how I understand if we're being successful, if we are successfully moving some of these things forward.
[00:52:19] Speaker B: Well, we're at the end of our time together. Is there any, any last things you might want to mention?
[00:52:27] Speaker C: First of all, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Love talking about the network and I'll just say, folks can look out. In early 2028, we're going to do a science and stewardship symposium. We just did one back in January and will get a lot of stewardship practitioners and researchers together to talk about the Santa Cruz Mountains. This will be really fascinating.
And the other thing I'll say is I just feel it's such a privilege to do this work in this region. It's such a beautiful place. The people I work with are absolute heroes. They do so much to help the land.
You know, when you're out there and you're looking down at a stream, you might not know it used to be damned and that one of these organizations has worked to undam it, work with the hydrology, reintroduced coho and steelhead. And so now it's healthy again.
So just give it a thought as you're out there hiking or biking that there are people who are working to steward this land. And if you're aware of your local organization who does that work, you know, maybe go and volunteer or give them a donation or something like that.
[00:53:36] Speaker B: Okay? Dylan Skybrook, thank you so much for being my guest on Sustainability Now.
[00:53:42] Speaker C: All right, thank you so much for having me.
[00:53:45] Speaker B: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Dylan Skybrook, manager of the Santa Cruz Mountain Stewardship Network, a collaboration of 26 organizations engaged in land stewardship in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Its mission is to help cultivate a resilient, vibrant region where human and natural systems can thrive for generations to come.
If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] Sustainability now, as well as Spotify, YouTube and Pocket Casts, amongst other podcast sites. If you'd like to get emails about forthcoming shows, please drop me a line@ronnie lsqd.org so thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K SQUID your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next every other Sunday, Sustainability Now.
[00:54:47] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out.
Temperate zones, tropics climbs and through currents and thriving seas, Winds blowing through breathing trees, strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah, good.
