Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Good planet's are hard to find out separate zones. The tropic climbs through Ss and thriving the wind's blowing some breathing trees and strong zone and save sunshine. Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:00:34 Yes. Good planets are hard to find. High case, good listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to sustainability now, a biweekly 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 Lipitz. We live in a world of landscapes, whether they are in the middle of cities or out in the wilderness, and virtually all these landscapes have been transformed by human action, whether an ancient times or just last week. We're now in the midst of what many scholars and pundits call the anthrop scene. And we're anticipating major, major impacts and disasters as a result of human cause climate change. Yet few of us experienced climate change is anything more than an abstraction, even in the midst of floods and hurricanes. Climate change is by and large experienced in local terms and not as vast atmospheric masses in oceanic rivers in motion or secular. Global temperature changes over decades or even the disappearance of familiar species such as birds and insects. So what does it mean to experience climate change locally in local terms? My guest today, I hope will answer some of those questions. He's Andrew Matthews, chair and associate professor of anthropology at uc Santa Cruz. He's just published, trees are shape shifters, how cultivation, climate change and disaster create landscapes. A closely documented study of trees in people in Central Italy and how they make sense of social and environmental change around them. Andrew Matthews, welcome to sustainability. Now,
Speaker 3 00:02:09 Uh, it's a great pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2 00:02:11 Uh, I read your book with great interest and, um, found some echoes of stuff that I wrote 25 years ago in the book. So I was pleased on the one hand. And, uh, I, uh, anyway, let's just, let's just go on. Okay. So perhaps the best way to, to begin is to have you give a brief summary of the book and how you decided to do research in Central Italy around Pi Lucha Luca Luca and Mount Pisano.
Speaker 3 00:02:40 Yes, that's Monte Pisano.
Speaker 2 00:02:41 Monte Pisano. Okay.
Speaker 3 00:02:43 Yes. Uh, great question. Uh, well, um, I partly grew up in Italy and I knew I wanted to go back there to learn about it with a whole new set of eyes, which is one thing is to grow up in a place where your elders and neighbors tell you things. And another thing is to study it for yourself and learn again. Uh, but, uh, I was interested in Italian landscape because like most Mediterranean landscapes, this is a place where people have been cultivating, shaping the landscape, transforming it for thousands of years. And I was interested in seeing what, what does it feel like to experience climate change in a place when you also have to remember all of this history of cultivation and landscape care, uh, disasters in the past that have maybe reshaped, uh, the ecosystems reshaped human cultivation systems and sort of people there have this constant balance between the new ideas about climate change, but the older ideas about what it's like to live in a landscape where people used to be, uh, sort of peasant small holders, and now they're all working in factories and the landscape is falling into ruin.
Speaker 2 00:03:48 Oh, well, you're calling, the book is titled Trees Are Shapeshifters, you know, why did you choose that title?
Speaker 3 00:03:53 Ah, thank you so much. Well, first of all, because trees are shape shifters, but you have to sort of, uh, attune yourself to the capacity of trees and plants to change form, uh, right. Because, uh, they grow very slowly, but they respond to things like, uh, having branches cut off, being logged, uh, fire and disease. A and you know, once you begin to appreciate the capacity of trees and plants to respond to the world, it just, life becomes a lot more interesting. Um, I could give examples of the shapeshifting capacities of trees on the uc Santa Cruz campus, right?
Speaker 2 00:04:29 Yeah. That would be, that would be interesting since our listeners presumably, you know, know about redwoods, right?
Speaker 3 00:04:34 Yeah. So redwoods are champion shapeshifters, right? So, um, many of you have probably been up in the woods, uh, different parts of, of pretty much anywhere in Santa Cruz County, or we have redwoods. They were all logged in the late 19th, early 20th century. And then, you know, they were cut off. They were just stumps, often they burned slash afterwards the fires kind of left charcoal in all the stumps and then this wonderful ecological sort of accident. Nobody was planning for it, although presumably lots of people knew about it in some way. They rerouted from the stumps and all of those redwood trees that you see when you walk in the woods around here rerouted from the stumps of trees that were logged, uh, during this crazy frontier period in the late 19th, early 20th century. And once your eyes get kind of clued in on that, all of a sudden you realize that these trees are changing shape all the time, and they can do something kind of miraculous. They can grow new branches, and if unfortunately, if someone cuts my arm off, I cannot grow a new one, but a tree can, which is quite a trick.
Speaker 2 00:05:37 Yeah. Well, that's how you get fury circles, right? Because of the, the sprouting of trees around the original
Speaker 3 00:05:43 Stump. That's right. The ferry rings theory
Speaker 2 00:05:46 Ferry rings. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:05:46 Uh, yes, same thing. And often you can see on some of the stumps, the kind of the, the cuts where people built a, a platform so they could go up there and, you know, sew the tree down, down, so you can see the physical traces of that frontier period in front of your eyes everywhere.
Speaker 2 00:06:03 Yeah. I mean, in a way, Henry Cow is kind of misleading Henry Cow Park because there are, uh, original redwoods there, right. I don't think, I don't know if it it was logged or not, but one goes there and gets the impression that these are, you know, these have been there forever. And the same thing is true when students come to visit the campus. You know, they have no sense that that a hundred years ago, 120 years ago, all of this place was, was clear cut. It's, it's, it's surprising. They're surprised when they hear it. Um, well, in the book, you argue that caring for tree form persuades humans to also care about landscape form giving rise to a distinctive kind of politics. I'm kind of anticipating here some of our later discussion, but, but you know, we, we certainly see politics of around trees in the United States, but that idea of, of sort of original primordial forest right, permeates the way that, that our politics of trees proceeds. What, what's the difference between, between the United States and Italy?
Speaker 3 00:07:09 That's such a great question. So, you know, there's many complexities, but a very good place to start is just that when they're, uh, in Italy, and I would say in the Mediterranean more broadly, just people are aware that this is a landscape that has been cared for by human beings kind of since forever. You could say that's how people understand it. And so whenever there is a forest fire or a landslide or a flood, the immediate response responses, people need to take more care. In other words, humans need to do something in the landscape to make it safer, to restore it, to take care of it. And again, simplifying greatly. But the, in, in the United States and North America, the immediate assumption is, oh, people need to get out of the landscape so that nature can do its thing, right? Yeah. So putting people in versus taking people out, these are very different responses. And in some ways, I think Italy is a harbinger for where we're going to be at in North America, also because the landscapes that we live in North America are so profoundly transformed by human action that we can't imagine that just removing ourselves from the landscape is possible. So we are having to live now with the consequences of all the centuries of sort of land care and land abandonment and landscape abuse that we've done. And,
Speaker 2 00:08:29 You know, as I'm thinking about, the closest parallel is probably New England, but in New England, you have all had all of these abandoned farms going back to forest, right? I mean, there are similarities there, but, but I don't know if, if you see the same kind of politics about New England forests that you describe in your book. Uh, and if you don't have an answer to that, that's fine. It's just an observation.
Speaker 3 00:08:55 Yeah. You know, I think that that's a really good question. And I actually worked as a forester in New England. So
Speaker 2 00:09:00 Tell us about that too.
Speaker 3 00:09:01 Somewhere in my mind. Well, I'll just, uh, new England is sort of like Italy, which in the sense that when you walk through forest, you find all these stone walls and cell holes, and you get a sense that this was an incredibly heavily humanized landscape. Uh, Vermont, where I worked, you know, I don't have the numbers, but early in the 19th century, it was about 85 or 90% fields and pastures, and now it's just the opposite. It's about 90% forest. So that gives you a sense for how incredibly transformed the world is there. Um, I would say one thing that is different in Italy from New England, and which actually resonates with California, is that, um, it's a very unstable landscape. So like coastal California, they're recently uplifted marine sediments through tectonic action, basically sands and mud and shas and, and mm-hmm. <affirmative> and the like.
Speaker 3 00:09:55 And when forests are damaged or removed, you can get landslides. We also have earthquakes. So landscape stability in Italy is a directly practical question. Uh, there was, uh, landslides in east outside Naples like yesterday. Yeah. Right. And the first thing people said is, well, why did they cut the trees down? And why didn't they fix the drainage? So people are, they're saying, we need to take care of the landscape because it's unstable. We have to get involved in it. And that's a, uh, new England's pretty gentle place, and we don't have that particular problem there.
Speaker 2 00:10:28 Yeah. Um, how did you, I mean, what you, you mentioned that you, uh, were trained as a forester. I thought that was kind of interesting how, tell us about that.
Speaker 3 00:10:37 Yeah, actually, the forester thing connects back to Italy. So when I, you know, was an undergraduate, I was a physics major, I didn't know what I was gonna do,
Speaker 2 00:10:45 So was I,
Speaker 3 00:10:46 Oh, <laugh>. That's amazing. Well, physics majors, they end up everywhere. Um, so, you know, after college I was working in Italy working as an agricultural labor, and I was, um, impressed and fascinated by the kind of the practical ecological knowledge of this generation of peasant farmers who are already quite elderly, but were still around. They were doing their thing. And I thought, okay, how can I learn about landscapes in something like the way that they understand trees and soils and plants? So I went back to school to do, to study forestry, and that's how I got into it. It started with this idea that I would, you know, learn how to take care of forests and come back to Italy. But I made a long detour by way of Mexico. But this, this project is by return to Italy. And, um, yeah,
Speaker 2 00:11:31 I mean, one of the, one of the things that turns up in the book is this local knowledge of the Italian peasants. Yes. The peasantry, which has died out. Right. And, um, of course, there's a lot of interest, especially in the academy about indigenous and local knowledge. Um, and, and later on in the book, you contrast that, that kind of of applied practical experience with scientific forestry, and maybe you can, you know, compare the two, I mean, which is, uh, which is better. I mean, that's probably not the right term, but, uh, which works better.
Speaker 3 00:12:09 Yeah. So that's a really great question. And you know, people have been asking that question for the last 200 years, and we're not done asking it, but I will give you some sort of, some things I've learned along the way. So, you know, the sci, I was trained as a scientific forester, foresters love tolls, straight trees that you cut up into beams and, you know, planks basically, um, they can build cathedrals or ships out of the kinds of timbers that, uh, foresters know how to grow. And, you know, peasants were interested in a lot of other things. They were interested in, uh, fruit trees, trees that had horizontal branches. They were interested in firewood, they were interested in poles. They were interested in the fact that trees would stabilize canal banks, they would build terraces for them. So they were interested in many more things about trees than scientific foresters were. And they also developed a host of detailed, practical play space forms of knowledge, which more often don't translate to other places. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's the translatability of sort of scientific forestry, which is on the one hand allows you to go to a new landscape and think you know what you're doing, but on the other hand, might lead you badly astray because you may well not know what you're doing.
Speaker 2 00:13:27 Not not to drop into lecture mode, but, but I did, you know, this is now 30 years ago when, um, I wrote a, a book chapter on what was then called Redwood Summer. I don't know if you were around. This was a, this was a campaign modeled on freedom summer that took place up in northern California and, and up the Pacific coast trying to, to protect the redwoods. And what was really sort of interesting was thinking about how, how scientific forestry, or industrial forestry as it was taught right, was very much about productivity, whereas you might say ecological forestry, which was starting to become, you know, which was being taught more and more in the universities, looked at biodiversity and, and ecosystem conservation. And the two were very much in, you know, direct conflict. And to some degree, it seems like it's still the case, although the, the scientific foresters are gradually dying out. Right. Because I don't know if that gets taught in universities anymore, that kind of industrial focused forestry. Um, but I could be wrong about that.
Speaker 3 00:14:37 Well, we still have, uh, around the world we have sort of plantation forestry and industrial forestry. So I think it's more the case that it's retreated from the, what we call the wilder parts of the landscape. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but there are industrial plantations are unfortunately expanding in, in many parts of the
Speaker 2 00:14:54 World. You're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipitz, and my guest today is Dr. Andrew Matthews, uh, professor of anthropology at uc, Santa Cruz and chair of the department. And we're talking about his recently published book. Trees Are Shape Shifters, and we're sort of roaming back and forth amongst Italy and California and New England, and I guess the rest of the world where plantation forestry is becoming, um, sort of the, it's, it's also becoming a, a, a, a way to sequester carbon for a certain period of time. Right. I mean, that's, but you know, we can come back to that. It's, it's, uh, not really part of, of the conversation. Well, in your book, your focus is on chestnut trees. They're brought to decline due to disease, and they're displaced by other tree uh, species. So, you know, I'm intrigued by the idea of, of chestnut as a, as a food source. Maybe talk, tell us about that.
Speaker 3 00:15:51 Yes. So, um, and, and I, I more or less stumbled across this, the chestnut in this landscape where I was working, which is the best kind of research when you come across it by accident. And so, chestnut trees, uh, were the main source of carbohydrate food for people in Italy who are in the middle hills, I would say sort of between, say, 208 or 900 meters in the elevation. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And, uh, it was part of this amazingly productive and complex system that linked chestnut trees with, uh, sheep and goats grazing in the woods, and they provided fuel, they provided the animals, provided, you know, milk and cheese and butter and so on. And so it was a very integrated human animal plant system. Um, it was greatly damaged in the late 19th century by diseases that were brought actually from East Asia, probably from China with, uh, uh, chestnut varieties were introduced from China, first and North America, and then to, to Europe.
Speaker 3 00:16:53 And, uh, they gradually sort of eliminated big parts of, of the, uh, chestnut forest from the lower elevations. And all of this is happening at a time when the Italian government, as many other governments was really interested in industrial agriculture and industrialization. So industrial agriculture in Italy meant wheat. So wheat cultivation was what governments cared about. And they saw chestnut cultivation as backward, uh, insufficient, inadequate, uh, lacking in nutrition. They had all kinds of, uh, rude, uh, stereotypes about people who lived dog chestnut, uh, you know, as a staple. And so they didn't really care too much about the damage caused by the disease. And when chestnut cultivation went away, they just said, well, that's progress for you. And again, there was a second disease that came through in the late thirties also from, uh, sort of introduced from, uh, east Asian chestnut varieties. And again, that seemed to be the final death now of the population.
Speaker 3 00:17:59 Um, so chestnut cultivation is interesting because they're grafted trees, which means you combine a cultivated variety with a wild root stock, and, uh, they can live for centuries, but only if people keep on taking care of them. So in many places in the landscape, you'll have cultivated chestnut trees that are 3, 4, 5, 600 years old that, uh, have required more or less continual human care over these many centuries. If someone doesn't come by every decade or so, and kind of cut off the shoots that emerge from the, what we call the lower part, the root stock, it'll fall apart. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So it's a very inspiring example in a world where people do everything in the short term of, in some places at sometimes humans manage to keep things going for decades and centuries. It's a good example for us. And, you know, in North America, the oldest old growth trees are sort of trees which appear not to have much connection with humans. And in the Mediterranean, uh, chestnuts aren't necessarily the oldest trees, but they're getting up there. And the, those are trees, which if you find them anywhere, they're there because humans cared about them and planted them and have continued to care for them.
Speaker 2 00:19:14 But given the two diseases that, that, you know, ran through the, the chestnut groves, why are there still surviving trees?
Speaker 3 00:19:24 Um, luck is one factor, but elevation is another. Right. The, the diseases that do the most damage are happier at lower elevations. So the places where the chestnut has survived is sort of higher up where it's cooler. And in fact, now with climate change, of course, the disease is pushing uphill.
Speaker 2 00:19:42 Huh. Huh. That's interesting.
Speaker 3 00:19:45 Uh, the, actually, the other part that I was forgetting, which is that, um, the second disease is chestnut caner. This is the disease that wiped out the North American chestnut in the early 20th century mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And so this is like the 1910s or so that it arrives in Pennsylvania, and it's the disaster and our governmental commissions. And of course, there's nothing they can do. And this species, which formerly was a huge component of eastern forest, just basically disappeared within, within a period of 20 years or so. And then that same disease arrived in Italy and in the Mediterranean in the late 1930s. And people had been watching North America and they thought, this is the end of the world. The same exact thing that happened in Pennsylvania or, or or Connecticut is gonna happen here. And at first, that seemed to be what was happening. The trees were dying in the space of a year or two, and that was it. But then this sort of ecological miracle happened, which is that the chestnut caner itself acquired a disease which slowed it down, and that largely halted it. And that's why chestnut in Mediterranean didn't disappear.
Speaker 2 00:20:54 Huh. That's interesting. Of course, the chestnuts in North America weren't cultivated, right? Or were they, I mean, you know, this is something that, that, uh, nobody would know about, you know, as, as food.
Speaker 3 00:21:07 Well, I think that indigenous people and other people in North America did eat chestnuts mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and it seems likely they didn't graft them, so they didn't have that kind of more intense form of cultivation. But it's quite likely that there was some landscape care practices which would've favored a species that produced food, both for humans and for wildlife. Right. Yeah. It's not well understood to my knowledge, but I'm, I would say that given what we know about indigenous land care practices, I would be astonished if they were not observing and sort of caring for these, uh, these species. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 00:21:40 <affirmative> mm-hmm. <affirmative>. But you did, you did meet up with some of these, these, uh, Italian peasants, right? I mean, they were quite old according to what you wrote in the book. And, um, one of the things I remember now, 30 years ago, hearing someone, it might have been Margaret Fitzsimons or, or, um, someone else talk about the many meanings of the forest, you know, that for a forester, it's, and, and it's lumber for, uh, someone who, uh, is interested in recreation, you know, it's the outdoors. Um, and I'm curious, was there, did you get a sense from these peasants of the meaning meanings, cultural meanings that were imputed to these, these chestnut groves? Um, was, and, and I asked this question, right, because, and it's something that, that talked about on previous shows, right? Is about, uh, that we tend to look at nature in terms of value, in terms of particularly economic value, right? As opposed to cultural value or, or cultural meaning, because I don't like, you know, the idea of value. And I'm, I'm wondering, did you get from the peasants, these, these old peasants, any ideas of how they, you know, sort of their social relationship to the forest?
Speaker 3 00:22:59 That's a really good question. So, um, the, they're very interested in working with, in the chestnut trees, but also olive trees. So there's this practical, working with plants is just fascinating to them. They're just, they're committed to keeping them going. Right? So there's a sense that, uh, a sense of obligation to keep it going, a sense of responsibility. Also very intensely judgmental about their neighbors who don't take trees, take care of trees in just the way that they would. So, um, you know, if you ever wondered what, you know, you know, three old farmers are doing, sitting at a cafe somewhere in Italy, they're probably gossiping about their neighbor's cultivation practices and basically arguing that the way they do it is better. Right? So, but it's practical, it's aesthetic, and there's a sense of obligation. There's also judgment, all of those things.
Speaker 2 00:23:54 It's a lot like raising children, I guess, in that respect. Right? There are dozens of ways, and no one can agree on what is the best,
Speaker 3 00:24:02 But in the case of trees, your neighbors walk by and look at your trees and say, oh, <laugh>, Andrew doesn't know what he's doing.
Speaker 2 00:24:08 Yeah. Well, <laugh>, um, you know, one of the things you talked about, uh, that really struck me is this idea of forest cleaning, the, the raking up of leaves and litter to reduce the risk of fire, make compost, the copying of trees and shoots probably should say what that means to control she shape and growth, and the system of terras and drainage to direct water and avoid mudslides. And I mean, all of this resonates with debates here in California about overgrown forests. And so how did this system of, of forest care develop?
Speaker 3 00:24:41 Yeah, so over, I would say since the Roman time, since the Middle Ages, this has been a landscape that is just full of people, right? Requiring continual work to keep it going. And as human populations increase in middle ages, that becomes even more the case. So the kinds of things people did, every, I would say every growing thing had a purpose, and someone who's responsible for keeping it going. So firewood would be cut and copying is the way they would cut firewood. This takes advantage of this capacity of trees to resprout from the stump. So you might get like a dozen or 15 shoots, and then gradually that's reduced to four or five, and after 15 years, you come back and you cut it again. And so, firewood in all across Europe has been produced for many, many centuries of the same stumps. This is called copying mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
Speaker 3 00:25:34 So that's one of the ways in which people sort of continually worked with trees, uh, to, you know, get things they needed. Sometimes firewood, sometimes poles lit is just another aspect of this. So, um, it's well known for central Europe, not well known for Italy, but it turns out to be ubiquitous. So basically, people would go out in the woods, they would pick up certainly every scrap of firewood on the ground, but another practice was to rake up the leaf litter, either with these sort of wooden claws. They would just rake it up, put it in baskets, uh, or in bundles, and carry it down to the farm. They would mix that with, uh, animal manure from their, their, the stables from the stalls. They would compost it, and then that was their source of fertilizer. So in that world, forests and agriculture were tightly linked.
Speaker 3 00:26:23 Forest were a source of nutrients, and you really couldn't keep olive cultivation going without the support of sheep, goats, and forests and lit. And at least for the generation that I talked to, you know, really quite elderly people. Now, in their seventies, eighties, even nineties, most of that work was done by women and children. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, it's hard to say what it was like a hundred or 200 years ago, but it's quite likely that that was also the case then. So imagine a world in which, uh, the forest looked really different from here, where it literally, every scrap of vegetable material that fell on the forest for was gathered and had a purpose in someone who's responsible for it. And that produced a landscape which was very much less likely to burn, because as my informants, as the people I talked to told me, they said, how could it burn if a flame started? Someone would put it out and it had nowhere to go. There was nothing to burn. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, this is very different from now, and this is much more similar to what we have here in Santa Cruz in California, where the forest is full of dry vegetation, and as we know, uh, we can have, you know, catastrophic fires.
Speaker 2 00:27:30 Yeah. You are listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipitz, and my guest today is Professor Andrew Matthews, uh, who is in the answer to anthropology department at uc Santa Cruz. And we're talking about his newly published book. Trees Are Shapeshifters, uh, and we were just, uh, talking about cleaning the forest floor, which of course is a topic that comes up repeatedly, uh, in California, uh, between those who argue that we need to, you know, tidy up the forests so that forest fires aren't intense, and those who argue for leaving it as it is in the interest of, uh, ecosystemic processes. But, um, let's go, let's go on. Right. So, so in the 19th century, industrialization and state building appear right in the, in the modern sense. And, um, you bring in, in the book, not just industrialization, but, but political economy as well, a changing political economy as critical factors and forces, you know, transforming this landscape, right. And what people were doing in the landscape. So how did that, you know, what did this do to chestnut cultivation? And, and you know, what did pe how did people respond to it?
Speaker 3 00:28:50 Yeah, so, uh, people had been leaving the mountains in Italy already since the mid 19th century. The, I would say the peak population, uh, and industry in mountains, really, right across the Mediterranean, Mediterranean world was sometime like in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s. So at that time, in, in rural places, there was lots of industry. So something that happens, the, the, the system shifts in, in the late 19th century, and all of that rural industry kind of goes away, and it gets concentrated down in the valleys in large cities. So this is really hard for us to imagine, right? We think of the mountains as being kind of remote, close to nature. And yet, at that time, for much of the last 1500, 1500 years, mountains and middle hills were where industry was. Cuz there there was water power. Yeah. You could get work done. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
Speaker 3 00:29:43 So lots, imagine lots of small factories, you know, shoe factor, a small little shoemaker, a paper mill, these kinds of things. They just all go away and people have to leave. And they, they move down to big cities, they move to pi, they move to Milan, they move to Brazil, they move to New York, right? That's the, the where people begin to leave, uh, cultivation and enter the industrial labor force, uh, in Italy, it really takes hold after World War ii and in a, in a period of 10, or, or maybe that's the last blow of that system when, um, uh, Italy begins to have very rapid industrialization in the montesano. You know, people go and get works making scooters. Uh, you know,
Speaker 2 00:30:24 The, the
Speaker 3 00:30:25 Vespers Vespas, yes, there was a Vespa factory like 15 miles away, Uhhuh. And that was a great job. And, uh, people left and did that and very, very rapidly. And then all of this landscape gets abandoned. The forest grows very rapidly. People no longer need it for, for fuel, no longer doing littering. And within 15 or 20 years, you begin to have very large and dangerous
Speaker 2 00:30:46 Wildfires. I mean, it's very characteristic right? Of, of rural and agri agricultural areas around the world that, um, when particularly state and and capital, you know, seek to expand, right? People, uh, living, living in the more remote places find that they, they can no longer make a living. Right. And they migrate to cities. I mean, it's, it's, it's happened here. It's happened, you know, it's everywhere. Everywhere and, and what's left behind. And of course in the mountains, I suppose it's much more difficult to, to come up with large scale in industrial replacements for what's been going on there because the landscape is so varied. Um, uh, so, um, let's turn to climate change because we've been having shows on climate change. Everybody's been sort of going nuts because of the conference in Egypt, which was the topic of our last show. Um, the basic argument that you make as I understand it, is that climate change, as we sort of generally talk about, is to abstract and distance to motivate people to action. And that scientific models and predictions seek precision in an area of social life that is characterized by messiness. And did I get that right?
Speaker 3 00:32:04 Yes. You put it very well. Um, I mean, climate is a strange term, right? Yeah. Climate really is an average of weather over some period of time and over some area. So we could say Santa Cruz has climate, if we mean well over a period of 10 or 20 or 30 years, these are the temperatures, this is the rainfall. This is kind of what we might expect. So it's a mathematical construct in the way that scientists use it. And, uh, like mathematical constructs, uh, like gross national product. It's hard to get excited about it. So when was the last time, you know, you felt really deeply, personally intimately concerned the United States gross national product, and it's not really until someone tells you that, you know, the budget of your employer is being cut or something, that's when you, that's when you feel it rubber hits the road.
Speaker 3 00:32:52 And climate change is kind of like that. It's like, you know, it's only when climate change causes a sort of environmental or social consequences, uh, in the world as you experience it, that you really begin to get concerned. Uh, and actually Santa Cruz is a great example. You know, until we had the lightning complex C Fire, I feel like a lots of people felt climate change was somewhat more abstract than, uh, after the fire, I noticed people becoming, including myself, being much more passionately concerned about it. Uh, in Italy, the analog for that would be not actually so much fires, although they're a problem too, but it's floods and landslides. So people initially feel really concerned about sort of floods and landslides and also for with droughts. And those are the ways that, those are the experiences of life which make them care about climate change and demand that something be done about it.
Speaker 2 00:33:52 Yeah. Okay. Sorry, I was just, um, and, and then, you know, what would've, are there vernacular models of, of weather and climate? I, I mean, you know, because you know, again, as you talk about this, right? I mean, the Czu complex fire was an immediate event in those of us, you know, living here, um, and much more so people living, living in the mountains, right? Um, and the, the sort of the models right? Seek to draw curves and lines, which again, uh, are are argued to have certain precision even though they're, you know, they don't give predictability for specific places, right? And yet there's a sense of this is how we control this, right? By understanding the, the, uh, the statistics, the, the, the lines and the curves. And yet the local sort of manifestation is, is quite different. So, I mean, I'm talking a lot here, but this, this idea, are there vernacular models? I mean Yes. That you think, yes.
Speaker 3 00:34:56 So that's a vernacular, you know, just, it's a word for, you know, ordinary people's ways of talking about climate. Right? And of course, and this surprises my students, but, um, we are all climate experts Sure. Because, uh, when we go outside and we say, this is odd, it's unusually rainy. Today we have a model in our head of what an ordinary kind of day should be, and we decide whether today is weird or normal or interesting or whatever. So that's a, what you might call a vernacular popular model of climate. So one of the problems with climate change policy, right, is that the scientific version of climate is only one kind of climate. There's also a more popular version of climate. And I think scientists and policy makers don't realize that there's more than one version of climate out there. And therefore, uh, they see their task as one of persuading everyone to see it their way, when really it's a case of collaborating across many different ways of thinking about climate.
Speaker 2 00:35:57 Uh, in a way just, you know, parenthetically, it's, it's almost a reflection of the crisis of, you might call it crisis of science, right? That, that, uh, the, the control over phenomena, physical phenomena that was promised, or that seemed to emerge out of the technologies of the mid 20th century, right? Have not materialized to a significant degree. I mean, the big technologies is right, you think of nu nuclear power or even weather modification. Um, and, and so there's a, you know, there's this whole idea of scientific skepticism is not just simply, I don't believe, but it's also skepticism about, uh, just how predictable things might be. You know, that, and, and again, right? The, the key here is, is to try and predict the future. Um, uh, economists try to do that too. They're not so good at it. But, but again, it's sort of that, that reflection of that, if we can only draw these lines and predict the future, we can also control it.
Speaker 3 00:37:03 Yeah. Actually, this is a really nice example because, uh, you know, one of the effects of the climate crisis is that we think intensely about climate change, but we actually also have to think about other environmental disasters because they're sort of in particular places equally important or at least worthy of thinking about. And really nice example of what happens when you get focused on one set of numbers to the detriment of the world is, um, you know, uh, logging off the redwoods in Santa Cruz in the 1890s, you know, there was a boom time economy and people said, wow, we're gonna get rich quickly, let's just cut them down. And measuring trees in terms of board feet made sense for that brief period mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and we are living in the ruins of that experiment, right? Um, in, in Italy in the 1950s, people thought chest was gonna disappear, and they logged those trees and turned them into tannin for making, you know, fancy handbags and shoes.
Speaker 3 00:37:59 So, um, whenever we're faced with an environmental crisis, we tend to get kind of overly focused on that crisis and the solutions to it. And understanding more of the history of our landscape gives us a little bit of a distance on it. So, you know, the next time someone says, let's, uh, dedicate all forests to one purpose, you might be able to say, well, last time we tried that in Santa Cruz in 1890, it didn't work out so well. And so that mono monomaniacal focus on one problem and one purpose, uh, needs to be tempered by understanding sort of examples from the past that kind of teach us to be a little bit more skeptical.
Speaker 2 00:38:39 Mm-hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And one of the sections of your book is headed is, is entitled Ecological Modeling as Empirical Storytelling. And, you know, that's a really interesting sort of what claim argument heading. And I'm, I'm wondering if you could tell us a story about what that means.
Speaker 3 00:38:56 Sure. Well, I might get a little tactical here, and you'll have to flag me down if I go there. Okay. I'll do that. But, um, you know, um, so when we see climate models, we see what look like very, sort of confident predictions, but climate models and ecological models in general always rely upon, you know, simplifications, right? Yeah. You have to decide which aspects of this very complex ecosystem are to be measured, which processes are going to be modeled, and then you extrapolate forward. So, you know, it's not so much that you're predicting in the sort of straightforward this happens, therefore that happens. It's much more the case that you set out your assumptions and then you extrapolate them forward. So think of that as being a kind of a, a, it is a kind of storytelling, but it's empirical because you have to be responsible, you have to measure things, you have to figure out whether you're going to count the number of trees or measure, uh, how quickly they, they're, they're respiring and so on. So it is absolutely empirical, but it also requires you to extrapolate and it becomes, uh, you know, principled estimation. And in some ways, guess what?
Speaker 2 00:40:04 Brun Laure wrote about this in his book Laboratory Life back in the late 1970s, about how scientists have to make judgments and how they work with black boxes, things that produce outputs, but which they, you know, they don't know exactly what's going on inside of it. And so, uh, the whole sort of enterprise, right, is, is not just about assumptions, it's also about judgments experience and, and peer pressure. I mean, that's what peer review is, is basically about, right? So, so a process that's presented as very meticulous and data driven is actually also soc a social process and quite messy. And, um, but if you confront from experience, I know if you confront scientists with this kind of proposition, they often get very, um, alarmed and huffy, right? Because they think you're saying, well, you know, uh, it's not science. It's, it's something else. And you're listening to sustainability.
Speaker 2 00:41:03 Now, I'm Ronnie Lipitz, and my guest today is Professor Andrew Matthews of the U C S C anthropology Department. And we're, we've been talking about trees and particularly about his recently published book, trees Are Shapeshifters Well, you're an anthropologist and anthropologists focus on local life, nature, and culture. And I, my experience is they find it difficult to generalize from their specific case studies. And so I'm wondering if you can generalize, you know, broadly speaking, I mean, we have been talking about California and other parts of the world, but what can you extract from your research particularly around, um, this idea of citizen opposition, you know, that might be, uh, something that you could, you know, generalize to other parts of the world. I mean, you, you sort of present the struggles over the Tuscan forest as, um, you know, a particular, uh, example of forest politics, but what does it have, you know, what insights can it shed on forest politics elsewhere?
Speaker 3 00:42:09 Yeah. So, um, I would, I think that anthropologists, we went through a period when we basically always said, you know, my, my place, my local place is different from every other place to some degree. But I think that, um, I would like us, and I think many of us do think that we can, our, the stories that we learn from paying attention to, you know, peasants or indigenous people or scientists and laboratories, you know, they can travel, they can inspire you to understand the world different in other places too. Uh, and I think that the example that I give from Italy is really how people, uh, draw on their experience of, you know, landscape abandonment from, they saw what happened when, you know, people went to the cities, they saw the effects of pollution when, when, uh, uh, tannin factories polluted the air, and that led them to sort of push back against it and to say, no, we don't want it. Right? So people can draw upon their landscape to inspire a kind of environmental politics, which is attentive to their particular needs. And I think that's a story that travels, uh, I hope it does, right? Um, I see a lot of more specific similarities actually, between California and Italy to do with sort of forests and geology and soils, but that's another matter. But I think that, you know, the kind of storytelling that anthropologists engage in can provide us examples that can inspire us to do things differently in other places too.
Speaker 2 00:43:36 But I mean, you see this, this, this example as being, uh, about politics, right? About force politics. It's not, I mean, we always look at these things in terms of, of production, right? And political economy and value, and yet they're political. And so my question is if, do you regard the political struggle going on over these forests? Uh, who is, who is winning, let me put it that way, who is winning and what can you, what can you provide any advice to, to these sorts of, you know, movements in other places? That's really what I wanted to try and get at.
Speaker 3 00:44:13 Yes. I would say that the landscapes you live in are full of stories and full of history, and they're a resource for dealing with contemporary politics. Um, in lots of parts of the world, actually, specifically with relation to climate change. Uh, this, the promise of governments and states around the world of how are we gonna deal with climate change? One of the big parts of it is, is has been, yes, we're gonna get energy from biomass by cutting down forest and burning them and getting electricity from that, right? And there are lots of things wrong with that. Uh, part of that is that it's kind of crazy when you hitch the world energy system just to forests and therefore don't deal with where energy is coming from, which is possible fuels that you're pulling out of the ground. So that's your hitching a small part of the, you know, the energy system to forests and then destroying forests.
Speaker 3 00:45:03 So we can draw upon our daily life, the world that surrounds us, uh, to, to inspire our own political demands and our own resistances to basically bad ideas that are coming down the turnpike. Uh, specific example I think would be in Santa Cruz. You know, we are so lucky that redwoods are holding those hillsides together, because if they weren't, we would have a lot more landslides. So we should be grateful to them, and we should be very skeptical about, uh, sort of projects that say biomass energy is going to be the most important thing to do with forests.
Speaker 2 00:45:36 Well, redwoods of course, are not, don't, don't provide the kind of, uh, uh, growth Yes. Right? That provides that sort of the ability to, to, to harvest selectively for, for forest. I mean, the, the Tuscan the idea here is behind the, the biomass projects in, in the Italian mountains, right? Is that these are, what, what's the right word? These are sort of classical trees, right? They don't grow tall and straight. They grow all over the place, right? And, and there's this, this notion that there's some kind of surplus growth in these forests, right? And if they're carefully harvested, you can keep on growing. And of course, the, the, um, it's renewable, right? I mean, that's the, no, no, it's zero emission. That's the term, right? Is that you sequester the carbon and the trees, you cut off the branches, the branches grow back sucking carbon out of the air. And so there's this kind of net zero proposition, right? Which is a, you know, which you can't really talk about redwoods in that way because nobody is, is cutting them down for, you can't copy them because they're so tall.
Speaker 3 00:46:44 Well, I think we're lucky that we're not copying them, but you actually could, because weirdly they do. And that's exactly what happened here when we had logging in the 19th century. The only reason he had redwoods now is they copied, they grew back from the stump. Uh, luckily no one's proposing, as far as I know, to convert redwood forest to biomass, to wood chips. But, but, but biomass projects are big in, uh, further inland in California, uh, for much the same sets of reasons, right? It's supposed to be carbon neutral energy, it's supposed to deal with diseased forests where you want to eliminate trees, right? Yeah. And, um, you know, it's potentially very problematic. Let's leave it with the, you know, uh, in Italy, it turns out that you can't produce enough wood chips to power the energy system. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, so they're busy importing, uh, wood chips from Eastern Europe and probably from the Ukraine too. Uh, so you have timber bfia, uh, importing wood chips, uh, uh, with all kinds of sort of violence and corruption.
Speaker 2 00:47:41 Yeah. Well, that's a kind of a, you know, bizarre outcome, right? That, that you argue on the basis of these abstract calculations that there is enough to power these projects. And then you discover that, no, it doesn't work that way, and we have to go somewhere else, somewhere else to get it. Um, oh, the last thing that I, that I have here on my, on my list is this idea of, uh, that the political struggle is, is underway in these forests between those who regard forest underlie underutilized resources and those who take cultural positions on them. You, we talked about that. I mean, who are these culturalists? I thought that was a sort of an interesting term. Um, do you remember it? You were
Speaker 3 00:48:26 <laugh>? I'm, well, I, so one thing, actually, this is a very Italian story, but I think it might have some kind of echo with this, which is that, um, uh, there's sort of an aesthetic attraction to holding the landscape fixed, uh, making it beautiful. And the sort of cultural tourist, uh, institutions in Italy have basically made it very hard to continue working in the landscape. So rural people find this very threatening. So it's something like this, it goes, well, you mustn't touch that tree because it's beautiful. And rural people say it's beautiful because my grandfather took care of it and my father took care of it, and I proposed to take care of it also. So there is kind of culture as a set of practices and culture as a set of ideas about holding things fixed. And, and that of course, is very different from the United States. Um, I think probably we should hang onto culture as a set of practices, as well as ideas and that, that might make it work better.
Speaker 2 00:49:21 Yeah. Well, I mean, in the United States it's, I mean, it's this idea of the primeval, the primordial forest, right? The forest before, before the arrival of Europeans. Um, that, that these were a place that were in, in balance, um, you know, and, and self regenerating, although there was a lot of care going into many of them, right. You know, does is that the, the sense of of what goes on in, in Italy is, is people are not looking at landscapes in terms of originary conditions, I suppose, since that's thousands of years in the past.
Speaker 3 00:50:00 Yes, that's right. And that's, I would say that's the big difference. And maybe the big lesson that Italy has to offer us is just that, um, you know, in Italy it's basically very difficult, or I wouldn't say impossible, very difficult ever to say, this is pure nature, don't touch it because human beings should stay out. And, you know, of course, uh, there are places that just people should, uh, retreat from and not do things in. But nevertheless, we're now in a world that is so profoundly transformed by human action that even withdrawing is a form of human action. So, you know, we need to be involved in and care for landscapes. Uh, certainly indigenous folks in California have been caring for their landscapes forever. And of course they want to do more of that. And that's something that is, you know, admirable and we should both, uh, respect and support and learn from. Uh, and I think that that kind of the idea that humans are responsible for and are able to, if they pay attention and are respectful enough to, uh, make landscapes kind of work better, is something we're just gonna have to be living with because, uh, with climate change and with disease epidemics and the like, you know, there's no option.
Speaker 2 00:51:10 Well, we're at the end of the show and I want to thank you, Andrew, for that, you know, wonderful conversation and for being my guest on sustainability now.
Speaker 3 00:51:19 Thank you. It's just been a great pleasure and I've really enjoyed your questions and I'll be thinking about them, uh, as I go out.
Speaker 2 00:51:24 So the title of the book is Trees Are Shapeshifters, how Cultivation Climate Change and Disaster Create Landscapes. And it's published this year by Yale University Press. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find them at case squid.org/sustainability now, as well as Spotify, Google Podcasts and PocketCasts among other podcasts sites. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make Case Good, your community radio station and keep it going. And so until next, every other Sunday, sustainability. Now
Speaker 1 00:52:08 Good planets a hard find, tempera zones. The tropic climbs through currents and thriving seas. Winds blowing some breathing trees, strong zone and save. So good planets are hard to find, gal
Speaker 0 00:52:34 Good.
