Sierra In Peril; Sf 184

Yes. He would just like to know. Yes we do we can eat people watching.

That's nice guys. Stop. They're on Candid Camera. Keep walking though. OK. OK and. Let's talk amongst yourselves when you don't really know what it's like you know. OK everybody required plays you guys can talk and you can just do a little walking the go ahead. See. Along. Oh. He's.

Great. This would just go ahead and spell your name and the way you'd like yourself to be labeled son of. Deletions that may be just a tad careful but. When you build a. Computer. Yourself. OK so going and getting a spelling affiliation. OK my name is Aaron you know and it's spelled he r i n an o e l. And my affiliation is. I'm a member of the Sierra Nevada alliance and I work with an organization called Forest alert. I direct an organization called for a start. Up until we get there. You have little time to think. It

can't. Just go ahead. Tell us. Why. This is very significant especially to other forestry issues in ways. OK. Well sailor basin is is a place that's particularly special to me that I really love and I've been here on my own my first solo trip of more than two days was here. But in addition to that this is one of precious few remaining old growth forests and wild areas in the Sierra Nevada. There are less than 10 percent of remaining old forests in the Sierra Nevada. This is one of the particularly special ones it's adjacent to the North Fork. The American roadless area which is one of the more significant wild areas in the Sierra Nevada.

The rest of the landscape a huge amount of the landscape has been heavily impacted by logging grazing and other. Activities that we've we've been engaged in here as a culture. If we can't protect places like this. If we can't protect the very few places like this that exist then our actions here are living here in the Sierra Nevada is truly unsustainable. This is such a small part of the landscape now. And it's incredible. So I I can't imagine not being able to set aside a few areas like that and that's something that I'm working towards. You know you're working so well I think. You know. I think it's something that's developing as people spend time here in these places and talk about what we want to have happen in the short term

something that I'm working on is having tumor cells be modified or not located simply moved so they're not located in places like this. There's a time and place for logging and places like these are not not the place for logging. There's ways that logging can before be performed to be less destructive on the rest of the landscape. So I used administrative appeals process and other kind of public participation processes to affect decisions of the U.S. Forest Service that manages this land to make sure that places like this aren't. Devastated. Before we can work toward some longer term protection. And to be quite frank I think the only way we're really going to be able to protect these places in the long term is by asking Congress to protect them. We. Have to make hard choices at this point. People talk about how important jobs are and yet people's livelihoods are important.

But we have to be willing as a culture to ask the industry to make relatively minor changes in its practices to protect places like this in the long term. And I think that one of our mechanisms for doing that that we should use is to ask the U.S. Congress to set aside old growth forest ancient forest here in the Sierra Nevada and other wild places we're standing right next to a meadow. We're sitting next to a meadow that is you know and one of the few and grazed meadows here in the Sierra. So there's lots of different reasons to protect places like this. Couple different questions. One hundred you get people to terms of personal interest to something having seen it just right. Well hopefully. Yeah that's that's a really good question. One of the reasons why we're talking about protecting places like this why that's something that I care about and want to do is so that future generations can experience places

like this so that people can. See places like this were lucky enough to have some left so that there's there's reasons for taking action to protect places like this. But the broader question of how how can we. Influence People who have not yet had the opportunity to be in a wild place. Well I guess on one level a lot of it is faith. You know trust us. Right. It's great out here. You know it's beautiful. Your water comes from places like this. Part portions of watersheds that have not yet been degraded and have not yet had soil disturbance and soil compaction that results in all kinds of sediment pouring down the creeks and streams and rivers that go and provide municipal water sources. You know you are if you're drinking water if you drink water you're probably drinking water that originated in a place like this at some point. We're all connected here. We're not separate from these places. They affect all of our lives no matter where we

are. And convincing people of that may be difficult and it may take a little bit of faith. May take trusting that yes these places are important. And the scientists tell it tell us they are the biologists tell us they are the people who walk them tell us they are. Trust us. You were talking about future generations in a less obvious way. Job doing. Just even that generation late young women in particular. Their own ability to explore nature with no fear to talk about. Yeah I take groups of teenage girls out into the woods and I. Take them into precarious situations. They're parents like that. No. It's. A great source of self-confidence for

young people and. People as they grow older too. To trust you to trust your body to trust your experience to be able to hike into a place to go wherever you want to go and trust that your your legs will take you there and take you back out again. As you'll see as you hike out of the canyon they're. Just about the value of exposing. To build tension as. Well. Yeah it is very hard to understand in a physical way. Why places like these are important if you havent been here. There is something that communicates in being here and particularly to young people. That

can't be communicated in photographs or in pictures. The land here the place here is healthy. It feels right. Every cell in your body feels good being here. We have a lot to learn about sustaining our culture sustaining our economic system from places like this. It's it works and you can feel that it works. When you walk on the soil and it squishes on your feet just right you know the light and shadow everything feels right. The senses are open to that. And you learn so much more from all of your senses operating at once then you do from any words or images that that can be conveyed outside of these places so I think it's very important for young people and older people to experience these places what they get is a commitment. To. What is actually the fabric of life to the natural systems that sustain all of our lives that

goes beyond ideology. So there's really. A. Well I think. I'd like to say again. The kind of changes in the timber industry in grazing industry that would be needed to protect places like these are in the long term relatively minor by comparison to what we get in return. It's worth it you know it's really worth making these changes. This place will be here for thousands of years if we let it. And that's something that I will definitely work. A large portion of my life to make sure happens.

Yes. I think you can see. The whole you know the idea that in the first minute this or that or me. I don't. Want to. Hear A. Lot of them. Are some of the people who were some of the larger of the point through the. Years. OK it's not usable. I'll probably get down on your level. All right Bill thanks for that when you look at it I mean look a little more than three children at this point it's all relative right. I was thinking you could use it for you. Is there no Bill Clinton era where there was a judicial rings which didn't tell us what he had to meet with him. Oh it's been pretty will. You know you know that. Every year and if you just give me a moment. Real real.

There you go crawling looking probably the one. You see there. Yeah. Enough to hear people eat it. I know right from the get a million little one a. Little. Ho. Ho. Ho. Ho. Ho. Ho. 100. Foot.

Crank. Crank. Thanks. Thank. You for Your name and then the way you'd like to be titled. Now the loathing they put in your name on TV. Right. Decide what you want that to be and put that out there. OK my name is Eric Beckwith and Scottie r i c b e c k w i t t. And I'd like to be titled biodiversity Institute.

You have written the wire pullers. Those are birds. Those are good. Those are primates. OK so I will start with the same question I asked Aaron which is why did you bring us here. I brought you here to this particular place which is a 50000 acre tract of roadless land that extends actually all the way west to the forest boundary down to low elevations because this best represents what the remaining wild lands are in the Sierra Nevada. They were working to protect the low and middle elevation lands that have been left out of the parks and wilderness by most biologically rich lands and the lands that are closest to what we mythologically remember as Eden. Because we've tended to land so we've protected have been the island nation desolate landscapes yet we still have hundreds of thousands of acres in the Sierra Nevada of lands that are wild it's a very small portion of the total landscape. But still because the landscape is a large hundreds of thousands of acres of land in the elevations and which we thrive there completely while remarkably wild like 15th and 16th century wild. And

that's what's here. Thirteen thousand species of plants and animals in the evolutionary landscapes in which they evolved. If you're based in my river basin. And so in that what do you hope to achieve by bringing you know I'll bring I'll bring you back around to the question of what do you hope to achieve by bringing media and others in here with you hoping the experience and the net effect. Well there's currently there's a lot of focus right now on what's taking place in the tropics in terms of the loss of species but few people realize how incredibly rich and diverse the temperate zones are. And California in particular. And what I'd like to focus on the reason that we're bringing people in here is because in the state of California we have a tremendous amount to lose and we have a tremendous amount that still here you don't have to go to the other side of the world to experience the original earth the earth as it was known before industrialization the earth as it was known really before agriculture. And I wanted to introduce people to these landscapes and let them know that they were still here because almost no one knows they're

still here. They're hidden canyons they're remote they're unknown that they're so unknown that we still discover new species and here each year new insects a fun guy. It's that much of a frontier. And in a way it's the life and it's a frontier because I traveled in these landscapes right here in California for years. I've seen people twice that haven't brought with me. That's how remote this is where all the time we're within 400 miles of Sacramento and we're in canyons are so remote that you never see him being. 100 to 400 miles actually three hundred miles of air miles from north and south. Oh I see. Right exactly. I mean within within a few hours travel by car of Sacramento. OK so let's get let's get specific Now let's talk about first of all I want to know and I'll ask you to sort of Ben-Ami us here right now. You as Aaron are interested in legislation that could be introduced to protect the region only. Have you brought any of legislators in the people that will ultimately be

making the decisions have any of them have any exposure to this. You know only it's only programs in Washington D.C. We put on many many programs over the years there. We have not directly brought any legislators here. That's something that we need to do for sure. Especially now that we're. We've been involved in a process starting in the mid 1980s of reforming the management federal lands in the Sierra Nevada. Initially it looked really grim. The mindset and the attitudes of people at that time suggested that nothing could be saved nothing could be protected because they were using a body of science they were using a body of training and a perspective on a landscape that didn't have that showed no value for these lands. They had no meaning or even no value. And there's been a huge social change over that time period in which late succession or old growth forests in which biological diversity has become much more valuable primarily due to the work of a body people like Edward Wilson of Harvard University. Over the last decade in educating large bodies people as to the role of biological diversity in the role of the natural communities of the world in supporting

and making our lives possible for the planetary changes occurring in Western culture now. And it's been reflected on the ground in terms of new policies. The Forest Service has really been forced to adopt that protect the large old trees in the Sierra Nevada and they protect some of the roadless landscapes temporarily. Let's get into the temporarily aspect of it. And staying nontechnical some money. OK I thought I heard something. OK getting into Casper these need to be really concise to the point says Bateman Isn't that the fact this is not written in blood into eternity here right. Exactly. Exactly so tell us what is and isn't protected about it ok like that. The place that we're sitting in right now in the SE the meadow area of the North American River is not protected in any way just east of us. It's temporarily protected administratively by the U.S. Forest Service as a spotted owl habitat area across the

Sierra Nevada right now there are temporary guidelines for services operating under the Protect large trees. Those are now subject to revision. There's no permanent protection for this place and the problem with administrative protection is at any point in time the agency in this case the Forest Service can change it. It's not safe. The only thing that's really safe is an act of Congress. Like when they create a wilderness and they send it through the House and the Senate they sign into law by the president. Then it's permanently protected and you can actually watch it and you know it it's there you know it's going to be there in a decade or two decades. A lot of people have heard about Castro a spotted owl and that and a lot of there has been a lot of pain and anger associated with the loss of jobs because of Casco because those recommendations. How how far do these recommendations go. At what point will the new regulatory measures be introduced based on caste. Well there are temporary regulatory measures that are presently in effect based on Castro and it's unfortunate

that we had to do it using only the biology of the spotted owl. But that's it takes millions of dollars worth of research to find out enough about a species to actually be able to use the information we have over one hundred thirteen species of vertebrates here of animals and of basically of wild animals in this particular place that we could use you can hear them singing all around us is that we don't know enough about their particular biology to demonstrate why it's so critical to protect a particular place. And so ultimately they'll be a larger body of research will come in that will show why this place is essential for so many other species. But nature of all we have is the spotted owl. And just using the biology of one species is a very weak way to go about protecting a landscape. It's not as efficient or effective but a temporary in the temporary world in which we operate in the short term. It's the only thing that the scientists are able to point to to demonstrate their concern about the whole system the whole ecosystem and all its species. Are you hopeful that he will talk to people outside your field requires understanding in simple English. Right. Ready. OK. So OK going back now

even though Castro is basically. Just maintaining the status quo for a short time. Hopefully that will segue into some sort of protection. I am very hopeful that we can achieve permanent protection for this place if enough people know about it. It's all a matter of education and outreach right now it's a matter of people coming in and experiencing it directly. There's a body of science associated with this but the most that motivates most people is just the direct personal experience of these places. Several days here with a small group of people there's nothing like it publicly because you learn you're studying. Everything is good but once you study history Western history you study yourselves you study relationship to landscape your own total own internal biology the bird species the plants. Everything is here the whole picture emerges. So specifically what are you working on.