Mythologizing Place with Obi Kaufmann

Note: This episode was transcribed by AI and has not been checked by a human. Please forgive any errors. 

Obi Kaufmann  0:00  
In fact, we are just as natural as anything else. We are a dream of the Earth as much as anything else ever in the history of evolution or terrestrial life on this planet. We are an emergent phenomenon that isn't going anywhere. Until it's time for us to go somewhere. Hello,

Michelle Fullner  0:20  
and welcome to Golden State naturalist, a podcast for anyone who is made out of Earth. I'm Michelle Fullner. And today I'm talking with artist, author, poet and eco philosopher, Obi Kaufmann, whose voice you just heard. In this episode, we discuss humanity's relationship with the Earth, Mount Diablo daisies ways in which meaning is CO constructed biodiversity, what a myth really is very quiet Lyons, how we relate to place and how telling a better story about this land we love this place now known as California might just help humans come together to care for it. A quick heads up that this episode is number nine out of 12 for season three. So there are just three episodes left after this one before I take a break between seasons so I can get out into the field and record more interviews for season four, which is already starting to come together in some really exciting ways. I'll tell you more about that in another episode soon. So stay tuned for updates. And before the end of season three, we still have some fantastic episodes, including a conversation with crystal Hickman on native bees that will be coming up next. So make sure you're following the podcast wherever you listen so you don't miss it. I also want to take a second to thank everyone who's supporting the show on Patreon which is so appreciated and allows me to keep doing this work. You can join the Patreon community for as little as $4 a month and enjoy bonus content from Select episode A patrons only book club each month and the ability to submit your questions to be asked in interviews. You can find me on Patreon at patreon.com/michelle Fullner. That's Michelle with two L's and Fullner is fu ll en er and if you listen to the recent New Year's bonus episode, you already know that I have recently released a set of six California nature themed Valentine's featuring artists who have been guests on Golden State naturalist including today's guest Obi Kaufmann obese Valentine is a map of California fault lines painted by Obi with the words. I love you Falton all and the whole set of Valentine's is wonderful and beautiful and delightfully corny. So go check those out at love that Golden State naturalist.com This project is rad for three reasons. One, you get these super high quality Valentines to each purchase supports me in creating new episodes, and three 10% of the profit from this project will be donated directly to cow wild, which is the only statewide organization dedicated solely to protecting and restoring the wild places and native biodiversity of California's public lands. It's a win all around. So again, you can find those at love dot Golden State naturalist.com or by following the link in the show notes. But now let's get to the episode. Obie Kaufman is the author of the best selling book The California field Atlas, the first in a series of bestsellers, which includes the state of water understanding California's most precious resource, the force of California, the coast of California, and most recently the deserts of California. He's currently working on his sixth book, the state of fire understanding why where and how Calif burns which will be published by Haiti books this fall over his books have received multiple awards, including the California Book Awards gold medal in 2018. For notable contribution to publishing, Obie is an engaging public speaker, co host of the place and purpose podcast and one of the kindest human beings any of us could hope to meet. So without further ado, let's hear from Obi Kauffman on Golden State naturalist.

I met up with OB last spring, almost at the top of Mount Diablo. We parked our cars near a large expanse of chaparral where we were awash in the intermingling aromas of black sage and Ceanothus in full bloom then made our way through an area wooded with grey pines and the unmistakable home scent of California Bay trees out to a patch of grassland Bejeweled with wildflowers all at OB set the scene really where

Unknown Speaker  4:23  
we are right now.

Michelle Fullner  4:24  
No, can you just tell us what we're looking at?

Obi Kaufmann  4:27  
We're just we're in the very center of the bee's home. We are surrounded by 1000s and 1000s of wildflowers This is the late April bloom on Mount Diablo inside of Mount Diablo State Park. We are now at about 3000 feet. We have we have the blue Dick's and the California poppies making this contrasting blue and orange statement that's very profound, but to the painter's eye You know, there's there's a million other color relationships in this larger story. But what does that Stellaris jail, it looks like we have this beautiful yellow flower Diablo Daisy everywhere. Also we have piles of gray pine cones, you know just the biggest cone in the pine family, right just these watermelon sized vicious looking pine cones stacked up making this like silver background kind of. We've got we've got the poison oak on the edges doing their rust colored thing, being very respectful to be on the on the outskirts in the metal here. Got it is magical out here. I'm

Unknown Speaker  5:39  
almost at a loss for words.

Obi Kaufmann  5:40  
This is the kind of space you just want to like sit. It's fun to talk with you but it's also fun to not dark. There's all kinds of reptiles in the ground, all kinds of all kinds of vertebrates and invertebrates all around us. It's Elysium it's having me up here. It's funny too that like we're in the middle of the Bay Area, right, you know, yeah, this is such a funny little like gem of wilderness.

Michelle Fullner  6:04  
We will get back to the field of wildflowers and my conversation with OB after a quick break.

Welcome back today's conversation takes place on Mount Diablo with Obi Kauffman. This is your home mountain. So I want to hear about your relationship with Mount Diablo.

Obi Kaufmann  6:55  
Thank you Yeah, not enough my relationship is particularly modern in one sense, right? Like this is unseated topkin land, you know, this is on the on the west side of Mount Diablo, we've got the topkin People's ancestral homeland and then on the east side, we've got we've got the vote of own people, right and, and Diablo is sort of a funny word too, isn't it very, as a kid growing up loving rock and roll I sort of liked that. My favorite place was demo mountain. But you know push the UK is the is the voted a name for this mountain in which I think this sounds better. I

Michelle Fullner  7:33  
found the story of how Mount Diablo got its name on a sign near the summit after Obi and I had finished talking. And of course I took a picture of it because this story contains so many elements of the last few 100 years of California history. I'm going to read this right from my photograph and you'll understand what I'm talking about. Okay, here we go. The reference to Diablo or devil can be traced back to 1804 or 1805 When a Spanish military expedition visited the area in search of runaway Mission Indians at a willow thicket several miles northeast of here near present day Buchanan field, the soldiers encountered a village of chub con people and surrounded it but that night, evidently all of the Indians escaped, angry and confused the Spanish called the site monta del diablo or thicket of the devil. Later, English speaking newcomers mistakenly assumed the word monta to mean mountain and apply the title to this prominent East Bay peak. A linguistic accident thus gave California it's devil mountain. vitally. Of course, this history only stretches back a few 100 years and humans have had a relationship with this place for 10s of 1000s of years. So this story and most of the stories we hear for that matter barely scratched the surface of the story of humans in California. A page on the safe Mount Diablo Land Trust website points out that the Spanish imposed removal of the vole bone people severed a pivotal piece of stewardship impacting the evolution of the area, human beings and the role they play as chief stewards of the land. You can hear a little bit about indigenous land relationships. If you listen to the California condors episode of this podcast with Yurok tribe, Wildlife Department Director Tiana Williams Clawson and condors are part of the Mount Diablo story too.

Obi Kaufmann  9:09  
So this is Condor land to write in the 80s. When I was growing up on Mount Diablo, I knew that there was a particular quality of nature here. But in general, I sort of felt like nature was something that was going away, you know, or something that I missed? Yeah. And I think the Condor really emblematic of that being down to, you know, scant more than a dozen individuals, right, very tiny genetic pool. Now there's over 500 condors representing this resurgence and now I'm like inside of this gorgeous ethical horizon almost where I can foresee a day where I will be able to see a condor flying over my beloved mountain here.

Michelle Fullner  9:55  
Okay, this is wild. Just a few months after we recorded this conversation, a full of California condors entered Contra Costa County for the first time in over 100 years, one of them flying about a mile west of Mount Diablo Summit, which is almost exactly where Obi and I sat for this conversation. So I will now forever imagine this place and this conversation with a condor soaring overhead. Hopefully this means the birds are expanding their range northward from their home in Pinnacles National Park. It certainly makes a Mount Diablo with condors easier to imagine.

Obi Kaufmann  10:28  
So you know, back in the in the 19th century, there were a lot of as Robin wall Kimmerer would put it more more than human kin that have that have been extirpated from this place

Michelle Fullner  10:41  
and Robin wall Kimmerer wrote the book breeding sweet grass, which I have recommended 1000 times on this podcast. This

Obi Kaufmann  10:47  
was very much habitat for the California grizzly. Many different types of anatomist fish. And you know now so think of the dwindling dwindling populations of local amphibians, for example, no salamanders and newts and but we we still have the entire botanical complement I think as as is as is evident here today, which is incredible floral biodiversity,

Michelle Fullner  11:15  
which means that those animals can come back right to some extent. Well, you

Obi Kaufmann  11:19  
know, I mean, talking about Condor returning for example, the turkey vultures do their job, they have a very specific ecological role to play the cleanup crew Condor much the same kind. These relics of Pleistocene era when the mega funnel food portfolio was not really as it is in the Anthropocene here today, you know, they were deer herds of elk here, you know, truly elk for example, these enormous ungulates that that that that aided the the human stewards in the land to to keep the meadows free of encroaching pines, for example. And it would be a lot of work and to rebuild the complex system necessary for the reintroduction of like

a bear like an apex predator like them.

Michelle Fullner  12:14  
With the floral biodiversity that OB mentioned, you have one component of what's needed for the animals to come back because native plants as Naomi Fraga of the native plants episode put it are the building blocks of all terrestrial ecosystems. However, as Obie points out here, plants alone can't bring back and sustain these big animals. They have other needs that have been removed from the land as well. One thing that comes to mind in general, not just on Mount Diablo is connectivity, fragmented populations locked on small bits of habitat separated by roads and other barriers can't always get their needs met, either in terms of food, or a finding potential mates. And with his Tullio example, ob points to a system that's out of balance in ways that might not be able to support all of the life that was once on Mount Diablo, even if the native plants remain. Now

Obi Kaufmann  13:01  
the apex predator on this mountain is, is there a little local lion? And I've seen many of them up here. And it's always an experience, because whenever you see a mountain lion, it's her decision to show herself Yeah, I am sure that I have walked within inches or feet of many, many lions. There's they become invisible. They're silent. They're the most silent creatures, they their survival depends on it. And the fact that they're still here is evidence of that, like that superpower that they have. Really so. So if you ever see a mountain lion, it's by their choice, at least I'm convinced of that.

Michelle Fullner  13:45  
I believe that Yeah. Right. So that's the backdrop, right? That's the setting. And that's the history of this place. How do you think that it had an impact on you, when you were coming up to have access to this space and to be

Obi Kaufmann  14:00  
here? Right, right, right. Well, it's kind of like a zoom lens, isn't it? Like we can we can like go to specific details or we can backup back up further into greater and greater contexts for how this place exists, right? Because Mount Diablo is a vortex for all of California. Not only is it one of California's largest view sheds, right, the Mount Diablo meridian is one of the the geographic features that the cartographic features I should say that were that were involved in the invention of the borders of the state

Michelle Fullner  14:29  
in July of 1851. Less than a year after California became a state. A Colonel Leander ransom deputy surveyor of the new state hiked through brush and a particularly hot summer to the summit of Mount Diablo. According to a brochure from the State Park ransom established Mount Diablo as the initial reference point for land surveys and began dividing up public lands from this starting point. lines extending north south east and west formed a survey grid that covers most of Northern California and all of Nevada, the basis of today's land. The survey system, I looked at a map of this system and Mount Diablo was the first of three of these reference points to be used in California. And it was the one covering the most land by far. The other two were on San Bernardino mountain in San Bernardino County, that reference point established in 1852, and mount Pierce in Humboldt County, established in 1853, according to an article from the Mount Diablo surveyors Historical Society, so Mount Diablo is an incredible vantage point from which to see much of California. And it makes a lot of sense to me, given his connection to the place that Obi would work to develop, in his mind a sort of cartographic habit, and ended up creating so many gorgeous maps of California in his books, which we'll talk more about a little bit later. Here's a bit more about what you can see from the summit from OB, you

Obi Kaufmann  15:46  
can see the entirety of the Sierra Nevada range, all 400 miles of North America's longest contiguous mountain range, you know, and in California, it seems to make sense for her up here to sort of see across all of these different ecography is really, and so now because it kind of sticks out like a geologic anomaly really into the Central Valley catching seeds. We're talking about wildfires today, catching seeds from the Pacific Northwest from the desert southwest along its south facing sides there. And so when I was young, what I had here was this microcosm of diversity really realizing at an early age that as greater diversity equals greater resiliency, the fires that come through this place was sculpted by fire continues to be sculpted by fire and biologically sculpted ecologically sculpted by fire, and it always rebounds after if that wound you know, after after the application of that good fire, it comes back stronger than land gets shocked with the fertilizer that the seeds have evolved inside of. And it was always such a solace. A contrast from the urban or suburban existence that I grew up in coming back here was a retreat into the real. So that's a big theme in my work is that nature is a construct nature is a commodity. Here I experience something much better than nature, I don't go to another place I come to work can be thought of as like a symbiotic real. And I love that let's capitalize as capitalize our

Michelle Fullner  17:30  
Okay, so philosopher Timothy Morton coined this term symbiotic real. And I'll read you a definition from the website cyber biomes.org that aligns with what I was able to find out about this term in other places. It says the symbiotic real is quote, a term used by Timothy Morton to describe the inseparable connection and participation of humans. In the context of the wider ecosphere. It implies a non hierarchical solidarity of humans with nonhumans. And it stems from the critique of the use of the word nature, which arbitrarily separates humans from the rest of the living systems surrounding us. And so it's basically this idea that humans aren't separate from what we call nature, as many Indigenous peoples have known forever, we're part of the earth. And using the term nature reinforces that false idea of separation. Now, I've been training myself to think like this for the past couple of years, because, of course, it's more accurate. We are completely a manifestation of life on earth, not something separate or different from the earth. And I want to change my language to reflect this idea. But I still find it hard to avoid using the word nature because people know what I mean when I say it. It's a convenient shorthand for the world that is outdoors, less built, and more rich with species adapted to live in a given place. But saying all of that each time is a bit of a mouthful. So I haven't quite figured out how to talk about this or even totally how to think about it, given a lifetime of conditioning to think about humanity and nature as two separate things, but I'm working on it and OB is helping me. He gives a great example here

Obi Kaufmann  19:03  
to quote Pandora Thomas, who is leading a land stewardship movement or is part of a land stewardship movement in the North Bay on the great and Manchuria, the southern Pomo and custom Ewok land up there.

Michelle Fullner  19:20  
Pandora Thomas is the founder and farm manager of Earth Seed Farm and permaculture center. Here's the description of Earth seed from their website, established in March 2021. Earth Seed Farm is a 14 acre solar powered organic farm and orchard located on the ancestral lands of the coast Miwok and southern Pomo peoples in Sonoma County, California. With the permission and blessings of greyton Ranch area tribe our farm is operated and rooted in Afro indigenous permaculture principles and built on the long legacy of Earth wisdom traditions of people of African descent. Permaculture is a relationship based ecological design system embedded in indigenous wisdom that elevates ecosystem health while maintaining human needs. This beautiful project is packed with purpose. According to an LA Times article on Earthseed Thomas, a Berkeley based naturalist and environmental educator wants to teach her fellow Black Californians to use their African American Heritage to usher their communities and all of humanity through the climate crisis. There's so much more to learn about Earthseed. So I encourage you to check out their website earthseed.org And maybe even plan a visit just make sure to check when they're open. And if you're wondering if Earthseed is a reference to science fiction icon Octavia Butler's novel The Parable of the Sower, I was wondering that too, and it 100% is, if you haven't read the parable of the sower yet, it's very relevant to our time, and I highly recommend it also excitingly, Pandora Thomas is going to be the march guest on OB Kaufman's podcast place and purpose which he co hosts with Greg saris chairman of the federated Indians of great and Rancher Ria. So make sure you're following that show. So you get notified of new episodes and can hear the conversation with Pandora when that comes out. Okay, so OB was just about to quote Pandora, when I cut in and gave you like, 20 homework assignments, I'm so sorry. But I promise you'll thank me if you follow up on even one of them, to quote her, she says,

Obi Kaufmann  21:04  
We are the environment. And I am so drawn to that way of thinking where we are ecological creatures, not only is there like, there's space for healing inside of that, and forgiveness, too, as we attempt every day just to do better, as opposed to everyday punish ourselves for some for our, for our ecological sins. Right? Well,

Michelle Fullner  21:30  
an othering has always been a tool of genocide. Right? You are there yourself from the natural world, then you can extract endlessly you can kill it. Right? I

Obi Kaufmann  21:40  
think that's that's a wonderfully inclusive point there, Michelle, you know, how do we take down these assertions of what nature is or what it isn't in order such that we might better be in a reciprocal relationship with with not only the the living world, but there's also like the spatial world, the temporal world, if you will, like be at peace with the future, with our future ancestors, with the responsibility that we have to them, and to ourselves as one day will be ancestors to them. So engaging that intersectional space of human identity, human justice, as it plays out across the larger pattern inside of what increasingly becomes rather, Ill relevantly known as environmental, because it is attached to everything else. It has to be in that and that also frees us from these philosophical pitfalls of anti humanism. That is, that is a particular vein of thinking about conservation preservation, in terms of biodiversity, especially where we are the problem when in fact, we are just as natural as anything else. We are a dream of the Earth as much as anything else ever in the history of evolution, or terrestrial life on this planet. We are an emergent phenomenon that isn't going anywhere. Until it's time for us to go somewhere. So now Diablo for me has always afforded me a place enough space, enough color enough life where thinking thoughts like this comes very naturally, it's of no effort that we can make conclusions about our our loving relationship to this place and respectful attitudes towards it. It's nothing short of a miracle that this is, in fact, still here. At

Michelle Fullner  23:42  
this point, Obi and I had been sitting in the open grassy fields in direct sunlight, occasionally turning ourselves like rotisserie chickens to avoid burning for long enough, and we decided to move the conversation to a shaded picnic table at an empty campsite. We pick up our conversation there. So

Obi Kaufmann  23:59  
here we are, here we are two non Indigenous people talking about land quality, land justice, in what right? Do we have to engage this conversation without other voices necessarily being present here, you know, I hope I hope the best that we can do is acknowledge that and then to amplify that voice through through the retelling of this message. So

Michelle Fullner  24:23  
all of us are impacted by the way we treat the land. And everyone should be included in conversations about the land, our relationship with it and its use, I appreciate Obie acknowledging the absence of indigenous voices in particular in this conversation so as you listen just remember that this is but one conversation and is not intended to be the be all end all conversation on these topics. Rather, I hope this conversation is one point of inspiration for deeper connection with and knowledge of the place where you live. Also, you might have noticed a low buzzing sound in the recording and I'm here to let you know that this only lasts for about one minute, and then is done. I'm pretty sure it was caused by my wired mics. So I want to thank my patrons for allowing me now to have upgraded to wireless mics. So we don't have this problem again, in the future, you're the best.

Obi Kaufmann  25:13  
So it's an interesting thing, the sacredness of this place, you know, sacred is a is a is a word that I have a very difficult time when I grew up without any bit of religion in my life. Both my parents were scientists, you know, father was an astrophysicist. My mother was a psychologist. So I grew up with this really large sense of human perspective, right. And so because of that, I tend to put a lot of faith in sort of this quasi academic style of talking about these subjects, and placing them in patterns of theory, that can sort of be cubbyhole, if you will, for different ways of interpreting reality, especially that reality. That how do I put this blows one apart, right? That the beauty, the sublimation, the transcendence that I feel in nature, connecting with the land with the symbiotic real becoming ecological in my heart. And on our hike, you're mentioning that the colonizing mind, the settling mind, the settling of the land, the colonization of the land, the colonization of the people that I am attempting to, by way of my work, uncouple from if I can write, I never, I mean, the mountain has always been my people. I was kind of a lonely kid, you know, in the woods, drawing maps through the sage mazes, you know, naming the big old oak trees, you know, and they were my friends, they were my people, I identified as one of them. Among them,

I felt forgiven, I felt safe. I felt, I mean, there was

something almost like, Eden, like, if you will, and in my adult life, realizing what an incredible privilege that was, in order to be able to find that space to be given the permission to find that space here, by myself, different and then and then to then define that, my identity, my adult identity in that. Yeah, I think that, you know, although my works are about the theologies, if

you will, ology is the study of theology,

the ologies as pluralizing ology, which of course is the suffix to the study of anything, right? Or like when one of the big ones, whether it's biology, geology, or whatever, but but one of the big ones for me is cartography. And with the getting to know the place on a spatial level, mapping it out however you want, it might, it might that might be more than just space, of course, it might be energy, if we're talking about ecology, or it might be a time if we're talking about geology, or maps of self. In fact, it might be a map of a well rendered bat face that I put in watercolor, right, that is a map of sorts, right? A map of this particular moment, evolutionary time. And capturing that, in this aesthetic dimension, has great meaning for me, and in fact, touches something like the mythic, something like the sacred, we're inside of this aesthetic theory, I have access to those parts of me that are at once animal, but also something else, something human, something symbolic, something able to grasp, Render, apprehend and convey symbolism.

Michelle Fullner  28:46  
If you're not familiar with Opie's work, particularly his field atlases, here's a little rundown. So these are big, thick books filled with a very aesthetically pleasing balance of watercolor paintings and text. And the paintings include lots of maps of just about every conceivable aspect of the place that we call California. Things like mountain ranges, public lands, bodies of water, distributions of different species, hotsprings dams, even unexpected things like light pollution, and California during the Pleistocene. He also includes paintings of landscapes, and plant and animal species. So the books contain specific, accurate geographic and ecological information but portrayed from a perspective with a voice. They're not dryly academic. So in this conversation, when we talk about storytelling, we're not talking about fictional narratives or a made up story about California. We're talking about how OB tells the true story of California or a true story of California or many true stories of California through his own lens, and with the tools of his words and his paintings. All of these aspects of California come together in the field atlases to tell a complete Next yet very accessible story about this place in presenting all of these aspects of place together, Obi has created a rich, multi layered story of California. So as you do that in the field Atlas series and in your essays and in your other work, to what degree are you? Are you abstracting? And are you finding that greater truth? And are you mythologizing? Right? Right? And to what degree are you conveying facts? How do you kind of find that balance? And what does that mean to you?

Obi Kaufmann  30:30  
Right? Conveying facts, facts, facts is an interesting word. You know, Shelley said that, that poets are the secret adjudicators of the world, right. And so I think of like Gary Snyder, one of my, one of my, one of my heroes, right, where he talks about the circum ambulation of peaks walking around the peak, as an access point, and he was talking about it, particularly from a Japanese Zen experience of becoming of and with the mountain circum ambulating, the peak, and he also talks about an artist's relationship to activism. And namely, that, I think, to quote him directly, he says, that activism must always be second, if at all relevant to the art being produced. And I, I will take his lead on that. I don't want my work to be associated necessarily with direct activism, as say, Ursinus is doing on in the land trust in the land back movement, that's not my voice. That's not my story to tell. Right? My story to tell is this, again, these if I get the parameters, right, if I get the language, right, and I'm very careful, in my words, because I really want I want to sort of make this infinitely defensible space around the brand of my voice, if you will, and to not misrepresent some others voice. There's a funny when I when I first started writing the California feel that listen, I didn't know exactly what that voice was right now. I just finished my fifth book, you know, and so we're just rocking rocking right now. And I feel like I've kind of got this now. But when I first started writing the California feel that this I hadn't grand hopes of like, as an expression of solidarity. I wanted to rename many of California's places, or reclaim, or help to reclaim with the original, quote unquote, original indigenous names, as I would research them. And my editor, Lindsey bear, who's an indigenous person herself, it's like, don't do that. She's one, she, I mean, she's pressing in this she says, One, you're gonna get it wrong. Yeah. And two, that's not your story to tell. And I know that was such a weight was a door open for him. Yeah, right. So it was like just do this right. So so here we are on my mountain home my home mountain Mount Diablo where I feel it's the center of the universe. It's my access Mooney, right access Monday, the the the, the hub of the world, the whole world spins around here. For me, it always has the center of the cosmos. My father I mentioned was an astrophysicist. He had the actual Cosmos, he uses a metaphor for his inquiry into a relationship with the symbiotic real. Me I had the microcosm that is not Diablo, and thereby was able to project out to the macrocosm. That is California, because all of California is in Mount Diablo, you know, I mean, inside the state parks, we don't have things like wetlands and, you know, that kind of thing. But we've got something and approaches a desert. We've got something that approaches the Pacific Northwest, we've got something that approaches the coastal woodlands, we've got, you know, we don't quite have like an Alpine thing. So we don't, it's only you know, 3600 feet. So it's not, it's not that tall, but boy, in the gloriously, generously wet winter, that was this past one here in the winter of 2022 2023. We we had snow on the mountain for over a month and I've never seen that, you know, 50 years of loving this mountain. I've never seen that. Right? So that was something to behold. Right. So as you can tell by my voice slides pretty easily between talking about the mountain and talking about myself. Absolutely.

Michelle Fullner  34:29  
And also the scale you're talking to reminds me of that lens, right? Like, you can zoom in and see the you know, the petals on the mountain Avila Daisy, or you can zoom all the way out to the cosmos. And there's what is the relationship right, I'm endlessly

Obi Kaufmann  34:44  
fascinated by that. Right? And as above so below, as you look more into the microscope, you find more and more detail there. It's infinitely deep in both directions at whatever level of scale Oh, that you're talking about, I mean, we interact with the world in a very medium scale over medium speeds within a specific human time span. But the mountain is unfolding is, you know, you see, you see every leaf twitch in the wind at this particular moment, never to twitch exactly that way again. And yet also, we were talking earlier about the 10 million year history of this particular mountain, go back further, and there's a fossil ridge down there that has Cretaceous fossils, from when this was underneath the seat, right? And so at 35, so we are experiencing the world at this grand singularity, the simultaneous this and being able to apprehend that for just a moment approaches something to me, that is, and this is, this is where I dot dot dot off into an ellipsis, right? Because this spiritual, what the incredible quantity of life on this mountain and around the biosphere actually, is and contains the variety of that, like, that life, the infinite quality of that life is something that feeds on my work. And in fact, is the reason why I'm not a scientist and not an expert. I'm a generalist, I am a, that you interact with this word naturalist a lot, which is a very comfortable word, for me to, to, to wear, especially in regards to this mountain where it feels like all of the species of grass, flowers, roots, flowers, and fruit all more than human, you know, and, and so the friend of me, I am of this place there of me. In that way, Diablo offers this mirror to some deeply affectionate core of me that shares its space. And if I can just keep going with that story, you know, um, die Ungratified man, you know, just keep. And that's the thing about this story, though. It's, it's this is Magic water than like this, like this magic well, that I keep drinking from and the more that I drink from it, the more water there is, you know, it doesn't go away. It's not like I'm going to exhaust the knowledge or exhaust the things because you can

Speaker 1  37:25  
get go back and try to appear

Obi Kaufmann  37:29  
in the future. Yeah, it, I could draw 1000 maps a day for the rest of my life and never tell you in a bit of the story.

Michelle Fullner  37:36  
So what is that? What is that story for you? So how do you think about what a myth is? Is that the same as a story? Or is it a kind of a story? What are you talking about? When you're talking about mythology?

Unknown Speaker  37:48  
I am very comfortable

Obi Kaufmann  37:50  
with the word myth two, most people hear the word myth and they're like, Oh, you mean a lie? Right? You know, that's the second. Right, exactly. That's another first definition. A myth is any story that connects you to the value of human experience. And we call this meaning. Okay, so the value of our experience, and in that way, all myths from all people, whether we're talking about Jesus, or we're talking about Odin, or we're talking about all myths at one time, or even, you know, for that specific culture in that specific time and space, they were true in that they were metaphoric of the potential of human experience, and an inroad to meaning of that experience that makes them true. And it's all in that way. Why that's why I'm not like an atheist necessarily. I don't believe in a God. But God is a thought that exists beyond the realm of being a non being why can't we transcend existence to the world is under no obligation to make sense to you? You know, and when I'm encountering these experiences out outside of myself inside of myself, it seems like a bad rip off of the John Muir quote the John

Michelle Fullner  39:17  
Muir quote I think OB is referencing here goes like this I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown for going out I found was really going in. In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The sun shines not on us, but in us.

Obi Kaufmann  39:32  
But when the greatest epiphany is to use something like a James You know, James Joyce talks about this a lot the aesthetic arrest, when the eye of the universe perceives the thing of the universe and the two are main one in this kind of at one minute right atonement, then we're exposed to a truth that is, gosh, here, here I am. Plugging the big academic floss A few words again, but I really feel like they're they're apt right? The one I want to say is they're ontologically. Non objective. ontology is the study of how things exist. And objectiveness is the study of what is an object? What are we talking about? This table? Are we talking about California is California? And is the biosphere an object? Is climate change an object, right? So like these, these, the philosopher Timothy Morton calls them hyper objects where you can't quite encounter the size of these objects, but they're objects that are that are everywhere, imposing themselves on our subjective minds all the time. And so interacting with this with these models of reality, is what I mean about mythologizing a space where particular perspectives are afforded us particular moments of insight, seem to be better accessed through, you could say, the metaphor of ecology or

Speaker 1  41:02  
botany or geography. So So, in

Obi Kaufmann  41:07  
that way, I keep coming back to Mount Diablo because I keep finding new things here. But but but I tell you, as we were saying before, California is full of places that we're just never gonna get to. Yeah.

Michelle Fullner  41:19  
Are you familiar with reader response theory, literary criticism, it's it. This is my background. I don't know, philosophy. This is, this is a an, a way of approaching literature. And the theory basically goes that the author of a work and the reader are co constructing meaning, right? You don't have the text in a vacuum, because the text has to be interpreted through someone's mind. Right? And through someone's way of looking at the world in their perspective. And so kind of tell me if this relates to what you're saying, If I'm summarizing it, well, oh, is that the the the world, right, this objective reality is kind of like the text, and then we're the reader approaching that text. And we're co creating with that objective reality and our mind, this sense of Oh, that's very

Obi Kaufmann  42:12  
good. Michelle, inside of this really sophisticated lexicon of symbology that's incredibly culturally culturally specific, I think of, you know, chasing Chumash paintings around the Santa Ynez mountains when I was in college, you know, just these big, beautiful mandalas painted, you know, 500 years ago, a lot of the specific narrative narrative, meaning that the prose that might have described what exactly is being depicted has been lost. But but a lot of it hasn't been too much people can Reese reencountering, their, their ancient myths because of these, there's 1000s of art sites. But But, but standing in front of these large like anthropomorphic creatures that are vaguely human like, or they seem to have like bodies with kind of like heads kind of like legs, kind of like wings, that exist in a space. Finding these when I was in my 20s, I had no idea what I was. What I did understand, though, is that I'm standing in front of a piece of art that was made by an artist conveying something to their community, about their relationship with the more than human world. Ah, I do that. And then I'm thinking like a wonder though, if I were to take that to mesh artist and show him one of my watercolor watercolors of an eagle head, that's just lino scratched up kind of abstract or whatever, you know, if they would be as mystified as I am looking at their art as they would be looking at

Unknown Speaker  43:50  
you didn't capture the eagle. This is a smear on

Obi Kaufmann  43:53  
what is this? You know, what is, you know, like, like, that's, that's it? That doesn't look like right.

Unknown Speaker  43:58  
How did you feel having that revelation that well,

Obi Kaufmann  44:01  
that cultural specific pneus is is very important when parsing these these qualities of expertise, right, which is something that I'm always trying to deconstruct in my work, right. I don't want to necessarily make textbooks about California nature. Right. Okay. Right. And I, I say things like, I don't want to leave you I'm not gonna leave you alone with the knowledge right? So I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring you on this journey. I'm inviting you to come on this journey where I'm figuring it out for myself too. Okay. And this is very complicated stuff. I'm in love with biodiversity. First, I really understand that biodiversity systems are resilient system going forward with some sort of prescription where in we leave California's natural world in better shape at the end of the 21st century than we lifted at the end of the 20th century. We must work then to keep all of these pieces on the table And it's infuriatingly difficult to argue. So let's not argue it at all. In fact, argument will just make divisiveness as far as the allocation of resources are concerned, say, you know, especially in California, we're talking about WaterFire, whenever you're talking.

So what I

then aim to do, is to employ what I believe is the only technology that has ever changed anyone's mind ever about anything. And that is the telling of a better story, the telling of a better story, and the telling of the better story, remembering our way forward, right? The reengagement of these ancient systems of California, this California that abides this California, that is all still here, how do we best attend to that, we're gonna have to give a lot to indigenous ecological knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, we're gonna have to give a lot to scientific innovation both at the same time. These this is not necessarily my job, but on my job, if I had one is the witnessing the witness, the witnessing, allowing myself to enter into the space of arrest or aesthetic arrest, where I am working to convey this desperate affection, that is, I think, a valuable natural resource into its own. Right. Right, that I think that there is, there is discourse that in in the applied arts that can, as you say, be made together between the viewer and the audience, where the meaning happens, where the value is witnessed, where the thing that is precious, that is rare, where the living species, for example, is worthy, valuable, and necessarily integrate into this ancient language that California speaks.

Michelle Fullner  47:12  
And I think it's a really interesting and important thing that you're doing. Because taking the scientific perspective that you grew up with, right, coming at it from a scientific viewpoint, and understanding kind of this objective reality, and then distilling that into a story is something that humans are drawn to stories. And I think sometimes if, if we are just presented with bare scientific data and facts, right, we're if we're presented with those things, you see what happens there is people ignore that, right? And they go to anecdote, right. And they rely on that, because that's, that's the closest thing to a story that, well, my uncle saw this other thing happened, right. And that's, and I feel that anecdote can be very, very dangerous. Whereas I think that what you're doing that I really admire is, is capturing and condensing and distilling in a very poetic way, the way the with the efficiency of a poet, right, the way that those truths can come together into a story. And so it's like, a way for it's a way to replace anecdote.

Obi Kaufmann  48:19  
That's right. I think that's right. Yeah, it's like, it's like the primary news source. It's the it's, it's the personal experience and engagement. And the first line of my first book in the California field Atlas is that this is a love story. Right? In my next field Atlas, which is the force of California, after I wrote the state of water, the force, California, my first line was that this is a family album. Okay, so like, already from from that book to the next book, the relationship has developed and mature just like a human relationship might where you fall in love. And then the family, maturing and developing into this into this networked relationship. Right. In my third field Atlas, the coasts of California, I opened it up to the temporal realm and realized that book is an object of that affection and called it a time capsule. Right? the coasts of before are not the coasts of now are not the

coasts that they will

Michelle Fullner  49:16  
be. They're different from when you wrote the book. Exactly. Especially after the storms.

Obi Kaufmann  49:22  
It's true. And then and then from my last field Atlas, which I just finished, which we published by hayday books in the fall, the deserts of California,

Michelle Fullner  49:30  
the deserts of California is now out and available both online and in every bookstore. I've checked.

Obi Kaufmann  49:35  
The first line of that book is that this is an adventure store. Okay, so that's like, that's like where it goes, right? We're finally you are so integrated into it, that you're allowed to have fun with it. Go have fun with the family now.

Unknown Speaker  49:50  
Yeah.

Obi Kaufmann  49:51  
And you know, it's that desert book has particular quality to it. You know, I don't make I don't make travel books I don't make too or guides, you know, I don't make roadhouses I don't really even tell you how to get anywhere, you know, like these books. What they are is like a handbook of what I believe is, is fostering a relationship that is akin to locality, if not, indigenous in nature, of course, it's not that because it is made up of these modern political designations, land designations with their borders and their fences, which is its own story, which is its own story. That's right. There's a lot of imagining going on in my field ounces, imagining what it was and what it could be by reading what is underneath there. So engaging this thing that is, like a geographic literacy, this democratic

Unknown Speaker  50:49  
exercise in

Obi Kaufmann  50:51  
knowing where you are, thereby knowing who you are, sound like Wendell Berry, your relationship to the place changes, the place changes, and you change. And this, I think, is exactly what we're talking about past, the blame, the past the guilt, past the trauma, letting the paradigm slip from something like industrialized fundamentalism, or whatever we're doing towards this carbon based economy into this new space that is speeding towards us an ecological space where we are part of it. And this is a revolutionary space. This is a space that will redefine everything that we know from commodity, to freedom, to wealth, to kinship, and you can already see it, like light shining through. And you could see it everywhere. I travel California, all over on the speaker series on this book tour, you know, in this endless book tour that I seem to be talking to people in Fresno, San Diego Crescent City, Truckee, Nevada City, San Francisco, Sonoma County, wherever I am, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what religion you are, it doesn't matter what political affiliation you are, it doesn't matter. Any of the other sort of metaphysical assertions that we all walk around with, you know, the big bundle of things that I am. There's this emergent paradigm that rests in love for this place this desire. No one, no one in California wants to see California degraded.

No one does.

Negotiating the finer details of that is what we get tripped up. Right? And what and what is so and what is so profitable for corporate entities than to monopolize upon. But the divisive rhetoric is very thin. And I think, and I think that I think that I maintain, given all the hype, that there is this abidance of hope, and will and togetherness, that is that will institute a kind of justice, that we have only yet begun to imagine.

Michelle Fullner  53:33  
I have I have two things from that. Okay. One, the idea of being in a place and knowing who you are, right, because of that place i that just resonates so deeply with me. I remember the first time somebody said, Just be yourself. To me. It has always struck me as the most unhelpful advice. I think I was in like fourth or fifth grade. And I remember thinking like, How can I be myself? I'm not in an oak tree. Right? Like, this doesn't make sense to me. I'm on a school playground where I don't want to be and I also am a lonely kid and don't understand the other kids and what they're doing and how can I be myself in this context? Yeah, this is not the place where it can be my Yeah,

Speaker 2  54:11  
please just know where you are to know who you are. You also have to know when you're right.

Obi Kaufmann  54:18  
You know, hanging out with Greg saris doing this podcast and place in purpose, we talk a lot about the difference between what is now and what was sacred time, secret time, when the animals were people when the animals were characters is still happening all around us. We are inside sacred time, sacred time has almost has something to do with eternity. Eternity has very little to do with time. You know, it's almost like the difference. Here. We are talking mythological symbolism again, but it's almost the difference between the sun and the moon. Sun is always always rises the same. It's outside of time, right? The moon though, exists In, in, in the field of temporality, where where the, where the serpent, sheds its skin and where the woman has a, as a bodily reflection of that as well, you know, this, this idea between eternal and everlasting, everlasting, very long time, but eternal has nothing to do with the field. So those two mythological constructs are reflected in space in terms of like the the circle of everything whose circumference is everywhere in his centers, nowhere that leaves us with potentially an existential crisis, when you're asked to be just yourself, right, which sort of means nothing to me was to being on the axis Mooney, on the on the hub of the world, from, from where all directions originate, and that that also is inside of you. So studying patterns in the landscape remind us of these deeper inner identities that navigate the difficult existential questions.

Michelle Fullner  56:05  
And then the second point that I wanted to get to is really reflected. Let me see if I can find the exact quote, it's somewhere here you had mentioned in the original field Atlason, kind of being afraid of presenting a too rosy greenwashed picture of the natural systems of California, as stewards of this land, we're largely doing a poor job, and perhaps I have done more to warn of the threats our state faces on an environmental level, I'm at peace with what I hope is an uplifting tone throughout the book, because that feeling is the feeling I get when I experienced California's extensive nature, its biodiversity, its fathomless living networks, I am confident that those networks will survive us and our imposed ecology, and I am happy to introduce you to those networks, as I know them to be.

Obi Kaufmann  56:48  
That's good. That still holds up. I wrote that passage seven years ago. It's

Michelle Fullner  56:51  
and it's beautiful. And I think that it, it for me creates a beautiful framework for reading the rest of the bone and understanding and kind of this form of communication of the story that you are telling. Right, right, because I think that you're not ignoring the climate catastrophe and disruption, right? This, this imposed disruption, but the story that you're telling isn't about that,

Obi Kaufmann  57:13  
right? No, no, it's about it's about resiliency. It's about the study of paleoclimate since paleoecology, in California, and how they, and how those systems remain active today. But it also interfaces with the modern world with modern California and society, the government of Sacramento making policies making specific goals as if that's going to work. Okay, so I think I think of the 30 by 30 plan, I think of Earth Day, I think of like writing cheap receipts, to continue a particular quality of the status quo, right? Not Earth Day, and 30 by 30, as noble as they are. And as much as I support them, I'm very critical of how they do sequester, the idea, the sequester, and they reinforce the idea of nature itself, as something apart from the decisions that we make, and I'm not talking about turning on your car every day, I don't want you to feel bad for driving your car, you know, we are that's statistically insignificant. This is the way that we do things right now, and someday the cities of mankind will become something else. And we are working towards that what I what I want you to do, what I want you to do is what I try and do myself, sustain myself in terms of the consideration, the appreciation, the return, the grounding, the unpacked, the unpacked attitude towards the natural world, and this is this is this is this is me having an imaginary conversation with somebody like Greta Thun Berg, where it's like, the future is not spent. The future is not written, the future is not over. The future is not dead. It's very important to not kill things before they die. Whatever those things are, they might be ideas they might be. There are precious entities in the world that are depending on us to not let go of our own stewardship. Remember it California, California, nature. Nature hasn't existed for 10s of 1000s of years. Everywhere. It's been stewarded by a lot of people doing a lot of things everywhere.

There is no nature. In California. There has always been reciprocal ecological relationships, you

know, between humans and the more than human kin. You know, I'm really attracted to that phraseology by Kimber. Yes. And

Michelle Fullner  1:00:21  
I think that what you're doing here, too, is kind of going after the concept that keeps us separated, right, that that false construct that keeps us separated? Because as long as we think that way, whether we're aware of climate disaster and all that are not, we're continuing the same patterns, because we're continuing the same worldview. That's right. And so if you can change the worldview, you don't have to focus on climate catastrophe. Because then you change the paradigm. And we we naturally shift, right? So

Obi Kaufmann  1:00:52  
change our behavior, we change our behaviors. That's so beautiful. And you know, what I'm doing right now, is I'm not I'm listening. And I'm following, for example, the the black, queer, indigenous community and the lanch. I'm listening to them, I am learning from them, I am putting them first. Everything that I'm saying, here's an echo of, of what I've heard in terms of my own voice. So it's not it's not exactly an echo, you know, because it's very, it's very important, it's very important to like to draw this line very carefully. And what I mean by that is like, to offer no complacency. Okay, I'm not saying that, that there is not a desperate dance being danced. I want to avoid the use, like, I want to avoid the use of the word like fight, right? More like trauma and is, this is let's let this be a dance. Let's let it unfold. Let's look at an important healthy exercise of expression as opposed to a antagonistic confrontation with ourselves.

Where we're finger wagging.

Crying behind a podium saying How dare you? It's like, okay, okay. Yes, we have a lot of trauma. It's on the land. These last 200 years have been devastating. But all the pieces are still here. That's the miracle to Stuart. And the Resurgence is everywhere. It's a plug into that energy. Yeah, like into that energy. And that at any, that's a thought that gets me up at five in the morning, get to work on these big, big books, you know, to engage that to participate in that. Yeah, the future, the future is unfolding, and is more beautiful than we can.

Michelle Fullner  1:02:43  
Okay, okay. I don't want to take all of your time. Oh, my gosh, it got so late, and you gotta go. My last question is just what about, I mean, you've, you've read so many books, now you're gonna work on an app, you've got so much more ahead of you? What about this work or just being in a place like this takes your breath away?

Obi Kaufmann  1:03:03  
How To Best answer that question, Mr. Welch, what I want to do is I want to, I want to I want to go somewhere else, like I want to go to like one of my favorite, one of my favorite adventure stories ever is Lord of the Rings. And I don't know why I still watch his movies and read those books over and over again. I just finished a fellowship a couple weeks ago. In fact, when I when I when I was when I was pitching my book to my publisher, I included Tolkiens little map of Middle Earth with the trees over here in the mountains over there and that kind of thing. And it's like, I want to do that for a place that has more adventure. More romance, more monsters, crazy creatures, millions of monsters. You know, I use that word affectionately. Alright, monsters are I know, they're just misunderstood ecological agents. This portrayals you know, so the adventure the Rhapsody the romance for here is endlessly tappable and constantly researching and have a different character throughout the year. And, and so the changing face of this living world is always welcome, engaging, beautiful, internet, diverse, you know, these things that I crave and myself, you know, apart from the urban landscape, which is largely built on routine, transaction, transactional, monotonous. It's all just what you've got there and you're that little box of light that you have a keyboard in front of that you stare at all day, right like that box.

Unknown Speaker  1:04:48  
A lot. We're all painfully

Obi Kaufmann  1:04:50  
intimate with that box. But without the monitor out here inside of the symbient reel. It is a it is a there are truths presented that reminds me of exactly the person that I want to be. And just like the battery level on our phone we have, I have a battery level inside of my heart that needs this juice. That is only, but it only provided by, by this by this gorgeous canopy by this fragrant soil by this warm sky and by this gentle wind and the the between between the flowers and the birds, the wildflowers become a mountain, the mountain becomes a wildflower, everything becomes all things and metaphors abound as I grapple with, as you said, the existential question to end all existential dilemmas, challenges, just be yourself.

Unknown Speaker  1:06:07  
Thank you.

Michelle Fullner  1:06:08  
Thank you good. So if you can power down your box of light, put on some comfortable shoes and get out into a landscape that's a little less built. Try to see the places where the boundaries between yourself and the living world around you start to blur, and maybe even find that you are home. I want to give the biggest thank you to Obi Kauffman for taking an entire morning to show me Mount Diablo and have this wonderful conversation with me. Thank you for generously supporting my valentine project with your art and for believing in me and this podcast from the beginning. That has all meant the world to me. And dear listener, if you haven't done so already, don't forget to check out of his gorgeous set of California filled atlases which bring together the story of California in such an original and beautiful way. If you listen all the way to the end of the episode, I always tell you something interesting or embarrassing or otherwise noteworthy from my week and this week is that my husband taught our six year old how to play a game called Dragon wood and watching her roll the dice and then add up the numbers on her fingers is everything and she gives her little sister all the lucky Ladybug cards to play with. And I wouldn't see this and say my life is complete. But I think maybe it's just going to keep getting better from here. Okay, that's all for this week. I can't wait to see you on the next episode of Golden State naturalist bye

the song's called it no buy grapes and you can find a link to the song as well as the Creative Commons license in the show notes

Transcribed by https://otter.ai