Video Production: Cameron Farboud
Aerial Photography: Ron Chapple
Music: Pat Metheny

According to legend, de Mestral and his Irish pointer were on a hunting expedition when they accidentally walked through a patch of burdock thistle. Later, while painstakingly removing the burrs from the dog’s fur, de Mestral decided to take a closer look. How could the burrs stick so tenaciously and still reattach after removal? Under the microscope, the answer was obvious: the burrs were covered in thousands of tiny hooks. The hooks snagged on loops of thread or fur, allowing the burrs to disperse across the landscape.

George soon discovered that imitating nature was a sticky business. After several unsuccessful attempts to recruit a textile manufacturer and even more trouble designing a method of mass production, he finally registered his product in 1958. And with that, Velcro was born.

Biomimicry, or the science of design based on nature’s patterns and processes, is a new name for an old idea. Over millions of years, natural selection has produced highly efficient (though often imperfect) structures and processes that allow a vast diversity of organisms to survive. These organisms are engineers by necessity, undergoing thousands of iterations to find a solution.

The invention of Velcro is one of the most memorable examples of biomimicry, but it is just one of many. Noses of Japanese trains modeled after kingfisher beaks, stain repellant fabrics designed to resemble the surface of lotus leaves, and cooling systems in skyscrapers based on those of termite mounds are only a handful of examples of borrowing nature’s solutions to solve human problems.

“We tend to think we’re categorically distinct from the rest of the natural world,” says ecologist Sam Stier, an ecologist at Biomimicry 3.8, “but what we see in the natural world is technology. The beak of a bird is technology just as chemical communication between ants is technology. Until we understand the natural world in those terms, we can’t conceptually understand ourselves as really being part of nature.”

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Several years ago, while teaching a group of third graders about the geologic time scale, I held my arms outstretched on either side of my body. My arms, I told them, represented the Earth’s entire history from the Big Bang to the present. In comparison, human history was the equivalent of the tip of my fingernail. Thousands of years of history encompassed in a thin sliver of nail.

Biomimicry is built on the same concept. Our capacity for reasoning is impressive, but in the end, it pales in comparison to millions of years of trial and error.

Listen: Interview with Sam Stier, a biologist at Biomimicry 3.8.

UC Davis’ Art of Regional Change program and the Cache Creek Nature Preserve recently collaborated on a multimedia project exploring the social and environmental history of lower Cache Creek near Sacramento. Photo mural by jesikah maria ross and Gale Peterson.

Nature preserves are so much about the wildlife. Visitors are like houseguests. They’re welcome as long as they respect the house rules: stay on trails, give creatures their space and leave no trace.

jesikah maria ross says nature might be better served if the guests felt more at home.

“You don’t care for a place unless you have a relationship with it,” said ross, a documentary mediamaker who spells her name lowercase. “One way to do that is to tell stories about the place that humanize it.”

She recently did just that. As founding director of the Art of Regional Change program at UC Davis, ross rallied dozens of students to find and interview people who could tell the social and environmental history of the 130-acre Cache Creek Nature Preserve north of Sacramento.

jesikah maria ross
Photo by fischphoto.com

The students recorded a diverse range of voices articulating a passion for the place: farmers, miners, flood-control managers, Native Americans, environmental scientists, environmental activists, poets – you name it.

Initially, ross planned to center the storytelling project on “the gravel wars,” a 20-year-long environmental conflict over aggregate mining in the creek bed. Not far into her research, however, she realized the mining was only the latest enterprise to change the ecology of the creek.

Native Americans, including the Southern Patwin Tribe, regularly gathered creekside grasses for weaving baskets, hunted Tule elk and fished for native Chinook salmon, lamprey, American shad and Sacramento splitttail. Mexican ranchers’ cattle grazed the banks. The Cache derives its name from the French trappers who cached their pelts there in the early 19^th century.

The creek is significantly contaminated with mercury washed down from the Coast Range, where it was mined for gold recovery operations after 1850. At the same time, homesteaders diverted the stream for irrigation. Some of their descendants continue to farm along the creek.

In other words, the environmental history of Cache Creek is much like that of many rivers and creeks in California’s Central Valley.

“I’ve learned more about the history of California just by looking at a 130-acre parcel in Yolo County on the lower Cache,” ross said.

The Cache Creek Nature Preserve also is home to 30 acres of constructed wetlands, a rare savannah of oak trees and many birds – including snowy egrets, great blue herons and red-tailed hawks. But it’s the exposition of the hidden social landscape that makes the preserve more than just a nice place to visit.

“The more we can peel back those layers,” ross said in an interview, “the more we can have a connection – not just to our shared geography, but to our shared history and our shared humanity.”

Project participants collaboratively researched and produced stories on the layers. Then ross artfully wove all those media pieces into a website — Restore/Restory: A People’s History of the Cache Creek Nature Preserve – and an interactive audio tour of the preserve.  The tour features vignettes from as many as 50 storytellers, each with a different take on the creek. Storyteller profiles paint the history along with a timeline linked to photos, maps and documents.

Marshall McKay
Photo by fischphoto.com

In one recording, Marshall McKay, chairman of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation tribal council, describes how the creek “sings” at high flows and “thinks” in calmer waters.

The preserve is also a story of environmental reconciliation. Miners, environmentalists and county officials tell the history of the gravel wars, from conflict to compromise to collaboration. County voters approved an initiative that banned mining from the creek bed but allowed extraction nearby to continue. A gravel company donated land that became the preserve, which is operated and maintained with a fee assessed on mining operations.

Wyatt Cline
Photo by fischphoto.com

A large gravel pit became a wetland and pond, and a political battleground became a preserve with all sides vested. As long-time Capay valley rancher Wyatt Cline put it in his interview with ross, the preserve “is everybody – it’s who we are.”

Ben Adamo
Photo by fischphoto.com

Miner Ben Adamo describes how his views toward environmentalism evolved:

Ann Brice
Photo by fischphoto.com

Ann Brice, an ecologist and founding executive director of the Cache Creek Conservancy, tells how at least one Yolo County supervisor became intimately connected with the creek:

For Sarah Motley, an Episcopal priest, Cache Creek “is a place where God has been made real to me.” In one excerpt, she describes to ross the baptism of her son in the creek, which holds some of her fondest childhood memories:

As for ross, the synthesizing of so many different voices and histories tied to a single patch of land in the Golden State made her “a hyperactive patriot of California who cares about the environment.”

“I’ve never felt so connected to the land,” she said.

By the time it was all said and done, an entire Saturday (and the first two layers of skin on my hands) was gone. But I felt a quiet rush of happiness when I saw the first worm castings appear on the soil surface a few days later. I built it and they came!

Worms are so-called ecosystem engineers, changing the physical structure of the soil as they move through it and digest it. In doing so, they change the availability of resources for other organisms and even change the flow of energy through an ecosystem.

Although North American soils are teeming with earthworms, it may surprise you to learn that the majority of these worms are non-native species. The reason for the mass extinction of native earthworms? According to one leading hypothesis, as the glaciers receded ten thousand years ago, they scraped off the top layer of soil and drove all of the native earthworms in the Northern US and much of Canada extinct.

So, over the last 10,000 years, forests in these regions have evolved without earthworms. Without worms to help decompose organic matter such as leaf litter, other detritivores (i.e. fungi and bacteria) became wholly responsible for recycling nutrients. Because these organisms are a bit slower than earthworms at decomposing organic matter, gradually a forest floor accumulated. This layer of dead plant matter served as habitat for all manner of creatures, including insects, spiders, fungi, and small vertebrates.

Flash forward to the 1700s. European colonists have arrived in North America, carrying an array of goods in the hulls of their ships. In the hustle and bustle of colonization, Europeans also unknowingly transported a few stowaways, including viral diseases and earthworms.

As these non-native earthworms colonized forests in the Northern US, they also ate. In fact, they ate so much that the layer of leaf litter on the forest floor all but disappeared. In the Great Lakes region, populations of ground-nesting songbirds that depended on the litter for shelter declined. The litter had also provided protection for seedlings from predators and extreme temperatures. Slowly, the thick carpet of vegetation on the forest floor disappeared.

To better understand the distribution of these invasive earthworms, researchers at the University of Minnesota-Duluth created Worm Watch, a citizen science initiative. So far, Worm Watch has received over 25,000 earthworm specimens collected by residents in the Great Lakes region as well as Alaska and Canada.

“We’re are not only using data collected by citizen scientists to document the distribution and density of worms across the landscape, but we’re also identifying earthworm-free areas for preservation,” says Ryan Hueffmeier, a researcher with Worm Watch.

In California, earthworm awareness is on the rise, though not necessarily due to their detrimental effects on forest ecology. Although the increasing popularity of worm-composting (a.k.a. vermiculture) operations has led to concerns of non-native species introductions, Hueffmeier points out that the most commonly used species, the Red wiggler (Eisenia fetida) cannot survive cold Northern winters.

Proponents of vermiculture defend it fiercely, arguing that it binds nutrients to aggregated soil particles and increases microbial activity, leading to a slow release of nutrients.

“The earthworms are actually putting the beneficial microorganisms back into the soil that need to be there for the plants to take up nutrients naturally,” says Larry Royal, owner of Earthworm Soil Factory. “It’s very similar to the forest—nobody fertilizes the forest, yet it continues to grow.”

Whether you’re an earthworm aficionado or an ecologist tracking the movement of invasive species across the landscape, few can disagree that these invertebrates are quiet revolutionaries. The humblest of creatures, the earthworm, is changing the face of an entire forest ecosystem while we unknowingly go about our lives aboveground.

First and foremost, the beaches of Half Moon Bay are not your normal, run-of-the-mill beaches with scorching hot sand, crisp blue waves and stretches of half naked sun worshipers as orange as Doritos: they’re cold. They’re really, really cold, so cold that most days you can barely muster the gall to even step foot in the water. And the wind – don’t get me started about the wind – it feels almost violent at times, pelting the sand across your face and clothes, blowing your hair every which way, forcing you to curl yourself into a tight, heat-conserving ball while you huddle on a blanket behind whatever rocky ledge you can find. I know, it sounds miserable, but it’s not: it’s perfect. Because in that moment you forget about how terrible your hair looks (and trust me, it looks awful), or how pasty your makeup has become, or how your clothes will reek of ocean smell as soon as you get back to the car. All you can see, all you can feel is that infinite ocean, the misty sky, and how so incredibly lucky you are to be in the presence of something so beautiful and so much more powerful than you will ever be.

Not convinced? What about the memories – the memories that can only be enhanced by the grandeur of Half Moon Bay. How about the time that my boyfriend surprised me with a horseback-riding excursion across the beach: the moment was magical, like something from a sappy love story that I’d never read, and yet even my emotionally-devoid self couldn’t deny the perfection of it all. Sure, the surprise alone was sweet and romantic, but the fact that it was at the beach – that we saw nothing but steady, rippling waves and golden sand for miles into the distance – made it simply unforgettable. And then there were the photo shoots: photographers throughout the San Francisco bay area always seem to flock to Half Moon Bay, desperate to snap photos of skinny girls in clothes no one would think of wearing to the beach, and I have been one of those girls more times than I can count. Most of us hate it – donning a tiny dress in the middle of a rainy beach, all the while trying to look aloof or fierce – but for me, moments like that make me feel alive. Every single hair on my body is standing on end, the rain is sprinkling across my face, and while everyone else is setting up lights or stabilizing reflectors, I get to frolic through the waves and dance across the sand feeling free and connected with nature. In that moment, I’m able to team up with my majestic surroundings and try to create art, and let me tell you, the beach always upstages me.

So, there you have it: my love affair with Half Moon Bay. She’s a bit cold-hearted, somewhat unpredictable and has a raging temper, but she’s certainly a stunning sight to see. I can never forget her: her primal, untouched elegance, the moments she’s helped me create with the people I care for, and the art she has allowed me to craft. Even though she may have frozen my fingers or ruined a few pairs of shoes, I will keep coming back to her: I guess I’m just a sucker for her strength and beauty.

(Photo by Martine Pinnel, Hair & makeup by Cynthea Amnatkeo & Desiree Cerda)

Death Valley inspires me because it reflects a great lesson about life. It appears to have a pretty basic geology but, in fact, it is very complex. Despite the harsh weather extremes, it is the home of many organisms, plants, and even native American tribes. So why would one life want to exist here? Because the beauty of Death Valley is its reward. Similar to life where people struggle with ordinary lives, try to make ends meet in an economy where unemployment is a common trend, and overcoming obstacles they never saw coming. Why are these people fighting to live? Because they see the beauty that their lives offer.

Death Valley has much to offer such as the variety of strong organisms, its unique geology, amazing sunsets, and best of all its lightening storms. You can find great entertainment in the lightning storms. During one of my visits, I was able to get very close to the lightening storms and it was absolutely breathtaking. It was then that I realized the beauty of life and why people/organisms strive to live; to enjoy what the world offers us. As I watched the lightning storm, I felt so inspired knowing that I am witnessing one of the strongest forces in the world and in one of the most challenging living conditions in the world. This was all due to Mother Nature and this very world that we perceive as so simple, yet is truly omnipotent and ready for us to open our arms to and enjoy.

My father and I hiked this hill together for nearly 20 years and he had already been his hiking here for years. A big part of my childhood was spent here and I learned so many life lessons from this mountain and also formed an everlasting bond and love for nature and all things wild. I would have hiked this hill with my father many more years, however he became ill. It was a very sad day for him when he could no longer make the hike. I continued to go often and we enjoyed talking about what I saw and any details of the trip. My favorite story I got to share with him was the time my good friend and I saw a bear at the bottom of the trail, taking a bath in the American River. We were only a few hundred feet away which was close enough for a good view and I was also grateful for the river between us creating a bit of a barrier. For as long as I could remember we were always on “bear patrol” hoping to get a good glimpse of one. My dad always loved to pretend he would see bears way off in the hills, and sometimes I would maybe even agree, but his was the first time I’d ever unmistakably saw a bear in its own true element unaware of our blissful observation. It was a beautiful day.

My father fought a good fight, but we all have our time here on earth, and unfortunately his was up. After his memorial service, we took a trip up to the hill. We had a large group of family and friends and this time the mountain felt a bit different, more powerful and loving than ever before. I have many places I can go to remember and visit him, but this is my favorite. Everything along the trail like the trees, and rocks, and water and plants and bushes, and critters all hold memories and lessons learned. I love our beautiful state of California, and I have so many special places, I feel so blessed to have been born and raised here. I have also been lucky to have visited many beautiful places in faraway lands. For about the last 9 months I have been blessed to be living in the magical Hawaiian Islands. And I love it there, so many wonders and adventures. But I’ve learned that there is a certain feeling that home makes you feel, and I feel it most when I’m amongst the forests we have here on the mainland. This is where I was raised. I share a bond with these mountains and asked where my “one true place” is? Without a doubt it’s our special family mountain. Every time I go it makes me feel like I can conquer anything. I can climb to the top of any of life’s monutains. It is my sanctuary. I know the trees and rocks and landmarks just like I know the cabinets in my kitchen. Once I step foot on this mountain, I know I’m home.

The northeast is filled with Lake Tahoe which is utterly breathtaking from this vantage. Craggy peaks and alpine lakes are abundant in every other direction. In the shadows of towering summits, lakes (Fallen Leaf, Cascade, Gilmore, Aloha, Heather, and Suzie) occupy low spots that once held enormous glaciers which carved out the rugged relief and picturesque scenery through which cascading creeks now tumble and crash.

The summit is a great place to ponder the barely imaginable forces that have formed the place. How did the rocks of Tallac that hold fossils of sea life become the stunning altar of the Tahoe Sierra? Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, glaciers, and landslides shook, pushed, and buried the landscape over and over like a blacksmith pounds and pounds hot slaggy goo to finally yield a mighty metal. Tallac was buried miles deep and baked in a furnace then quenched in glacial waters. Molded and mangled by fire and ice until the perfect peak was formed, Tallac was forged in fury and polished with a glacial glaze.

Although the hike up these steep slopes can be hard, the victory atop is well worth the struggle. You’ll see landslides where slopes lost whatever resolve they had to resist the tests of time and bold peaks that still raise defiant fists. Tallac tells a parable about impermanence and renewal. The trillions of gallons of water in Lake Tahoe with dusty dry Nevada in the background reminds me of the great disparities in life and how fortunes can and do change. For back when the glaciers were polishing these slopes, Nevada had lovely lakes and forests. Back then Tahoe and Tallac were icy barren places. Time may be the mightiest force. Ultimately all is transformed and re-created.

Tallac is the place I retreat to when I feel stuck, clinging to some notion of how things should be different. By mustering the strength to climb, I somehow purge bothersome thoughts. By resolving to simply put one foot in front of the other despite any obstacles, I regain a sense of what matters.

My sister and I were very good little swimmers, so we were allowed to swim by ourselves when our mom was too cold or too tired, as adults get. But us, we could stay in the water all day.

I remember how sometimes we would lie with our bellies on the sandy floor waiting for the too rough waves to pass over our heads until we couldn’t hold our breaths any longer. Then we would jump to the top and reevaluate, sometimes having to duck immediately. I would shout orders, typical bossy older sister. When we couldn’t take it any longer, we would fight our way through the waves and run, shivering, for our towels. Careful to pick up as little sand on our feet and legs as possible as cold skin and tiny rocks are no great combination.

Currently, I live about five blocks from the ocean. When I leave in the morning and when the ocean becomes visible on my drive home, I always look over my shoulder to see what it looks like at that moment. I know it’s there and I know what it looks like, and yet I always look.

Have you ever watched someone looking at the ocean? Watching, waiting eyes. Sometimes happy, sometimes sad, often pensive. I always wonder what they are thinking. I wonder what brought them to the ocean that day. What they are looking for, for what question they are seeking an answer. The ocean can make you and your problems feel smaller on a bad day. And on a good day, it makes the world feel full of endless possibilities.

My mom’s ashes are in the ocean. On the morning of her memorial service I wrote this poem in my sleep, woke up and quickly scribbled it down. She was a great poet, and this was the only time I had ever written a poem that was not assigned to me.

My mom is like the ocean
Far too vast to understand

My mom is like the ocean
How she danced upon the sand

If I told you how I loved her so
Would you even understand?

My mom is like the ocean
How I long to hold her hand.