Adina Merenlender - Climate Stewardship: Taking Collective Action to Protect California

Ive told this story a hundred times. Maybe there is no other story worth telling these days. I am driving renowned Pomo basket maker and medicine woman Mabel McKay back to the Yocha Dehe reservation in Yolo County after a talk she gave to a classroom of undergraduates at Stanford University. It is 1988, early autumn. On Highway 80, somewhere near Vacaville, Mabel gazed out the car window to the dry hills. Then she turned back to me.

Everythings going to burn, she said. Everythings going to go dry. There will be no escaping it. Going to burn, top to bottom. Even the ocean, it will go hot. Thats my latest Dream, what I seen in my Dream. Were coming to that point.

What do I do? I asked. What am I supposed to do?

Mabel listened, then immediately broke into laughter. She seemed to be making fun of me. Thats cute: What am I supposed to do?

No, Mabel, Im serious.

She became quiet, and after a moment answered, You live the best way you know how, what else.

I was used to Mabels uncanny interlocutory style, her upending conversation in a way that made you think, wonder. The last Dreamer, or prophet, amongst the Pomo nations of Sonoma, Lake, and Mendocino Counties, she was the wisest of teachers. She was the last of many things, the last descendent of the Lolsel Pomo of eastern Lake County and therefore the last to speak her language. She was the last sucking doctor anywhere in California. Indian doctors capable of extracting disease by sucking were considered the most powerful. Her ancestors lived along Clear Lake, the oldest lake in North America, for thousands of years. Arrowheads and other artifacts from the region date back over 14,000 years. But who is counting? These ancestors experienced deep pine forests and sprawling wetlands, and then about 8,000 years ago, with a warming climate, a much drier landscape of grasses and oaks. They adapted, transforming their diet and no doubt patterns and places of social organization. The people, they knowed what to do, Mabel said. They paid attention to their world and their Dreams. The world gives us the Dreams.

What Mabel seemed to be describing was a relationship with the world so intimate that the dichotomy between person and place, spiritual and physical, was collapsed. This intimacy with the environment no doubt was what predicated a culture of reciprocity and responsibility, ensuring continuance for a people and their world over eons. Of course, Mabel, who died in 1993, might tell you that Im talking too much, too busy trying to explain things. Often, I drove Mabel to visit sacred places she remembered as a child: Clear Lake shore where she danced in a Roundhouse with her grandmother, a cave where a medicine man kept his cloak of white eagle feathers. Many of these places were buried under roads and housing tracts. A creek bed where Mabel gathered sedge root for basketmaking sits under Lake Sonoma. Mabel wasnt preoccupied with the loss. She kept telling stories. So often the stories wandered, or so it seemed to me, and only later, upon reflection, would I make a connection between them and then understand them in a new way, or better said, make meaning.

So it is now with a recounting of her apocalyptic Dream of fire. Ive told that Dream over and over in light of the climate disaster and the associated horrific firesIve told it as proof of a dire prophecy. But Ive left out the larger context of Mabels revelation. Ive left out other parts of the story, which Im urgently reminded of. Earlier in the day, while talking to the Stanford students, Mabel described the end of the world as coming in fire and destruction, again as shown to her in her Dream. She told the students that the world would be renewed again, that people would be planted here again, but we wont know who those people will be. Id heard Mabel before tell of the end of the world, and perhaps influenced by my Catholic upbringing, her description of the end had been reminiscent of the description in the Book of Revelations. I hadnt thought of the world being renewed, perhaps because the Biblical version had influenced me to think otherwise. Maybe in light of current world events Id been plain pessimistic, until now. If global warming and horrific fires have come to pass, wouldnt I also see a renewed world? Wasnt it possible?

In Climate Stewardship: Taking Collective Action to Protect California, authors Adina Merenlender and Brenden Buhler describe the challenges, indeed much of the environmental degradation, in California, but more, they relate stories of hopestories of individuals banding together in numerous ways to address the destruction that, as they say, will help stave off climate disruption and make communities and ecosystems more resilient to change. In seven chapters, the authors focus on particular climate concernsthe wildfires, the compromised San Francisco Bay wetlands, the harmful consequences of large-scale corporate farming, shrinking forests, drier deserts, the Los Angeles metropolis of endless concrete, the rising Pacific Ocean temperature and changing currentsand then relate multiple stories of communities of environmental activists working to address those concerns. What all of them have in mindwhether theyre teachers working with fourth graders to restore Bay Area wetlands, landowners joining with environmental organizations to create habitat corridors, a Native tribe planting an orchard of no-till olives, or a group of Weed Warriors removing invasive plants from the Desert Mountainswhat all of them are doing by organizing and collecting together is preparing for, and therefore showing the way to, a renewed world. As I see it, they are the part of Mabels story that provides hope. Are they not working to make that part of her Dream of a renewed world as true as the dried hills and fires? They are living the best way we know how.