Genius Teatime with Joan Stevens

Plants save the world: action strategies for a resilient future

Now resuming the transcripts of archived Genius Teatime talks!

For more archived talks, check out earlier posts and the archived videos on the Opulent Mobility YouTube channel. The next live Genius Teatime talks will be July 26th when Dr. Ifunanya Nweke of Jazz Hands for Autism discusses how to make education work better for our neurodivergent students and August 16th with Diane Kolin of Arts Ably and a conversation on accessible arts for all.

Joan Stevens, aka Mamabotanica, has an M.S. in Botany with an emphasis in plant chemistry and ethnobotany. As part of her explorations she has ingested a variety of awareness expanding plant compounds. She has been a professor at Pasadena City College, a backyard flower farmer, and a permaculture instructor.  Studying botany opened her eyes to a whole new way of looking at the world.  Permaculture provided practical skills to apply that new understanding and flower farming has shown her how local businesses help build community.  She believes wholeheartedly that partnering with plants makes the world a better place and helps to make a future we can look forward to.

Joan Stevens joined us for a fascinating conversation in June of 2023. She has since moved to Germany and we wish her and her family good fortune— and wonder if they’ll take in house guests!

Laura: Hi, and welcome to Genius Teatime with Joan Stevens. Thank you so much for being part of this. So Joan Stevens, aka Mama Botanica, has an MS in botany with an emphasis on plant chemistry and ethno-botany. As part of her explorations, she has ingested a variety of awareness-expanding plant compounds. All good. She's a professor at PCC, Pasadena City College, a backyard flower farmer and a permaculture instructor. Studying botany opened her eyes to a whole new way of looking at the world, and permaculture provided practical skills to apply that new understanding. And flower farming has shown her how local businesses help build community. She believes wholeheartedly that partnering with the plants helps make this world a better place and brings a future we can look forward to. And there is a future I want, so that's awesome. I'm going to have you tell us about Amigas de los Rios, the organization we're sponsoring today.

Joan: OK, so it is a local organization. You can picture their little office right now. I go by it regularly. And I first worked with them because they have been putting in the greening school gardens, greening school properties, actually, in Pasadena. And I think other places, too, but they've also had projects working on something called the Emerald Necklace, where they're trying to have parks that connect all kinds of areas in our local watershed and really revitalize the watershed and rebuild its capacity to retain water, absorb water, and hold onto it. I just love the work that they do. And I took my environmental horticulture class to one of their school sites as a field trip this last spring.

And it was such an extraordinary place for the kids to play. When I think about the contrast between black asphalt that just bakes in the heat and with lines drawn on it in paint, here's your playground, kids, versus this playground that they built that had topography and there were a giant stump that was like the size of a car. I don't even know where they got this thing. And just all kinds of places for the kids to climb around in and jump off of. And it was just such an extraordinary place for the kids. but also like you know butterflies and hummingbirds and you know lots of native plants and it was just it's like where I wish my kids were you know I wish all kids had that so I just I want to support them the way I can.

Laura: That’s amazing, and what would you like to tell us today about the plants saving the world?

Joan: Right, so first I'm going to give a little bit of a background on who I am and how I came into this work in this mindset and then a little bit of setting the stage in terms of what's happening in the world right now, and probably none of that's going to be a big surprise, and then some of the things that have really inspired me lately. When we think about the state of the world often it's easy to to get pessimistic, you know, it's easy to get overwhelmed and feel like what are we going to do, especially because I teach environmental science at PCC and it's real easy to tell a story that's so doom and gloom and tragic, right, but this does not tell the whole picture and it doesn't necessarily serve a purpose to inspire one to action and there's so many really incredible things happening in the world right now and I'm going to share some of the things that I think are most inspiring and then talk about this vision that I have. It's what I call “thrivelihoods”, to really encourage people to be in action in ways that make a difference.

So about me, gosh, it seems like I've been working in and around plants for quite a while but I did not start out that way, you know, my parents grew up on farms, I think we had a garden when I was growing up but it wasn't anything that I really remember at all. It was just sort of haphazard thing. It wasn't that plants were a really important part of my life. And then something changed, which I hope will happen to my kids too. Like, “I hate flowers” say my boys, and I hope that they'll have an epiphany of “oh, yes, this is sort of just the the water that I was growing up in and now I see it for what it was”.

Part of it happened because I thought drugs were super interesting when I was in college. Not so much in high school, but certainly in college and like, you know, Anthropology, like cool ways of healing and magic, witchcraft and the old cult, I was really into these kinds of things. I went to Occidental College, and I was very interested in anthropology. Culture to me was just fascinating, still is, and at some point I got hooked into the idea of plants and how they were used. And I think, I'm trying to recall, I was very interested in in medicinal plants and in healing rituals associated with plants and and also curious too about reading about these things. I was saying earlier that I had a book that influenced me that I used in a lot of papers is called Hallucinogens and Cross-cultural Perspective and it's by Marlene D’Optin de Rios, and she had married the son of a shaman, I think he was Peruvian, and had written this book, you know, it's a very good anthropological text. It's kind of dry and sort of distant and sort of like observing these phenomena kind of from an outsider's perspective, which is like a good anthropology. And so I had a wonderful, you know, just a couple of different meetings with someone who was doing academic work, I think it was in the College of Medical Anthropology actually, University of Minnesota, because I was back in Minnesota where I'd grown up. And he said, "Well, you should maybe write letters or see if you can go study with the people that you were influenced by." I go, "Okay, that makes a lot of sense. It wouldn't have occurred to me before, you know, but these are people that have written books and, you know, who am I?" And I've actually used that so many times in my life, and it's been such a great source of information and connection. So I sent a letter saying I would really like to study with you, I'm very interested in what you're doing. And she said, "You know, great, apply," which I did.

And I got into Cal State Fullerton, and I moved my whole life from, you know, cool hippie culture, like working at a co -op restaurant, you know, where everybody, even the people that had been there for 20 years, made $4.50 an hour, a collective. It's been around since the 60s and still exists to Orange County. And that was like such a different sort of place, such a different sort of place. And Dr. Darius, she was not at all what I had imagined her to be. You know, she wasn't really interested in hallucinogens and cross-cultural perspectives. She just felt like she had this sort of, you know, book with her father-in-law and then, you know, wanted to author a book. She was much more interested in cross-cultural pain tolerance and all kinds of other things. But she had some excellent advice as well. She said, "If you want to study anthropology, you should have some other skillset." She's very, very practical. "Do you want to study ethnobotany in the way that plants are used in healing rituals? You should learn some botany." And as someone who'd gone through college avoiding working hard, you know, I was like, I'm not going to take a science class, like no way. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And I spent most of my time like partying. That's pretty much what I did all through my first four years of college at Occidental College right over there.

So I finally decided that I ought to do this, I had to take a little bit of botany. And I had the great fortune of connecting with Dr. Jack Burke, who's the author of Plant Ecology in California, one of those books. And he had someone just like a few years prior to me who sort of been a crossover from the English department, and she'd worked really well for him and everybody loved her in the department. And then she and her husband had gone on to write a huge like wildlife area in Orange County. And so he was willing to take a chance on me, even though I was from psychology and anthropology, I was not a scientist at all. A national scientist. And so he took me under his wing and let me grade an undergraduate biology class that I'd never taken, so I had a little bit of income. And then, you know, we took classes like field botany and all kinds of other classes. And, and I just, I was in heaven. I mean, I was in heaven so much so that he used to joke that I was the only tenured graduate student, which is kind of funny, and kind of sad, the same time. And I spent a lot of living on my student loans, took out lots of student loans to get that master's degree which took me a long time because I got a full undergraduate degree in biology, as well as a minor in chemistry at the same time. But, you know, it was an extraordinary time because nobody was depending on me. I had a dog, you know, that was it and I could just dive into chemistry. And I just found that I blossomed and I loved it and I loved the rigor of it and I loved the new way of thinking about the world. And field botany particularly was just extraordinary because before, you know, I had looked at a patch of green stuff on the ground, I've been “like that's grass”, right and then never given it a second thought. And suddenly, like in a square foot of grass. There's like grass, there's maybe some clover in there, there might be like three or four different kinds of grass. and then like maybe three or four different kinds of annual weeds, however we use that term. But there was like a whole bunch of stuff going on that before was under my radar, I had never noticed it before. And now, even if I didn't know the name of the plant, I learned to see them, I learned to recognize the differences between them, you know, to identify, well, this is not like the other, you know, even with grass, like I didn't even know that grass had flowers before that. Now, it's hard to believe, it's like before the plants and then after the plants, you know, things that I just never would have been aware of, you know, like even the term flower, like so many people in the world think that a flower is like a thing, right? This plant is a flower. No, no, no, flower is like just part of the life cycle, you know, it's part of the flowering plants, like the flowering plants all have flowers. It's just, you know, the stage in the life cycle, it's like the juicy sort of like maiden who's trying to, you know, get some action, right? Before she has the seeds, which are the offspring. And so, yeah, just understanding the way that plants work, it was like getting plugged into reality and it's so easy to grow up in this culture without that grounding, without that plug, you know, without that connection to like the seasons and understanding that a flower is part of the life cycle of a plant rather than like this plant is a flower, you know?

So, at the same time that I was doing that, that I was getting all this academic kind of stuff, I also was interested in hallucinogens and cross-cultural perspective. I was interested in ayahuasca and a lot of these alternative healing experiences and Richard Evans-Schultes, can't believe I didn't even put him in my outline who was just an extraordinary botanist out of Harvard. He did groundbreaking work with people all over South America and was, you know, often in ethno, botanical disciplines, there can be, is sort of like the carryover of anthropology, which is, you know, let me just sit and look at you here. You know, give me a seat at your table so I can write down everything you do and then try to make up reasons for why you did that thing, which is just such an invasive and kind of gross way to be with people. And I didn't ever get to meet Richard Evan Schultes, but according to many people, he didn't have that disease, that othering disease. He was a very brilliant academic, but he was also, you know, saw people for people and built relationships with people as well, part of why I think he was also such an extraordinary botanist too. So yeah, if you ever look into his work, there's some phenomenal website that goes over his entire career and, well, not the entire career, but a lot of it, and a lot of the places that he went to that I think had not seen any foreigners before and maybe even since really, I mean, he did some extraordinary exploring and also, you know, named all kinds of plants and described all kinds of rituals with plants. So he was someone early on that I just admired. I thought he was just such a cool person and I really always wanted to meet him, but I think he had Parkinson's or something, at the time that I maybe would have. And so he was already a bit out of commission, but I sing his praises wherever I can.

So I'm exploring the stuff in the world of ethnobotany, and I'm in Orange County where there's not a whole lot of like hippie mind expanding, you know? It's really, that's not the world there, right? So what was the John Berger society or something like that? These are like pretty conservative folks, you know? But even like working in the arboretum, which I did often, you know, there were people who probably our politics were so different, but we loved plants and we could talk forever about the plants, you know? And I had a real fondness too for the older people, the older people and their plant wisdom. In my own family tradition, I didn't get a lot of that plant wisdom, you know? Like the farms were mostly done by the time I showed up. And mostly it wasn't a great story. It was a story of like hard work and failure. It wasn't a story of like connection and community, which is what I romanticize it as, you know? But even like at the Fullerton Arboretum, just chatting with a plant that we really liked, you know? I could have great conversations with people and learn so much because these are people that had been gardening for 30 and 40 years or more, you know? What an amazing wealth of knowledge.

So during that same time, you know, I went to the, it wasn't even anthropology of consciousness, but there was a conference in Killarney, Ireland and there were some radical thinkers like Rupert Sheldrake and Christiane Reich and a whole bunch of other interesting people. They're also kind of involved in ethnobotany and have written articles about, you know, wild plant use and psychoactive adventures. So I was doing these conferences at the same time. And then I was curious about ayahuasca and I made a new friend at a Mayan calendar workshop who said, "Oh, did you happen to know that there's a Santo Daime,” which is an ayahuasca church out of Brazil, "we're doing this here in Los Angeles, you know?” My ears hurt. I'm like, "Oh, really?" So I ended up participating in that. And it became something that I did pretty regularly regularly for quite a while. And in that tradition, once you take your star, which is a little like six-pointed star, you wear with your little Catholic school girl uniform with like a blue pleated skirt and a little white button-up shirt. When you do that, which is something that I have done, then it's a lifetime kind of commitment. But I am not a very good committed lifetimer. It's been a long time since I've been back to the Santo Daime. But you know, it's the experience of ingesting ayahuasca in my belief system shifts back through your lineage. And this is not science I'm talking about. This is something that I feel and believe is that it affects the way that my lineage moves through me and how I refer to them and connect to them. You know, and maybe that would have happened without the ayahuasca, but it really felt like the ayahuasca does something, you know, there are stories in anthropology of people who have no knowledge of deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA, right? That's the hereditary material that like you get from the egg in the sperm and blah, blah, blah, from your grandparents and all that stuff. And it's, you know, the double helix, right? It's like the shape like this, right? These twining ladders. And there are accounts in the anthropological literature of Shaman describing these spiraling ladders that go to the ancestors. I mean, if that's not some little spark of, I don't know, evolutionary wisdom, insight, I don't know what is. I mean, I totally get that, I believe that, that makes sense to me. And in my own heart, I feel like it changed the way that I relate to my ancestors. And I feel like it made me better able to, I don't know, like, to let them move me. It's a little weird sort of channeling thing, not at all what I meant to talk about right now, but it's appropriate to bring up the ancestors.

So I also happened to go to this conference that they used to do. And yesterday, I was looking this up to try to remember the name of it, it turns out that Ken Simington, who is someone I think is still running Nature Friends in Sierra Madre, which is a great place to know of, both for places to have people gather, but also for the gatherings that they've had there, the Botanical Preservation Court. And Jonathan Ott, his book, "Ruminations of an Unabashed Chocolate Addict." I mean, Jonathan Ott is just a phenomenal author. He's extraordinary, lots of big words, but playful and funny and rich. So he was one of the founders. And Terrence McKenna, and I'm not sure who else, but, you know, back when Terrence McKenna and his wife, Kat, were married, and they also had the company Botanical Preservation Court. And they were trying to take, especially like cacti that were rare and going in danger because of habitat loss and all kinds of other things and hold on to them.

So they used to have these, I think, annual conferences, and this one was in Palenque in Mexico, right near the ruins of Palenque in this beautiful resort, you know, and I was just some poor grad student at the time, you know, I like just scrapped together student loans to to make this happen. And one of the people was there, his name was …poof, I remembered it last night, now it just went boom. Anyway, and I could see his face, he had red hair, he apparently was one of the people that supplied Terence with all his magical chemistry. And Alex and Sasha Shulgin were there. The Shulgins who also wrote PiHKAL and TiHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved), psychoactive compounds I have known and loved. And this is also, it's a chemistry book, like the last half of the book is a cookbook for making all these mind expanding chemicals and recreational, however you want to describe them, and the first half is like the love story, I think that the second the subtitle is a chemical love story. And, and it's just this beautiful story about how they came together and they're wonderful people. I think they have both passed at this point, and they were madly in love, and they would have these parties, where he would manufacture these chemicals, and then they would try them out and they would all rate them. It was very scientific, in a really lovely way. The people at the party would rate the compound, like, you know, any kind of body sensations, like what does it do, how does it make you feel, you know, and the stories of these adventures are just fantastic. So the books detail those stories in the first half and the second half is like the chemical recipe book. Great stuff, so these guys were also there. I mean it was just like a brain trust of the wacky far out science, nerdy plant psychoactive people.

So, my gosh, this name, it'll come to me at some point, like I'll be, you know, serving my kids dinner, I'll be like it was Frank, it may actually have been Frank. So Frank is like, would you like to smoke a little DMT? And you know, I was like in my 25, maybe early 30s, I was pretty much a yes to everything. I was a yes and then figure it out. And then if I'm in danger, like make another plan. I don't necessarily advise that, you know, these days, I certainly would not tell my kids that if they were girls, but it worked out okay for me. So, you know, and everyone was like, you know, smoking off this, like a crack pipe, like it was not really my thing, but I was willing, right? So, and they were falling back on the bed, and then they come back and talk about these machine elves, or this, or that, or the other, like, okay, I'm gay, I guess you see machine elves, right? And someone said, oh, you should go outside. And so we went outside and we're in Palenque in the rainforest. And I had spent like the whole week just being like my own little, like, I'm just a little nerdy plant girl, you know, like tickling the little mimosas that then the leaves all fold in and like, oh, look, it's a quercus, which is an oak. We have these back home, you know, just like nerding out with all the plants and always on the outskirts, you know, I'm never the trail blazer. I'm not the one that says, I have arrived, you know, I'm the one that like hangs back and goes, some of these people look friendly, you know.

So anyway, so here I am with Frank, right? And I take the hit off the DMT pipe. And I'm expecting that I'm going to like sink back, you know, and instead I grab him by the hand and I am propelled forward. And I am telling him what is really here. This is a temple. I see the architecture of the brand. I can feel the goosebumps actually, because it's so alive for me still. I can see above me the ways that the branches come together. And it's a cathedral. I mean, this is, you know, my own religious iconography, right, that it's a temple and this rainforest and the faces of all the people that have have been here on this very land that have touched these plants that have been here that are still part of this land. It's all right there. I take my clothes off, right? And I'm pulling this guy, Frank, along who's like, you know, yippee here, right? And I'm telling him, what's here? And I want to get on my belly. I want to get on my belly here on this beautiful living landscape. I am breathing with this landscape. And then the fireflies start going and then it starts to rain. And I really truly believe that the rain was like the catac(?)— like it was me and my consciousness, boom, like connecting. I mean, this is a long time ago that this happened. And I'm really like having goosebumps recalling it so vividly again because it was such an extraordinary thing. And I feel like it was my earlier work of two with the ayahuasca that kind of like set the stage and also my seeing the plants. You know, like I don't have a tradition that I'm aware of, of psychoactive plants, of this real revelatory connection that kind of reciprocates a reciprocal connection to the plants that I always sort of wish that I had, right? That people maybe with brown skin sometimes get and a lot of us who don't have that, we don't have that connection necessarily. But here it was. And it was just right there. But I felt like a lot of it was just my wonder and amazement and utter delight in the botany side of things, in understanding the taxonomy of things. And oh, this is a quercus. That means it's related somewhere back in time. There's a common ancestor with the quercus that's in my backyard. And just being so delighted by this that I felt like it was sort of a gift, you know, that that was the reciprocity, like you see us, we're gonna show you really how it is.

Anyway, so that was a really lovely conference, it was wonderful and fun and then when I got back I started exploring a little bit of permaculture too, because at the time, you know, a lot of people have gone into studying psychoactive plant use and whatever, but there just wasn't really a way for me to do that in a very cohesive way at the time, and I was always looking for ways to kind of apply what I've learned and experience a little bit more of the world so I started learning about permaculture. I was working for the Forest Service, actually, up in Big Bear and I met a family of people that their dad was Australian and so they knew a lot about permaculture and I think that was the first time I'd heard that word because it was came out of Australia and I looked into places where I could maybe learn more about permaculture and I connected with Larry Santoyo who at the time was in San Luis Obispo and I was going up there taking a permaculture design course so I signed up to take the 72 hour permaculture design course. And I drive up there, you know, one weekend a month or maybe it was like every weekend in a row, and permaculture was also like boom, you know, it connected all these different things that I was into, like yoga and how we think about our body and our space and design and food and medicine and materials that we use and like just practical design. Like it was an epiphany and I still think it's really among the most exciting disciplines out there, particularly if we want to talk about, you know, saving the world. I mean the world is fine, it's really humans in our culture that's a threat, so, you know, permaculture comes from the words permanent culture. It is used to really describe permanent agriculture but it's much more broad than that. It's really using nature as the model to design to meet human needs. And so many things that we do in our culture are the antithesis of this. We don't use nature as the model. We use nature as a resource. It's just a limitless resource. And it's been that way for generations, for hundreds of years. I mean, thousands of years, you know, nature is a resource, we keep cutting the trees. Sure, they'll keep growing back, right? You know, it's like the Lorax, right? I mean, my kids, one of my kids was just watching this, you know, the Truffula trees, you know, there's so many Truffula trees, we'll just keep making thneeds. A thneed is the thing that everyone needs.

If you've ever seen the story of stuff, Annie, whose name I can't remember, last name, but the woman who narrates that, it is just, it's like, everybody ought to watch this. And it's been around for 15 years or something, but it's just such a perfect little synopsis of what's messed up with our consumer culture. You know, most of the goods that we buy are in the landfill in six months on average. You know, I mean, it's just gut-wrenching. How much trash, how much throughput we have, we take beautiful raw materials, turn them into something, cover them with plastic, ship them out, use them up, throw them away as fast as we can. Like that model has never, ever, ever existed before, that we've had the whole globe of resources, and that we can just throw stuff away at such an incredible rate, and when such a huge amount of energy, investment into that whole system, it's, it's bizarre. So I see my little outline here, and I want to get back to it. So that's, you know, permaculture really spoke to me because I'd already been studying anthropology, right, culture. And I also had been teaching AP Environmental Science at the high school for a long time. And it just seemed like something's not working with this system, and we need a new way of thinking and being and permaculture felt like that.

So more recently, you know, as I have like two young kids and, and I'm not a young person, by the way, I had my kids old. I mean, that's relative, right? 43 and 46 when I had my kids, which is older than all the other moms at the park. But it, you know, it meant a lot of changes in my life. Like I was not the number one anymore. I couldn't just go like go to Palenque for the week for fun. You know, I could get up early in the morning and feed my kids and all that kind of stuff. And I found I was like, you know, I planted a big garden, we moved to a new house and I put in some garden beds in the back. But, you know, having two young kids and trying to garden, especially with food and I, perennial things and trees that we can eat from and all that kind of stuff. But it was a real slog to get anything edible, you know, like, especially with a new garden, you know, the pests are like, you know, it's a banana. So it would be like, oh, here's the kale we can eat. We'll just rinse it like five times. You know, I mean, it was just covered in aphids. Like I didn't want to eat that. And I consider myself kind of a, you know, I used to consider myself more of that. But, you know, like I let him, tough, I'm going to eat what's the food is, but it was so unappetizing. And it was kind of demoralizing, you know, I want this verdant garden. And then, you know, you just had a, like a triple whammy of like both kids sick, husband is out of town on some like psychoactive week. Yeah. Moms, you know, we got pneumonia, my six month old had pneumonia, my other kid had an ear infection. It was like no sleep and just awful. It was just awful, right. And my husband comes back back to town and I said, you're going to pay for me to take a flower farming course? Like, okay, because before I'm like, oh, this looks cool, but I would never spend that money. And I'm like, you know, I think I need to do this. Otherwise, I'm going to leave my family. I mean, I joke about that, but it was like it was extreme. Like I needed something and that was mine. And so I signed up for this flower farming course that Erin Benzekine from, she does Floret Flower Farms up in the Bay Area. And you can tell right away that her first career was marketing, because she's marketing the flower farming lifestyle beautifully. I mean, she's impeccable. But I read this stuff and I'm like, you know, I'm a botanist. I'm a master gardener. I started growing lots of flowers and it was just like a balm to my soul.

You know, like there's a lot of sort of like masculine energy in my house, you know, like the men and the two boys and the fighting and the nerf everywhere and the noise. And I come outside and it's beautiful color. You know, the flowers and their color and the butterflies and all the life from the flowers, you know, inviting that life in and then even just cutting them and arranging them. And it's just been, it's been a really wonderful thing. And I also mentioned too that, you know, I really want to help people grow stuff. And there's a lot of people out there teaching people how to grow food, you know, and I grew food for a long time. And, you know, but like flowers to me, there's something about them that gets right into like the tender places.

You know, there was a man, Abouad, I think was his name, he was the gardener of Aleppo. And he was growing flowers when there were bombs falling all around his city. You know, and for a long time, especially coming from a permaculture background, I thought flowers were a stupid waste of time. Why would you grow those if you could grow food? I mean, isn't that the most important thing everyone could be doing is is growing food? But I was so certain that this was the case. But I've not had food stop me in my tracks. I've not had food, like, you know, like the flowers will truly like, you know, I just pause and the world just melts away. It's gone. It's just this moment of beauty, like that breathy pause that just puts you right into your body and brings you right to the moment. So that to me is part of the beauty of what flowers have. And I'm also a huge supporter.

Laura: Yes, beauty feeds our soul. Absolutely. It's so essential these days as well.

Joan: So from that place, then they started a plant sciences program at Pasadena City College where I teach. And so I've been teaching environmental horticulture, like horticulture and landscaping basically, but it's kind of like a permaculture design course. And also it's a little bit about like, how can we reconnect to things that are real? You know, how can we build in a sense of reciprocity between us and the plant kingdom? How can we start to see the plants that are already around us? And it's super empowering to be able to give them names. You know, and there's so many apps these days that can help with that. Although those are super tricky because I have a pretty decent background in botany and in naming plants. And, you know, I had never really noticed shrubs before. They're just like shrubs, you know, like whatever. You know, I wasn't a landscaper, so I didn't really see them. And now there's like, you know, 20 shrubs on the plant list I'm supposed to be teaching my students. And so I'm using these plant apps to try to identify these different shrubs. And sometimes it comes back with this is a tracheophyte, which is like all the things that aren't moss. I mean, it's just like AI with anything, right? Can be helpful in the right context. Not always so helpful. So if you really want to know some plants they'll like spend time at nurseries. They've got tags, right? Or like if you want to know the names of native plants, you know, both like the native plant nurseries like the Theodore Payne Foundation and other native plant nurseries, but also the California Native Plant Society, they have field trips all the time. And they're doing some pretty heavy, like using the Jepsen KeyBase and try to figure out plants that, you know, normal people would never even tell the difference between. But in the meantime, you know, they're on a field trip and they'll deal just in lots and lots of plant names, which I think is pretty cool.

So I wanted to mention, you know, the fact that things are not great in the world, but I don't think I can mention that at all. My point even for bringing that up was the fact that it's time to start building these reciprocal relationships. It's time to start seeing that nature is around us, even if we're in the middle of the city, you know? Farmer Rishi, he's kind of a controversial guy. He's out in Claremont doing wonderful food forcing, growing extraordinary varieties of plants like blackberries that are like that big. I mean, he's really doing great work. Like if you want to get the best of the edibles, you know, tap into his supply of stuff. But, you know, he stresses this all the time. And at first I was a little put off by it, but I get it now. It's like, you know, nature is not away. Nature is not in some pristine place. You know, nature is in my backyard in Pasadena, right? Now I'm all for like taking the fences down and wildlife corridors and, you know, really like making it a better place for nature. Like, E .O. Wilson talks about, I think, 10% for the planet. Like, we should save 10 % of the planet that's just for the wildlife. I think that's extraordinary. I think it's kind of an essential thing. I truly believe that. E .O. Wilson, if anybody would know, you know, another departed ancestor who was an extraordinary author, talked about biophilia, that we have an inherent love of life and nature that is just part of our evolutionary heritage. And I believe him, especially because he grew up loving ants. He was a myrmecologist for a long time, and even as a little boy growing up in Alabama, like he was super into ants. Sadly, you can't really do that here in Southern California, because now we only have Argentine ants, which is sad. Because ants are an easy way to get people into like, they're all around. But the Argentine answer, maybe not as exciting as like, you know, the five different kinds of ants you can go find. But 10% for the planet, I think, is a really great idea.

But that's at scale, right? What can you do to do like 10% for the planet, even if you have a patio balcony in an apartment? You know, can you do 10% for the planet there? Right? Can, you know, if you've got just a little patch of brown, can you do 10% for the planet there, right? So if you've got just a little patch of grass, maybe on one little bit of it, yeah, you can grow milkweed, you know, like take 10% or more, you know, don't stop at 10. But it's good to start. This is another great permaculture thing is start small and then scale up. Because another thing that we have a tendency to do is like, super excited about stuff, I'm going to transform the whole backyard. You know, and then it's like, oh, that's a lot of work. And you got a little bit done and then you're over it, right? Start at scale and then build on your success.

So there's a huge amount of biodiversity in my backyard, you know, I don't spray, like occasionally maybe I'll spray like a horticultural oil if I'm being super on top of things in the winter time and I want to grow nice roses but usually I just don't get around to it which is not an ethics thing, it's just about time, but for the most part I don’t. I don't use pesticides, just don’t, usually I use my fingers, you know, I take the aphids off with my fingers and if a pest problem comes up because I have enough diversity now especially with so many flowers, which is another advantage of flower farming rather than vegetable farming. Vegetables, there's not a huge number of different plant families, you've got like your brassicas, right, like your broccoli and kale and full robin collards, you've got maybe the beets, slightly different family than that, the apiaceae which is like carrots and dill, fennel, and then the solanaceae, you know, your eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, tobacco, we grow that for flowers anyway, it's just not a huge amount of diversity. So if you get something that comes in like the cabbage looper, like that little green thing that wants to eat all your broccoli and stuff and whatever it's going to go to town on all of the brassicas, right, but with the flowers there's such a huge amount of diversity, the way that I grow, anyway, in a small space that it’s, you know, the pests, there's not like a whole big smorgasbord. It’s not like a monocrop kind of thing where there’s, you know, enough similarity that they can really kind of jump from one to the next so there's a far reduced amount of pest damage. It's kind of nice but also it just makes for a lot more biodiversity because if you have a little population of pests then their predators are called in, right? So then you get like the pests and you get some predators and like, there is so much going on in my backyard. You know, there are so many bugs flying around and crawling around and like big ones and little ones. And like, I've created a real, you know, like a bug heaven, really. There's lots of diversity, lots of interactions. You know, that's like a yield that I have from growing a lot of diverse flowers that I might not otherwise have. And to me, you know, if you're hanging out in the backyard and the Gulf fritillary butterflies, which nest on the passion vine, shoot it, if you don't have them already, you probably will. They've got the caterpillars are like orange and kind of steel gray looking. They're really cool. And then the butterfly look like small monarchs, kind of or the, what is it with the yellow, yellow swallowtail butterflies?

Laura: Oh yeah.

Joan: So many butterflies in my backyard, it's wild.

Give me that. I'm watching like monarchs out here 'cause I did put in milkweed. I'm trying to make sure the dog doesn't wreck it.

So, you know, having these kinds of experiences where you, you know, like play God, I guess, sort of goddess really, you know, where you are like creating these opportunities for life to do its thing, you know, this is where life is rich and good. Now, there are specific things that I also wanted to mention.

Laura: Cool.

Joan: ’Cause you could tell, I could talk about this for a long time. But in terms of like specific things that we can do, like that resilient future kind of action steps, there's some stuff that I talk about in my environmental science class that I think are, and also actually all my classes 'cause I think like people need to know this, right? Like for many of us when we learned about the water cycle, we learned about, you know, like the water evaporates off the oceans and then it falls back down as rain or, you know, falls run after it. But what they didn't include was the biotic pump and there's a really great little video. It's like 30 minutes long that explains this beautifully. I think the title is the biotic pump. And I think it's on YouTube. And you could also look it up as forests make the rain. So something that they're really understanding now is the role that biology plays in the water cycle.

Botanists have known this for a long time that plants transpire. You know, they take water from their roots and they move it up their tall bodies and then they let it out through their leaves. That's just transpiration. You know, that's why if you have an area that has plants, it's going to be a little bit more humid than an area that doesn't. But the role that that plays in creating rain in places that haven't had rain before is really quite substantial. So this biotic pump brings rain to places. And in that short YouTube video too, what the narrator says is like, this is something that indigenous people have talked about forever. And it's just such an important thing. You know, so we've got the biotic pump. If you can get some plants to grow, you can build in more plants, right? Because once you get a few established, then you end up with some plant material falling down and a little bit more organic matter building the soil, right? The roots are going to hold on to that soil. So if any rain falls, they grab it and then they transpire it. So when you build that up and build that up and build that up, then you can have water and rain where there hasn't been for a long time. And so the role of plants in creating the rain is really important. That's why deforestation is such a tragic and wrong thing to do. So reforesting is a good thing to do.

I'm going to jump a little bit, as there are a couple of different really inspiring places where I've seen this, not with my own eyes, but on videos. One is the Loess Plateau, L -O -E -S -S in China, I think in Northwest China, which is very dry desert. So Dennis Lu, who's a filmmaker, he has filmed some of this restoration. And it's restoration that's happened, I think maybe in the decade. It's like not, you know, generations of time. It's like decades of time where they took what was just completely desolate, dry, parched desert, and turned it into a verdant grassland. And he's got lots of great videos about this, like short little three minutes that show this transformation. And we get to listen to him at a drylands permaculture course too. And he talks about this and many other projects like this, where doing targeted restoration can transform an ecology from a dry desert. Like, and these are deserts that are degraded. They're not deserts that have historically been desert. These are deserts that were denuded of trees and then became desertified. And then flipping that switch and revegetating them. There are so many extraordinary examples of this.

So we've got the biotic pump. We've got this, we've also got Geoff Lawton, G -E -O -F -F -L -A -T -W -O -N, he’s done a lot of videos about greening the desert. And his projects are in Jordan. And I think maybe they take a little bit of irrigation water to get them started. But once you prime that pump for life, you know, it's depending. I think you need like a critical mass. But once you have the parts in place, it's not such a stretch that a place even in Jordan, which is extraordinarily dry, can be growing food and fiber and all kinds of stuff for the people that live there. And a lot of this work is actually done even looking both at, you know, indigenous people now in dry places, as well as looking even at the archeological record. There's a great book called "Secrets of the Desert" and the Namib Desert. And that back in the day, people used to stack stones as places for condensation to start to pool. And they would plant like an olive tree. And then with the stone stacked around it to bring the water to the roots, you know, stuff like that. Like simple, brilliant technology that, we could be doing stuff like this with the precious water that we have now and the incredible resource of fossil fuels. Like I know that we're denigrating fossil fuels, right? But I really feel like if we were in reverence to what they are and the capacity that they have for energy, we wouldn't be using them so foolishly. You know, if we were like making altars at the gas station, these are the bones and bodies of our ancient, ancient ancestors. Thank you for giving us this incredible power, you know, and like let's not just drive to the freaking grocery store that's like three blocks away to get milk, right, with this beautiful resource or, you know, using it to blow up people, whatever, right? If we were more reverent about these resources, we wouldn't be in the mess that we're in.

Anyway, and yeah, if we were using these precious tools we have, like right now we have incredible access to water. I mean, it's diminishing, but still it's unprecedented. The amount of power, actual energy power, like physics power that people like you and I have capacity, you know, to have the access to that never in history did people like you and I have access to this much of the world's resources. We are living like the kings and queens of old, you know, and squandering it like it's no big deal, you know, it's just a different way of looking at things. Anyway, so back to ecological restoration, right? So we've got the Loess Plateau, we've got Geoff Lawton reading the desert, and so many examples like that of taking neutered and deforested landscapes and turning them back into verdant places where food can grow. And even if it's not food for us, it still sets up that ecosystem. It becomes food for something else. And then the whole cycle of life jumps from there. Other super inspiring things.

So Dennis Lu, I mentioned is the filmmaker for the Loess Plateau Stuff, but he also started the eco restoration camps. And I know that the birdhouse, which is a really lovely group of people in Hollywood, I believe, underneath the Hollywood sign of Brentwood Canyon. They are registered as an eco restoration camp. And then there's some sweet people up in San Jose. Just really lovely people who are also registered coyote eco camp. Paradise, the place that burned has an eco camp. So his idea with these eco camps is that people go there to learn skills. And some people go there to teach the skills, you would hope there needs to be a good match of both of those things. And then you have these skills to do ecological restoration, which the planet needs. Now there's some pieces missing from that puzzle for me. One of them is that I think Dennis Lu lives in a giant fancy house because he's like been a filmmaker for a long time. But he says that everyone should just go to these eco camps and all the needs will be taken care of by the community. Like theoretically, that's a great idea in practice. Like I've been to camps like this enough times where the 80/20 rule is what happens 80% of the people, you know, do whatever and 20% of the people do 80% of the work, you know, like who are the people in the kitchen and doing the cleaning, right? I like that kind of stuff, you know, who is bringing the food that everyone's going to cook and all that sort of thing. But you know, these are all things that need to be figured out at some point anyway. And it's not really that different than regular life. But these eco restoration camps are supposed to be like great places to learn some skills. And I think they are skills that we all need. Okay.

Just quickly also want to mention there's a woman named Ming Kuo, K -U -O. And I think she also goes by Frances, but I believe her publishing name is Ming. And she came out, she spoke at Occidental College. and what she was speaking about was her research that showed that when school campuses have trees around them, that the kids end up doing better in school. I mean, it was like, how could this be, right on radical stuff, right, so also that when the students were outside, even for very minimal amounts of time, you know something that a lot of teachers feel like is going to take away from their instructional time, that even like, I mean it was something kind of sad, it was like five minutes a week or something of being outside, that the time in the classroom was much more efficient, that the students were able to concentrate and focus so it actually ended up being a really good investment of time. And that to me was sort of an epiphany, also about how are we going to make these big changes we need to make, we need to get kids, you know kids at schools, schools are municipal sites. That means it's public, right, public school.

I think about the great work of Mark Lakeman who's a dear friend of mine and someone who I have trouble not putting on a pedestal. You know he's like that kind of person, like I know you're my friend and stuff but am I worthy of your time? He says, you know, the public lands. That's for us. The public lands are for us. Go do things with these public lands. Like what they've done in Portland is they've done intersection repair where they take over the intersection and they paint it with beautiful inspiring things that the community has come together to say, we want a sunflower, and then the kids say but I want a dinosaur that's eating up something and then that that goes in there too and somebody else says, oh I want to include something, you know, the person who died five years ago but was such a huge resource for the neighborhood, always made these funnel cakes, so then somebody puts a funnel cake into design. And then there's this whole thing in the intersection and it slows traffic a little bit and is like all of the neighbors came together to create this because it's public space and a lot of his message is that we take over public space because it's public. We are the public. If it's not serving us it's not serving its purpose. And he shares too that when the first time they did one of these intersection repair projects that somebody said “you can't do that, that's public space” and just how funny that was. I think it's not just the kids, though, that need to be raised up to revitalize, re-lively, I don't know what the word is but to like take back space, you know, to to grow plants that are food for us and for animals, you know, to build habitat, like just taking things back from grass that needs to be mown, you know, from this whole thing that's so focused on cars. I think there's such great room for that.

Also imagine if kids go to school in a place that's this green ecosystem full of little places where they can run and hide and play and they pick cherry tomatoes and eat them, you know, those are kids who are going to eat tomatoes, those are kids who are going to want more green space. It's part of why I picked Amigos de los Rios because they're doing some of that work and I think it's just so essential. I wanted to mention too that Lauren Bond, who's local here in the Metabolic Studio, that there are people who are taking a lot of these ideas of of revegetating and revitalizing and turning them into extraordinary performance art, you know, like life as art so what they did first was they took this brownfield, which is toxic and turn it into Not the Cornfield. It was a cornfield, but it couldn't be a cornfield because you can't apparently grow things on brownfield. So it was Not a Cornfield, right, and now they've got this Bending the River project, and just everything that Metabolic Studios does under her guide to me is Important work because it it speaks to our hearts and our minds and it also shifts the conversation about land and what's possible and it also incorporates history too, you know, what is the history of this land? Which is also it's a critical part of permaculture and I think just an important part of of honoring all the people that have come before, you know, all the people, not just the ones that make it to the history books, right?

So when I was planning this talk, I really wanted to talk about thrivelihoods and this idea is like, you know, I think for young people, because I deal with a lot of young people, I have the great fortune to be in the company of a lot of younger people who are like at a very different stage of their lives and careers than I am and I feel like, you know, we're focused in something, what we're supposed to be focusing on at PCC is like career readiness and what kind of careers… Students may not, you know, they may be first-generation college students. They might not know that there's all these other careers, like if they think of a career in horticulture they think gardener and gardeners don't make a lot of money and maybe that's not the kind of career they want but there are so many things that, you know, I'm supposed to help them understand which is great. But I think there's also like a whole avenue of entrepreneurial things. I call thrivelihoods.

Like what if you could do something, and this is also inspired by Mark Lakeman, too, because this little quote of his recently blew my mind. He said, what if we're not so concerned about public transportation? What if we worry less about making sure that there's public transportation than we do about making the people don't actually have to leave their houses?" I'm like, "What are you talking about? Like, but people want to leave their houses." And he's like, "No, but just," and then he showed, you know, importantly, he's like, "So this family, you know, she used to be a teacher somewhere, but now she has a nursery school in the back of her house." Oh, like, you know, not leaving the house. I know for some people that it's like a death sentence, right? But for me in the pandemic, I feel like I'm the homebody. I loved it. I mean, it's part of why I have this little business in my yard is like, people come to me to take classes, don't have to go anywhere. I love this, right? So what if you could have less of a need for transportation? You know, you can still go places that you want to, but you don't have to drive an hour to go to work in the morning or be on the bus for 40 minutes, you know, or whatever. Like, what if, what if you could do what you needed to do? Your needs were being met just like, you know, within walking distance of your house. Like, so this idea of livelihoods, like, what if we had career options that were about building careers that made sense for the future, like growing food, you know, building soil that then grows really good food, you know, like, flowers are a luxury that people pay pretty good money for flowers, you know, medicinal plants, cannabis, right? You know, medicinal mushrooms, like there's all kinds of things. I mean, for a long time, this has been sort of illicit. And because it's illicit, it's like, you know, makes more money. But there's so many opportunities for exchange of resources. And these sorts of interpersonal trades, they build community in ways that we don't really have a lot of things that do that anymore. And I found like my little flower business, it just doesn't make any money, but it builds relationships, right? And that's another yield. And I feel like building relationships is going to be way more lucrative in the long run, especially with uncertainties in terms of, you know, fires and climate and economic challenges, then, you know, whatever money I might extract from selling flowers, you know, that there's a lot of other yields that can be got.

So if we start thinking about like, you know, what are the real needs that people have? You know, and so like Bill Raleigh is a permaculture teacher, he talks about the five fingers of permaculture, like food, waste, water, the one that I forgot before, energy and shelter. And then, you know, like I would also add in like certainly medicine should be in there, right? Probably fibers, you know, fibers and fabrics, another really critical one, especially for women throughout history. There's a lot of things that should be on that hand more than just the five. But, you know, if you can pick one of those things that really gets you going, like maybe it's knitting, you know, and then like get into knitting, and being able to do that, that's a really important skill. You know, how did people catch fish before we had plastic? They knit together plant fibers and made these little fish cages, right? You know, there are so many really cool things that translate into, you know, keeping people fed, watered, clothed, sheltered, etc. That, you know, we can do it like as a hobby, or, you know, for some people it might be, yeah, I'm going to make a career out of this. But I feel like if we start thinking like that and build in some skill sets, you know, through mentorship, or taking classes at PCC, or other places that are pretty accessible, it seems like a really smart way to be planning for an uncertain future. And I feel like the plants to me are just like the wise elders just waiting for us to wake up a little bit and like see how things are.

Laura: That is awesome. Like a good place to end also. That is great. Thank you so much. Judith, did you have a question or anything?

Judith: I guess I'm the audience on the line. You know, I wanted to, I mean, part of what you're very wisely saying is that that dealing with the plant world and plant ecology is asking us to reimagine community in the 21st century. And it may be reimagining community based on, you know, ancient models or non hyper industrialized digitally independent models, what have you. But it's important. As I say, I'm looking out my back window and like while you were talking about it, there's a little monarch going and, you know, I have planted milkweed in my front yard and tried to keep it going in and watch the monarchs lay eggs and they hide them under the leaves and then the aphids show up and then somebody else shows up and then there's a possum that kind of, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's, I mean, super interesting. But it's also, it's also important. This Lauren Bond project, which I'd encourage people to find out about and if not visit, I mean, they have dug up part of the Los Angeles, the so-called river that we, this concrete channel, this hideous concrete channel that's over 100 years old and they dug up earth from under that concrete channel and in that earth was where seeds that they've been able to regrow. So it's basically the vegetation that was present in the Los Angeles base and pre industrial modernity, and that's actually really exciting. You know, at a number of levels, not just because it's still there and still alive, but talking about remediating that kind of landscape.

It's a real possibility. It doesn't mean inventing it and popping in your own new stuff, but actually figuring out what has worked there all along and been part of everyone's foodways, humans and animals, and insects. And that is what we need to be thinking about in terms of how we relate. And weirdly, we have this kind of technology that we're communicating through that's available to us now. It probably won't be for long. It'll morph into something else hideous, but at least right now, we can use it for our own purposes. So it's totally exciting what you're doing.

Laura: It is wonderful. I'm trying to keep these at an hour. So if you don't mind, I'm going to stop the recording, but it doesn't mean you can't stop asking questions. If that is cool, all right.