Slide Ranch, teaching kids about food and farming for 40 years

On a sunny afternoon, Slide Ranch is a picture of rugged beauty perched above the Pacific. The rambling paths, gardens and outbuildings of this nonprofit environmental education center are overflowing with life. Groups of children laugh and shout as goats browse and chickens scratch by the compost bin.

April marks the fortieth anniversary of Slide Ranch, which was founded in the same month and year as Earth Day. The Muir Beach center serves 8,000 visitors annually, giving hands-on lessons in food, farming and environmental awareness.

“The program is phenomenal,” said Anastasia Pickens, a teacher who brings her fourth and fifth graders to Slide Ranch from San Francisco every year for an overnight campout. “My students have a deeper love of nature and wanting to care for the earth just because they’ve experienced such fun with it. You can guilt trip them – oh, yeah, plastics are choking the oceans – but Slide Ranch does a great job balancing that with pure joy.”

Making environmental education fun is a deliberate choice, says the organization’s executive director, Charles Higgins. “Without wanting to get too ethereal about it, we’re affecting the way that people structure their belief systems,” he said. “This is particularly important with children – how they develop their belief systems, and what they base their beliefs on.”

The value of work is one of the key lessons conveyed in an afternoon program at Slide Ranch. Kids help with various tasks around the farm, learning as they make cheese, turn compost, and feed and milk goats and other livestock. “It takes a lot of work to grow food, but all that is glossed over when you get it in a plastic package from Safeway,” Higgins said. “Getting children to realize that they need to be prepared to roll up their sleeves is an important part of the work that we do.”

Long Roots
The property now known as Slide Ranch was originally a dairy farm owned by a Portuguese family that emigrated from the Azores. But the dairy was isolated and access was difficult, and eventually the business closed its doors. A screenwriter bought the 134-acre property in the 1950s, and rented the farm’s outbuildings to various tenants who found the isolation a boon.

“It was kind of the Wild West back then,” Higgins said, arching an eyebrow. The record from those years is spotty, he added, but a number of sources suggest that the property was a hangout for drug dealers.

In 1969, the spot began on its current course. The Nature Conservancy and longtime Marin resident and philanthropist Doug Ferguson pegged the ranch as a good location for an environmental education center. The Conservancy bought the land with the help of $150,000 from Fergusen; they then enlisted the San Francisco-based Frontier Arts Institute to start an outdoor education program.

In 1974, the Nature Conservancy donated the land to Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Over the intervening years, the program has changed name and shifted its emphasis from art to ecology, but its overall mission has remained.

“The site continues to be used much in the same way that it has been for the last hundred years,” Higgins said. “The farm ethic and the sustainability ethic are more consistent with repairing and adapting existing buildings than to tearing them down and build all new buildings.”

This ethic – and the very existence of Slide Ranch in its present form – have been tested over the last decades. In the 1990s an ambitious Master Plan proposed replacing all the ranch’s characteristically weathered buildings – including those that date back to the dairy days of 1919. That plan fell flat due to fundraising failures. A second test came in 2008, when the Park Service threatened to relocate the entire facility. After substantial public opposition, that plan was also retracted.

Today, Slide Ranch offers three types of programs for visitors – one for families and one for school kids, as well as annual summer camps. Many qualify for a sliding scale, and many more visitors wander through uncounted as the ranch is part of a network of coastal hiking trails and always open to the public.

“Just remember,” one teacher said to a cheering group of kids from Marin Primary as they gathered for a closing ceremony last week, “If you ever want to come back to Slide Ranch – you can!”

Lesson in a Dome
In celebration of their fourth decade, the organization has been rehabilitating aging facilities. The key project is the refurbishment of a geodesic dome that has been one of the signature spots on the property since it was built forty years ago. The building was inspired by Buckminster Fuller and was dreamed up by Reno Taini, a teacher from Daly City, who brought his high school students to Slide Ranch each year. In 1971 he decided to give something back.

“He had the gumption to inspire his students – most of whom were girls – to cut all of the pieces in their woodshop,” Higgins said. He gestured to the building’s newly-painted and intricate support system. “Then they were trucked in here from Daly City.”

Standing about a quarter-mile south of the farm, the little building has been the destination of innumerable hikes over the years. The meadow surrounding it is where overnight campers pitch their tents, and where Anastasia Pickens brings her students each year. “For some kids is their very first time in a tent,” she said. “You can tell from their hiking that they aren’t used to uneven terrain. One boy, who is autistic, got into his tent and he was like, so where’s the light in here?”

This year’s campers will find that the dome’s familiar façade has received a modernist facelift. Plexiglas and plywood walls were replaced with a tight aluminum skin designed by staffer Steve Thompson in order to combat ongoing leaks resulting from the dome’s many angular surfaces.

Teachers at the ranch are likely celebrating another, less public project: construction of tidy one-room cabins to replace aging trailers that until now served as their housing for the year. Each cabin is designed for one person, was built primarily from recycled materials and has a priceless view of the sea.


“People who’ve been coming out for years have noticed that it still looks rustic but it looks less funky,” Higgins said. “I’m just pleased as peaches that we’ve gotten as much done as we have.”

(Originally published in the Point Reyes Light on 4/22/2010)

Texas fights California's climate bill

In 2012, California is set to enact its ambitious climate law that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels in only 8 years. Now, according to the New York Times, at least two Texas-based oil companies are financing a ballot initiative designed to delay that law.

The companies, Valero and Tesoro, have contributed over $500,000 to a ballot initiative that would prohibit AB-32 from taking effect until the state's unemployment rate drops to 5.5 percent; a hefty fall from the current 12.5 percent. The stall is being sponsored by the California Jobs Initiative, which has raised nearly $1 million - almost all of which has come from oil companies, according to the Times.

The stated concern is that increased restrictions on emissions will lead to job loss. AB-32, which is the first law in the nation to cap industrial emissions statewide, will penalize those who don't comply. It is expected that the requirements will be met through carbon credit market.

Already, business are scrambling - both to get in line to aquire their green creds, or else to trade in them. Entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on carbon in venues ranging from farms to forestry. But, if AB-32 is successful and Texas is not, whatever workers remain in the new marketplace will be putting out roughly 25 percent less greenhouse gasses than they will if business continues as usual.

Non-newsflash: lawns aren't green

Urban parks and suburban lawns are bad for the climate. This week, that topic has been the subject of a media blitz triggered by a new study at UC Irvine titled “Carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions in urban turf”.

Truthfully, I’m disappointed by the tone of mild surprise adopted in every article I’ve read. The fact that your classic American lawn is bad for the environment is very old news. Watered year-round, kept emerald green by chemical fertilizers and dandelion-free by herbicides; trimmed and tidied with gas-guzzling mowers and leaf blowers – this is not an environmentally sustainable space! For decades, native plant gardens, rock gardens, and urban natural areas have been promoted by green thinkers.

The UC Irvine study helpfully quantifies the damage (at least as it occurs in Southern California), but the media it has received does its audience a disservice. While an academic discussion has been going on about the possibility of sequestering carbon in turfgrass, that conversation hasn’t filtered into the public consciousness. By claiming that the study “dispels” the notion that “urban "green" spaces help counteract greenhouse gas emissions,” that very notion is in fact created by bulldozing over a nuanced subject.

For example, “urban green spaces” can be forests, gardens, green rooftops, managed natural areas, lawns, and golf courses. Some of these have a positive environmental impact; others have a negative one. Lumping them together is a mistake.

The study itself, which has not yet been released to the public but is in press in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, appears to capture the nuance of the subject, specifically addressing previous studies that have documented lawns storing carbon, but haven’t looked at the emissions associated with tending them. The study shows that nitrous oxide emissions from lawns are comparable to those found in agricultural farms, which (according to the press release) are among the largest emitters of nitrous oxide globally. And nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that's 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

In ornamental lawns, nitrous oxide emissions from fertilization offset just 10 percent to 30 percent of carbon sequestration. But fossil fuel consumption for management, the researchers calculate, releases about four times more carbon dioxide than the plots can take up. Athletic fields fare even worse, because — due to soil disruption by tilling and resodding — they don't trap nearly as much carbon as ornamental grass but require the same emissions-producing care.

“It's impossible for these lawns to be net greenhouse gas sinks because too much fuel is used to maintain them,” study author Amy Townsend-Small concludes. Which is indeed useful information – but perhaps the media should be asking who is making the counterargument that inspired her research? And why?

Climate in the spotlight

Climate is the hot topic at this year’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, happening this week. Roughly three hundred separate talks mention the subject. How does climate change alter wind-generated power production? Does planetary orbit affect climate change? What was climate change like in the past? And how does it impact salmon, pikas, skiing?

There are oblique talks and posters composed primarily of acronyms, and practical sessions on prediction and prevention. There are many scary graphs with red lines that keep going up.

“Humanity has transitioned from passive bystander to an active agent of change in the climate system,” said Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley. “We can no longer plead ignorance.”

Santer, who is a co-author of the report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, went on to decry the recent Climategate scandal. And indeed, in this environment, the dubious content of a few emails seems to pale beside the wealth of earnest evidence. The world as we have known it is changing; the drastic effects we have made in our atmosphere are indisputable. The connection between these two facts is a questionable thing to question.

Already we are seeing increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows.

This year, 16,000 students, professors, researchers, policymakers and land managers are at the country’s foremost convention on earth sciences. Does this sound dry? Earth sciences affect everything from food to water to electricity to recreation. And all of these are affected by climate change.

It’s a sobering thought.

Goby on the rocks

Tidewater Goby by JacobaCharles

The man from Channel 7 news kept asking the biologist why anyone should care about the survival of a small fish called the tidewater goby.

He was one of several dozen news media and government scientists standing on a springy field of marsh plants on a late October morning. The occasion was the release of the endangered goby into a long-unused habitat, and there was much clicking of cameras and offering of microphones. It was unusual to see such an unsexy little animal getting so much attention.

In truth, there are few good answers to Channel 7’s question. Gobies are at risk of extinction because of humans, and yet - like so many other plants and animals – offer nothing that most people value. They are not attractive or tasty; they are not a source of medicine or fuel. All gobies do is live a short, quiet life in the lightly salty waters where fresh streams meets the sea. They nibble on algae and get devoured by larger fish. Each male digs a nesting burrow in the gravel for his lady, who will lay several hundred eggs and then leave him to tend them. Newly hatched gobies live for about a year, and then they die. And no person picnicking on the bank is any the wiser.

Unlike the biologist, a spokesman for the US Fish and Wildlife service was happy to tell reporters why people should care, citing one of the basic principals of ecology. Every species is like a single thread in the fabric of our ecosystem, spokesman Al Donner said. With each thread that vanishes, the fabric becomes weaker. If you lose too many, the very thing that provides all our goods and services – the environment that allows us to thrive – will weaken and collapse. We need to save even the seemingly insignificant, Donner concluded, because this system isn’t designed to be a monoculture with just a few plants and animals.

The thread we call the tidewater goby lives in small, scattered patches all up and down the California coast, from San Diego to Del Norte County. The patches are scattered because this fish’s habitat needs are specific: the water can’t be too deep, or too salty, or too fresh. This keeps each population separate from the others – most of the time. Genetic evidence shows that occasionally, by some method we may never understand, fishy romance can occur between gobies from different lagoons.

By the mid 1990s, coastal development and other problems had caused goby populations to dwindle statewide, and the fish was added to the endangered species list. The goby’s problems were many, and worst in the southern part of the state. Wetlands had been dredged, diked, drained and developed; streambanks were hardened with rocks and cement; dams were erected. Tide gates and levees blocked occasional flow between separate lagoons. Habitats that had once been naturally fragmented became artificially fragmented. And, according to a recent study by a Humboldt State University student, gobies’ genetic diversity declined correspondingly. In other words, no more romance across borders. Tidewater Romeo never even got to meet Tidewater Juliet. Isolation led (as it will) to inbreeding.

No one knows exactly why the goby vanished from Tomales Bay in particular. Development is minimal, but the area does have a long history of agriculture. The records say the fish was here, and then it wasn’t. Until a few years ago it hadn’t been seen in the Tomales Bay area since 1953. Then, biologists doing preliminary surveys for a wetland restoration project discovered that a few of the fish were still living in a brackish slough that drained into the bay. Now the restoration project is complete, and the gobies have expanded their range to include the newly created wetland.

Last week, some fish from the slough were captured and driven to another brackish lagoon ten miles up the bay. As the cameras rolled, a woman knelt by the muddy water, scooping gobies out of a five-gallon bucket with a bright blue aquarium net. They were immediately invisible among the reeds of their new home, where they just might settle in, snack on some algae, and stay for good.

Carbon farming in West Marin

Someday, the ranches of West Marin could become a battlefield in the fight against climate change through reducing the carbon dioxide in the air. Rangeland soil could become a tool used to sequester atmospheric carbon, a major greenhouse gas.

“Our earliest soil survey results strongly suggested that management can enhance carbon sequestration, which is very important,” said John Wick, director of the Nicasio-based Marin Carbon Project. “Based on that we designed a set of experiments here on my ranch and on the sister site up in the Sierra foothills.”

Wick and, a team of local scientists, ranchers and nonprofit organizations, formed the Marin Carbon Project last year. The Marin Community Foundation recently gave them a $240,000 grant as part of their new “Climate change strategic initiative” that was launched earlier this month.

“The majority of that has gone to set up, execute and begin doing analysis on John Wick’s property,” said Torri Estrada, manager of the foundation’s new initiative. “They are doing controlled experiments with different applications of land management techniques on the ground and demonstrating which of those are carbon neutral, sequester carbon or emit carbon. It’s really basic research.”

For some, the idea that dirt could hang on to carbon for long enough to make a difference to global warming is counterintuitive. But the idea makes more sense when you realize that all soil contains organic matter – and that is roughly 50 percent carbon. All living plants trap carbon in their flesh, pulling it from the air to build new cells. After the plant dies, the carbon-rich stems and roots become part of the soil when they are buried or decomposed.

Some of the carbon that is trapped is prevented from re-entering the atmosphere. “It’s very chemically sticky,” explained Dr. Whendee Silver, a scientist at UC Berkeley who is heading up the Marin Carbon Project’s research. “It can bind onto soil surfaces, it can bind onto other organic matter surfaces. When it does that it’s hard for the microbes to break it down.”

Since the plants vacuum carbon out of the air and bury it under ground, researchers want to see how they can maximize the amount of carbon that is trapped. Traditional agricultural methods actually deplete levels of soil carbon.

“There certainly is certainly the potential to increase soil carbon in many regions and we can say that in Marin confidently,” Silver said. “What we can’t say yet is that we can’t walk into a ranch and say, ‘This is exactly what you should do.’”

This is the question that the Marin Carbon Project is trying to answer. And the methods they use aren’t rocket science – applying compost, rotating pastures and using a different kind of plow are all being studied. So far, they’ve been getting good results.

“This is an amazing model for leadership,” said Estrada. “People came together and put a vision together and are spending the time to commit to something that we thing has a lot of potential but hasn’t been fully demonstrated yet.”

“You’ve got to invest in the tried and true things but you’ve also got to invest in some things that might be a little more risky but have the potential to make huge impacts,” he added.

Someday, this research could lead to a profit for ranchers through “carbon farming” and participating in a carbon market, but today that’s still a long way off.

[Originally broadcast as a news report on KWMR radio news. Click below or go to www.kwmr.org/news to listen to the audio version.]

Carbon Farming by JacobaCharles

A colorful history of Tamalpais

Inverness Park artist Tom Killion and poet Gary Snyder spoke to a full house at Book Passage in Corte Madera on Tuesday night. The pair recently co-authored Tamalpais Walking, a multifaceted portrait of a much-loved mountain that blends poetry, history and Japanese-style woodblock prints.

“You learn a lot, that’s one of the great things about the book,” Snyder said. “It really deepens what the mountain is in our landscape.”

He’s right. Leafing through Tamalpais Walking is like discovering a mythical version of home. Everything is familiar – pipeline trail, Potrero meadows, rock springs – yet each page is full of the unexpected. The sweeping views and brilliant colors of Killion’s prints have a timeless quality, and Snyder’s tales of exploring the mountain with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers bring modern legends to life.

“Later I went alone over the rocky hill – swarmed by gnats – and being curious went along Mickey O’Brien trail to Laurel Dell, a lovely flat meadow glowing green in the afternoon sun and a good camp,” Snyder wrote in a journal entry from 1956. “Stopped and thought about what I’d said to Jack about human history, remembered that Nature is inexhaustible, why should I fret about a few years of men?”

In addition to their personal perspectives, Killion contributed a chapter on the history of the mountain. The early poets and preservationists who gave us the Mount Tam that we know today – from its undeveloped slopes to the Legend of the Sleeping Lady – are illuminated. The mountain was easily visible and accessible from San Francisco, which made it both a muse and a destination from early on.

“Standing sentinel above the Golden Gate, where snowmelt and rainfall culled from Shasta to the southern Sierra meet the salty Pacific, this mountain has been a gatepost for myriad immigrants entering San Francisco Bay,” Killion wrote. “For those who have stayed and built their cities along its shores, Tamalpais beckons with the mystery and delight that high places evoke. Dark bar across San Francisco’s northern horizon, touching the winter clouds, rising above tongues of summer fog. Just a mountain, but fixed in the imagination of a city”

Tamalpais Walking is the second book produced by the two authors, who share a love of wilderness and influences from Japan. Their first book was The High Sierra of California, a book of prints and writings from the mountain range that has been another focus for both Snyder’s and Killion’s art and recreation. A similar project focused on Mount Tamalpais was a natural next step.

Both Snyder and Killion have long relationships with Tamalpais. Killion, who now lives in Inverness Park, grew up on the foot of the mountain. “It was the most important landscape of my life,” Killion said. “The formative landscape is always the one that you take with you, and there it was, looming over my childhood world.”

He liked to explore the wild-seeming mountain, and from an early age wanted to make woodblock prints of it.

“When I was ten, my parents gave me this little book of Hokusai prints of Mount Fuji,” Killion said. Inspired by that book, he developed an urge to create his own prints, capturing Mount Tamalpais in Hokusai’s style.

“I always saw a parallel between Mount Tamalpais and Mount Fuji,” Killion mused on Saturday, standing on the overlook where he sketched the first version of the print that can now be seen on the title page of his new book. “It is a world of little people – no cars or construction projects or big freeways – and wild mountains.”

He first began making prints as a teenager – he was probably 15 when he did the first one reproduced in Tamalpais Walking. Though he went on to pursue a successful academic career in African history, he never stopped making prints. Seven years ago, he left academia to pursue his art full-time.

“I had this strange combination of being interested in a quite a few different things but being able to focus myopically and stupidly on this one thing,” Killion said. “And it’s a weird thing to get good at because it takes a lot of work. It’s a very labor-intensive art form.”

The woodblock prints also were key to his friendship with Snyder, which began in 1975 when Killion offered his first book, 28 Views of Mount Tamalpais, to the poet.

“I really loved it and told him how much I appreciated the mountain,” Snyder said. “We started seeing him from time to time and staying in touch.”

Snyder’s own relationship with Mount Tam began as a young man. Though he was born in San Francisco in 1930, he grew up on a farm north of Seattle. At 18, he hitchhiked through San Francisco to meet up with his girlfriend on his way back to Reed College in Portland. The two went camping on Mount Tamalpais and wound up walking and hitching all the way to Tomales Bay, “taking the easiest way through the chaparral like a pair of little god and goddess critters.”

Over the two decades, Snyder lived in the Bay Area when he wasn’t traveling or living in Japan. Whether he was living in Marin, Berkeley or San Francisco he always wound up on the mountain. For a year or more he lived in a cabin in Homestead Valley.

“I would walk right out the door of that cabin and I’d be all over the mountain,” he said with a gold-capped grin. “All the way to Stinson and Bolinas. I did a night hike every evening when I was working on building a house with my father.”

But before he went to Japan, he added, he was “just a normal hiker.” While working at a Zen temple in Kyoto translating Buddhist texts for an American heiress he discovered an old tradition of circumambulating mountains as a walking meditation practice. He later saw similar rituals performed in other countries such as India and Nepal, and along with Ginsberg decided to bring the ceremony home to Mount Tam.

Like the poets, trailbuilders, preservationists and playwrights who are also given voice in Tamalpais Walking, the lighthearted-yet-serious ritual the pair developed was one more way for a people to make the mountain their own.

“Why Tamalpais?” Snyder asks in the book. “Because it’s there, you might say. And it blessedly balances the magic city along the tight-rope of the fault line.”

Point Reyes Books will be sponsoring a reading, lecture and book signing by Gary Snyder and Tom Killion at Toby’s Feed Barn on June 20. The event is a benefit for the North Bay Conservation Corps. Tickets will be available by mid-May.

(Originally published in the Point Reyes Light)