Stewardship: Keepers of the Land

Episode 8: Stewardship: Keepers of the Land

SPEAKERS

Emily Harwitz (host), Clarisa Rosas (guest), JoeJoe Clark (guest)

[INTRO MUSIC]

Episode 8 Transcript

SPEAKERS

Emily Harwitz, JoeJoe Clark, Clarisa Rosas

Emily Harwitz 00:00

Hi and welcome to another episode of I’ll Go If You Go! I’m your host, Emily Harwitz. When was the last time you did something just for the love of it? For today’s guests, the answer would be: every day they go to work. Joseph JoeJoe Clark and Clarisa Rosas work in stewardship and monitoring, a key area of environmental work that’s fundamental to conservation. If you remember from episode 6, a forest isn’t a museum. Nature is constantly changing and it’s the responsibility of land managers to take care of the land, or steward it. So what does that look like? One thing we’ll find out from our guests is that a job in stewardship can look different season to season, even day to day, depending on the unique needs and history of the land.

In today’s episode, we sat down by a creek beneath the redwoods on one of the Napa Land Trsut preserves JoeJoe and Clarisa steward, JoeJoe as a field technician and Clarisa as a monitoring assistant. We are actually sitting on the ground on sticks and leaves, so please excuse the occasional rustle—and now, relax and enjoy the sounds of JoeJoe and Clarisa’s “office” as they share with us a slice of stewardship life.

[MUSIC]

Emily Harwitz 01:05

We are here today at Archer Taylor Preserve in Napa County. It’s a beautiful sunny day. We’re sitting on a trail by Redwood Creek. You can hear that in the background. There are California towhees, Pacific flycatchers, black phoebes, all sorts of birds around here today. And we’re here with our wonderful lovely guests, Clarisa and JoeJoe!

JoeJoe Clark 01:27

Yeah! Hi, I’m Joseph Clark. JoeJoe, I go by. I work for the Napa Land Trust underneath the stewardship department, as a field technician.

Clarisa Rosas 01:37

And my name is Clarisa Rosas. I work as a monitoring assistant, also at the Napa Land Trust, and my position is in the land protection department.

Emily Harwitz 01:47

What is stewardship?

JoeJoe Clark 01:49

I believe stewarding the land is managing the land, getting to know the species, figuring out the immediate and long-term needs of the land. That’s just a general sense of what what we do and what I think stewardship is—and also enjoying it as well.

Clarisa Rosas 02:09

Yeah, I think just to add on to what JoeJoe said, stewarding is the long-term protection of the land, and that includes a lot of management, short and long-term.

Emily Harwitz 02:20

And how would you describe your roles to someone who doesn’t know what this looks like?

JoeJoe Clark 02:25

Well, my role is a little bit complex and more of a jack-of-all-trades, but some some days I’ll be going looking for a camera in one of our preserves, or tagging frogs or monitoring oak trees, and so it ranges throughout the week.

Clarisa Rosas 02:43

As a monitoring assistant, it’s kind of similar to JoeJoe, but I get to go out to a lot of different private properties that have conservation easements on them. A conservation easement is a legal agreement between the private landowner and any land trust, and it’s recorded at the recorder’s office. It follows the property, even if the original donor sells the property, so it is a way to permanently protect private property. So my day-to-day is going out to different properties, meeting with landowners, and then getting back to the office and writing a report, and a mix of field and administrative work.

Emily Harwitz 03:23

What is a typical day in the life?

JoeJoe Clark 03:25

Of a field technician? Like, so like last week, like on Monday, we [went] out to many preserves and looked for cameras. We have almost 20 different cameras that capture wildlife and if you go to our website, you’ll see some photos that have been documented there. Tuesday, I will be pulling weeds, pulling some type of invasive, non-native, and that’s another way we manage the land. Other days, I’m with the public. We will have many field trips coming up in the near future, but on the weekends, we have botanical hikes, or hikes centered around wildlife or different types of things like art. So yeah, it’s a very, how would you say, it’s a gumbo of a job. There’s so many ingredients, but at the end of it, it’s a beautiful dish or different [laughs]—

Emily Harwitz 04:27

Mmm delicious! [laughs]

JoeJoe Clark 04:29

Yeah, I’m kind of hungry, too.

Emily Harwitz 04:31

What about you, Clarisa?

Clarisa Rosas 04:34

The-day-in-the-life of a monitoring assistant—so I usually am going out to a property with a volunteer, either they have already been to the property several times, or they’re just getting to know it with me. And what we do in a monitoring visit, we check in with a landowner, see if they have any concerns about the property, and then we typically try to check boundaries on the property if they’re accessible. So that’s a lot of fun trying to get to those boundaries. A lot of the times there’s no definitive trail or road to get to them, so it’s a lot of bushwhacking and finding your own way. And on that visit, I will take photographs, take notes of what I see, and then compile that into a report that will be sent to the landowner.

Emily Harwitz 05:15

So what percentage of the time would you say you’re in the office versus out in the field?

Clarisa Rosas 05:19

I would say it’s a good split of 50/50—50% in the field, 50% in the office, and it’s a really nice balance.

Emily Harwitz 05:26

What about you, JoeJoe?

JoeJoe Clark 05:27

Mine would be like 90/10, so 90% in the field and 10% in the office.

Emily Harwitz 05:34

Cool. And how does stewardship contribute to conservation?

JoeJoe Clark 05:39

Once we receive the property, either through donations or different types of ways, we don’t want to just not do anything, let the property just sit. So this is where we come into play, right? We go and we do a botanical survey, see what’s out there, the immediate tasks, like, how’s the road doing?

Emily Harwitz 06:00

So in conservation, you acquire the land, you protect it, and then you have to steward it. But before you steward it, you have to see what you have out there and see what condition the land is in.

JoeJoe Clark 06:10

And even on top of that, fire—like probably 90% of our preserves and conservation easements have had a fire in the last five years. And so it does make a lot more complicated things that have to be taken into place. For example, should we be removing all the trees that have been burned along the road that will eventually become a hazard when there’s a lot of rain, snow, wind, you know, or just leave those there, because, you know, wildlife does take care of that? So it’s very—there’s no one-[size]-fits-all, if that makes sense, for each preserve.

Emily Harwitz 06:49

What projects are you currently working on that you’re excited about?

Clarisa Rosas 06:53

One of the activities I am very excited about is, I will be taking a group out this weekend to a recently acquired conservation easement on a property. So I’m really excited to share the work that the land protection department has been doing and share it with all of our constituents and everybody. Our field trip program is open to the public, so anybody can sign up, and I’m really excited to get the group out there. I was out there last week and just really taking it all in, and I’m super excited to share it with everybody.

Emily Harwitz 07:25

Who’s coming?

Clarisa Rosas 07:27

It’s open to the public, so we have like 24 participants who signed up, and we’ll meet them, and I will caravan them out to the property. This is a conservation easement, so it’s a private owner, and this is the only way to get the public out to the property, and so I feel like it will be a great way for them to see what projects we’re working on behind the scenes that they don’t ever get to go to.

Emily Harwitz 07:50

What about you, JoeJoe, what are you working on right now that you’re excited about?

JoeJoe Clark 07:53

Well, what’s coming up in one of our preserves, Wantrup in Pope Valley, is the grazing. This Preserve is mainly oak woodland. It’s so cool just to see them eat grass! [laughs] That’s it. That’s all!

Emily Harwitz 08:06

[laughs] So grazing, can you explain how that relates to conservation?

JoeJoe Clark 08:09

It does, yeah, because a lot of these places that we see as you drive were ranches, and different types of methods were used to either mitigate fuel—flammable vegetation—to allow other native plants to thrive after all the sheep have eaten the invasive grasses. So I really enjoy that project, because first, I get to see the before and the after. What I mean by that, we have a lot of harding grass, which was a major bunch grass that was used to feed a lot of our cows and livestock. And also, in the 60s, they did a lot of planting after fires. They had Henley fire in Sonoma County, they planted a lot of seeds of Harding grass, and thus we have a problem. And so for the project that we’re working on, it’s called the valley floor restoration vernal pool there. So the sheep will eat the grass. We will see what comes up afterwards. And then hopefully, in the works, do restoration to remove any remaining parts of it and put the native grasses back together. So little by little bit, it’s all these different pieces.

Another thing is, when the sheep go into the preserve, all these oaks are thriving in the sense that they’re regenerating really well because [the sheep] are eating the non-native grasses when they’re flowering, and so they don’t go into seed, right? And so the timing is so weird and interesting, and there’s so many nuances to it. And honestly, some people have different methods of grazing and non-grazing. So I can go on and on, but that’s a cool project that we’re working on.

Emily Harwitz 10:07

So there’s a lot of planning involved. There’s also experimentation.

JoeJoe Clark 10:09

Yeah, yeah.

Emily Harwitz 10:11

Are you working on any stewardship projects together?

JoeJoe Clark 10:13

Me and Clarisa, we go out to do the California red legged frog tagging. We do that together.

Clarisa Rosas 10:20

The California red-legged frog project—it’s a large project that involves the translocation of egg masses. So we have a site that’s producing California red-legged frog egg masses. We take those and put them into the ponds on one of our preserves, and we shelter those egg masses until they’re tadpoles and release them into the pond. And one of the experiments in that larger project is to see whether the frogs will move between the ponds. So that preserve has three ponds and we want to see if they’ll be using the highlands and actually breeding in between the ponds. So far, we’ve had really great success. In the first two years, we’re seeing populations of frogs as young as two years old getting ready to breed. We hear them making breeding noises, breeding calls, and that’s something that’s completely unheard of in the California red-legged frog scientific community.

Emily Harwitz 11:18

Oh! Why is that?

Clarisa Rosas 11:19

They’re typically matured at three years old or above, but we think because of the habitat, it’s very undisturbed. It’s a preserve. Not a lot of people go. We think they’re just in prime conditions, and they’re taking advantage of that.

Emily Harwitz 11:35

And why are you restoring these frogs?

Clarisa Rosas 11:37

So these frogs are endangered in California, and the Napa Land Trust secrued a grant to restore them.

Emily Harwitz 11:56

What is the most challenging thing about your work?

JoeJoe Clark 12:00

I think it’d be the elements—going out, and it’s just really hot or really cold. Again, a lot of our preserves, well, not all of them, 90% have had some disturbance of fire, and so I have to go off trail, and it’s just treacherous sometimes. So I’m covered in soot or being pinched or being stabbed by sticks or whatever. Another, which would be more of a heavier one—I’m African American. I identify as Black. We go in rural areas, and some people have not seen a Black person or person of color in this type of field of work. When I go to a preserve and I try to get in the preserve and somebody, one of the neighbors or whatever, is questioning me, I just have to have in the back of my mind grace, understanding, because it’s scary for people when people like me are in spaces like that, because there’s a realization, there’s almost a reckoning of, ‘oh, people can be whatever they want,’ you know. I don’t know if that all makes sense. That part of my job that is not in the job description. It’s not! You know what I mean. It’s not. So there’s this nuance to that.

Emily Harwitz 13:24

Clarisa, what about you? What’s the most challenging thing about being a monitoring assistant working in the outdoors?

Clarisa Rosas 13:30

So one of the aspects that JoeJoe mentioned that I completely agree with is just—the elements. It’s going through poison oak, burned trees that are now fallen, and where there used to be a trail there is no longer a trail. And the other side of that is the landowner management. It’s the hard letters and conversations that say what they can and can’t do to their property. We have original donors, but we also have a lot of subsequent landowners who purchase properties, and they can get upset if what they were planning to do with their property is not permitted within the easement, and we have to be the bad guys and say “no, this is actually not permitted and we don’t want to take legal action so here’s the letter saying, ‘no, please don’t do it.'” That’s definitely a hard part of it.

Emily Harwitz 14:24

It’s funny—I think some people who hear these stories about, “oh, working in the elements, you have to hike through all this soot and, like, bushwhack.” Some people listening might go, “okay, that’s not for me,” but I’m sure there are tons of people, like myself, who would hear this and say, “yeah! I want to be out there!”

Clarisa Rosas 14:40

What an adventure, right? I feel like I’m like, tarzaning out there. I’m like, going from one limb to the other. Let me crawl under this bush to get out, and let me check my iPad and make sure I’m still going in the right direction. Because there’s, like, no visibility outside of these bushes.

Emily Harwitz 14:54

Yeah, that sounds so fun.

Clarisa Rosas 14:55

Yeah, it is a lot of fun. It’s a challenge, but it’s fun.

Emily Harwitz 14:58

Ok, now what’s the most rewarding thing about the work that you do?

Clarisa Rosas 15:02

The most rewarding thing for me is getting those moments where I am mostly all by myself and I get to look out into the vista, I get to hear the sounds of the streams, I get to see a bird who’s right in front of me. The other day, I saw a skunk, and it was just so cute. And it’s like, you don’t think that it’s a magical moment, but it really is. It was the highlight of my whole week. And just getting to have those very intimate moments with the wildlife are my favorite part of the job.

Emily Harwitz 15:33

And I’m guessing that a lot of the work you do is on these preserves, like the land doesn’t see a lot of people because they’re private, and so the wildlife there is going to be less afraid of people, too, right?

Clarisa Rosas 15:43

Yeah, especially with the easement, sometimes the landowners don’t even go to that side of the property and I’m the only person who’s been there in the last couple of years. And it really is something special, where I feel like I’m very, very lucky to be out there.

JoeJoe Clark 15:57

I love going out and seeing so many flowers, lilies, oak trees, hearing the sounds of tree frogs and stuff like that. It’s such a joy.

Emily Harwitz 16:12

How did you get into this line of work? What kind of experience have you had that has prepared you for this?

Clarisa Rosas 16:20

I was really lucky in undergrad to have some service learning classes where I was required to work with an organization, and I got the privilege and opportunity to work with the Return of the Natives, which is a community based organization to bring kids out to the land through hands on experience. That was a really, really pivotal moment where I knew I wanted to work in some aspect in environmental education. Another service learning opportunity that I got was with the Bureau of Land Management, and they are managing the lands on Fort Ord next to Cal State, Monterey Bay. I got the opportunity to work with a biologist and really see the projects that were happening—the removal of invasive species, implementing new trail segments to avoid sensitive areas, and we actually worked on a grazing project at that time. So all of those experiences, though they weren’t paid, gave me the opportunity to put stuff on my resume and say, ‘I know what I’m doing and I’m ready for this.’ This is my first real conservation job. I’ve had a lot of other jobs that were in spa concierge, customer service, and I feel like those also prepared me just to multitask, do a lot of time management, a lot of people skills—the combination of that is really what prepared me to work out here.

JoeJoe Clark 17:43

After college, my first job was working in the kiosk at Bothe Napa Valley State Park, and that allowed me to see different parts of a park system, how it’s operated and run. After leaving that, I was desperate to get my hands in doing restoration, so I went to Sonoma Ecology Center, and I was a restoration technician. That was really fun. We converted back to a working, functioning part of the landscape. I thought that was amazing. And I knew that land trusts had a higher value in my mind when it comes to that, because that’s what they do, purchasing the land, protecting it, and then also restoring it.

Emily Harwitz 18:34

What advice do you have for people who want to get into this line of work?

Clarisa Rosas 18:37

I would give the preface that it’s not easy, but it is doable, and you have to keep trying. You will get rejected, and you don’t have to take that rejection personally. There were a lot of other positions that I applied for [that] I never even got an interview for, but you have to keep trying and keep volunteering and keep applying, and you will get there.

JoeJoe Clark 18:59

It’s really funny you said that because I applied for this job like five times in the last like six years. Because, like, how you said it, Clarisa. Yeah, it was through volunteering, local things like that.

Emily Harwitz 19:16

What is it about your specific roles that feeds back into the bigger picture of conservation? So we have monitoring with Clarisa, stewardship with JoeJoe—

Clarisa Rosas 19:24

Yeah, I guess for monitoring, it instills that confidence in the community that we are protecting the land that we say we’re going to protect. There’s an annual report. Somebody is either on the property or viewing the property through satellite imagery. Although we visit the property every year, I’m learning that our landscapes are ever-changing. Although the landowner hasn’t done anything to change it, it’s changing on its own, whether it’s through fire or lack of maintenance or a heavy hand of maintenance. It’s always changing, and I think that’s really cool to see on the ground, and feeds into the larger picture of monitoring and stewardship. The conservation is, you can’t always keep something as it was before. Things will change, and you need to be fluid.

Emily Harwitz 20:19

Right, like with a preserve, you can’t just preserve it in the state that you get it in. It’s always changing. Even if you don’t actively manage the land, there’s still plants. People think of plants as stationary, but the seeds blow in the wind. They travel.

JoeJoe Clark 20:35

Just an image that comes to my mind is like Johnny Appleseed. It’s like—wherever I go, there will be a green fingerprint. Another rewarding thing that I feel in my heart, especially when I plant an acorn and I see the sprout coming up—that’s going to be there for hopefully another 500 years. JoeJoe planted that! Not like, ‘I’ planted that, but there was a community behind that. And so the things that I do see around here, they’re not just randomly placed. I benefit from them. And so I hope that I could do that for the next generation, or even for just a species alone, because I do have a love for—nothing else, just for the love of it.

[OUTRO MUSIC]

Emily Harwitz 21:27

Thanks for joining us on I’ll Go If You Go, a Save the Redwoods League podcast. This season is produced by Leslie Parra and hosted, edited, and sound engineered by Emily Harwitz. Thank you to Adam Kaplan for tech support, and Caleb Castle, Marcos Castineiras, and Mary McPheely for graphic design and media support. Theme song and music by Nhu Nguyen and Anni Feng. You can find seasons one, two, and three wherever you listen to podcasts or on savetheredwoods.org where you can also find transcripts of each episode.

If you like our show, please rate and review. It helps more people find us and join in the conversation. For behind-the-scenes and bonus content, follow us on Instagram @IllGoIfYouGoPod. If you have comments or questions, you can email us at outreach@savetheredwoods.org. We’d love to hear from you and maybe even share your comments on the podcast. That’s all folks. Catch you next time!