Restoring Paradise

All photographs belong to Joel Caldwell

Editor's Note: During the summers of 2021 and 2022, as parts of the western United States experienced the worst drought in 1,200 years, Joel Caldwell undertook a series of road trips through California's Central Valley and northward to document those working to restore and reclaim lost ecosystems and repopulate native species. Ecosystem Restoration Camps (ERCs) emerged as part of a global movement led by activist workers from community organizations. John D. Liu, founder of ERCs, explains that they exist "as an example of a new way of life, a way of teaching, learning, and participating in saving human civilization."

These seven camps, each in its own way, empower ordinary people to transform devastated ecosystems. From an off-grid community planting trees and restoring soil next to a landfill, to a man cultivating a food oasis after spending half his life in prison, these people aren't waiting for others to take the lead on climate change.

I'm heading north on I-5 past Bakersfield in a white Chevrolet Spark. To the east, a vast industrial farm stretches into the distance, teeming with forlorn cows, captive creatures emitting a fetid stench that blends with—or perhaps creates—the brown haze my little car is driving through. It's unbearably hot. The first of a string of heat waves has descended on California during the dry months of 2021, and they're predicted to accompany this entire first tour of the state's Ecosystem Restoration Camps (ERCs), international communities, and permaculture sites.

For the past four years, I've immersed myself in the world of ecosystem restoration and native reforestation. Professionally, I've researched, discussed, photographed, filmed, written, and promoted hundreds of restoration projects around the world. Personally, I've prepared, fertilized, planted, burned, harvested, observed, and connected with the soil. In the process of developing and nurturing this newfound obsession, my attention has increasingly focused on stories of hope, healing, and environmental action. In short, I've undergone a kind of personal transformation.

I continue north toward EcoCamp Coyote, the first ERC on my itinerary. As dystopian landscapes of factory farms and patchwork fields pass by the window, I turn up the volume on John D. Liu's podcast; his voice sounds metallic through the Spark's speakers: "We should be able to drink water from rivers," he says. "And we will be able to in 100 years if we really put our minds to it. This should be the purpose of human civilization."

ECOCAMP COYOTE | Santa Clara County, California

From landfill to fertile land

From the outside, EcoCamp Coyote doesn't look like the best place to start an "ecosystem restoration camp." After entering a code, a chain-locked gate opens onto a labyrinthine industrial landfill. It's dry and dusty, filled with heavy equipment and stacked materials. I keep driving and begin to see patches of deep green on the land ahead, and to my surprise, I smell the comforting, earthy scent of damp soil wafting through the window as I park the car.

I'm watching a feathered woodpecker drill a hole in the trunk of a lone black walnut tree when I hear Leo Lauchere, founder of EcoCamp Coyote ERC, greet me. Leo is tall and thin, with a nose ring, a well-worn Lake Tahoe cap, and a broad, welcoming smile. He feels like a camp totem: a kind of vegan, mythical figure straight out of Mad Max, capable of catalyzing discarded waste and transforming it into materials that sustain a human community. “This used to be all gravel,” he tells me, gesturing to a particularly leafy corner of the camp. “We spread a few hundred acres with wood chips. I bought an old, barely running truck and piled on layer after layer of mushroom compost from a local farm. Now we have this soil,” he says with a hint of surprise. “Because it’s so dense, sometimes we don’t even water the garden.”

Leo guides me through the native plants and trees of the orchard. He shows me how they collect rainwater and integrate it with a series of greywater systems that transform wastewater into irrigation water. Leo has set up camp on the extremely degraded soil of a former sod farm southeast of San Jose, California. A small community lives here, completely off the grid, and uses urban waste to build structures, reshape the soil, and restore the land.

Listen to Leo talk about restoration

Transcription

Restoring is one of my favorite activities. Maintaining and repairing things, instead of building or buying new ones, naturally aligns with the spirit of caring for what already exists. Having a workshop and developing at least a basic level of skills in areas like electricity, plumbing, welding, and carpentry is fundamental to this lifestyle. We can fix and care for things, not only for ourselves but also for future generations who will use them.

The next morning, I woke up in a shipping container that serves primarily as an oven. We had a hearty breakfast of vegetables discarded by a local store and spent the morning building firebreaks along the road. “Once the camp started to get too small, we moved to the side of the road,” Leo tells me as we load up his 1964 Chevy K10, one of the few gasoline-powered vehicles still operating in his 95% petroleum-free lifestyle. “It was being poisoned to control the ‘weeds,’ so we rescued it from the city.”

The chainsaws whir as we prune oak trees and clear the weeds around their trunks. We haul away a pile of trash: old porcelain toilet bowls and disfigured dolls, discarded relics that bear witness to the throwaway culture's disregard for objects. The goal is to mitigate the fire, but also to plant trees. Leo and his team collected acorns for months and cultivated them in the greenhouse. “Everyone interacts with the paths, but no one takes care of them. The verges are the ugliest and most despised dumps,” Leo tells me. “I want the paths here to be covered in the green of living oak trees.”

That night, Leo turned on a solar-powered light show, started the music, and I participated for the first time in my life in a “dance therapy” session. A diverse group of misfits wriggled, shook, and laughed as the music loosened our tired minds and bodies.

CANTICLE FARM | Alameda County, California

A rehabilitated ex-convict.

“I spent half my life behind bars,” says Troy Williams. “When you’re in solitary confinement, you feel a deep tension in your body. I was in a cell where I could touch both ends at the same time. The window was painted over from the outside, but there was a small opening through which I could watch the little birds line up as if they were performing their morning prayers. Waking up and watching the birds in the morning became a ritual for connecting with nature, for feeling the harmony flow.”

I'm sitting with Troy amidst the bounty of Canticle Farm, a regenerative oasis in Oakland that aspires to be a platform for "the great change"—a global shift from a society of industrial growth to one that sustains life with a focus on environmental and social justice. Troy has lived at Canticle for seven years, and during our conversation—which is constantly interrupted by clumsy, curious pollinators—he paints a picture completely opposite to where we're sitting: two and a half decades of being imprisoned, surrounded by concrete and steel, defined by the total removal of nature.

Troy co-founded The Green Life Project at San Quentin State Prison to connect inmates with nature and facilitate healing. During the last eight years of his sentence, Troy earned 37 cents an hour managing the San Quentin Television broadcast. He created programming and acquired audio and video skills, but because the prices of basic goods were so high, he couldn't save enough to prepare for life outside prison. Upon being paroled in 2014, Troy also received $200 and was sent to a halfway house in the Bay Area. Marijuana was being sold next door, and prostitutes hung out on the corner. To Troy, it felt like a trap. “The message that sends is deeply psychologically traumatic,” he explains. “And the message is that you're not being looked after.”

After a year in that home, Canticle Farm came to Troy's attention. “I didn't really know what I was missing until I got here, to this oasis of fruit trees, earth, and grass.” Troy describes a feeling of self-awareness, something he can't quite put into words. “Out there, you try to replace nature with imagination, with memories. That keeps you sane enough, I guess, but the connective tissue, the knowledge, isn't there. Your body and mind feel restricted.”

In Canticle, I watch a group of volunteers and residents working among wildflowers to restore a stream long confined to an underground culvert. For me, this restoration—and Troy's as well—illustrates the resilience of the bond with humanity that sustains us, capable of transcending concrete, steel, and other less visible (but no less damaging) human-made obstacles.

Listen to Troy talk about overcoming difficult times

Transcription

I grew up with a father who broke broncos, wore cowboy boots, and worked in construction—probably the hardest-working man I ever knew. I spent 25 years in prison. I went in when I was 27. I was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. You couldn't even see the outside from the cell. But there was a small hole in the paint on the window, and I used it to look out and watch the little birds line up in the morning. And that became almost a ritual for me to connect with nature as soon as I woke up, to look through that hole and watch the birds line up in the morning. In 2014, I was paroled. I actually made it to Chemical Farm and walked back here to the garden, this sort of little oasis. If I need vegetables, I don't have to go to the corner store. I just go out to the yard and pick some kale, some cabbage, and a few other things I need to make a meal.

CAMP PARADISE | Butte County, California

Where the answer to disaster is constant work.

“Let us gather around the campfire and restore paradise…” Matthew Trumm heard John D. Liu’s eerily prophetic words in 2018, just 10 days before the Camp Fire—California’s most destructive and deadly wildfire—killed 86 people and burned more than 18,000 structures. The megafire destroyed the town of Paradise, California, where Matthew’s daughter lived with her mother.

In response to this catastrophe, Matthew founded Camp Paradise, the world's first disaster relief camp focused on ecosystem restoration. Without a fixed location, Camp Paradise is a series of "uprisings" and action days around the area known as the "Camp Fire burn scar," where campers meet with locals to work on restoration and permaculture projects to heal the land while also healing the community. With Camp Paradise, Matthew seeks to transform how we understand effective ecosystem restoration in areas impacted by the climate crisis, including lands damaged by wildfires.

Driving through Paradise and its surroundings today, you don't see much of the apocalyptic destruction you might expect. The wreckage has been mostly cleaned up, save for the occasional burned-out car. I arrived on a sweltering day; the temperature was over 38°C, and I couldn't find any shade. What was once a tree-filled community was now an open space. For those who remember Paradise, it's almost unrecognizable.

I met Matthew on his property, an hour from town. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and working hard in the blazing sun. This property had also burned, but more recently, in 2020, when the Bear Fire ripped through the towns of Berry Creek and Feather Falls, giving this part of Northern California the dubious distinction of being “the epicenter of wind-driven megafires.” I parked next to Matthew’s charred pickup truck and surveyed the blackened pillars of old, charred oak trees, the undergrowth gone except for patches of blonde broom and California lilac. Using a mini-excavator, Matthew has constructed a series of sustainable water-collecting drains—a terracing excavation technique that creates levels and embankments in the hillside to help water run off and permeate—which decreases erosion and increases the soil’s water-holding capacity. Then, create micro terraces, small furrows covered with buckwheat and then with compost, to stabilize the soil and prevent erosion.

“All the soil on Earth should be covered,” Matthew tells me over his shoulder. “If you see exposed soil, think of it as a wound that needs to be covered.” Exposed soil kills vital life and increases evaporation through condensation, leading to drought and ultimately soil degradation—the perfect conditions for a massive wildfire and subsequent flooding.

Stabilizing the soil is crucial after a wildfire. Heavy winter rains trigger landslides in recently burned areas, making a bad situation even worse. Here, on his recently burned property, Matthew is creating a permaculture demonstration site, an educational center focused on restoring burned land. “These giant, wind-driven fires are very new,” he tells me, kneeling and scattering seeds with his hands. “We don’t yet have much information on how to clean up after so many homes have burned down.”

When a home, or a neighborhood, burns, the debris is extremely toxic. The first step is to mitigate toxin production to ensure the pollution doesn't end up in rivers and streams. After the Camp Fire, Matthew spearheaded efforts to use materials typically used for erosion control—thatch, compost, and straw barriers—to contain the contamination around burned homes until the footprints were cleared and the toxic debris was taken to hazardous waste facilities. With today's large-scale wildfires, it generally takes more than two rainy seasons for sites to be cleared, so protecting watersheds in the short term is critical. But nothing like this has been done before. Matthew and his team of volunteers created a "best practice model" that FEMA has now adopted.

However, according to Matthew, the real solutions are systemic. “We can’t just create disaster response systems,” he tells me, leaning against the charred trunk of a strawberry tree in the small shade. “We need to work on ecosystem restoration all the time. We need to restore everything.” For Matthew, it’s a way of life, not a response. “This way, when a disaster happens or when areas are seriously affected, we can focus on the systemic approach.” "If any degraded areas need to be addressed, we will be prepared, mentally and physically."

Our conversation continues over beers on a patio in the historic town of Oroville. “These forests have been nourished for millions of years, and we’ve eliminated that source of nourishment, and they’re running out of energy,” Matthew tells me as the sun sets and the temperature drops. “We’re losing so many species. We no longer have the ocean’s contribution to the forest. Salmon used to swim upriver, and bears carried nutrients to the trees. We no longer have beavers to slow the water. We no longer have millions of animals grazing and fertilizing the pastures.”

I lean back in my chair, my slightly intoxicated mind absorbing Matthew's words. "So, when we restore the land, we have to replicate the work these animals did," Matthew says, taking a sip of beer before closing up. "We need our animal friends back on the land."

HOTLUM CAMP | Siskiyou County, California

Rising from the ashes.

I met with Jonathan Kabat, co-founder of Camp Hotlum, at the Hi-Lo Café in Weed, California, at the foot of Mount Shasta. Outside the window, I could see the devastation left by decades of logging. “You become deeply attached to a child or an animal as you care for them,” Jonathan told me. “At Hotlum, you care for the land and reconnect with nature.”

Over the next few days, we'll be working on a fire mitigation project with a group of volunteers, planting ponderosa trees and removing Arctostaphylos and Purshia tridentata. We camped under the stars, the Milky Way shining gloriously overhead. It's hard, but rewarding, working under the scorching summer sun. Just a few days after I left, lightning started the Lava Fire, and the wind drove the flames that surrounded Hotlum. The fire consumed all the homes and 95% of the trees.

I reconnected with Jonathan a year later, and he told me that Hotlum was recovering; the seed bank was intact, and wildflowers were blooming. He found the first beehive just the other day. Oaks are sprouting again from charred branches, and Hotlum's team has planted 500 trees. Some of the old-growth forest—canyon live oaks, ponderosa, mountain mahogany, Douglas fir, white spruce, and incense cedar—survived the fire and subsequent avalanches.

QUAIL SPRINGS PERMACULTURE | Ventura County, California

An abandoned stream receives a new community.

Listen to Brenton talk about resilience

Transcription

It wasn't property. I wasn't interested in having a title to a piece of land, but I still wanted to be deeply rooted in it. To truly feel some of the more tangible things that sustain my life: where the water comes from, where the light comes from, and how to build, how to be self-sufficient in the sense of needing nothing more than resilience to be able to care for the things that sustain me and nurture them, feed them, honor them.

I turn off onto an off-the-map road, enter a code into a lockbox, and drive slowly east through a series of gates to Quail Springs Permaculture (QSP). Barren, dry canyons stretch into the distance. The Cuyama Valley is the driest place on California’s central coast—receiving only 127 millimeters of rain annually—and also has one of the most heavily exploited groundwater basins in the state. Although the Chumash people have lived here for 10,000 years, it has taken private landowners only a century of extraction to bring the valley to a point of significant decline.

QSP is a sustainable community originally created to bring children to nature, but today it is organized around a five-pronged ethos: growing food in the desert to create healthy soil; protecting the local watershed by promoting sustainable groundwater policies; teaching permaculture, natural building, and earth-based tools online; advocating for fire-resistant and Earth-centered homes; and reaching out to the community in the underserved Cuyama Valley. Community members and staff who live and work here welcome volunteers who stay on the property for three to six months.

When I met Brenton Kelly, one of QSP's first board members who arrived here with his wife Jan in 2008, he was building a mud structure between his elegant, earth-connected home and his bountiful vegetable garden. The rhythmic, damp blows of his mud-covered shovel mingled with the buzzing of pollinators in the sage. Nearby, someone was playing a stringed instrument. Brenton washed the earth-and-straw mixture from his hands and bent down to scratch the ears of one of the giant Great Pyrenees dogs frolicking in the shade.

“This place used to be deserted,” Brenton tells me, without taking his eyes off what he’s doing. “Nobody lived here. But over the years, we’ve created a bed of shady trees and built homes where people feel comfortable.”

For 75 years, the previous owners kept 20 head of cattle on the property that is now Quail Springs Permaculture. Over time, the creek dried up completely. “It was largely just removing the cattle that allowed the creek to return,” Brenton tells me. Through careful observation and by studying Craig Sponholtz, a wetland restoration designer, Brenton finally felt capable of intervening to restore the creek. He built a few gabions (containers or cages filled with rocks to prevent erosion) and then placed sandbags impregnated with bulrush root rhizomes, allowing the roots to sprout through the tearing burlap and become a permanent part of the riverbank to accelerate natural restoration.

As the wetlands recover, they begin to produce more water, up to 5 gallons per minute. Today, 99% of the farm's water needs—irrigation for half a hectare of orchards, water for 20 Nubian goats and 20 chickens, and water for showering and cleaning for 20 residents—are supplied by the stream (a solar-powered windmill delivers drinking water to the community). A bed of cottonwood, black locust, and cottonwood trees provides precious shade and stands as a testament to the renewed cycle.

The sun dips behind the mountain to the west, casting long shadows across the valley. The Muddy Daughters band tunes their instruments and sings original songs in gratitude to the land that sustains them. I hear a flock of California ptarmigans in the distance, calling "chi-ca-go!" I follow Andre, a new volunteer, as he leads the goats out with a wooden staff. The sun highlights his silhouette, making him look like a biblical shepherd guiding his flock through the valley, a moment outside of time.

Listen to Ashwin talk about reconnecting with the earth

Transcription

I wanted a complete disconnect from the electronic world. And this place offered me the opportunity, so I took it as a volunteer. I lived in a tent for four months, almost five. I took the goats for walks, spent time in the fields. I learned basic irrigation and animal care, which in this environment also opened me up to a connection with the cosmos, between the stars you see at night and the details of the desert flora and fauna.

BIRDHOUSE CAMP | Los Angeles County, California

Changing the cast of the Hollywood Hills.

“Hollywood is important,” Jonny Allen tells me as we have coffee and toast with his partner, Bella LeNestour. “Because this is where stories are told, this is where our dystopian futures are created through the media, and we can make an impact by telling a new story of interdependence and possibility. That, as much as learning to farm the land, is our job.”

Bella and Jonny, both artists, co-founded Camp BirdHouse—a community garden and Environmental Resource Center (ERC) one mile from the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles—to answer a fundamental question: How do we live the life the planet demands of us today? Their garden is a food forest, an explosion of edible perennials, fruit trees, and nuts planted to support biodiversity and improve soil health. Two residential buildings on the property send greywater from dishwashers, showers, and appliances to the garden. To prevent evaporation, they cover the soil with compost; a large tree canopy helps manage the amount of sunlight reaching the ground.

Unable to acquire a large plot of land in the coveted Hollywood Hills, the BirdHouse team builds relationships with neighbors who embrace the project and participate in regenerating their own land, creating a mosaic of biodiversity within the urban landscape. One plot cultivates a medicinal herb garden, while another focuses on food production. A third parcel, owned by the municipality, was transformed into a demonstration site to show how severely desertified land can be transformed into a wildlife corridor.

Listen to Jonny talk about the importance of imagination

Transcription

Hollywood is important to us because it's where stories are told. It's where our futures are, in a way, designed through the media, and we can have an impact on that because most people live in a world of resignation, and we believe that all it takes is imagination. And once we've developed the ability to imagine a more beautiful future, we can live in that future. And I would say that's as much our job as learning to cultivate the soil.

“Once you start paying attention and developing a relationship with plants,” Bella tells me, “you can’t just say, ‘Let’s put a parking lot here.’” Jonny hands me an apricot from a nearby tree and pauses his harvest to gaze through the canopy of Los Angeles trees below. “Most people live in a world of unacknowledged resignation,” he says. “We believe that all it takes is a little imagination—we need to develop tools for imagining—and then we can live that more beautiful future.”

After saying goodbye to Jonny and Bella, it's time to head back home to South Carolina. I descend into the Los Angeles traffic on my way to the airport, the faces, places, and voices I encountered during my California tour flooding back into my mind, battling the endless concrete and trash-strewn streets to capture my imagination and establish a dominant narrative. The people I met refuse to give up and stop working for a better future. They stand defiant against the prevailing paradigm and model a better way of living. I choose to join them. As John D. Liu says, “This is the greatest work of our time.”