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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. Joining me is my friend, Alicia Hamann, Executive Director of Friends of the Yale River. Hey, Alicia.

HAMANN:

Hey, Tom. Hey, listeners.

WHEELER:

And we are joined this week by Bob Schneider and Marc Hoshovsky, the authors of Exploring the Berryessa Region. Welcome to the show, fellas.

MARC HOSHOVSKY:

Thanks, good to be on the air with you.

BOB SCHNEIDER:

Thanks, Tom. And I want to add that Tim Messick was also one of the authors of the book, and he did all our graphics.

WHEELER:

All right. Well, so Bob and Marc, I imagine that you get to know each other well as you write a book. So if you could, Marc, please introduce Bob to our listeners. What should we know about this guy who you co-authored a book with?

HOSHOVSKY:

Well, Bob and I have known each other for a number of years. We actually worked on the first edition of this book, which was just focused on the Berryessa region. And Bob has a bachelor's degree in geology from UC Davis. He was the co-founder of the California Wilderness Coalition, and he also started Tuleyome, which is a regional conservation organization based in Woodland, but it covers some of the Coast Range areas. Bob and I have been working together on the first book we worked with a couple other geologists. On this recent book, one of the other authors was, two other authors, Tim Messick did the graphics, and Peter Schiffman, who is a retired geology professor. Unfortunately, Peter passed away while we were working on the book.

WHEELER:

All right, Bob, same question back to you. Tell us about Marc. What do we need to know about this guy?

SCHNEIDER:

I've known Marc for a long time and, you know, his face kept popping up now and then in Putah Creek issues or other conservation issues in Yolo County. He worked on the Davis Open Space Committee, and we have a lot of open space around Davis, so it's a tribute to Marc's hard work on that. And we came together on this, writing this book, and I'd done a little preliminary work starting off, just enough I knew I could tweak Marc into helping decide, yes, we should be writing a book on this book.

Marc's our primary author. He's a tremendous researcher. He also is quite good at running down into rabbit holes or wormholes, but he did the yeoman work in bringing this book to fruition, and I thank you for that, Marc. And we've worked well as a partnership, and I got to say, one of the really admirable work that I found, and I've told them this before, is he may be working on something and have feelings about it and writing it, and I'll say, that's not quite right, Marc. Mostly it's not about the science, it's about the tone, and Marc's always been excellent at looking at that and making a decision and changing his mind completely, and scientists sometimes have a hard time doing that, so a great compliment to you, Marc, and it's good to work with you.

HAMANN:

You guys make a really great team. Before we start diving into the book itself, can we back up a little bit and talk about the region that the book focuses on?

SCHNEIDER:

Yeah, let me start that, you know, we live in this area and probably, I like to say, about 25 years ago, I finally really discovered it after driving through it for years. And it's about the remarkable geology, it's about the biological diversity, it's about the incredible cultural diversity in this part of the world. In and around the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument and the Mendocino National Forest are 31 plus or minus different tribes, which made it quite complex, but also incredibly interesting as we wrote about that.

HOSHOVSKY:

Yeah, this is an area that is relatively unknown to a lot of Californians. It's almost the size of the state of Delaware, actually. And most people, when they're traveling in California, they'll go up the Central Valley on I-5 or they'll pass up 101 through Eureka and all the way to Oregon. And they really miss this central part of the coast ranges.

And this is an area, as Bob mentioned, the geology is so fascinating. Geologists fly in from all over the world to see this. There are features here that you can, that elsewhere you have to go down to the bottom of the oceanic trench to see it as submersible. Here you can drive by it and touch it. And this has such, has really unusual soil types, serpentines with rare species. As Bob mentioned, the cultural diversity from the tribes is really rich. There's a long history there that's happened to be interpreted from a lot of different lines of evidence. But it also has a great history of mining and these cultural, these health spring, mineral spring health resorts that had hotels that would host 250 people. And now all that's left are foundations of swimming pools.

So in many areas, there's a few of the hot springs that are still available, but it has just a lot of different features that people don't quite appreciate. And we wanted to tell people about that and get them inspired to go out and visit the area.

WHEELER:

So how did you come to fall in love with this region? If it is underheralded, how did it come onto your radar, Marc?

HOSHOVSKY:

Well, I love traveling. I have probably been on almost every state or county road in California, and I just love to explore places. And this is really in our backyard. We got involved a lot in doing Putah Creek conservation work. The Putah Creek watershed covers the southern part of the monument. And I also just started traveling through this area, and I just started appreciating more of the diversity that was there. And actually, when I got into the book, it pushed me into even more remote areas that just surprised me with what I found there.

WHEELER:

I was going to ask you, Bob, you began a movement to create a national monument for this place. So what drew you to it?

SCHNEIDER:

Again, it's those key issues that we talked about that are really special here. And one of my geology professors, Eldridge Moores, and his wife, Judy, started, we call him Mr. Plate Tectonics sometimes, but started leading tour trips into this region. And we wanted to memorialize those trips because they were getting older and couldn't do it any longer. And in doing that, we created our first book. And this grew out of that.

And I've been on Firescape Mendocino since it started. And with that organization, I learned a lot about the management and the leadership teams on the Mendocino National Forest and discovered a lot of what was in that part of the world. So this combining over 100 miles from Berryessa Peak to Snow Mountain just became a natural thought. And also, in terms of wildlife connectivity, this North-South orientation is an area that's really important for that through the monument.

HAMANN:

So for folks who just like you two did want to explore this region and fall in love with it, what are some like easy access points? Because I know I've traveled out there a little bit and not everyone can go and make a five or six hour drive and get deep into the wilderness. Are there places where people can dip their toes in to explore this region?

HOSHOVSKY:

Yeah, this is a challenging area because it's actually only two paved roads that cross the region. The rest of them are Forest Service roads, especially in the northern part where a lot of your listeners would be coming from. People can get into Lake Pillsbury area and drive some of the roads in the northern part of the region. And we have detailed driving guides that show what you can see along each of their major routes in the monument. It's more accessible in the southern part of the monument where there's a lot more roads, a lot more paved roads.

So one of our favorite spots is east of Clear Lake. If you take Highway 20 going over towards Sacramento Valley, you can get off of that at the ridge and go up on top of Molok Luyuk, which is a ridge going north. And you can get into incredible serpentine and geology. Our books describe a driving route you can take on that ridge, go all the way around the Bear Valley. And then there's other places down around the Berryessa region that it's easy to get access from Napa or from Woodland-Winters area that you can take our driving guides and go explore.

SCHNEIDER:

When we were working on the monument designation, at our first meeting we sat down and decided that this really needed to be an inclusive movement, that people cared about protecting our public lands. They could and should be a part of our campaign. And that largely came true. And the monument was designated on July 10, 2015. And a couple of years later, working with the [...] tribe, they became interested in protecting the Molok Luyuk Ridge that weren't mentioned. And it used to be Walker Road and Walker Ridge. And it was redesignated in the monument designation that was May 2, 2023, by President Biden. I guess that had to be earlier. Anyway, President Biden signed that one. And it was this collaboration with tribes that was a very, very strong effort. And we didn't get to have that in the first one, but we sure did later. So that was pretty amazing.

HOSHOVSKY:

I wanted to add that Bob was a very essential part of getting the monument established and the expansion. He was working very closely with Tuolomne and the California Native Plant Society and others, as well as the tribes, to really lobby people in Congress to establish the monument and expand it.

HAMANN:

So as you touch on in the book, the this region is ancestral lands for a really wide diversity of people, Yuki, Pomo, Wintun, many, many others. Were you able to connect with any of those folks in writing the second edition of the book? And and what what was that like?

SCHNEIDER:

Well, we consider that the issue is, really, there are 31 tribes, and they have their own stories. And we can't tell their stories, but at the same time they can't tell each other's stories, you know. So you could have 31 people contribute, and somebody should write that book, but we we decided we would undertake that, and Marc with some of his research actually took a lot of the wording from some of the tribal websites in the region. But also we looked ... really we focus on linguistics and how people arrived.

There's the 1908 Barrett map that's kind of considered by the state ... that's what is used for tribal sovereign boundaries now. That was a moment in time, because those tribes arrived at different times and they moved in and out and some of them mingled a lot, and and then they've changed since then, of course. So this is a moving time period which in that whole movement of how tribes arrived -- Yuki tribes, which later Hokan and Wappo were part of that language group, and then there was other language, Pomo language group, and then the Wintuns came in with late Miwok, and and the Hill Patwin and the River Patwin and one of my favorites, the [...], which is the northeast Pomo, which are the Salt Pomo tribe.

And they had trading routes because all these tribes interacted they they had trading routes they had hunting routes they had gathering routes and that tying together of there and during those times ... they they didn't just trade, they had like big times dancing celebrations opportunities. So that's been really awesome too, and very recently during the last two years I walked for a couple days on the commemorative walk and met a lot of tribal people at that event walking with them, and a lot of the people that led that and developed that commemorative walk were survivors of that trail of tears.

HOSHOVSKY:

And part of the teamwork here is that Bob was more engaged with individuals, tribal members, and a lot of his work with the National Monument. I started with the tribal websites, but I found that they were actually fairly sparse, and they made references to ethnographic papers. And so I actually did the research into these ethnographic papers to pull together a lot of information that's out there, but it's very inaccessible to most of the readers, and trying to weave it together with what I was finding from the tribal websites.

We did have some review from the [...] tribe of what we wrote, so hopefully we've hit the mark close enough. But like Bob said, only the people of the tribes can tell their story, and we're just trying our best to kind of consolidate from a lot of different viewpoints.

SCHNEIDER:

And I want to say there were two sources that we read that are very helpful. One's called Tending the Wild, and that's by Kat Anderson. She's a professor at UC Davis. And that's a really good—if somebody wanted to read one book about tribes in this region, that would be a really good book to read. Another book that was difficult to read but is critically important was An American Genocide: The United States and California Indian Catastrophe, and that's by Benjamin Madley. Those two books, I think, tell a lot of the story.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. We're talking to the authors of Exploring the Berryessa Snow Mountain Region about their new book.

HOSHOVSKY:

And one of the other things to add here is that the story is really, I didn't quite appreciate how tragic the story was. I've known about loss of Indians, but I didn't realize like admissions, there were 80 to 90% mortality rates, that so many 90% of people were killed by measles and other epidemics. That was just incredible. As I did the research, I began to realize how tragic this story was. But it also, we wanted to end the story with, you know, they're resilient people, they're reclaiming their lands, they're diversifying their economies, they're getting more rights, they're getting more public support. So we wanted to say that this is not like, they're still here and they're getting better at being present in society.

WHEELER:

Well, I think it's very cool that folks were able to work together for that 2024 expansion of the National Monument, that it was this conservation and tribal partnership to get this done. And, you know, I think that we see that now elsewhere in the state of California and other National Monument designations, whether that's Chuckwalla or Sáttítla. It is a very fun time for me as an environmentalist that we are seeing an expansion of our movement and the tent widening as opposed to contracting and becoming smaller than ourselves. So it's a great work to the whole team who made that possible.

So I want to get into the geology of this region to talk briefly about why it's so cool. And then, as I understand it, geology often makes geological diversity often kind of makes biodiversity in some sense. And so maybe we can then pivot from geology after which to talk about biodiversity. So who wants to talk about what makes this a geologically fun place to go?

HOSHOVSKY:

I'll go ahead and launch into that. You're right. The geology not only creates the rocks and the soils, but it also creates the topography, which influences the climate. And that's where the biodiversity is responding to a lot of those, the soil, the climate. So geology really does come from, is sort of the key part there. And this is the edge of a subduction zone. This is where an oceanic plate has been basically, initially was broken off and thrown on top of the continent. And then over time, subsequent parts of the oceanic plate were subducted beneath the North America. And you can walk out there and see these rocks that are out there.

You can go out and touch what are known as pillow lavas. These are lavas that have come out of either hotspots or mid-ocean ridges as basalt liquid rock. And when it hits the seawater, it forms this big pillow pattern and cools of the surface. And then more of it squirts out another way and it forms more of a pillow. You can walk over like in several places and touch these rocks that were formed at the bottom of the ocean. You can see rocks like on Molok Yuluk and other places that are metamorphosed and they were subducted 12 to 18 miles below the surface. Subjected to so much pressure and temperature, it changed the minerals into blue schist and in some places eclogite. These are rocks that you normally would not find on the surface. And they've been dragged up from like 18 miles below the surface up here so we can actually touch and find it. You can drive along and scrape your wheels on it, you know, as you're driving on the roads.

This place has other features. For example, there are two sea volcanoes. Volcanoes erupted on the sea floor. They erupted at different times about 50 million years apart in different situations and they have been pushed together so they are now within just a couple of miles each other. Very different histories but both volcanoes. There's places through the monument that the rocks, the Pacific plate is being, is sliding across North America. Most people know about the San Andreas Fault. They don't realize that in this area the San Andreas splits into several different branches and the eastern branch, the Bartlett Springs Fault, runs right through the monument and rocks along this fault zone have been sheared up to 20 miles apart from each other. They used to be right next to each other but the fault action has slid them so they're now 20 miles away from each other. There's just so many different cool things in this area that surprises us.

HAMANN:

And has the like fascinating parts of this of the geology of this region been known to scientists for a long time? Is this something that's been like well studied and well documented, or is this something that we're still learning new things about even today?

SCHNEIDER:

happened just in the last 20 or 25 years. There's been a lot of study, particularly like along the Bartlett Springs Fault. That's where the Scott Dam is in Lake Pillsbury, and the fault goes right through the reservoir. So there's a lot of concern over, well, I have a lot of concern for the seismic safety of the Scott Dam, good reason.

HAMANN:

Me too, Bob. Me too.

HOSHOVSKY:

This area, there's a paper that was produced in 1960 about the geology of California, and it identified this area as one of the least geologically known areas in the entire state. So that was 60 years ago. And even today, what we're writing about the geology is actually still being, the story is still being written. And there's different theories being developed about how ocean crust got on top of the continent, et cetera. We've had to basically try to select what we think are some of the most appealing stories and tell them, but there's still controversy and the story is still being written.

SCHNEIDER:

When we were working on the geology part of this book in 2024, twice new papers came out and we had to rewrite sections of our book. That's how recent this is.

WHEELER:

So let's let's dive into biodiversity then. So as as we previewed, geological diversity can can mirror biodiversity or can can cause biodiversity hotspots. This is a biodiversity hotspot. What what is so precious or what are the the life forms that are rare here that make this a place to visit?

HOSHOVSKY:

There's two different ways of answering that question. One is within this region, we actually have an incredible amount of habitat diversity. We go from these really dry, hot grasslands of the Central Valley up to red fir forests and conifer forests on the tops of the high peaks. We go from the coast into the interior. There's a lot of different climatic changes, so we have lots of different types of habitat in a fairly small area. But even more than that is the serpentine soils.

The serpentine soils are chemically really challenging for plants to live on, and as a result, plants have evolved different approaches to deal with this chemical imbalance, and thus has created a whole bunch of different rare plants. There's several rare plant hotspots here, which you can find 15, 16, 17 species that are found really nowhere else. Molecular is a great example of that. You just drive on through there, and just so many rare plants can be found on those serpentine soils. There's also these interesting cypress, Sarchin cypress and McNab cypress. The cypresses are like a type of conifer or evergreen, but they are fire-dependent. They need fire to open their cones and to prepare the soil for germination.

Without fire, these species will just be overgrown by other plants or just can't reproduce very well. They illustrate that fire is an essential part of the ecosystem of this area.

WHEELER:

So, we are in a tough spot for public lands these days. We have proposals coming out of Congress to sell public lands. We have discussions repeatedly about some sort of inability of the president to perhaps remove national monuments at their whim. This area is protected because of the Antiquities Act, which is over 100 years old. And we aren't seeing new wilderness areas being created. We're not seeing new federal laws being enacted to protect public lands. A recurring theme in the book is the need for public engagement. Why is it so important at this time? And Bob, given that you were so critical in the establishment of this national monument, and given your long work at the forefront of wilderness designations, I'll throw it to you.

SCHNEIDER:

Oh, it's just the attacks are somewhat relentless. And one of the shortcomings of our national monument, the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument with the Yuluk addition, is there hasn't been enough public information about this place where the public can find this, they can go and look at it and understand it and see it. And when people know a place, they work and want to help protect it. So this is a big step in that direction. And I hope from here, other people will write other books. And I also hope that people start coming here more and seeing it. And I could see people deciding to open a small guide service to tour people around now that they know how to show people what's here. And I think build that cadre of new people coming here to help us protect these lands. That's a good thing.

HOSHOVSKY:

And Bob had a great statement earlier to me that conservation is not just science, it's community, it's engaging people, and that's what we want to do. We want to intrigue people about this area, we want to get them out exploring it, to enjoy it, to learn about it, and by doing so get their support for helping protect this area.

SCHNEIDER:

And I want to read one quote from Kim Stanley Robinson, who's an award-winning author and wrote for the Minister of the Future about climate change. He wrote, every bioregion deserves a book this good, but very few have them. The deep dive across all the relevant disciplines is admirable. Together, they make a kind of bedrock for a living relationship between active readers and the land we live on. What this book teaches us will help us to preserve and to pass our home intact on to generations to come. So I thank Stan for writing that for us.

WHEELER:

That is a hell of a quote from a great author. So congratulations, that is a fantastic blurb for this book. So the book is being published. I believe we have some word today that books are on the truck going to be delivered or something like that. Can you tell us about how to get your book, who's publishing it, all of those sorts of good details?

SCHNEIDER:

Well, we're fortunate to have Backcountry Press as our publisher. Michael Kauffmann in the North Coast, he's printed a lot of really excellent books on the outdoors and these monuments and trees and mushrooms and whatnot, but the best place to get information on our book, yes, the books are on the truck, but the publisher release is going to be in early January. In the meantime, please email Backcountry Press, get it on their email list, newsletter list and Michael will let you all know.

HAMANN:

So for those of you who want to gift this book to someone for the holidays, make a little coupon. Stick it in their stocking. Book to come in January.

SCHNEIDER:

We like that. We like that. We like all the pre-sales. People want to just email me too. I'm at verve2006 at comcast.net

WHEELER:

All right. Well, Bob, expect a lot of spam and I, I really appreciate you both coming on the show and for your work to, to promote the Berryessa Snow Mountain Region. I honestly have driven by it on the 20, but have never taken the time to go explore. And now it is on my to do list. So I will see you folks out there maybe this summer.

HOSHOVSKY:

Awesome. It'd be fun to see you out there. All right.

WHEELER:

I will. I will give you a call. Maybe we can go for a hike together. Well, friends, unfortunately, we are just about out of time. Again, we have the authors, Alicia. Yeah.

HAMANN:

I just remembered I have a really important announcement to make. While we're talking about this cool region and getting involved and engaging with protecting a place that you love, the deadline to submit comments in support of Eel River Dam removal has been extended. So you can submit comments now until December 15th. Folks, we have seen a lot of comments in opposition. So we really, really need to bolster, bolster our community to raise their voices in support of Eel River Dam removal. And you can find instructions for submitting those comments at EelRiver.org.

WHEELER:

All right, and there'll be a link in the show notes to eelriver.org and to Backcountry Press where you can find more information about this book and so many other wonderful books about our region. Again, we have the authors of Exploring the Berryessa Snow Mountain Region, Marc Koshovsky and Bob Schneider. Thank you so much for joining the Econews Report.

HOSHOVSKY:

Thanks for giving us a chance to talk about the book. I appreciate that.

WHEELER:

All right join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the north coast of California