Season Two, Episode Eleven: Conservation Visionary Spencer Beebe on Salmon Nation and the Future of Community-Based Environmentalism

In this illuminating episode of Roots to Renewal, host Martin Ping engages with Spencer Beebe, a pioneering conservation leader who founded influential organizations including Salmon Nation, Conservation International and EcoTrust.

Spencer shares his remarkable journey and the development of his visionary concept "Salmon Nation," which reimagines conservation through the lens of bioregional identity and community empowerment. Throughout the conversation, Spencer illustrates how grassroots leadership is transforming environmental stewardship across the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

The discussion explores Spencer's philosophy that true ecological health is inseparable from community wellbeing, emphasizing the importance of empowering local "raven" leaders who understand their regions intimately. His approach focuses on restoring our fundamental connection to place as a critical pathway forward in addressing environmental challenges.

Listeners interested in learning more about Spencer Beebe's transformative work can visit ecotrust.org and salmonnation.net.

About Spencer Beebe:

Spencer B. Beebe, Ecotrust Founder and Board Chairman, earned his MFS (Forest Science) degree in 1974 from Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a B.A. in Economics from Williams College in 1968. He served with the Peace Corps in Honduras from 1968-71 and, after serving 14 years with The Nature Conservancy as Northwest representative, Western Regional Director, Vice President and President of the Nature Conservancy's International Program, he was the founding President of Conservation International in 1987. In February 1991, Spencer founded Ecotrust; with Shorebank Corporation of Chicago he helped found ShoreBank Pacific, the first environmental bank, now OnePacific Coast Bank. In addition to his work with Ecotrust, Spencer serves on the board of Walsh Construction Company and the Ecotrust Board of Directors. He is the author of Cache: Creating Natural Economies. 

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Transcript

Heather Gibbons (00:09):

We can think of no better way to bring you a new episode of our Roots to Renewal podcast than with special guest, Spencer Beebe, a pioneering conservation leader whose life's work embodies the powerful connection between ecological health and community wellbeing. Join our executive director Martin Ping as he sits down with Spencer to discuss his remarkable journey from falconry enthusiast to founder of groundbreaking organizations like Conservation International and EcoTrust. In this thought provoking conversation, you'll discover Spencer's inspiring vision for Salmon Nation and learn how grassroots leadership is reshaping conservation in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Stay with us for an hour of wisdom from a true environmental steward.

Martin Ping (00:55):

Good morning, Spencer.

Spencer Beebe (00:57):

Good morning, Martin. Glad to be with you.

Martin Ping (01:00):

Oh man, it's nice to be with you. It's been a long time. I was actually trying to remember this morning, when was the last time we were together and it was either when I visited Redd on Salmon in whatever year the biodynamic conference was happening out in Portland or when you came here and spoke at Hawthorne Valley.

Spencer Beebe (01:19):

It was four or five years ago.

Martin Ping (01:21):

Yeah.

(01:23):

Well, it's good to catch up with you now and we'll find out what you're up to lately. But for the benefit of anyone who might be listening who doesn't already know you, I think it's helpful to retrace some of the steps that led us to today and sitting here on this podcast, which in my understanding from reading your bio and from knowing you and doing some things together, it all begins with nature and your deep, deep connection and reverence to nature and maybe a childhood story that you could think of coming forward now that connects you back to your origin story and to the work that you're doing now.

Spencer Beebe (02:09):

Well, I've had a very fortunate run. I grew up in Portland with a family grandfather - great grandfathers who camped and fished and hunted and ran rivers and so virtually every weekend, somehow or other, my parents packed up a home built little green camp trailer and took five of us in an old station wagon, dragging a trailer up to the mountain somewhere and camping. And as I think you know I grew up practicing falconry, and that was probably the most powerful ingredient to my growing up and those sensitive adolescent ears. I was more often with a falcon or a hawk on my fist than I was drinking beer with a gang. And when you raise a Peregrine falcon from two or three weeks old to adulthood, you're building a relationship with an absolutely magnificent wild creature that forced you to respect the absolute integrity and beauty of those animals.

(03:21):

Every feather, every aspect of their lives is the result, of course millions of years of evolution, and they're absolute perfect at what they do. So when people would say, how'd you train that falcon? I'd have to keep from laughing because I'd say, no, you don't understand that Falcon's training me. So I had that wonderful experience growing up and it pretty much committed me to a life outdoors and a life trying to help look after the whatever it is, 15 to 30 million other species in addition to the human species around the world. That's been my devotion.

Martin Ping (04:00):

Well, and it led you to certainly land conservation, but obviously so much more than conserving land, really conserving these relationships that you're speaking about and that began with the Nature Conservancy, is that right?

Spencer Beebe (04:15):

Yeah, 1974, coming out of graduate school, I studied economics graduate and then Forest ecology, and of course my life has been mostly trying to put those two ecology and economics back together again. I found out there was an organization devoted to buying land and protecting wild little pieces of nature. Just thought that was absolutely a glorious possibility that you could actually make a living saving land. The Nature Conservancy Northwest Office in those days, there are about six of us and we had Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska. I think today there are a hundred staff in most of those individual offices. We thought we had it pretty well covered. We were far enough ahead away from the national headquarters that as long as we were doing deals, finding precious land and raising the money to acquire them and protect them, the honchos in Washington DC pretty much left us alone.

(05:20):

Of course, we had this big beautiful whack of the Pacific Northwest, including Alaska to run around in, and my sense at the time was that the conservancy, having grown up in the East Coast, was pretty focused on small tracts of land around endangered species, endemic species, unusual occurrences, small habitats, and out here I was always trying to push us to a larger landscape ecosystem scale initiatives and ultimately ones that embraced ranchers and farmers and loggers and fishermen, guest ranches in Montana to address the need to protect large functioning landscapes and ecosystems as well as small habitats and integrate it with interests of people who lived in these places. Those Sycan Marsh was a 30,000 acre acquisition we did in Southern Oregon. It's beautiful, high Mountain Marsh, really unusual pie. Butte Swamp in Montana, silver Creek and Sun Valley and south of Sun Valley. They were always examples of start trying to push the edges and inevitably I was sideways with a lot of them. Other folks at the Conservancy thought it was too ambitious or too big or too logged over or too overfished or too heavily grazed, but they all have become great examples of ecosystem restoration and integration with ranching and so forth. So it was a great experience and good training ground. I thought I was going to spend my whole life working for the Nature Conservancy. I could have very easily. It's a wonderful organization.

Martin Ping (07:09):

You stepped away from that. Is that when you helped or did form Conservation International?

Spencer Beebe (07:15):

Well, I spent two years in the Peace Corps in Honduras, spoke a little bit of stumbling fishermen Spanish and got talked into moving with the family to Washington DC to explore whether or not the Nature Conservancy should be working internationally. So I had what, 1980 till 87 when we started Conservation International and packing up a young family to DC was a little tortuous, but we did it and my poor wife raising our three beautiful kids almost on her own while I was running around all over Latin America. The focus was Tropical Rainforests, of course, and my thought was that we need to build local support local initiatives, not create them and not do the usual American thing of telling people if they did it our way, we'd give 'em some money, but rather to build Panamanian conservation organizations in Panama with those who might be interested in doing just that and just sharing our experience and providing support to the extent that we could for more bottom up local initiatives.

(08:29):

Local sovereignty became a really powerful motivation, and it also, of course in the tropics, we were in 13 Latin American countries. You end up looking at very large landscapes and the fact is that there are people living everywhere. And so the intersection with both indigenous people and rural people trying to make a living off the land was a given, and it forced us to further this idea of integrating social economic and ecological wellbeing on a scale that actually mattered. My suggestion was if the Nature Conservancy really wanted to protect biodiversity on Earth, most of it is in the tropics around the world, and that implied that the organization itself had to be international, so the board had to be international, the staff had to be international, and that needed to be structured to support country by country, local initiatives from the bottom up. But ultimately, I think the organization, some of them felt kind of threatened that we were running away with the future of the organization and they kind of wanted to take it over. And so a bunch of us got rambunctious and I drafted a letter of resignation and 55 and the 60 staff resigned and five board members signed. And on January 30th, turned out to be my wife, Janie's birthday, 1987. We created Conservation International. It was total mayhem.

(10:10):

It was a terrible way to start an organization and it was pretty chaotic, but freed from the nonstop bureaucratic like, why are you doing this and why are you doing that? We did the world's first debt- for-nature swap in Bolivia, and we had the support of the MacArthur Foundation and Muarie Gelmont, who's this wonderful, crazy smart guy who was chairman of the World Resource Environment Committee at MacArthur Foundation. Anyway, we got on the map and a bunch of guys from World Wildlife Fund decided to sign up, and Pete Seligman and the staff there really grew it into something pretty significant. I think it's 2000 staff today, $300 million a year budget. And they say they've protected almost a billion hectares of land and sea around the world. That's two and a half billion acres. That's 15 Californias and various protected areas around the world. I don't know how much of that is baloney, but if half of that is true, then it feels like we might've done something useful. And the conservancy rebuilt their international program and now they're all over the place.

Martin Ping (11:25):

I think it's been incredibly useful. And I take a moment just to say thank you for your part in that because it's really spearheaded quite important advocacy for nature and parts of what doesn't always have a voice at the table, the rest of our wonderful biodiverse species on this planet that we are sharing the planet with and the cultures that are connected. And I think that to me is one of the really interesting elements in this is the relationship of nature to people and vice versa. And I love the origin story of EcoTrust, which is the next chapter along the way as I understand in your journey of nature conservation and culture conservation,

Spencer Beebe (12:23):

When I felt like CI was up and running by that time, Janie and I and the kids, we moved all back to Portland home here. But it occurred to me that tropical rainforest, yes, sustainable development, yes, but there was something a little hypocritical about down the Brazilians had to say their rainforest when in fact we have our own rainforest. They're temperate rather than tropical. And so I thought, why don't we devote an effort to rainforest what we call the rainforest of home, the coastal redwood cedar hemlock for forest that extend all the way from the San Francisco Bay Big Sur to Kodiak Island, Alaska. And we said, why don't we take this on as a bio region and draw the lines around nature rather than straight lines of war and politics and genocide.

(13:34):

That was interesting. I think a lot of people got caught a little bit off guard about that. Temper rainforest, what's that? I mean, there's no intact entire watershed of any size in the lower 48 made a lot of mapping and analysis, what is a temper rainforest? Where are the temper rainforests, what's their status? And we found out that the North American expression of temper rainforest was the largest and also half of it was virtually gone being converted by industrial logging or agriculture urban development. And we were able to map out where the big remaining intact watersheds were. We used the watershed as a framework. So the effort, it was framed by the rainforest of home, the wiggly lines of nature, and at the core of the commitment was what I called E of the third power equity, economy, ecology. So equitably appropriate economic demand, environmentally appropriate economic development.

(14:40):

So it was very much about as much about community development and supporting small businesses as it was about conservation. And also at the core was the very simple recognition that, hey, by the way, like so many places around the world, most places around the world, there have been people living in this coastal temperate rainforest region as long as it has existed. The occupation of this part of the world by indigenous people came probably 15, maybe as much as 20,000 years ago. It was about the same time that the Interglacial period ice was retreating and this new kind of forest, coastal forest was emerging. So as the glaciers retreated, the salmon recolonized the streams and indigenous people colonized the whole territory. And I just thought, well, hello, where do you start with these initiatives? Addition to the mapping and understanding, but you start with the people who've lived here for thousands of years.

(15:50):

Surely they've learned something and their treatment has been dreadful as it was around the world and certainly across the western hemisphere. But we ought to stop and start and just connect with and listen to the leaders of the First Nations, indigenous Native American tribes before we go charging off with some grand ideas about what's best for that particular place and the people who live there. And clearly there was also fishermen, loggers, ranchers, farmers, as well as the urban development. We've got San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, big, beautiful, rich cities. It's one of the wealthiest places in the world in terms of economy and enterprise. Anyway, it turned out we started the Conservation International on Janie's birthday, January 30th, 87, and it turned out just altogether accidentally that we incorporated EcoTrust on February 13th, 1991, which was my birthday. It's about 30 years years old or more 34 years old now, and started as a simple c3 of 501c3 nonprofit.

(17:10):

I was struggling with the challenge between the way we organized the human enterprise relative to nature, and we'd inevitably create these nonprofits that were all together hierarchical rather than wholearchical. They were, you'd have a board, you'd have staff, you'd have a president, you have vice presidents, you have programs that you'd invent. You have to go put together a plan and a strategic plan and a mission statement. And it just all in the end would seem like, wow, this is not the way nature self organizes. It's not the way simple rules lead to complexity, and how could we make these organizations behave in the same ways as natural systems work? Now, that's been a sort of constant preoccupation. EcoTrust had a wonderful run as we explored what we could do to support people who lived in these places. We end up creating what we call the world's first environmental bank at Shore Bank Pacific and a related CDFI community development financial institution called TruBank Enterprise at first, now Craft3, the bank is now owned by Cal Beneficial State Bank, and they have offices in Los Angeles, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, and it's something like two and a half billion in assets.

(18:49):

And every day is making loans to small businesses that have committed to improving social, environmental and economic opportunity. We created EcoTrust Forest 20 years ago, which today, an independent organization called EFMI, as we thought, if these forests are more valuable as function ecosystems than they are as let's call a tree farm just to be cut every 30 years and then replanted and cut again. The ecosystem services provided particularly by these very rich, old, wonderful forests provide clean air, clean water, productive soil, recreation, alt range of wildlife and biodiversity themselves. And those values were not being represented by the clear cut and plant model. So we developed different models that said we're going to monetize the sale of ecosystem services through conservation easements and new market tax credits and other mechanisms, and we're going to do some logging but log less and we're growing every year.

(20:08):

And so we'll combine, we'll layer on the sale of ecosystem service, revenues on the ecosystem, product revenues, ecosystem products and forest are saw logs and boat logs. And I think over the 20 years now, run by this wonderful, smart woman named Bettina Von Hagen. They've raised $300-400 million wired over 200,000 acres, done over 20 acquisitions. They're in Oregon, Washington, California, and Nevada. And it's proving up to be a very solid, financially smart, low risk climate adaptive strategy for people to invest in the full range of values that these forests represent. That was a good piece. We just stumbled into all these different things that ended up, EcoTrust was a nonprofit, the c3 at the top, but we had about 25 for-profit subsidiaries. New market tax credits was this crazy complicated deal with US Treasury that was designed to support job creation in low income census tracks around the country.

(21:32):

And we pitched the rural development. Most of that was pitched around housing and low income housing in cities. The EcoTrust has been allocated, I think 10 allocations from Treasury over the last, what, 15 years total, over $400 million, and has done wonderful deals with tribes and rural communities. And some of the forest acquisition is financed in part with new market tax credits. It's a complicated damn thing, but they provide tax credits to develop oil, why not provide tax credits to support business development that's compatible with environmental restoration. Anyway, that's been a very successful thing. So EcoTrust has had a good run. I think it's got as rich and deep history of committing to a particular place, defined by nature, and then developing a wide range of ways in which to leverage charitable resources into substantial multi billion dollars in capital investments that just keep going. So that's a good thing. Of course, I got restless after 30 years or so and said, okay, that organization's up and running, how do we really create an organization designed with nature? And that's when I took off with this idea of the Salmon Nation and Salmon Nation Trust. I don't know if you want me to.

Martin Ping (23:03):

Yeah, I was actually, everything was in a way leading there because for one thing you've mentioned several times like the Shore Bank and some of the various operations operating in different states and their nation states or just arbitrary geopolitical ideas versus nature state or distinct from nature state. And the idea of Salmon Nation encompasses something entirely different, a really, really, I think beautiful and important imagination. So I was hoping we would get into that. And your thinking behind that.

Spencer Beebe (23:42):

Well, there's several answers to that. One is the fact that we're obviously in a very new era. We're clearly in what some people have called the Anthropocene, whether the geologists want to call it an actual new era or not, sort of beside the point. The fact is that humans collectively have an enormous influence on the function of large scale life support systems around the world. And we're in a period of systemic collapse of planetary life support systems, as most people focus on climate and on floods in Kentucky and fires in LA and so forth, which of course will be part of this, but not about ocean currents and ocean acidity and salinity and fresh water systems and the wide range welders. There about nine core life support systems that support all life on earth, ours and the rest of the species on earth. And most of 'em are moving from a condition of relative stability through boundary conditions of relative instability and the combination and the negative feedback's built in around things like melting ice and the Arctic and the Antarctic reduces the solar reflection that when the sun hits the ice bounces back the atmosphere, but instead it goes into the ocean and that feedback loops starts to accelerate the temperatures and the loss of sea ice and the changing oceans conditions.

(25:33):

So that's a big, we've finally come to the recognition that this is potentially really catastrophic. We're in a global emergency, clearly. So that's one thing, detail, right? But also with the cascading collapse. You look around at the world's nation states, the nations, they're about 200 worldwide. And try to think of the ones that are really, seem to be capable of supporting the ambitions of their citizens for a healthy, happy life, which also maintains and restores character of our water and air and land and soil. And you think of Denmark and maybe Iceland and maybe New Zealand and Bhutan, obviously there's some isolated condition, but wow, this disruption that's going on clearly pushing this country and other countries around the world towards pretty chaotic systems that tend to be more autocratic than democratic. And we're certainly seeing it here at home. So there's all those conditions. So I think, okay, nation states are collapsing, planetary life support systems are collapsing.

(27:08):

What if we tried to organize our human enterprise, at least our middle model around nature, which I call a nature state or a bio region. And depending on how you map it, there are 180, 200 bio regions around the world, about the same as the number of states around the world. And what we did at EcoTrust is say, well, here's a nature state that we call Salmon Nation or the Coastal Temple Rainforest, the rainforest of home. And what do you need to do to help support equitable, environmentally sensible economic development? And that's sort of a model. But then just as significantly, how do you create an organization which is modeled after these way natural systems self-organize? And what I find really interesting now is that after traveling in this part of the world for 35 years, everywhere you go in small, remote, isolated communities, outside the centers of power and politics and celebrity and billionaires and the preoccupation with people hanging on to the old system of money and power politics, you find that there are tough, smart, resilient individuals everywhere already doing everything we need to do to address the cascading collapse of planetary life support systems, climate change, and developing regenerative agriculture and ecological forestry and community-based fisheries and repatriating land and culture language with the sovereign tribes to green energy and green building.

(29:08):

There is a whole array of things that we know we can do that are economically sensible, more sensible than the existing models and employ people and provide for a sensible living. They're already out there, but these individuals tend to be isolated. They tend to feel unrecognized, under-resourced and a little frustrated because they're all radicals. They're all doing things exactly opposite of the traditional way. And I think, as you know, one of my favorites is somebody like Corey Carman, who young woman went to POA High School in northeastern Oregon, went off to Stanford and was doing food policy work in Washington DC and found out sadly, her dad was, had died in a tractor accident. She was called home. She took over the family ranch and grandma said, Corey, just do it the way we've all was done at. And Corey said, grandma, we've lost six inches of soil.

(30:15):

We're washing sediment into the Lau River. We live in a sea of chemicals. We're not pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and putting the organic, rebuilding organic matter in the soil, and we're sending our cattle to feedlots, and it's not even a healthy product on the end by the time it gets through. And it's certainly not humane to the animals. So I can't do it the old way. I just can't. Morally, ethically and practically, we've got to do something completely different. And so she's an outcast. She's like, what are you doing? You're crazy woman. You can't do that. Well, you can. And she is, it's a struggle. And then we call it a raven in the spiral dance at the edge of chaos. The edge of chaos is where new ideas emerge. They have to emerge to survive and to take care of land and water and livelihood.

(31:11):

So you just all, we found this wonderful man named Gerald Amos and some of his indigenous friends in the Haisla community, which happened to be a territory that was the largest intact coastal temperate rainforest left on the face of the earth, a million acres where they had lived for thousands and thousands of years. And Gerald led the fight to talk the company and to leave it alone, who was about to log it. And it's now this absolutely gorgeous co-managed million acres almost of Temperate rain forest from the top of the mountains to the estuary, the salt water. Anyway, and that was because of the leadership of this incredible small group of Haisla leaders. I've got this idea that if we built in this time the organization that we built instead of a c3, 501c3 straight nonprofit, we thought we really want more freedom to attract resources to support these individuals.

(32:27):

And the c3, as you so well know, the nonprofit has wonderful opportunities to raise money from philanthropic sources, but also has constraints in terms of cultural constraints and the, oh, you can't spend too much money on administration. You can't pay too many salaries, competitive salaries to get the best people on and on. So we created an LLC, a public benefit, LLC incorporated in Delaware, and it's called the Salmon Trust, and it's guided not by a board that tells us what to do, but by a 12 senior high profile public citizens who devoted their lives to wellbeing and are known and trusted, and they're not bored, but they track our commitment to social, environmental, and economic wellbeing in the bio region, in the place we call Salmon Nation by nature state. And then we have members of the LLC partners and we can invest in individuals or oriented businesses or creating new organizations or bringing people together or education research, basically whatever we want to.

(33:47):

There are investments in an LLC from people who share our interest in building out this idea nature state across the bio region. It's a tough sell. It gets complicated. And of course, I would make it way more complicated than it needs to be. But the interesting thing is these, if you dive in deep on how does self-organizing systems work, they start, there are three basic principles as far as I can tell. One is, you have autonomous agents making decisions based on simple rules. That's the way a flock of shorebirds murmurates its way up the coast. Keep moving forward. Don't smash into your neighbor and don't go 90 degrees or 180 degrees, or you're going to be the one that the Falcon picks off as it goes off and separate from the flock. Autonomous agents in our case are individuals, are these ravens in the spiral dance and they're making decisions and based on trying to improve social, environmental and economic wellbeing in their own territory.

(34:53):

There's three rules. Social, environmental, economic wellbeing. The second condition of self-organizing systems is moderately dense connections, not hard, hierarchical command and control connections, and not just downfield running, but some connection between, in this case, these ravens. When you get Corey and Crystie Kisler up in the north end of the Olympic peninsula, and similar people doing regenerative agriculture, getting them together, three or four or five of them in small groups or larger groups around their shared experience, what they've learned and what they've avoided and what they're struggling with. So moderately dense connections are these networks among ravens. The third criteria are tight feedback loops in nature, when you go astray and you don't obey the simple rules or the moderately dense connections, relationships, you're out of the gene pool. You get picked off. In our systems, we thought, well, the tight feedback loops would be stories of what works and what doesn't work.

(36:14):

So one, you have ravens, and that's the fractal. And one individual, Corey Carman managing her ranch in a truly holistic way, the way Hawthorne Valley Association's done so beautifully in New York, that's a fractal of how the system could work. And the trick is to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat what's working. And that happens in part by connecting those individual fractals with each other and then picking off the ones that are working because we're all doing dumb things all the time, and some things work and some things don't. But then promoting the stories of success. Wow, look at this. This is cool. But anyway, so it's a bottom up, not top down. And the governance that we've created at the Salmon Nation Trust is what we call inverse governance, because all the decisions are based on the needs and interests of the ravens, period. We don't have to create programs and projects.

(37:27):

We don't write annual plans and strategic plans. You can't plan anything today in the way world works. It's nonsense thinking. You've got a plan that's going to endure even for a year or six months. You go out and go to these places and ask, who's making stuff happen in this community? Who's doing radical new, important initiatives? And listen to them and listen and listen and listen some more. And some of 'em just say, just leave me alone. I'm fine. Get out of here. We got enough people, missionaries wandering around in here telling us what to do, but just finding them, listen to them. And some of 'em need technical support. Some of 'em could use just a human pat on the back and connections with others. Everybody needs money, of course. But if you make it about money, then you're just like another foundation sitting back in your big office handing out grants here and there to maybe one out of a hundred that people that come along looking for people like you and me with their hand out all the time with these nonprofits.

(38:35):

So that fractal, I mean, that's kind of a self-organizing system. And that's as close as I've come. And I think this idea of working the mental shift from nation state to "I'm the emperor I can do whatever I want" to Nature state is like, okay, we live in a place that has unusual ecological characteristics, allow us to do particular a kind of farming or a particular kind of forestry, particular kind of fisheries, particular kind of coastal development, particular kind of university and educational facilities that stimulate enterprise, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you take that idea of those individuals everywhere in the world and every bio region of the world, you'll find individuals usually outside the centers of traditional power. We're saying there's a better way to go. Maybe it was a historic way to go. Maybe it's a altogether new way to go, but those individuals need to be recognized, listened to, supported, connected, networked in the stories of hope in those places where that's happening, become kind islands of possibility, islands of hope and inspiration.

Martin Ping (39:59):

I liked when you were mentioning Corey and all of the ravens, and you used the term radical, and I always think of the root radis and that, to be radical is to be rooted and to be really more deeply connected to place. And it feels to me like that is one of the essential elements in this new story is that we're finding that relationship to our places in a way that's not so scattershot.

Spencer Beebe (40:30):

Yeah, I love the interview we did with Steve Jones, you know Steve Jones, the bread lad who was focused on local grains,

(40:40):

Traditional grains, the full range of grains milling and flour malting and so forth. He said, growing local grains and producing local flour is radical. Said that we used to have, what did he say? Several hundred today said, we've got, I've forgotten, 13 flour mills producing virtually all the flour in the country. There more. He said, there's more people making buggy whips than there are people making flour today. Are you kidding? He said, no, when you do this, this is radical. There used to be flower mills everywhere, and they're healthy. They're not causing this endemic of health issues that industrial culture has created.

Martin Ping (41:28):

Yeah, you mentioned the word hope and clearly, and one of the things that we're hoping to keep alive is that sense of hope for our young people being somewhat in the education business here with our visiting school program and the Waldorf School. And you want young people to have a sense of hope while also being very awake to the times they're living in, which are, as you mentioned, we're in a period of collapse and we need to be all doing something about that in whatever way we can. And I like that your stories all point out ways that things are happening. And I would encourage anyone who has not already done so to read both of the books that I'm aware of, which is "Cache: Creating Natural Economies", I think came out in 2010 or so and has some of these great stories, which again, they're practical, they're encouraging and hopeful, and they're just also fun to read and to think about being dropped off there by a float plane and then waiting for your boat ride to meet up with the native people in Canada, it's hysterical. I won't go into it. People should read it. And then "It's Not Any House You Know: New Myths for a Changing Planet", just beautiful stories, really, really poignant and really illustrating everything that you're talking about now in a way that is, I think, very hope giving. So I would encourage everyone to get a copy of both of those books, and they will end up being as dogeared as mine are because I refer back to them all the time.

Spencer Beebe (43:22):

"It's Not Any House", I had a wonderful editor who was a Pulitzer nominee, a poet, but we used the word deadly serious whimsy because we had this crazy French artist that did these drawings and paintings that had worked on, "[It's] Not Any House", but he said that nobody wished anybody a sustainable wedding, and if we can't laugh and dance and sing and have a good time, are you kidding me? So the whimsy, which is part of that just reckless, like, okay, let's go try this crazy thing. It's deadly serious right now. We've got to do truly radical systems change at a very micro level, but then we need the fractal scopus to scale it up to a, I think potentially global level. I think this basic thing of, hey, the good people everywhere doing good work, go find them and support 'em, period.

Martin Ping (44:21):

And it is serious work, and I always like to think we should have serious fun doing it, because if you're not, then it's not going to really attract that many people to want to sign on if we get up in the morning and whip ourselves with our hair shirts. And so I think of someone like you and our good friend, Judy Wicks, who's been the guest on the podcast and others who just really demonstrate that you can be engaged in this work day in, day out, tireless uphill battles in many instances, and yet never lose sight of the human element of it, and really being able to honor each other and have a fairly good time doing it. And anytime I'm hanging with you, I'm having a good time.

Spencer Beebe (45:09):

Nothing more fun in the world than going finding all these wonderful people. I walked into Sitka, Alaska, and a friend of mine said, Hey, you got to meet this guy. Roger Schmidt said, who the heck is Roger Schmidt? Well, he's got something called the Sitka Fine Arts Camp. We go, where in the world's that, what does that do with anything? He said, lemme go over and meet this guy. So we talked to this guy, Roger, he grows up in Sitka. He's a kayaker. He is a mountain climber. He sailed around the world. He builds anything and everything. He's a world-class musician. And he said, well, I was sitting here one day, minding my own business, and Lisa Bush, the director of the Sitka Science Center comes up and say, Hey, Roger, the old Sheldon Jackson College shut down the first one in Alaska built for native people. It's 20 acres right on the waterfront.

(45:59):

It's got 20 old buildings. It's all fallen apart. They don't know what to do with it. Why don't we go fix up the old theater building? He goes, Lisa, I have fixed up so many old buildings. I don't want anything to do with that to fix up another broken down building. He said, well, let's go. He said, the only reason that I'd be interested is if they just gave us the whole goddamn thing and just is a sort of throwaway joke. So he said, well, let's go out and talk to the trustees. I walk in and talk to the chairman of the trustee of the college, and he says, you know what, Roger? I think we should just give you the whole goddamn thing.

(46:37):

And six months later for a dollar, they got the key to 20 old buildings with what Roger said was at least a $40 million deferred maintenance problem and right in the waterfront in beautiful Sitka, Alaska. And he said, oh my God, what are we going to do? He said, he started talking to his friends that eventually he got a thousand volunteers, put up 40,000 hours and rebuilt every one of those old buildings, and they now have 800 to a thousand students from remarkably diverse backgrounds in the summer, programs, art and drawing and painting, photography and theater. That is just absolutely extraordinary. He said once people say, well, what's your budget? He said, budget, my is zero. And so he found out it really isn't about the money. It's about community. It's about creating hope and opportunity for young people that think they're not sure what they can do, but giving them the sense they can do anything they want. It's an amazing program. Came out of nowhere. He's just a cool guy to spend time with.

Heather Gibbons (47:59):

From his early days, exploring the outdoors to his transformative work with EcoTrust and his vision for Salmon Nation, Spencer Bebe exemplifies how one person's commitment can ripple outward to create meaningful change. His emphasis on empowering local raven leaders and restoring our connection to place offers a hopeful path forward in challenging times. To learn more about Spencer's work, visit ecotrust.org and salmonnation.net. Thank you for tuning in to Hawthorne Valley's Roots to Renewal podcast. Our interconnected initiatives work together to fulfill our association's mission of renewing soil, society, and self. To learn more about our efforts, visit us at https://hawthornevalley.org. As a registered 5 0 1 C3 nonprofit, Hawthorne Valley thrives on the generosity of supporters like you. Please consider making a donation to help us continue our work. Additionally, you can support us by sharing this podcast with your friends and leaving us a rating and review. We extend our gratitude to Grammy Award winner Aaron Dessner for providing our wonderful soundtrack and to Aaron Ping for his outstanding editing work.