Nature's Archive Podcast

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[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: Have you ever thought about how or why natural areas like state or county parks, open space, or wildlife refuges were set aside and saved? Sometimes it seems amazingly unlikely that these places even exist. And it’s too easy to assume that there’s no land left to set aside. But today, we’re telling the story of Coyote Valley, a land adjacent to the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley.

[00:00:23] I don’t want to spoil the story, but I will tell you it’s inspiring and it shows just what can happen with the right combination of ingredients. And it turns out those ingredients probably exist where you live, too. This episode was actually aired on our Jumpstart Nature podcast last month.

[00:00:39] The Jumpstart Nature podcast is a little bit different than Nature’s Archive. It’s an immersive narrative style hosted by Griff Griffith and written by myself. Our goal with Jumpstart Nature is not only to inspire existing nature lovers, but to reach beyond the choir, so to speak.

[00:00:53] So with that in mind, will you please consider sharing this episode with two people or groups that you think would enjoy it? We really need your help in getting the word out on behalf of nature. So without additional delay, saving a valley.

[00:01:06] Griff Griffith: On a crisp morning in 1983, Steve Jobs was on a mission.

[00:01:16] A helicopter carried him high above the rolling green hills just south of Silicon Valley as he searched for something that would change the future of Apple computers.

[00:01:27] With him was an Apple Vice President and a real estate consultant. Their objective? Find a new headquarters for the rapidly growing computer company.

[00:01:36] Jobs had found his site, the lush grasslands and oak savanna covered hillsides of Coyote Valley.

[00:01:43] Griff Griffith: Soon after, Apple owned the land and it looked like the headquarters project was off and running.

[00:01:49] Andrea Mackenzie: the Coyote Valley landscape has captured my heart.

[00:01:53] It’s

[00:01:53] a, in many ways, a forgotten landscape, a tortured landscape, and yet it survives and keeps coming back time and time again. It’s showing that resilience for nature and resilience for people.

[00:02:07] And turns out that the Coyote Valley is one of the most important undeveloped valley floor landscapes in the entire San Francisco Bay region. And so each day we’re discovering more and more about why this kind of a place adjoining the 12th largest city in the nation is so very important.

[00:02:27] Griff Griffith: , Andrea McKenzie is a general manager of the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority, an organization that stewards much of the land in Coyote Valley.

[00:02:36] Now you might be wondering how she can refer to the space as undeveloped when a tech giant like Apple , with a driven and unstoppable leader like Steve Jobs was intent on developing it.

[00:02:47] This is an amazing story of an incredible land with equally incredible history.

[00:02:53] Chairman Lopez: And if you look west , you would see the peaks of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and one of the tallest peaks. That’s Mount Umunum, and that’s the location of our creation story .

[00:03:03] Griff Griffith: And the story of what happened to Coyote Valley is full of unexpected alliances.

[00:03:08] Megan Fluke: I jokingly suggested that he should start donating to, uh, support all of the work that they were creating for me and the team. well, wouldn’t you believe it? they’ve been an annual donor ever since

[00:03:20] Griff Griffith: A little luck.

[00:03:21] Stu Weiss: one of the things I noticed is that every time a coyote valley development started getting some momentum the economy would crash or there’d be a tech crash, and the plans would go away for a few years.

[00:03:33] Griff Griffith: And Incredible Perseverance.

[00:03:36] Megan Fluke: yeah, it was hard. But at the end of the day, we were working in community

[00:03:41] Coyote

[00:03:41] Griff Griffith: Valley’s Story is one of hope and inspiration and it’s a model for nature conservation of all kinds.

Theme Music Here

[00:03:46] Griff Griffith: I’m Griff Griffith, and welcome to Jumpstart Nature Okay. You’re here listening to Jumpstart Nature. That tells me one thing. You are a nature lover., and I bet there’s a landscape near you that you absolutely cherish.

[00:04:16] It might not be famous. It might even be overlooked. It’s beauty and importance unnoticed by most, but you see it, you feel it. You have a deep personal connection with that place. We all have these places, but my next question is the most important one. Is that land that you love threatened by habitat loss?

[00:04:34] Human encroachment or construction? Is that land protected? If not, why not? But first let’s paint the picture of Coyote Valley a bit more to make it real for you.

[00:04:45] Michael Hawk: I moved to San Jose in 2011. So San Jose is considered the heart of Silicon Valley, where tech companies employ hundreds of thousands of people. It’s part of the greater San Francisco metro area, which is home to nearly 10 million people.

[00:05:00] After I moved here, I hiked a hill very close to my house and I noticed this vast open space to the south. It was a valley with a mosaic of landscapes. There was agriculture, a river running through the middle of it, there was a massive wetland full of water just over the hill from where I lived. It looked beautiful.

[00:05:18] I wondered why it hadn’t been built in to suburbs and business parks like the rest of Silicon Valley. The iconic US 101 highway bisects the valley. But I was drawn to that wetland. I wanted to go explore it. I could see the mountain range on the other side of the valley. It’s called the Diablo Range, and it was poking its way across the valley floor almost connecting to the Santa Cruz foothills on the other side, and the hills were dotted with massive and ancient oak trees, bay trees, buckeye, trees, and so much more.

[00:05:49] I slowly realized I’d lucked into moving to what was perhaps the last suburb to have been built next to Coyote Valley.

[00:05:56]

[00:05:56] Griff Griffith: That’s Michael Hawk, who you probably know as the founder of Jumpstart Nature and the producer of this podcast.

[00:06:01] He’s been telling me stories about Coyote Valley for years, and that we had to do a podcast episode about it. Well, he convinced me. To show you why you should know the story of this land.

[00:06:13] Nick Perry: So I grew up door to my grandparents. and they came here during the Great Depression when my grandpa did. He was actually a migrant farm worker from New Mexico.

[00:06:22] And so he would take me places to show me what Santa Clara County looked like before it was Silicon Valley, one of the places we would come to.

[00:06:29] As we would keep driving south, out of San Jose and to Coyote Valley, and he’d be like, Nicholas, this is what Santa Clara County used to look like. This was a paradise before it all got developed. And this is, this is your glimpse of what it was before. And it just really fascinated me. I was like, wow, this place still exists. My name is Nick Perry. Coyote Valley Project Director for the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority.

[00:06:51] Griff Griffith: Nick has a deeply personal relationship with this paradise.

[00:06:55] Just like Apple before, Cisco Systems, a global tech giant, wanted to relocate their headquarters to Coyote Valley.

[00:07:02] Griff Griffith: Nick, just a high school student at the time, couldn’t stand to see his paradise turn into another sprawling low rise office campus.

[00:07:09] Nick Perry: I created a Save Coyote Valley website, because I thought, well, you know, like there’s someone who needs to advocate for this place. When I created my little website, it got a lot of attention. And as a teenager I was getting emails from people, who were angry at me. I was just rereading some of them because I printed them out and put them in this folder that I’ve had since high school. But some of them were like, how could you stop progress?

[00:07:31] Griff Griffith: Politicians and real estate moguls like to call this “development”. You know, take some useless land and make it useful.

[00:07:39] Develop it. To developers, usefulness often starts with a large construction contract. For politicians, it starts with tax revenue, but there are other ways to value land too.

[00:07:52] Andrea Mackenzie: these kinds of large extensive open spaces

[00:07:55] act in our favor. They act to help us build resilience to these increased climate challenges by buffering lands from massive wildfires, soaking up storm waters as they come through, storing water underground, which we can tap during times of drought. These are the gifts that nature keeps giving us for free. And increasingly we’re putting a price on those and we’re understanding the value of them. But it’s really important to educate the broader public and decision makers so that piecemeal decisions aren’t made that undercut these services that nature is providing us

[00:08:35] Griff Griffith: That’s Andrea Mackenzie again. She’s talking about ecosystem services.

[00:08:40] There are so many things that nature does for us that we often take for granted and overlook. These services don’t show up on corporate balance sheets, but if they go away, they show up as natural disasters. They also show up in the form of increased insurance rates, increased food prices, pollution, floods, and wildfires. But it’s easy for a developer to discount or ignore these free services when advocating for their projects.

[00:09:02] After all, most of those costs I just mentioned, aren’t felt by the developer because they are paid by others often months or years later. In economics, these are called externalities. And unfortunately, are often overlooked.

[00:09:14] But in order to solve this, we must first understand how the land benefits us

[00:09:19] Megan Fluke: the Coyote Valley campaign, which you know, is a multi-generational campaign that started decades ago. The effort really seemed like a campaign to protect this landscape for the sake of the landscape, and that it was beautiful and it was open space and open space ought to be protected.

[00:09:38] The way that it evolved is we started to learn so much more about Coyote Valley, that it was an essential wildlife corridor for large mammals between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Mount Diablo Range, that it protected San Jose’s water quality and protected San Jose from flooding. Just a whole host of other benefits that I could riddle off.

[00:09:59] The way that the goal evolved is that as we learned more about all of the value that Coyote Valley provides, that development in Coyote Valley just didn’t make sense both from a climate change perspective and also from an economic perspective.

[00:10:14] Griff Griffith: Megan Fluke, who we heard from in the intro, is the former Executive Director of Green Foothills, a non profit that advocates to protect open space and natural resources in the South San Francisco Bay Area.

[00:10:26] Green Foothills was among many other local advocacy organizations that have played a critical role in working to protect Coyote Valley, but ecosystem services aren’t just about the economic benefits of nature.

[00:10:38] It also includes the cultural and spiritual benefits.

[00:10:42] Chairman Lopez: My name is Valentin Lopez, and I’m the chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. I’m also president of the board of directors of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust. Amah Mutsun Tribal Band is comprised of the descendants of the indigenous peoples that we’re taking the missions San Juan Bautista and Santa Cruz. Our territories began at the very southern end of Coyote Valley. History identifies our tribe as hunters and gatherers. And, uh, that’s quite insulting, and nothing can be further from the truth. Our people were very active stewards of the land. You know, our creation story takes place just directly west Coyote Valley, and if you look west, you would see the peaks of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and one of the tallest peaks. That’s Mount Umunum, and that’s the location of our creation story. And in our creation story, Creator gives us the responsibility to take care of Mother Earth and all living things. And so for us, all living things are the plants, the trees, The wildlife, the birds, the fish, the four legged, the finned, but then also the rivers, the mountains, and, the view sheds.

[00:12:00] Those were all our responsibilities and our people took it very seriously. We had the responsibility to ensure there was adequate foods for the fish, for the migrating birds, for the deer, the elk, the bear, etc. That was our responsibility to take care of those cultural resources, those food resources for all species.

[00:12:20] Griff Griffith: The depth of connection that indigenous people have with this land is hard for most non indigenous people to fathom. And modern society is often dismissive of traditional ecological knowledge because it doesn’t use the same terminology as Western science.

[00:12:33] And isn’t written up in pricey academic journals.

[00:12:36] Chairman Lopez: when I was in college, I went and looked at the words science and, because I knew that archaeology and chemistry, or biology, you know, I understood what those words meant, but science, what the heck did science mean?

[00:12:49] So I went to the library and looked it up, and science is the study of knowledge. And so when I look at it that way, all of our ancestors were scientists. You know, they’d studied how the plants interconnected, how they studied about the winds.

[00:13:03] They studied about the rains. They studied about the fog, the shadows. we knew that when the insects, nested in the ground, you know, what their nesting periods were so we wouldn’t burn during that time.

[00:13:14] Griff Griffith: You know, science is one of those terms we hear and use all the time, but I decided to look up the definition, just like Chairman Lopez did. Here’s what I found. The systemic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against evidence obtained. Over thousands of years, indigenous people had to study, observe, experiment, and test in order to thrive.

[00:13:56] As you might guess, open space adjacent to a prosperous area like Silicon Valley is in high demand.

[00:14:02] And And demand to develop in Coyote Valley has been consistent. Dr. Stuart Weiss is Chief Scientist at Creekside Science. He’s been working on various biology and ecology projects in and near the Valley for many years.

[00:14:17] Stu Weiss: Over the years, there’s just been all these development proposals in Coyote Valley. So back in the eighties, it was Apple and Tandem Computer wanted to put in a huge development in the late nineties cisco wanted to put their world headquarters right down there as part of Coyote Valley Research Park. And then in the mid two thousands people were pushing to have a city, developed on the valley floor. And one of the things I noticed is that every time a Coyote Valley development started getting some momentum, the economy would crash or there’d be a tech crash, and the plans would go away for a few years.

[00:14:58] I just thought that was an interesting leading economic indicator kind of wish I had based my stock investments on that

[00:15:06] Griff Griffith: the demand to develop Coyote Valley was so high that huge projects were pursued. Each one was complex and costly.

[00:15:13] And thankfully, there was a little luck that prevented these projects from proceeding. In fact, the Apple project fell through during the mid eighties, not just because of an uncertain economy, but Apple’s internal politics led to Steve Jobs being forced out.

[00:15:26] Apple ended up selling the land to another developer. And this is one of the first lessons that Coyote Valley can teach us. Perseverance is critical because you never know what is around the corner.

[00:15:38] Griff Griffith: But even as the development projects fell through, other threats remained.

[00:15:42] Dr. Weiss, while in graduate school, had been studying the Bay Checkerspot butterfly. The small butterfly used to be abundant across much of The San Francisco Bay Area. But at this time, only a few small populations remained, and one of those populations was in some hills adjacent to Coyote Valley.

[00:15:59] These grassland hills were grazed by cattle, so some of the researchers decided to fence off a section and see what happened. To their surprise, the fenced off area was taken over by non native Italian ryegrass. The soils in those hills were made of an ancient serpentine rock, which is known to be nutrient poor. And only specifically adapted plants can grow in serpentine soil. Why was the Italian ryegrass here when it struggled to grow so well in other serpentine areas?

[00:16:27] Stu Weiss: I went back to graduate school at Stanford to get my PhD. And I was sitting in a ecosystem ecology class, and the professor Peter Vitousek gave a lecture about something called dry nitrogen deposition. And it was like the light bulb went off in my head and I think it was the magnitude of the Las Vegas strip by the time it was over.

[00:16:53] Stu: And I made all the connections because I’ve been staring up at the smog cloud for about a decade at that point

[00:17:01] And then few back of the envelope calculations and it’s like, yeah, that’s a lot of nitrogen coming down. And that was the moment when I knew that this was an amazing connection here.

[00:17:12] Griff Griffith: It took Dr. Weiss a few years putting the research and science together. He needed to find out why the grazed areas showed more native plants and stronger butterfly populations, and why Italian ryegrass was growing so much better in those areas that were not grazed.

[00:17:27] Stu: And then I published a paper in 1999 that described the phenomenon.

[00:17:32] It’s called Cars, Cows, and Checkerspot Butterflies. And it’s become a bit of a citation classic at this point because I had made a really direct connection between the nitrogen deposition and the loss of biodiversity.

[00:17:45] Griff Griffith: Dr. Weiss was able to show that emissions from cars were fertilizing nearby lands. It was turning those nutrient poor soils into soils that could support invaders like ryegrass. His math showed that as much as 6 kilograms, or 13 pounds, of nitrogen was being applied to an acre of land every year.

[00:18:03] It turned out that the cattle were preferentially eating the invasive grass, due in part to how the grazing was managed. That’s right. Cows were actually helping biodiversity in this unique environment. This is a fascinating story that we looked at in more detail

[00:18:17] in Nature’s Archive Podcast Episode 37. But this discovery and the research that Dr. Weiss did was a key to unlock some of the biggest steps to protect Coyote Valley.

[00:18:27] In 1999, when Dr. Weiss’s paper was published, there was also a proposal to build a power plant in the north end of Coyote Valley.

[00:18:35] Stu: There was a proposal for the Metcalf energy center, 600 megawatt gas fire power plant,

[00:18:41] And it’s a large source of nitrogen oxides.

[00:18:46] The U S Fish and Wildlife service and the California Energy Commission told the proposers of the power plant that they had to do something, we have to mitigate for this.

[00:18:56] Griff Griffith: Many federal, state, and sometimes even local governments require projects that cause environmental harm to offset that harm in some way. In this case

[00:19:06] Stu: they really wanted the power plant and, we’re willing to put out a lot of extra what seemed to me have a lot of extra money, but it’s a half billion dollar project.

[00:19:15] 10, $20 million extra for mitigating was part of the capital costs and they were willing to do it. And we really wanted a precedent for mitigating for nitrogen emissions, because we figured we could start leveraging that. So that went through. In 2003, we have this ceremony dedicated in the Metcalf’s Energy Center Ecological Reserve.

[00:19:40] Stu Weiss: the mitigation for the Metcalf Energy Center turned out to be 131 acres of habitat conserved,

[00:19:47] Stu: So we had the precedent.

[00:19:49] Griff Griffith: This precedent led to 600 additional acres preserved when the US 1 0 1 highway was widened. Eventually, an 1800 acre hillside preserve was also developed This allowed local groups to show the public and the politicians this gem that people were driving by every day, but not noticing -until now. The views from the ridge were both breathtaking and informative.

[00:20:11] Advocates and biologists could tell the story of the land.

[00:20:15] They could show people super blooms of native flowers, the wetland below and how the highways bisected this narrow valley.

[00:20:21] People could easily see just how close the other range was across the valley.

[00:20:27] Andrea Mackenzie: One of the earliest Discoveries about Coyote Valley and why it was and is irreplaceable landscape is we realized that it was the last viable land connection or bridge connecting the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range. A million acres of habitat in those two ranges. The success of those habitats depends on the gene flow and wildlife able to move between those two mountain ranges. So by protecting it, it’s the missing puzzle piece that allows us to avoid extinctions and to, improve the biological conditions for many, many species, some of which are found nowhere else in the world.

[00:21:12] And it’s easy for people to understand. It’s compelling. You have charismatic megafauna, as we like to call them, the mountain lions and the bobcats and the foxes and the golden eagles and the bald eagles that are all active in this landscape. And so they become really the salespersons, the ambassadors for protecting this landscape.

[00:21:35]

[00:21:35] Griff Griffith: I like to call those charismatic animal species

[00:21:38] ambassador animals. And if this story of landscape linkages and connectivity sounds familiar, it’s because we did a deep dive in the episode we called The Age of Connectivity.

[00:21:48] Biologists and the general public, like you , are recognizing that the impact of fragmented habitats goes way beyond tragic roadkill.

[00:21:57] Ambassador animals are a critical part of many successful conservation efforts. The charismatic mountain lion of Hollywood, P 22, did so much to sway public opinion, resulting in the construction of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in Los Angeles.

[00:22:11] And these types of stories are showing up more and more all around the world.

[00:22:22] Nick Perry: right now we have about 1, 500 acres of the valley floor permanently protected.

[00:22:26] Griff Griffith: That’s 1500 acres protected in addition to a few thousand acres in the bordering hills. The Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority sees a bright future ahead, but protection of this landscape is just one important step in Coyote Valley’s journey. They are developing a comprehensive master plan that incorporates land use agriculture, habitat restoration, and access. And to do this well, they are engaging with the public, landowners, the Amah Mutsun, and other local tribes, as well as other users and stakeholders. Many more steps lie ahead. Some of the improvements will happen quickly, but some habitats may take years or even decades to fully recover.

[00:23:04] Andrea Mackenzie: Native American ethos and philosophy is that we should be thinking seven generations ahead. And conservationists know this. They feel it in their, bones that we must be thinking long term

[00:23:19] Griff Griffith: remember earlier when I asked you about the local landscape that you love? Chances are it needs some help just like Coyote Valley.

[00:23:26] And there are so many lessons to be learned from this story. So what lessons can our guests share from this experience in Coyote Valley?

[00:23:33] We already mentioned the importance of perseverance, even when times look tough. Unexpected turns led to development projects falling by the wayside. Megan Fluke elaborates on this.

[00:23:43] Megan Fluke: What was surprising was that at some point we realized that the energy to pave over Coyote Valley and industrialize Coyote Valley really was just coming from a handful of people who had hopes for an industrial and urban city on this landscape.

[00:24:02] It almost felt like the Wizard of the Wizard of Oz for those that know that story. Once we looked behind the curtain, this seemingly, you know, sort of formidable opposition that just we couldn’t really grasp, but we didn’t really know where all this, you know, energy was coming from. This opposition really wasn’t as powerful as we thought.

[00:24:22] the campaign to protect Coyote Valley not once felt hopeless. It felt hard. It felt overwhelming, maybe confusing at times, but not hopeless. we pushed through and we persevered because that’s what advocates do, and we had the community on our side. I

[00:24:39] Griff Griffith: Getting the community on your side is another critical lesson. Ambassador animals can help with that, but you need to be sure people are connected to the land and the vision.

[00:24:48] Megan Fluke: One way that we’ve found to keep people energized is connecting them to the land. One of my favorite quotes is from the naturalist and writer Obi Kaufmann, people protect what they love and love what they know. The way that I found that’s helpful to keep people energized is through education and community connection And. Frankly, having a good fight every so often also energizes people too.

[00:25:15] Stu: We started taking people up to Coyote Ridge to see it, in 2003, I invited all of the elected officials in Santa Clara county to come take a tour and we had it set up so they would show up we’d shuttle them to the top in our four wheel drive vehicles, . And we’d have them for a few hours.

[00:25:35] We’d feed them like this gourmet lunch, then we’d send them on their way back down the hill. And it was transformative. We ended up with some real champions in the elected bodies who realized that, hey, we’re Santa Clara county. We do things right.

[00:25:51] Griff Griffith: Finding champions is also critical, whether it be elected officials, energetic advocates, or existing landowners.

[00:25:59] Nick Perry: Coyote Valley is an amazing place for agriculture. It has great soil, good weather. Agriculture definitely faces economic challenges, but there’s really great potential to help reestablish local agriculture in places like Coyote Valley.

[00:26:15] Griff Griffith: And feel free to toot your own horn once in a while, too.

[00:26:18] Andrea Mackenzie: We acquired a piece of property and opened it to the public in 2015, 350 acres called the Coyote Valley Open Space Preserve. Right before we opened it to the public, we had convenings there and community celebrations to bring many, many people out. People actually drove 45 minutes from San Francisco to come check out this new landscape. And it became a wonderful gathering spot for people to learn about Coyote Valley.

[00:26:52] That would be just a fraction of the conservation achievements we’ve achieved since then. I kind of liken it to this analogy of a, a small bird sticking out its chest and trying to appear bigger than it really is. That’s the kind of behavior that, that we engaged in to show people this was a small but really, really important

[00:27:13] Open Space Preserve, and when we opened it to the public and invited them to come in, they started to get a taste of what this amazing landscape, which had been forgotten for so long, and was surely going to be developed over time, and now belonged to them. What it could be if we thought bigger.

[00:27:31] Griff Griffith: And too often, Indigenous knowledge and partnership is missed.

[00:27:36] Chairman Lopez: I think that what’s really important is for the land managers to recognize the importance and the contributions of traditional indigenous knowledge, you know, our knowledge of the use of fire for cultural burning, not just prescribed fires to reduce fuel, but the importance of fire for, you know, enhancing and developing cultural landscapes. Restoring native plants.

[00:28:02] we’ve talked about these authorities and we’re actually working with them on a number of these initiatives as such. we feel that we have a good relationship with them today. And, and that we are working with them and they do have an appreciation for indigenous knowledge.

[00:28:17] I’d like people to recognize that we suffered through three the brutal periods of colonization. They were very difficult to us. And we people to know that we do not look at them as being the perpetrators to what happened to us. We don’t blame them. But what we ask for them to recognize, how much they benefited from that horrific history. And to recognize that the tribes today, especially the unrecognized tribes, but all tribes today, to work with tribes to help them restore their culture, restore their spirituality, restore their identity, and restore their, their landscapes, and to work with us to heal and recover from the past, And there’s a number of ways they can do that, you know, by supporting tribes in a lot of ways. But like, say for example, our land trust. Our land trust is a non profit. We can only do so much work, according to the amount of, money that we can raise. And so if they can help our land trust through donations that would go a long way to helping Mother Earth and helping our tribe.

[00:29:33] Griff Griffith: And we need to remember an important saying in conservation.

[00:29:36] Megan Fluke: advocates at Green Foothills like Brian Schmidt and Lenny Roberts would tell me ” the wins are temporary, but the losses are permanent”

[00:29:43] Griff Griffith: The wins are temporary because there’s always a new push to develop or purchase land or rezone it.

[00:29:49] Nick Perry: If you look back at the history, Coyote Valley was, I think, first zoned by the city of San Jose for development in 1960 in the And then in 1975, they rezoned it back to agriculture because, you know, people started to advocate that maybe it wasn’t best to continue to sprawl out.

[00:30:06] but then in 1984, they rezoned it back to development when companies like Apple wanted to build here. And that was the case until 2021. So, tides can change.

[00:30:16] Griff Griffith: That’s perhaps the last lesson of Coyote Valley. It’s important to constantly remind people of the value of their land because it’s all too easy for it to be taken for granted. As Megan Fluke said, the wins are temporary, , but the losses are permanent. So think about the special land near you and what you can do to support it. Which groups can you join? Which city council meetings can you attend?

[00:30:37] Perhaps you can organize a hike, birdwalk, or bioblitz to and show others the value of the land. Just get started. And big thanks to our guest today, Andrea Mackenzie, Megan Fluke, Nick Perry, Stuart Weiss, and Chairman Valentin Lopez.

[00:30:51] Chairman Lopez mentioned the Amah Mutsun Land Trust. I love Land Trust because they give us another opportunity to connect, to save, to be a hero, to have a relationship with the land. You can learn more about the Amah Mutsun land trust at www. amahmutsunlandtrust. org. We have links to them and all of our other guests in the show notes at jumpstartnature.com/podcast. And we also post a transcript of this episode and many other resources to help you jumpstart your own personal journey to help the environment. See you next time..

[00:31:24] Michael Hawk: The Jumpstart Nature podcast was created, written, and produced by me, Michael Hawk, and our host and co writer is Griff Griffith. Thanks for listening.