Projects
We believe that process is as important as product. We don’t have a map, but that’s on purpose. Sometimes our ignorance is a strength. We are exploring freely. Not restricted by routes laid out, well-beaten, or known. There will be dead ends. There will be struggle. But through it we will learn, and have fun, together. And when the stars align, we'll find something great.
Uplift
As we face the future of life on the Colorado Plateau, it can be hard to fathom what our world will look and feel like given the complexities and uncertainties of climate change. Ecologists, hydrologists, and climatologists are developing predictions of what this place will be like as our climate shifts, but challenges arise when this complex information needs to be relayed to our community. [read more]
Projections
We are young, but not that young. We are experienced, but not that experienced. We have developed ideas about who we are, and who we should be. These thoughts can drift from cocky to self loathing, optimistic to crushingly pessimistic, focused to so directionless we might as well be blindfolded in space with Russian instructions. It is with these thoughts – good, bad, and ugly – we approach conservation problems. It is with a quarter life’s worth of baggage we develop our ideas about how the world is, and how it should be. We project our deepest darkest fears and twinkley eyed-iest hopes onto the conservation challenges and solutions. It was with this in mind that we developed Projections. As an attempt to challenge ourselves, early in our career, to push back against our own perceptions of the world around us and at the very least ask each other, “how does your own personal baggage affect how you view the world, and how you play on the conservation team?” We decided to explore these ideas on a road trip in a place unfamiliar to all of us.
Cutting Lines
Wildfire is not the destructive, devastating thing it is made out to be. Sure, it can be, but only because a century of forest fire exclusion has resulted in tinderbox-like conditions prone to high-intensity, high-severity crown fires. Fire is a natural process, one that keeps forests healthy. It encourages seed germination in some species, adds nitrogen to soils, and clears out excess debris and young trees. When we stop natural wildfires from happening, forests get overly dense, and burn catastrophically.