In December 2022, only a few weeks after MG became official stewards of land in Bay Miwok Territory of the East Bay Hills, the atmospheric river sent a deluge of water onto the land below. The impact of the sudden rush of this precious lifesource onto the land was a small shock to us all: a landslide blocked off an access road. The event wasn’t surprising or unusual for hilly terrain that had been terraformed and mismanaged for decades. What it did remind us almost immediately was that we really needed to spend our first rainy season observing the way water moves—and wants to move—across the land.
Several rainy seasons and many consultations and nerdy deep dives later, we are understanding the dynamic water processes and the interplay between water cycles and the destructive patterns from colonization and settlement—including deforestation and overgrazing—that impacted these Bay Miwok hills. What we observed were incisions (called gullies) on the land created by water running across the surface rather than sinking into the soil as it would in a healthy ecosystem. The impacts of colonization depleted the soil and native plants and trees whose root stocks prevent soil erosion by supporting the water slowing, spreading, and sinking into the soil rather than hastily running off the hillsides.
Using a restoration technique called gullystuffing, which we learned from our friends at the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, we began the long road of repairing the incisions and restoring the hydrologic cycle on the land. We use biomass (tree branches and woody plants like Scotch Broom) from our forestry fire mitigation work and methodically layer it inside the gullies. This stuffing process stacks functions, allowing us to put the beneficial biomass to work on the land rather than hauling it off to be recycled as mulch. At the same time, the stuffed gully becomes a structure that supports the slowing, spreading, and sinking of water on the land and prevents the incisions from growing deeper and wider and possibly becoming a landslide.
As diasporic people whose ancestors came to Turtle Island through kidnapping, forced migration, and imperialism, and also as people who have been detribalized from other Turtle Island territories, the MG collective has a core commitment to restore land, labor, and culture in the most honorable ways we can as guests on these lands.
While we organize folks and accompany them in making connections between the extractive economic systems imposed on us and the ecological crisis that we all find ourselves in now, we also engage in sharing earth skills in community as a way to organize ourselves towards ecological justice. It’s a long arc, and by putting our labor towards restoration and repair and doing that together, we live into the worlds we need right now.
Video by Breaktide Productions