Focusing on ecological nature-based solutions is really one of the fundamental ways that well be able to make progress against climate change.

Listen to nature.

Nature has done this for a long time.

On this planet we have both an epidemic of wildfires which are taking place in the American West, and a huge amount of degraded soil which is depleted of biological activity and organic matter.

Is there a way we can connect these two problems into one holistic solution by listening to the principles of nature?

Where does the forest intersect with the grasslands?

What is that holistic approach between the two?

Because they are all part of the same ecosystem.

One thing that we want people where we live all across the West to become more comfortable with, is fire as a benefitical tool on the landscape.

Wildfire has always been part of our environment.

It is really critical to the ecosystems.

But the fires that we're seeing now partially due to climate change, are larger, longer, and more intense.

Here in Colorado in the Mountain West our forests are meant to burn periodically, but through a legacy of fire suppression over the last 100 years or so, we've seen a proliferation of abnormally high fuel loads within our forests.

And that leads to very destructive and very unnaturally hot wildfires.

There is this really delicate balance that we're out of balance on now.

Thinning the forests is one way that we're trying to create a landscape that is able to receive more restorative and regenerative wildfire.

When fire existed here more regularly, fire would burn out some of the smaller trees and it would create this mosaic across the landscape.

We had some areas where we had dense pockets of trees, some areas where we had open meadows.

In some areas, fire would stay lower on the ground, not creating canopy fire where we're burning from tree to tree to tree.

When you do the thinning, you end up taking out a significant number of trees.

The boles are the trunks of the trees.

There are some uses for that.

Turning them into wood products or firewood.

And then there is the slash, which is basically the branches and the needles.

And there really isn't a good use for that.

And so that's called biomass.

And that biomass becomes essentially a waste product.

And that is one of the most challenging pieces of doing a forestry project.

Throughout the globe we have millions of acres of depleted agricultural soil and one of the things that all of those soils have in common is a low organic matter profile and a low biological profile.

I see these parcels as forgotten parcels.

as parcels that are saying it's not worth my time.

But as I look at the world, these are the parcels that are worth most of our time.

We need these parcels to be recovered within an agricultural context so that we can actually have a healthy food system.

The Gallagher property is one of Open Space and Mountain Parks irrigated properties.

It's one of the properties that over the past couple decades has kind of fallen in disrepair I guess you could say.

A lot of bare soil, if you can call it soil.

Noxious weeds and other invasive plants that have been occupying this property for at least 18 years and most likely longer.

As we talk about restoring land, the reason why it is degraded is because of agriculture's historic practices.

This land was native prairie that was converted to non-native pasture grass species.

Instead of 100 species of plants you have dozens at most.

So you're converting the land to a system that requires water and definitely requires water when you start grazing it and haying it.

In the situation on Gallagher when the prairie dogs moved in, it became harder and harder to efficiently irrigate this property.

the agricultural tenant might have stopped irrigating certain areas because we just couldn't get water to them anymore.

And so you take a plant community that requires water.

You stop irrigating it.

You add a prairie dog on top of grazing or haying, and that system just can't handle that kind of clipping and grazing anymore.

So it starts to collapse and the more collapses, the less it get used and less it gets managed.

And so it's just like a downward spiral.

Soil starts collapsing and it ends up like it is today.

Our past trials failed largely because the soil is in such poor condition.

Even when we were irrigating the field, we were getting the water on the soil but it would dry out within two days.

It's so hot on this exposed south facing soil that we believe a lot of the seedlings would just wither up and die even with irrigation.

Depleted soil is the first step of desertificaiton.

When you have no cover on your soil a windstorm will easily blow away all of your topsoil, leaving you with a hard pan layer that nothing can grow in other than the most noxious weeds When our land turns to desertification, we cant grow any food on that land.

No crops are able to survive.

No animals can live on it without additional food.

It's just nothing.

When we look at degraded agricultural soil and we ask what does it need?

One of the things that it needs is organic matter, and the other thing that it needs is life.

Mushrooms?

They're very powerful, interesting organisms.

Fungi are nature's recyclers.

They're incredibly powerful at breaking down organic material and turning it into rich soil.

Without fungi we would have over proliferation of organic matter building up over the planet.

Mycelium is the network of life underneath the ground that gives rise to mushrooms.

We culture mycelium directly from these native fungi in order to use them in our projects.

They're very well adapted to expanding their cellular networks.

In fact, one mushroom, if cultured and handled properly can be used to generate thousands or tens of thousands of pounds of mycelium or thousands of gallons of liquid inoculant.

And if we as humans start to learn how those cellular networks expand we can harness and ally with that process in order to help address some of our human created issues What we're really trying to do is solve two problems with one solution by saying, how can we make use of all this excess biomass, which is generated out of forestry projects up in the mountains, and turn that into a valuable asset for soil health in the prairie ecosystem.

And we are doing that by inoculating wood waste with native fungi, to be able to use that as an additive for depleted agricultural soil and depleted soil in the plains.

By introducing life in the form of microbiology and giving it a food source in the form of organic matter, in this case wood, we can start to refuel, refeed and bring that soil back to life.

So we brought the woodchips down to Gallagher Open Space property to inoculate all of that with native fungi.

Thousands of pounds of mycelium both hand inoculated and sprayed a liquid inoculation.

Those woodchips were left to sit and cure for about six months to do their work of primary decomposition.

The mycelium starts to jump off of the inoculate and slowly eat up all of those woodchips, and it's essentially bioactivated by this native microorganism.

And you can see how the sections which have the mycelium are so wet.

Like thats soaked because it's catching moisture from precipitation events and it's locking it into its network.

So if you think about this at a landscape scale, when it rains or when it snows, if your soil doesn't have much biological activity or organic matter then that water goes away very quickly.

It either runs off or it evaporates.

The mycelium and the organic matter slows that moisture down, and it retains moisture in the landscape for a longer period of time, which essentially makes the whole landscape more drought resistant and more resilient.

Yeah, that's so wet.

You can feel that.

Woah.

That's crazy.

I'm still like, I'm kind of tripped out because pretty hot out here, and this is and this is like it's so wet that it's gleaming.

Look at the top of how dry this you know, compared to this, how wet that is.

So that's from inside of the pile, and this is what we're working with.

I mean, this is a millions of year old process going on right here.

We're just trying to recreate that process in the face of a lot of mismanagement caused by human beings.

Carbon cycling happens on its own in nature but when we continually take and take and take from our soils and we don't give anything back, you know, we end up with a land that looks like this and then we have to figure out how do we give back to it.

And this wood waste from fire mitigation is one of the most ample resources that we have around here.

Nature has been recycling organic matter, biomass, life for as life has been on this planet.

We're just essentially mimicking nature.

Taking carbon, taking organic matter, converting it into a form that can be broken down by soil organisms and turn it into a soil amendment to help hopefully restore this property.

The biggest piece thats the innovative thinking is how are we looking at what's natural, what's already there, what's wasteful and how do we turn that into something that's no longer considered waste but actually considered a positive.

And that's where the big difference is going to come is how do we stop producing waste ad nauseum?

Just to put it into perspective, I recently spoke with the City of Flagstaff Fire Department, and they are estimating that theyll be removing 1.75 million tons of wood biomass annually for the next 25 years as a prevention against mega wildfires.

Traditionally, one of the primary techniques for dealing with this wood waste is by building piles and then burning those piles.

The issue is that with our changing climate and risk associated with burning those piles, the safe operable burn window is getting shorter and shorter.

The other thing is that when you burn any kind of wood, then that carbon is released up into the atmosphere.

Another option is to chip it up and to put it in big trucks and haul it away to a waste disposal facility that could be 100 to 150 miles away or more.

There's a huge amount of emissions that are associated with all that trucking, as well as cost.

Another option is to leave the wood chips on site, and those chips over time decompose and become soil.

But because of our arid climate in the American West, wood chips can on their own take 10, 20 plus years sometimes to decompose.

That means that that potential fire risk is there for a very long period of time.

Is there a way that we can rethink waste?

What is a waste product and what is a resource?

The carbon cycle tells us that there is no waste.

Carbon that falls down onto the floor is meant to be recycled back into the soil.

That carbon gives life to the next generation of plants.

Adding mycelium speeds up that process of decomposing the wood.

That's the innovative piece here.

That's the piece that might change things.

If we can start to break that down on land that needs that carbon, that'll create a huge change.

After about six months, the fungi have been able to run through the woodchips and bioactivate that organic matter.

Then we were able to make use of them at a landscape scale by spreading that activated organic matter over this depleted acreage.

Another aspect of this project was that we wanted it to be holistic, we wanted it to be multi-partner, and we wanted it to be innovative.

We wanted to try new things.

One of the new things that we're trying is to bring in cows on top of those woodchips to bale graze.

The benefit that we're foreseeing by doing that is that is that the cows will actually with their hooves, work that organic matter and that biology into the soil.

They'll be able to move that organic matter around like a living machine for working the organic matter and the mycelium into the soil.

Plus, they'll be able to fertilize the land with their manure.

And jump start even quicker that biological process of bringing that soil back to life.

Incorporating the hay into their composting bellies is another great source of taking a raw material like hay and making it more accessible to the biology in the soil.

If this project is successful, what we want to see within 5 to 10 years time is a flourishing ecosystem on this grassland.

We are at a pasture here in Boulder County that's much further along in their regenerative journey.

This property here has a lot of life.

I envision a property thats dominated by a high diversity of plants.

A landscape that can be leased by the City of Boulder.

When I look at this grass and I can see how thick it is, cows grazing out here would have no choice but to get fat.

Our long term vision for this project is that we can start to regenerate hundreds of thousands to millions of acres of soil throughout the world, using biological principles and nature based solutions.

What makes this planet special is that it has life.

And so we're hoping to restore these properties to bring as much life back to them as possible.

Soil health or the soil is Mother Earth.

Mother Earth is what cares for us.

Without healthy soil, we don't have a planet.

We don't have an ecosystem.

We don't have the human species.

If we want to survive on this planet long term, we really need to think about how we can take care of the soil and how we can do it on a very large scale.

You know, the world is ever changing.

Climate's ever changing.

You can't get static with one approach or one mindset.

You have to keep on learning from nature.

That's why I'm out here.

Thats why Ive been doing it for decades, and why I continue to do it well, probably til the day I die so well see.