Reactivating “keystone hands” at the UC Irvine Ecological Preserve

Marianna Davison and Aaron Katzeman
July 26, 2024

It’s rare to get your hands dirty at an artist talk—to be encouraged to rub, smell, and taste the plants we walk by every day. Yet on Friday, June 14, Samantha Morales Johnson Yang, a Tongva biologist, ethnobotanist, and scientific illustrator, led a group through the UC Irvine Ecological Preserve to do exactly that.

UCI students, faculty, and community members joined M.J. Yang on a walkthrough of the site to learn about the ecological and cultural significance of native plants on the traditional Tongva and Acjachemen lands upon which UCI’s campus was built.

Addressing legacies of colonialism embedded within the landscape, M.J. Yang highlighted the loss of over 90 percent of native riparian and grassland habitats in California. She urged participants to embrace our shared responsibility as stewards of the environment, emphasizing that “we can return to a keystone species role.” Like the keystone that keeps an arch from toppling, keystone species sustain an ecosystem’s equilibrium. To inhabit this role requires collectively fostering land relations based on respect and reciprocity.

The event was sponsored by the Coastal Aesthetics, Environmental Justice, and Indigenous Futures research cluster of UCI’s Center for Liberation, Anti-Racism & Belonging (C-LAB). It was co-organized by two Wildland-Urban Interface Climate Action Network (WUICAN) partners: the UCI Environmental Humanities Research Center and the Living with Wildfire Initiative. Land and fire managers from Laguna Canyon Foundation and Irvine Ranch Conservancy, also WUICAN partners, were in attendance.

Currently maintained by UCI Nature, another WUICAN partner, the UC Irvine Ecological Preserve is a 62-acre permanently preserved habitat bordered by campus, UCI Research Park, University Hills, and the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor. A site of research and environmental education at UCI since the 1970s, the land was officially designated an Ecological Preserve in 1989. Studies and conservation efforts have successfully restored native plants like California buckwheat and coastal sagebrush in the coastal sage scrub and chaparral habitat, which had been decimated by the site’s prior 100-year history as Irvine Ranch cattle grazing lands.

The walkthrough began at a sprawling roadside lemonade berry bush that welcomed the group with an abundance of ripe fruits. Before inviting participants to pick and taste the slimy, shockingly sour red berry, M.J. Yang shared a few “Honorable Harvest” tenets from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: never take the first, the last, or more than half while foraging, and only take what you need. In order to enjoy the fragrant sagebrush without picking it, for example, M.J. Yang recommended gently rubbing the plant between our fingers and savoring the distinct scent. Through these and other native plants including toyon, white sage, and elderberry, participants learned about various Indigenous uses for food, medicine, and musical instruments.

M.J. Yang’s work exemplifies the art of foraging, relating to both the practice of native plant gathering and the illustration of such plants for educational purposes. She majored in marine biology as an undergraduate at Cal State Long Beach-Puvungna before returning to graduate school to study science illustration, which pulled her back to her roots in ethnobotany. M.J. Yang currently works as Land Back Coordinator for the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy, a nonprofit organization founded by members of the Gabrieleno/Tongva tribe to remediate a one-acre plot in Altadena, California, returned to the tribe in October 2022. She has developed and implemented a restoration plan for the Altadena site grounded in traditional Tongva ecological knowledge.

At the UC Irvine Ecological Preserve, M.J. Yang discussed how invasive plant species like black mustard seed (pervasive throughout Southern California) mark the ongoing impact of colonial land relations. Spanish colonizers, she shared, scattered mustard seeds to trace their invasion and establishment of missions along El Camino Real. M.J. Yang also noted how the eucalyptus tree, brought from Australia for its drought-tolerant qualities, drops its oily leaves in the summer when wildfire risk is highest.

While non-native plants like mustard and eucalyptus fuel larger and hotter burning wildfires, M.J. Yang clarified that “fire is also a relative.” Indigenous peoples were the keystone species before the arrival of European colonizers, she suggested, keeping ecosystems in balance for millennia. Controlled burns were often used to mitigate overgrowth and clear space for select plants to thrive. At Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa, however, cultural burns once used to manage lands are impeded by urban infrastructure such as gas lines. Remediating contemporary landscapes thus requires diverse tactics to reckon with the despoiled environment.

Contending with the extensive ecological impacts of colonialism now requires the participation of all. When asked how non-Indigenous land stewards can support restorative efforts, M.J. Yang invited attendees to start by learning how to distinguish native and invasive plants, while also cautioning against the immediate demonization of all non-natives because some have become critical animal habitats. She offered ways for honoring invasives that we do remove, from showering with eucalyptus for its aromatherapeutic benefits, to cooking with black mustard, and weaving with English ivy. 

Because “soil holds a seed bank” of existing invasives, we must “work with the land as opposed to on the land” to assist native plants in their return to Tongva and Acjachemen territories. M.J. Yang encouraged participants to be “guerrilla gardeners,” scattering native seeds by hand and allowing them to travel a little further than they could on their own. She also proposed “yard return,” or utilizing any areas we have access to for the replenishment of native ecosystems, no matter how small. 

As the walk concluded, the aromatic residue of lemonade berry and sagebrush lingered on the fingertips of participants, who had gained tools for embodying the role of temporary guests and supporting long-term land rematriation. To fully activate what M.J. Yang described as our species’ “keystone hands,” humans must continually cultivate mutual relationships with the plant communities we live among.

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Marianna Davison is a postdoctoral scholar with the Wildland-Urban Interface Climate Action Network, hosted by the Department of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. As a WUICAN postdoc, Marianna is focused on facilitating community-centered climate justice arts and education projects. Since 2022, she has coordinated UCI’s Living with Wildfire Initiative, working with local first responders, artists, and land stewards to co-design projects exploring management practices and cultural understandings of wildfire in Southern California. Marianna earned her PhD in Visual Studies at UCI, specializing in the environmental history of nineteenth and twentieth-century American art, visual culture, and landscape design, and was a 2020-21 Junior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. Along with Aaron Katzeman and Scott Volz, she is a co-founder of the Climate Futures Collective (CFC).

Aaron Katzeman is a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute. As part of the Wildland-Urban Interface Climate Action Network, he was previously a UCHRI graduate student researcher in climate communications and environmental justice. He earned a PhD in Visual Studies with an emphasis in Global Studies from the University of California, Irvine. Aaron was a 2022 Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and a 2021 Humanities Out There Public Fellow with Orange County Environmental Justice. His research specializes in contemporary environmental art and visual culture produced alongside resistance to military occupation, social movements for agrarian reform, and anti-colonial national liberation struggles.

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WUICAN acknowledges our presence on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Acjachemen and Tongva Peoples, who still hold strong cultural, spiritual and physical ties to this region.