S5, E8: The Naturalist Who’s Been Decoding—and Painting—California’s Wild Spaces for 30 Years

This is a very special episode of Unpacked by Afar. This week, we hosted Unpacked Live—a live version of the podcast—in partnership with Visit California in Dallas, Texas. The event celebrated California’s extraordinary creative landscape, and today’s guest is one of its most original voices.

Obi Kaufmann is a naturalist, writer, and illustrator whose California Field Atlas series has redefined what a nature book can be. His books—filled with hand-painted watercolor maps, poetry, and decades of ecological research—don’t tell you where to go or what you’re looking at. They ask why the landscape works the way it does, and what it means to truly belong to a place.

In this episode, Obi talks about growing up exploring Mount Diablo in Northern California, what makes a field atlas, and why he believes the future of California conservation depends on better poetry.

Transcript

Aislyn Greene: I’m Aislyn Greene, and this is Unpacked. Today we’re exploring California’s wilder side with Obi Kaufmann. Obi is a naturalist, a writer, and an illustrator who has created a series of field atlases. Basically, they are these gorgeous books that blend science, art and history to provide a deep understanding of the state that he and I call home. If you haven’t seen them yet, they’re filled with watercolor paintings and poetry and research, all pulled from his decades immersed in California’s natural spaces.

In this episode, he shares what exactly a field atlas is, what his work and artistic practice look like on a day to day basis, and the best ways to experience California through his lens.

Obi, welcome to Unpacked. It’s so nice to meet you.

Obi Kaufmann: Oh, it’s so nice to meet you too. Thank you so much for having me.

Aislyn: It sounds like you had a fascinating childhood. Like you were born to two scientists. You entered the world of mathematics at an early age, and you also explore the California backcountry quite extensively. So what do you remember about those early childhood wanderings?

Obi: It’s true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My dad was a New Yorker and he was a California transplant. He came here as the director of the Griffith Observatory. So his vocation was astrophysics. Okay. And my mother was a LA native, and she was a clinical psychologist for many, many decades. And so that is sort of the parental recipe that I have clanking around in my skull. Right. And I’ll tell you what, Doctor Kaufman’s son was gonna be a mathematician. So I it’s funny, you know, I went through like my teenage years training kind of the same way that I work now, like big ream of 20 bond paper and a can full of sharp number twos. You know, this is how you did your math homework every night.

And so and that’s still how I make my books, except where I let my dad go. Was in this, like, idea of place. Okay. The aesthetic experience, the total experience of beauty on the landscape. And when I was five years old, my dad quit his job in LA and moved us up to Northern California, about 25 miles east of San Francisco is the lonely peak of Mount Diablo. And this became my mountain home and my home mountain, like I just. And to this day, I still live 15 miles away. I go as often as I can. It is a magical, mystical place of ecological wonder, endlessly inspiring as a young painter, and I am just blessed now, so many decades later, to have found, like this voice in the publishing business where I find that I am not the only one who wishes to express their depthless affection for this most beautiful corner of the globe. This. This beautiful California.

Aislyn: Yeah. Well, you mentioned that you sit down with a ream of paper and a container of freshly sharpened pencils. Is that really how you create all of your books?

Obi: It’s true, it’s true. Yeah, I do. I think there’s this image of me sort of sitting in a field and doing all of this work.

Aislyn: I was picturing that. Yes.

Obi: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s that’s, uh, there’s always almost that like meme of just like, like what, what people think I do, what my mom thinks I do, what my publisher thinks I do and what I actually do. And like what I actually do is like, you know, sit here in my, in my lab, in my studio and I go through a lot of paper. I make a lot of mistakes, right? Because, because all of these wildlife renderings, everything you see across these thousands and thousands of pages that populate my books, right? All of these I try and make an illustration on every single page because I really want that sort of like I want every page to drip with color and soul, right? But I need the computer. I need the computer too. I work from photographic references and all of that kind of stuff. You know, like generally the rule of thumb is like if it’s really small, like a flower or if it’s really big, like a mountain, I’m probably doing it live. I do do a lot of like going places and painting those places. And yet, and yet, but, but like, if it’s a mountain lion. Mountain lions make terrible models, right? So like, I’ve got, you know, so I’ve got, I need like the photographic reference, I need the anatomical reference to, to get it right.

Aislyn: Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I would love to go back to kind of the starting point. What first gave you the idea to create a field atlas? Did you pitch it to a publisher? Did somebody come to you like, how did this whole evolution of your career basically, and what you’ve become known for come about?

Obi: Oh, I sure did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. So I’ve always been a bibliophile, right? I’m surrounded by books Right now I’ve got a couple of rooms full of libraries. It’s like my tomb in my temple. It’s like, you know, my house is so well insulated because of all the damn books, right? So I’m like. Like, I’ve been a lover of books for a very long time, and I’ve been a lover of California for longer. How about that? Um, and yet and yet, so I sensed, I sensed that there was like this whole, um, retail habitat space or as ecologists might, might call it, like this like niche opportunity for a book about California and to use the phrase that I used earlier, like where every page just drips with color and soul. I didn’t know what it was going to be. I just knew, like with enough poetry, with well rendered pieces of wildlife, I might be able to approach the story in such a way that might satisfy or gratify some part of me that is experiencing a lot of sort of modernist alienation from the more than human world. I think that’s a common thing. Like I want to be from somewhere. You know, my mother was born in this state. Her mother was born in the state. And yet I still feel like I’m settling this place.

You know, my publisher, then Heyday Books is like, you know, they publish news from native California. They have a great portfolio of indigenous authors. And here I am wondering how I can one be an ally, but two, like sort of engage the process because it’s not a destination. I’m not going to eventually like be indigenous. Right? But, but what I am doing is I’m engaging the process of like knowing this place as best that I can, right? And these books become evidence for that. And so what happened there, Aislyn, finally was like this idea that there is a character of California that I aim to describe, comprehensively survey, the character of which cannot be tackled in normal genre modes like a road Atlas tells you how to go places, right? A field guide, tells you what you’re looking at. Like, I’m not really interested in doing either of those things, right.

So I invented this genre called Field Atlas. You know, field atlases don’t exist. What I did then was like, how about the how or the why of that mountain peak or how that mountain’s ecosystem actually works, or how it evolved, or what aspects of the more than human world have always been, continue to be and shall always be, despite this, like so successfully imposed urban veneer across the whole place. Right? Because California remains strong. It remains, uh, dynamic in terms of biodiversity and in terms of ecological functionality. Regardless of the hype of what you might hear on the nightly news, right? I mean, there are miracles to be tended. I love to talk about California on that level. Like, what is the nature of conservation in California in the 21st century? And how do we navigate towards like the 22nd century?

Aislyn: Yeah. I mean, as someone who’s only lived here for about 15 years, I feel like I’ve just barely started to understand this place that I do call home and imagine I’ll call home for a long time. So where do you think you are in that understanding of place?

Obi: See, that’s like the mystic well. Check this out. It’s almost like, it’s almost like California is so big, so deep, so beautiful, so romantic, so epic, so adventure filled. It’s like this well of knowledge. It’s like this drinking fountain. Okay. It’s like a it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a hole, it’s filled with water and I’m drinking from it. And you would think that the more that I drank from it, the, the water level would go down. But the magicness of it is the more I drink from it, the more there is to drink. I could make, I could make a map every day of some aspect of the world of California. Yeah, I could make 100 maps a day for the rest of my life and not even touch the potentially infinite beauty of this place.

Aislyn: When you mentioned Mount Diablo, I mean, that could be a study of a lifetime, right? It sounds like you have had that relationship, but that could just be a singular place of focus that you would never maybe fully understand.

Obi: It’s so true. It’s so true. There’s like a there’s an old ecologist’s experiment where you just, you can draw a 3-foot circle on the floor of a forest and you can look at that circle for a year, and you will see the whole forest pass through that circle from the tiniest of mice to the largest of mountain lions, from the, from the seeds that wash through the circle to the snow, to the rain to the sun. Like all of the, all of the living patterns of the landscape exist in that microcosm. And so that’s kind of what I’m doing with California. Just drew a circle around California to describe not only processes across the biosphere and their evolutionary origins and their evolutionary futures, but also my own.

Aislyn: Yes, sure. What would you say conservation means today in California to you?

Obi: Well, it’s it’s evolving. It’s not only evolving in the political space, but it’s also evolving in my own sort of sense of identity. Like I think of, I think of my relationship, for example, to the word wilderness, which has really evolved over the past 15 years, as I’ve been working through these books. And thinking about the nature of California and nature is another word that makes little sense in California, because California exists historically, culturally, as no other place on the planet. There are more indigenous nations here speaking more languages than there are in any other comparable region of North America, well, north of Mexico.

This is an interesting correlation, but wherever you get a density of indigenous languages in any given area, you get a corresponding increase in biodiversity. And often that biodiversity is endemic, meaning that it exists nowhere else on the planet. And that’s what we have in California, one of these world class biodiverse spots across what is called the California Floristic Province, which is everything west of the Sierra crest. And so that area of land for several thousand years, like at least 6,000 years, which is like the Mid-holocene climate optimum, which is what Paleoclimatologists might call this warming period in the middle of the Holocene, when San Francisco Bay became a geographic entity on the landscape, for example, or even way far back before the Holocene. There’s a lot of evidence that already at that point, intensive and very sophisticated landscape wide stewardship techniques and technologies were applied everywhere across all of California.

Okay. So we have a lot of people for a long time engaging the landscape, often using fire. And in so doing, I begin to question where is this wilderness thing you’re talking about? In fact, wilderness, there’s no such word for wilderness in any of all of those languages that I’m talking about. There’s no really there’s no word for nature either, right? There’s no separating the people from the land. And a lot of what 20th century conservation wishes to do is to remove people from the land, as if, like people are the problem. Perhaps you’ve heard that refrain among some of your environmentalist friends, right? It’s a common sort of anti-human ethic among 20th century environmental thought. Like humans are the the primary pathogen, and certainly humans are a disturbance agent. My critique of that thinking is, of course, where does that thinking take you like what sort of solution then are you implying?

Aislyn: Yeah.

Obi: I’m my whole stance on conservation, which I think is like a pretty good heading, at least in the near future, is the re-establishment of these interesting kind of covenants. And I don’t mean to like, use an explicitly a religious word, but I do want to imply some semblance of the sacred towards, towards the relationship between humans and the more than human world.

In California, these co-evolved systems work to propagate one another. Human harvesting human tending to the landscape makes for abundant and fecund ecosystems under these regimes of what’s called traditional ecological knowledge, which is what ecological philosophers and and others might call the other tech. Right? TEK, traditional ecological knowledge, which is evolved over thousands of years, is hyper local and still very much a game piece on the board despite centuries of attempted genocide, enslavement and erasure of indigenous culture in California.

So engaging that kind of thinking, and I tell you, I tell you that indigenous people have a have a bigger seat at the table in Sacramento than they ever have had in history. And I think and there’s no reason to suggest right now that it’s going to go any other way, despite the sort of spasmodic behavior of, of Washington or of, you know, or of, you know, X, Y, or Z politicians. What we’ve got is a trend towards that taking seriously of indigenous technologies. And I think that that might be the serious future of conservation. And in so doing, we’re going to need better poetry. Okay. And I don’t mean poetry necessarily like verse. I mean like the vanguard of language. We’re going to need better vocabulary to describe some of these relationships that we have to the land itself, because I don’t think wilderness is cutting it.

Aislyn: I have never thought about it in that way, but it kind of reminds me of this thing that has always stuck with me. I interviewed a Maori storyteller many years ago, and he talked about how he introduces himself, and basically it starts with the land and then goes through his ancestors, and then he’s kind of last. Like, it feels like that’s the kind of poetry that we need where it’s like the land is who we are, and it comes first in these ways. It’s not separate from us.

Obi: Check this out. The founder of Heyday Books, my publisher, his name is Malcolm Margolin, and he wrote a book in 1974 called The Ohlone Way. And it’s about living in the San Francisco Bay area for thousands and thousands of years at least. At least, you know, the oldest Shellmounds go back about 5,000 years, when really modern tribal identities begin to emerge across the Bay area landscape here in California. And one of the things he talks about is like even the idea of freedom, the idea of freedom is very different in the indigenous mind and the indigenous mind of the local Californians here, where you have this idea of like a Miwok mother, right, or an Ohlone mother, the last thing in the world that she would want for her son is for like him to like, go out and find himself. Right? Like that, that’s just completely anathema to what a wealthy, healthy, socially adapted young man might need in his life and to be a functioning part of this true social network as opposed to this, setting them up as, as I feel like I was set up in my own personal history towards this like, existential crisis. Well, who are you? Who are you? Who are you? It’s like, well, can’t can’t the trees tell me that somehow or can’t? Can’t the people in my life inform that construct as opposed to me? Like pulling it out of, you know, ex nihilo out of like, some whole cloth that I don’t even understand the tools that I’m handed. Right. So that that’s sort of like place based thinking.

Aislyn: Yeah, yeah. You could even then go into kind of like the world of people using travel to find themselves, but we’re not going to go there today.

Obi: I think that I think that that’s cool. Yeah, I think that that’s cool. Yeah. The break from the regular stimuli is, is, is interesting. You know, there was a lot of like migratory patterns in California life too. It’s not like people were just like sitting in their home for all year round. You’d go up to the top of the mountains in the summertime and you’d come down to the river mouths in the in the winter time, you know, so like there’s a lot of moving around. There’s a lot of travel and indigenous culture too.

But travel, you know, especially as a guy who has walked thousands of miles in California and still tours California all the time touring and speaking on my speaking tours, I, I can’t get enough of the, gosh, the plurality of California culture across across the state, from the deserts of the Mojave to the tallest forests of the world in Humboldt County, to the most massive forest of the world in the Sequoia Forest, to the volcanoes of Lassen and Shasta, to all of the people that live there, and all of the cool, funky little towns. I mean, give me a night at a honky tonk, you know, whether we’re talking about, you know, outside of Joshua Tree or, or maybe in the Malibu mountains or somewhere in Santa Cruz. I’m a happy man.

Aislyn: Yeah. Yeah. Well, will you share a few of your favorite places to walk and or tour and or honky tonk in California?

Obi: Yeah. For sure. Okay. Yeah.

Aislyn: Honky tonk as a verb.

Obi: Well, I really like a lot of the named trails around the state. Like, for example, there’s the Bigfoot Trail. The Bigfoot trail goes like, Crescent City through the Klamath and Siskiyou Mountains, around like Eureka and Arcata. And on that trip, you pass through one area inside the Russian wilderness, which is, which is one of the most magical spots on the planet. OK.

Arboreal scientists, people who are really into trees call this place the Miracle Mile because there’s 19 different conifer species. And a conifer is like everything from a spruce to a redwood to a cedar, or for whatever goes on and on. But like there’s 19 different species in this one square mile. Every tree is a different species. Like, as you’re walking through this grove, it doesn’t happen anywhere else on the planet, you know. And that’s one of these, like this headline grabbers and California’s full of headline grabbers. You know, these, these like, part of the effort in my books is to democratize all of California, right? People are like, what are your favorite spots in California? It’s like, well, where are you? I’ll tell you what’s cool near you. But anyway, we got but I’ll be more specific. We got the Bigfoot trail, right?

Aislyn: How long is it?

Obi: Gosh, how long is it? I think it’s about 200 miles.

Aislyn: Okay. Have you done all of it?

Obi: No, no, I’m not much of a thru-hiker. Uh, that’s never really been like the calling to me. And I’m not much of a peakbagger either, you know? Especially as I get long in the tooth here. I’m, you know, 52 years old. It’s like. It’s like, I prefer to, like, follow the contour lines than cross them. You know, I prefer to like, walk on the level. I’m happy to be sitting next to a wildflower trying to identify it all day long and not not necessarily, um, you know, bagging that 13,000 foot peak or whatever.

But that being said, I do love the John Muir Trail. Yeah. So that, that that’s one that takes about a month in August. I, I’ve never done the whole, the whole trail in one, but I’ve done the whole trail. And that is, that’s like, uh, gosh, what are you averaging there? Probably about 10,000 feet is what you average. But, but you know, when John Muir called it the range of light, it’s like, oh, it’s sunset. It almost seems like you can see through the tops of those granite peaks. You know, it’s like, I get that, they seem to be made of some sort of foggy diamond and scattered with those, those mountain lakes. You know, I can feel my blood pressure going down just thinking about that too.

Aislyn: Yeah, me too. Thank you.

Obi: Yeah. Uh, what else do I like? I like, um, hiking the Sand to Snow region. Sand to Snow National Monument down there on San Gorgonio, which is the tallest peak in Southern California. I love the San Bernardino Mountains and its sister peak San Jacinto, across the highway there above Palm Springs. And then you descend down into the the palm filled groves of the of the seeps, springs and the migrating songbirds.

I also love Coast to Cactus trails of San Diego County. San Diego County, perhaps the most biodiverse of all California’s 58 counties. That you just walk through. You know where I said the Miracle Mile up north is about conifer species. That’s about habitat diversity. You go from you can go from wetland to coastal sage scrub, to, to California grassland to, you know, X, Y, and Z habitat space in the course of, you know, 10 miles. Um, and that, and that’s amazing, you know, uh, a true, uh, hidden gem.

What else do we got here? Oh, I love the Ventana Wilderness across Big Sur. Big Sur. Oh, you know, I mean, that’s where I cut my teeth as a young naturalist is in Big Sur. And I’ll tell you, Aislyn, like it was the ‘80s. And I had thought nature itself was something that I just missed. There were no condors. There were no tule elk. There were no river otters. There were no sea otters. There were no, um, white tailed American kites. There were no peregrine falcons. Like, the list goes on and on. Every single one of those species I’ve I’ve talked about right now is making a dramatic recovery like that. Is hope written in the land and written in the community, scripted by the community. That’s good science. That is deep love, that is affection for this, for these spaces, these processes and these species that deserve our attention and are getting our attention.

See, that’s the thing, you know, although every single one of our habitat spaces in California is either endangered or critically endangered. Although that’s the case, we have a very low extinction rate in the state. All the pieces are still on the board. When I was talking earlier about like, like the miracle, the miracles that can be tended, like that’s the one. There’s no laurels to rest on. There really isn’t. But that’s the situation right now. It’s all still here. Keeping it all still here is the best story. It plugs into that best story we were talking about earlier. What is the what is the most healthy world for our grandchildren like grow up in?

Aislyn: Yeah. Do you feel more hopeful now than you did when you were first starting out?

Obi: Oh, 2026 sucks. I don’t know, you know, where’s hope? You know, I can, I can opine on this and, and discuss that. That being said, I got to tell you like my, my podcast co-host is Greg Sarris and he is the chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria out of Santa Rosa, and he and I sit down and and talk about these kinds of things all the time. And he brings the indigenous perspective. He’s also a professor of literature at Stanford and UCLA, too. So he’s like an incredible he’s a polymath.

But we talk about these kinds of things and he talks about the end of the world, right? And he says things like, Oh yeah, my people have seen it before and we’ll see it again. You know, it’s like, can you imagine?

Remember I was talking about how like the San Francisco Bay became a geographic entity. It became a thing about 6,000 years ago. During that time, during the Holocene Climate Optimum, the sea level on the coast of California was rising about 3/4 of an inch every year. You know, right now we think a lot about sea level rise, and it’s like we’ve gained about an inch and a half over the past 90 years, right? So like, it’s not it’s not the same rate at all. Right. And can you imagine, like sitting on like Sonoma Peak and watching the San Francisco Bay come in? Like, I mean, what, that must have been the end of the world on some level. Is there you know?

Aislyn: Yes. It is a reminder to step back and try to take in the big picture, but not not try and not not take action. I feel like that’s the important part is to not be hopeless and to still do what you can, especially on a local level.

Obi: Of course, of course. I agree with that, although I do believe that there are cultural stories that are being told that outweigh individual effort to such a degree that I see undue pressure, especially in like the young people in my life who are feeling just utter anxiety.

Climate anxiety is a real thing that’s affecting kids like, you know, to such a degree. It’s like, I have to do better. It’s like, it’s what can I do? It’s like, oh, Honey, like, your job is to live the best life that you can. Okay. Your job is to, like, enjoy existence. Like, like, please don’t put this all on your shoulders. Which is exactly where, you know, quote unquote, the corporations want you to put the blame. That’s why they invented things like the carbon footprint.

Aislyn: It’s interesting. We’ve talked a lot about this in terms of like covering the aviation industry. And we did a story a couple years ago on like, if you’re an environmentalist, should you be flying, right? Like the carbon cost of flying. And, you know, there was we had one person who argued that like, you should take alternate forms of transportation, and there was another person that argued that that’s on the corporations. It’s not on you on an individual level. And I think I’ve, you know, I net out somewhere in between. Like I do believe that there are things that are outside of my control that I don’t need to worry about. But I also feel like there are things that I can do and it makes me feel okay. Like it helps me feel like I am participating in this. You know, the ten, I don’t know the the mile that I spend most of my time in on a day to day level anyway.

Obi: That’s exactly right, Aislyn. And I think there’s a, there’s a good point to be made there about something that might be counterintuitive. You know, you often hear about like, uh, should I fly? Should I, should I do this? Should I do that? Like, I know a lot of people who have gone homesteading across California, right? Or, or living a rural life, which is an incredibly energy intensive proposition. Living an urban life. Like I’m super happy being an urban coyote. You know, that’s just sort of like me. You know, I get all the wildness I, I need here in like beautiful, scenic, flavorful Oakland, right? And I don’t need to turn my car on. I don’t use a lot of energy. You know, I can go. I got the best produce in the world that’s made within a foodshed. That’s all locally right here. That’s walking distance, you know?

And so I worked my ass off to live here. But I feel, I feel like, my you know, I feel like my corporate overlords should be happy with me because in general, my footprint is very small. And I think those who live in cities have the opportunity to those local resources that can keep one small. So here I am, you know, writing about the more than human world, writing about nature, natural landscapes in California. And I’m a city guy.

Aislyn: I want to go back to your handwriting. It is so beautiful. So for listeners who have not seen your handwriting, we will, you know, include lots of links in the show notes. But tell us about it because it’s marvelous. And in this world, that’s not very analog, it’s so analog.

Obi: Oh, yeah. You’re right. That’s my secret motive. You know, a lot of these kids I was talking about who are in my life, you know, they have a really hard time reading cursive, and my handwriting is cursive, right? Because they don’t teach cursive as they once did. If I could, if I could just sort of like, like modestly put forth that as like an ulterior motive to these books, you know, just I just was reading a study last week about how cognition is actually affected by handwriting something as opposed to typing like the conceptual understanding that’s what it is, is better served by handwriting than by typing.

But yeah, you know, you know what it was here’s sort of a nerdy confession, like I’m a lifetime Lord of the Rings fan. Like, so when I was, when I was really young, this actually, there’s a funny story that kind of ties this into The California Field Atlas, too. It’s like, it’s like when I was young and trying to like learn Elvish like J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, you know, like, how would Galadriel of the elves, like, write, you know, and then imagining I could do that too. And so practicing, practicing, practicing.

But I’ll tell you, when I, when I first broached the idea, when I first proposed, when I first submitted a pitch deck to Heyday Books for what would eventually become the California Field Atlas in like 2016, one of the things that was in that pitch deck was the map of Tolkien’s middle earth, right where you got the trees over here and the and the mountains over here. And, you know, you know, I’m like, I could do that for a real place that has way more monsters, way more adventure, way more romance, way more capacity for epic adventures than anything made up could ever have. You know, it’s called California, right? It’s like that. That’s sort of the thing. And so the, this book, um, hundreds of hand-painted maps describing how earth, air, fire and water move around the state seems to me like it’s the same sort of imaginative process, uh, engaging this, this whole world, this whole history, this whole elaborate narrative that is right there, accessible, merging this, this, you know, this consilient thinking between the scientific and the aesthetic, you know, offering this unity of knowledge, which I think is like a foot stone into figuring out the whole thing.

Aislyn: Yeah, absolutely.

Obi: And certainly the handwriting is part of that as an activity. You know, Aislyn, I pretty much have you asked me about my days earlier? It’s like, it’s like I pretty much have it down to like four things I do in a day, which is like walking, reading, painting, and writing. Right? And, and there’s almost like this synesthesia. It’s almost like this equivocation between all of those different expressions. It’s like when I’m walking, it’s like the trees unfold around me, like chapters. Like, like there’s, there is a arc to this habitat story, to this landscape story. Or when I’m reading, it’s like my eyes are walking across miles of printed ink, right? Because that’s actually what you’re doing.

Or, you know, and I even paint from left to right, like I’m writing and my writing for me is just like moving fluid around on the page too, which is like painting. So like there’s all this like crossover between, between these, these ritual disciplines, this practice. God, I’d love to. I would love to not have an occupation, but have a practice, right? Where it’s like, this is just what I do. And if and if there’s, if there’s a sort of a eyes on the prize type mission to whatever I think I’m up to here is, is that’s probably the one.

Aislyn: I feel like we’re going to see more people returning to paper or more analog forms of media, like younger folks. And I was really inspired. I was in Tokyo a couple of years ago, and there’s that series of notebooks called The Traveler’s Notebook or The Traveler’s Collection. Are you familiar with those?

Obi: Just like the blank workbooks.

Aislyn: Well, workbooks, but then they have a bunch of accoutrements. I mean, it’s a fantastic, like sales technique.

Obi: Yeah, yeah, it’s like the leather booklets and stuff, but they’re blank there for you to fill in. It’s like a brand name for travelers.

Aislyn: Yes, exactly.

Obi: I’ve got a couple of them right here.

Aislyn: So we were in the store in Tokyo, and I was blown away by the number of people that were probably 30 and under that were in that store shopping for these notebooks, like going nuts for them. I mean, I think it’s really good marketing. Really good, you know, like window shop, really good, like displays. But it was, I was inspired by that. And I bought a lot of notebooks.

Obi: Yes, yeah. That’s so cool. Have you been using them?

Aislyn: No.

Obi: Well that’s that, that’s that practice. That’s that practice thing. You know. Like when I was, I was probably about 20 years old when I decided, okay, I’m going to be an artist. If you’re going to be an artist, you got to do it every day. There’s no days off ever. Even if you’re on vacation, why are you taking like, why are you taking days off from being an artist? You can’t do that. You have to make things. You have to work on your practice. You have to work like this is like, I take that like deathly seriously. Like to me, it’s, it’s like a, it’s like sword fighting or something. It’s like, you know, you have to be ready. You have to be trained.

Aislyn: You can’t just show up to the sword fight.

Obi: A muscle that you will lose. I’m paranoid that I’ll lose it if I stop doing it.

Aislyn: Yes, well, no. Okay, I have to share that the the reason that we were in that store was because I was we were in Japan. I was actually on my sabbatical from afar because I’d been at afar for 10 years. So I got 6 weeks off, my partner and I hiked the Kumano Kodo trail. And part of what we did along this whole journey was we were, we were journaling, we were notebooking, we were scrapbooking, we were drawing, we were writing. And so I, it was just so I was like, I need to do this. I need to go back to return to this.

I was really inspired when I was a kid by that woman, Sark, I think that was her name. She had these really beautiful painted books. She’s based in LA, I think. But anyway, so we went to that store I bought of tons of things with great intentions to come home and, you know, journal every day. I haven’t done that, but I have returned to the notebook in terms of like my schedule and my daily kind of recording of what I’m doing, what I’m, my priorities are what I loved. So I’m, like you said, it’s a practice. And I, I, it has felt really important to me. So I’ll get back. I’m working my way toward the notebooks.

Obi: Do it. We need you. We need you.

Aislyn: But California, we’re going to talk about California. Your next books. Are you able to talk at all about number seven and number eight?

Obi: Oh, yeah. For sure. Yeah. So the first 6 books were the completion of phase one of the California Field Atlas series.

Aislyn: Oh, really? That completed phase one?

Obi: It did. Okay. So yeah, the first California field Atlas and then I wrote a book called The State of Water: Understanding California’s Most Precious Resource. That was book number two. And then books number 3, 4 and 5 were what I called the California Lands Trilogy. That’s The Forests of California, The Coasts of California, and The Deserts of California. Okay. This is like the evolutionary past in the forests. We’ve, you know, why are all these trees growing together? For example, I go through every single arboreal habitat type in California.

And then like the evolutionary present, like the coasts of California. Right. Which is like describing the 27 different ecological characters as I have categorized them from Del Norte County all the way down to San Diego County. And that coastline being very different from what it was and what it will be. Right? This is a snapshot of the right now.

And then the last book in that series is The Deserts of California. And that is a investigation really into the continuing desertification aridification increasing temperatures across the state and how those contrast with what a mature desert ecosystem actually is. And then that whole series, all 6 books ended with The State of Fire. Why California Burns?

Aislyn: Yeah. Okay.

Obi: Which came out about 3 months before, uh, Pacific Palisades and Altadena went up. And so, uh, that book kept me really busy. Uh, but, uh, but now I am in contract to write the second California Lands trilogy. And so this is what I’ll be doing over the next 5 years. And so that’s books 8, 9, and 10. Book 7 is coming out in the fall, and it’s called California Inside Out Mapping an Ecology of Mind. This is my first book of essays.

Aislyn: Oh how cool.

Obi: Yeah. It’s like a little manifesto. It’s a little sort of like cry in the dark, if you will. But it’s also a justification and a summarization of where I’ve been and where I’m going. Why does there need to be a second California Lands trilogy? Well, there’s I’m calling out specifically the temporal aspects over the spatial aspects in this of, of ecological processes of California in these next 3 books, which will be my 8th book, which is The Origins of California, my 9th book, which will come out about 18 months after that one, which will be called The Cities of California. And then my last book, book number 10, is going to be called The Futures of California.

Aislyn: Wow.

Obi: And so these are 3 more California field atlases that are going to describe those respective subjects with my particular touch.

Aislyn: And have you already I mean, I’m sure they’re in process because they’re just in you, but are they already in process on the page?

Obi: Oh, yeah. Yeah. The, the manuscript for the 8th book, The Origins of California, has already been submitted. I’m painting a lot of creatures from the Pleistocene epoch, and I’ve been.

Aislyn: For example.

Obi: You know, yeah, we go, we go, we go all the way back to Precambrian, California, which certainly did not exist 500 million years ago. What we know is of as California is really not much older than bipedalism itself, about 6 million years or so, the age of sort of proto humans and the age of proto California are roughly the same, about 6 million years or so when California began to resemble its current tectonic configuration. So that manuscript has been submitted, and the other ones are just going forward right now with tables of contents that are completed. So now I just need to actually fill in all the pages.

Aislyn: No big deal.

Obi: Right?

Aislyn: If you wanted people to see your California story in a place, where would you send them?

Obi: Well, it’s super fun right now because we are sitting here in the middle of February and the rain is coming down, down, down, down, down. And what that means, March, April, May, June, is wildflowers. Wildflowers, wildflowers. Go find them. One of my favorite maps in the California field. Atlas is 50 of my favorite wildflower blooms across the state.

Right? A wildflower bloom is a really impressive thing to behold on a number of levels. One of them is the species level. Actually identifying a this flower or that flower is an accomplishment. And flowers are nice. Unlike birds, flowers stay still so you can really examine them and figure out what you’re looking at. And there’s some great field guides, but also like, I wonder too about the nature of pollinators and what color is and how the perfumed landscape of chemical signals attracts all of these different ways of being. These precious invertebrates who are themselves experiencing a terrible crisis. How do these wildflower patterns, all of them, of course, are about attracting these pollinators. The bright purple of a Lupin flower might be growing next to the bright orange of a poppy flower. That contrast between the purple and the orange, which are complements on the color wheel, right. To cause maximum contrast between these two flowers is a navigational aid for these more than human intelligences.

So we have like all of these different evolutionary strategies for intelligently interacting with a habitat space. And I think that that that’s sort of like begins to open up this infinite network of relationships inside the ecological space. And that, to me, approaches something like the spiritual. I like that California, these wildflowers, it’s all just here. I don’t need to transcend anything. This is here. And I think that like putting that in the land, putting my spirituality in the land, if it exists at all, is the only place it really needs to go.

So I would, you know, to close out, it’s just like, it’s just like, please take we are one month away from the vernal equinox, and that is when you begin to see like the real sort of, they call them like, uh, early bloomers. You see, you see the first violets coming up, and then there’s this whole wave over the next 90 days, you can go to the same wildflower garden in March and see a completely different bloom than you will see in May. But you got to strike fast, especially in the desert.

Like if you want to go see one of the super blooms in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park or Death Valley National Monument, keep your eye out. You can go to like the California Native Plant Society or Calflora and find out when these blooms are happening and try and get there. Because. Because in the deserts, you probably have about a week window. Two weeks. Lord knows I’ve gone too early and I’ve gone too late.

Aislyn: I know I was in DC a couple of years ago and these poor tourists came in the blooms. It was too early for the blooms, but it was seasonally appropriate. And they were like, Why aren’t the blooms here? And this poor front desk person was like, I’m sorry, I don’t there’s no button that I push. Okay. So as an urban coyote, where would you send someone? Perhaps in Oakland, perhaps, you know, in the, I don’t know, 29 Palms.

Obi: Right?

Aislyn: Maybe two places that you really care about.

Obi: How about Big Sur if you haven’t been to Big Sur in a while? You know, highway one is open again and, um, go support that little community. Don’t linger for too long, but, uh, climb a mountain. If you haven’t seen a California condor, go appreciate that. Marvel at the fact that they still exist. You know, in 1987, there was only 17. Now there’s over 500.

Or you can go to Pinnacles National Park. That’s another good place to see condors. That’s the smallest national park in California. And it’s also the least visited. So that’s pretty cool. But gosh, what a beautiful gem of wilderness that place is. You can take the High Peaks trail and you’ll see a condor. When you see a condor, these California condors with the 10-foot wingspan and they’re flying right over your head, it is a different kind of feeling. That is no turkey vulture, my friend. That is a condor. And. And you get the sense that you’re being checked out, you’re being measured up, that you are no longer necessarily on top of the food web for this Pleistocene, uh, you know, anachronism deep in the 21st century. The condors are here. They have been here for millions and millions of years. And, um, the fact that they still are is a testament to good love and good science.

Aislyn: Well, Obi, I think that’s a perfect place to end. So thank you so much for your time and sharing all of your wisdom and your books with us.

Obi: Oh, Aislyn, that was so much fun. Thank you so much for all of your attention. And I really look forward to seeing what you do with your travelers notebooks.

Aislyn: Yes, I will send you a photo when I finally break one open.

Thank you so much to Obi Kaufmann. This was part of our Unpacked: Live series in partnership with Visit California. In the show notes, we’ve included links to Obi’s work, his website, his books, and his travel suggestions. Of course.

And please check out our other unpacked live episodes featuring architect Barbara Bestor and the landscape designer Roderick Wyllie.