Climate heroes: The North Bay people who are making a difference on the key issue of our time

Condensed and reprinted from Sonoma Magazine

From forward-thinking foresters to marine-science researchers to fire-recovery documentarians, meet the neighbors who are making Sonoma County one of the most resilient communities in the nation.

The Forester

Dan Falk, Cazadero

Branches, brush, stumps, and vines: Timber and agricultural operations produce a lot of organic waste. And it doesn’t exactly fit in the green bin. A common solution is to send unwanted byproducts up in smoke through large burn piles.

But for Dan Falk and his team at Richardson Ranch—an 8,000-acre, family-owned lumber, beef cattle, and winegrape operation near Cazadero—the status quo needed updating. That so-called waste needed to be seen as a usable resource, its valuable carbon returned to the earth rather than lost to the atmosphere, where it would contribute to climate change.

Since 2019, Falk has been a leader in demonstrating a better way to recycle wood waste through the use of the Tigercat 6050 Carbonator, a $750,000 piece of machinery that converts wood into carbon-rich biochar while limiting emissions through the careful control of temperature and airflow. The ranch currently owns the only Carbonator in California, but Falk leases out the machine for regional projects and says he hopes the idea will catch on widely soon, particularly with all the fire cleanup happening up and down the state each year.

“I’m fifth-generation,” Falk says. “The land has been in management about 150 years. And if you don't change with the changing times, you get kind of left behind in the old ways. With the biochar machine, the Carbonator, we’re looking at different ways to grow cleaner, healthier timber trees and also grasses for our cattle so they're healthier, too.”

The Commissioner

Kailea Frederick, Petaluma

Last year, Petaluma’s Climate Action Commission embarked on a climate “moonshot” goal of pushing the city to become carbon neutral by 2030. “It’s a huge task, but this is the reality that we need to be facing,” says Kailea Frederick, who has been part of the commission since its inception. "We have a small window to make these changes. And it’s created a ripple effect in other cities and towns, pushing them towards similar commitments. That’s something I’m really proud of.”

Frederick’s climate work spans geographies, identities, and generations: Raised on Maui and nudged towards activism by her grandmother, she is now raising a family in Petaluma, as well as working as a climate justice campaigner with the NDN Collective, a national Indigenous-led organization.

Developing climate solutions through a Native lens has been core to Frederick’s work from the beginning, who is of Tahltan, Kaska, and Black American ancestry. “Indigenous people have brilliant ideas and innovations that need to be invested in if we’re going to get out of this current crisis,” she says.

“One of the things that keeps me up at night is thinking about how unprepared individuals are for high heat, or fire, or smoke; that really scares me. Disaster preparedness is in some ways the conversation of our times...It’s something we could all become more comfortable speaking with each other about.”

The visionary

Steve Heckeroth, Santa Rosa

Steve Heckeroth hopes to transform farming with electric tractors. It’s a goal he’s had since the early 1990s, when the longtime sustainability expert found himself building electric sports cars from scratch, outfitting replica Porsche Spyder frames with 1,200 pounds of lead-acid batteries.

Heckeroth now serves as Chief Innovation Officer for Santa Rosa-based Solectrac, a company he founded in 2012. He makes a strong case for tractors and other farm vehicles going electric, not only for sustainability, but for improved functionality—the weight of the batteries carried on board improves traction and balances heavy farm implements. Solectrac currently operates out of a 10,000 square-foot facility near the airport, where employees perform final assembly and testing of their three tractor models. Last June, Solectrac was acquired by electric-vehicle behemoth Ideanomics, a move that allowed the company to scale production even more quickly. They’re about to take over an additional 50,000 square feet of space, which Heckeroth thinks they’ll probably outgrow within just a few years.

Heckeroth says despite all the growth, he still relishes a good old-fashioned tractor showdown. “There are guys that are all about ‘noise plus smoke equals power,’ he says. “They're on their diesel tractor in the tractor pull with my electric, and they're just getting pulled away like they can't believe it. They're immediately converts; they’re like born again.

“I was at the [Mendocino] County Fair [in 1992], and I saw this big cement block on the back of a tractor to balance the weight of the forklift that they had fitted on the front of the tractor. And I thought, ‘Gosh, that's a pretty heavy weight. That should be batteries.’ And that's what made me switch my whole focus from cars to tractors.”

The youth leader

Janina Turner, Santa Rosa

Janina Turner is not naïve about what’s happening in our world. She is more aware of the challenges confronting us than she might like. She also has faith that the worst can be averted if informed, committed people act with the necessary urgency. “What it really takes is for people to understand that a better future is possible,” she says.

“We get a lot of climate messaging that is really doom and gloom, but a part of it is building a better world,” reflected in just housing, smarter transportation, and healthier food, says Turner. “I think it’s just painting the picture that we don’t have to be living in a world fueled by a climate crisis.”

But it’s an “emergency,” Turner believes, with little time left to make a difference, so she is working the problem on two fronts. In her day job as energy program coordinator at the nonprofit Climate Center, the Sonoma State University grad is focused on efforts to promote policies that reduce reliance on fossil fuels, specifically through increased electrification. Turner also works as a local leader with the national, youth-directed Sunrise Movement, which advocates for climate justice—the only way, she believes, to ensure that climate solutions don’t leave some people out. Says Turner: “People power translates to political power, and that’s truly how the movement works.

“Even though we know that climate change is real and happening and is obviously impacting our future, we still want to fight for a livable future. It’s our right to thrive and to live here. It’s really for my future. It’s for the future generations under me. And it’s hard work. It really does require a lot of positivity, even in the face of a living disaster.”

The environmental planner

Nina Hapner, The North Coast

When Nina Hapner considers the needs of a changing landscape, she looks forward—and she looks back. As director of environmental planning for the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria, Hapner hopes to restore balance to tribal lands along the North Coast.

She’s also seeking opportunities to blend generational knowledge with modern land management approaches, promoting both the health of the land in which the Kashia people have long held a stake and the availability of plants and foods important to cultural traditions.

Acquisition in 2015 of the 678-acre Kashia Coastal Reserve at the northern edge of Salt Point State Park ensures the tribe now has permanent access to coastal waters, where elders can pass on traditional harvest customs. Hapner, who is of Tsalagi heritage, works closely with Kashia members to develop goals for the land. Her team is working with local partners to monitor changes in marine species important to the tribe and collect observations from elders about past ocean and marine life conditions. “Resilience for the Kashia means reciprocity – using resources in such a way that there’s still some the next time you need it,” Hapner says.

“Sometimes people say, ‘Oh yeah, I talked to this sixth-generation salmon fisherman, and this is what they told me.’ And when a tribal member tells them the same thing, it’s disregarded. So working with tribal members, we’re trying to get their stories, with the work that we do and the monitoring that we’re putting together.”

The storyteller

Maya Khosla, Rohnert Park

As a child, Maya Khosla remembers waking up to her mother’s early morning ritual of listening to the birds. This is how Khosla, who was raised in part abroad, including in Myanmar and Bhutan, learned that there was something important about listening to wildlife. “Little did I know, I’d grow up to do a lot of that—both in poetry and in filmmaking, as well as as a biologist. All these pieces come together in that single memory of my mom.”

Khosla has spent years doing biological fieldwork in sites across the region. In 2014, she was asked to study forests across the state that had burned in wildfires. Initially, she was resistant. “I thought that these forests were done, finished—that fire was the end of the story.” But slowly she and her colleagues began observing something unexpected. The silent, burned forests began to show signs of life: a bobcat crossing the road. A rare pacific fisher. “What are these animals doing here?” she wondered. “This is a totally burned-out area.”

What she observed—and, she says, what hundreds of other studies support—is that, rather than being dead zones, post-fire forests are places where life not only returns, but thrives. “You might say that life returns in waves: insects come in, the birds come for the insects, then hawks and predator birds come for the smaller birds. Then, maybe some chicks fall from the nest onto the ground, and suddenly you have bobcats and mountain lions and bears. All these incredible layers of the wild coming back and claiming it for themselves.”

There’s also new plant growth: leaves, wildflowers, mushrooms. Even the blackened trees may begin to sprout bright green shoots. “It’s a new aesthetic that we’re not used to,” she says. “To see all of these charcoal-colored trees looking so stark— and they’re also full of life!”

In 2018, Khosla, who has published several volumes of poetry, used her platform as Sonoma County’s Poet Laureate to bring together communities around the topic of healing from fire. She organized a series of community events at burn sites in the early stages of regeneration from the 2017 fires. Youth and adults were invited to meet, write and read their work, surrounded by the post-fire landscape in bloom. Similarly, her films Firewise: The Scientists Speak and Rejuvenation Poem explore California’s fire ecology—and the policies that shape our relationship to it.

“One of the things that I’m hearing a lot is that it’s “too late”— we can try to tame climate change, but we’re losing everything. But I hope people can think about the aesthetic of the comeback: even when something looks far gone, there is hope that it’ll make the comeback it needs to make, if we don’t drag the machinery of extraction through it and try to tame it in some way.“