—

when he was a teenager, celso montalvo crawled quietly through the volcanic ash on the island of santa cruz with his three cousins and uncle, victor hugo, armed not with firearms, but with rope. he was either 14 or 15 years old. “i’m not 100% sure, but i remember i was bold and careless for adventure,” he says.

the naturalist and his family usually ate fish on the island. “but sometimes we would have a really honorable highlight to go and hunt the goats,” he says.

the goat that the party had chosen to hunt was an alpha male, surrounded by a harem of females, somewhere near cerro dragón, or dragon hill.

“i did not know, but it was my initiation,” he recalls. “my right of passage, and this changed my life forever.”

montalvo did not know that he was responsible for the catch. he had just gotten off a plane from mainland ecuador hours before and was already very tired. suddenly, he found himself creeping through the brush and his uncle whispered to him: “son, you see the alpha male right there? well, i think you can bring this guy down.”

“there was no excuses allowed,” montalvo says of a childhood in which he and his cousins were all given chores that would help the community at large. “your responsibility, whatever they gave you, was to be committed and you will grow into others as you become better.”

only a teenager and fresh out of the ecuadorian naval academy for the summer, montalvo was undeterred by the goat. he hunkered down into a burrow while his cousins moved to the other side of the herd and whistled. this scared the goats and the alpha male galloped in his direction.

“i was on the ground and when this goat appeared on the crevice, this thing was not smaller than me anymore,” he says with a laugh. “this thing was huge!”

the goat butted montalvo right in the chest with its massive horns and montalvo was immediately in severe pain. the goat then ran away, escaping its capture.

when his cousins asked him what happened — why he was unable to capture the goat for dinner — montalvo says he cried and made too many excuses. “immediately, my cousins started to shut down,” he says. “they did not speak to me.”

the hunting party trekked the two hours back to camp empty-handed. no one spoke. his uncle went into the ocean to catch fish for dinner. “the shame that i felt so bad. i did not provide for my family.”

he went to bed that night and had nightmares about goats.

**

the goats that montalvo and his family hunted were not native to the islands; they were brought over in the 1700’s by english settlers.

in those hundreds of years they inhabited the islands, they devastated them.

“we knew that goats did not belong to the galápagos,” montalvo says. and still, he had to watch them daily devouring all of the vegetation on the islands. “of course, it breaks your heart. of course, you want that to be over.”

in 1959 when the islands became a parque nacional, the government took inventory of the islands and their species.

“we needed to see what were our assets to protect and what were the problems,” montalvo says. the assessment concluded that goats were not only eating all of the native plants, but they were leaving none for other native animals. the goats had become invasive.

goats will “eat anything if there’s nothing else to eat, but if there’s everything to eat, they’re very selective,” says karl campbell, program director for island conservation, an organization dedicated to removing invasive species from islands. “it’s like letting a kid go in a supermarket. somehow, they manage to gravitate toward the candy section.”

in the plant world, ‘candy’ means endemic species in an area with no natural predators. the flora have adapted in a way that loses defenses like spines and toxins.

struggling to manage the goats on their own, the ecuadorian government sent out a distress call. “hunters of the world: come over!”

but that plan backfired. “they shot each other,” montalvo says, “they got lost and there was finally a heart attack because it was really hot.” 

then the army gave it a go. but that was unsuccessful because they could not find all of the goats. and if you don’t kill all of them, montalvo says, the population will bounce right back quickly.

“we were able to control them, but not to eradicate them.”

“it’s very easy to get the first 95% because they’re naive,” campbell says. “and you try to keep them naive as long as you can, but that’s not always possible.”

**

campbell now lives on the island of santa cruz where he works out of the charles darwin research station. he is the world’s leading goat eradication expert, having completed his ph.d. in the subject. he is interested in what he calls “active conservation efforts.” many efforts in the field have results that won’t be seen until years down the line, but invasive species eradication produces results that can be felt in real time. 

“if you look at islands, you’ve got less than 5% of the worlds surface area, but you’ve got around 40% of species that are heading toward extinction,” he says. “if you want to prevent extinctions, have a close look at islands. if you want to prevent extinctions on islands, you should get pretty good at removing invasive species.”

once an invasive species is removed, a threatened species can come back from the edge of extinction — provided they still have a sustainable environment.

that posed the biggest challenge for the eradication effort. how do you eliminate not just the majority of the goats, but also the ones in hiding, the ones that can rejuvenate the entire population if they’re not also killed?

eventually, the un and unesco connected ecuador with new zealand, which had had some small scale success with goat eradication.

enter the “judas goats,” which campbell describes as “horny but sterile.”

goats are gregarious by nature and are good at finding others. so in the late 1990s, scientists sterilized about 600 goats on isabela island, fitted them with radio collars and let them loose. then they trailed the judas goats in a helicopter, rifles in hand, until they were led to the smaller, harder-to-reach populations. from there, they could take out the smaller, stealthier populations.

they were named them judas goats because they “betray their own kind,” montalvo says.

“we’re a very catholic country,” he adds. “they chose that [name] so that we’d understand that that guy is going to work for us.”

the effort had been wildly successful. “we are proud, very proud, and honored to say that we have totally eradicated goats from santiago island. and it’s a very large island. also, we have totally eradicated goats from this northern part of isabella.

“we fought and we raised millions of dollars. we thought it would take forever. it took probably like three years and one-third of the money we raised.” the total effort cost $1 million.

montalvo laughs. “the truth is we thought it was just another project that would fail.”

**

eradicating an invasive species has more challenges than just with the animals.

“when you start working on inhabited islands, suddenly you start interacting with communities and politics,” campbell says. “how do you engage with them? how do you fit in with their vision and their goals or actually even help them establish what is their vision and their goals because sometimes there’s disparities within communities.”

for example, some people in a community may look at an invasive species as an important food source. so while eliminating that species may help many, others may not directly see any of those benefits.

“this is a bit that, instead of harmony, actually continues division between communities,” campbell says. “you want to structure your projects so that the benefits seem to be — and truly are — well divided among the community.”

campbell says a more holistic approach should be taken when creating an eradication plan, one that puts community members into a leading role. 

“you might have the best idea in the world,” campbell says, “but if the idea is not coming from them or their ideas haven’t been heard… you’re pretty quickly being told, ‘there’s the door, mate.’”

island conservation therefore seeks to establish itself as more of a “technical assistance” program on the islands — one that takes on a supportive role rather than a leading one.

this approach worked on the island of pinzon in 2012 when they helped eliminate invasive rats. in the 90’s, the california academy of sciences hadn’t been unable to collect any giant tortoises due to the rodents’ aggressiveness, but by working with communities to eliminate them, they were able to bring back the giant tortoise population for the first time in 150 years.

“this is a bright spot for conservation,” campbell says. “we can basically recover species that are on the brink of extinction and get them back to healthy populations so that they’re ready for the next threat — whether it’s a major cyclone or el niño or la niña or whatever affects you negatively in these large cyclical patterns.

“it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the u.s. or europe or anywhere else, your life is impacted by invasive species. if you’re a baseball fan, you’re impacted. why? because the trees that are used for your bats are now impacted by abora. those trees are no longer available and you can’t get bat-length pieces that haven’t been bored (by insects).”

**

at 5 a.m., the morning after his failed hunt, montalvo woke up to a tapping on his shoulder. it was his uncle, victor hugo. 

“you can do anything you put in your mind as long as you believe in yourself,” he told montalvo. “i believe you can stop this alpha male.”

montalvo says that the story played out much in the same way — the trek to cerro dragón, hiding in the crevice — except this time, his cousins made him wait longer before they scared the goats. maybe to increase the intensity, to build up montalvo’s adrenaline.

“i was not the same kid the day before,” montalvo says. “that was another kid. i was ready for that goat.”

and finally, he heard his cousins whistling and the goats stampeding. again, the alpha male trampled its way in montalvo’s direction. “i needed to embrace the situation, so i run towards the guy,” he says.

again, there was a painful struggle. montalvo wrestled with the goat exactly as his uncle taught him: by grabbing onto its horns and heaving it up into the air.

“so i’m rolling on the ground with this,” he says. “this guy’s kicking and everything. i would not let go. i didn’t even care.”

suddenly, victor hugo stopped him and told him to let go of the goat. once the pain subsided, montalvo heard his cousins cheering for him. the goat ran away, though this time, it was by montalvo’s choice, not because he couldn’t capture it.

“this is why you have no excuses,” victor hugo said. “we’re here to assist as a family. you have to believe in yourself. today, you’re providing.”

**

as an adult, montalvo is no longer wrestling goats. but he provides in a different way: as a galápagos naturalist, he gives tours of the islands to visitors from all over the world, telling them about the important measures the government takes to mitigate the threat of invasive species.

however, he says these efforts could not be successful without tourism.

“many places, people don’t like tourism,” he says. “we are not going to throw open the door, but tourism is greatly involved. conservation would not work without tourism, that’s for sure. it works here in galápagos.”

in this short video, i wanted to tell the story of my neighborhood on madison’s east side. it is known for being a more working class side of town and not as attractive to tourists. because of this, children in the area may be less likely to have the outdoors access that children in wealthier areas have. that’s why it’s so important that programs like the one in this video exist. i hope you enjoy it, and i hope it inspires you to get outdoors!

he examines the contents of a series of glass jars. one is full of little brown pellets. the other contains a dark brown liquid and is labeled “raw digestate – non-hazardous.”

“we’re trying to produce sustainable fertilizers,”  explains edalati, a graduate student in the university of california, davis, department of biological and agricultural engineering.

edalati said that each kind of fertilizer has its benefits and its drawbacks. the liquid form can be applied through drip irrigation, a farming method in which the plant roots are slowly watered via small tubes; however, it contains very little nitrogen – in many cases, not even 1 percent. the pellets, on the other hand, contain up to 5 percent nitrogen but cannot be applied through the ease of drip. 

plants need nitrogen to thrive. they use it to make chlorophyll, a compound that aids them in photosynthesis.

“soils need organic matter returned to them to support the soil microbiology that helps in crop cultivation,” edalati says. the fertilizer he is creating helps provide that.

these fertilizers are the byproduct of the renewable energy anaerobic biodigester (read), which make up the four giant silos that tower in the sun behind edalati. the vision behind read is to break down organic waste and produce a recycled product that can be used in farming and agriculture. it can hold up to 50 tons of organic waste like food and manure.

the concept for read was invented by ruihong zhang, ph.d., of the uc davis department of biological and agricultural engineering. she is also the chief technology advisor to cleanworld, a private company with which uc davis partnered to produce the machine.

“the digester is basically a vertical hammer mill,” zhang says, referring to a machine that crushes and shreds material through the repeated blows of little hammers.

read is composed of four tanks. three of them are for breaking up and pulverizing waste. the digester first separates any plastic that does not belong. it then grinds the food waste and organic material into a paste, which is pumped into the first tank.

“the first tank has bacteria that break food waste down into organic acid,” zhang says. “then (it) goes into the second tank, which has high density microbes that convert organic matter into gas.”

the fourth tank is where the digestate, or leftover organic matter, is stored.

“the leftovers have all the nutrients,” zhang says.

zhang developed this technology 10 years ago at uc davis and was able to turn the plans into action with the help of cleanworld, which specializes in biodigesters.  the university took over full operation of the digester in early 2018, with zhang as a liaison between cleanworld and uc davis, and is now investing more into the operation.

it’s also an easy way for local restaurants, farms and communities to dispose of waste for between $35 and $52 per ton.

uc davis is a non-profit, but zhang says her operation “is a full business model.”

“economically, we’re not getting any money back,” she says. “we got funding from [the] state to create these. it’s not about money, it’s about the show and tell, and making it work.”

even though zhang and her team are not making money, that’s not to say others couldn’t.

“this is a great example of taking the technology forward and making a commercial business,” she says.

zhang and her team give the fertilizer they make to area farms who then report the results back to them. a 2-year-long study on digestate fertilized tomatoes yielded results comparable to tomatoes fertilized with uan-32, a popular synthetic fertilizer, which is 32% nitrogen.

“yields for the digestate fertilizers were equal to the uan-32 and even higher in the case of the digestate concentrate,” edalati says. “the digestate fertilized tomatoes had higher soluble sugar content than the uan-32 tomatoes.

“uan-32 is good for providing nitrogen, but does not give you anything else. plants also need more than just nitrogen. digestate can provide that.”

zhang and her team want to ship the digestate farther than they are currently able to.

“the digestate is valuable, but transporting it is not necessarily economically viable,” edalati says of the liquid fertilizer. “the pellets would be one way to be able to transport nutrients far away at a cheaper cost.”

the difficulty lies in nitrogen content. the liquid digestate is 5% to 6% nitrogen – an essential component to fertilizer – whereas the pellet form is only 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent nitrogen. “you’d have to transfer a lot more of this to get the same amount of nitrogen,” edalati says.

neither, though, compare to uan-32, the popular synthetic commercial fertilizer.

“you can literally apply a couple hundred milliliters of uan-32 versus hundreds of gallons of (digestate),” edalati says. “that’s the challenge.”

thankfully, though, they have a virtually endless supply of test material while they work out how to make their fertilizer more nitrogen-rich.

“ice cream, muscle milk, tomato paste and cut tomatoes from campbell’s,” he says with a laugh, listing some of the more frequent items from which he’s made fertilizer. “all of those used to go to a landfill. now they come here.”

“coffee, too,” zhang adds. “we put a lot of coffee in here. maybe those bacteria love it and get energized.”

we do this often; it’s our “couples thing.” it horrified many of our friends and family when we started about a year ago, but now our finds are a part of normal conversations. given our successes, other friends have given it a go as well. we always exercise caution by only going together and sticking to areas that are pretty well lit. (we’ve only day dove once, but are still not super comfortable with it. odd glances and all.)

it started out as a fun and thrifty hobby we could do after talking to a couple who had actually met in a dumpster. and while it is certainly fun, it also became heartbreaking very quickly to see how many perfectly good items — especially food — get thrown out on a daily basis.

according to the food and agriculture organization, if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, just behind china and the united states. based on what i’ve seen in dumpsters — and to know that this is all in just one midwestern town — that’s not unfathomable: i’ve seen dumpsters full of spaghetti, still steaming from the hot bar it occupied only an hour before.

not all food found in a dumpster is edible, of course — at least not by humans. but there is quite a lot that is. i therefore encourage everyone to give it a shot. (i’m happy to report i’ve lost no friends by talking about it so much.) here is a list of ways that my and emily’s lives have changed thanks to this unusual practice:

we eat healthier

“healthier? no way!”

it’s true! produce expires pretty quickly. for example, the shelf life for brussels sprouts is about three to four days if properly refrigerated. that means that they start showing signs of wear in the supermarket in less time. so where is a grocer going to put them if they are technically fine, but no longer attractive enough to sell? the trash, of course! and with any luck, that grocer will dispose of them in a way that makes it safe for me to scoop‘em right out for dinner!

i’m not saying this to knock grocers; they provide an invaluable service to their communities. but we in the u.s. do have some issues with unattractive, yet healthy, food. thankfully, companies like imperfect produce exist, which combats food waste by “finding a home for ‘ugly’ produce,” as their website states. that is, they take produce from farms that is perfectly good, but won’t sell in grocery stores due to superficial damage, and they sell it for far less than you’d normally pay!

we eat more creatively

when you are suddenly in possession of 50 husks of corn, there are only so many times you can eat corn on the cob before you start to look for more creative ways to prepare it. the same goes for steak, bagels, strawberries, asparagus. (we’re still waiting to have this problem with chocolate.)

we’re saving money

in october of 2018, emily and i spent a whopping $84 on groceries, all thanks to dumpster diving. the only grocery shopping we’ve actually done is for essentials that we don’t usually find: milk, sugar, salt, flour.

we’re reducing waste

we may not be reducing it by a lot, but it feels like we are. it feels oddly satisfying, like a subversive civic duty, to come home from a 15 minute trek with two giant boxes of food. but it’s also very sad: the u.s. department of agriculture in 2014 estimated that 49.1 million americans were living in food insecure households.

thankfully, there are apps out there that work to curb such waste. apps like mealconnect act as liaisons among food donors, food pantries, and food insecure households. (emily and i have discussed starting a similar business.) but while they do exist and do amazing work, nearly half of all food produced still ends up in dumpsters.

we’re actually making money

as the saying goes: one person’s trash is another’s treasure.

in addition to scrounging for food in dumpsters, emily and i have been keeping our eyes peeled for what we call “roadside finds” — or large furniture items people leave on their curbs for garbage day. we take these items, spruce them up, and sell them. we’ve made over $1,000 doing this.

i’m writing this not to brag (ok, maybe a little), but to highlight that these items we’ve sold may also have ended up in a landfill otherwise. but for less than an hour of work for each sale, we’ve been able to clean them up and give them happy homes while making a small profit.

i’d like to challenge you to keep a look out for perfectly good discarded items in your community. they may not mean anything to the person throwing them away, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have new life elsewhere.

obviously, dumpster diving is not for everyone. it takes a lot of suspension of disbelief to shove your (hopefully gloved) hand into a pile of trash. or to not even question what that liquid that just spilled on your arm was. but there are definitely good things that come of it if you can. this hobby has changed my life in many ways, and i hope that after reading this, it might change yours, too.

“if you’re hanging out with me, i’m not going to strike you as a class clown,” says the pulitzer prize-nominated environmental writer. “despite my political convictions, i suffer from a case of good manners.”

that seems contradictory for someone a literary agent once said “writes like a drunken professorial hillbilly,” but branch insists that is the voice he’s cultivated for his writing – his “narrator.”

“my narrator is more fun than i am, more irreverent, more energetic,” he says. “it’s amazing how often people will mistake me for my narrator and assume i want to stay up all night partying with them.”

an english professor at university of nevada, reno, branch has published eight books; more than 200 essays, articles, and reviews; and has given more than 300 invited lectures, readings, and workshops around the theme of environmentalism. his work has been taught in creative writing and environmental literature courses around the country.

what sets him apart in a field often characterized by messages of doom and gloom, however, is his expert use of humor. his latest book rants from the hill, shows off this uncommon ability.

for example, in the chapter “lawn guilt” – a nearly 2,000-word diatribe against the front lawn – branch uses a trademark curmudgeonly style to argue the financial and environmental impracticalities of the “exotic, barren monocultures” and also bemoan his own “dual status as arid lands environmentalist and lawn-watering dolt.”

while lawns are sometimes referred to as “ecological deserts,” he writes, “this characterization is an insult to deserts, which are remarkably biodiverse ecosystems.”

“i think the conventions of any genre can ossify over time,” he says. “with nature writing in particular, we’ve sort of indulged too much in writing that’s either driven by anger or sadness and i think that’s really fatiguing for our readers.”

the problem with such levity, he says, is that “humor is seen as antithetical to serious work rather than potentially an agent of it.”

that has not always been the case. “there have been plenty of periods in world history where humor was thought of as one of the greatest vehicles for conveying the most important information that a culture had to express,” he says. “nobody says that because shakespeare wrote comedy, he was a lightweight writer.”

but even though the scientific community has yet to fully embrace this method, branch has enough reason to believe that the public is hungry for it.

“in terms of connecting with other folks, the humor is what worked best,” he says of his early forays into comedic prose. “it was proving to be the most powerful tool in my bag.”

how the humor started

“humor came first through just trying to be honest about my own failures,” branch says.

in 1995, he and his wife eryn moved from virginia to the high cold desert of nevada. “we wanted to be in a wide open space with lots and lots of critters and opportunities to be outside,” he says. “we designed and built a passive solar house on 50 acres out here in the middle of nowhere.”

their property, located at 6,000 feet on the eastern slope of the sierra nevada, is just a lot away from public land that stretches all the way to california. the “vast sagebrush ocean” is home to rattlesnakes, bobcats, vultures, pronghorns, and all other manner of fauna. “it was going to be a flawless pastoral retreat and i was going to escape the vices of over-civilization and blah blah blah, right?”

but at some point during their move, eryn became pregnant with their first daughter hannah – a milestone for which they had been hoping for more stability.

 “life has a way of not really respecting your plan,” branch jokes.

the first-time “desert rats” found themselves tackling not only the unforgiving landscape, but also the challenges of parenthood. branch thought the trial and error of raising a family in such non-traditional circumstances so peculiar, he began to document his life unfiltered.

“when you see yourself fail at things, you only have a certain number of choices on how to respond,” he says. “you can pretend you’re not making mistakes and cover it up, you can beat yourself up about it, or you can learn from it. i learn best when i laugh at myself.”

the process 

when he’s home, you can find branch “walking around the desert reading stuff aloud like a madman.”

ten years ago, he set a goal to walk 1,000 miles a year – a target he’s about doubled.

and while he walks, he writes.

“for me, walking and writing are part of the same motion,” he says. “i print manuscripts and read them aloud. i really believe in editing by ear and not just by eye. and i’m too restless to just sit around and do it.”

he says others question is ability to walk the same landscape every day without getting bored. but to him, it’s different every time he ventures out.

“when you walk the same territory at all times of the year, it’s amazing how different it is,” he says. “even when the landscape doesn’t change, my way of seeing it changes as i change.”

the land in branch’s work is more than a setting. it is a writer and a central character. it opens the door and invites his survivalist neighbors. it teaches his daughters to avoid scorpions – despite putting them there in the first place. and most importantly, it supports him during the most precious and vulnerable moments of his life.

the environmentalist aldo leopold once wrote, “when we see the land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

humor is a bonding agent. it brings loved ones and strangers closer together simply through the shared experience of laughter. when we laugh, we open ourselves up to new people, new ideas and new experiences.

branch offers us exactly those – with the land at center stage. and after he’s had the last word, we might find ourselves using the land with the love and respect leopold predicted.