In this episode of Discern Earth, I speak with my good friend and forest technologist, Brandon Craft, about how he got into forestry after studying biblical theology, his deep connection to the coastal plain of Georgia, how managing fire is instinctual to him, the value of a liberal arts education in applied Earth science, his concept of a home ecosystem, and perceiving the sublime in forest fires, hurricanes, and deserts.
David Valerio: Howdy! My name is David Valerio and this is Discern Earth, the podcast where I ask people who work in nature and climate about why they do what they do. Today I have on my good friend Brandon Craft, who is a forester with deep expertise both on the ground and in forest technology, and has done a lot of different, very interesting things throughout his career. And we're going to just have a really open conversation about the things that have motivated his work to date and in the future. So that being said, Brandon would love for you to introduce yourself a little bit more fully and then we can dig right into it.
Brandon Craft: Hey, David. Thanks for having me. My name is Brandon Craft. I live in LaGrange, Georgia, was born and raised in Georgia, and I am a product manager at Orbis, which is a forestry software company. But like you mentioned, I've done a bunch of things around forestry and forest technology, and, yeah, happy to be here.
David Valerio: Excellent. First question is, I know that you're a Christian and I would love for you to describe what your version of Christianity looks like and how it influences your work and relationship to the natural world.
Brandon Craft: Yeah, absolutely. It's funny, if you don't mind me flattering you for a second before I answer, I really like this question because I'm the type of person who, in a professional context, doesn't talk about my own personal beliefs very much. I don't kind of like wear my Christianity on my sleeve. So it's kind of neat to, the whole concept of your podcast is interesting to me—of like digging into the human elements of why we do what we do. For me, my Christian faith is a huge part of that. I’m a very ecumenical Christian, meaning kind of all over the place, not particularly tied to a single denomination. For most of my adult life I have attended Episcopal or Anglican churches, and that's where I currently attend now, but my faith is also heavily influenced by other portions of Christianity. I was raised Southern Baptist, attended a really kind of fun, super energetic Pentecostal church, went to undergrad at a kind of broadly evangelical liberal arts school. I have a lot of friends that are Catholic, Eastern Orthodox. So pretty much the full span of Christianity has at least some influence on me.
How does it influence my work and relationship to natural world? The work piece of it is really interesting. When I was like 18 or 20 years old, I originally wanted to go into ministry. Close observers of my LinkedIn are often surprised that I have an undergrad in biblical studies and humanities. The original plan was to go into ministry, but there was this really cool C. S. Lewis quote I came across at one point, and I'm going from memory here so I might be butchering the quote, but I think it's from his essay, Christian Apologetics. He says, “I believe that any Christian who’s qualified to write a good popular book in science may do much more by doing that than by doing any like directly Christian work.”1 That quote kind of like caught me at a point in my life where it hit me like a truck, because with going into ministry, I always felt like I was kind of putting myself like a round peg into a square hole or vice versa. All of a sudden it occurred to me that, there's probably other things I can do better.
Just by kind of sheer coincidence of the geography that I grew up in, I had been working in an ecology lab in south Georgia called the Jones Center. At the time it had a longer name. It was the Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center at Ichauway. It's kind of like the heart of ecological forestry research in the Southeast. I had just gotten a job as like a fresh-out-of-high-school, local 18 year old who knew the woods and was willing to take instruction from scientists and collect some data. So I kind of originally focused on that explicitly Christian stuff, but then realized I'm way more passionate about being in the woods and learning as much as I can about it.
The next step in that kind of progression was that I spent the next few years with a plan of wanting to go to grad school for creative writing. Because I thought, oh, I should be writing about these things. At some point, a really good mentor of mine, Jonathan Stober, he's a fire ecologist with the US Forest Service now. It's kind of hard to find those mentors that are willing to like push back on you. I think sometimes people find mentors who are, like, purely cheerleaders, as opposed to like coaches. Somebody who's, like, willing to challenge you and say like, "Hey, this doesn't make sense." He said at some point, "What makes you want to write about it?" And I kind of went off on this 20 year old, idealistic, passion-driven spiel about how I wanted to write about nature and help other people experience it. And he, after this 10-minute monologue from me, just said, "Or you could just do it." It was this like funny, blunt way that he has of saying, "You could just keep doing this, right? You could just keep collecting data and supporting science." So I ended up making the decision to go back to grad school for forestry. But, yeah, the Christian foundations, the original piece of that has continued to impact my career on every level.
David Valerio: That's amazing. I love that quote you shared from C. S. Lewis. I'd love to track it down some time, because I had somebody tell me a similar thing. My own faith story is that I grew up Catholic, but my family left church when I was pretty young, was sort of agnostic in middle school, and ended up coming back to the faith in grad school. But I met a family friend, an older man who was originally pursuing the priesthood, and he was a big fan of science and was a theologian or studied theology. But anyways, he said something to me about, you know, with your science background (and I studied oceanography and geology) that is a beautiful, very powerful way to evangelize the world. Not through like going and just studying theology for its own sake, but like connecting theology to these other aspects of the Creation that maybe most theologians may not necessarily think about, but that are obviously relevant to every other person in the world who is not a Christian. So I very much sympathize with that, although I wasn't a Christian when I decided to become a scientist, but ended up becoming a Christian after becoming a scientist and have found that it's been useful in that context.
I also wanted to sort of reflect on the personal aspect that you said. You mentioned a mentor of yours, and I'm very big on mentorship. Like I have a priest who I go to confession and spiritual direction with. And I think it's such a lacking part of our society. You said your mentor basically told you the hard stuff, like, "Hey, maybe you should just do something different." Sometimes people can be too nice. Like one mentor I had was a… an ex girlfriend of mine, her dad was an Exxon geologist. Originally I went into college thinking I was going to do chemical engineering, because my Dad told me not to do economics and history because I needed to get a job. I hated chemical engineering and he just happened to be at the right place at the right time to say, "Hey, take a geology class." Took that and it was amazing, I loved it. So it's amazing just the sort of ways that individual human persons who come into our lives can radically alter the trajectory of what we do going forward.
I had a question about how growing up in Georgia affected all that you had just discussed above. You sort of alluded to it, that Georgia is a big forestry state, but I would love to hear from you about how you connect to Georgia. From what I understand you've lived in Georgia your whole life, spent some time in the UK, but it's your home and that landscape I'd imagine has a big impact on you. Would love for you to sort of expand on that.
Brandon Craft: Yeah, absolutely. I should probably preface my answer with that I have thought about this way more than most people, like almost like to the point of like neuroticism. You mentioned having a friend who is a theologian. My wife is actually a theology professor and a theologian. Her specialty is actually sense of place. We joke that her PhD was a PhD on homesickness because she did her PhD at the University of St. Andrews. So we moved to Scotland for four years and it was amazing. St. Andrews is a beautiful town. Fife is always going to have a special place in my heart. My daughter is named after a river in Fife in Scotland. But ultimately it wasn't home and we weren't able to ever fully settle in there. Part of it was that we were both first generation college students. None of our family had ever, other than a few relatives with military service, truly left where we were all from. My parents house is a half mile away from a cemetery that has relatives of mine who passed away in the 1800s. So my kind of entire existence was in this maybe 20 or 30 mile circle.
And I think a lot of people reflect on that as a very bad thing, right? But for me, it was like wildly positive because inside of that 20 to 30 mile circle is some of the most beautiful forests in America, some of the most beautiful swamps in America, some of the most productive and beautiful farmland in America. It was also just this kind of like wild open place where a kid could wander for the entire day. I mean, I feel like trespass, the notion of getting in trouble for walking on someone else's land, didn't even occur to me probably until my late teens. We just had complete free reign of a lot of timber company land that was near us. The ecology lab that I started my career at was only a few miles up the road. We spent time playing under the irrigation equipment and in ag fields, wandering through swamps.
In terms of how it impacted me, one of my favorite quotes, not from anyone of any celebrity that people would have heard of, but early in my career I was on a field tour with an older forester who had gone to Vietnam and he kind of summed up his experience in a way that has resonated with me. He said the whole time he was in Vietnam, he was terribly homesick, with all of the negative experiences that were sort of accumulating there, but also he just had this notion of home. And he would lay awake at night, opposite side of the globe, thinking of the sound of the wind through a longleaf pine canopy and how he just missed these pine forests that he had grown up in. I mean, as soon as he said that... I don't know. It just clicked with me. Like, I don't have just an attachment to my parents house or a neighborhood. I have an attachment to this ecosystem that I grew up in, and several ecosystems because I was kind of at this place where the swamp met the Red Hills.
I think I got lucky that that ecosystem was one in which I could launch a career. I could get my career started using a lot of that tacit knowledge that I had built up just from growing up in it. Fire ecology is like, wildly instinctive for me. A lot of my early field career was spent doing prescribed fire. I did my first prescribed fire when I was four years old, like, not by myself, with adults, but my whole family burned the woods to kind of keep the forest healthy and manage it for human objectives. Fire was just kind of like, in me, instinctually. Like my son, he turns four in a couple weeks, and he's already done a handful of prescribed burns with relatives.
It's not often talked about, like, as we're trying to decide what we want to do in our career... A lot of us, especially first generation college students, you have to pull from sources other than like a road map that someone else has written for you. I didn't have an archetype of someone in my family who had gotten this degree and done this thing with it, et cetera. So I was able to kind of just stop and say, what do I love and make a career out of that?
David Valerio: That was such a beautiful story and I sympathize with it in some ways. I was born and raised in Houston, Texas and my family is half Mexican and half Cuban. My dad's side is Mexican. They came here, came to Houston, during the 1910s during the Mexican Revolution. Which on Houston timescales is a very long time because it's a big city. Most people are transient, come in and out. My mom's side is Cuban, came here in the 1960s. I'm very attached to Houston as a place. It's hard to describe. As you were describing it, you were describing it so beautifully, but also there's something necessarily ineffable about how we relate to our landscapes and our environment. It's not like Houston was even a particularly, it's a lot of concrete, a lot of buildings, et cetera, but it's got such natural beauty hidden underneath it as well that I got to connect with at local nature parks and whatnot.
But I do think that our culture radically disapproves of people who want to root themselves in a particular place. I was blessed to end up in really good public schools, in the gifted and talented program. And the smart kid funnel, even in a place like Houston, which is a dynamic large city that has a big industry, the shunting of young, talented people away from where they're from to places like San Francisco, New York, LA, whatever, it's really a tragedy. And it's amazing that I even noticed that in Houston. Houston's a big city. But it's like everybody I knew and grew up around was ready to leave. I was always the one guy, probably just cause I'm a contrarian by nature, saying, no, I'm staying here. I'm not leaving. I love this place. And I also happened to have an industry, adjacent to what I do now, oil and gas. It’s about carbon in some way, releasing emissions, but now I'm in carbon credits, taking them out of the air.
That line you had about the fire being within you kind of gets me to my next question, related to that sense of place. You have a very poetical way of speaking about it, and you mentioned that at first your idea of what you wanted to do as a career was to become a writer. How do you think that humanities orientation has affected the work that you do in like, how you operate in a technical field like forestry?
Brandon Craft: Yeah, that's a great question. I think if you had asked me like 10 or 15 years ago, I was really self conscious about what, at the time, I considered a pretty major pivot, to get a BA in humanities. The language that I studied in undergrad was ancient Greek. It's like, kind of a completely different world than I've lived and moved in since. So for a long time I was self conscious, somewhat apologetic, and I thought of it as a weakness. These days, I just think of college as the chance to build a toolkit. And like any toolkit… If you think about somebody who's a mechanic for a living, their first six months of being a mechanic they have the first tools that they bought and it's what they could afford at the time. Not everything's perfect. They probably wish they had a different brand or a couple of extra tools, but then the longer they're in that profession, they buy more, they replace some of the earlier versions, they swap things out. That's kind of how I think about education.
As a foundation for what I have ended up doing in my career, I would say humanities is probably the strongest thing I could have picked. Ultimately what the humanities taught me to do was engage with people I disagree with. I remember when I was really in the thick of junior and senior year just having to read books on topics and by people that, like, primary sources that I don't think any other degree would have encouraged me to read. I've, like, taken a lot of stuff from it in ways that has impacted my life. It also taught me how to do copious amounts of reading and writing. I remember one of my best friends from high school was an accounting major, and he was in a great accounting program. He's had a really good career. So this is not a dig at his program or even accounting as a major. But one day we were talking about how different our college experiences were, because I mentioned I had a paper due and he acted like that was like a really big deal. He was like, do you write a lot of papers? And I added it up. I took out all of my syllabi and I added it up. And I realized that just that one semester, I would end up writing about 120 pages worth of essays for classes and the only way to do that is to like build up to it. Every semester throughout college, I wrote more and more and I read more and more and it kind of taught me to be a super aggressive researcher and to be as broadly read as possible on a topic while still having depth.
Most of my friends within forest technology have heard me say before that naturally I'm a generalist. I think if I weren't self reflective about how my personality has strengths and weaknesses, I run the risk of being one of those people that's a mile wide and an inch deep. I realized early on that that was a potential problem. So I thought, what if over time I could be a mile wide and two inches deep, a mile wide, three inches deep. And then within that dig some wells. I kind of developed this mindset of reading broadly, reading voraciously, trying to gather as much of the human experience and the knowledge that other people have kind of already accumulated, then combine that with expertise. Especially when I pivoted into forestry, it was just so easy to kind of quickly dig some pretty deep wells like silviculture, GIS, forest management and then later on investment forestry and the business side of things.
I think that whole process started with that humanities degree. It started with this notion of understanding the context for any new piece of knowledge that I learned, and trying to build out systems of thinking that accounted for all of it. Fitting it into an overarching narrative of my, like, personal knowledge base.
David Valerio: Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think I mentioned this earlier, like if I had studied what I wanted to study in college it would have been economics and history because by nature I'm more of that generalist that you mentioned. I like history, I like to read and write. All that kind of stuff. But if you're a smart person who has some sort of mathematical ability, it's like STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, otherwise you're wasting your time. Kind of related to that feeling of inadequacy you mentioned having earlier in your career.
I also sympathize with what you said about recognizing, like, I'm also one of those people who's such a generalist that I could just like, I just want to learn as much about as many things as possible and not necessarily go deep and having to sort of force myself to go deep. But that skill set of just reading and writing, like you said, it can only help in getting deep on any other particular topic.
Brandon Craft: Absolutely. One, one real quick thing on that whole notion of like accumulating this personal knowledge base, this is like tactical level. I've been telling anybody who will listen, cause it's completely changed how I structure all of that. I use a tool called Obsidian, which is basically just a Markdown text editor, but it allows you to build out what people call personal knowledge management or PKM. Basically everything I do every day gets put into Obsidian. If I learn a new fact, it goes in there. I tag it so that it's connected to other things. If I meet a new person I have to put a contact in a contacts folder in Obsidian. So, David, you've got a contact card in my Obsidian knowledge base. It's kind of this, like, way to very tangibly build up that knowledge base over time.
Personality wise, like in undergrad, I was always the kid that carried around a Moleskine and like wrote everything down in a physical notebook. And after a few years of doing that I realized I had all of this information that I would never be able to access again. I still like handwriting things down, but eventually I wanted like a searchable knowledge base and I came across the notion of personal knowledge management and it's been a game changer.
David Valerio: I love that you mentioned that. I used to use Roam Research, if you know that. It's a similar thing to Obsidian, the non open-source version. Moved to Obsidian for a while. Now I'm on Notion, but I'm also a big note taker. An earlier guest on the podcast, Bryan Kam, he's a philosopher. He is also obsessed with Obsidian and he uses it like crazy as part of writing his book. And his knowledge management system is the most crazy one that I've ever encountered. But yeah, highly recommended. Take notes, at a minimum, take notes.
Brandon Craft: Yeah, yeah. That's the main point, is just take notes, write things down, hold on to knowledge.
David Valerio: Yeah, regardless of the way it fits, just writing things down, taking good meeting notes, like all these sorts of things. It makes your knowledge more embodied, even if it's on a computer, than it would otherwise. So it helps you remember it and helps you sort of shape it going forward.
Another thing I wanted to actually reflect on was the value of a humanities degree. in terms of like human-to-human interaction, and like having a broad and deep understanding the varieties of human experience is like something that I've learned is perhaps the most important thing one can do in a career. Obviously people optimize for different things, but coming from a technical background and then moving more into customer and people-facing roles, I'm like, “Why has the world been trying to make me a STEM guy when I could be running the world by talking to everybody?” Not that I want to run the world, but like the people who talk to people and know how to communicate ideas, the word, like the power of the written word, the spoken word. It's remarkable, like they're telling the technical guys what to do, right? I don't know, that's been a realization for me over the past three years being in industry now where I'm like, "Why have I been wasting my time doing this technical stuff?" It wasn't a waste of time. I learned a skill set, a framework for looking at the world as you mentioned. But it's interesting that people like myself, who naturally are inclined more to thee humanities and philosophy, we, if you're good enough at math, get shunted into STEM. And then it's like, well, that's not where you necessarily are probably going to have the highest impact.
In the same vein, you mentioned being passionate about technology, forest technology in particular. How does that aspect of your career and what you've studied differentiate you relative to other people in your industry? From what I understand, there's differing levels of technological adoption within the forest industry. And I'd love for you to just reflect on how generally having that technical aptitude and desire to use new technology has manifested itself throughout the work you've done.
Brandon Craft: Yeah, that's a good question. I will say in terms of differentiation, I feel like it's important for me to say up front, I definitely don't think it makes me like any better than like friends of mine who are pure foresters, always been in the woods want to stay in the woods. It's just made it more geared towards like my personal interest and path. I've been able to have a more diverse career because of it, but it's definitely changed that path. I think especially in my current role, like, I'm a product manager. I'm building the next flagship product for Orbis, a forestry software company. Anytime you're building anything technology-based for foresters to use, there's this kind of inherent distrust of novelty and of technology because there are a lot of really, really good legacy systems. I've said before a number of times, we don't call it a legacy system if it doesn't work. Sometimes legacy system is like a euphemism. Like, “Oh, we've got these legacy systems...” But in forestry, the legacy systems that are in place have been running an entire industry, like a multibillion dollar industry for decades. There are multimillion-dollar forestry companies being run on Microsoft Access. It's like a Microsoft Office product that sometimes Microsoft employees forget exists. It's an older tool, but it works great for a lot of the stuff that our industry needs. So baked into the culture of forestry is this notion of, “Well, we've got this tool. It's been working for, you know, 10 years, 20 years, 40 years. Why would we change it?”
I think the only way you help people in that journey is to have walked it with them. So the fact that I started over 20 years ago, taking measurements in the forest with manual tools. The fact that the technology that was available then, I was using. Back when hand data collectors you used in the woods had like a mobile copy of Windows on them. If you were waiting on somebody else to meet you, you could like sit on the tailgate of a truck and play solitaire. You had a GPS antenna that weighed 15 or 20 pounds in a backpack just to get the amount of GPS accuracy that now everyone has in their phones. Having done that I think gives me a lot more empathy with the people that are still using... I think a few years ago, when I was working in forestry consulting, about a month before I left this job, I had a landowner email me their cruise data, and they were like, "Hey, I've got this cruise data, tell me what I can do with it." I had this like vague recollection of the file extension. But it was kind of like Gandalf outside the caves of Moria, like, oh, I haven't seen this language in a while and had to Google it. Even though I had used it 15 years before, but it was like a cruise program that the company that had made it hadn't even existed for like 10 or 15 years. But the thing is it worked. Like I opened the file. I had to hack into it, figured out how to get into it and like the data was there. This guy's still been using this program for years. I think the only way you get someone like that to see the potential of a new technology is to be like, "Hey, I also loved this cruise program 15 years ago, but it would probably be better if you switched to this so that I wouldn't have to Google how to open the file." So I think part of it is just that empathy, like just that ability to put yourself in their shoes. I think that's the main thing.
And then also just general industry awareness. Even just in the time that you and I have known one another, my career has like changed considerably. I've like leaned really hard in a direction because I noticed a trend towards technological change management, updating new technologies. And decided like, this is the problem that's big enough to spend the rest of my career in. I think that general knowledge base is what allows you to spot things like that.
David Valerio: Something that this reminds me of is when I used to work at a company called Validere that was trying to like automate emissions reporting for oil and gas companies. We had this kind of like the trite saying internally was like, we're disrupting the spreadsheets that everybody was using in order to do their reporting. You might call that a legacy system. But it's worked for a long time, and Microsoft's not going away anytime soon. Whereas Validere might be gone in like two years. Who knows, right? So I think that a level of intellectual humility when it comes to applying technology to new industries is something that a lot of people, I work in climate tech, a lot of people who work with a tech mentality don't necessarily have when they're going and trying to interact with existing industries because they're like “Oh yeah, in software we've disrupted X, Y, or Z thing." But when you're dealing with the real world, with people like foresters who are dealing with stuff in the real world, or people in oil and gas who are dealing with stuff in the real world, there's a lot of that tacit knowledge understanding that you would not know the problem you're actually trying to solve for them unless you've actually done it yourself. So with your experience, you've been on the ground, you've been in the field, you've gone and done the physical measurements that you now might be advising people to take using software solutions. But you know where they're actually coming from rather than just saying, “Well, obviously you should change the way that you're doing this because this is dumb.”
This next question I want to ask is, having this humanities background, having this technology orientation, that's a unique and interesting mix of skills. With having those two interesting backgrounds, what novel things do you think that you've been able to apply in your industry? That somebody who may not have both the humanities and the technical skills would otherwise not have been able to do.
Brandon Craft: I'll probably have to back into answering it in reference to my career, but immediately I think of the ways it's impacted me in my personal life. I think a lot of the, like, metaphors we use to understand concepts impact everything else in our lives. For instance, when I was doing my masters I ended up doing what is probably still to this day the strangest master's project that the school of forestry at Auburn had ever seen. I was a big fan of this French philosopher named Gaston Bachelard. I had, like, a whole section about phenomenology, which is like a really cool, esoteric, philosophical school in continental philosophy. He had done this like phenomenology of the childhood home, where he talked about how the architecture of the home that you grow up in sort of forms the moral and cognitive structures in your brain. The concept I mentioned earlier of my home ecosystem forming me came out of all of that work. I developed this notion of a phenomenology of forested places, and how do we understand our personal experiences of, for me, forests, for other people it would be different types of ecosystems. How do we really think about how being in those places forms us?
That led to like a lot of the stuff that's happened in my career. The ecosystem I grew up in is wildly complex. In some ways it seems really delicate, but it's actually super resilient because it adapted to some of the most aggressive fire return interval intervals in the Western Hemisphere. Some of the longleaf pine forest in the Southeast, historically, were burning every year. So the fire return interval was a year. I think there are some places in the central ridge of Florida further south of me where a lot of years would see multiple fires per year naturally. So you had this, like, notion of, "Hey, this forest could be destroyed at any minute" The whole system organized itself to that so that it wasn't destructive. That kind of formed me personally in how I think about resilience, how I think about preparing for bad things that could happen. Just this notion of adapting and being able to bounce back from a perturbation.
And the way it informed my career was this notion of complexity. It was exactly the complexity of the understory in a longleaf pine forest that allows it to do that. It has all these fire-adapted, highly flammable plants that basically just used that fire that would kill other plants to help themselves reproduce and take care of the landscape. So it was all like a fire-adapted grass understory underneath these trees. I don't think I could have reached that conclusion without pretty much the sum total of experience that I've had. The humanities degree, the on-the-ground experience, the fire experience—all of that kind of helped me get to that point.
David Valerio: That's super interesting. I have a similar thing growing up in Houston, but with hurricanes, right? Gulf Coast hurricanes. We get them. I'm thinking about this phenomenology of home ecosystem that you're describing and I'm realizing that… We had like, I guess, three or four hurricanes when I was growing up. Probably more than that. They're this thing that you're expecting every year, kind of like how maybe in your ecosystems in Georgia you're expecting a fire every year, potentially, although they're probably stopping it now, but you never know what's going to happen. So every year you could just have a big storm that knocks out electricity for a good amount of time. And so your life is sort of radically altered on these semi-regular frequencies.
And I think that that really oriented me to like catastrophism in like the geological record and the idea that these sort of Black Swan events, the rare edge-case things, have a dramatic, huge impact on the way that the world works, which is tied into complexity theory, as you mentioned. The idea of a tipping point and then past a certain point you have a downward spiral. And so I don't know if I grew up in, I don't know, I'm speaking to you from North Dakota right now, if I grew up in North Dakota—Snow storms are a thing, but I don't think I would have that appreciation for, or understanding, or desire to learn more about, man, there's like something here that's so deep about the randomness of life and the way that a huge ocean that I really know nothing about can form these massive storms that come and sort of knock off life as I know it for a long time.
One could potentially reach some similar conclusion from a scientific perspective. I think the example of complexity science is a key example from that, like starting off from scientific, material-reductionist principles, ending up in this really, in my view, sort of mystical-spiritual conclusion about there's just a lot of stuff we don't know. That's something that is, I think, baked into some degree in the humanities and that orientation. That you can't discretize everything and somehow try to understand the whole in that way.
Brandon Craft: It's funny, that also touches on another element of my really weird masters project. I was basically looking at scenic beauty estimates, which is this way of ranking how beautiful a forest is that originated with a handful of professors in the UK, one of whom I studied under before we moved back. I started a graduate program down in Wales, and there was a forest economics professor there by the name of Colin Price who's been really influential and continues to be influential to me. Himself and a handful of other researchers in the, like, 60s and 70s started thinking through forest beauty which spilled over into the Forest Service, and I kind of took it in a weirder direction because of the humanities background. But I spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of beauty in natural systems and the concept of natural beauty. One of the things that I constantly came across was this notion of the sublime. So what you just described, what I described in relation to fire. I grew up in the coastal plain further south in Georgia, so hurricanes, but not quite to the extent that Houston would see. We're probably 90 miles inland from the coast, but we had fire and you mentioned it in reference to hurricanes. And then you said North Dakota and how other than maybe snowstorms, you couldn't think of a similar example. But when I think of North Dakota, and the like stark landscape there, I think of the sublime.
It's like a concept that's related to beauty, but it's not one in the same. In the context of nature, it's all of these things that if we're not being careful with language, we might call beauty, but in reality it's an emotion much more like fear. You see how big nature is like when you see a hurricane, you see the full power and force of nature when you see a large wildfire or a large enough prescribed fire, you have this moment of “This thing could destroy me.” You're slightly scared of it, but it's also utterly beautiful. And to me, that's just been, like, hugely formative. The other example that I'd normally give when I'm talking about the sublime is when we lived in St. Andrews. The North Sea is by far one of the crazier natural environments I've ever experienced. You could go from having a perfectly sunny day to having these fog events that they call, the Scottish call the haar. Which I'm not going to try to say it like a Scottish person because I don't want to offend any of my friends. But it's H A A R and it's basically this like Black Swan fog event where all of a sudden you truly can barely see your hand in front of your face. The thickest fog I've ever seen. Then there were other times where these storms would blow in. The pier at St. Andrews is like 30 feet above the water and I've seen waves just completely overtop it in like a normal storm. To me, that's often lumped together with natural beauty, but it's actually the sublime. It's this, it's almost even more formative than beauty itself, because it's the power of nature.
David Valerio: That's such a keen insight. I hadn't really thought about the sublime and beauty as being… I, like you just mentioned, as most people do, thought of them as being synonyms for one another. But you're right that the sublime as manifested in hurricanes, it's beautiful, but it's also like, “Oh my gosh, I'm so scared. I don't want to deal with this right now.” And it makes me think about deserts too. Like I'm a big lover of deserts. I have family in Phoenix, spent a lot of time out in the Mountain West. Some people hate deserts. I love deserts because it's sublime, as I'm learning now, right? It's like, you look out at this, from our eyes, barren wasteland. Hot, you know, I would not live here very long. There's like a thrill to that being on the edge. And maybe this is like what mountain climbers experience when they're like hiking Everest or whatever, and they know they can die, or maybe Everest isn't the best example cause it's pretty well trotted now. But something about this, the human getting out of civilization, out of our sort of little cultivated ecosystems and moving into places that it's clear that actually we are at the mercies of nature. That the combination of fear and beauty is maybe what the sublime is.
Brandon Craft: It's funny you mentioned deserts in particular because that relates to, for me, one of the issues I spot when we're talking about sustainability, love of nature. One of the main issues when it comes to getting people to notice and love an ecosystem is if they think of it as an empty place, they're never going to be able to love it. Like, the people that you said hate deserts, like, I've encountered that too. And it almost feels like it's because they think deserts are empty.
I'm a big fan of Donella Meadows, one of the most accessible thinkers in systems theory. At one point she had this quote about naming things. She was talking about being careful with language and how we can only see what we are able to name or talk about. Like if we don't have vocabulary to discuss something, then our mind kind of sees it as an empty space. And I think a lot of times in natural systems, if you're trying to educate someone on an ecosystem, and get them to fall in love with it, like, as soon as you can get them started naming things it all clicks and they begin to grow a vocabulary. Like, in my ecosystem and in the Southeast and longleaf pine, understanding what prescribed fire is and that it's different from wildfire. That's a really important thing that somebody coming from other parts of the world or other parts of the country struggles to understand. We burn our woods carefully. We do it with intention ,in a way that enhances and works alongside the local ecology. There's a whole vocab set and way of thinking and talking about that, that once you see it, it's like kind of revealed to you. That's what I think of when I think of desert ecology or any of these ecosystems that are more challenging initially to people, you just have to teach them what's there, you know?
David Valerio: I love this idea and I think it's so true. You know, being Christian, that words are very important. The word of God, right? The words that are behind these things, the logoi, these things that we see around us are all emanating from that one source. But I think with deserts, right? Like you said, if you name like an arroyo, like it looks dry right now, but that's not dry, it's not always dry. There's water there that's going to feed the ecosystem. That changes your view of it from being like a static, "Oh, there used to be a river here. Now there's no water. This is just terrible. Screw it. Let's put solar panels over everything" to like, "Oh, actually, there's something here!" There's a dynamism here. There is life here. It is not dead.
I think about this too with the ocean a lot, because as I mentioned, I've studied oceanography, and I think the ocean is the hardest, I'm going to say it, it's the hardest ecosystem for us in the world to put words to because we fundamentally do not understand what it's like to be a fish, or any of these other sea creatures. We breathe air, they breathe water. We just can't conceive of the mass and the scale of the ocean and the way that a deep sea ecosystem operates. It's something that is beyond human experience in a lot of ways. And because of that, you have examples like deep seabed mining being proposed as a massive thing to help bring electric vehicles on, on shore. Like, let's go mine manganese nodule or polymetallic modules from the bottom of the ocean because we got to get electric cars out there without even thinking that we don't have a deep understanding of what's going on there. That work of figuring out how to translate natural systems into human language I think is at the heart of how we as a society and as just individual human persons interact and come to come to love the Creation.
Sort of just to close out a really big question, going forward what are you striving to achieve in your life? What do you think you're going to work on next? What are your goals? What are you striving for?
Brandon Craft: Yeah, great question. I can say 100 percent, for sure, I'm going to continue to chase complex problems and chase curiosity. I've realized as I've gotten older that's just who I am. Like, I really, really want to find a sticky problem that our sector has problems with and hunker down on it. The version that all of my friends have heard me say, like, I've said it so much, they're probably people sick of hearing me say it. But I've also started to have it repeated back to me. Like, I've had friends come back and say like, man, I've stolen that from you. I'm using that too.
I've been working for startups for a few years. Thankfully now I'm no longer at a startup because it's a very difficult way to move through your career. And during the height of that difficulty, at some point, I realized I needed like a mantra, like I needed a single sentence that would get me out of bed every single morning that could define my career, but also had implications for my life. And I've been very careful, so every word in this sentence is intentionally chosen. The current version is, "I want to build things of value with good people." Is it okay if I cuss?
David Valerio: Oh yeah. Feel free.
Brandon Craft: So, a friend of mine, I don't think he would mind me saying his name, but he's one of the people that started repeating it back to me. He's modified it to, "I want to build cool shit with cool people." And I like that too. It's a very similar thing. I'm to the point. Like, I turn 40 in like two weeks. Me and my son have the same birthday, which is kind of fun. I turn 40 in two weeks, and the past few years I've just been thinking like, 40 years from now what do I want people to say? Like Brandon did this. And the longer I sit with it… I'm at about a year and a half now of that mantra. I want to build things of value with good people. The longer I sit with it, the more I think that completely sums it up at a high level.
What that looks like in practice is what I'm doing right now. I think building a next generation forest information management system is really important—that excites me, man. Building a system that brings value to anybody managing forest, that makes their data easier to understand, easier to summarize and carve out, and develop better understanding from it. I think that's great. The other thing that came out of the past year for me is I've started advising forest tech startups. In between jobs at one point I was doing it on a consulting basis for pay. But at this point, now that I'm in a full time role again, at this point, it's just a passion project. Our industry needs better and more tools and a lot of those are technological. The people that have the skills and talents needed to build those things and the people who understand forestry are almost never... If it were Venn diagrams, it would just be like two circles next to one another. They barely touch. So I've started just coming alongside of founders and helping them refine a lot of what they're trying to do. And man, there's a bunch of stealth mode forest technology companies out there. Companies that people don't even know exist yet. But if their vision comes to fruition, they'll chip away at completely changing the industry I've devoted my life to. Man, that's the good stuff, man. Like, that's truly what gets me out of bed in the morning.
David Valerio: Well, I think that's the best way we can close out the show. Brandon, thank you very much for coming on. I really enjoyed this and we'll have to talk again soon.
Brandon Craft: Yeah, thanks, David. This was really fun, man.
The direct quote is “I believe that any Christian who is qualified to write a good popular book on any science may do much more by that than by an directly apologetic work.” Brandon was remarkably close!
Brandon Craft on the Humanities and Prescribed Fire