There is a mature oak on Monterey Street that before this spring many people in San Luis Obispo had walked past without stopping. It stands at the edge of what will become the SLO REP performing arts theater and was caught briefly in a civic argument about how a tree and a building could share the same ground.
I got involved in that argument earlier this year. I wrote letters, convened conversations, and prepared proposals. For a while it looked like the tree would simply come down. The situation has continued to develop, a path to preserve the tree is now underway, and what’s emerged in the process is a larger picture than the outcome either way.
People came out of nowhere. A donor who had never thought about urban trees before called to ask how she could help. A landscape architect I’d never met sent me research on structural bridging techniques that could have accommodated the tree within the theater footprint. A group of community members pledged actual money and resources to absorb the financial burden that SLO REP couldn’t put on its donors. City staff acknowledged real gaps in prior oversight while also pointing to existing frameworks for protection.
What it took to get all of them into the same conversation was a single friction point and someone willing to sit in the middle of it. That’s not a system. That’s luck. And it means that every time something like this happens, the coordination has to be reinvented from scratch by whoever happens to care enough to show up. The people with experience from the last time are exhausted or gone. The frameworks that were surfaced get submerged again.
That’s what struck me most. Not the conflict itself, but what the conflict briefly illuminated: a network of care and knowledge that exists in this county but has no common visibility and struggles for consistent activation. Even with Nextdoor and active social media engagement from civic organizations, the way we receive information has actually built walls between adjacent concerns. Common goals simmer in near isolation. When they do surface, it’s usually through tension.
This network of care does continue to exist, especially in this county. It’s just not consistently supported.
SLO County has an extraordinary concentration of people doing serious work with the living landscape. Grazers managing hillsides with livestock. Burn associations building fire resilience through prescribed fire. Tribes holding and revitalizing cultural and ecological knowledge. Watershed stewards. Educators. City staff/natural resource managers. Urban foresters. Seed savers. People who have spent decades learning the particular language of one piece of ground.
The threshold between most people and the living world around them is no longer determined primarily by knowledge or access, but orientation.
Many of them can’t rely on a common, unfractured network … even here.
And most residents—people who live here because they love this place, who slow down driving past a well-grazed hillside without quite knowing why—often aren’t aware that this community and practice exists the way that it does, let alone how to become part of it.
That gap isn’t inevitable. It’s just ineffectively addressed.
I’ve spent the last several months working on a few responses to it: a county grazing association currently taking shape as a regional stewardship directory called GrazeSLO and a broader project in development called Commons, which is a living map of how the members of this county are engaging with its land, built in part from what the theater oak made visible.
Commons is built around a simple idea. The threshold between most people and the living world around them is no longer determined primarily by knowledge or access, but orientation. People don’t know meaningfully where to look, what to ask, or who to ask it to. They feel the pull of a place without having language for it yet. Our project is in early development. What exists right now is a first layer equipped with a conversational guide called Navi, named for what she does and for something older than that, who begins building the map through conversation. One question, one thread, one connection at a time.
The map itself is what we’re working toward and what Naviis helping us build: not something you consult, but something you move through, that moves with you. But the network it will trace already exists.
In the meantime, if you know a significant tree—one that has shaped a block, a yard, a view for decades—we want to know about it. If you work with land in this county in any capacity, we want to find you.
If you felt something driving through this landscape recently and didn’t know what to do with it, that feeling is exactly where this starts.
You can find us at slocommons.orgor reach me directly at subcanopyplanning@gmail.com.
The theater oak on Monterey Street is still standing. What it’s made visible doesn’t have to be temporary. ∆
NicholasDePaoli is a landscape planner based in SLO County and the founder of SubcanopyPlanning. Send a response to letters@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Student Guide 2026.
