My Story
Jessica Teona Schley
I come from a place where land has a long memory.
I grew up on a multigenerational working cattle and horse ranch in Happy Canyon, in California’s Santa Ynez Valley.
We raised Charolais cattle and ranch-stock Quarter Horses, and the rhythms of ranch life were simply part of the fabric of my childhood—the horses, the cattle, the work, the stories, and the generations of people who had cared for that land before me.
Long before I studied conservation or began writing about the West, I understood something about belonging to a place.
That understanding has shaped nearly everything I’ve done since.
Writer. Rider. Storyteller.
The stories I’m most interested in are often the ones that could easily disappear.
Old cowboy stories. Family histories. Ranching traditions. The complicated relationships between people and the places they call home. The knowledge passed between generations, sometimes without anyone realizing that’s what’s happening.
My writing grew from a desire to pay attention to those stories—and to the people still living them.
That became Roots & Resilience: California Ranchers in Their Own Words, a collection of stories, poems, and essays written by 17 ranchers from across California.
Through the book, readings, gatherings, and my own writing, I’ve had the privilege of helping bring those voices into rooms where they might not otherwise be heard.
But underneath the storytelling is something even bigger for me:
What happens to a place when the people who know how to care for it can no longer stay?
The land is part of the story.
My love of ranching eventually led me to UC Berkeley, where I studied rangeland ecology, food distribution, and land and water conservation policy.
For my senior thesis, I studied land trusts and conservation easements as tools for helping ranching families navigate long-term and intergenerational transitions.
What fascinated me then still fascinates me now: conservation doesn’t have to mean separating people from the land.
Sometimes the people working the land are among its most important stewards.
Research has demonstrated the ecological role livestock grazing can play in California’s rangelands, including benefits to habitats for certain protected species. Yet ranchers and environmentalists are still too often portrayed as standing on opposite sides of a divide.
I don’t believe they have to be.
I believe we accomplish far more when we get curious about one another, find common ground, and recognize that many of us are ultimately fighting for the same thing:
to leave something worth inheriting.
I call that Carhartt Conservationism.
You don’t have to wear a cowboy hat. You don’t have to come from a ranch. The point is finding the common ground underneath the labels—and learning how to work from there.
Keeping working landscapes working.
Today, I serve on the Legacy Council for the California Rangeland Trust, supporting its work to conserve California’s ranches and rangelands.
That same perspective follows me into my work with people buying and selling ranches, equestrian properties, and rural estates.
To me, these places are never simply acreage.
They have histories. Water. Animals. Families. Ecosystems. Memories. Possibilities.
Whether I’m writing about a ranching family, standing in front of an audience sharing a story, riding through country I’ve known for years, or helping someone navigate the future of a piece of land, I keep coming back to the same questions:
How do we belong to a place?
How do we care for it while it’s ours?
And what stories—and landscapes—will we leave for the people who come after us?
Those are the questions I’m still exploring.
And, I suspect, I always will.