We just released a new paper that takes a look at the powerfully positive influence of wildness – being out in Nature for an extended period of time. It tells the story of three inspiring, independent spirits who refused to go along to get along, finding Nature as their ally.
You can download the paper here:
https://chaparralwisdom.org/2023/07/19/wildness-a-crucible-for-independence/

Marshal and Rider South.

Embracing Wisdom Over Gossip

The drum beat of doom has been pounding out the same headline in the Los Angeles Times for a month now: Beware the Big Melt! The dire warning appeared April 3, April 5, April 11, April 25, April 26, May 3. And again this morning. Same sensationalism, same embellishment, same catastrophizing.

BIG MELT ‘JUST GETTING STARTED’ Much of the massive Sierra Nevada snowpack remains,keeping flood risk high as temperatures rise

With an added twist at the bottom of column…

FIRE SEASON IS COMING The wet winter will only delay the inevitable, officials say, as fuels across the state begin to dry out and become susceptible to ignition.

“Don’t let the rain and the snow fool you,” the expert said. And all that green Nature? It’s just fuel. Armageddon is coming; walls of water and fires from hell.

We shall see.

Meanwhile, glancing at the rest of the paper revealed more slamming of adjectives against nouns to trigger reader fear: danger in LA streets, a disunited kingdom, three stabbings spark fears, etc., etc.

To continue reading, please visit our online journal here:
https://chaparralwisdom.org/2023/05/08/the-big-melt-is-coming-hell-fire-inevitable/

Part IV of the Series, How Truth Metastasized Into A Lie: The Fire Suppression Fallacy

How did the observation that fire suppression has caused some forests to miss several natural fire cycles metastasize into a pernicious stereotype that has convinced huge numbers of people that Nature is sick, clogged with dead trees and unhealthy vegetation, and is ready to vaporize in the next wildfire?

As is the case with fear-mongering media outlets, catastrophizing even the most insignificant events to obtain attention, images and situations are cherry-picked by proponents of the fire suppression fallacy to communicate the most dire circumstance. The propaganda has been incredibly successful, convincing politicians to allocate billions of dollars to “fix” Nature with grinding machines, chainsaws, and herbicide.

As with most stories designed to panic, the truth becomes embellished and inconvenient facts are ignored or forgotten.

The origins of the fire suppression fallacy can be traced back to the late 1800’s when westward expansion brought more human beings, and hence sources of ignition, into a highly flammable environment. Vast piles of logging slash (limbs and other waste from timber operations), hot cinders from trains traveling deep into the back country, unattended fires utilized to clear land, outright carelessness (Pyne 1982), and most importantly drought and high winds, all played a role in adding more, larger fires to the landscape. Between 1865 and 1910 large wildfires from the Great Lakes region to California led federal and state governments to form cooperative firefighting agreements and pass regulations attempting to reduce the likelihood of human caused ignitions and fight fires when they started.

Many of these fires, such as the 1871 Peshtigo fire in Wisconsin, which killed an estimated 1,500 people, were linked to piles of logging slash. Such slash-related forest fires continued into the early 1900’s, due to the deadly combination of loggers resisting change in their practices (McMahon and Karamanski 2002) and severe fire weather. As a reminder, these huge, high-intensity wildfires burned prior to the era of fire suppression (Table 1)...

To read more, please visit our journal at:
https://chaparralwisdom.org/2023/05/02/the-beginnings-of-the-fire-suppression-fallacy/

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Just completed this landscape rehaul project in my relative's yard in Grand Terrace. Stripped out all the water-guzzling grass and replaced it with mulch, gravel, and a stock of 100% native plants like Black Sage, Toyon, Bush Monkeyflower, Manzanitas, Yarrow, California Lilacs, Coyote Brush, Buckwheat, and Penstemons - common hallmarks of the SoCal mixed chaparral communities. I can't wait to see them all grow in.

Better drainage, lower water bill, turf rebate $$$, pollinator friendly, colorful, fragrant, beautiful! (in my humble opinion)

Let me know what you think - would you rather have something like this than a plain lawn?

Once a year, we offer a unique learning experience to explore and enjoy a place few people know - the chaparral.

Our Chaparral Naturalist program is an opportunity to discover the remarkable native plants and animals with which we share California's beautiful landscape, and to rekindle our innate love for Nature.

The adventure begins February 25, 2023, in sunny San Diego County.

All the details, a sample class schedule, and topics covered can be found on our Education page here:

https://californiachaparral.org/education/

We hope you will join us!

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In Pursuit of Logic: Part V of V

“Although most Americans know they are supposed to say ‘We learn from our mistakes,’ deep down they don’t believe it for a minute.”
– Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

The key issue we have been struggling with while exploring the topic of this series, In Pursuit of Logic, is how to develop engaging conversations with people of divergent views that avoid the toxicity of ego – to inspire people to listen rather than waiting to talk.

We keep coming back to Brother David Steindl-Rast and his simple message of gratitude. Simply put, he suggests an easy first step that is based on what we do before crossing the street. We stop, look, then cross. The key here is stopping to allow time to think. Or put another way, placing some space between our feelings and how we eventually respond.

Recently, I had a wonderful conversation with my dear friend Mike about the issue that has inspired this series: clearing habitat in an attempt to reduce the threat of wildfire. Mike filled our experience together on the phone with laughter, self-depreciation, respect, and pauses. I knew we disagreed on a few things, but by the end of the call I honestly couldn’t tell what exactly those things were. Mike always provided space for me to think, to contribute. That’s the secret of successful communication.

Mike and I have been traveling similar journeys of late, the kind that a lot of folks take an interest in after realizing they’ve entered the last third of their lives – how to connect it all; our triumphs, our mistakes, the space we occupy, the life around us, and the space we will leave behind. On his recent journey to the Southwest, I gave Mike one of the most influential books I’ve read in my life, Masked Gods: Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism, by Frank Waters.

Like the underground mycelial network of delicate white threads joining together to provide common, vital nutrients to individual plants, Waters connects Indigenous wisdom with other spiritual and intellectual journeys that cultures have taken to understand the flow and meaning of life: Buddhism, Taoism, Christian Science, and Carl Jung’s analytical psychology. They all travel parallel paths.

The road of life …is a long one and a difficult one. For man is at once born of the Earth Mother and the Sun Father and acknowledges allegiance to both the cosmic dualities which they symbolize. Hence the supreme purpose of his life is to resolve within himself the conflict of these polarities so that he may finish his road in harmonic relationship with both and with all the universe.

Much of my life has been guided by the richness of such words, words shared in the kivas of Pueblo ancestors and Buddhist monasteries for centuries.

Stepping Back From the Abyss

And so, when we were accused of using “offensive, racist language,” and were told we were promoting the “erasure” of Native American “cultures and stewardship” in our original essay of this series, We’re Getting Indigenous Burning All Wrong (which appeared originally as a letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times), the dissonance was significant...

Please continue reading by visiting the full essay here.

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I have a small bush transplanted into a container in 2018, saved from a wind turbine installation. I’ve finally nailed the temperature and moisture/humidity conditions, but the soil is becoming nitrogen depleted and traditional fertilizers (organic or not) cause complete defoliation. Getting more desert soil isn’t an option at the moment, I’m afraid. Any help or ideas will be greatly appreciated.

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Contrary to the continual virtual signaling by many mainstream environmental groups, John Muir was, and remains, an inspiration for equality and Nature. While all his peers were engaged in exploiting Native Americans, Muir was fighting to protect what remained of the landscape they loved and rejected our nation’s policies toward Indigenous Peoples. To find out more, please read our article, Inspired by John Muir: The Eternal Conflict Between Right and Wrong.

Photo: John Muir

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Hi fellow chaparralians,

Some very dedicated activists are standing in the way of a planned lithium mine in a sagebrush steppe in Paiute territory, known as Thacker Pass of Northern Nevada. It's rich with life in a way similar to our homes. A dry climate, with harsher elements than ours. Perhaps unimpressive looking to some, but brimming with life in every possible niche. Underrepresented in the environmentalist communities at large, like ours, but also very loved by our non-human kin who call it home, and people who know it.Low lying old-growth sage brush blankets the biotic crust. Springs host a highly specialized, endangered species of snail. Sage grouse, pronghorn antelope, golden eagles, Lahontan cutthroat trout would all be impacted, certainly among many others.

They would be sacrificed in exchange for an open pit lithium mine; energy storage in batteries to continue fueling machines which will in turn demand more sacrifice later. The land protectors there won't be letting that happen. But like all resistance efforts, this land can't be protected without support. Right now they need writers, poets, media, videographers, photographers, painters, anyone who can tell a story to be there for any stretch of time, as well as some material support. So please reach out to them - https://www.protectthackerpass.org/ - if you're interested in being involved! Spread the word, this is going to be a big fight and they'll need all the support they can get!

An organizer Max Wilbert is putting updates on youtube to give people some more depth to what's going on with the occupation.https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX_04JGnK6w733vu2OfOTWw

Greater Sage Grouse

I hope this is okay to share here. Sunbelt Publications is a big fan of the California Chaparral Institute and Rick Halsey. We are the publisher of his books Fire, Chaparral, and Survival in Southern California and Coloring Nature in the California Chaparral. We thought the users here may be interested in an upcoming Zoom lecture we are hosting with Bill Howell, author of our newest coloring book, Coloring Southern California Butterflies and Caterpillars. He will be sharing his favorite butterflies that live in San Diego County with us on October 14th at 1:00 pm.

The link to RSVP can be found here.

Rebecca @ Sunbelt Publications

I understand that chaparral evolved with 30-150 year interval crown fires, but it seems our current and future wildfire problem is occuring in wildland-urban interface zones already dominated by invasive plant species (in San Diego county from my limited and amateur observations).

Assuming it is economically impractical to manually re-plant and tend to new chaparral plant communities on a large enough scale to reverse the type conversion, could prescribed burns and managed ungulate grazing be part of the effort to manage wildfires ecologically in SoCal? (Only on landscapes already dominated by invasive plant/shrubs in the WUI)

Or does the science show that fire supression will eventually lead to non-native weedy grassland type-converting back to chaparral on it’s own? That would be great. I could not find definitive information on that.

(I am all for an army of citizen scientists pulling out invasives before they go to seed while tending native plant nurseries at home, ready to plant mature chaparral specimens to replace the invasives. Maybe in the future!)

Thank you for your time, may we find the best way forward.