Chaparral Wisdom
To celebrate the magic and beauty of Nature & the chaparral
Hear Something Different for a Change
Listening to a webcast, attending a conference, or watching a powerpoint presentation about wildfire is akin to sipping warm water with a side of Wonder Bread – tasteless, boring, expected. Speakers will wax and wane about the evils of fire suppression, how clearing habitat will save us, and if we could just do more prescribed fire like Indigenous People supposedly did we would solve the wildfire crisis overnight.
How about discussing why humans keep believing fallacies that can be easily refuted by rational thought; why we keep pouring billions of dollars into programs that fail to produce desired outcomes; and why people believe mistakes are made, but not by them?
Please join us November 19th, Thursday evening from 7 to 9 PM, at the San Diego Library for a free, divergent offering by divergent thinkers: Wildfire and the Quest for Control: Why do we keep getting burned? Details below.
And please consider attending, in person, as part of your effort to enhance and preserve our humanity by leaving the confines of your home, walking away from the screens, and meeting people in a new, physical environment. Additional suggestions on how do more of that can be found in our online journal here: The Chaparralian Creed.
We Lost Ken Sleight at 97
For those us who forged our environmental passions by reading Ed Abbey, falling in love with our own red rock country, and embracing the visceral and uncompromising connection we have for Wilderness, Ken Sleight has always been an inspiration.
From the Salt Lake Tribune
October 3, 2026
Ken Sleight may be most well known for something that he probably never did: kneeling on the bridge in front of the Glen Canyon Dam, his hands clasped and eyes closed, praying to the Almighty to produce a “precision-type earthquake” that would free the Colorado River from its imprisonment in Lake Powell.
The Sleight-inspired character Seldom Seen Smith acted out the scene in “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” Edward Abbey’s 1975 cult classic of ecosabotage. But although the character was fictional, Sleight’s lifelong hatred of the dam was very real, as was his love of Glen Canyon, the area drowned by Lake Powell.
“It was Glen Canyon that changed my whole life,” Sleight told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2018. “It made an environmentalist out of me.”
Sleight died Friday, Spanish Valley Mortuary in Moab confirmed. He was 97.
“We just lost such a wonderful person,” John Weisheit, director of Living Rivers and friend and mentee of Sleight’s, told The Salt Lake Tribune on Saturday.
“We need more Ken Sleights, not less,” he added.
Please read the rest at the Salt Lake Tribune.
No on Prop 45 and Celebrating Firebirds!
And if you live in San Diego County, please vote NO on Measure B
The habitat destroyers are at it again with CA State Proposition 45. Please vote NO.
And if you are in San Diego County, also vote NO on Measure B.
Both will allow massive habitat clearance projects under the guise of fire prevention to go forward without environmental review, objective scientific oversight, and opportunities for you to provide input. Prop 45 is straight forward on this. Measure B is a tax that provides zero details, but will fund habitat clearance projects of unknown scope.
Both will make the landscape more flammable by causing the spread of flammable non-native weeds and grasses.
Because we keep beating these folks in court, and because there is so much money sloshing around to clear nature, they are turning to the ballot box to void the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Don’t be fooled by the propaganda. This is about the money, plain and simple.
On a more encouraging note, please enjoy this fabulous short film about one of the many species that depend on large, high-severity wildfires for their survival. The existence of these species proves that large, high-severity fires have been part of the natural environment for millions of years. They also expose the twin fallacies of past fire suppression and landscape scale Native American fire use.
Here’s the link to the film:
https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la/shows/more-on-that
Also, please pick up a copy of Dick Hutto’s fabulous book, A Beautifully Burned Forest: Learning to Celebrate Severe Forest Fire.
