Nature is Not Our Garden in Need of “Tending”

– How the California Coastal Commission is Failing Us –
The clearance of old-growth Bishop Pine Forests at Tomales Bay State Park

In the summer of 1972, my friend Eric Strom and I went door to door to encourage our neighbors to vote for Proposition 20, the landmark initiative to create the California Coastal Commission.

After suffering a defeat in the legislature the previous year, citizens had rallied to place the proposition on the ballot. As high school students, we dove into the battle through the neighborhood environmental group we formed, Help Our Environment. Our monthly publication, The Conservatory Tribune, published courtesy of the ditto machine in our school’s copy room, was distributed by mail to around 100 people. We covered a lot of issues, garnering support for the causes we championed during the heyday of the environmental movement. But the cause we were most proud of was our participation in the effort to establish the California Coastal Commission to protect our fragile coastline.

Prop 20 passed, Eric and I graduated from high school, and a wonderful assortment of laws were on the books to protect Nature. We felt the natural environment was finally given a fighting chance.

Although the laws are still with us, anthropocentrism has slowly crept into the collective mindset, elevating human interests and desires above the needs of native, wild life forms. The Tomales Bay State Park Public Works Plan (PWP) is unfortunately a reflection of this change.

We lost Eric on Easter Day, 1995. He lived large. I can still hear his booming, beautiful voice singing his favorite songs on stage. Both my parents passed away about the same time. I remember the animated disagreements we had over Prop 20 at the kitchen table. Mom voted yes, dad voted no. In 1972, people could have opposite opinions and still respect each other.

And so, as I reflect on my decades-long effort to protect Nature from misconceptions and vested interests determined to demonize vibrant ecosystems, it is bittersweet to be writing this letter. It has been difficult to see the California Coastal Commission, under pressure from Cal Fire, helping to facilitate the loss of the very coastal habitats it was originally chartered to protect.

On July 8, 2021, we offered a well-documented comment letter and oral testimony to the Commission that pointed out major errors in staff reports that supported two large PWP habitat clearance plans along the coast of San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties – plans similar to the Tomales Bay State Park PWP.

Like the Tomales Bay PWP, these plans repeated the persistent misconception about past fire suppression, claiming that natural habitat nearly everywhere is an unnaturally dense, unsightly mess growing out of control, and that humans know best – all antagonistic reflections emerging from the shift away from embracing Nature’s intrinsic value, toward human-centrism.

The recommended solution of the latest PWP is also the same: habitats need to be cleared, mowed, logged, and/or sprayed with herbicide to remove the offending native plant growth – all described with Orwellian acuity as improving forest or ecological health and resiliency.

The actual purpose is to prevent what humans have erroneously defined as “bad” high-intensity fire in favor of “good” low intensity fire. This, despite the fact that high-intensity fire is the natural condition for many ecosystems, including the Bishop pine being targeted by the PWP. Indeed, all ecosystems are naturally subject to high-intensity fire when the conditions line up, conditions that have always determined the size and intensity of wildfires: long-term drought, low humidity, high temperatures, and wind.

The fundamental problem is that the binary “bad” vs. “good” view of fire is an artificial construct reflecting the fear humans have of fire and their dislike of burned trees and blackened ground. It has nothing to do with natural ecosystem function.

During the 2021 public testimony, ten out of eleven speakers spoke against the two plans before the Coastal Commission. Most pointed out that the underlying reports had misrepresented the region’s fire regimes to justify the plans’ approach, as does the Tomales Bay PWP.

The commission’s response? Not one commissioner asked a single question of staff or the agencies supporting the plans to reflect as to why so many science-based public comments contradicted the main assumptions underlying the plans. After several commissioners repeated the exact same misconceptions about fire suppression that had been corrected earlier by the testimony, the Commission voted unanimously to approve the plans.

It is a behavior we have come to expect – commissioners, politicians, and board members typically endure, rather than embrace, public testimony. Decisions are typically made long before the hearing begins.

The old-growth Bishop pine forest at Tomales Bay State Park targeted for clearance.

Nature Subsumed by Hubris

The Return of Human-centrism
Where once wildness was seen as sublime, manifesting the beautifulness of life, allowing us to connect to our ancestral selves and find inspiration in the untrammeled, natural world, it is becoming, as it was prior to the environmental movement, a commodity that needs to serve us. To repackage this shift in thinking and accommodate the still influential biocentric perspective, purveyors of Nature exploitation have been successful in convincing much of the public into believing not only that Nature serves us, but that it can’t survive without our tending, our gardening.

During public presentations concerning the PWP, Tomales Bay State Park officials blame human activity (colonialism, fire suppression, cessation of Native American fire use, etc.) for the current condition of the Bishop pine forests on the Pt. Reyes Peninsula. In short, the forests have become unhealthy because they have not been tended properly by humans – the common rationale to support logging and habitat clearance operations throughout California.

Foundational to this rationale is the false notion that to function properly, Nature needs human beings.

This increasingly popular human-centric model is exemplified by One Tam, a habitat clearance advocacy group that focuses on the wildlands of nearby Mt. Tamalpais.

But left to themselves, forests can also grow large and dense, putting the entire system in danger of catastrophic wildfire, loss of life and livelihoods, and extreme carbon emissions.

These forests need care, and Tribal stewardship responsibilities to gather, hunt, fish, burn, and tend in coordination with management rooted in the best available science will continue to improve and maintain these ecosystems into the future. 

In other words, creating Nature in our own image, as a garden – for humans, by humans.

The fact that forests and native shrublands thrived for millions of years prior to the arrival of Homo sapiens in North America is ignored.

As evidenced by the on-going ecological disaster caused by the clearance of post-fire habitat in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park in San Diego County, a human-centric approach is contrary to the California State Parks’ mission “to preserve the state’s extraordinary biological diversity.” Because conifers are preferred over naturally regenerating, shrubland communities, large areas of Cuyamaca Rancho State Park have been masticated, burned, and sprayed with herbicide to rid the landscape of extremely biodiverse successional habitat.

Exploitation of Native American Culture
To further legitimize the anthropocentric paradigm, land management agencies, logging and biomass interests, and many environmental groups have appropriated Native American cultural burning practices. The strategy is an old one for conquering societies – exploiting the conquered in pursuit of self-interest and financial gain, in this case millions of dollars in grants to fund non-profits, government agencies, and private contractors.

The appeal is easy to understand. The grantor provides money to organizations to fund their administrative salaries if the organization agrees the clear or burn habitat. The pressure on regulatory agencies to approve projects with money waiting in the wings can be enormous, regardless of the negative environmental impacts, especially when the projects provide opportunities for performative allyship – habitat clearance in the name of Indigenous Peoples.

Native Americans long used cultural burning practices near their population centers for food- and fiber-related purposes, particularly at low elevations. These fires were purposeful and localized and may have created vegetation mosaics consisting of shrublands, woodlands, and grasslands near villages. Localized conversion of habitats by Native Americans in these areas would have resulted in a shift from dense shrublands and/or forests to a different assemblage favoring native herbaceous plants.

However, natural habitats across the broader California landscape remained relatively undisturbed, being shaped by the same physical, ecological, and evolutionary processes that have occurred for millions of years – to claim otherwise is contrary to science and logic.

Equating the mechanized clearance of large swaths of habitat with chain saws, grinding machines, drip torches, and chemicals to the tending of localized areas that Indigenous Peoples conducted to sustain their cultures is an affront to the respect and intimate connections many Native American cultures hold for Nature.

Invoking Indigenous fire use to justify habitat clearance plans also ignores the fact that the manipulation of the environment by humans has been for the purpose of improving human survival, to change wild into something less so.

As evidenced by the drastic changes many early inhabitants caused to the environments in which they occupied, from extinctions to the loss of native shrublands and forests, efforts to restore wild landscapes need to focus on what may have been prior to the arrival of humans, if restoration of native habitat is the actual objective.

Nature Seen As Fuel Rather Than a Source of Life
Nature is increasingly being viewed as something broken, in need of fixing. This is exemplified in the Tomales Bay PWP and State Park presentations.

The rationale given for this view is that Nature is overgrown, clogged with too many trees, too many shrubs. Regardless of ecosystem type, the claimed cause for the mess is fire suppression. The prescription involves the removal of Nature through clearance, euphemistically referred to as “restoration.”

To promote the preferred “treatment,” legions of land managers, fire managers, and environmental consultants have successfully convinced much of the public that wild Nature is ugly, “unnatural.” We are told that lush, dense forests, piles of downed wood and leaf litter filled with rich fungal networks, and standing dead trees used by cavity nesting birds and an array of insects are not beautiful habitats, but rather “unnatural accumulations” of native vegetation in need of removal.

In the case of the Bishop pine forests in Tomales Bay State Park, naturally dense, even-aged wild landscapes shall be become instead, pastoral, Disneyland-like mosaics of mixed-aged greenery to create a more pleasing setting to suit human sensibilities. The stated goal is to prevent the very kind of fire that the Bishop pine species has evolved to survive. Never mind that,

• the Bishop pine fire regime is defined by infrequent, high-intensity fire that creates large stands of even-aged forest;

• old-growth Bishop pine forests are naturally characterized by large numbers of dead trees, piles of downed wood, thick layers of litter, and dense shrub growth;

• and combined with a moist climate and one of the lowest lightning frequencies in North America, Pt. Reyes Peninsula plant communities have natural fire return intervals of a century or more.

The larger tragedy, once Park managers conduct their initial habitat clearance operations, is that future management will continue to be based on unscientific, subjective metrics within the Cal Fire Vegetation Treatment Program (VTP). The VTP claims that after 40 years, Bishop pines are ready to be “treated” again because they will be “outside of their natural fire regime.” In fact, at 40 years, Bishop pine forests are just entering their mid-seral stage when the forest is yet to reach its natural, old-growth climax stage.

And as with all the other prescriptions in the VTP, managers can always burn or masticate the forest prior to 40 years if they deem it contains “uncharacteristic fuel loads,” i.e., native habitat. Such a determination will not be subject to independent oversight as the VTP is a “programmatic” document, meaning the usual opportunities for the public to review projects as provided by the California Environmental Quality Act will not be available.

The 40-year metric dictated by the Cal Fire VTP is based on the CNPS Manual on California Vegetation. The only reference the Manual uses to support the 40-year number is a four-decade old, non-peer reviewed Master’s thesis that is not readily available (Sugnet 1985). This is a typical problem for the CNPS Manual as many of the fire regime intervals listed in the document are guesses, not based on solid research. In fact, recent papers indicate that the natural fire return interval for Bishop pine communities is extremely difficult to determine. However, what we do know is that natural moisture levels and low lightning frequency in the Pt. Reyes area, coupled with historical data, indicate natural fire frequency in Tomales State Park is one of the lowest in North America – the opposite to what the manual and the VTP indicate.

Consequently, the primary basis for the Tomales Bay State Park PWP, that the region suffers from not enough fire, is not supported by the science.

Despite past actions by the Coastal Commission, we still hold out hope that this time the Commissioners will find the courage to be skeptical, question assumptions, reject the Tomales Bay PWP, and inform State Parks they need to put Nature first.

UPDATE 7/4/2024
The hearing for the Tomales Bay PWP was held April 11, 2024. We asked for comment letters to let the Coastal Commission know that you supported Nature, not the habitat clearance contractors.

As expected, the Coastal Commission approved the plan as the Commission is no longer a guardian of coastal habitat, but an enabler of Cal Fire’s draconian project to clear hundreds of thousands of acres of native shrublands and forests. The myths that Nature can not exist without our tending, that we need to treat Nature like our garden to “get a bigger return,” and that the naturally dense forests of Tomales Bay are result of lack of Native American fire use, were enthusiastically endorsed by the Commissioners (e.g. mark 4:53 in the hearing video).

Here’s the State Park site with the details about their clearance plan.

References

Our letter from 2021 is available here. It addresses the same issues that plague the current Tomales Bay State Park PWP. Merely replace the terms chaparral or redwood forest in the letter with Marin manzanita and Bishop pine – the same basic misconceptions are addressed, just the names have changed.

Our effort to help Cal Fire develop a rational, science-based fire risk reduction plan (VTP) began in 2005. We were on the cusp of producing such a plan until the incoming Newsom administration rejected years of work and engaged Ascent Environmental to produce a Programmatic EIR that allows Cal Fire and its partners (e.g. agencies, non-profits) to obtain millions of dollars to clear habitat across hundreds of thousands of acres without objective oversight or citizen involvement.

We filed suit in 2020 to stop the environmental damage the VTP would cause. Our case is currently on appeal.

Five Reasons We Challenged the VTP in Court can be found here: https://chaparralwisdom.org/2020/03/02/five-reasons-we-are-taking-cal-fire-to-court/

The 15-year history of the effort to bring science into the Cal Fire VTP can be found here:
https://californiachaparral.org/threats/cal-fire/

Bendix, J. 2002. Pre-European fire in California chaparral. In, Vale, T.R. (ed) Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape. Island Press.  ‘‘It would be reasonable to summarize the impact of native Californian fire in the following terms: a variety of Native cultures made sophisticated use of fire, both to favor edible species and to facilitate (directly or indirectly) hunting. The scale of fire use was so limited, however, that the bulk of the chaparral as we know it evolved under a natural, lightning-dependent fire regime. Undoubtedly, anthropogenic fire did have some ecological impacts, but those impacts were spatially limited to the immediate surroundings of population centers and to the preexisting (i.e., quasinatural) ecotones. Because of the limited spatial extent of anthropogenic burning, the overall chaparral environment was unchanged by the cessation of native burning, as evidenced by the static nature of the stratigraphic record.’’

Broughton, J.M. 1997. Widening diet breadth, declining foraging efficiency, and prehistoric harvest pressure: ichthyofaunal evidence from Emeryville Shellmound, California. Antiquity 71: 845-62.
“The Emeryville Shellmound is a famous but now destroyed midden once located on the east shore of San Francisco Bay. Analyses of the fish remains from the stratified late Holocene deposits indicate that prehistoric peoples had substantial impacts on the sturgeon populations of the Bay. This calls into question the commonly held belief that native peoples lived in harmony with nature and has important implications for the management of modern vertebrate populations.”

In R.S. Vachula et al. 2019. Climate exceeded human management as the dominant control of fire at the regional scale in California’s Sierra Nevada. Environmental Research Letters 14 104011.  ‘‘Our data suggest that though human management can influence local fire, a warmer and drier climate controls large-scale area burned… Our record indicates that (1) climate changes influenced burning at all spatial scales, (2) Native American influences appear to have been limited to local scales, but (3) high Miwok populations resulted in fire even during periods of climate conditions unfavorable to fires…’’

Chamberlin, T.C. 1890. The method of multiple working hypotheses. Science: Feb. 7. Also reprinted in 1965. Science 148: 754 –759. Read before the Society of Western Naturalists in 1889, Thomas C. Chamberlin (1890) described the critical role played by formulating multiple working hypotheses in discovering ‘‘new truths.’’ Chamberlin’s basic point was that if an investigator focuses on a single, original hypothesis, which seems to be satisfactory for a particular phenomenon, he has a tendency to view the explanation paternalistically. It becomes his ‘‘intellectual child.’’ Affections for such a favored hypothesis become a blinding influence.

‘‘Love was long since represented as blind,’’ Chamberlin wrote, ‘‘and what is true in the personal realm is measurably true in the intellectual realm. Important as the intellectual affections are as stimuli and as rewards, they are nevertheless dangerous factors, which menace the integrity of the intellectual process.’’ With experimental data in mind, he added, ‘‘There is an unconscious selection and magnifying of the phenomena that fall into harmony with the theory and support it, and an unconscious neglect of those that fail of coincidence. There springs up, also, an unconscious pressing of the theory to make it fit the facts, and a pressing of the facts to make them fit the theory.’’

Baker, B. and R. W. Halsey. 2020. California chaparral and woodlands. In, R. Berryman, Ed., Imperiled: The Encyclopedia of Conservation. Elsevier Inc.

Bendix, J., Hartnett, J.J. 2018. Asynchronous lightning and Santa Ana winds highlight human role in southern California fire regimes. Environmental Research Letters 13, 074024.

Greenlee, J.M. and J.H. Langenheim. 1990. Historic fire regimes and their relation to vegetation patterns in the Monterey Bay area of California. The American Midland Naturalist 124: 239-253.

Harvey, B.J. and M.C. Agne. 2021. Bishop Pine (Pinus muricata) Forest Health. White paper prepared for the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy. University of Washington. School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Seattle, WA 98125.

Timbrook, J., J.R. Johnson, D.D. Earle. 1982. Vegetation Burning by the Chumash. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 4: 163-186