Chaparral Wisdom
To celebrate the magic and beauty of Nature & the chaparral
Today, Cal Fire Will Redefine Chaparral: Just a Few Shrubs Here and There
To Circumvent State Law, Cal Fire Misrepresents
Established Science
Today, our twenty year legal effort to convince Cal Fire to develop a plan to save lives and property from wildfires, rather than clearing millions of acres of native habitat, will be heard by the California State Court of Appeal.
To justify their approach, Cal Fire is employing Orwellian doublespeak to circumvent state law by redefining native shrublands as having only 10% cover. Yes, that’s right, 10% cover. So, according to Cal Fire, if 90% of all shrubs are cleared from a naturally dense, contiguous chaparral community by herbicide, shredding, or prescribed fire, it is still a healthy shrubland. Therefore, the agency claims their habitat clearance projects will not be converting chaparral, or sage scrub, or Great Basin sagebrush habitats, to flammable, non-native grasslands because, after all, if there’s an occasional shrub still present, it’s still a shrubland.
This is like claiming a man has a full beard when only 10% of his face has whiskers.
Why the deceitful 10% rule? State law prevents Cal Fire from type converting chaparral or sage scrub to non-native grassland through its clearance projects. By redefining what constitutes a native shrubland, Cal Fire is trying to dodge the law that was established to protect California’s native shrublands from further loss.
Cal Fire’s definition of a native shrubland – 10% cover.
Where did Cal Fire come up with their 10% figure? By misrepresenting the plant identification key in the California Native Plant Society’s Manual of California Vegetation.
Identification keys are based on a series of questions that are used to find the identity of an object. The first set of questions in the plant community identification key in the Manual of California Vegetation is to determine if you are looking at one of three main communities: grassland, shrubland, or forest. If you determine there is at least a 10% shrub cover, you are directed to the shrubland key. Once you go there, you can determine the type of shrubland present. Not surprisingly, nearly all native chaparral-type shrublands have at least 60% cover, with many having 100% continuous cover or even a double-layered canopy.
The 10% cover description is obviously not a definition of a shrubland, but rather a step in an identification key that directs the user to the next level. Cal Fire has has either failed to grasp the concept of a basic scientific tool understood by beginning biology students, or more likely is engaging in an obvious ploy to ignore state law.
The future of Nature in California will depend on the fate of our case before the court as California State Parks, government agencies, and many land conservancies are eager to compromise Nature to obtain habitat clearance grants (masked by euphemisms like restoration, fire resilience, and fuel reduction) to fund their bureaucracies.
For updates regarding our case, please visit our lawsuit webpage here:
https://californiachaparral.org/threats/cal-fire
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Here’s the details on the 10% claim. In the State’s reply brief filed with the court on November 15, 2024. Cal Fire claims that,
“Because shrub cover must be at least 10 percent for vegetation to be classified as shrubland, (AR 1773.251), “if at least 35 percent of relative cover of shrubs is maintained within a shrub-dominated treatment area, it is reasonable to assume that the treated stand of vegetation would continue to be characterized by shrubs and that those shrubs would provide a seed source for shrub regeneration so that the habitat would not be converted to one dominated by herbaceous cover and no longer meeting the classification criteria of a shrubland,” (AR 1590.310).” – State’s reply pg 42.
AR refers to pages of the Cal Fire Vegetation Treatment Program in the Administrative Record (all the relevant public files) that was submitted to the court
So, what the State is arguing is that since they claim something is still classified as a shrubland with 10% cover (which it isn’t as explained in our post above), Cal Fire’s clearance activities are actually “mitigating” the negative environmental impact they are causing by only reducing shrubland cover to 35% (or more depending on the project’s proponent’s decision)… when presumably they could clear down to 10% and still be good.
The claim that a naturally occurring shrubland with continuous cover can remain viable and not subject to type conversion if reduced by 65% is not a reasonable assumption. There is substantial evidence that shows removing the majority of the canopy cover in a chaparral-type shrubland can lead to type conversion.
I dunno, Mr. Halsey, Cal Fire — and Cal Parks here in Marin County doing similar “thinning” and “health” and “fuel loads” treatments of forests — may be on to something here.
For example, I think I may ‘thin’ or ‘weed’ out 8 of the kittens in my Fluffy’s too-large litter of 10 kittens. I realize now that I wouldn’t be “converting” my cat-full house to a cat-free house. Because I’d still have 2 kittens remaining after ‘trimming’ 20% of the litter. That’s double the 10% needed to still qualify as a cat house!
And with 8 of the over-crowded, competing kittens ‘removed,’ the 2 remaining would grow up without such unnaturally great competition for resources. And eventually they’ll breed more cats. I can ‘manage’ those litters for optimum numbers too.
I realize now that cats are not unlike chaparral and shrub and trees. These lower life forms aren’t intelligent enough to know exactly where to grow and in what numbers. Fortunately, we humans are smart enough to know better. So we can ‘manage’ them for maximum health, by ‘removing’ those that don’t belong.
I think next I’ll suggest this same sensible, common-sense approach to ‘thin’ the seniors at the retirement home where my 89-year-old Ukrainian immigrant mother lives. Having lived years beyond what’s ‘normal,’ she’s become very ‘unhealthy,’ with arthritis and scoliosis, and nearly deaf. She’s taking up valuable space in the facility, and resources too, that ‘native-born’ Americans could be using.
Is it too late to sign an amicus brief in support of CalFire, throw in with their hands-on environmentally forward thinking with their CalVTP vegetation management. Plus, those big masticating machines pictured in this post are really cool! I’d love to see how many of the dangerous, ‘overgrown’ pyrophytic chaparral plants like coyote brush I could ‘remove’ in a day!
I’d wear one of the nifty new CalFire t-shirts inspired by the 1970s U.S. Army shirt:
“Travel to exotic, distant California lands, find exotic, unusual plants, and kill them.”
Thanks, CCI, for your inspiring, ongoing work to champion (what remains of) wild nature, beating back those who are so disconnected from Her, they kill routinely, unrelentingly, without remorse, or even awareness. (Or conform out of for fear of losing their jobs.)
Jack Gescheidt, Founder
The TreeSpirit Project
https://www. TreeSpiritProject.com/CalFire
Using your cat analogy, removing 80-90% of Chaparral is also removing 80-90% of habitat that all the insects, birds, mammals, reptiles etc. Require for their survival. Our survival too.
A truly unique, and spot on analogy, Jack… as usual. Thank you!
Fingers crossed for a good outcome from the Appellate Court!
Despite much evidence against it, I choose to be optimistic. The document that was recently issued by the State Wildfire Task Force fuels my optimism. Yes, I too hope that justice will be on nature’s side today.
Thank you Rick for the information, and all you and the team do in attempts to preserve the Chaparral. I hope justice will be on the nature’s side today. I will share this post.
I went to my cardiologist. He told me only 10% of my arteries were clear and I was likely to drop dead at any moment. 10% I asked? He affirmed. Ok, I said. We’ll check again when I come back next year!
Exactly, Al. Perfect analogy.