Chaparral Wisdom
To celebrate the magic and beauty of Nature & the chaparral
Celebrating Our Species Progress
We have so much to be grateful for, something that becomes clear when you take control.
Celebrating the state of our species came to mind after learning of the loss of P-22, the legendary cougar of the Santa Monica Mountains and Griffith Park. He was mercifully euthanized by a team of caring veterinarians last month after sustaining injuries from being hit by a car. The news caused me to think about the multi-million dollar wildlife crossing bridge soon to be built over Highway 101 near Liberty Canyon in Los Angeles County. I wondered if someday wolves would be using the bridge, wolves from the pack that has been finding its way into California due to our efforts to reintroduce the species in Yellowstone National Park.
What accounts for these incredibly expensive and heartfelt efforts to care for species that used to be our competitors, our predators, creatures that once made living in North America a seriously dangerous affair? There was good reason Native Americans celebrated the Spanish having their guns – it made living in California much safer by dispatching the great terror of the landscape, the California grizzly bear. Not only did grizzlies kill humans, but the bears raided the valuable stores of acorns many tribal groups collected and depended upon for food.
But after thousands of years of civilization, many nations have become wealthy enough, secure enough, to view Nature as something to cherish, rather than fear.
We are experiencing a unique time in human history when a large percentage of the population values wildness, Wilderness, and all the non-human species we share this planet with. Beginning with the creation of Yellowstone National Park, followed by the efforts of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt to protect even more, there is now broad public support for preserving Nature.
Such positive change is not restricted to our relationship with Nature. As Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has pointed out, “Extreme poverty has been decimated: It’s gone from 90 percent of the world’s population to 10 percent. Literacy has increased from about 15 percent to more than 85 percent. Prosperity has increased; longevity has increased from about 30 to about 71 years worldwide, and 80 in the developed world.”
Even a superficial understanding human history reveals how far we’ve moved away from our standard operating procedures of violence, slavery, murder, and mayhem. And despite the not-so-small hiccup after the collapse of Rome, the positive advancements in philosophy, science, and politics, especially the little experiment in democracy, have been breathtaking. Empirical thought has replaced witchcraft and mythology.
Read MoreManzanita on the Rocks – A Vivifying and Surprising Cocktail
Searching for exposed slices of Vulcan’s highly viscous, ancient exudations during our Thanksgiving holiday road trip may strike one as somewhat odd. But then again, it was a perfect way to celebrate Nature’s ability to remind us of our ephemeral existence, our atavistic connections to rock, manzanitas, and the Dionysian freedom available when we dare dissolve the boundaries that separate us not only from other living things, but from our own unfettered selves.
Celebrating such connections wound its way through my own nervous tissue while swinging a geology hammer one morning during our holiday adventure. In need of rock samples for our upcoming Chaparral Naturalist course, we pulled over to examine a road cut revealing a deposit of 250-million-year-old rhyolite, a highly viscous, rich-in-silica, lava flow a few miles east of Redding, California, along Highway 299.
Pump lots of air into the stuff and you have pumice. Concentrate the silica, cool it quickly, and you’ve got obsidian. Keep it underground and let it cool slowly, you’ve baked a pluton loaf of granite. Four kinds of igneous rocks, all with the same ingredients, just cooked differently.
Consider that, what you have just read. Imagine now, being there.
You’ve had a faint understanding of rocks, but now you know a few names. You’ve learned that these previously amorphous hard objects you’ve passed by a thousand times have stories. The next road cut, the next layer, the next unusual pebble will never be the same again.
Now consider how much fun you’ve had at gatherings with a few friends and a sprinkling of curious strangers. In both situations, geologicalizing and partying, familiarity provides opportunities to learn more, to discover new things. New worlds open up, your mind expands.
Curiosity inspired by Nature.
Photos: (L) Exploring the signs of Vulcan’s past activity. (R) The geological map of the roadside adventure marked with an “M”. The purple marked Pbh identifies the rhyolite deposit. The red line is Highway 299. Notice how the road bends around Little Cow Creek. The greenish areas (Pd) identify an andesite deposit, another volcanic exudation with a bit less silica, more calcium.
Lost in the thought of exploring the infinite world of terra firma, speeding tourists and truck drivers, seeing this wayward figure hacking away with abandon, honked their horns as they roared by. Were they humorously curious or signaling their kinship with geophilia? I doubted the latter as geo-literacy is an uncommon state of affairs for most, a perplexing condition considering our lives are spent playing in geology when we’re young, walking upon it as we travel through the years, and being buried in it at the end. Dust to dust. One might as well go through life without taste buds.
And then there’s the life that emerges from the geology.
Read MoreNature Surprises During a Sunday Drive
The key principle underlying the power of Nature to inspire is how easily Nature surprises. And in those surprises, our minds are suddenly removed from dwelling on the daily mundane, and instead propelled into contemplating the wonder of life.
The surprise can be seeing a flash of bright blue as a screaming Scrub Jay flies through the shrubbery, an emerging wild cucumber vine pushing up through moist clods of earth, or a coyote sitting quietly in a vacant lot, looking right at you.
Today, for us, it was spying a beautiful stand of old-growth mission manzanita chaparral (aka, Xylococcus bicolor) in a wild canyon surrounded by rural living, bisected by the signs of human activity. But there it was, remaining pristine, rich with native life forms, a remarkable island of hope.
We had been on a Sunday journey to find an accessible deposit of diorite, a granite-like, plutonic igneous rock that we needed to complete our backyard, graphic version of the rock chart, a useful teaching tool used to help teach the intrigues of geology.
