Chaparral Wisdom

As of last night, with the governor’s signature, Bigberry Manzanita (Arctostaphylos glauca) is now California’s Official State Shrub!

Joining other officially recognized denizens of the chaparral, the California Grizzly Bear, the California Poppy, the metamorphic rock Serpentine, and the California Quail, our beautiful manzanita becomes yet another voice for California’s most extensive ecosystem.

A big thank you to all of you who wrote letters and helped us accomplish this long hoped for recognition of the chaparral’s most iconic plant species.

And special thanks to our friends at Los Padres Forest Watch who initiated this final round to get the job done.

So cool!

An old-growth Bigberry Manzanita (Arctostaphylos glauca) wrapping its arms around an Engelmann Oak in southern San Diego County.

– Become a Chaparral Naturalist –

Renew Your Humanity by Exploring Nature, The Wisdom of Forgotten Philosophers,
and the Wildness Within

It is time to resist.

As most of us are well aware, news is no longer informative – it is insidious gossip designed to feed our fears. The noise from technology is severing us from one of our most basic human needs – personal connection. And the educational foundation that once provided us the opportunity to learn from the remarkable journey our species has traveled, has been replaced by specialization and parochialism, ignoring a wealth of knowledge scattered about us like golden coins on a sandy beach.

We invite you to join us for a break from the hectic world and gather some of those coins.

Over eight wonderful Saturday mornings, a full day exploring San Diego County’s priceless biodiversity, and hours of rewarding discussions celebrating not just animals, plants, and rocks, but our inspiring biological and social evolutionary development – from stone age wanderers, to cave artists, to philosophers, to lunar explorers – we ignite wonder for the natural world as well as our humanity.

As humans, life has never been better.

However, our fortune and intellectual gifts have been muddled by a deluge of distractions and irrational thinking. As Chaparral Naturalists, we turn away from the contrived chaos to create an environment that fosters the acquisition of knowledge, friendship, and awe. We create a thoughtful place where cell phones, social media, AI, and the constant chatter of “the news” do not intrude. Together, by exploring the wisdom of Nature, we discover that very little of the human drama is new, including our own conclusions here about the times in which we live.*

The questions we ask about ourselves that seem so pressing have been pondered over for thousands of years, and in most cases, have been answered in multiple ways. We explore those answers. We experience solace by understanding the concept of deep time from the rocks and fossils we study. We learn wisdom from the animals we watch, animals that do not worry about appointments, goals, or what happens in the statehouse. Although we are hoping our time together will inspire you to wake up every morning as Teddy Roosevelt once did and shout, “Bring it on!” we’re sure you’ll discover new opportunities to more fully appreciate the most valuable treasure in our lives – time.

Join us this spring to renew your humanity through Nature.

The adventure begins March 14, 2026, at the Owl’s Nest, the California Chaparral Institute’s retreat center in Escondido, California. More details and your application can be found on our education page here.

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* “The Renaissance everywhere brought about a break between people of culture and the mass of the population; but while abstracting culture from national tradition, it did at least cause it to be steeped in Greek tradition. Since then, links with the national traditions have not been renewed, but Greece has been forgotten. The result has been a culture which has developed in a very restricted medium, removed from the world, in a stove-pipe atmosphere—a culture very strongly directed towards and influenced by technical science, very strongly tinged with pragmatism, extremely broken up by specialization, entirely deprived both of contact with this world and, at the same time, of any window opening on to the world beyond.”
– Simone Weil
From The Need for Roots (1949)