Chaparral Wisdom
To celebrate the magic and beauty of Nature & the chaparral
The Schwinn – Therapy to Calm the Mind
“Be home for dinner.”
If you remember hearing your parents shouting this just before you flew out the door as a kid, there’s a fair chance that you’ll likely also remember what gave you the freedom to escape – your bike.
Sometimes with a box of stuff strapped on your book rack (for me, jars for bug collecting, BB gun, Snickers, a bottle of Nesbitt’s orange soda), you raced to meet your friends. Where you’d end up, no one really knew. You just rode – sometimes without hands, sometimes standing, always yelling, laughing, talking.
Freedom. Bike. Two of the same.
Although bikes have been around for a long time, there was a special time when they showed a couple generations the meaning of independence forged with an indestructible iron frame painted blue, red, green, or black with white pinstriping on the tubes, the front wheel fork, and fenders. Schwinn.
The only safety feature was a single, red reflector on the rear fender. And no helmet.
You didn’t come home early unless you’d taken a spill on the asphalt.
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Fighting the Four Horsemen of Nature Suppression, and still having room to enjoy life and the beauty around me, has been a major challenge over the past 17 years. Daily email reminders, “Have you seen this!?,” of yet another destructive habitat clearance project by Cal Fire or the US Forest Service were slowly consuming my heart. After multiple attempts to deal with the abyss, I finally learned how to protect myself through my 7th Rehab experience.
One of the most effective therapies during rehab was, and remains, discovering a task that involves creating something with my hands, something that allows me to set an achievable goal, something that allows my mind to create new neural pathways to replace the well worn ones that descended straight into the abyss.
The task didn’t take long to reveal itself – the 1961 Schwinn Speedster bicycle my parents had given me when I was a kid.
Read MoreThe Seventh Rehab – Maintaining one’s mooring while the sirens call
I offer this lifeline to all of you who care about Nature, understand the magic it holds, but feel overwhelmed by those who want to rip it all out. There’s hope. But first, some background.
You know the feeling when witnessing the destruction of habitat. Anger, frustration, helplessness. You stare into the abyss and it begins to stare right back, pulling you in, consuming you, darkening your heart.
We’ve all heard the encouraging platitudes. “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” “Behold the turtle; he only makes progress when sticking his neck out.” “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” That last one has never made much sense to me.
In the work I do – as many of us do – to protect other living things who share the earth with us, it is difficult at times not to be absorbed by the darkness and give up.
I’ve tried six times to look away, to give up the fight with the Four Horsemen of Nature Suppression – Burning, Mastication, Herbicide, and Hubris. The pain was just too great. But each time, I was pulled back in, tempted to take another sip by a devilish bartender, descending back into the inferno from which I sought escape. It was killing me.
Not anymore. I’ve finally found a successful rehab program, my seventh, to help me develop the skills, the temperament, to ignore the siren’s call when need be, smiling while turning away and enjoying the beauty of life that surrounds me everyday. The help I needed was all around me. I just didn’t see it. Although my recent counselors, Wren, Schwinn, and Marcus Aurelius, are local, the program they offer is available no matter where you live.
The basic foundation of the program is one the Stoics of Ancient Greece shared with the world long ago – we are responsible for our own sense of worth, we choose how we feel, and only the present moment is the relevant time period in our daily lives. Gnothi seauton, nothing new under the sun, and unconditional kindness fits in there too, but more on all that, and the counselors who helped me understand, later.
The wisdom learned: one can continue to care, to carry on the good fight, but that task must breathe only within a confined space, only when necessary, then locked away to prevent one’s heart from being enveloped by the darkness the task breeds. With the newly available mental space, new tasks emerge to quiet the mind. Gandhi spun cotton. Muir hiked. I began restoring my 1961 Schwinn bicycle, spent quiet hours discovering the lives of Roman emperors, and remembered how to listen to birds.
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The little Wren landed on top of the wooden bird house. He’d been singing nonstop in the upper reaches of the oak tree since I’d arrived. It’s been maybe five minutes.
He continued his singing – short bursts, a buzz, then a rapid series of similar notes. Between each short speech, he’d slightly reposition himself on the tiny roof. My camera caught him winking a few times. Then he’d fly off to another high perch, sing some more.
Read MoreCal Fire is Out of Control Part II
A beautiful native landscape above Santa Barbara targeted for clearance by Cal Fire.
This remarkable, old-growth ceanothus and manzanita chaparral stand decorates the mountain slopes above Santa Barbara, California. Such chaparral communities support the state’s rich biodiversity, biodiversity that Governor Newsom has claimed he treasures.
However, in action, the governor and Cal Cal Fire have decided it’s not so remarkable.
Cal Fire has targeted this area for “treatment,” an Orwellian term that ignores the ecological damage their actions will cause. Some areas are being disturbed under the pretext that they pose a fire hazard (identified in olive in the Cal Fire habitat target map below). The nearest community is more than two miles away – the most effective fire risk reduction is directly within and around communities. In addition, Cal Fire has also deemed some of this area as needing “ecological restoration” (identified in light-red). Using fire, huge grinding machines, and/or herbicides to eliminate the old-growth stands of chaparral is not restoration, it’s destruction of native habitat.
The notion that a state agency considers increasingly rare, biodiverse old-growth chaparral as somehow needing “restoration” clearly demonstrates the state’s failure to not only understand the basics of ecology, but the deep disregard the Newsom administration has for Nature.
To discover how Cal Fire intends to treat your favorite wild, open space, visit their habitat target map here.
Please support our lawsuit. Our best hope to stop Cal Fire from locking out the public and preventing objective oversight is our ongoing lawsuit. Please make a donation to help with our legal costs. We will take this to the State Supreme Court if necessary, so the costs will be significant.