Chaparral Wisdom
To celebrate the magic and beauty of Nature & the chaparral
Appellate Court to Cal Fire – You’re Making the Landscape More Flammable
After twenty years of fighting, Nature and Fire Safety have prevailed
The California Appellate Court ruled in the chaparral’s favor yesterday afternoon in our lawsuit against Cal Fire and their insidious plan to clear millions of acres of native habitat in California.
We won on every point.
- The Board of Forestry (Cal Fire’s boss) abused its discretion.
- The Board failed to address the impact of type conversion of chaparral and sage scrub to non-native, weedy landscapes.
- Cal Fire’s habitat clearance projects will cause type conversion.
- Cal Fire’s habitat clearance projects will increase the flammability of the landscape.
- Cal Fire habitat clearance projects relating to chaparral and sage scrub should be suspended pending further analysis.
- The court agreed our evidence was substantial.
Cal Fire will need to go back and redo their program relating to chaparral and sage scrub and address the risk of type conversion and the increased flammability it will cause. We’ll be there.
Big thanks to Dan Silver of the Endangered Habitats League for his steadfast support throughout it all. When things became bleak, Endangered Habitats League stayed with us on the front lines.
And a thousand Chaparralian hugs to our attorney, Todd Cardiff. His legal talents were obvious from the beginning, but equally important was his belief in the value of Nature.
Here’s the music from the Court of Appeal’s decision
“We conclude the Board’s findings are not supported by substantial evidence, and it was required under CEQA to consider the adverse environmental effects of type conversion most specifically, the increased wildfire danger… By doing so, the Board prejudicially abused its discretion in certifying the Report, requiring reversal of the judgment…
In failing to fully analyze type conversion and to make such written findings, the Board abused its discretion…
To the extent the Board otherwise implies Plaintiffs provided a one-sided recitation of the facts, we disagree…
Plaintiffs argue the lack of a findings leave the public with no understanding of how type conversion will actually be evaluated, mitigated, avoided, or monitored. We agree this error is significant given that it could leave decision makers and residents alike unaware that measures they believe are being taken to reduce fire risk are actually increasing the threat that wildfires will ignite and spread…
We end by noting the irony of the Board’s argument that type conversion, which results in a more flammable landscape, is not a significant impact of prescribed burns when the express goals of the Program are to (1) “treat vegetation that could become fire fuel,” (2) “reduc[e] the likelihood of a ground fire increasing in intensity and helping suppression forces more easily 30 contain a fire,”13 and (3) “reduce risks to life, property, and natural resources by managing the amount and continuity of hazardous vegetative fuels that promote wildland fire.
And finally,
The judgment is reversed. The matter is remanded to the superior court with directions to vacate its denial of the petition for writ of mandate and to enter a new order granting the petition for writ of mandate consistent with the views expressed in this opinion. Such order shall include only those mandates necessary to achieve compliance with CEQA in accord with this opinion. (§ 21168.9, subd. (b).) The court shall further consider whether any specific project should be suspended until the Board takes action to comply with the court’s mandate.“
The entire decision is available here on the court’s website.
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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.
The Unholy Trinity of Fear, Conformity and Moral Abdication Creates Stupidity’s Perfect Storm
The Path to Intellectual Autonomy to Resist Societal Stupidity
and Overcome Cognitive Dissonance *
From the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Overcoming the discomfort and pain of holding positions different from your community requires not just intelligence (societal stupidity is immune to facts), but courage. This courage can be learned through practice, strengthening with each small choice to think for yourself.
- Start by questioning not just what you think, but how you came to think it.
- Examine the sources of your convictions. Did you reach them after careful consideration, or absorb them from your environment?
- Strengthen your intellectual independence by deliberately seeking perspectives that challenge your existing views. This is not about being contrarian, but developing cognitive flexibility – the ability to consider multiple viewpoints without being captured by any of them. Understanding mass manipulation requires understanding its psychological mechanisms.
- Watch for emotional contagion, how feelings spread through groups, overwhelming individual judgement.
- Notice false dichotomies that eliminate nuance, and force false choices.
- Pay attention to your own emotional reactions. Strong feelings often signal that someone is manipulating rather than informing you. These techniques have been perfected over the centuries. Awareness of the process is the first step toward immunity to it.
- The ultimate goal isn’t perfect resistance to every influence, but living in truth – maintaining alignment between your internal values and external actions, reclaiming human dignity by exercising the distinctly human capacity to think and choose for yourself.
- The most radical act of courage in today’s world isn’t physical bravery, but simply the willingness to think for yourself when everyone around you has surrendered that right.
- Pause. Ask yourself, “Who is benefiting from me believing this?”
- Question authority, always.
* Ignorance can be resolved through learning. Societal stupidity is immune to resolution as new information is rejected if it is contrary to the embedded belief.
Modified from The Theory of Societal Stupidity
Further reading
High-severity fire in chaparral: cognitive dissonance in the shrublands (Halsey and Syphard 2024).
Bonhoeffer: A Brief Overview of the Writings and Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Matthews 2002).
Why Stupidity is More Dangerous than Evil (video).
