Chaparral Wisdom
To celebrate the magic and beauty of Nature & the chaparral
Nature – The Cause Worth Fighting For
As I have listened to the unenlightened blame dead trees for all our fires, where there are no dead trees, have suffered under the barrage of ignorance from politicians and industrialists who talk of clearing forests to protect us from fires that occur nowhere near such forests, and fretted over the demonization of habitat under, between, and far from forests in the form of small plants and bushes, I have found myself embittered, saddened, remorseful, worried about our future as a species.
Have we really become so disconnected from Nature that we now make up stories to push her further away, to justify her domestication until all that is left is the occasional weed between the cracks of a sidewalk, or the random shrub that appears in the human-made, park-like forest? Do we really believe that logging companies, burners of smashed habitat, and Novocained bureaucrats who have barely left their desks in years to kiss an unfettered stream, have our best interests at heart? Do we honestly think such broken souls will fix Nature for us so that she will finally bend to our will? Do we really believe in our own hubris so much that we really think we can force Nature to reflect our fantasy of a bucolic place that has lost all manner of teeth and spirit? What kind of world do we think we are creating?
The Doorway to Nature is Sitting Right Next to You
This morning, Nature was lying next to me, upside down, paws in the air, with a slight smile that only a complete abandonment of responsibility can create.
As I reached over and threaded my fingers into the soft, dense fur under his chin, I could feel a wave of relaxation course through my body. My heart rate slowed, blood pressure dropped, and remnants of excess cortisol left over in my body from the previous day’s stresses disappeared. And the pair-bonding hormone oxytocin began to work its magic on both of us.
As I rubbed his soft tummy, his four limbs reached out as far as they could, creating a dog-and-a-half. I leaned over and mumbled sweet things into his ear. He responded with that sneeze of his and a full body wiggle, letting me know he concurred.
But there was something more in those eyes than just another animal looking back at me, something more than the simple enjoyment of having soft fur nearby. My dog provided an access to something very deep inside.
While there are many mutually beneficial relationships between species, the one we have with our four-legged companions is truly unique.
Why?
Investigating the Fragility of the Chaparral (Part III)
The magic of youth is not in the superficial, but in the unfettered expression of the authentic self. The beauty of age is the wisdom to rediscover the same, if the courage can be found to recognize and accept fallibility.
The difficulty many adults have with rediscovering their authentic selves partially explains why some cling to old, outdated paradigms. It also helps explain why change usually comes through the actions of the young.
So it should be no mystery why we gathered a handful of youthful explorers to help us collect the information we needed to put to rest, once and for all, the incorrect notion that chaparral can “burn several times in a dozen years” and recover just fine. Younger explorers are more willing to question, everything, including the investigator-in-chief. They also see things that older investigators have been staring at for years, but never noticed.
Holden Caulfield was on to something when he said (in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye), “People never notice anything.”
Background: The Sweetwater River Canyon below the Alpine Overlook on Interstate Highway 8 in San Diego County provides a unique opportunity to measure how chaparral recovers from frequent fire. The area had been burned three times, the first in 1970, with one fire overlapping another. Some have claimed the chaparral burned in 2001 and 2003 is recovering without a problem. We descended into the canyon twice to collect biodiversity data to quantify what has actually been happening. For details about our first trip on April 29, please see our earlier post. For a full explanation about why this research project began, please see our original story, Denying the Threat of High Fire Frequency in the Chaparral.
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