Chaparral Wisdom
To celebrate the magic and beauty of Nature & the chaparral
Alpine View Point – Field research: impact of frequent fire on chaparral (Part II)
Being inspired to discover the truth can come from many directions.
Our current field research study has been stimulated by a recent claim that frequent fire had not harmed a particular patch of chaparral we are very familiar with – below the history-rich Alpine View Point overlook off Interstate Highway 8 in San Diego County. Our motivation recalls Thomas C. Chamberlin’s insightful paper back in 1890. He wrote,
“To be sure, truth may be brought forth by an investigator dominated by a false ruling idea. His very errors may indeed stimulate investigation on the part of others.”
– Thomas C. Chamberlin, 1890
So alas, down into the canyon we plunged this past weekend, with GPS gear, 50 meter tapes, recording journals, and a lot of water.
Denying the Threat of High Fire Frequency in the Chaparral (Part I)
The beauty and magic of the chaparral ecosystem is dependent on long fire return intervals. If fires occur more frequently than once every 30 years, the chaparral’s rich biodiversity is lost.
It saddens us to learn there remains resistance to this fact, despite overwhelming scientific evidence.
As with climate change denial, the active rejection of the threat of high fire frequency to the chaparral presents a serious environmental challenge – it delays needed change that can help us protect what wild nature we have left. Equally important, believing constructs that attempt to force nature to conform to our personal biases makes it more difficult for us to find connections with nature, a force that has shaped our needs and souls for millions of years.
Direct Rejection of the Science
For example, in a recent article entitled, Botany in San Diego County before European Contact (Oberbauer 2018), the author wrote:
“In other locations, such as the area below the Alpine View Point on I-8, repeated fires in Chaparral, even when burned several times in a dozen years, have not changed the chaparral and it has recovered.”
San Diego County’s Alpine View Point is shown in Figure 1 below. The chaparral that the author claims has not changed due to frequent burning is shown in the lower, right hand corner. After being burned in 2001 and again in 2003, native plant seed germination was minimal to non-existent, many chamise shrubs failed to resprout and consequently died, and the bare ground became dominated by non-native weeds.
Ten years later (as shown in Figure 2 below), the area was still suffering from the impact of high fire frequency, characterized by a sparse population of weakly resprouting chamise shrubs and large empty patches filled in with non-native weeds. The re-bruned area remains compromised today with a dramatic loss of biodiversity, 15 years post-fire. The comparison to the adjacent area that has not been subjected to frequent fire is stark.
Rediscovering the Magic in Nature – Giving your youthful innocence a chance to speak again
Do you fit into your daily schedule? Or are you an afterthought?
Nature can help.
Nature provides the space and clarity that allow us to experience the vastness, the texture of life that is difficult to find anywhere else. Nature allows us to cultivate the present moment. It reaches out to us to reconnect with our innocent, younger, unvarnished selves without bias, without shame, without all the layers of personality we have developed to survive our childhood and the society we live in.
Nature allows us to be naked without being self-conscious. Nature doesn’t care whether we think we are short, tall, skinny, overweight, blemished. Nature defines acceptance. All have an equal chance to enjoy the cool stream, to feel the green moss, to fall into a rocky ravine. The rhythms of life and death continue to flow regardless of our age, wealth, or identity. Guilt, insecurity, self-loathing, judgement have no meaning in Nature. We become beautiful in Nature because we are allowed to define ourselves, by ourselves.
No matter our personal connection with Nature today, our intellects and emotional selves have created filters, perspectives, biases, the cobwebs of life, that often make it difficult to allow the youthful love and curiosity for Nature we all have within to be fully expressed.
Think about the last time your busy mind was distracted, if only for a moment, by a bird sitting in a tree, or a flower blowing delicately in the wind. How did you feel? Wonder, awe, compassion? It softened you. That was the door of your childhood opening up ever so slightly, allowing your emotional self to speak again, like a gentle wind pushing away the cobwebs, asking your intellect to pause for a moment and allow your life to breathe.
For us to allow Nature to reestablish this connection, permanently, to make curiosity and compassion (as opposed to judgement and apathy) guiding principles of our lives, we need to form new neural pathways to replace the older, worn channels that have been directing our thoughts and actions for years.
Where once we thought adult brains were fixed, we now know that the brain can grow new neurons to repair damage, replace older neural pathways that no longer serve us, change to help us change. It takes conscious effort, practice, to form new channels, to no longer allow the older, easier path to determine our actions. But the practice is within our reach.