Chaparral Wisdom

Despite the negative impact it can have on our hearts, it is prudent to be aware that a growing anthropocentric mind-set is posing increasing challenges to, as John Muir wrote, our fellow mortals.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, the respect for Nature and the desire to protect her reached a new zenith. Biocentric thinking became the norm across the country. Regionally, by 2015, chaparral was finally recognized as a valued habitat, for humans as well as for the species who live there. The US Forest Service officially recognized the chaparral’s fragility and importance. The old notions that chaparral should be burned frequently and that large, high-intensity wildfires were abnormal were finally rejected by the scientific community.

Old-growth mixed chaparral, south of I-8 near the Viejas Overlook, San Diego County, California.

But the tide began to turn in the mid-2000 teens. Anthropocentrism regained a new foothold. The belief that Nature was something to be either feared or exploited, infected the public’s mindset. In part, this shift was fueled by wildfire, specifically the 2017 wildfires in northern California.

Reflecting the long time cultural schism between northern and southern California, Sacramento had politically ignored the 2003 and 2007 wildfire storms that devastated many communities in the southern part of the state. However, once the fires began hitting in the north, specifically after the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, Sacramento finally took notice. Nature, now called “fuel,” became an enemy that needed to be controlled.

Fire-related legislature proliferated, fire agency budgets expanded, and the clearance of habitat became the new crusade. Seeing public oversight and environmental review as a drag on their designs, Cal Fire created a plan that dispensed with the safeguards of public oversight and objective science – the Vegetation Treatment Program, or VTP – targeting millions of acres of native habitat for elimination.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

This growing self-centered, human-centric thinking has been embraced effectively by each side of the political divide.

The right has been emboldened to apply its already traditional view that wild Nature is something to exploit for profit. The use of categorical exclusions, which prevent proper environmental analysis and public involvement, to permit logging, habitat clearance, and other environmentally damaging projects on federal land, began to increase significantly over the past decade.

The new regime in Washington, D.C. is making a sincere effort to expand this approach. The current “Fix Our Forests Act,” pushed by the Republican Congress in response to the recent urban fires in Los Angeles (forests had nothing to do with them), is designed to accelerate logging and eliminate native habitat, forest or otherwise. When we discussed the matter with a Congressional staff member recently and told him the Act would do nothing to save lives and property in the wildfires that kill the most people and burn the most homes, he ignored the fact and justified the focus on trees by repeating logging industry talking points.

On the left, the preservation of wild Nature began to be increasingly dismissed as a colonial construct. Wild Nature was never wild, the claim goes, it has always been managed by humans, to serve humans, since time immemorial. Without human intervention, Nature becomes decadent and sick. Nature cannot survive on its own. The theme can be found in nearly every new land management plan and is used in part by California Governor Newsom’s administration to justify their VTP habitat clearance plan, doubling down on the same approach that has failed for more than a century. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of lives and homes are lost in wildfires not because of surrounding, native habitat, but because communities are flammable, being ignited by embers blown miles ahead of the fire front.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
– Alcoholics Anonymous

Threats to the environment by developers and resource exploitation are nothing new, but the growing anthropocentrism by previous advocates of Nature presents a difficult challenge.

As George Wuerthner discusses, Wilderness is now mischaracterized as a “white man’s” idea that discriminates against marginalized communities. New public land preservation efforts, like California’s 30 x 30 Initiative (conserving 30% of California’s lands and coastal waters by 2030), are being compromised by demands that funds be used for urban development instead, not to protect Nature. New management plans concerning public lands are increasingly involving partnerships with tribal interests that are not subject to public oversight, interests that have often proven to be as environmentally exploitive as any other group of humans. Such conflicts increasingly involve identity politics and revisionist history about past environmental icons like John Muir. The conflicts are crippling the effectiveness of environmental groups such as the Sierra Club.

Back to the Dark Ages

Fire and resource agencies, environmental groups like the Nature Conservancy, and research institutions like the College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley, have justified the clearance of habitat through logging, fire, and herbicide by not only hyping fear over understanding, but by invoking the name of Native Americans.

Despite the complete lack of scientific evidence, these entities claim natural, dense habitat across the West is an anomaly, existing only because European settlers and the government stopped Indigenous Peoples from burning the broad landscape. Indigenous Peoples did indeed use fire, but on a local level, not on the broad landscape to “manage” all of Nature. The notion that Nature cannot survive on its own and requires human intervention has weaved itself into nearly every governmental and private institution involved in land management. It has become dogma.

The social pressure to not question anything being offered in support of using Indigenous stories to develop modern fire policy, even if complete nonsense, is so strong that it can transform large groups of normally rational, inquisitive people into a compliant sea of nodding heads. Expressing skepticism within such an environment, an essential component of the scientific method, a scientist now risks being accused of racism. This anti-scientific approach to wildfire has even been codified by the Association for Fire Ecology in its official policy statement that Indigenous memories and stories about fire ecology are science.

Unquestionable dogma is not science, a principle that required centuries of inspired work by thousands of inquisitive minds like Galileo to establish. As Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana warned in 1905, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The force of the new dogma has directly impacted our work. A large, national environmental group resolved it would no longer sign on to the Chaparral Institute’s comment letters regarding habitat clearance plans because we challenged the claim that chaparral was regularly burned every 10 years or less by Indigenous Peoples, a frequency that would burn the shrublands out of existence. An environmental legal firm that advised us that our lawsuit against Cal Fire’s habitat clearance plan (VTP) would not have much merit, later helped draft California’s prescribed fire plan that depends heavily on Indigenous fire dogma. In an email response to a letter we wrote to the Los Angeles Times challenging the plan, one of the partners of the firm accused us of using racist language and demanded a retraction.

Unquestionable dogma is not science, a principle that required centuries of inspired work by thousands of inquisitive minds like Galileo.

With the billions of dollars now available to log and clear habitat (facilitated by Proposition 4 on California’s ballot last election), non-profit land conservancies have been seduced into compromising native life forms in exchange for funding their bureaucracies. Having been deceived by the notion that dense habitat is sick via the Fire Suppression Fallacy, local conservancies are obtaining grants to clear naturally successional, post-fire habitat of ceanothus, manzanita, and other native plants, all in the pursuit of creating “healthy” habitat. Both the California Coastal Commission and the Sierra Nevada Conservancy have given the green light to massive habitat clearance operations.

Nature’s Voice Will be Heard

Yet despite it all, those of us who believe in the value of wild Nature will persist as will our ability to be inspired by Nature’s beauty and complexity. While wildfire propaganda, group think, ego, money, and fear of reprisal have frightened away many who once championed Nature, we will continue the fight and find solace in the natural wonders we experience every day.

Because of support from our members, the Endangered Habitats League, and who we are, our lawsuit against Cal Fire will be fought to its conclusion. We are now in the California Appellate Court. If we do not prevail there, we shall seek a hearing before the California Supreme Court.

As thoughtful people, we know right does not always triumph. We can only control what we do, how we feel, and how we react. Regardless of what happens in the courtroom, we are secure in the knowledge that our commitment to champion the voice of Nature, to fight for what is right, will never waiver.

Why are we so determined? We have embraced the innate connection with the wild that we have felt since childhood. It is a connection that Novocained functionaries, with souls atrophied within the artificial confines of enclosed spaces and electronic screens, have lost. To them, Nature is only fuel or something to exploit. To us, champions of the Wrentit, the manzanita, the horned lizard, the bobcat, Nature is life. We can feel her power every time we smell the sage, hear the Spotted Towhee, see the green of winter’s spring, and feel the crystalline surface of an ancient granitic boulder. We think and feel differently than the rest, we lovers of wildness. And for that, we shall always be kindred spirits with, and guardians of, our fellow mortals.