A Burning Issue: The LA Times Mischaracterizes Chaparral in Their Story On the Powerhouse Fire

Whenever there is a large-scale fire here in southern California, the press repeats the same narrative about our native flora that just continues a great deal of misunderstanding of our environment and our relationship to it.

            The Powerhouse fire, which has been burning in the Angeles National Forest since last week, is the subject of this story in the Los Angeles Times: Powerhouse fire: Old dry brush proved explosive. Among the descriptions of the chaparral in the story are the following sentences:

This old chaparral, with layer upon layer of dead growth underneath, has proved difficult to fight.

Chaparral tends to grow taller as it ages, collecting dead material below it.

Readers are left with the impression that chaparral builds up dead and highly flammable twigs and wood as it ages. This is not true. While dead twigs and leaves do fall from the canopy of a chaparral stand, creating a blanket of duff on the ground, most of the plants that comprise chaparral are actually evergreen. As someone who hikes around in chaparral country, I can attest that stands of chaparral that are decades old can be quite lush, with decomposing duff on the ground that is about as flammable as most other mulch.

            San Diego County, where I live, experienced huge wildfires in 2003 and 2007. If the thinking that is conveyed in this article were true, then the stands of chaparral that are 40, 60, or 100 years old would have been more likely to burn than younger stands of chaparral in these wildfires. This did not happen. As a matter of fact, GIS analysis that I did on the 2007 fires indicated that areas that had burned in 2003, only four years earlier, were actually more likely to burn than older flora.

            Before we had millions of people making their homes here, the chaparral had rare chances of being ignited. Thunderstorms are rare along the coast and foothills where chaparral grows. It is just unlikely that a lightning strike will start a fire among the chaparral. Unlike western forests, which are estimated to have, historically, experienced ground fires every seven to 20 years, chaparral may not burn for decades. Some stands of old growth chaparral are well over 100 years old.

But now add to the naturally occurring thunderstorms ignition from cigarettes, sparks from machinery, arson, and stray embers from barbeques. With the prevalence of nonnative grasses, which dry up early in spring and serve as tinder the rest of the year, you have a formula for lots of wildfires in southern California. That should have been the greater narrative of this LA Times story.

For a greater understanding of chaparral, visit the California Chaparral Institute's website.

California State Parks: Clear That Chaparral, We Need to Plant Some Trees in Cuyamaca State Park!

Shaking my head and thinking, “They should know better,” is about the only reaction I can have in this situation.

            In 2003, with humidity hovering around ten percent and foehn desert winds, locally known as Santa Anas, blowing through the canyons and valley at 60 to 70 mile an hour, one of the most destructive series of fires swept through San Diego County. One of these fires, known as the Cedar Fire, burned about a quarter of a million acres. Much of the area that went up in flames was the pine forest and oak woodland in the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.

            In the intervening years chaparral, mostly ceanothus, has taken root in the old forest stands. This is a natural occurrence after a forest fire. After a disturbance to an ecosystem, such as a fire, plants known as pioneer species will take root. Ceanothus is such a pioneer plant. These plants will reestablish the soil ecology after the disturbance. In time, other species will take root. These secondary succession species will displace the pioneer species. After many years, a forest or other “mature” plant community will once again dominate the landscape. The next big fire or disturbance will set the stage for this to happen all over again. This is a natural cycle. It goes on all the time.

California State Parks Department is trying to ignore this natural process and jumpstart the forest of Cuyamaca by burning and removing the ceanothus and other chaparral and planting pine trees. This is disrupting the natural succession and putting in jeopardy the soil ecology that pioneer species create.

            The chaparral grew from a seed bank that had been in the soil for scores of years. If the these plants are not allowed to mature and produce flowers and seeds, the next time there is a catastrophic fire in the Cuyamacas, there will not be the necessary seed bank to start the pioneer succession, and the natural cycle will be broken.

A path in a chaparral covered canyon. People don't think of this when they think about nature. photo: nobodyhikesinla.com

California State Parks Department is getting money to clear the chaparral and plant the trees. Companies get carbon credits for financing this project, as the trees are carbon sinks as they grow. Ironically, the chaparral has done a fine job of sequestering carbon. As the Parks Department burns and masticates the chaparral, that sequestration is lost.

I suspect that there is also an ecology of aesthetics and expectations in this scenario as well. When people conjure an image of “nature,” alpine forests and hillsides of oaks are often what they see in their mind’s eye. Though it is the plant community that dominates most of California, chaparral is easily dismissed as brush. The psychology of fire—a very complicated topic when it comes to chaparral that I don’t have the time or space to go into here—also plays a part in the general disregard toward chaparral.

When these folks go see nature, they expect to see what they think what nature is, and that’s oaks and pines, so the State Parks of California will give it to them all the sooner. Tourists and campers don’t have the patience that Mother Nature has.

What people think of when they think of nature photo: vrbo.com

There is much more about this, including some of the legal aspects of what is going on in this situation over at the Chaparral Institute.