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.

Teaching Southern Californians About Southern California

I’m a member of the California Native Plant Society. I haven’t been a member very long, only about eight or nine years. As part of our outreach and education efforts for our local chapter, I lead hikes through some of our canyons and open spaces in which I explain to folks about the native flora and plant communities here. This past weekend I conducted a hike through Florida Canyon, a fairly well preserved native area in Balboa Park.

            I grew up in Appalachia, a place where, even if you didn’t eat them, everyone took note of the Mayapples, whose broad green leaves would blanket forest floors in early spring. In late summer we picked blackberries and in fall we would gather walnuts.

Besides the fruits and nuts that we would harvest and eat, most folks had some notion of the flora around them. It would be impossible not to notice the azaleas and dogwood trees blooming in springtime. And people had some idea of the oaks, sycamores, and elm trees growing around them.

San Diego is far different. We have two plant communities that are native to the coastal area where the city is, coastal sage scrub and coastal chaparral. Whenever people talk about these plants, if they talk about them at all, they are usually just called “brush.”

The landscaping around our houses and along our highways is all from somewhere else. We plant eucalyptus from Australia, iceplant from southern Africa, palms from the south Pacific and Mexico, and scores of other plants from the Mediterranean and South America. What we have made is some sort of international never-never land and is ubiquitous in our landscaped environment. It is possible to wake up in the morning, drive through your neighborhood, fight traffic on the freeway, and make your way to the office park where you work without seeing a tree or any other kind of plant native to southern California.

So for a lot of folks, even for people who have lived in southern California all or most of their lives, it can be an astounding eye-opener when I explain to them about the native sunflowers and sages that live in the canyons and open spaces around them. Many of them have never been up close and personal with their natural environment.

For southern Californians to be so cut off from our natural environment does have consequences. The average American uses about 90 gallons of water a day for cleaning, drinking, bathing, and other purposes. San Diegans use about 150 gallons a day, more than 65 percent more. Those 60 additional gallons that we use every day are used to water our lawns and nonnative plants that we have planted in our lawns and parks.

This water we ship in from hundreds of miles away. Half of our water comes from the Colorado, which is so overused and drawn upon that it usually dries up before it makes its way to its mouth in the Sea of Cortez. Also, shipping all that water takes effort. It’s estimated that 20 percent of the energy used in California is used to move water from one point to another, which has implications for energy security and climate change.

So folks join me on these native plant hikes. I hope they learn something and maybe appreciate their native environment. I hope that it somehow makes a difference.

A Visit to Our Border Wall

I’m with my friend Jill. We’ve just spent the last 45 minutes driving on route 94, a winding two lane that climbs the mountains east of San Diego, and are now a few miles east of the small town of Campo. Besides a convenience store with a sign that says that it does NOT have a public restroom, there is not much to Campo. The big attraction here is a railway museum with an old depot and acres of old rail cars and engines. On weekends you can ride for several miles on some of their bygone trains. Next to the train museum is a Border Patrol station. The station has a big parking lot filled with white vans and trucks, all with the green stripe and lettering that says BORDER PATROL.

  Turning off the highway, we head south on a road called the Shockey Truck Trail. If Edward Hopper had painted southwest landscapes, they would have looked like this. Long driveways lead to modest two and three bedroom homes adrift on huge lots, their midwestern architecture contrasting with the austere landscape. About a mile in, the pavement gives way to a dirt road and the houses disappear. The reason we’ve chosen this route is that, according to the map that Jill has, Shocky Truck Trail heads south and comes within a hair of the US-Mexico border. We’ve come to see the border wall. Until the nineties there was no structure of any sort through this expanse of landscape and no way of telling if you may have wandered from the US to Mexico or vice versa.
          Coming up over a crest, a vista opens. The fitful breeze retains a midmorning chill and the smell of sage gives a sense that the landscape has just been scrubbed clean. We’re at about 3000 feet above sea level in the Peninsular Range, a swath of granite mountains that runs north northwest along the California coast. The range contains Mount Palomar, where the famous telescope is, as well as a few peaks that exceed 10,000 feet. In this region of the range the rough terrain comes to an end and stretches out in a relatively flat expanse with a few rolling hills, the sort of vista that might be featured in the opening scenes of many a 1950s western movie. Looming over us and trailing off to the east are high power lines, and we can hear a low constant electrical hum from the wires. We spy the border wall about a few hundred yards across the chaparral. A fence with private property and NO TRESPASSING signs keeps us from approaching the structure. Pulling out the binoculars, we get a glimpse of a white cross. Jill tells me that it’s a memorial to a Border Patrol agent who was killed out here a couple years ago.
          Within a few minutes of our arrival, a Border Patrol agent drives up in an enormous truck. Jill and I have walked the border down by Tijuana before, and from that experience we both know that if you’re anywhere near the border wall, Border Patrol agents will come up and talk to you. It’s their job to check out the few individuals they see out here. Also, their days must be plagued by long stretches of boredom. They probably just want to talk when they see someone. It breaks up their day. Like every other agent, this guy is one of the most pleasant persons you might ever meet. He lets us know that if we double back and take another dirt road off to our left we can get right up to the border and also get to the memorial.
          I’ve been expecting this feeling as we get close to the wall, but I’m still surprised by the degree of disquietude that comes over me. The Border Patrol, and for that matter, the rest of the government, calls this a fence, but it most certainly is a wall. It’s a deep rust brown and stands at about ten feet. The wall is made of army surplus plates of steel - 12 feet long, 20 inches wide, and 1/4 inch thick - that had been used to make landing strips in Vietnam during the war. Each mile of the wall uses over 3,000 of these panels. Every six feet, steel pipes that are buried eight feet into the ground hold the fence up. As though the wall has been visited by an obsessive compulsive tagger, all of the eight foot sections are numbered with spray paint, giving it an odd sort of slapdash inner city quality. About 62 miles of the border have this type of wall. The wall stretches off to the horizon. Its plumb line straightness is dizzying.

The border wall

Adjacent to the wall is a dirt road. Visually its’ impossible to separate the wall from the road. Following the two off in the distance, the image of the road dominates. For a dirt road it is wide and amazingly smooth. I assume that the Border Patrol wants the road smooth so they can hurry from point to point along its extent if they need to. Off to the side the eroded gullies lead into the landscape. Construction of this wall started in the early nineties as part of of Operation Gatekeeper, a Clinton era initiative that was spearheaded by Janet Reno. Depending on the source, Operation Gatekeeper was Clinton’s response to diffuse pressure from the right, while other sources say that it was Janet Reno, appalled by the conditions she found at the border, who initiated the program.
          This scene goes on all along the border with Mexico. Nearly 650 miles of additional fencing is up, and the numbers of Border Patrol agents exceed 17,600. At last count, four unmanned drones patrol from California to the Gulf of Mexico. there are probably more now. We tend to think of this as a Border Patrol operation, but besides the Border Patrol agents, 1200 National Guard soldiers are also stationed along the border. More than 450 camera systems monitor the area between the U.S. and Mexico.

  The landscape through which the wall passes here is chaparral. Most folks, even those who live in the chaparral, are confused as to what chaparral is. If you ever watched the 1960s television show High Chaparral, the landscape you saw was not chaparral. The series was shot outside Tucson in the Sonoran Desert, not a chaparral environment. If, on the other hand, you watched any of the Dukes of Hazzard, the 1970s TV show that took place in Kentucky, you’ve seen plenty of chaparral, as the action scenes were shot in the chaparral covered canyons around Los Angeles.

  Chaparral is not a plant, but a plant community, a designation like northeastern hardwood forrest or northwestern rainforest. Covering foothills and mountain slopes from the northern section of the Baja Peninsula all the way to the Rouge River Valley in Southern Oregon, chaparral is the most extensive plant community in California and its most characteristic wilderness.

          Through this area the most common plant you see is chamise, an evergreen that grows about six to seven feet high. Large fragrant sugarbush and ceanothus, now in bloom with blue flowers, dot the landscape. Nearly 900 species of plants occur in chaparral, among the plant communities with the highest in native plant diversity and has a greater number of rare and endangered species.

  It can also be fragile. Chaparral does not have great resiliency to bounce back from human interference. Nonnative species have a pretty easy time pushing out the native chaparral plants, too. The border wall and Mexican immigration through this section have implications for the chaparral. In one study of the five-year period after the start of Operation Gatekeeper in late 1994 “there were 772 meters of new trail created per 1,000 unauthorized immigrants, accompanied by 656 square meters of area disturbed per 1,000 immigrants, fifty kilograms of litter left behind per 1,000 immigrants, eleven illegal campfires per 1,000 immigrants, and 1.7 hectares burned by wildfires attributed to illegal immigrants.”

  We walk east a bit to find the memorial. Just like when we were kids playing on the farms, we limbo through the old barbed wire fence that parallels the wall about thirty yards north. For decades the demarkation between the two countries might only be an out or repair fence like this, or no barrier whatsoever. In the border area known as the “Soccer Field,” where there was no wall or fence, migrants would gather during the day by the hundreds. After dusk they would dash north in the darkness and hope for a more prosperous life. Like damming a river with a paper cup, the few Border Patrol agents assigned to this area at the time could do little to keep the migrants from passing into the United States.
  I’m surprised by the size of the cross, about 12 feet high, it occupies the center of a clearing the size of my front lawn. Flowers and photographs encircle the structure. Judging from the pictures, this was a young man who was killed, a guy in his twenties. A teenager from Mexico was convicted and sentenced to 40 years for his part in the crime. The remoteness just seems to make the memorial all the sadder.

  Under this cross, with only Jill and me here, it’s hard to believe that this huge wall is needed to control immigration. We certainly cannot go back to the days of the Soccer Field, and I do believe in some form of border security. But the costs—the billions of dollars, the scarring of the environment, and the lives lost—are too high.

Jill taking a photo of the memorial to the slain border patrol agent

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.