I
can only imagine what folks living elsewhere think when they see our California wildfires raging up hillsides, down canyons and through homes. I imagine it’s something like, “Why in the world would they live there?”
Well, “there” in most of California necessarily means somewhere in close proximity to chapparel or sage scrub, the two most prevelant plant communities from San Diego to Mendocino. And what a plant community it is! It doesn’t just burn; it has to burn, as John McPhee wrote in “The Control of Nature,”
High or low – hard, soft, or mixed – all chaparral has in common an always developing, relentlessly intensifying, vital necessity to burst into flame. In a sense, chaparral consumes fire no less than fire consumes chaparral. Fire nourishes and rejuvenates the plants. There are seeds that fall into the soil, stay there indefinitely, and will not germinate except in the aftermath of fire. …
When fire comes, it puts the nutrients [from mature shrubs] back in the ground. It clears the terrain for fresh growth. When chaparral has not been burned for thirty years, about half the thicket will be dry dead stuff – twenty-five thousand tons of it in one quare mile. The living plants are no less flammable. The chamise, the manzanita – in fact, most chaparral plants – are full of solvent extractives that burn intensely and ignite easily. Their leaves are glossy with oils and resins that seal in mositure during hot dry periods and serve the dual purpose of responding explosively to flame.
So Californians don’t really choose to live surrounded by chaparral and scrub. Unless they live packed in urban areas that were cleared of it by pioneers 150 years ago – who chose to live surrounded by it and clear it acre by acre – they have to put up with the stuff. It’s pretty for a couple months of the year at best, fragrant with sage, resplendant in purple flowers, then it browns out and looks dead for the rest of the year. And it burns. But we can no more avoid it than Midwesterners can avoid living surrounded by agricultural fields.
Enter groups like the Coastal Property Owners Association of Big Sur, who watched 20 homes in their neighborhood burn last year, and who blame the regulatory rigidity of the California Coastal Commission – not oil-rich bushes – for their woes. The Commission has rules that protect scrub and chaparral, and it requires homeowners to get a permit before they can trim back the explosive shrubs … permits that can be costly to pursue and difficult to get.
[H]omeowners say the commission’s chaparral-protection rule blocks them from taking even basic precautions against wildfires, such as cutting a defensive perimeter around their homes, or from remodeling or expanding structures on their property.
They also contend that the definitions of precisely what constitutes maritime chaparral are vague, noting that the Coastal Commission staff said in one report that “the syntaxonomy of maritime chaparral has not been formally studied, hence arguments as to the identity of a particular stand of chaparral as either falling within or without such a category is subject to the vacillation of personal opinion.”
The statement means that “people will have their land effectively condemned based upon the personal opinion of one person, the expert the county or commission requires them to hire to do a biological assessment of their property as part of the permit process. It seems you couldn’t find a more arbitrary and vague system for designating which land is ESHA and therefore essentially unusable,” said Michael Caplin, a member of the homeowners group who has lived in the area since the 1970s. ….
“Even when everybody could see the fire was raging, they said we had to get permits to cut. People didn’t have a choice. They had to get permits. Finally, the firefighters jumped right in, and of course they helped the property owners remove trees. It shouldn’t take a disaster like this to put some sense into the process,” [Lisa] Kleissner said. (Capitol Weekly)
The Coastal Commission takes a “Who? Us?” attitude when accused of complicitcy in coastal area fire damage, and shifts the blame instead to the silly people who insist on living close to nature. (The Commission is based in San Francisco, which was stripped of its habitat before the beginning of the 20th century.)
“The central message here for us is that the maritime chaparral, like the San Diego coast sage shrub, are not just fire-prone, they are fire-dependent. They have evolved over a millenium to require fire to regenerate. They have to burn, they will burn,” said Coast Commission spokeswoman Sarah Christie.
“When people build in those kinds of habitats, you have to expect that there are going to be wildfires. When a wildfire is raging out of control, it’s not reasonable to expect that you would be able to clear enough vegetation from around your house to keep it from harm’s way. People are emotional distressed and they are looking to lash out. Those fires were caused by natural forces. The Coastal Commission can’t control the lightning.”
Imagine being a coastal California homeowner looking at the charred skeleton of your home and reading that. You might be tempted to lash out. Of course Commission staffers aren’t out there starting fires; that’s hardly the point, Ms. Christie, even if the Commission’s rules against thinning without permits may intensify the fires. The point is, the Commission could do something to help contain the fires, but it puts Gaea first and people second.
It would be an interesting study to compare houses lost to wildfire in the coastal region to the number lost in scrub/chaparral habitat outside the Coastal Zone. I’m sure the difference would be remarkable. Outside the Coastal Zone, developers and homebuilders work with the less rigid California Department of Fish & Game and their local fire department to develop a fire plan that involves thinning native habitat around new homes.
It works like a charm. In last year’s Yorba Linda fire, one of the most exposed neighborhoods of all, Casino Ridge, which was surrounded on three sides by raging fire, lost not a single home because it was newly built and contained a carefully engineered “fuel modification zone” that knocked down the fire for the firefighters. The neighborhood with the most losses, Hidden Hills, was built before the practice was put into effect, and had scrub growing up to the backyards of most of the homes.
The Coastal Commission’s desire to save every chaparral and coastal sage bush it can makes engineering protections like Casino Ridge’s in the Coastal Zone vastly more difficult.
It may all get down to varying views of how much of this stuff there is around us. When I was fighting to keep the California gnatcatcher from being listed as endangered, we found a simple, dumb mathematical error in the fed’s computation of habitat loss. They put it at 95 percent gone, but if they’d done their math right, they would have seen it was actually 70 percent lost – and that was based on suspect data; the actual amount lost is almost certainly much lower.
As for chaparral, locals say there’s 1.3 million acres of it, but the Commission clings to an entirely insane 20,000-acre figure, which it gets by counting only eugenically pure patches of the stuff with no other plants gumming up the purity. It’s an absurd and artificial standard, and it’s causing houses to burn.
So it’s your choice: Is California going down the tubes or up in smoke? Or both?
hat-tip: Marshall
The worst of it is the dishonesty CARB uses when talking to us about their plan. The bureaucrats must think we are so dumb. This is from the CARB Web site’s 
We tried to get that cost effective and reasonable idea approved by any number of regional boards, but they said they wanted the conveyance systems – be it a creek or a concrete-lined channel – to be “fishable” and “swimable.” We had some fun with that, creating this image of what every Southern Californian would rather do than go to a nearby beach.
