written with clouds

On Sun­day we were work­ing out­side on a project and hap­pened to look up at the sky. A plane had been sky­writ­ing, spread­ing some adver­tis­ing copy in the sky to the north–some sort of ad for Geico insur­ance, I think. After that text was done, up popped this message:

be-fire-safe-skywiriting-as-seen-from-the-ground

Here’s the same pic­ture turned upside down if you’re not one of those peo­ple who read books inverted:

be-fire-safe-skywiriting-inverted

“Be fire safe?”

Here in San Diego we often don’t obsess about fire until after the end of sum­mer, when the land around us has gone with­out water for six months and the hot desert winds blow from the east. The end of Octo­ber is clas­sic fire sea­son for us, the time of year when the firestorms of 2003 and 2007 rav­aged this part of the state. But last month’s Santa Bar­bara fire and this lit­tle bit of public-service sky­writ­ing got me think­ing about the place of fire in the local ecosystem.

Cover of Richard Halsey's book

Three meet­ings ago, the local chap­ter of the Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety hosted wild­fire ecol­o­gist Richard Halsey. Direc­tor of the Cal­i­for­nia Chap­ar­ral Insti­tute, Halsey has been work­ing to try edu­cate the pub­lic about new under­stand­ings about fire. In addi­tion to the insti­tute, he’s been a strong voice in the media, and has authored the book, Fire, Chap­ar­ral and Sur­vival in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. (Town Mouse & Coun­try Mouse did a nice post on Fire this month, which included some good quotes from Halsey.)

Any­one who thinks that plant soci­ety meet­ings are slow, drawn out affairs wasn’t at the meet­ing I attended. Halsey and one of the other biol­o­gists invited to speak went mano a mano over some of the ideas that rep­re­sented a break from what is still being taught in schools.

I’m no biol­o­gist, but at least some of Halsey’s points made sense to me. Here’s a short list of some of what he had to say:

  • The notion that “chap­ar­ral needs to burn” is a crock of bat guano. Although the ecosys­tem is adapted to com­ing back after a blaze, it doesn’t need fire to thrive.
  • When areas burn more fre­quently than the plants liv­ing there are adapted to, how­ever, many orig­i­nal plant species die out and inva­sives begin to move in. Type con­ver­sion of chap­ar­ral into a weedy grass­land of exotic species can begin.
  • Exten­sive fire breaks gouged into a nat­ural area are a mag­net for weed species that can take over the ecosys­tem. (See the pre­vi­ous bul­let point.) Of all of these points, the other biol­o­gist made the strongest argu­ment against this posi­tion of Halsey’s, cit­ing a study where areas with aban­doned fire breaks revert almost com­pletely to their pre­vi­ous species after a cer­tain num­ber of years.
  • A new study look­ing at ocean sed­i­ments in the Chan­nel Islands shows that large fires have occurred in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, but were sep­a­rated by far greater num­bers of years than we’re see­ing today. Vir­tu­ally all the fires we’re see­ing today have been caused by humans.
  • A leg­end of the local Kumeyaay peo­ple men­tions a par­tic­u­larly dev­as­tat­ing fire sev­eral hun­dred years before the arrival of the Span­ish in Cal­i­for­nia and Mex­ico. After the fire, the Kumeyaay had to live in the desert for an entire gen­er­a­tion before the land west of the moun­tains was hab­it­able again.

As recently as 2003–2004, when I was work­ing a pho­tog­ra­phy series on the 2003 Cedar Fire, I put together an artist’s state­ment for that body of work that included the sen­tence, “The land needed to burn, to regen­er­ate.” Halsey has con­vinced me that it’s time for me to rethink that position.

James SOE NYUN: Hill with wildflowersJames SOE NYUN. Hill with Wild­flow­ers, Cuya­maca Ran­cho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004. Chro­mogenic print, 15 x 18 3/4 in.

May 26 2009 05:37 am | Categories: landscape | Tags: •

3 Responses to “written with clouds”

  1. tina on 26 May 2009 at 11:46 am #

    That is cool!

  2. Susie on 26 May 2009 at 7:15 pm #

    Thanks for the link to the Chap­parel Insti­tute. Much needed info. Great post.

  3. ryan on 26 May 2009 at 8:28 pm #

    It’s hard to pull back far enough to see fire clearly. I just lis­ten to lis­ten to the voices in the debate.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply