Patricia Damery's Blog, page 7
December 7, 2016
Deforestation Storm in Napa County: Denied Appeal of Walt Ranch
We are in a deforestation storm in Napa County, and it has only begun.
And yet, the sun rose at 7:15 this morning, the trees in the west glowing orange against the storm clouds moving in. It was one of those moments of grace when I am derailed — opened to the magnificent beauty of Presence. The valley oaks’ tall and gentle forms caught the rays. They still have their leaves, but the next storm may well finish them off. The grass’s golden green almost hurt my eyes.
And then sun slipped up under cloud cover. They say rain by 1 pm, and that it will last for several days, welcome rain we need.
This sunrise was a gift. I am aware of how easy it is to ignore golden light in the midst of the many storms we are facing, some, weather related, some, of human greed or passion. Yesterday we endured the storm at the Board of Supervisors when they denied the appeals of five appellant groups after two days of hearings and comment. Walt Ranch, a large, 2300 acre plot of land with 209 acres of vineyard and 316 acres of disturbed area, has been permitted. This involves 35 lots, all which can be developed as residences and wineries. The EIR (environmental impact report) was being questioned by very credible experts, whose arguments were dismissed. Walt Ranch is in one of the remaining biological “hotspots” of Napa County.
The fight may well not be over. Most of us know Nature needs an attorney. But sitting in the cold and drafty overflow room of the lobby to the County administration building, the sliding door to the outside sticking open as people came in and out to pay their property taxes, I felt sickened. Sound arguments by the appellants’ expert witnesses and attorneys were dismissed as each supervisor expressed opinions before their vote. In fact, the supervisor of my district, Diane Dillon, scorned commenters and appellants, characterizing comments made by opponents as “post-truth”… more based on emotion than on fact. She said that some people just don’t want more vineyards planted in Napa County. And she is correct, but for the wrong reasons.
Other supervisors’ comments were no less disappointing. Supervisor Luce made the confounding statement, “I’m very confident the environment will actually be in better shape after this project.” And while acknowledging that under regulatory standards, the project receives greenhouse gas credits for not cutting woodlands to offset the clear cutting of 14,000 mature trees, and wishing the Board would consider this further, Supervisor Wagenknecht still voted to deny the appeal. All agreed that Hall Brambletree, the applicant, followed the rules and should get the permit.
Whether Hall Brambletree followed the rules is not the issue. The issue is far more serious than vineyards and whether Hall’s get to expand their operations. Deforestation impacts climate change big time. Supervisors Dillon and Caldwell traveled to Porto Portugal to attend the Great Wine Capitals Conference this last month, but perhaps the money could have been better spent in attending a deforestation climate change educational conference. In 2014, the United Nations set a goal to stop deforestation by 2030.
To this, in our county, we might add “the production of commodity of wine”.
So there is so much work to be done.
Still, this morning, the Spirit of our Earth visits in the beauty of the sunrise. I rest in that, recovering, before the next onslaught.
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Path of Man and Path of Salmon
Fern Creek rose in the night with the punishing rain. The log jams are now dams pouring water, bruising, but still navigable— for a coho salmon. Walking along the trail that traces Fern Creek, I watch for the iron fish, each with a number. I have seen as many as three, up to the number 6, but because the fish are rusted, they blend in and are hard to see. At first I thought an artist had decided to leave a message with his or her installation, but then I realized this is a place juvenile and returning salmon are probably counted each season. This is an area that humans are carefully monitoring.
Metal salmon along Fern Creek.
We have done so much to destroy salmon habitat, and never more so than on the north coast. Within the last 150 years we have cut 99% of old growth redwoods. This is particularly poignant walking through the forest of second growth along Fern Creek. The trees stretch forever to the sky, the forest, cold and damp. You feel dwarfed, cautious. What else is here? What is that smell of musk that has marked the bridge over a feeder creek? A coyote— or mountain lion? Here you are reminded of your place in the food chain.
And yet, as your eyes accommodate to the darkened conditions, you see the shadows of fire-blackened redwood stumps whose girth dwarfs that of their offspring. What could we have been thinking to kill millions of these gigantic beings? In very few protected areas they still exist, but very few escaped the saws. With the cutting of these redwoods, the temperatures of the North Coast have risen.
The coho salmon are an integral part of this forest and their populations have been profoundly impacted by our thoughtless clear cutting of the redwood giants, by our damning of rivers, and taking waters for irrigation. The salmon runs were critically important for First People of the North Coast: the Yurok and the Hupa; the Pomo and the Miwok. It is said you could walk across the creeks on the salmons’ backs, they were that numerous. Bear, mountain lions, and coyotes feasted on these fish. Osprey carried them to their nests on the tops of redwoods. Salmon bones and carcasses nourished the soils. Salmon were a source of sustenance to so many beings—a keystone species.
I have not seen one fish in the five days that I have walked this stream, although I think this is the traditional time of the salmon runs here. And yet, I take heart in seeing the rusted effigies of the coho along the trail. Finally, we are witnessing what has happened, what is happening, and hopefully learning the intricacies of interconnections of all beings. This is a different paradigm, from that we have lived over the last centuries. It is the challenge of climate change: can we meet it soon enough to make life possible into the future?
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November 30, 2016
The Sacred and Land Use Issues:Remembering The Whole
When we exited the Napa County Administration Building for the noon break of the Walt Ranch appeal hearings, I was surprised. Upwards of a hundred people rallied on the lawns holding signs of protest. Walt Ranch is an ambitious project seeking to cut almost 15,000 mature trees for 35 lifestyle tract vineyards in one of the most biologically diverse areas of Napa County. Four environmental and citizen groups are appealing the Planning Commission’s approval of this project to the Board of Supervisors, based on a very questionable Environmental Impact Report.
But that is not the topic of this blog. The topic is the sacred. As I walked out that noon, I was also met with the steady beat of a drum coming from a small gathering of indigenous people. The beat, that of the heart, united us. An abalone shell holding a smoldering sage wand rested on a bench nearby. The pungent smoke wafted toward me, reminding me of sweat-lodges I attended throughout the years. For me, white sage is the aroma of the sacred. It hints of that deep interconnection of all beings— as the Lakota say, All my relatives. I asked if I could take pictures, and they agreed. This was just before other amplified music drowned out the beating of the drum.
I loved the other music too. It is not that I didn’t. The musician played variations of protest songs from the years I was a young adult protesting the Vietnam War. Songs that are a call to action.
Charlie Toledo, Director of Suscol Intertribal Council.
But I am also aware of how the calming, meditative beat that opens us to immediacy of the Present was also drowned out– not unlike how the indigenous all my relatives approach to the natural world has been drowned out.
Yet I think the drum set a rhythm for the rally. Strangers talked to each other, respectful but determined to stand for the sovereignty of the trees and the water and the land.
Hanging in the air was the knowledge that before the arrival of our western European ancestors, the North American continent was an agricultural preserve so richly complex that invaders had no idea what they were seeing. Within a century these invaders plundered every resource they could liquidate.
The wound in these land use issues goes back to then. The ancestors of the people sitting in the drumming circle lived here for 60,000 years, according to Director of Suscol Intertribal Council Charlie Toledo‘s accounts. Within a few decades, they were mostly wiped out by disease and murder or chased off.
Ironically, after the land was “acquired”—stolen— by western Europeans, property rights became important, and another land ethic was imposed. Nature became a commodity for our exploitation. In some ways, we have come full circle. We protesters are advocating for our governing bodies to consider first the Commons, for the rights of nature over property rights of men. As the meaning of a word is embedded the mystery of its etymology, the root cause of land use issues revisits us in these battles.
We have a chance to heal this one. It may be our only way of surviving, given the climate changes coming our way—by aligning with the sacred of that beat the reminds us we are all of a piece, we are All Relatives.
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November 26, 2016
Water, Trees, Mistakes: Watershed Health
Napping was not only from exhaustion; it was also defense to the weight of what I was reading, Alice Outwater’s Water: A Natural History, not nap time reading!
I knew discrete facts of the history. How early 18th century explorers skilled off many fur-bearing animals, especially the beaver, important to watershed health throughout our country. The massacre of millions of buffalo in a few short years of the early 1840’s, buffalo, whose wallows collected waters and allowed slow seepage into the ground, restoring aquifers. And the prairie dogs, whose tunnels provided passage for water for ground water restoration, yet annoyed ranchers and were poisoned. How Western Europeans treated the lands of the west as they had lands to the east and in Europe, plowing and planting land that had to be irrigated by aquifers once restored by actions of buffalo and prairie dog tunnels and beaver. How this has let to desertification and the drought.
Add in our twentieth century dam-building binge, which made our rivers inhospitable to those fish so important to the nutrition of native inhabitants and whose reproduction depended on swimming back to their places of origin—well, I just kept waking up, a dream, I wished, except it wasn’t. Buffalo were slaughtered for their tongues. Beaver for their pelts. Prairie dogs, also one of these keystone species, are still poisoned because they supposedly compete for vegetation with cattle, also misadapted for the ecology of the West.
It is bad news. I wish it were like one of those dreams of Scrooge, who awakens to find he has a second chance. Do we? We have gone from this garden of interconnected abundance, and now here we are. In drought. Species coming extinct. Ecosystems wrecked. Even though we know biodiversity increases a system’s chance at survival, our agriculture too often is one of increasing simplification through monocropping. The question of short-term profit trumps the question of sustainable balance.
Yesterday I walked a trail into the depth of Fern Canyon, a canyon whose crotch is Fern Creek. Wild coho salmon still run this creek. Entering this ecosystem is a yin experience: damp, dark, dripping rain— something we Californians no longer take for granted. Absolutely silent. Suddenly I noticed many enormous fire-blackened stumps of what would be growing here if it had not been for the 19th century logging of our old growth redwoods, 99% of which is gone. It is a gut shock: The impossibly huge stumps surrounded by the offspring, tall and straight themselves, but dwarfed in girth by these stump ghosts.
Outwater says that the trees in the primeval forests that the 18th and 19th century explorers encountered had almost twice the girth of the trees our second-growth forests will ever reach. This is not just about the length of time they are allowed to grow: it is about the way we culled the largest in logging and about ecosystems we have destroyed which supported the forests.
I imagined what entering this forest 200 years ago would have been like. Occasionally a raven’s percussion of wings broke the silence. One circled me several times, making the enigmatic clicking sound that always makes me wonder, is this really a raven? This is not the first time I have been scoped out by a raven in a remote location, but this time was different. At the time I was standing in one of those witch’s circles of redwoods, one where you are in the heart of the mother tree, all of her offspring ringing around you. The raven circled twice, settling in a branch. I watched her beak open and her body strain as she clicked some more, then circled again.
Was she making a mandala as I stood in that mandala of redwood survivors? Carl Jung said mandalas appear when psychic equilibrium is disturbed. “The goal of contemplating the processes depicted in the mandala is that the yogi shall become inwardly aware of the deity. Through contemplation, he recognizes himself as God again, and thus returns from the illusion of individual existence into the universal totality of the divine state (9i:633).”
Perhaps the hope of the lesson of contemplating the destruction of our watersheds through our ignorance is this realization of our responsibility in being good citizens of Earth.
Redwood circle from Mother Tree’s perspective.
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September 16, 2016
How an Oak Helped Me into the World
When I was six, I met my first oak. I was a shy child, having grown up on a small farm in central Illinois. When I entered first grade, I had little experience being away from my mother, grandmothers, and little sister Judy. I was not used to the social rigors of being with a group of kids my own age. Our socialization to that point consisted mainly of playing tag with several boys in the cemetary after Sunday School.
My grandfather died within days of my first day of school, and my mother and grandmother became mysteriously withdrawn. One day early on Mrs. Waddell, my teacher, told me my mother left a message that she could not pick me up as planned and to ride the bus. I felt like the floor had dropped out from under me, and I cried and cried. When kids asked me what was wrong, I told them that my uncle had died. I was embarrassed to say how much I had counted on my mother getting me.
There were other challenges as well. Kids were punished with spankings. I feared doing anything that would get me disciplined. Once my friend Penny broke a light in the basement by jumping rope with a string of beads that she and I had just strung. When Mrs. Waddell spanked Penny, I cried in guilt and terror. Mrs. Waddell stood by, bewildered.
Some of my classmates were cousins and rode the bus home together. Others knew each other before. I didn’t know how to break into these groups. So when I found the young oak just outside the south bank of windows of our first grade room, I delighted in collecting acorns.
Our own yard at home had an ash and a box elder, a birch and a cottonwood, but we did not have an oak. I spent recesses that fall under the tree picking up the night’s droppings. Steve from our church, who was much older, teased me as I took off their little hats and then replaced them. Otherwise I remember being alone with the slender young tree.
Although it seems I spent the year in this activity, it couldn’t have been that long. Oaks drop acorns for only a few weeks, just before their leaves turn brilliant crimson. At most, it must have been six weeks. Before long I was playing soft ball or on the merry-go-round with others.
This August, 62 year later, I returned for my 50th high school reunion to discover the one-room school house was gone, but the tree remained. Of course, it is larger, but surprisingly, not that much. Oaks grow slowly.
But it is still the first oak I have known. There have been many others since which have been important to me.Today I support efforts to re-oak Napa Valley by collecting acorns and as well as legislation to protect the lovely oak savannas that are still here. Perhaps I am returning the favor to these majestic trees, and to that one in particular, who so many years ago helped me make a difficult transition into the world.
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September 8, 2016
Lessons from Serpents and Goats
Life’s stories, heeded, have their lessons. Writing this next manuscript educates me about my own stories, yet another zen whack!
Most accounts of the Garden of Eden creation story leave out the details of the Serpent.
The Old Testament tells how the Serpent tempted Eve to eat the fruit from the one tree from which God forbade them to eat, The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. You know the story. The Serpent appears and tells Eve it is okay, she’ll become wiser, as goddess? Eve succumbs and then feeds the fruit, which some translations say is a pomegranate, to Adam. God finds out and throws them both out of paradise, cursing them all in various ways. Many medieval paintings depict the Serpent with a woman’s head.
What isn’t told is the story from The Zohar, a 13th century Cabalistic amplification of the Old Testament. In this version, the tempting Serpent is Lilith, Adam’s first wife. Adam co-habitated with her until he was given a soul, that in-between of spirit and matter that we incarnate to develop. At that point, Lilith flies off. In this story, she is always out there, ready to cause trouble with her anger and her sexuality.
But Lilith is also described as the undifferentiated “soul of all the beasts of the field and every living creature that creepth”. As such she can talk with plants and animals. As the instinctual level of our being, she refuses to be suppressed. When we ignore this level, we pay a high price in the health of our bodies and of our planet.
I learn a great deal about Lilith from my goats. In the last years we have Swiss alpine goats with their long, crescent horns. Each day they walk with me, as many as nine of them, a few as four, and they teach me the ways of the land. They are a little dangerous. To walk with them, you need to develop mindfulness, a present-in-the-moment quality, paying attention to where you are, where they are, what else might be present. Twice I have been flattened by a 130 pound goat joyfully gambling down a narrow trail— because I was lost in thought. It is like a zen master’s whack.
No, to walk with goats, you need to develop awareness of who is where and what they are up to. The herd has needs, and it is up to you to be sensitive to those needs: the need to stay together, to be protected from predators, to find food, and last, but certainly not least, to have fun. If you try to subordinate a goat, like if you try to subordinate Lilith, you are in trouble. They will fight you and figure out how to win. It is where they get their bad name — like Lilith! She who refuses to be subordinated! I think of the Earth today— and climate change. We will not subordinate Nature. If we continue try, she will win.
On the other hand, when you befriend a goat, and are a good goat citizen, they readily accept you into the herd.
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September 2, 2016
How Napa County Mirrors World Concerns:United Nations Dialogue
Our land use issues in Napa County are those addressed in the 2016 United Nations Harmony with Nature virtual dialogue.
The purpose of the dialogue was “to inspire citizens and societies to reconsider how they interact with the natural world in order to implement the Sustainable Development Goals in harmony with nature.” 120 experts from 33 countries represented eight disciplines. I was honored to participate in the philosophy and ethics section. Other disciplines included holistic science; Earth-centered law; ecological economics; education; the humanities; the arts, media, design and architecture; and theology and spirituality.
The recommendations made can be viewed fully at www.harmonywithnatureun.org/wordpress/2016-dialogue. They mirror the concerns of Napa Vision 2050, the Water, Forest, and Oak Woodland Protection Initiative, and various other citizen groups. There is an urgent world wide call to recognize “the need for a holistic worldview rooted in respect for Nature.”
We Napa County citizens are working to establish protections for our watersheds, forests, and oak woodlands, and to protect the lives of citizens who live here. Tourism and powerful outside economic interests impact our quality of life. Many of our children can no longer afford to live here. Traffic is burdensome. Our governing officials too often bend to special interest groups.
The experts in the UN dialogues stressed that globally, economic growth for a few has been achieved at the expense of the natural world and of many human populations. They emphasized the need to foster an “ecocentric democracy”. In such a democracy, the intrinsic value of non-human Nature is recognized as equal to that of humans. The recommendations are very much in concert with the principles of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si. “Broad-scale adoption of an Earth-centered worldview, the only way in which the impending species extinction crisis can be averted, advances the concept of humankind and of our activities as integrated with all life on the planet.”
Attorneys in the group say the first step is to include the rights of Nature in our governing systems. Nature is not a resource to be exploited but has “the fundamental legal rights of ecosystems and species to exist, thrive, and regenerate”. I think of our oak woodlands and forests in Napa which have only voluntary protections against the ambitions of corporations and wealthy individuals—to grow a “great cab” and farm tourists in the process!
Expert theologians underscored the necessity of moving from an attitude of “dominion over” or “stewardship” to one of being citizens of the planet, “earthlings”. They also discussed the importance of the spiritual growth in the paradigm shift to an Earth-centric perspective.
Scientists lamented that present regulation is “how much destruction can occur”. This new model asks, “What would a healthy system look like?” Many of the experts talked about the need to return to traditional ecological indigenous knowledge. About one eighth of the world’s forests are held by indigenous and forest people who protect 80% of its biodiversity. This knowledge is critically important in re-learning how to live in local ecosystems. Education develops knowledge of the interconnectedness of our ecosystems, which can lead to the protection of them through legal standing.
I am struck with how we are dealing locally with the same issues that these 33 countries are also addressing, and that how our solutions may well come from our joint endeavors. We really are one when it comes to our planet.
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August 25, 2016
Finding Conscious Activism
I go back and forth about the working title for my current manuscript. At first I called it Fire and the New Consciousness: Finding a Path to a Conscious Activism. It morphed into The Uninvited Guest: Finding a Path to a Conscious Activism. The first had an introverted tone to it; the second was more outgoing, like an intruder in a dream who announces something new. But now in this lineup is Eden and the Serpent: Finding a Path to a Conscious Activism. The subtitle remains steady, but the title itself shifts.
I contemplate what this means. The foundation of the book is the needed shift in consciousness if we are to survive on our planet. My personal struggle to “shift” in the face of outer events is the centerpiece. The intrusion of a new neighbor, an “uninvited guest”, precipitates this story, like the serpent in the story of Eden. I search for a path of activism.
But the serpent is a bigger force than an intruder breaking some old stasis. The serpent necessitates a suffering of the opposites, like the creation of the world from the former heaven of Taoism.
The new consciousness is like the new heaven of Taoism, that which is beyond duality. The former heaven is more like Eden. Then there is the in-between: in this case, my book.
I was once criticized in a public presentation in which I discussed Eden and Lilith, the name given the serpent. The confronter, a fellow presenter, felt this myth of Eden ignored the evolved consciousness of First People’s of the North American continent.
Was he correct? But then myth is like the concept of “model” in scientific thought: it only illustrates a pattern of truth. It is not the truth. For these last years, Eden follows me around like utopia tasted, lost, and searched for once again.
The book is a caldron for me, a place my own motives and actions cook back into me. It returns me to myself, a soul retrieval. There is so much soul loss in our current situation with Earth and her changes, both individually and collectively. Choose your own mythic way of understanding it, but life will never be the same again. We have been kicked out of paradise and confronted with the facts of the situation, the knowledge of good and evil within and without in our actions toward each other and Earth. Now, we have to go forward.
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June 20, 2016
Peter Pan, Pirates, Neverland—and Grandsons
One of the pleasures of grandsons living on the property is getting to witness magical moments like this: Wesley and Sabien’s preparation to attend the Pirate Festival in Vallejo.
We have been having a lot of pirate activity here since five year old Wesley discovered Peter Pan. It started with the Lost Boy song. Wesley watched a You Tube video version of the song by Ruth B. over and over, memorizing the words. (Since then, to his grief, the video version, which went viral, has been blocked.) Soon three year old Sabien was also captivated. My son Casey, their dad, made them wooden swords, swords being a passion of his own since he was younger than they are now. The three of them sword fight most of an hour every day. This sword fighting became banned in the house after one of my orchids was shredded by the action.
My mother had a Peter Pan book as a child, published when she was about Wesley’s age. The front cover shows an elfin figure tiptoeing into Wendy’s nursery, a finger to his lips to quiet the fairy Tinker Bell. He is looking for his shadow which was cut off by a rapidly slammed-shut window. I pulled this fragile book off the shelf and Wesley, Sabien, and I read it over and over. The pictures are emblazoned in my memory as my mother read it to me when I was about Wesley and Sabien’s ages. Wesley loves the pirate fighting; Sabien is frightened by the rather violent action at the end and usually takes a break at that time. Captain Hook is a particular favorite of them both, however, as is the tick-tock of the clock in the crocodile. They also both love the Lost Boys when they pretend to be pirates.
Sabien and Wesley with swords.
Yesterday Wesley, Sabien, and Casey got their swords and their pirate hats, and loaded up to go to the Pirate Festival. The Peter Pan in my son prevailed for a few hours as they flew off to Neverland.
In Neverland, the imagination rules. Boys fight mythic fights and the good always wins. It is a kingdom we all know, or remember, and grandchildren remind us that it is always there, somewhere. It’s not all so simple, I know; the good and the bad: it’s all in us. When we grow up, we struggle with that. But maybe it is only in play that we resolve it. Grandsons teach us this too.
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June 1, 2016
Fire and the Danger of What We Exclude
Fire and the Danger of What We Exclude
In writing The Uninvited Guest: Finding a Path to a Conscious Activism, I have to work in fits and starts. Is it always that way when you are riding the edge? I am working something through. This morning I realized there is an underlying myth that’s been tailing me for ages, like a recurring dream. More on that later. This is an excerpt from a story living me with mystery of an unknown ending.
I have a litany of visitors who have arrived uninvited, all of them changing my life in some way.
In the spring of 2009 Donald and I were sipping martinis in North Carolina when I again saw the flashing red message light on my cell phone. Donald’s brother Richard was turning 80 and we were toasting him before joining friends at a restaurant. I remember Richard standing by the fireplace, tall, tanned, and smiling, when I noticed the message light. Faintly disturbed, as in those days almost no one had my cellphone number except those who might need us, I quickly slipped away and punched in my code, having no idea of what I was about to hear.
There was not one message, but several. They were the phone calls you never want to receive, and especially when you are 3000 miles away from home. First the panicked voice of Ramon, our vineyard manager at that time who lived on our Napa Valley ranch and was managing everything in our absence.“There is a fire!” he exclaimed and hung up. Then there was a second call, and a third, each more panicked and beseeching us to please answer. By the time I got to the message from our son Jesse, I too was in a panic. Jesse was evidently just walking up the path to the yurt site as he left his message: “Mom, there has been a fire… it burned the yurt…Oh no, it’s burned all the way to the house!” and hung up. He too was obviously in shock.
I quickly returned to the festive gathering and blurted out,“There was a fire, and it has burned all the way to the house.”
Suddenly the room was silent. “Call Jesse.” Donald had assumed his take-charge mode. I quickly dialed Jesse’s cell number. I was relieved when Jesse answered. The fire was out, he said, and not much had been damaged, although it looked bad. There was blackened grass and trees everywhere, and the fire consumed the piles of brush we cleared for the 100 foot defensible space around our home.
But it demolished the yurt—the yurt that Jesse and his wife Lisa were living in while they were considering whether or not to take over managing the ranch. Jesse was refinishing the wooden deck outside the entrance to the yurt, leaving an oily rag on the deck while he took a lunch break in town. Evidently the rag spontaneously combusted. When he returned to apply the second coat, he discovered firetrucks choking the driveway and men rolling up hoses. Two helicopters had delivered 30 firefighters into the meadow who hurriedly dug a firebreak surrounding the quickly spreading grassfire. Part of the garden fence was melted, some of the lavender had burned, but the house, the goat barn, and the goats were okay, largely due to Ramon’s quick action to water down the ground.
Sometimes I use pictures of the fire blackened grass and trees when I talk about the importance if this uninvited guest, Fire. Actually, Fire is an important resident in California. Truth be known, excluding Fire has created a very dangerous situation. Not only has the underbrush built up when smaller fires have not been able to burn, but diseased debris, including, in the oak woodlands, acorns, have accumulated. As a result, many of our trees are infected with oak bore and now sudden oak death fungal infections. After this four year drought in California, we are losing way too many drought-weakened oaks.
I once heard Greg Sarris, the chief of the Graton Pueblo, say that “wild” is what happened when white man arrived. Towa Charlie Toledo called Napa County “a cultivated paradise,” so unique from what white man was used to that we didn’t even recognize what we are seeing. Fire was an important element in this cultivated paradise. First Peoples understood the need for pyrodiversity: diversity in the frequency and intensity of fire. When we try to exclude Fire, like the “uninvited guest” in the fairytale, Fire doesn’t disappear, but becomes more dangerous.
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