"Save the shrubs" doesn't resonate with people the way "save the redwoods" does. Yet chaparral and coastal sage scrublands are as defining a feature of California's landscape as the ancient giants of the North Coast forests.

Like many Californians, I grew up ignorant of my natural surroundings. I took for granted the woolly evergreen shrubs blanketing coastal hillsides near my high school in Pacific Palisades, so it was something of a shock to learn last year that chaparral and coastal sage scrub are disappearing from southern California. Foothills that used to be carpeted with ceanothus and other flowering shrubs are now dirt mounds with rashes of poverty grass and tarweed. The major agent of destruction has been wildfire caused by human actions.

Large, high-intensity wildfires are a natural feature of the region and in fact are essential to the propagation of some shrubs. Now, however, they occur too often for the brush to recover.

On January 8, 2008, biologists Richard Halsey and Bill Howell took me along on tours of fire scars in San Diego County, where 40 percent of the chaparral and coastal sage scrub had burned at least once in the previous four years. Two months earlier, wildfires had scorched more than half a million acres, and 97 percent of that terrain was scrublands. The fire perimeter spanned seven counties and four national forests, stretching as far north as Malibu and as far south as Tecate, Mexico, and as far east as San Bernardino and Agua Dulce near Santa Clarita.

Hellhole Canyon Burns Again
We set out from Halsey's house in Escondido as the sun was beginning to dissipate the morning mist. It had rained for three days, the first heavy rainfall since the latest wildfires, and the two biologists were eager to see how the chaparral was faring. Halsey is the founder of the California Chaparral Institute, a nonprofit association of scientists, wildland firefighters, and educators that promotes understanding and respect for this ecosystem. Howell, his friend and colleague, taught biology for 30 years in the San Diego County School District and for the past 15 years has taught outdoor education programs for local trail guides. He wrote a chapter of Halsey's book Fire, Chaparral, and Survival in Southern California.

Our first destination was Hellhole Canyon Open Space Preserve, a 1,700-acre wildland hemmed in by suburbs northeast of the town of Valley Center. Almost the entire preserve (95 percent) had burned in October 2003, and parts of it had burned again four years later.

Parking in a dirt lot peppered with ash and a blackened telephone pole, Halsey was relieved to see patches of chaparral that had survived both fires. Much of the brush was charred, but the worst fire damage we saw was across the canyon on 3,881-foot Rodriguez Mountain, which looked denuded. It was eerily quiet; there were no leaves to rustle and no creatures to rustle them.

Halsey walked down a sandy slope, through dry brush and scorched spots, his forest green chinos and blue T-shirt a patch of color against the bleak landscape. Flames had stripped the shrubs, leaving only charred branches, spiked like pitchforks. Wisps of ash on the black soil hinted of animals killed by the fire.