California Coast & Ocean

Unlike forests, scrublands burn to the ground in a fire. To survive, chaparral plants have evolved two regeneration strategies. Some, including ceanothus, are obligate seeders: they depend on the fire's intense heat or chemicals to break their seeds' dormancy and allow germination. Others, such as mountain mahogany, toyon, wild hyacinth, and most manzanita species, store energy in their roots and resprout from stumps. But now, all too often seedlings don't have time to mature and throw off seeds before they are incinerated again, and resprouting from stumps uses up so much of the stored energy that plants may not be able do it if they are burned more often than every 15 years, Halsey explained.

Howell spotted two bright green stalks with needle-like leaves at the base of a crown of roasted twigs. It was a chamise stump, sprouting. Chamise is among plants that use both strategies, obligate seeding and resprouting, "and maybe that has something to do with the fact that chamise is the most common chaparral shrub around," he said.

Nearby, Halsey was snapping photos of a short crown of charred branches. "This is a ceanothus, a four-year-old seedling, dead," he said. "So stuff was trying to come back and it got hammered again," Howell explained. "The seeds came up with the first fire and everything was fine, but before they could mature and give back to the seedbank, they got burned again."

"What starts happening now, you see, you eliminate the obligate seeding species, the ones that require fire cues, because that thing is never throwing off enough seeds," Halsey continued. "It's gone and there's no recovering from this." He worries that other obligate seeders, such as species of manzanita, could also die off here.

With shrubs gone, non-native grasses may well take over. All but five percent of California's perennial grasses have been replaced by shorter-lived and shallower-rooted European species which firefighters call "flash fuels." They ignite more easily than the native shrubs, many of which have waxy evergreen leaves that seal in moisture. Their roots don't hold soil as well as the shrubs' deep roots do, leaving burned areas susceptible to erosion, nor do they support the wealth of wildlife that thrives in shrubs. Unlike native grasses, they die in the spring, prolonging the fire season. And because they can survive an annual fire cycle, they can burn every year, carrying fire to scrublands and homes.

We gloomily considered the possibility that this hillside we were looking at could soon become as barren as Rodriguez Mountain.

Learning to See Differently
On March 28, 2008, I met with Richard Hawkins, then chief fire and aviation officer at Cleveland National Forest, for a tour of the San Pasqual Valley and San Dieguito River near Escondido, which burned in the October 2007 Witch and Guejito fires.

Hawkins was driving a white Ford Expedition, with green racing stripes and a green U.S. Forest Service shield on its sides, and his uniform matched the truck: green chinos and a khaki shirt with a Forest Service shield on the sleeve. With his close-cropped blond hair and wild bushy mustache, he fit my image of a forest ranger and firefighter.

During his 30-year career, Hawkins served in all five of California's national forests and on hundreds of fires, and now he was ready to retire. "I'm finding that it's becoming so stressful when the wind blows that I'm actually sick to my stomach with stress, and it's just gonna kill me," he told me. "I just can't do this anymore."