Fire’s impact points North Coast toward longer view

Here on San Luis Obispo’s North Coast, we’re calling it “the summer of smoke.” First, a huge monster dubbed the Soberanes Fire swallowed acres by the thousands down the backbone of the Big Sur/Ventana Wilderness. It began mid-July and it’s still active at the end of September, turning North County skies a muddy blue-gray. At 70 days, it’s the longest-burning blaze Los Padres National Forest history, blackening more than 126,000 acres. Heroic work by firefighting personnel and local residents has finally wrestled it to 76 percent containment.

Next, residents of the Cambria-San Simeon area were shaken in August by the rapid growth and spread of the Chimney Fire, which started near Lake Nacimiento. The blaze spread north and west across the Santa Lucias, coming within two miles of Hearst Castle and just above upper San Simeon Creek Road. It burned a 47,000-acre swath through our backcountry, destroying 49 homes.

The Soberanes Fire started from an illegal campfire on a forest service road. The Chimney Fire began on a clear dry day, more than likely caused by intentional or accidental human action. The consequences of each are incalculable, including the loss of more than 100 homes, the death of a bulldozer driver and injuries to firefighting personnel. And, of course, the death and displacement of countless native animals. A butterfly subspecies, the unsilvered fritillary, may have been lost forever, according to one specialist.

Fires alter human lives, ecosystems and landscapes. Those who remember the huge blaze that burned through Yellowstone National Park in the 1980s may recall the post-conflagration vistas — the dense forests turned to patchy grassland, blistered with burned-out logs. It looked like the park, especially the west side, would never again be home to unbroken forest views rising above mineral pools and geysers, or to bears, elk and bison.

Given the extent and the loss associated with our recent local fires, I wanted to go back and see what happened in Yellowstone over the thirty years that followed those blazes. Maybe just to create a little hope in my heart that the Santa Lucias will not remain a moonscape for generations.

What I found is both heartening and cautionary. Satellite images show a devastated brown landscape one year after the fire. But as the years passed, the colors altered, with pale green covering more of the park, indicating a spread of grassland, then darker green chaparral and stands of small pine and fir seedlings. (See the video of year-to-year changes at http:// go.nasa.gov/2dlCZY8.)

By 2011, the study’s final year, new stands of trees were visible in some of the burned areas. The overall image was much greener, though not the deep rich green of pre-fire Yellowstone. The long-term drought in the western United States has slowed recovery. At least for our lifetimes, Yellowstone is a different place than it was before fire raked through.

And that will be true for the Ventana and Big Sur wilderness, for the eastern slope of the Santa Lucias above Lake Nacimiento, for Rocky Butte and Hesperia. Fire changes our world, just as the ongoing drought is changing it.

In this place, at this time, we can’t ignore the natural world. Given that it is telling us urgent stories, perhaps we should listen to this place where we live, side by side with wildlands, creeks, forest and sea. How shall we respond to their stories?

Our community reaction to the Chimney Fire may hold a clue. The focus during those weeks of shifting winds and constantly changing fire threat was on gathering and sharing information, hour-by-hour, through Facebook, the NIXLE system, phone calls, or talking with firefighters. I found it fascinating to hear from ranchers and multi-generational residents of areas directly threatened by the fire. Their calm observations, based on deep experience with the land and the weather, provided a settling influence across the community.

These conversations drove home again to me how important it is to become intimately knowledgeable about the places where we live. It’s crucial that we see our task as learning to live with what is, instead of forcing nature to conform to what we want. This second attitude leads to perceiving the forest as imminent threat, to wanting all dead or dying trees cut down and hauled away, all understory cleared out, any possible threat removed. The first seeks instead to protect the forest, to manage it for its own health and longevity, as well as for our enjoyment and safety.

We can impose our will on our community to a certain point. We can demand total safety, an endless water supply, perfect ocean views, expansion and all the conveniences of larger towns, the development of Cambria as a major “destination” venue. But there’s a cost for these demands — the place we love will lose the very qualities we cherish.

Or we can let this place shape us. We can choose lifestyles that respect the capacity of our watersheds. We can implement a forest care plan that accommodates the claims of the ecosystem along with human needs. We can forgo huge houses and chain stores in order to retain the unique historical character of our community. We can welcome visitors, yet call for prudence when it comes to relying overly much on tourism as the base for our local economy.

As Wendell Berry notes in “The Unsettling of America,” “All who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another … our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other.”

Where do these different visions of our North Coast lead us? What are the consequences of our personal and policy choices? The long-term impacts of a major fire can teach us to think beyond our own few decades, to recognize that our decisions and actions lead to outcomes that influence places and change prospects for those who come after us, for many generations.

This story was originally published September 28, 2016 at 8:56 AM with the headline "Fire’s impact points North Coast toward longer view."