Whose Habitat Is it? Musings Upon Seeing the Effects of Wildfire Mitigation in a High-Risk Area

WHOSE HABITAT IS IT?

Musings Upon Seeing the Effects of Wildfire Mitigation in a High-Risk Area

Linda Hawes Clever, MD

The context:

We face many difficult choices these days. Consider COVID, for example. Do we shut down or open up? When and how much? Who knows the best and whose interest is being served? Whom do we trust (if anyone)? Who is affected the most; who is most vulnerable? Health care workers? Elders? Minorities? How do we assure vaccine and health care equity? Similar tough decisions arise when questions, policies and practices arise about protecting neighborhoods, towns and cities from wildfires. Just like pandemics, wildfires will return, ferocious.

As millions more acres burn every year, more trees, animals, people and towns disappear. The skies turn orange at noon, and local AQI (Air Quality Index) and wind condition reports, never mind the temperature, are major topics of conversation. We wear masks, regardless of COVID. Work assignments and exercise locations shift; fear, anger, and sadness rise. Eyes, sinuses, and lungs suffer. Lives change forever. So we develop and undertake safeguards against these menacing infernos. Like COVID, however, it is not easy. Good wildfire mitigation requires knowledge, experience, money, planning, permits, public education and (preferably) endorsement, care and caring, an eye to beauty and the sanctity of all life, selective clearing, thorough cleanup and even rehabilitation of our precious lands.

Not everyone has taken a walk in the woods lately, nor visited a meadow, a glen, a little lake brimming with frogs and birds and secret underwater dwellers. This bounty may be lost to well-meant, if over-bold, clearance measures, far ahead of fire. Walks in “mitigated”, perhaps under-appreciated, areas led to these musings.

The musings:

The buckeye and the big-leafed maple were not majestic. The buckeye’s gifts—shiny, smooth, blonde-to-mahogany nuts— filled the palm of a delighted scavenger and folded with time into irregular, elegant sculptures. The big leaf maple graced the trail each autumn with, no surprise, REALLY BIG warm-brown leaves that were the size of your turkey platter.

Talking about turkeys…One could rave on about our dear departeds, so conversational among themselves and with us as they enforced their pecking order and displayed spectacular tails. Their rare flights featured awkward take-offs and gliding crash landings.

Talking about birds…the bright bluebirds’ swoops won’t vie with the sky for beauty, now that their sheltering tree is gone. The quail might make it. They murmur over in the meadow across from the old corral with its loading chute—now collapsed, its sturdy posts painfully askew—that once entered onto the broad trail.

The bobcat probably didn’t bother with the turkeys and other birds and vice versa. No, bobcats prefer bunnies. The bunnies know that. They know when sitting very still won’t work and that they may escape in headlong hops. The bunnies might find new homes in the open spaces where cats and coyotes roam.

The moms and fawns, too, will have to go elsewhere, along with their proudly-antlered mates and papas.

The miners and other critters aren’t around anymore to munch the miners lettuce. It may not regrow anyway, having to push up through the heavy sawdust.

The ground squirrels and whatever else engineers those underground passageways with yawning or modest holes--some with entry and exit porches—will wonder what happened to their world when they poke out and see it, shaved.

The rattlesnakes and fellow reptiles…bonne chance and good riddance. As for the humans, well, our brains understand fire danger and concur in our desire for safety. Our pocketbooks support the clearance. Our hearts and spirits break, you must know, at the effect our good intentions have on our wounded habitat.

Linda Hawes Clever, MD, Founder and President of RENEW, a not-for-profit aimed at helping devoted people maintain or regain effectiveness, enthusiasm and purpose so they can have a whole, healthy life, trained at Stanford and UCSF in Internal Medicine, Infectious Diseases, Community Medicine and Occupational Medicine. She lives in a lightly forested neighborhood that is a couple hundred steps from Open Space.