By Frank Landis, Conservation Committee Chair & Rare Plants Co-chair
This month’s column is a mix of issues big and small.
First, a note to myself as much as to everyone else living in a high or very high fire hazard zone: Haul out your evacuation plan. Check it, update it as necessary, and test it out. Tis the season. Mine lives as a checklist on a clipboard on a nail in my bedroom. If you’re in fire country and don’t have one of these, make one. You can find advice from San Diego County or CalFire easily online.
Second, a small correction from my August 2021 article. I wrote “There may even be talk of reintroducing beavers to San Diego, where they used to live 150 years ago. They would really rewild the creeks.” I got that off a 2013 paper that claimed there was evidence of beavers in coastal southern California all the way to the Tijuana River, and the Kumeyaay had a word for beaver. A couple of weeks later I was contacted by a really nice beaver researcher who had read my article. He’d read the same paper, decided to check the evidence, and now has a paper in the publication pipeline claiming there actually is no evidence for beaver in cismontane southern California, even 150 years ago. Science marches on! Incidentally, there were very definitely beaver in the Colorado River all the way down, and we know the Kumeyaay made it out to the Colorado River occasionally. That’s probably where they saw them.
A third item, not precisely native plant related, is a hot air balloon company seems to be in the business of landing on public open space and driving their big pickups out onto the space to retrieve their balloons. This problem goes back decades. If you know the CDFW area on Del Mar Mesa, with its fences and K-rails, my understanding is that these were installed to prevent balloon retrievals from the biggest vernal pools out there. You can still find heaps of old gravel, presumably discarded balloon ballast, on the biggest pools, and these little hummocks are weed islands in a sea of endangered plants.
Anyway, the balloons still land in open spaces on occasion, even though they’ve been ordered not to. As we get into high fire season (formerly called fall) this is getting a bit dangerous, with everything tinder-dry, the balloons using propane burners, and the trucks occasionally driving cross country through dry grass. If you see such a landing, take pictures and contact the open space ranger (if you know them), your local park department, and/or your city councilmember. To be fair, no balloon landing has caused a fire to my knowledge, but we don’t need that streak broken. And we definitely do not need more vernal pools illegally driven over, for that matter. Del Mar Mesa may be protected, but other pools are not.
A fourth item: the recall election on 9/14. CNPS does not endorse candidates as we do issues, so I will not tell you how to vote. Instead, I will talk about my summer reading, which was about the post-Civil War Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement. One historian noted that while the Black community has always advocated for equal treatment, whether they got anywhere depended on whether the people in power, in state and especially federal government, were on their side. From my experience, this is also true on environmental issues.
Environmental advocates have been speaking out on climate change for many decades. Right now, we’re in a situation where the President, the Congress, our Governor, the State Legislature, the County Supervisors, most San Diego Mayors, and the San Diego City Council all want to act on climate change. Given the urgency of the situation, we need to keep all these bodies working hard on climate change for at least another decade, whether we think the candidates have perfect records or not. That’s my advice for the recall election.
Now, about that IPCC 6 report. That’s the Sixth Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who are so mainstream that 19 countries signed off on releasing the latest report. The report of Working Group 1 came out on August 9th, with the other two working groups publishing soon. You undoubtedly saw it in the news three weeks ago, and likely you’ve forgotten it by now, in the rush of whatever news came after.
Long story short, if we want to hit the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of GHG levels peaking around 1.5% of baseline, we have to make transformational changes in how we do this civilization thing by 2030, perhaps 2035 at the latest. In a total non-coincidence, this is why San Diego County and the State are pushing for rapid decarbonization.
To put this in context, we’re in the neighborhood of a 1.5oC increase now, and climate change definitely is playing a part in the massive droughts and huge fires we’re seeing now. We can also expect more frequent, and bigger, atmospheric river storms, with up to a meter of rain in a month here (google ArkStorm). We get a century of this if we meet the Paris goals, but we avoid climate change causing a mass extinction and wiping out the possibility for human civilization for the next 10,000-50,000 years (read my book Hot Earth Dreams if you want more. The basic scenario has held up surprisingly well, mostly because I based it on the work of a really good climatologist).
The key thing to realize is that the problem gets progressively worse the more we dawdle. To quote the report now out: “With every additional increment of global warming, changes in extremes continue to become larger.” Or as Dr. John Holdren, who taught me the rudiments about global warming back in the 1980s (!) put it back then: “the problem with global warming is not that the average temperature rises, it’s that the extremes become more extreme.” He went on to work in the Obama White House.
I’m not going to nag, because if that worked, we would have listened to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon when they both spoke about how climate change was a serious threat to civilization, one that we needed to take seriously. We’ve used up our procrastination time, and now we’re down to the wire.
If you want a positive view, that’s what my August column was about, all the things we can do to actually make a change through a lot of hard work. Beavers aside, it is basically what I and a number of others are trying to get San Diego County to buy into, so that’s more of a work plan than hopes and dreams.
This brings me to a more plant-related point: if we don’t deal with our emissions now, we lose control of our ability to do much about the climate. This takes two forms. The big, scary one is permafrost melt and the release of greenhouse gases from there. That has already started, but if the process truly takes off in a positive feedback loop, we won’t be able to control or stop it. Similarly, we could plant huge forests in, say Northern California. A few years ago, that was my favored solution to climate change. Now, as I watch Portland, Oregon, go over 100o F again and fires rage through Northern California, it’s become obvious that planting trees alone will not work. They’re too likely to die from droughts, storms, or fire. If we don’t get our emissions down, we’ll lose our current ability to get carbon out of the air by planting long-lived trees and shrubs, and counting on them to grow for decades or centuries. If we continue with business as usual, in about 20 years we’ll be out of control and not just along for the ride, but trying to survive it for the next 100,000 years.
We can do a lot now, but our ability to do anything meaningful is slipping away. So cut your emissions already!
Dare to dream, dare to decarbonize, dare to garden for a changing climate, and dare to plant trees. This is the time to plant oaks, even though they might well burn, or get killed by shothole borers, or die of drought.
But unless it’s planted, an acorn, any seed, will die anyway. So, what better thing to do than to dare to plant a native tree in the face of climate change, and then to change your life, too, so that you and that seedling grow old together?