This Is It

A smoke-filled view of the CZU fire bearing down on the Monterey Pine Forest at Waddell Creek, Big Basin State Park. 19 August 2020

The last month has been a wrenching experience for people throughout the Pacific states. Lives have been lost, tens of thousands of people displaced, and a pall of smoke has cloaked a huge swath of the western skies. Wildfires of exceptional scale and intensity have now burned more than 3 million acres in California alone. The August Complex Fire burned 832,000 acres by itself, making it far and away the largest fire in state history.

One of the first incidents of this fire season started in the predawn hours on August 16th when a lightning storm ignited forests across the southern Santa Cruz Mountains. Despite being one of the smaller fires currently burning in the state (at 'merely' 86,000 acres), as well one of the few fires nearing full containment, the CZU Lightning Complex has nevertheless devastated the local communities: A stunning 25% of the land area of Santa Cruz County has burned and nearly 1,000 homes were destroyed. A number of my friends are homeless at the moment – some can afford hotels, others are living in tents in neighbors' yards.

Satellite view of the aftermath of the CZU fire. Taken 16th September 2020. © CalFire.

Among wildlands, it was Big Basin State Park that bore the brunt of the fire. Virtually the entire park burned, from the upper elevations in old-growth redwood forest all the way to beach sands – blackening trees just a stone’s throw from the waves of the Pacific.

Big Basin was the finest remaining southern stronghold of truly large old-growth Redwoods, where the ages of some trees measured in millennia. This habitat was the peak of a rare ecological ferment: Dense, complex networks of relationships between trees, birds, invertebrates, and especially a diverse and precious soil microbiome.

A still-unidentified species of Mycena that was common at Big Basin, where it fruited from enormous trunks of fallen Douglas-fir. 31 January 2015.

Maybe you’ve seen early reports that the park's large trees survived, or optimistic articles about redwoods being fire-adapted, or even that redwoods "need fire to germinate". While it is true that many of the park's redwoods survived the fire (including some of the largest trees), and that there will be extensive regeneration in the coming years, it’s not true that fire is beneficial for redwood germination, nor is it the case that redwoods can easily withstand hot crown fires – which is exactly what happened throughout much of the park. And beyond these inaccuracies, celebration of mere survival misses the larger context – the future of this forest was already in jeopardy before the fire. 

There may be plenty of big trees left – at least enough to impress the tourists. But the indescribable ecological depth of this relict forest almost certainly will not return. Many of the fungi that lived in Big Basin represented the southernmost populations of their species – if they don’t return we have witnessed a major community-level extirpation event. Hopes for a full recovery are predicated on assumptions that no longer hold. Winter rainfall and summer fog patterns are becoming more volatile and declining overall. There’s no reason to think we'll see the cool, wet climate of the last centuries again in our time. On the contrary, California is warming and drying.

I hope that my intuitions are somehow wrong; that I’ll be surprised by resiliency I hadn’t guessed at. There are some reasons to be hopeful: The Monterey Pine forests that burned are adapted to germinate in their own footprints after a stand-replacing fire thanks to their ‘serotinous’ cones (needing heat to release their seeds). And there are plenty of fire-following plants that we can hope will put on dazzling displays of color and abundance on the newly-fertile and sunlit hills.

Santa Cruz Mountains Beardtongue (Penstemon rattanii var. kleei) – 4 June 2018. This rare fire-following plant has become very scarce in the county, and may benefit greatly from CZU Fire.

But these are the near-term patterns. Prospects for recovery of the deep, slow, old components of the Big Basin ecology are much more tenuous. At the moment my emotions are more of disbelief than grief: I haven’t yet been able to see for myself the reality on the ground, and I still don't really understand what’s happened.

But what has become clear to me is that this is it.

I don't mean to be grandiose, or that this fire represents some special climate inflection point. From a global perspective, Big Basin is just one loss among many. What I mean is that some of the worst fears I personally harbored have now happened. In my tiny universe of attachments and sensations, the climate crisis is no longer a distant, gradual process or abstract eventuality. It has arrived ahead of schedule and struck a heavy blow to the land that I loved best.

The experience of realizing that "this is it" is only going to become more common. Although these moments will take many forms, and arrive on an asymmetric schedule around the globe, they will share a timbre: The vague climate crisis snaps to acute proximity; nostalgia is tortured, expectations for a predictable future evaporate abruptly. I imagine that this feeling arrived for many Australians in 2019 when bushfires devoured 46 million acres across that continent. People who are more attuned to the ocean face perhaps a worse picture – I know of at least one marine ecologist who left his field because the feeling was overwhelming. Looking at projections for coral reefs, I can’t blame him.

But it's important to understand that whole cultures have already experienced this. For indigenous people across the continent, the apocalypse has long since come to pass. European colonists destroyed entire lifeways, languages, and the ecosystems from which they arose. In that destruction, the seeds of the current crisis were sown. A sense of surprise about the trouble we suddenly seem to be in speaks more to our cultural myopia than anything. Americans have done an especially thorough job of keeping the blinders on.

Where are we left when the moment arrives and our illusions are stripped away? I’ve been surprised to feel a mild sense of freedom. It's not a comforting feeling, but rather a kind of undeclinable invitation to learn to accept change – in its most expansive sense. I remind myself that this is deep ecology: The unsentimental flux, the rolling tangle of actions and consequences from which humans were never exempt.

I'm striving now (straining, really) to feel a kind of excitement in this uncertainty; to embrace a responsibility to bear witness – to stay with the trouble as Donna Haraway put it. When I find myself wishing it wasn’t so – that Big Basin hadn’t burned so harshly and so soon, I remind myself of the words of a certain wizard:

“… so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

With that in my heart, I'll keep visiting these forests to watch their futures unfold; to cheer progress and mourn the losses, and to tell about it.

Yellow Ceratiomyxa fruiting on a decaying oak among old-growth redwood forest at Big Basin. 19 December 2018.