NEAR IS THE new far.” That’s the sly headline of an article in Outside magazine describing an alternative to long-distance, high-carbon ecotourism: getting to know your own neck of the woods. But here’s the thing about travel. It helps us see more clearly where we live.
On a trip to Costa Rica, Kathy and I were on a bus headed into the rain forest. We passed through rugged farmland, bordered by undulating “live fences”—wire strung not to wood or metal posts, but to evenly spaced trees. We had never seen such a fence. With a little help from nature, farmers have probably been planting and stringing live fences for centuries. In England, hedgerows have been used since Roman times as field borders, but here the farmer deliberately plants the trees to hold wire, or birds drop seeds while perching on the original wood posts, and trees grow and become new posts that are integrated into the existing fence. Research in Costa Rica, Peru, Cuba, Nigeria, and Cameroon reveals how ingenious this ancient form of biophilic design can be. Living fences made of dense, thorny, and sometimes poisonous bushes are used by farmers who cannot afford barbed wire. Living fences provide mulch, erosion control, land stabilization, fuel, and food; in Cameroon, fences produce guava, citrus, bush plum, and other fruits, and they’re a source of forage for cattle. They can also serve as seed banks.1
As the bus rose and fell along the dusty road, I was impressed by this ingenious partnership of life forms, human and plant. Like the stone fences of New England, and the windbreaks planted across the prairies of the United States, these fences seemed born to the earth.
That day, my wife and I were headed to a rain forest in a Costa Rican national park. In the country’s Pacific coastal area, the California-like desert and dry forest turns suddenly into rain forest that stretches from this part of Costa Rica into South America.
Our guide, Max Vindas, had been raised “in the jungle,” as he put it. He told us that a person cannot know the rain forest without meeting it personally. He found it humorous that North Americans so often consider the rain forest dangerous. It can be, of course, but Vindas had a different take. “When I visited California and went to the national parks, I learned that there were bears who would kill you, and that in Southern California, there were mountain lions that would attack you, but in this jungle we have sloths.”
Dusk came on quickly during our visit and the forest seemed to become one being with a thousand voices, screams, and whispers, chatters and long calls. We heard feet or hooves racing through leaves and branches, and wings rising, and cicadas (we were told) that sounded like no earthly cicadas I had ever heard. I was stunned by the rising music—concurrently discordant, in tune, percussive, and smooth.
One thinks of our own habitats, our one-note yards, our three-chord city parks, our flat and tuneless soccer fields. What if, in our human habitats, we strove for biodiversity, for living fences and natural music?
We headed back the way we had come, on the roads lined with living fences, and then home to another landscape that, until recently, I barely knew.
My wife, Kathy, was raised in San Diego. I moved here from Kansas in 1971, just out of college. She had spent little time exploring the natural habitats of this region, and I viewed it as a resort city, beautiful in its way, but I missed the green woods and plains of the Midwest. So when I looked for nature here, I saw less than met the eye. For years, we were restless. We bored our friends with all our talk of moving, of finding our one true place in, say, New Mexico, or maybe in New England. We even bored ourselves. One day Kathy said, “Our tombstones are going to say, ‘We’re moving.’ “I may never bond to this region as I did to the woods behind my boyhood home, and who knows, we may yet move.
On the other hand, we both seem to be undergoing a vision shift.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein conceived the notion of “aspect-blindness” and “aspect-seeing” in imagery or language. Think of those strange drawings that appear as completely different images, depending on how, and on where, our eyes focus. The same adjustment can happen with our perception of place, and the nature within it.
A decade ago, my ignorance about this bioregion—San Diego County and northern Baja—became clear 153 miles south of the border, under the tutelage of the late Andy Meling. Andy was one of the elders of the family that founded the famous Meling Ranch, which had been established in the late 1800 s by immigrants from Norway and Denmark. He looked a lot like the actor Robert Duvall in the Lonesome Dove TV series. I was there, with my oldest son, Jason, then a teenager, to research a chapter for a book. Andy had driven the two of us high into the Sierra San Pedro Mártir, one of the remnant sky islands of a strange archipelago called the Peninsular Range that extends from Southern California into Baja. We walked through tangled oaks in violet light and peered upward at the white granite of Picacho del Diablo, the highest peak in Baja California, which rises 10,157 feet through piñon pine and quaking aspen. I was stunned. I had had no idea that such a lush reality existed in Baja, which I had assumed was the shriveled lower limb of North America.
When I told Andy that, he pushed his cowboy hat back, squinted at me with a hint of disdain, and headed back to his cabin to make skillet stew over a wood fire.
Since then, I have learned a thing or two. I read in Fremontia, a journal of the California Native Plant Society, that this “true mountain island” is a lost world, a virtual relic of the Pleistocene epoch. Cut off by time and geography, life there is “ethereal … primeval,” the journal reported. I now know that the trout of the Rio Santo Domingo in Baja, along with a closely related species in the mountains just to the north, in San Diego County, are as close as we can find to the progenitor rainbows that spread between fifty thousand and sixty thousand years ago from what would become northern Baja California and the southernmost county of Alta California, across the Kamchatka Peninsula between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea, and then further dispersed—sometimes by the hands of trout worshipers—around the world. And I have learned that San Diego, though one of the most densely human-populated counties in the United States, contains more biodiversity than any other county in the country, with the exception of Riverside County just to the north.
Here, and south into Baja, is a land of sky islands, ring-tailed cats and mountain lions, whales, sea turtles, great white sharks, waterspouts and firestorms. In nearby Imperial and Riverside counties, there is a landlocked Salton Sea jammed with corvina. The Anza-Borrego Desert, a short drive east, holds badlands reminiscent of a small-scale Grand Canyon, and deep, palm-filled desert oases—mountain canyons so yawning that when camping in them in midsummer, one can awake in the morning shivering in frost. I had no clue how otherworldly my adopted corner of the world was, until, as a journalist, I made it my job to dig deeper into it. Until then, I had place blindness.
Perhaps I was afraid to attach to this area. In that, I was not alone. As a columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune in the 1990s, I posed this question to readers: What are you attached to here in Southern California, other than good friends, good work, and the weather? The majority of responses were from people who said they felt, at best, a fragile sense of attachment to the region. Some blamed the crowding, the freeway traffic, the politics of the region—but often, they wrote about the threat to nature. “The haunting notion that this is only temporary has followed me to this day,” wrote one reader. Another likened living here to standing on shifting sand: “One must constantly readjust one’s position to stand in place or become lost. One has the sense that nothing is sacred here and that any place you bond to is likely to be bulldozed. Therefore we develop the strategy, which in attachment theory is called avoidance—pretending that our ties with someone or someplace are not important because it is too painful to show our feelings and risk being abandoned.” I share that anxiety. But here’s the problem: We cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense.
Fortunately, groups that help people really see where they live, that foster a sense of place, are growing in size and number. One of them, Exploring a Sense of Place (ESP), follows the model developed in 2002 by Karen Harwell and Joanna Reynolds in the San Francisco Bay Area. In their book, Exploring a Sense of Place, Harwell and Reynolds write: “As humans, we identify ourselves primarily through relationship—relationship with family, religion, ethnicity, community, town, state, nation.”2 They argue that our loss of connection to natural history represents a lost relationship, and that this connection is among the most important and least recognized needs of the human soul: “While most of us recognize where we live by its cities, buildings, places of business, even sport teams, how many of us identify with and understand the beauty, wonder and actual functioning of the natural ecosystem which supports us, and of which we are a part?”
Exploring a Sense of Place has developed a guidebook, leadership training workshops, and local courses, and has established additional regional programs. Harwell reports that requests for the guidebook have been received from over one hundred locations in the United States and from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Germany, and France. In England, two pilot courses based on ESP are being established.
In 2009, an ESP-inspired San Diego group of twenty-five committed explorers spent one Saturday a month for seven months on day treks in my region. The explorers climbed to the top of Volcan Mountain near the headwaters of the San Dieguito River. At a Kumeyaay archeological site, they learned about the pre-European cultures of the river valley. They hiked a thousand feet up a winding trail through dense forest, which opened onto grasslands. Phil Pryde, professor emeritus, Department of Geography, San Diego State University, accompanied the hikers and described the bird life in the river valley. Two professional trackers taught the group to identify the footprints and scat of the wild animals. In the following months, as the group explored different geologies and microclimates of the region, the participants gained a deeper understanding of the whole territory.
On an overcast April day, my wife and I joined the group to learn about native wildflowers on the plateaus and valleys south of Lake Hodges, a few miles from where we live. One reason I went on this hike was to overcome my plant blindness. For most of my life, I have looked past the flora to find the fauna, which means I have missed out on at least half of what I might have experienced outdoors.
The term plant blindness was coined by James Wandersee, of Louisiana State University, and Elisabeth E. Schussler of Southeastern Natural Sciences Academy. In an article for Plant Science Bulletin (published quarterly by the Botanical Society of America), they define plant blindness forthrightly, as “the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment.”3 Based on their review of a wide range of research, the botanists explore some of the complex reasons for plant blindness, including our “misguided, anthropocentric ranking of plants as inferior to animals, leading to the erroneous conclusion that they are unworthy of human consideration.” One of the reasons may be the inherent constraints of our visual information processing systems. “It seems that visual consciousness is like a spotlight, not a floodlight,” they write. “And if that is not shocking enough, we do not see events in real time. The computation time involved in processing the visual data we receive has been shown by experiment to take approximately .5 second, making the present a self-delusion.” Plants simply live in a different dimension.
Whatever our limitations—cultural, physiological, or both—considering the acute plant sightedness of some cultures, and the neighbor with the green thumb, surely we can overcome some of our plant blindness. Schussler and Wandersee (the perfect name!) think so. They believe we’re missing out on, and can come to see, another world. As part of their campaign against plant blindness, they encourage plant lovers to become “plant mentors” to help the rest of us develop a “botanical sense of place.”
That morning, James Dillane, botanist and middle school teacher, was the leader of our group. Before we headed out on the trail, we gathered in a park building, where Dillane gave us a short course on the flora of this place—our place. He described our region’s extraordinary biodiversity, how it is, above all, a land of chaparral and coastal sage and fire. The Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillo, who sailed to the area in the sixteenth century, called San Diego the Bay of Fire; in the 1880s, fire raged from the Mexican border to Los Angeles and burned everything in its path; and recently, firestorms threatened to do the same. My family has been evacuated twice.
Dillane then showed us a time-lapse video of the backcountry as one of those fires swept over; look closely and you can see chemise chaparral, its waxy cover bursting into flame even before the fire reaches it. The pace of the time-lapse video picks up, moving now much faster than real time—as in the movie The Time Machine. Birds of the Pacific Flyway flash by. The fire marches across the land, followed by charring like the sweeping dark shadow of a storm; then countless new plants appear, like camp followers chasing after the flames. I once thought that plants lacked the species-on-species violence of animals—although, is this true? Speeded up in the video, the plants fight for space and water; the natives beat back invaders or are overcome by them.
Watching these videos, I saw for the first time what the botanist sees: a story, a narrative of great families living, burning; and their resurrection—civilizations parallel to our own, but invisible to most of us.
We headed out to the ridges above the lake, steeped in cool afternoon mist. Dillane warmed to the task at hand as he spoke. This land, seemingly mild, lacking in drama, is, in fact, dynamic. Except during fire season, it alters at a pace as slow as an opening flower; we do not see the landscape shift, unless we look closely and know what we are looking for.
“This year the fire poppies, which show up only after fires, are spectacular,” Dillane said. “A once in a lifetime event! Fire poppy seeds can sit for one hundred years waiting for another fire.” What wakens them? “No one thing. Heat, a chemical in the smoke, a charcoal-caused chemical reaction.” He pointed out desert broom, a chemise chaparral that the Spanish and Mexicans called yerba de pasmo, or herb of the spasm. They, like earlier residents, found it useful for convulsions, snakebites, lockjaw, syphilis, and inflammation. Sage and chaparral scrublands have ingenious survival techniques, he told us. Sage can produce different sizes of leaves depending on the amount of available water; and the leaves of one species of sage is covered with tiny hairs, “creating a kind of sunscreen.”
In his book Green Nature/Human Nature: The Meaning of Plants in Our Lives, Charles A. Lewis, of the University of Illinois, counsels us to look, to see plants not as objects, but as interconnected strands in a larger design, in which we, also, are threads.4 He writes that the two life forms, plants and humans, “are joined in ways that denote an even closer relationship than most people suspect.” Lewis makes the case, as does writer Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire, that we Homo sapiens should balance our sense of self-importance with the fact that we are a “plant-dependent species.” The chlorophyll molecules of green plants “bear an intriguing similarity to hemoglobin, the prime constituent of mammalian blood,” Lewis points out. Both consist of a single atom surrounded by a ring of carbon and nitrogen atoms. The difference is in the central atom: in chlorophyll, the atom is made of magnesium; in hemoglobin, it is made of iron. “The similarity of these two essential biological components suggests a common origin somewhere in the primordial soup where life began on earth,” writes Lewis. “Although vegetation’s role in sustaining physical mammalian life is fairly well understood, one aspect has remained unexplored. In what ways do plants in their myriad forms enter our mental and spiritual lives? What are the subtle meanings assigned to green nature by the human psyche?”5
Lewis is among those who propose that humans are participants in an environmental unconscious with evolutionary origins, that “we each harbor a hidden self that reacts without thinking to signals embedded within our bodies and in the outside world.” He adds, “Every subconscious response reveals threads that comprise the fabric of our lives, a protective cloak that has been woven about us for millennia to ensure our survival. Today, in a world largely shaped by intellect, those ancient intuitive threads are frequently pulled. We must learn to read them, for they provide insights into our basic humanity.”
Beneath the placid surface of the shrub forest, fungi connect the chaparral roots into vast communities; through this grid, the roots and fungi exchange water and nutrients. This system is comparable to a battery that holds energy until part of the community of chaparral and fungi needs it. Aboveground, lichen—a complex organism consisting of fungi and algae—bonds to chaparral, but some age-discriminating lichens refuse to grow on any chaparral younger than fifty years old.
Now our group stopped in a small canyon that was tucked down tight, with a slender, twenty-foot waterfall. The rock walls of the canyon were illustrated with designs of concentric circles and squares some five hundred to fifteen hundred years ago by Kumeyaay Indians, with paint made from wild cucumber seeds and red ochre and stinkbugs. A member of our party peered at a plant, possibly a willow dock: “I believe I ate that plant as a child. Slightly different.” He popped a leaf in his mouth and survived.
As we walked higher, Dillane gestured to a rocky point on a hill above the ridge. “Up there is a shaman’s cave. Some guy wanted to build a trail to it, but fortunately that didn’t happen.”
The air grew cooler as we climbed. We met other dwellers of this shadow world. Chinese houses, toad flats, sun cup poppies. And filaree, a ground cover, one of the first plants introduced to North America by Europeans. “Filaree can ‘walk’ until it finds a good crack,” said Dillane. He introduced us to the “fire followers,” including golden earth drop, adder’s-tongue fern, the parasitic witches’ hair lichen, “the vampire of the plant world.” And a towering yucca, a species that can grow two inches a day and, dependent on a single species of moth for pollination, flowers only once every fifteen years.
For a while, Dillane and the members of the group walked in silence. As we hiked to another ridge, he said: “Your eyes don’t know what to look at, so you don’t see.” He stopped suddenly. “Oh, fire poppies! We got fire poppies!”
We stood together on an outcropping of dark, lichen-licked rock. The lake, slate gray in the gathering fog, was below us. “We’re seeing one snapshot of one day of the year,” he said. “Not like any other. A day when it’s a whole different world.”
A world that suddenly seemed as exotic as a rain forest.