As summer approaches and we feel the pant of the summer heat at our heels I came across an interesting article I felt compelled to comment on.
You can read the article here: Golden Hill Residents Worried About Their Canyon
As a native Southern Californian I find this article interesting. I lost a home to wildfire in the 1970′s in La Crescenta, and as a resident of inland north county, I’ve needed to evacuate twice in the last 6 years from wildfire threat.
If the city met with the neighborhood-citizen/volunteer-resident group, and everyone voiced their concerns and talked about their mutual goals and solutions, possibly something viable could come out of the city’s proposal to cut back the brush.
I’m sure the resident’s don’t want to see their neighborhood impacted by a wildfire. The city had mandated cutting back brush to reduce damage to homes in the event of a wildfire.
The group had already cleaned up the area and planted native plant species, an important and positive move towards restoring native habitat and reducing invasive species.
Of course I hope that the neighborhood gets to keep all of their native habitat intact that is safe to keep providing it isn’t too close to homes. I know how passionate a person can feel towards the environment and how painful it can be to see nature disturbed. But we do have a real and present wildfire danger to life and property here in Southern California and we also have to mitigate the danger from combustible plants.
Maybe the city can consider selectively approaching the area possibly preserving as much chaparral as is safe, and not use a “cannon to kill the fly” strategy undoing all the progress that was done to restore the canyon.
On the other side of the coin read the article here: Maritime chaparral fuels more than fire in Big Sur, from the Capitol Weekly a few years ago. Residents of Big Sur area were frustrated with officials from the California Coastal Commission who wanted to protect the chaparral while the residents sought to reduce the chaparral to decrease the danger of their homes burning in a wildfire.
One of the most compelling quotes in the article states “On June 27, The Pine Cone newspaper in Carmel, often critical of the Coastal Commission, noted in an editorial that the chaparral was widespread throughout the region and that the fires “destroyed in an hour or two more maritime chaparral than all the residents of Big Sur could clear if they worked for 100 years.”
So if everyone keeps a level head; hopefully a solution will be found balancing the considerations of the residents to keep the beauty of the canyon while improving the area to reduce the risk of a wildfire decimating the canyon and the homes surrounding it.
