“Fortunately, the task of preparing this volume has been carried on by those who have had the feeling that a piece of work must be done, but who also have had a purpose to make it reveal beauty and exude the historical atmosphere of the region with which it is concerned.”
—Santa Barbara: A Guide to the Channel City and Its Environs (1941)
“Transmit the message
To the receiver
Hope for an answer someday”
—Talking Heads, Life During Wartime
Political Theatre
“Monkeywrenching can also be seen as a sophisticated political tactic that dramatizes ecological issues and places them before the public when they otherwise would be ignored in the media.”
—Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First!, as quoted by Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forests and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology (1995)
Who’s crazier?
The mud-streaked naked hippie running through the woods with a clown mask on?
Or
The armed federal agent in paramilitary gear leading a vicious K-9 chasing after to arrest her for hillwalking?
Santa Barbara backcountry bathtub, four-feet deep and chilly under the hot sun.
El Niño Rising & Precipitation Accumulation Intensifying
El Niño appears to be forming this year.
That does not mean we’ll experience a winter of above normal rainfall, necessarily. But the chance for it does seem more likely than usual at the moment.
In addition, whether or not rainfall totals for the entire season measure in above normal, we may experience torrential cloudbursts in short periods of time, with downpours that plunge with force and rush over the land in ways we’ve rarely if ever seen.
Singular events of significant precipitation accumulation are more likely in California with climate change, and could result in torrents of runoff damaging roads and trails and other humanmade developments.
Hell’s Half Acre, Santa Barbara backcountry.
Trial By Raindrop
Shouldn’t the Forest Service manage these wetter, more intense weather events in ways that accord with common daily behavior as seen across the nation?
Humans are not risk averse beings.
We take precautions like wearing seatbelts, but our lives in practice are not hemmed in by an “abundance of caution,” that ivory tower theoretical abstraction.
“In the United States, motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us.
Driving carries significant risk. So what? Most everybody drives anyway.
And so this begs a question. When the rains fall, will the Forest Service close our public lands?
Will Forest Supervisor, Kimberly Winter, close Los Padres National Forest and throw us out of our own backcountry by force, at gunpoint?
Will she prohibit hillwalking in 30% of Santa Barbara County that is national forest?
Will a woman treat us like convicted rapists for merely walking? Oh, the irony.
That Kimberly Winter may once more close the forest is not an unreasonable assumption. The question is not unwarranted.
Ms. Winter closed the forest before, citing “storm damage” and justifying the prohibition based on an expansive interpretation of public health law, contrary to the Constitution as per case law precedent, supposedly “to provide for public health and safety.”
The Forest Service now sees fit to burnish the resume of her predecessor, Christopher J. Stubbs, with reference to his prior role overseeing the closure of Los Padres National Forest in 2023.
“At Los Padres, Stubbs built key partnerships on a 2-million acre, urban-coastal National Forest and led his staff through severe flooding and storm damage during the winter of 2022-2023.”
Mr. Stubbs lead subordinates that toed the party line in pursuit of a paycheck, in a disservice to the common folk, as if that’s something to boast about or admire.
Who among them stood on principle, in defense of the Constitution, and resigned in protest?
Where were all the No Kings protesters?
Ms. Winter is a doctor of thought, a philosopher, of sorts. She holds a PhD from the University of Georgia.
Would that she thinks deeply when the rains fall heavily, and designs a plan of sound management that accommodates common recreation afoot out yonder.
Surely hiking is no more dangerous than driving.
They’re our bodies. Shouldn’t hiking be our choice?
Condor National Forest beckons.
Interlude
“. . .wandering the hills with no discernible purpose because he was a man and that’s what men did.”
—Eminent local novelist, T. C. Boyle, San Miguel
Off-trail in Santa Barbara County, deep within the hinterlands.
A day’s worth of hiking just to reach the staging ground for the next day’s adventure, further into the woods, into the unknown, to see sights for the first time.
Hiking, scrambling, crawling at times, fighting brambles of dense chaparral raking and scratching skin, dribbling droplets of blood, pouring sweat, face coated in dust and grit and duff, quenching thirst infrequently with warm water, rationing because only so much can be carried, and there’s no guarantee of finding more in the field; nibling nuts and dried fruit, chawing jerked beef, swallowing salt tabs and B-vitamins and caffeine pills, skittering across stone slopes, traversing steep and loose hillsides uneasily, skirting ledges, and downclimbing dry pour-over waterfalls, never knowing if the haphazard route will go or if mid-way through a reversal will be mandatory, to retrace the route entirely, back from whence we came, all the way back up in brutal defeat, because the indifferent mountain offers no other recourse, and the sun is slipping lower, ever lower.
Not enticing for most people, but requisite for some.
Meat and potatoes for the human mind. Salve for the soul.
That is the promise of public lands, “accessible by the simplest means—feet and legs and heart.”
Speaking of heart. . .
As my friend, David “Crash” Stillman, once quipped, somewhere off-trail together on the south slope of Haddock Peak out in the back of beyond, “you got the sickness, too.”
Yes. It’s an incurable affliction.
It’s sort of like hunger. It can be satiated, but only temporarily. Soon more food is needed or else you get hangry and fidgety.
My case is not nearly as severe. It’s only a mild compulsion.
Stillman’s is pathological; 21 miles in 22 hours, out of bounds, through a riverbed, up and down a pathless mountainside, to stand but briefly atop Devil’s Heart Peak, all alone in a desolate land.
Why?
God only knows.
There is no rational answer, as George Mallory once suggested of climbing Everest.
It’s something in the DNA of mankind, an indelible mark seared into the psyche by the hot iron of evolution.
“If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.
What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.
We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live.
That is what life means and what life is for.”
—George Mallory
The “pursuit of happiness,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.
That’s “the foundation of liberty,” John Locke wrote in 1689.
Santa Barbara County coast. Stay salty!
Guerilla Gauchos
“This was psychological warfare.
When the catskinners arrived at Bald Mountain, they freaked out as the four men suddenly appeared, looking like giant Hobbits, and announcing that they planned a nonviolent protest to stop the construction. …
This set the stage.
And the next day, when eco-commandos returned in cowboy costume, Earth First!’s guerrilla theatre was born.”
—Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood
Remember one lesson of the Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s.
Demonstrate the absurd by being absurd. Political theatre, the forest a stage.
When they draw a red line, tap dance all over it.
Make them enforce their crazy laws. Make them own it. Document it, project it, and use it against them.
“Road workers and Earth Firsters! were really having at each other now—arguing, spitting, and cursing—in front of furiously scribbling reporters and whirring video cameras.
. . .deputies arrived and arrested Roselle and his friends, the cameras continued to roll.
The story made the evening news. Stations around the country showed this same footage, over and over.
Each time it played, the incident looked bigger.
On the small screen the crowd seemed large, and viewers couldn’t tell that this whole carefully planned incident had been orchestrated by four unshaven guys in cowboy hats.
“. . .rather than crossbows and six-shooters, their weapon would be television.
As Alinsky advised protesters of any kind, have fun doing it.
“Rule 6: If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”
—Saul Alinsky, Rules For Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971)
“. . .what Foreman called ‘nonviolent direct intervention—with wit,'” Chase writes, quoting Foreman.
“That is, guerilla theatre and creative monkeywrenching. . .
Ed Abbey, who lived near Foreman in Tucson, became a kindly stepfather to the Earth Firsters!, reveling in the fact that their lives imitated his art.”
To arrive at this emerald gem one must first pass a No Trespassing sign, before then passing another sign declaring that the land behind it is forever protected as a preserve.
A Most Potent Weapon
“Nobody knows where or when guerilla theatre started.
A kind of subversive drama, it may have originated with traveling road shows during the Middle Ages.
Some Earth First!ers claim their use of it was inspired by the early Spanish ‘mudhead cantinas,’ in which peasants would put on plays to mock the nobility.
The idea was to make fun of authority, undermining its mystique with satire.
But the modern version married this idea with television.”
Today the average bloke in the street has more power than ever with the littlest thing.
A sleek handheld device more powerful than computing machines that once filled buildings the size of small homes.
Today, with cell phones in pocket, we’re all cinematographers on the spot.
With the Internet, we’re all broadcasters and distributors in real time.
Leverage the power.
Power to the peasants.
Figueroa Mountain
Los Padres Lunatics
“Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule.”
—Saul Alinsky, Rules For Radicals
Who is crazier?
The naked hippie running through the woods with a gingerbread mask on, catch me if you can, scrawled across his bare back?
Or
The armed federal agent chasing after to arrest him for walking the public lands?
Related Posts
Language of Forest Closure: Assault on an Ancient Right
Hiking is Not a Crime, Let Forest Be Thy Medicine
Hiking is Not a Crime; Bull Moose and Titmouse
Hiking is Not a Crime; Hiker’s Precheck Forest Entry Pass
Hiking is Not a Crime; Done Dirty By Diktat
Reference
“In May-July 2026, El Niño is likely to emerge (61% chance) and persist through at least the end of 2026.
In November 2026- January 2027, there are nearly equal chances (25%) of a very strong, strong, or moderate strength El Niño.
Stronger events do not always mean bigger weather and climate impacts. Stronger events can make it more likely that certain impacts could occur.
—NOAA, ENSO Evolution Status, April, 2026
“. . .most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in the winter, . . .”
—New York Times, Science Linking Drought to Global Warming Remains Matter of Dispute (2014)
“A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the probabilities of increased amounts of precipitation falling during a single event (also known as precipitation accumulation) will be higher with global warming.”
—NOAA, Global warming precipitation accumulation increases above the current-climate cutoff scale (2017)
“. . .there will be a robust future intensification of winter precipitation, . . .It will accelerate well past what we have seen in historic data.”
“. . .there has been an observed increase in wintertime precipitation in California due to ongoing greenhouse gas emissions32,33, accompanied by an increase in extreme precipitation34,35. Conversely, other seasons, notably spring, are expected to become drier36, signaling an intensification of the wet-dry seasonal cycle37, more frequent dry spells and floods38, and an increase in summertime drought in California39.”
—Nature Portfolio Journal, Robust future intensification of winter precipitation over the United States (2024)
Santa Ynez River once hosted the largest steelhead run in California south of San Francisco.
“National Mall site approved for memorial to fallen journalists
The site, which has a direct view of the Capitol, was chosen to evoke journalists’ role as government watchdogs.”
—Justin Jouvenal, Washington Post (2023)
“The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.”
—Edward Abbey, A Writer’s Credo, One Life at a Time, Please (1988)
Recap
In 2023, after a series of torrential atmospheric rivers dumped historic rainfall, Forest Supervisor, Christopher J. Stubbs, issued a diktat closing Los Padres National Forest.
The closure prohibited entry into 30% of Santa Barbara County.
Mr. Stubbs threatened the common walker of public lands like sexual predators, with jail terms and fines no less severe than those meted out to rapists in Santa Barbara County, if we entered to forest.
The Forest Service backed the order with armed agents leading dogs trained for domestic urban combat.
As veteran long-time local hillwalker Dan McCaslin at Noozhawk observed at the time, a rare voice of measured opposition questioning the closure:
“Federal law enforcement officers and their K-9 partners are actively patrolling.”
Iron-fisted prohibition with a threat of government gun violence.
Done with a smile and a pat on the back, for our safety.
The rigid politics of paternalism.
Santa Ynez Mountains, Channel Islands National Park on the horizon.
The story’s told
With facts and lies
You own the world
So never mind
Mr. Stubbs justified the closure of Los Padres National Forest based on an assertion that rainfall had damaged the forest.
And because the forest was damaged, it was supposedly a threat to public health.
Both claims were obviously preposterous.
He never explained what exactly was so threatening to the nation that 340+ million Americans should be collectively stripped of their ancient right to free movement by his signature alone.
The circumstances were extraordinary and so required extraordinary action.
“Ponch and Jean” on patrol, future citizen scientists, someday activists.
“The writer’s duty to speak the truth—especially unpopular truth. Especially truth that offends the powerful, the rich, the well-established, the traditional, the mythic, the sentimental. To attack, when the time makes it necessary, the sacred cows of his society. And I mean all sacred cows.”
—Edward Abbey, “A Writer’s Credo”
Chris Stubbs admitted up front to acting in ignorance, unaware what had happened throughout the ~1,100 square miles of wildlands in Santa Barbara County he had closed.
That was another reason why the forest must be closed, he told us, because he didn’t know.
The same land that by its very nature the people desire and expect and demand to be left untrammeled, rough and potentially dangerous, even deadly.
The Forest Service recognizes this obvious fact:
“Los Padres National Forest spans some of the most ruggedly beautiful landscapes to be found anywhere in California.”
Resorting to semantics in defense of truth and common sense, Merriam-Webster defines the word rugged as:
1 : having a rough uneven surface : jagged
rugged mountains
3 a : presenting a severe test of ability, stamina, or resolution
a rugged climb
“Find your next adventure,” the Forest Service says, but they don’t appear to truly mean it.
Actions speak louder than words.
Mr. Stubbs holds a post-graduate degree Master of Science in Forestry, yet nevertheless presented an argument divorced from scientific reality.
His academic field of concentration within that discipline is “Outdoor Recreation Planning.”
Yet, his order appeared knee-jerk and reactionary; a blind, blanket closure that was far out of line with American outdoor tradition and common behavior.
In unleashing the police state and threatening to let slip dogs of war, Mr. Stubbs brazenly violated the people’s civil rights.
Free movement is a right traced back to the Old World and long recognized and upheld by various American courts at all levels, including the Supreme Court.
Mr. Stubbs manipulated language in service to these ends.
And journalists like Ray Ford, another local veteran hillwalker writing for Noozhawk, aided and abetted Mr. Stubbs in this assault on a fundamental American right.
Santa Ynez Mountains
This was your heart
This swarm of flies
This was once your mouth
This bowl of lies
You serve them well
I’m not surprised
You’re of their kin
You’re of their kind—Leonard Cohen, Nevermind
Case In Point
Local reporters served as meek lapdogs rather than fierce watchdogs, and repeated and amplified the bogus narrative of closure.
These reporters behaved not as skeptical and inquisitive journalists, speaking truth to power and asking pointed questions of the ruling class on behalf of common folk, but instead as unquestioning stenographers.
“Over the last month, Los Padres received more than 100 percent of its annual rainfall along with extremely damaging wind events.”
“Over the last month, Los Padres received more than 100 percent of its annual rainfall along with extremely damaging wind events.”
Other writers also misrepresented the matter, echoing Mr. Stubbs.
They presented their stories in terms that conflated and confused the forest and the government agency charged with managing it.
And they based these stories on a false premise, framed by anthropocentric, fickle cultural notions of human aesthetics and perceived beauty.
Through this warped lens they projected a distorted view, as they told us rain had damaged the forest.
Everyone is familiar with the old saying, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
The editor-in-chief of Backpacker Magazine, Adam Roy, repeated the bogus narrative in an article titled, “Storm Damage Closes California’s Los Padres National Forest for Two Months.”
Mr. Roy wrote that rainfall “resulted in substantial damage to both the forest and the forest’s infrastructure.”
Santa Ynez Mountains
On Culture, Damage and Beauty
In traditional Japanese culture, people have a phrase describing appreciation of imperfection and transience in the world, which is often applied to nature: wabi-sabi.
In this Japanese aesthetic philosophy, sabi translates into English as rust or tarnish, while wabi conveys a sense of the calm acceptance and embrace of life’s imperfections.
Santa Barbara Backcountry
Ray Ford at Noozhawk leveraged his platform in a disservice to innocent hikers.
He went out of his way to author an apologia mansplaining to us proles the intent of the Forest Service in defense of the agency’s raw exercise of federal power.
He acknowledged the closure was rooted in ignorance, that the heart of the matter had yet to be assessed, thus echoing what Mr. Stubbs had already confessed from the get-go to justify his diktat.
“60-day Los Padres National Forest closure is designed to keep the public safe and provide time for damage assessments.”
—Ray Ford, Noozhawk
And then came the distortion of reality through manipulation of language in service to political ends.
The Forest Service claimed that nature had damaged nature, and in turn Mr. Ford and others toed the line, gaslighting the public.
In a breathless story bearing an overwrought title, Mr. Ford wrote:
“Recent Storms Wreak Havoc on Santa Barbara Backcountry”
“. . .recent storm events…may have caused more damage in the Santa Barbara backcountry and other rural areas than anyone realizes.
“…the type of damage they’ve never seen in their careers on the forest.”
In an amusing passage, Mr. Ford saw fit to quote Andrew Madsen, Los Padres National National Forest spokesman, speaking pure gibberish:
“We simply don’t even know what we don’t know at this point.”
—Andrew Madsen
We’d like to point out to the mealymouthed Mr. Madsen that we never know what we don’t know, and that ignorance is not a sound basis from which to craft national policy. (We recall watching the news conference of Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, 24 years ago.)
That was the flimsy, asinine basis upon which they threw us out of our own public lands.
For our own health, they told us with a smile.
Los Padres Forest Association, whose ostensible purpose is providing access to the forest, turned on a dime at the drop of Stubbs’ hat and backed the prohibition, calling it “wise.”
San Rafael Mountains, Santa Barbara County
“That’s all I ask of the author. To be a hero, appoint himself a moral leader, wanted or not.
I believe words count, that writing matters, that poems , essays, novels – in the long run – make a difference.
If they do not, then in the words of my exemplar Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s work is of no more importance than the barking village dogs of the night.
The hack writer, the temporizer, the toady, and the sycophant, the journalistic courtier (and what is a courtier but a male courtesan?), all of those in the word trade who simply go with the flow, who never oppose the rich and powerful, are no better in my view than Solzhenitsyn’s village dogs.
The dogs bark; the caravan moves on.”
—Edward Abbey, A Writer’s Credo
On the trail to Ben Lomond summit in Trossachs National Park, Scotland, sunsetting at ten o’clock at night, looking toward Jura, an island in the Inner Hebrides where George Orwell wrote 1984.
Orwell On Language
A defining feature of Orwell’s 1984 is an exploration of the manipulation of language in service to political ends and the massaging of public thought through speech.
What he called Newspeak was the advent of a new language created by the regime to advance its agenda.
Some of the vocabulary he created in 1949 appears prescient in describing the actions of people in 2023.
The Newspeak word bellyfeel describes the uncritical, unquestioning acceptance of party dogma by subservient followers whom toed the line:
“Only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic, and casual acceptance difficult to imagine today.”
Blackwhite describes the turning of language on its head by true believers:
“Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.”
Duckspeak describes the thoughtless expression and promotion of party line, ducks quacking like the village dogs barking:
“Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.”
The character Syme, a Newspeak linguist, explains the purpose of the language to the protagonist of the novel, Winston, whom works at the Ministry of Truth:
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?
. . .
Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . .
The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead.
Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”
Threads of Similarity
Analogies are imperfect, and while it’s often said that history repeats, it’s more accurate to say that it rhymes.
This is about considering possible degrees of likeness, not perfect comparisons.
Orwell’s thinking was informed and influenced by the horror of the twentieth century’s worst monsters in Stalin and Hitler.
Our point here is certainly not to suggest Mr. Stubbs or the Forest Service at large or the happy-go-lucky stenographers are evil or malicious.
The point to consider is the thread of similarity running through space and time, connecting Orwell’s novel in 1949 to the Stubbs Diktat of 2023, and how the forest closure was reported through media outlets by certain writers.
Figueroa Mountain snow (2019).
Parlance of Our Times
They said rain damaged the forest; that nature damaged nature.
The Forest Service spoke of “punishing rain and wind across the Forest,” as if nature was some malevolent punitive force out there manhandling itself.
But damage is largely an anthropocentric notion.
In the Anthropocene epoch it is not surprising that humans would define the natural world in such hubristic self-centered parlance.
But it’s a distortion.
And a dereliction of duty by journalists, whom served the most powerful and entrenched forces in society, to the detriment of the smallest and least influential.
Reality
That something happened in the mountains during a storm that they have never in their wee short lives seen or they think is ugly or they do not like having to physically deal with or that upset them emotionally, does not mean such natural change is damage.
The Forest Service and the stenographers and apologists cannot honestly or accurately reference damage in the forest as a reasonable justification to criminalize entry.
Nature did not damage nature.
Rainfall and wind are natural phenomenon that cause natural change.
Nature, and the universe at large, are indifferent to humanity’s myopic and self-centered notions of damage.
An oak tree ripped apart by wind; runoff from precipitation furrowing the earth; rocks tumbling; mountainsides sliding; high stream and river flows jumping existing temporal banks to form new watercourses; such natural phenomena formed Earth as we know it and love it.
The boulder field found in Rocky Nook Park in Santa Barbara, from which the park took its name, is an example of such natural change resulting from an ancient debris flow.
“These boulders are composed of sandstone from the Santa Ynez Mountains and we believe they record a catastrophic debris flow that occurred sometime in the recent geologic past.”
—Edward A. Keller, professor of geological sciences and environmental studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
These forces of natural change form new habitat and precipitate the birth of new life and serve to redistribute and recycle natural components, from the top of the highest mountain to the deepest sea.
The sea floor is then raised to the mountain top and the process continues.
A mountain or a glacier is said to calve off in the same vein that a cow giving birth to new life is said to be calving.
Natural events of consequential change, cataclysmic alterations of the land, cannot properly be described as damage.
These are part and parcel of the whole, and organic.
Travesty
Rain damaged artificial, human-made developments within Los Padres National Forest.
The Forest Service did actually acknowledge this fact in their press release, which mentioned “serious impacts to administrative and recreation facilities.“
Things like roads and trails and BBQ picnic areas and campgrounds.
However, that infrastructure was degraded or destroyed altogether only limits use and makes access more difficult.
It does not threaten public health at large by any reasonable metric.
Reasonable, as defined relative to everyday common practice across the nation by recreationists.
Thus, pointing to infrastructure that is not serviceable and suggesting the entire forest is damaged, and therefore dangerous and so unusable, is a misrepresentation of reality.
It’s an assault on truth and our intelligence.
It portrays a false image and advances the bogus premise that we can’t use the forest without having all roads and all trails useable, which is obvious nonsense.
It is not illegal to walk national forest or wilderness lands without a road or trail.
Yet, Ray Ford at Noozhawk would have us believe otherwise.
In a thoughtless, sloppy passage in utter servility, Mr. Ford wrote:
“Damage along Sunset Valley Road makes access to the wilderness trailheads impossible.”
One of many remarkable things during the forest closure of 2023 was the blunted, dim reportage from local media outlets.
The obsequious reports published by many journalists were poor imitations of real, honest journalism.
On more than one occasion we’ve personally crossed paths on foot with hikers far beyond seasonally locked gates, around Figueroa Mountain and Sunset Valley, accessing public lands by hoofing it, the old fashioned way, like Native Americans and American pioneers of old.
Men and women alike.
Good people of no particular exceptional fitness or ability.
Decent common folks, carrying on healthy, decent common lives by ordinary, common means and harming nobody.
Feet and legs and heart.
“What does accessibility mean?
Is there any spot on earth that men have not proved accessible by the simplest means—feet and legs and heart? …
A venturesome minority will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for Godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches—that is the right and privilege of any free American.”
—Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)
An emerald gem in the Santa Barbara backcountry.
Simple Questions
Is it too much to ask that our beneficent overlords in government exercise critical thought and sober restraint when formulating federal, state and local policy?
That knee-jerk power grabs stripping us of civil rights, while flying in the face of common practice by outdoor recreationists nation-wide, be avoided?
That journalists act like journalists and question authorities, rather than serve as force multipliers with bullhorns regurgitating the party line?
They are our bodies. It’s our choice.
Or are the people mere play things whose lives can be toyed with at will by those in power, like pawns on a board?
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.
And what I mean by that; it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
A criminal in the Santa Ynez Mountains.
“Against the grain
That’s where I’ll stay
Swimming upstream
I maintain against the grainHere labeled as a lunatic sequestered and content
There ignored and defeated by the government
There’s an oriented public who’s magnetic force does pull
But away from the potential of the individual—Bad Religion, Against the Grain (1990)
Precedent
The American legal system is built upon precedent, not reason and logic.
One unjust law advanced by misguided legislators, one unjust regulation issued by ham-handed bureaucrats, one unjust judgment handed down by a corrupt black robed jurist, can precipitate another, and yet more, all pointing to the first to justify the latest.
Brick by brick the people can be surrounded while not even realizing it, common liberties whittled away, the sphere of permissible activities narrowed and reduced.
If when they come for one we do not stand up and speak out, then they will find it easier to come for others.
It’s inconspicuous, because it’s done with a smile and good intentions, and so insidious.
If we are not vigilant and do not demand due process, then we may be stripped of rights under the guise of promoting the common good.
Liberty is a chain only as strong as its weakest link.
Each generation is a link connecting one with the next.
One weak link and the chain may break.
Once it breaks it can be difficult to repair, if repair is even possible at that point.
This may be one of the most critical lessons of history.
Sespe River mural, Fillmore, Ventura County.
Defining Danger Down
“Fascism, like many species of authoritarianism, relies on panic, and on the related belief that extraordinary measures must be deployed in extraordinary times, that emergencies must be met with unity and—most important—with submission and conformity.…The principle at work here is defining danger down.…The rules and laws, and the political assumptions supporting them, are all based on some notion of safety.…Defining danger down consists mainly in elevating the importance of hypothetical evils over real evils.…In order to prevent these hypothetical evils, we are instructed that we must accept real and immediate evils, …”—Kevin D. Williamson, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics (2019)
The Forest Service and its employees are not fascists.
They aren’t malicious agents either.
However, the Stubbs Diktat was an authoritarian act, no doubt, by definition.
The Forest Service defined danger down when closing Los Padres National Forest.
We were told that it was for public safety, to protect our health, in response to extraordinary events of exceptional danger.
Christopher J. Stubbs used the hypothetical threat of harm from broken trails and washed out roads to justify the immediate real harm of suspending a fundamental civil right.
Free movement is a right repeatedly recognized throughout American history as the essence of civil liberty.
Long-nosed leopard lizard.
Trampling Our Ancient Civil Right to Free Movement
“There is a powerful fundamental right hiding in plain sight: the fundamental right to free movement.
This right goes beyond the consistently acknowledged—though infrequently applied—fundamental right to interstate travel.
The true scope of the Constitution’s protection of movement through substantive due process safeguards local, interstate, and international travel.
Though overlooked today, the fundamental right to free movement has deep roots in history and tradition, and in the decisions of numerous state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court.
This Article is the first to examine freedom of movement using the history and tradition test for unenumerated fundamental rights.
This Article begins by tracing the right to free movement from the Magna Carta, through Blackstone’s Commentaries, colonial America, early state constitutions, and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.
As this analysis shows, repressive governments have routinely sought to limit movement across and within boundaries.
But the English and U.S. legal traditions are marked by repeated affirmations of the right—there is strong and persistent historical support for a fundamental right to free movement.
. . .
Given its firm foundation and expansive reach, this is a right that should be applied regularly—to anti-gender-affirming care or anti-abortion laws targeting travel, to quarantine restrictions locking down a community, and to any of the wide variety of other restrictions limiting free movement.— The Forgotten Fundamental Right to Free Movement, Noah Smith-Drelich, Northwestern University Law Review (2025)
Shouldn’t the suspension of this civil right if ever justified, in pursuit of our healthful happiness in body and mind, but not in violation of the rights of others, necessarily require the law be narrowly tailored and specific?
Should the federal government be allowed to suspend this long-standing right based on a vague, undefined claim of a threat to public health which it cannot identify?
In the context of American jurisprudence the idea that we can be stripped of this liberty because a road or a trail washed out is patently absurd.
This is America, dammit!
Land of the free and home of the brave.
Related Posts:
Hiking is Not a Crime, Let Forest Be Thy Medicine
Hiking is Not a Crime; Bull Moose and Titmouse
Mustard blooming trailside in Los Padres National Forest, growing where we’ve never seen it before.
“Like other mustards, black mustard grows profusely and produces allelopathic chemicals that prevent germination of native plants. The spread of black mustard can increase the frequency of fires in chaparral and coastal sage scrub, changing these habitats to annual grassland.”
“. . .Whether introduced unknowingly by pioneers 200 years ago, or more recently by worldwide commerce and travel, the spread of invasive alien plants into State Park System lands is reaching crisis levels. . . .Without the natural enemies of their original habitats, invasive exotic species can spread rapidly and out-compete California native species, thereby upsetting natural ecosystem processes.
“Invasive exotic plants are one of the most serious threats to natural resources in national parks. They are able to reproduce in great numbers, rapidly colonize new areas, displace native species, and alter ecosystem processes across multiple scales.”
Where humans go, so too the mustard.
We’ve never seen so much mustard covering so many places all around the County of Santa Barbara, city and country.
The noxious weed spreads in remarkable, unnerving fashion.
Mustard recently covered our backyard, where it hadn’t been before.
We now wage an ongoing battle to merely keep it at bay, two years into the war, a vain attempt to eradicate the beastly weed altogether.
Complete removal seems impossible without constant vigilance and an exceptional amount of manual labor or resorting to chemical warfare, which we’re loath to do and have not done.
No Roundup glyphosate biocide for us.
Turn your back for a moment, it seems, and there sprouts or resprouts a new mustard bloom waving in the breeze like a mischievous hand saying hello, yet again.
And this is just in our yard, to say nothing of national forest, wilderness areas, and still other public lands.
Pacific sea fog filling Santa Ynez Valley amid the San Rafael and Santa Ynez Mountains basking in a Mediterranean Climate.
“571 plants have completely disappeared from the wild, more than twice the number of birds, mammals and amphibians combined
. . .
Most people can name a mammal or bird that has become extinct in recent centuries, but few can name an extinct plant
. . .
The scientists found the highest rates of plant extinction to be on islands, in the tropics and in areas with a Mediterranean climate – typical biodiverse regions which are home to many unique species vulnerable to human activities.
. . .
These results suggest that the increase in plant extinction rate could be due to the same factors that are documented as threats to many surviving plants: fragmentation and destruction of native vegetation resulting in the reduction or loss of habitat of many range-restricted species.”—Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: Almost 600 plants have gone extinct in the last 250 years – Why should we care? (2019)
This year we’ve found the first ever few mustard shock troops sprouting and rearing up in the front yard.
We’re being overrun and overwhelmed right outside our front door.
Consider the problem at large across the state and the difficulty managing this menace.
The small individual flowers form on long stems, many at a time, each tiny bloom maturing rapidly, but sequentially, over a sustained period, the seeds dropping for weeks on end like paratroopers dropped deep into allied territory.
Seeds may last decades and still sprout, research shows. Dormant splinter cells awaiting activation.
Should the plant get a roothold growing into dense native soil, it becomes impossible to rip out, no matter how strong a person might be or how much force they can bring to bear.
This is not an exaggeration.
I’ve tried many times wrestling these weeds from hardpacked earth with both gloved hands tightly gripped around the stalk, yanking and pulling, teeth clenched, lips drawn, floundering around like a lunatic in the field, and failing miserably.
A fellow might be more apt to pull a sword from a stone than a mature mustard plant from the ground.
Should a person mow or weed whack the plant down to its crown at soil level, it rapidly regrows sending out yet more flower stems, like the flags of a victorious power holding ground in the face of an onslaught, leveraging its asymmetrical advantages.
To the brink of obsessive madness, the vile weed pushes me like the whale did Ahab.
The neighbors must be amused at the sight or maybe concerned.
Curvaceous beauty seen from Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge, Kern County.
“It’s got to stop right now! Nip it. Nip it in the bud.”
“I say this calls for action and now. Nip it in the bud.”
“Now the minute it looks like there’s gonna be trouble. We got to nip it!
Nip! It! In! The! Bud!”
This cycle of nipping it in the bud plays out for months, the mustard continuing with insidious insistence to sprout new flower stem after new flower stem, ever shorter depending on rainfall, to tiny stems of a mere several inches long if need be, and still then throw a payload of seed.
All summer long we battle the mustard that sprouts from winter rains, and into the fall, until winter once more waters them again, giving them yet another renewed burst of growth.
The plant might reach higher than six feet if allowed, thick and woody and covering our yard as a dense forest.
If clipped numerous times but the tuberous root not fully removed, it rises to mere inches in height, yet still there and able to procreate.
Mustard boasts a remarkable biological comparative advantage relative most other native plants, or anything, really.
One must begrudgingly admit the vile weed performs its duty with impressive vigor and resilience.
Baby blue eyes (Nemophila menziesii), Figueroa Mountain
The mustard army is on an unstoppable march, long ago seeded in the state, and sapping ever further into the once fortified strongholds of native plants, conquering and colonizing new places, sprouting where we haven’t seen it before.
Clearing a pathway through native vegetation all too often invites encroachment by exotics.
We see mustard growing along forest roads and trails, which serve well as avenues of expansion to increase its range, a stowaway going wherever we go, on our vehicles, on our animals, on our shoes and clothing.
That is not intelligence by human standards, but it is indeed smartness on another level.
Something along the lines of what Michael Pollan wrote about 25 years ago in his book, Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World.
The plant appears to know what it wants and how to get there to get it and it succeeds wildly.
We see mustard growing along creeks and rivers in national forest lands and in designated wilderness areas, miles from roads and far off-trail, its yellow flowered stems waiving tauntingly in the breeze, Ahoy, yes, we’ve made it here, too! And thank you.
An insect-eaten calochortus kennedyi at elevation in Chumash Wilderness, representative of the traditional Japanese aesthetic, wabi-sabi (侘び寂び), where beauty is found in natural imperfection.
“Long-term management needs include improving:
1) Resilience of vegetation to wildfires and overall improvement of forest health by reducing fuels and reintroducing fire on the landscape using prescribed fire;
2) Community and infrastructure protection by reducing fuels adjacent to communities, Forest Service facilities, communication sites, roads, motorized trails, property boundaries, and strategic fuelbreaks; and
3) Wildfire containment opportunities by establishing and maintaining fuelbreaks, defense zones, and maintaining general forested areas in strategic locations.
—U.S. Forest Service, Los Padres National Forest
Ecological Restoration Project #62369 [later renamed: Wildfire Risk Reduction Project]
The Forest Service, as led by Christopher J. Stubbs, argued that ecological restoration and protection requires industrial-scale raking of forest detritus, removal of deadwood and logging, and the establishment of firebreaks.
Tellingly, they renamed their euphemistic plan from restoration to risk reduction; an apparent attempt to make it more palatable to a local public population that expressed deep skepticism and strong opposition in great numbers.
Preventative measures, they say, to reduce the chance of exceptionally hot burning, stand replacing wildfire sweeping the land clear of everything, including the largest and oldest iconic trees.
We do not advocate the protection of native plants over that of people, to be clear.
But questions arise based on common sense, informed by the common experiences of common folk and their simple observations in the field.
Will the Project #62369 plan for Pine Mountain in Ventura County invite invasive exotic weeds deeper into the forest to “spread rapidly and out-compete California native species, thereby upsetting natural ecosystem processes,” as California State Parks warns?
Will weeds “reproduce in great numbers, rapidly colonize new areas, displace native species, and alter ecosystem processes across multiple scales,” as National Parks warns?
Will the plan serve to “increase the frequency of fires in chaparral and coastal sage scrub,” as the California Native Plant Council warns can happen with black mustard.
Red penstemon, Pine Mountain
Little Miss E on Pine Mountain, Ventura County.
The opposing sides in the dispute over the plan each have their own chosen group of scientific scholars with their own published peer reviewed studies to lean on, as is often typical of such policy arguments.
We shall bear witness to the results, for better or worse.
A common refrain we hear from the Forest Service is that they’re understaffed and underfunded. We agree.
Yet, the federal government says they will somehow nevertheless properly manage and maintain what conditions they create as a direct result of their new firebreaks.
But the Forest Service appears to contradict itself in remarkable fashion in their own document, Ecological Restoration Project (Renamed Wildfire Risk Reduction Project) #62369.
Their word of promise provides little if any comfort.
This confusion undermines their credibility and calls into question their competence and true motives, as will be addressed in a future post on this weblog.
Moreover, from what we’ve seen in practice through decades in the field afoot, we don’t believe the United States Forest Service has it in them to maintain much of anything, let alone the new corridors of entry into the forest they’re opening up, through which invasive plants may vigorously spread.
Phacelia crenulata, Santa Ynez Riverbed
Post Script
John Hankins, over at the local Sierra Club chapter, has a brief in the latest Condor Call newsletter (April-May) listing alternative methods of weed removal.
They include: Pelargonic Acid, Vinegar (47%), Salt, Iron-based Herbicides, Corn Gluten Meal, Flame Weeding, Mulching and Soil Solarization, Essential Oils (Clove, Citric, Orange)
Mortar, benchmark, cupules.
In a previous post we wrote about a United States Geological Survey benchmark medal adhered to a Chumash mortar stone, adjacent the Santa Ynez Mountains along the southern-most edge of Santa Barbara County.
Here we call attention to another example of metaphor in metal and stone, adjacent the Sierra Madre Mountains along the northern-most edge of Santa Barbara County.
The benchmark is seated amid what appears to be a series of cupules. Perhaps a cupule itself was used as a small bowl and filled with adhesive mortar and the benchmark placed on top.
A much larger, more prominent bedrock outcrop rises from the grassland near the mortar stone, suggesting the medal was intentionally set upon the Indian artifact like a flag, for reasons other than need of a solid footing in a precise location.
USGS benchmark dated 1934, Cuyama Valley.
Related Post:
The sycamore sprout on the tree that refuses to give up.
For years I’ve watched from the window of my passing vehicle the historic sycamore stump adjacent Santa Barbara’s Old Mission resprout, and get whacked.
Every time the tree pops its head up somebody takes it off. This may have been going on for decades or maybe even 100 years, as will be explained below.
Last year or thereabouts the sprout stood waist high with a two inch-thick trunk forming.
Then WHACK! Off with its head.
The sprout had been surrounded in day-glow orange plastic mesh fencing at one point, which was then removed, along with the tree.
Apparently, the makeshift barrier was the work of interested town folk rather than a decided policy to protect and allow the tree to regrow.
I do not know, but it seemed that the sprout had been taken by groundskeepers for no reason other than to maintain a manicured look, when they came through removing annual weeds and grasses along the sidewalk.
Now ’tis the season for such weeding and the tree faces decapitation once more.
Oddly, just behind the sycamore, a volunteer ficus tree has sprouted in the cracks of the Old Mission’s sandstone wall, its roots wrapping and burrowing around and into the stone blocks.
At some point the ficus, a tree of beastly proportions when mature with gnarly, invasive roots that wrap like pythons around anything in the tree’s way, will fracture the wall and send it crumbling apart, thus destroying a historic feature.
Yet, the volunteer ficus has been left in place, while the historic sycamore tree keeps getting whacked for no apparent good reason.
Why?
Probably its mere simple unknowing negligence.
Shouldn’t the sycamore be allowed to grow once more?
If not, why not?
Postcard showing the Old Mission Sycamores (1893).
The tree sprout at issue is one of two sycamores, twins that once stood together, as seen in a postcard image from 1893, as iconic in stature naturally as the Old Mission is in architecture.
I do not know when the one tree was felled whose stump remains, but the tree is very much alive.
A brief one line entry in the book, Trees of Santa Barbara, by Katherine K. Muller, Richard E. Broder, and Will Beittel published in 1974 notably mentions only a single tree:
“A fine specimen on the northeast side of Old Mission Santa Barbara.”
Thus it stands to reason that the tree was chopped sometime long ago.
And although the sycamore may have lost its towering column of a body many decades ago, the tree remains alive.
A tree stump in general may remain alive for hundreds of years after being cut down, by being provided nutrients through an interconnection of roots with other surrounding trees and also through a symbiotic fungal network.
German silviculturist, Peter Wohlleben, in a stunning passage, opened our eyes to this fact in his book, The Hidden Life of Trees (2016).
Wohlleben was previously mentioned on this weblog in other posts:
The Intelligence of Coyote Tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata)
The Mighty Chanterelle and the Gnarly Oak
In The Hidden Life of Trees, Wohlleben tells an incredible story about discovering a stump in a forest he had for years thought was just a rock.
One day he leans in out of curiously, peels back the moss covering from the rock and finds that it is actually a beech stump.
Using a pocket knife he carefully scrapes away some bark and is shocked to find green cambium.
The stump was still alive. What’s more, he surmised that the tree had been felled some four to five hundred years ago!
Wohlleben from The Hidden Life of Trees:
“Living cells must have food in the form of sugar, they must breathe, and they must grow, at least a little. But without leaves—and therefore without photosynthesis—that’s impossible.
No being on our planet can maintain a centuries-long fast, not even the remains of a tree, and certainly not a stump that has had to survive on its own.
It was clear that something else was happening with this stump.
It must be getting assistance from neighboring trees, specifically from their roots.
Scientists investigating similar situations have discovered that assistance may either be delivered remotely by fungal networks around the root tips—which facilitate nutrient exchange between trees—or the roots themselves may be interconnected.
In the case of the stump I had stumbled upon, I couldn’t find out what was going on, because I didn’t want to injure the old stump by digging around it, but one thing was clear; the surrounding beeches were pumping sugar to the stump to keep it alive.”
Put that in your pipe and smoke it. That’s some heady stuff.
And so it appears that something of similar kind is going on with the Twin Sycamores of Old Mission Santa Barbara.
Don’t the sycamores deserve to be allowed to flourish together once more as is their want?
Shouldn’t they be protected?
Would the two together not enrich the scene?
Save our sycamore.
SOS
Jack Elliott's Santa Barbara Adventure 