NEWSLETTER

Working for a safe, sustainable, and natural environment

North Hills Phoenix Association Awards Certificates of Appreciation for Achieving Consensus

At its annual meeting on January 26, the North Hills Phoenix Association (NHPA) presented Certificates of Appreciation to the co-chairs of its Vegetation Management Committee, Bill McClung and Peter Scott. The award recognized their leadership last fall in developing a consensus statement concerning the mitigation of wildfires in the hills. The purpose of the statement was to express the will of the community to FEMA, with the hope that funding would be released to support projects in the wildland-urban interface aimed at reducing the risk of fire.

FEMA’s funding has been stalled for two years, awaiting UC Berkeley’s modification of its proposed Strawberry Canyon project, in response to public comments. UC and FEMA had been negotiating the protocol for the project without success, and in the meantime, other similar local projects were being held up for lack of funding. UC, in its Environmental Assessment for the project, had stated that its plan to deforest Strawberry Canyon was supported by the community, a claim that FEMA questioned. In fact, there exists a wide variety of opinions in the community concerning the destruction of tens of thousands of mature trees in the name of fire risk mitigation.

NHPA’s Vegetation Management Committee accurately reflects that wide variety of opinions. Its members, who are arguably the most knowledgeable lay people in the community regarding fire mitigation, may disagree about mitigation methodology, but they all agree that the risk of wildfire must be addressed, and the sooner the better. 

McClung and Scott facilitated a series of meetings of the committee, to hammer out a statement—to be signed by all committee members and sent to FEMA—that would, in fact, represent the will of the community.

Committee members were: Jerry Baer, Madeline Hovland, David Kessler, Paul McGee, William McClung (co-chair), Gordon Piper, Robert Sand, Robert Sieben and Peter Scott (co-chair).

The three-page consensus statement listed specific strategies for reducing the risk of ignition and spread of fires in the wildland-urban interface: creating defensible space near structures and fuel breaks, reducing potential fuel in the understory, undergrounding of power lines, etc. The statement was subsequently endorsed by the NHPA before being forwarded to FEMA.

What’s in this issue:

Pitching Myths and Knocking ‘em Down

by Peter Scott

Garber Park in Claremont Canyon

Photos by Bindu Frank

Trees and Invasive Critters

by Jerry Baer

Everyone Wanted Them . . .

by Lynn Hovland

Pitching Myths, and Knocking ’em Down

One by one, myths about eucalyptus are pitched at us and, one by one, we must knock’em down. Like the WMD myth, the apparent intent of those who pitch these myths is to keep propping up the fear factor, to support the eucaphobia that unfortunately grips some of our neighbors. Repeat something scary enough times and in some peoples’ minds it becomes fact.

 

Myth 1: Eucalypts were responsible for, and exacerbated, the ’91 fire. 

The truth is that eucs were nowhere near the origin of the fire on Saturday, October 19. The fire started in dry brush, grass and scrub oak on a steep slope above Buckingham Boulevard. There were some pines nearby but the fire did not jump into them.

The fire restarted on Sunday, October 20, as flare-ups in dry brush within and just beyond the area that burned on the previous day. It spread first into oak trees. By the time the flames reached the first grove of eucs (1/6 mile away, just above Charing Cross) the conflagration was no longer a vegetation-fueled fire; it was a full-fledged structure-fueled fire that consumed everything in its path.

Myth 2: Blue gum eucalyptus trees are uniquely hazardous because they are oily, and explode in a fire.

Tree experts disagree with this myth. The leaves of blue gum eucalyptus trees contain oil; so do the leaves of bays and many species of chaparral. However, the trunks of eucalyptus trees are described as “fire-resistant (like redwoods).” Their trunks resist ignition, and the leaves are close to 50% water (koalas live off them).

When, finally, the tree’s temperature reaches an ignition point, the euc will outgas a flammable haze, producing a sudden bright flare . . . but this is not an “explosion.” It poses no extraordinary risk, and it occurs significantly after other species have already burned.

Myth 3: Eucalypts are responsible for advancing the fire-front by “spotting”—projecting burning bits ahead of the flames. 

In the first version of this myth, the leaves were blamed because they were said to be uniquely aerodynamic. However, experiments demonstrated that a) the leaves don’t fly very well, b) they don’t fly at all once burned, and c) they are incapable of maintaining an ember. So that myth was modified. Now it’s claimed that the euc’s bark strips are the culprits.

This assertion appears in serious presentations, like Jerry Kent’s history of the hills fires and EBRPD’s Environmental Impact Report, but it is unsupported by any evidence, and it denies common sense and actual experience. Why should eucalyptus bark embers fly but not burning oak twigs, bay branches and coyote brush limbs?

The truth is: all loose material flies in a Diablo wind. During the 1991 fire, a fire-fighting pilot reported seeing a burning sheet of plywood at 2000 feet!

Myth 4: Eucalyptus forests are prone to dangerous crown fires. 

The opposite is true. Because the mature trees’ lowest limbs tend to be more than 8 feet above the forest floor, no “fire ladder” sends the flames into the crowns; because the eucalypt’s wood and leaves naturally resist ignition, the underbrush and surface fuel is consumed before the euc reaches ignition temperature. Films of Australian wildfires show the fire sweeping through the understory, but leaving the eucalypts’ crowns green and intact. Photos of the ’91 fire indicate the same fire behavior in Gwin Canyon. The 2006 Broadway Terrace fire demonstrated this same characteristic. 

Myth 5: Eucalyptus are invasive; if they are not removed, they will crowd out other species and take over the hills.

Despite pressure from native-plant lobbies, the USDA does not list blue gum eucalyptus as an invasive species in California. Eucs are more correctly classified as an “introduced species.” They were brought into California by humans and planted throughout the state beginning more than 150 years ago. They did not spread into California as “invaders” such as pampas grass, Scotch broom, and English ivy; also, unlike true invasive species, eucs stay pretty much where they were planted.

For example, take a drive through the Petaluma—Valley Ford landscape, where isolated groves of eucs were planted long ago as windbreaks; they remain there, not surrounded by young shoots. The groves in the peninsula hills and in our East Bay Hills have not expanded. It is only when one chops down the euc that, in self defense, it sends up new shoots. If we don’t want new shoots, the solution is obvious: don’t chop them down. (On the other hand, baby redwoods and bays also volunteer at the base of their mother trees.)

And so on. Whether it’s unexpectedly toppling over, dropping “widow-maker” limbs or smothering humming birds, there is a seemingly endless list of allegations lobbed in the direction of eucalyptus trees. As soon as one myth is disproved, another myth pops up. 

In an effort to forestall climate change, cities and nations around the globe are busy protecting and planting thousands of trees. Ironically, organizations that historically have supported protection of the environment and the health of the planet—the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society and others—are actively supporting tree-removal projects. But it is clear they are advocates for a very different agenda: Although they superficially support fire risk mitigation, their true mission is restoration of native plants. Their hypothesis is that natives are less flammable, but since this claim is not based on facts or scientific evidence, they must promote a series of fearful myths to advance their strategy.

Fire professionals generally want to reduce the vegetation fuel load in the wildland-urban interface. The native-plant advocates argue that fuel reduction should be species-specific, to eliminate the plants identified as “non-native.”  The problem is, following this sort of species-cleansing, the landscape we are left with has a higher risk of ignition and fire.

While it makes sense, in terms of fire risk mitigation, to reduce the fuel load, the strategy should be to clear out the forests’ understory brush and litter, and eliminate fine fuels (less than 3” thick). Those are the sources of ignition, the causes of crown fires and the origin of embers that spread the fire. This, in contrast to felling healthy, mature trees. And, to state the obvious: fuel is fuel, regardless of species, so vegetation management should be species-neutral.

                                                          —Peter Scott

Garber Park in Claremont Canyon

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

John Garber (1833-1908), for whom Garber Park is named, was an attorney and judge who lived in Berkeley. He once owned (with several others) most of the land that is now the Claremont District. Garber’s daughter inherited his share of the land and donated 13 acres of it to the City of Berkeley for a public park. Garber Park became part of Oakland when the boundaries of Berkeley and Oakland were officially determined.

Looking northwest from the main trail.

All of the photos on this page and the next were taken by Bindu Frank who grew up in the house closest to Garber Park at the end of Evergreen Lane. The small, natural wilderness of Garber Park was his childhood playground.

Old stone fireplace near eucalyptus, pines and oaks.

After receiving his B.A. in economics from New York University, Frank, a graduate of Bishop O'Dowd High School, travelled in southeast Asia. He now teaches English at Hanoi University in Vietnam. Frank took these photos in January when he was at home on Evergreen Lane between semesters.

Bridge over stream; in the winter, there is a waterfall.

Maple  leaves carpeting the northern slope, near buckeye and maple groves.

Moss-covered maple growing out of the hillside.

Pines and oaks at a fork in the trail.

An oak tree in a rare patch of sunlight.

An oak framed by a pine (or fir) on the northern edge.

Trees and Invasive Critters:

The Importance of Raptors

The article “Raptor Perches Set to Control Squirrel Invaders” in the January 4, 2010 SF Chronicle brought back memories of the 1991 Berkeley-Oakland Hills Fire−and a lesson learned.  According to the article, Contra Costa County has erected 20 wooden perches to attract raptors that might once have perched in tall trees.

See: http://www.sfchronicle.us/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/04/BAMN1B2GPD.DTL

Raptor perch installed in a meadow at Lime Ridge Open Space in the Mt. Diablo valley.

Photo courtesy of SmokeysMountain.blogspot.com.

Without tall trees, the raptors (owls, hawks, falcons, and eagles) have flown away. Without the raptors that once dined on them, the ground squirrel population has multiplied in the meadows and along the ridges of Concord and Walnut Creek. They steal fruit from fruit trees, dig up lawns, and even (if one can believe the article) invade homes and schools. (And this army of thieves and rascals is made up of invasive natives--California ground squirrels!) 

California ground squirrel in front of its burrow (left). Photo by Howard Cheng.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/howcheng/3935734581/

For larger version, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CA_Ground_Squirrel_and_burrow.jpg

One lesson we learned from the 1991 fire was that once the trees were gone, the raptors disappeared as well. Many of us can remember seeing—not squirrels—but thousands of rats, mice, and voles infesting our hills. At night when we drove up the road, we could see those little and not-so-little critters diving into holes for safety as our car lights lit up ash-covered slopes.

We had never before realized the importance of raptors. Hawks, falcons and owls prey on the rodents in the hills and keep them from infesting our homes. When many of the tall trees were gone, the raptors took off and stayed away until the trees came back on their own or were replanted.

Rodents (not ground squirrels) infested our homes, even as we rebuilt them. We knew that they carry disease, and they ruined the very ground we rebuilt on by creating tunnels. My wife and I were so concerned that we had professionals come and evaluate what we could do about the rodents of every size and shape that had taken over our property.

Every creature has a right to live--and competition for survival will keep most populations at a reasonable number. But this was too much. The trees were gone. The raptors were gone. Even the cats that used to make the rodents feel unwelcome were gone.

The professional evaluation showed that, after the ’91 fire, our land had over 10,000 rodents living on and under the ground. Luckily, we were able to pour a cement base under our home that eliminated the rodent problem until the trees, raptors, and cats returned to do their part again.

What does this have to do with the East Bay hills in 2010?  Some people in our hills are encouraging the removal of thousands of trees. They believe that grassland is a more desirable landscape. Why? Because grass is what covered these hills long ago. But with grass (and chaparral) come rodents—and snakes and other creatures that hide in low-lying vegetation.

When we moved to these hills they were covered with all kinds of tree species that made this neighborhood unique and beautiful. We don’t want trees replaced with grassland. The destruction of our trees will not only destroy this landscape that we enjoy. It will also change the ecosystem. 

The situation in Contra Costa County with people putting up wooden perches (made from dead trees) to attract raptors makes me realize how important it is to be careful about what we destroy in our environment. We are the interlopers here. Human ignorance and carelessness—not trees—are the cause of almost every ignition in these hills.

We have been blessed by being able to live in this community so close to nature. Let’s not destroy these trees that so many animals—and humans—depend on.

                                                            —Jerry Baer

Everyone Wanted Them—When Non-native Trees

First Came to the Hills

This is an incomplete history, compiled from bits of information in books of popular history (not academic works) about Oakland and Berkeley. Our main sources are listed at the end of this article.

No one knows with complete certainty where the trees and plants that we now call “native” came from in the long-ago past before humans walked the earth. Some may have evolved here, but it is more likely that the ancestors of the vegetation we now describe as native migrated from other places.

For example, the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) of  the Cypress  (Cupressaceae) family of conifers once occurred all over the planet. According to Colin Tudge in The Tree, the  redwoods’ Cupressaceae ancestors first appeared 300 million years ago, probably on Gondwana, the southern of two supercontinents, from which our present-day continents were formed.

But let us move forward to the time only hundreds of years ago when Native Americans populated this area. The hills were covered with wildflowers in the spring, and tall grass all year round, lush and green in the winter, dry and yellow in the summer and fall.

On sunny slopes then as now, chaparral shrubs (scrub oak, chamise, manzanita, ceanothus, sagebrush, coyote brush, etc.) and berry bushes prospered. Oaks, bays, willows and some sycamore and buckeye trees grew along stream channels.

Even into the mid 1800s, there were bears in Berkeley—not golden bears, but grizzlies—and mountain lions, elk, wolves, antelope and many other “wild” animals roamed the hills.

Despite the fact that the Native Americans, depended on acorns from live oaks and black oaks as a staple food, the earliest explorers from Europe complained of difficulty finding firewood close to the Bay.

“By the time the Spanish arrived, Oakland was generally treeless except for the oak grove around the tidal lagoon at the inland end of the estuary. . .and a few wooded arroyos. . .” (David Weber in Oakland: Hub of the West). Weber attributes the lack of trees to the Native Americans’ practice of setting fires to increase the seed yields of native grasses.

It is more credible that, as other writers claim, thousands of “majestic oaks” grew in the broad flatland that was early Oakland. Oaks and willows thrived there because much of the gentle alluvial slope was marshland, with water that flowed down in streams from the hills.

Oakland’s ridges were lined by a 6-square mile grove of redwoods.  (One stump is reported to have measured more than 33 feet in diameter.) All of those original, native redwoods were cut down for lumber between 1841 and 1858.

Many native oaks were logged at that time for lumber, and cottonwood trees were planted where they had grown.

Let’s return to the early 1800s. By this time most of the Native Americans had been gathered into the missions, where many of them died. The largest landholder in this area was the Peralta family. The Spanish governor of Alta California had granted Don Luis Peralta (1759-1851) 44,688 acres of land from San Leandro Creek to El Cerrito Creek—most of San Leandro, Berkeley, Oakland and Albany.

Don Luis Peralta did not himself live on that land; when he was 83, he divided it among his four sons: Ygnacio, Antonio, Vicente, and Domingo. They cleared some of the land into pastures, raised cattle, introduced and farmed some food crops, with seeds brought from Spain and Mexico, for their families and servants, but they were primarily interested not in farming, but in selling cattle hides, which were worth more than beef.

Gloria Cooper in her essay “Trees and Flowers” (Phil McArdle, ed., Exactly Opposite the Golden Gate: Essays on Berkeley History 1845-1945), writes that the Spanish ranchers were the first to introduce plants from other countries and even from other continents. They planted lemon seeds from Spain; petunias, nasturtiums, and begonias from South America, and marigolds and cherry trees from Mexico. 

By the mid 1840s, settlers, mostly from Europe and other parts of the United States were flooding into what is now Alameda County, either buying land from the Peraltas, or squatting to lay illegal claim to land they wanted to farm.

In those early days, before and during the Gold Rush, hordes of mosquitoes (and fleas) infested the wetlands, and made would-be farmers miserable. By this time many native plants and trees had already disappeared as the settlers cut  down the oaks and even used weed killer on native grasslands to create farms and roads.

Nobody at that time, even experts in horticulture, seemed to realize how removing so much of the native vegetation might affect the ecology. (There were some conservation efforts in the early 1900s and even earlier, but the California Native Plant Society was not organized until the 1960s.)

In Great Britain and other European countries, from the mid 1700s up to World War I, a great number of botanists and horticulturists eagerly  collected plants from other continents to try them out in gardens at home. They brought back from America shiploads of “exotic” plants.

But to the  early settlers of Oakland and Berkeley, the existing plant species seemed uninteresting. Perhaps it is human nature: they prized plants and trees from far-off places.

  

As Kenneth I. Pettitt writes in Å Berkeley Åntebellum, about the pioneers who settled in the Elmwood, “They wanted to get back to nature but were not the sort to preserve the original environment. They brought with them trees and flowers in a bewildering array to the empty, sloping plains. . .” Many of the early settlers came from the East Coast, and they were used to towns surrounded by forests, and houses shaded by trees. They tried to replicate that environment, particularly in Berkeley.

In 1867, more than 1000 euc trees were planted on the hillside behind what is now the Clark Kerr campus dormitories. UC Berkeley at that time actively promoted the planting of eucalyptus trees.

Photos of the early UC campus show young trees, mostly eucalyptus, growing in the hills.

An inventor named Downie (no first name given) discovered that an extract from eucalyptus leaves dissolved rust. This was an important product used in steam boilers throughout the country. In 1888, Downie’s factory in Trestle Glen is said to have produced 45,000 gallons monthly of the anti-rust extract (Beth Bagwell’s Oakland: The Story of a City).

In the 1880s the Judson Dynamite and Powder Company planted a large eucalyptus grove on Albany Hill to muffle the sound of dynamite blasts.  Around this time, trees, including eucs, were planted to alleviate the problem of recurring grass fires that would sweep down from the hills in late summer when the tall grass became dry and yellow. As the trees grew tall, they provided shade and prevented grass from growing under them.  

Two renowned real estate tycoons planted thousands of eucalyptus trees in the hills: Frank C. Havens, a wealthy attorney, and his partner in the Realty Syndicate, Francis Marion “Borax” Smith. Havens and Smith hoped to fund their real estate ventures by starting eucalyptus trees in plant nurseries, transplanting them in long rows, and cutting them down for lumber after a few years.

Havens planted 14 miles of eucalyptus trees along the ridges and wide paths in the hills. They were (and still are) the best tree to use for windbreaks. Havens also planted eucalyptus trees to mark future roads and lot boundaries.

They expected that the hardwood eucalyptus could be used for making railroad ties, furniture, and  houses. Their plan failed because the wood from the young eucalyptus trees, unlike wood in older, bigger trees in Australia, was not suitable for commercial use.

Many investors, including Joaquin Miller and Jack London, lost money from speculating in eucalyptus logging. Even after losing a fortune, Joaquin Miller reportedly planted more than 75,000 trees (mostly redwoods and eucalyptus) on 70 acres around his house in the Oakland Hills. After his death, Oakland bought the land; it later became Joaquin Miller Park.

Frederick Law Olmsted, an environmentalist and landscape designer who had designed New York’s Central park and 39 other parks in the United States, as well as developing a plan for Stanford University, was a friend of the founders of UC Berkeley.  Many of his ideas for the “beautification of Berkeley” were adopted.

According to George Pettitt in Berkeley, The Town and Gown of It, Olmsted stressed the need to plant an assortment of trees to “diminish the dazzle of sunlight on yellow hills.”

Havens and Borax Smith began building the Claremont Hotel in 1905. They stopped construction for a few years because of a financial panic; the

Claremont, which is in Oakland, not Berkeley, was opened in 1915.

Havens and Smith also built the Key Route streetcar system. One important use for the streetcars was to take building materials as close as they could get to construction sites. From the end of the streetcar line at the Claremont, horses dragged wood for houses up into the hills.

Several of the old houses in the Berkeley part of Alvarado Road date from the early 1900s. The first two houses in these hills that eventually became Oakland were built on Eucalyptus Path around 1907. A descendant (who now lives on Siler Place) of that house builder told me that when his great grandfather built the two houses at about the middle of Eucalyptus Path, the trail was already lined on both sides with eucalyptus trees.

After UC’s Botanical Garden opened between 1919 and 1926, homeowners in Berkeley bought exotic trees and plants from all over the world and planted them in their gardens and in the hills.

Some popular trees (not native to this area) planted in Berkeley and Oakland were Monterey pines, palm trees from the Canary Islands, tree ferns from New Zealand, ginkgos and elms from China, fig trees and olive trees from the Middle East, magnolias from Asia, acacias from Australia, pepper trees from Chile, weeping willows from the Near East, jacarandas from Brazil and tamarisks from Asia and Africa.

                                                         —Lynn Hovland    

References:

Bagwell, Beth, Oakland: The Story of a City, Presidio Press, Novato, California, 1982.

Keator, Glenn, Introduction to Trees of the San Francisco Bay Region, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002. (An excellent guide to native and non-native trees.)

McArdle, Phil, ed., Exactly Opposite the Golden Gate: Essays on Berkeley History 1845-1945, Berkeley Historical Society, 1983.

Margolin, Malcolm, The Ohlone Way, Heyday Books, Berkeley, California, 1978.

Pettitt, George A. Berkeley, the Town and Gown of It, Howell-North Books, Berkeley, California, 1973.

Pettitt, Kenneth I., A Berkeley Antebellum, Berkeley, California, 2000.

Rogers, Phila, “Natural and Cultural History of Strawberry Canyon,” on the Save Strawberry Canyon website:

http://www.savestrawberrycanyon.org/history.html

(Don’t miss reading this beautifully written essay.)

Saunders, Charles Francis, With the Flowers and Trees of California, Robert M. McBride & Company, New York, 1923.

Tudge, Colin, The Tree, Crown Publishers, New York, 2006.

Weber, David, Oakland: Hub of the West, Continental Heritage Press, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1981.

WPA publication, Berkeley, the First Seventy-Five Years, Gillick Press, 1941. (Available online.)

Willes, Burl, Ed., Picturing Berkeley: A Postcard History, Berkeley Historical Society, Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, 2002. (Contains many historic postcards and is also a well-written history of postcards and the city of Berkeley. Our photo of the Claremont Hotel postcard does not do justice to the colors in the same postcard that is printed on page 146 of the book.)