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| Colorado When The Cork Oaks Are In Bloom |
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| As American as Apple Pie! Because apples, cinnamon, and the wheat for the flour crust aren't native either. |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, April 04, 2012. In 2010, the Four Mile Canyon forest fire left a wide swath of blackened earth west of Boulder. The County Bar Association recently and graciously announced a fund for replanting the area to prevent erosion and to get the place back to normal. Entirely gracious, and few would complain. I did. Sorta. I disagree because the trees under consideration were Pondersosa Pine. Which is to say, they're installing a guilty party for the next inevitable holocaust. There are alternatives, and I wondered if they'd been considered. I posted that on the Daily Camera web page devoted to the issue and there was exactly one response, which pointed out that Ponderosa was the native flora and so, duh, that was the reason. I understand, but Pine trees are pretty much designed to burn, and to burn in nature. Lodgepole pine trees don't even germinate till a fire putters by; it's in their dna. But the lovely evergreens of the Colorado mountains were here when Colorado was settled, and so that's that. Myself, I refuse to staple nature to a subjective point in time when the first Presbyterians saw Boulder and say that snapshot alone defines its primeval nature and that's how it should stay. Some people given to supporting nature really are just selfishly trying to preserve the nature of their childhood, which may in fact have not been nature as, say the first humans saw it, the first Indians. We now know that Indians, intentionally and not, terra-formed the Americas long before the Columbian Exchange began. They burned forests to plant, but they had no ability to stop the fire once in sap laden trees and tall dry grass. As such, the Great Plains themselves might be viewed as human made, because the forests grow back quickly whenever they are allowed since the fires ended. This doesn't blend with white Christian America's mythology, which is that God created and preserved the land since Hector was a pup just for them and God's Country, Freedom's Home, ourselves. And to honor god and ourselves, we should keep it pretty much that way. Ponderosa Pine are native, so duh.  Most people have no idea what's actually native and what is not. That's not surprising. People today go ape over the loss of honey bees and how unnatural it would be if our pesticides and hormones and flyswatters killed them off because how will anything grow in America without honey bees pollinating the plants? But honey bees are not only alien to Colorado, they're alien to the entire western hemisphere and came from Europe. Native Americans viewed them as the voice of doom when they encountered them, because they were the stigmata of the European. They were the early lion fish, the early kudzu. When does something become native? When the first Americans saw it, or the first white man, or just the bonker decisions of olde women today trying to duplicate the landscape of their childhood? They aren't allowing nature to adapt because it offends them. Not every - and in fact, very few - invasive species are as awful as made out. What many people consider 'native' around the world are the results of the Columbian exchange only 500 years in the past and totally because of man. Do we want to list apples, oranges, wheat, lettuce and onions as alien nuisance? They're not native. No. We just pretend they're native because we like them. As American as apple pie. But apple pie is not American at all, and constructed from apples and wheat flour and cinnamon and nuts alien to this Hemisphere. So, if we and Nature can survive the horror of apple trees, could we in Boulder survive the cork oak tree? That's an actual acorn producing oak that is evergreen all year and has very thick bark that is fire resistant, and this atop the issue that deciduous trees are far more fire resistant than pines and spruce. It's from the mountains of southwestern Europe. If this tree could grow in Four Mile Canyon, would it make much of an aesthetic difference at distance and would it not provide some protection against wind driven forest fires that seem to be our future? And maybe there are far better choices. Bringing in different and not native trees is not unleashing kudzu or brown snakes or Texans: oak trees are relatively slow growing, don't drink booze, are rarely poisonous, and carry no weapons. And I think replanting the sap torches west of town just out of fake concern for native flora is in the long term a major error. Canting, unthinking hypocrisy is always a major error. |
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