
TRAIL NOTES
Land Acknowledgement
My childhood home was built in a place that never should have seen suburban development. Real estate interests bought and paved over one of the last idyllic watersheds in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest, and the local environment suffered the negative impacts of that legacy ever after.
As if we had engendered a plague of cosmic proportions from an angry creator, catastrophic wildfires tore through the national forest on our very doorstep with frightening regularity through the years of my youth and up to present day.
What's more - my neighbors will be familiar - is that the fire is only the first hurdle after the event. Even if your home survives, you would be wise to start evaluating the risk of mud slides, debris flows, and flash floods - because these events are what follows if left unmitigated.
The air is so hot and windy that the power grid actually has been proven in court to contribute to causing these wildfires that have become strangely... normal.
I'm told that it didn't used to be this way, and I like to imagine what the place that I grew up in might have looked like before the colonial era. Were there people here? If so, since when? How did they obtain what they needed? What was the impact of that activity on area ecology?
I learned much too recently that I grew up in the wilderness of the native Chumash and Fernandeño Tataviam nations. I would like to acknowledge their history, the land, and my role as a visitor upon it.
Throughout my childhood, I was privileged to learn about the manzanita's smooth bark, how shade is sharp under a live oak, the thrill of canyoneering a seasonal stream, and safe techniques for humanely relocating rattlesnakes. My lifelong connection to this desperately fading wilderness has instilled in me a sense of duty to spend my life in service to the conservation of natural spaces, the preservation of global biodiversity, and the restoration of degraded lands.
June 21, 2022 at 10:00:00 PM