The Coasts of California, ecological apocalypse, & evolution

Written & illustrated by Obi Kaufmann

639 pages
$55.00 from HeydayBooks.com 

Yes,  The Coasts of California would make an excellent holiday season gift for anyone interested in nature,  ecology, hiking,  or just in California generally,  if only by reason of living there and wanting to understand the habitat and the socio-economic and political issues associated with it.

And now what’s in The Coasts of California,  beginning with the backstory.

Longtime friend Steve Wasserman,  now president of the nonprofit publishing company Heyday Books in Berkeley,  California,  publisher of The Coasts of California,  has been giving me things to think about since 1964,  when we landed a few desks away from each other in Miss Elizabeth Laurens’ English class at Garfield Junior High School in Berkeley,  long since renamed Martin Luther King Junior High.

Steve Wasserman.
(Facebook photo)

Responding from the back of the class

Steve sat in the front row,  was always bright and lively,  and was perceived as Miss Laurens’ favorite.  I sat in a back row,  by the window,  and may actually have been Miss Laurens’ favorite despite often daydreaming and class clowning.

After Steve spoke,  typically first in class discussions,  Miss Laurens would often wake me up to respond,  knowing that I would at least have read the assignment we were supposed to talk about.

Steve and I,  to Miss Laurens’ delight,  turned the class into a debating society focused on,  among others,  Edgar Allen Poe,  Jack London,  and Henry David Thoreau.  Steve would precociously describe their roles relevant to Marxist class struggle;  I would describe their views of animals.

Had Coasts of California author Obi Kaufmann been there,  he might have reconciled our perspectives.

What else was going on in Berkeley in 1964.
(U.C. Berkeley library photo)

Learning ecological evolution from the neighborhood

Miss Laurens had been the youngest teacher in Berkeley when hired,  at age 18,  to teach at the original Garfield Junior High School,  several blocks east,  which had been one of the first junior high schools in in the U.S.

That building,  directly across the street from Steve’s parents’ apartment,  was by our time the administration building for the entire Berkeley school system,  and is now the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay.

The evolution of the building,  the neighborhood,  and Miss Laurens herself all influenced my own understanding and appreciation of ecology much more profoundly than I ever realized until many decades later.

Remembered our fathers

My father grew up at three different addresses in the same neighborhood;  my mother lived right around the corner from Steve’s parents’ apartment,  before my parents were married;  my grandmother lived kitty-corner across an intersection from her;  my family from 1955 to 1995 lived only four blocks away.

Miss Laurens had taught my father,  and the fathers of at least two of our other classmates,  also residents of the neighborhood.  She remembered our fathers,  sometimes to our embarrassment,  much better than they remembered her.

Miss Laurens,  moreover,  had taught them from most of the same battered textbooks we used,  donated generations earlier by the Oakland-based Edith Latham Foundation for the Promotion of Humane Education,  as rubber stamps inside the front covers reminded us.

My Friend Flicka & My Side of the Mountain

These books,  with two additions substituted for older books which had fallen apart,  the 1941 novel My Friend Flicka,  by Mary O’Hara,   and the 1960 novel My Side of the Mountain,  by Jean Craighead George,  constituted the last remnant of the former California humane curriculum,  an alternative reading list that the young Miss Laurens had enthusiastically embraced in approximately her tenth year of teaching.

Miss Laurens determinedly continued to teach that curriculum,  decades after it was officially forgotten,  until her forced retirement at age 68,  her fiftieth year,  after which her beloved old books were burned in the Garfield incinerator.

Seldom in all these years since Miss Laurens’ class has Steve given me more to think about,  and never before in one package,  than in his recent gift of The Coasts of California,  a nature atlas that first reviews the entire ecology and geology of coastal California,  over 250 pages illustrated by Obi Kaufmann’s watercolors,  then meanders south for 300 pages and many more watercolors along the planned route of the California Coastal Trail,  still in development.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

The California Coastal Trail

A selection of those watercolors also illustrates this review.

The California Coastal Trail ,  when complete,  and only half of it is,  will run from the Oregon border to the Mexican border.

The Coasts of California appears to build upon and perhaps partially parallel two previous Kaufmann books,  The Forests of California and The California Field Atlas,  but Kaufmann himself draws significant distinctions between his approach in those volumes and his approach in The Coasts of California,  which is at once more encyclopedic and less narrowly focused.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

Electrical blackout

I happened to have the opportunity to read The Coasts of California,  from cover to cover,  almost entirely within the span of a four-day electrical blackout caused by high winds and heavy rainfall (still underway at this posting) that severely restricted my ability to do much of anything else.

The Coasts of California, however,  appears to have been neither written nor intended to be read as a single continuous narrative.  It is at least half a field guide,  even though Kaufmann insists it is not a field guide,  consisting of many independent sections that the author expects readers to consult when visiting particular habitats,  probably never to be read as a whole by most users.

The Coasts of California is also at least half a geographical atlas,  even though Kaufmann differentiates it from a road atlas,  including frequent maps and lists on almost every page of what one might see along each 20-to-40-mile California Coastal Trail segment.

More than half of the 639-page typeset text may be lists and footnotes.

Beth & Merritt at Berkeley Rose Garden,  2015.  (Geoff Geiger photo.)

Familiar landscapes & seascapes

The California Coastal Trail route,  though not the trail itself,  is thoroughly familiar to me.  My family drove most of it repeatedly during the 1960s for various reasons;  I have also driven most of it several times as an adult,  and Beth and I have together covered much of the northern half,  from Oregon to San Francisco Bay,  approximately every other year in our eight-plus years together,  most recently less than two months ago.

As a whole,  therefore,  much of The Coasts of California was for me a detailed review of  familiar landscapes and seacapes,  with every now and then an unfamiliar observation or insight,  sometimes a familiar but possibly fallacious argument,  and occasionally an instance of author Obi Kaufmann directly––if unwittingly––contradicting himself from one page to the next,  likely because chapters were not written consecutively.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

“The voice of the naturalist,  the ecologist,  and the philosopher”

Kaufmann defines his approach most succinctly on page 125:

“The study of habitat employs the voice of the naturalist,  the ecologist,  and the philosopher,”  all of which describe Kaufmann himself,  unfortunately omitting the artist.

“The naturalist is interested in studying the patterns of wildlife associations and how the mosaic of biogeography plays out across a given landscape.

“The ecologist is interested in the patterns of relationships between living and nonliving forces and what trends are present to influence a habitat’s character.

“And the philosopher is interested in the ethics of categorization beyond scientific application,  and questions the approach of analysis toward the natural world,  when perhaps a synthesis of elements might reveal greater intrinsic value.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufman.

“Nature always wins”

“The philosopher points out that if conservation,  mediation,  and restoration of the whole system is the goal,  why would dividing it up,  a process that leads to an incorrect assumption about the interconnected holism of life itself,  lead to anything but a fragmented view of what a habitat needs?”

Inconsistencies in Kaufmann’s contentions occur primarily when Kaufmann recites conventional environmental belief without applying his own admonition about incorrect assumptions.

For example,  Kaufmann on page 194 writes,  “Nature always wins.  The way we join in this victory is to work at keeping all the pieces on the board,  to help as many species as possible remain in their respective niches.”

The fatal flaw in this platitude is that successful species do not “remain in their respective niches.”  Instead,  those species diversify through evolution to expand into new and different niches,  leaving descendants who often thrive for many millions of years after their original niches disappeared.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

The fallacy of “restoration biology”

It is the height of hubris for humanity,  informed by a bare few centuries of scientific study,  to decide that any species should have as a permanent and exclusive niche the place where we happen to have found it.  Often,  indeed,  the niche where we find an endangered species is not the ideal niche for that species,  but is rather the last remnant of habitat where it happens to have survived,  isolated from more adaptive competition.

The fallacy of “restoration biology,”  including many California coastal projects that Kaufmann describes in passing,  is that it presumes to know what “belongs” and what does not belong in any given habitat,  frequently contradicting what nature is already in the process of deciding through natural selection.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

Natural selection

Natural selection occurs through the continual process of species introduction and challenge to the status quo.  Usually established species thrive sufficiently to repel introduced threats,  but if the waves,  weather,  climate change,  and the arrival of other species have sufficiently altered the habitat,  “non-native” species may prove to be better adapted to the habitat niche than those that evolved there long ago,  under vastly different conditions.

Under those circumstances,  intervening on behalf of the “native” over the “non-native” tends to be fighting evolution,  foredoomed to failure no matter how much ruthless cruelty is exercised against the purported invader.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

Contradicted by nature

Kaufmann cites on page 391 an instance of human presumption in “restoration” being contradicted by nature.

After a page of discussion of how oil drilling and especially catastrophic oil spills have affected the Santa Barbara channel,   Kaufmann observes that,  “Despite the threat of new [oil drilling] platforms,  six of the now more than two dozen platforms off the California coast are scheduled for decommission or have already been decommissioned.

“What should be a celebration presents us with a new conundrum.  Over the past sixty years that these platforms have been in place,  artificial reefs have developed around their bases and support several hundred species of fish and invertebrates.”

Nature,  in short,  is adapting successfully to the changed conditions,  and for humans to interfere in the name of habitat “restoration” would be the height of ecological arrogance.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

“Waste” is exterminating wildlife to “save nature”

Moving on to the Channel Islands,  where more than half a century of “restoration” projects meant to exterminate “non-native” species have wrought havoc on probably more species than ever were “native” in the first place,  Kaufmann on page 424 observes that,  “Despite so much waste and so much extinction,  the trend in the twenty-first century is toward restoration…Native plants are being managed to again dominate the landscape…Endangered species are rebounding,  and the damage of invasive species in the ecosystem is actively mitigated.”

Think that through.

Humans may “waste” this and that,  in the sense of having no perceived need for whatever remains after human usage,  but nature “wastes” nothing.  Even the harshest environments are gradually transformed into first a habitat for hardy micro-organisms,  and then gradually become an ever richer habitat,  for ever more abundant biodiversity.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

“Managing” & “dominating”

“Extinction,”  though much discussed,  usually in the context of a purported “extinction crisis,”  is so rarely actually observed and documented that new species discoveries each year far exceed presumed extinctions,  and most presumed extinctions,  especially of animals and plants other than “charismatic megafauna,”  are followed by re-discoveries.

Often the “re-discovered” species are in habitat they were not previously known to occupy,  where they might have been considered “invasive” if somewhat more abundant.

Further,  contemplate the hubris embodied in the phrase that “Native plants are being managed to again dominate the landscape.”

The very concept of “nature” contradicts the notions of management and dominance.  “Managing” and “dominating” are what humans do,  often to the extreme detriment of natural landscapes,  as Kaufmann often notes on other pages.

Darwin vs. the Garden of Eden

Finally,  the idea that “invasive species” do “damage” to “the ecosystem” is a perspective reflecting the view prevalent before Charles Darwin that God created a perfect Garden of Eden,  destroyed by the consequences of human sin.

A more biologically accurate description of “invasive species” is “adaptive species,”  and of the alleged damage resulting from their presence is simply “change,”  albeit often change of sorts that many humans do not welcome.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

“Island ecology”

Kaufmann on page 429 appears to channel the “island ecology” notions of the late author and entomologist E.O. Wilson,  who popularized medieval theology as a new religion that might be termed “ecologism.”

But there is a subtle but significant difference.  Writes Kaufmann,  “The biogeography of all islands is defined by isolation,  the ability of colonizing species to reach them,  and the resources present on those islands to maintain populations of species already present.”

Note that what Wilson and Kaufmann himself define in other passages as “invasive species” are in this passage much more accurately defined as “colonizing species,”  which may establish themselves,  or may not,  and if successful colonists,  contribute to future biodiversity.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufman.

“The legacy of 20th century ideology”

Observes Kaufmann on page 460,   “The legacy of twentieth century ideology holds enormous sway over twenty-first century conservation policy.  Sequestering landscapes as parkland,  enacting restrictive legislation to address industrial pollution,  relying on one species to represent a network of endangered life,  and the hubristic policies of wildfire suppression are four hallmarks of this ideology that began with good intentions but may well be served by an upgrade.”

In this respect Kaufmann as ecological philosopher is well ahead of the Wilsonians and disciples of older environmental theories such as hunter/conservationism,  which evolved out of the medieval practice of gamekeeping.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

Reprising Rousseau

But Kaufmann’s very next sentence takes a partial wrong turn,  echoed at greater length in many other chapters of The Coasts of California,  which conflate ideas about political,  economic,  and social justice with processes of evolution that are indifferent toward what humans think and do.

“Through the incorporation of new scientific findings and a growing respect for the wise application of indigenous knowledge systems,”  Kaufmann asserts,  “many of the shortcomings of these iconic strategies are now blatant.”

The insertion into this sentence and thought process of the phrase “wise application of indigenous knowledge systems” echoes,  however unawares,  the notion of the “noble savage” espoused early in the European intellectual reaction to the Industrial Revolution by the French romanticist Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

Trapping beavers & growing tobacco

To be sure,  indigenous knowledge of wildlife,  plants,  and weather has often been egregiously and harmfully overlooked by colonizers and the descendants of colonizers,  except where money can be made by using indigenous knowledge to,  for instance,  trap beavers to the verge of extinction and grow tobacco.

At the same time,  Kaufmann (like many of his sources) appears to hugely under-appreciate the extent to which indigenous peoples,  including indigenous Californians,  continually re-engineered their habitat to the extent of their technological ability.

Excavating the shell mounds that formerly lined the East Bay shores of San Francisco Bay,  to cite only one example,  has revealed a succession of species abundance and disappearance that reflects improvements in the construction of boats,  nets,  weirs,  digging technique,  and the ability to break shells.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

Mysterious stone walls & oak circles

Mysterious stone walls that run up and down the Berkeley hills and are found as far south as the nearest hills to the southern end of San Francisco Bay are currently thought to have been huge funnels for corralling deer,  elk,  and pronghorn,  similar to some used in parts of the Middle East.

Circular patterns of live oak trees indicating the locations of long vanished villages of acorn-eating indigenous people may have been accidental environmental engineering,  rather than part of a plan to keep acorn crops nearby,  but were transformative nonetheless,  also influencing the abundance and behavior of various wildlife.

If the epoch of indigenous occupation of California appears to have been an epoch of steady-state balanced ecology,  it is only through our own lens of observation from a time when change is more rapid and obvious.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

“The white man sure ruined this country.  It’s turned back to wilderness.”

Meanwhile,  few if any indigenous Californians had the opportunity to follow rivers back to source in the Sierra Nevada mountains,  or to see much of anything else beyond a few days’ walking distance,  let alone to have archaeological knowledge of the past or the overview of their habitat from space.

Respecting what indigenous people did and do know does not mean “indigenous” wisdom is inherently any wiser than that derived from many more sources of information.

On the other hand,  indigenous perspectives are often provocatively different from traditional western belief Kaufmann on page 486 cites  “James Rust,  a Southern Sierra Miwok elder,  [who] saw wilderness as antithetical to traditional stewardship and remarked,  “The white man sure ruined this country.  It’s turned back to wilderness.”

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

Creations of evolution & nature

Rust,  contrary to the doctrine of “Original Sin” that pervades Wilsonian ecologism,  understands that humans and human activity are as much creations of evolution and nature as any other life form,  and that what we do creates habitat for some species,  as in the example of the Santa Barbara oil drilling platforms,  even as it damages and destroys habitat for others.

Asks Kaufmann of rigorously protected wilderness,  on page 487,  “To what extent does our isolation of these places fundamentally prevent them from being healthy and whole?  It can be argued that of all the legislative wisdom and all the land police we have inherited from the twentieth century,  the idea that needs the most attention is the idea of wilderness.”

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

Threats vs. disturbances

Kaufmann goes on to draw,  on page 502,  a useful distinction between ecological threats and ecological disturbances.

“A threat,”  Kaufmann explains,  “is a particular stress on a system that can diminish,  disrupt,  or destroy the normal functioning of that system.  A disturbance is a change agent within an ecosystem that spurs succession,  the course that all living things take through the adaptive cycle of energy conservation,  expenditure,  and release.

“An example of a threat,”  Kaufmann elaborates,  “might be a source of pollution;  a disturbance might be a wildfire that exists within a normalized fire regime.

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

“We’ve gotten good at revolution”

“The difference between a threat and a disturbance is in their outcome,”  Kaufmann offers,  “not in the causal nature of their influence.  A threat can be categorized as a disturbance when the phenomenon (such as fire) doesn’t succeed in destroying the ecosystem past its own ability to repair itself,  because the system has a strategy to deal with the threat and incorporate the threat into its adaptive cycle.”

A further insight,  presented on page 505,  supporting a Darwinian rather than Wilsonian view of habitat change,  is that  “We’ve gotten good at revolution.  We need it.  We thrive not despite but because of the apocalypse.  From the beginning of time,  we have been telling stories about the end of the world.”

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

“Not only useless but unscientific?”

This leads Kaufmann to musing,  on page 513:  “If the fate of humanity is ecologically set,   the question could be asked:  Is what the conservationists and the environmentalists are asking from human society,  to keep growth and resource exploitation in check,  not only useless but unscientific?”

That may not be answerable,  but meanwhile Kaufmann mentions two potentially apocalyptic circumstances that are within our ability to rectify sooner rather than later.

The first,  noted on page 517,  is that,  “Commercial fisheries account for the take of the majority of 200 species within a total count of 350 species of plants and animals harvested near California’s shore.”

Watercolor by Obi Kaufmann.

More good news than bad

The second is that “Map 10:13,”  on page 546,  “describes a situation where,  directed by the runaway positive feedback loops of a warming earth,  California radically transforms:  the Pacific inundates the Central Valley,  the forests desiccate,  the Mediterranean climate and the California Current are destroyed.”

The good news is that California appears to be well ahead of the U.S. as a whole in taking action to slow global warming.

(Beth & Merritt Clifton)

Further good news is that if the Pacific Ocean really does come to inundate the Central Valley,  the net outcome is likely to be more rather than less precipitation over what remains of California,  as more evaporation occurs close to the Sierra Nevada range,  to cool and fall as rain or snow.

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