Insurance

Last week, the Marin Open Space District created a "shaded" fuel break along a fire road in French Ranch. They chipped and bucked a lot of trees near the road, some of which had fallen during winter storms. They took out a good number of trees in the lower grassland, before you reach the forest. It feels a lot more open and sunny now. Forest management isn't always pretty, but in a couple of years things grow back and look a lot better. And the long-term context is that over the last 40 years (with no grazing, no fires, and warmer temperatures) the woody vegetation is spreading, slowly converting the grassland to coyotebush and Douglas-fir forest. Perhaps the management goal is to revert these transitioning slopes back to a grassland? Or more likely, with work only occurring along the road, it is to give vehicles more room and safety during a wildfire.

But now imagine someone cutting down your favorite shade tree in your local park. The loss of individual shade trees on the steep hot sunny hike up to ridgetop forest makes this hike less accessible to kids and elderly and less pleasant for everyone. On a recent hike with my daughter and her friend, they were tired and we stopped to rest at one of these missing trees before heading back down. Doing that hike today would be a hotter and sunnier and less-pleasant experience.

February (left) and July (right) photos show the loss of 25-year-old shade trees on a hot south-facing slope.

A young solitary Pacific Madrone (Arbutus menziesii) was cut down in a Marin Open Space Preserve last week.

It has the feel of the kind of work that would be quickly done ahead of an advancing wildfire. In that situation, the loss of these trees might be more acceptable--a have-to, a lesser of two evils. Doing the work ahead of time is like buying insurance--you might need it, you might not, but you do it just in case because it is cheaper than waiting. In this case, cutting the fuel break ahead of time is more effective and better manages firefighting resources compared to waiting until a fire actually starts. 

But the challenge is managing the risk of low-likelihood but high-impact events with ongoing ordinary needs and concerns. We see this risk calculation everywhere, and different people disagree on how much risk is acceptable and how much risk mitigation is necessary, especially if it impacts other values.

With natural hazards (floods, fires, earthquakes, etc.), the trade-off is usually more cost and less development in order to keep people safer. That is usually a good trade off and smart planning--unfortunately we have already permitted development in areas that should never have been developed and now are costly to protect or retreat from.

In some cases, increased development or habitat destruction is associated with risk-management. Droughts, floods, and fires can all be dealt with by throwing more money at building structures (dams, levees, fire breaks) that protect development that perhaps shouldn't be there if we had smart planning from the beginning.

This is California's dilemma--protect habitat and manage our retreat from high-hazard areas, or throw money at the problem and protect what we've already built at great cost to our treasury and environment.

In many cases, there are multiple paths forward, with a variety of alternatives available if the choice is to protect development instead of retreat. Multi-benefit solutions (like expanded floodplains and groundwater recharge) are often cheaper and more environmentally friendly and create less risk and solve other problems compared to unimaginative twentieth-century approaches (like bigger dams and levees).

The Tuolumne River is a good example. San Francisco is like a grocery store owner starving one of their children so that they can pay for insurance and sell more food. In this case, the dammed and diverted Tuolumne River, which only gets 27% of its water (in some years as little as 8%) is the starving child, the insurance is the water hoarded in Hetch Hetchy reservoir (to manage an unlikely 8.5-year drought). And water is sold to the BAWSCA member agencies while the Tuolumne River starves.

San Francisco needs to realize that the Tuolumne River is one of its kids. You'd never do this to your own child. You'd sell less food or buy less insurance instead of starving your kid. The BAWSCA agencies can invest in water recycling and become more self sufficient. Expanding water conservation (stretching resources to serve more people) is healthier for everyone, including the planet.

Different interpretations of acceptable risk will always be challenging for managers--especially when we are already overextended in a changing climate. Fire safety is sometimes a trade-off between fuel reduction and habitat. Giant solar farms in the desert (the kind of solar that big business prefers over rooftops and parking lots) are being built at a rapid pace, destroying habitat in the name of climate change mitigation. Rivers and lakes and estuaries are starved of water so that cities and agribusiness can live more comfortably through long droughts.

But we don't need to do things this way. Habitat and biodiversity are declining, and you don't want to make that worse just to have more insurance that you may not even need. Our adaptation and mitigation measures should put habitat first, protecting basic needs of ecosystems. We are creative people--we can work around those needs. We should invest in less-expensive environmentally-friendly alternative solutions before going to the costly more-destructive ones.

Honorable Mention

 About thirty years ago, when I was at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, I took an environmental law class. At the end of the class we had to write a brief and present it to a panel of volunteer judges in a real courtroom. The judges awarded students first, second, third place for the best briefs, and I had an honorable mention--for being clever.

The case we had to argue was a real one from our environmental law book--a developer had proposed a housing development in the Central Valley, and a raptor center had challenged it on various environmental and CEQA grounds. Our instructor was also clever--he assigned which side of the case we were to argue based on our opposite inclinations. Since I probably exhibited signs of populism, caring about good governance, and prioritizing environmental and people protection over developers making money at public expense, I was assigned the developer's side of the case to argue.

This put me in a difficult position. In a real job, I just would have rejected it--frankly, I felt the developer's case sucked. I saw no way to win, or even argue that side with a straight face. But as a student, I couldn't say no. I had to do it somehow.

Then I had an idea.

Storm Totals, Storm Damage, Power Outages, Falling Trees, and Moving Logs

January 2023 will go down in the record books as one of the stormiest, snowiest, and rainiest months for many parts of California. As of January 16th, San Geronimo Valley had received 19 inches of rain--making it our second-wettest January in the last decade (after 2017). In addition, the wind, landslide, and flood damage has been widespread. And the month is only half over. Much of that was packed into the first 11 days.

The story starts in December, after a dry October-November start to the 2023 water year (following 3 dry years). Here in San Geronimo Valley, I measured 16.59 inches of rain in December, at 240% of average, the wettest December in 8 years and second-wettest in the last decade.

Logs began moving in San Geronimo Creek in early December, when a series of storms brought rare lightning and thunder, and enough rain to get San Geronimo Creek up to 200 cfs. This was not a large flow, but trees fell in the creek and rafted down to an engineered logjam that was placed in the creek in 2020. An October 2021 storm that peaked at 2,500 cfs had already moved around the logs connected to boulders in this logjam--logs that were designed to stay in place. Surprisingly, a log that didn't move in 2021 was scooted several feet downstream by the 660 cfs flow on December 27th, 2022. It stopped when the boulder it was anchored to bumped up against another log embedded in the creekbed.

Note the moving log bolted to a boulder at the lower right corner of the
photos on December 10th (left) and December 28th (right).

Two storms at the end of December were impressive. The one on the 27th dropped half-an-inch of rain an hour for six hours. Once again there was rare lightning and thunder. Read about "snow level bending" as freezing levels fluctuated near Lake Tahoe. Twenty-two foot waves towered along the coast.

On December 26th, 2022, seventeen-foot waves were oversteepened
and trailing banners of spray because of the east wind. They foreshadowed
the 22-foot waves that were forecasted on the 27th.

Inhabiting a fire-adapted land

The land used to be inhabited. People lived some or all of the year in almost every place in California, with exceptions of extreme high elevations and extreme desert. This made tending the land feasible--over 4 million acres could be burned each year easily, in areas where people were intimately familiar with the vegetation and weather, around people's homes, without traveling long distances to conduct the burns. Networks of trails--dense in inhabited places--would have been natural fire breaks under these conditions.

Today, much of the land is uninhabited, except temporarily by rangers and recreationists. The inhabited landscape has shrunk to a small fraction of California, and even there, outside of Southern California chaparral ecosystems where fire frequency has increased, most burning has been suppressed. So we have a build up of fuels in forests, a takeover of grasslands by non-native invasive weeds, and general ecosystem degradation.

Simply increasing the acreage burned each year would be a feasible approach to solving this problem if the land was still inhabited. But it is not. So people unfamiliar with the land (topography, vegetation, weather) must travel long distances to conduct controlled burns. This model is expensive, inefficient, and not scalable to the acreages that need to be burned each year--estimated to be over 4 million acres that burned in pre-European times and that is a sustainable level for maintaining California's ecosystems with a natural fire regime, and lessening the likelihood of catastrophic fires.

In addition, large areas of federal public land, formerly inhabited by Indians or patrolled by rangers, have been defunded by Congress year after year to the point where it is rare to see a ranger. The uninformed and uneducated public trashes these lands without guidance or oversight. And the neglected lands have a fire recurrence and intensity that is out of whack and getting wackier.

Hiring more rangers who actually manage and live and camp on the land is one way to solve this problem. Inviting indigenous people to live on and manage land is another. Both approaches should be used to get our public--and private--lands back in balance.

My great-grandmother was born in Mazatlan

Going through old papers, we had another family history breakthrough. Enough new information to make me want to revise former posts (see To Los Angeles in the 1840s), but I'll let them stand for now and put all the updates here.

A long-standing mystery has been where (and under what circumstances) was my great-grandmother born, and how and when did she get to L.A. We thought the Homestead Blog had answered the question August 24, 2019, when it stated:

"According to a genealogical source, the Bilderrains were living in Mulegé, Baja California, now a town of about 4,000 on the east coast of the peninsula along the Bay of California.  Based on somewhat conflicting census records (how many of these aren’t?), it appears that Ygnacio Bilderrain and his wife María Encarnación Martinez migrated to Los Angeles about 1847 or 1848 (a 1900 census listing for their son, Jesús, recorded his arrival in the area in 1846).

In the 1850 and 1860 censuses, there is no listed occupation for Ygnacio, so, whether he came north with some means is not known, but the family occupied the adobe house shown in the photograph and there were at least seven children.  Jesús, the eldest, and brother Guillermo and sisters Eduarda and Domitia, were all born in Baja, while three boys, Andrés, Refugio and Ygnacio, and a girl, Guadalupe, were born in Los Angeles."

This was fantastic information, pushing our knowledge forward (or more accurately, back). Mulege, an oasis near a desert sea, is a pretty cool place to have ancestors from--I spent an afternoon and a night near there and have fond memories of that area. So for about three years now we've assumed our great-grandmother Domitila was born in Baja.

Well, it turns out she was born in Mazatlan on January 1st, 1845 while the family was on a business trip. According to a "Vital Statistics and Historical Record" filled out on March 5th, 1947 by my dad's aunt, Lillian Caroline Orr:

"Father was of German descent. Came with his brother to California in their youth, from Ohio during the Gold Rush. Both located in Los Angeles in 1850 where my father and mother were married June 11, 1868. Mother was of Spanish descent, born Jan. 1st, 1845 at Mazatlan, Mexico while her father was on a journey with his wife and children and a stock or [sic] merchandise from Mexico to Los Angeles where in due course they established their home and business. Mother died in Los Angeles in 1942."

Henry Starr-Domatilda Bildarrain marriage license
and certificate, June 11, 1868, Los Angeles, CA.
My great-grandmother died on the
74th anniversary of her wedding at age 97. 

As always, new information raises new questions. What was her father's business, and what merchandise was he bringing from Mazatlan to L.A. on January 1st, 1845? Why were they living in Mulege and why did they relocate to L.A. just as the U.S. began to invade California? Gold was first discovered in California in 1842, and the U.S. declared war on Mexico in May 1846, so there were a lot of reasons to migrate (or not migrate) in the late 1840s.

On a side note, Aunt Lillian's vital record also records very interesting historical information about her late husband, Oscar Owen Orr:

"...at the time of our marriage my husband was associated with the Banning Company and the Catalina Island Company in Los Angeles, Calif, and so continued until February 1903, when he entered the business of Life Insurance. From July 1907 to February 1939 he was Gneral Agent for the Prudential Insurance of American first at Denver (1907 to 1910) and then at San Francisco from 1910 to 1939."

The house on Hobart St. in L.A. where my dad lived with his mom, aunts, uncle, and his grandma Domitila Bilderrain during her last decades.

The IRS really could make this easier on us

It usually is a simple process to file our federal taxes each year, copying more or less what we did the previous year. Free Fillable Forms generally works well, but it is always apparent that the instructions are written from the point of view of the IRS and not with the audience in mind. This year, I started running into confusing things right away--kind of ridiculous no one noticed and fixed these problems--and I decided to keep track here of all the confusion and how much extra time it took. 

Bob's Trees

About six years ago, I wrote a blog post called "Bob's Trees," after one day, my neighbor Bob told me about the trees near his house. He had lived in that house for a long time, and passed away on November 8th, 2015, after living close to 100 years.

Unfortunately, as I tried to upload a photo of a ginko leaf, the browser crashed and the entire blog post was lost.

Since then, I had always hoped that I'd remember any of the stories enough to write them down, but now six years later, I'm pretty sure I won't.

But the trees are so amazing, especially in autumn, and I want to tell their story. The story of the ginko, in front of the house that Bob said used to have a truck regularly parked on the front lawn/steps. The story of the Japanese maples. The story of the birch. But I don't remember.

What I do remember slightly are his stories of working at a bank, and of San Quentin (where his dad may have worked?). I remember they were often humorous, at times offensive or inappropriate, but interesting stories that only a 96-year old can get away with telling. Even those stories are now lost--surprising details I was sure I'd remember are now faded--something about the trunk of a car and San Quentin. Because I stopped to listen, and he took the time to share, I felt almost a responsibility to share the remarkable stories.

So I saved this draft blog post with a few notes, and every time I scroll down far enough to see it, I think I'll finally write something about Bob's Trees. Well, this is it.

A note I made here about a dumpster--I don't remember the story I wanted to tell when I wrote the abrupt note six years ago, but after Bob died, his house was so full of unwanted stuff that a dumpster sat out front for a while, and free books sat on shelves in front of his house until the winter rains finally ended the drought and soaked the books. There was probably something really interesting or funny about the dumpster, but then I had a child and four years of new daddy brain plus two years of pandemic brain. I've been unearthing pre-pandemic layers in piles of paper, and it is striking how unfiled papers mimic geologic strata--and how quickly two years can go by, and be buried by more current matters. Like unraked ginko leaves in autumn covering organic material from last year's leaves.