life on the edge

Spring's Eternal

Keith K. Howell

Wildflowers, native California wildflowers, dominate these pages. California's native plants have become the preoccupation of Judith Larner Lowry, who is profiled by Jerry Emory in "Going Native in the Garden." For Lowry though, it is not just, or even primarily, the showboating flowers of spring that she champions. To her, and a growing number of other Californians, the native plants are always beautiful, whether brightly colored, green, or muted brown. North Table Mountain, just north of Oroville, was a dull brown when author David Lukas hiked across its mesa last winter, but you might never know from the effusion of flowers that become magnets for visitors through the spring months.

Some of the most stunning images in this issue display the magical profusion of color that followed last year's El Niño watering and drew photographer Jeff Foott to the California desert. The 1998 bloom–pending global warming–was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Nine years ago, a special "Desert" issue of Pacific Discovery, the precursor to California Wild, discussed the possible ramifications of the proposed California Desert Protection Act. At the time, passage of the Act seemed imminent, but in fact it would be another four years before the bill was eventually signed, emerging as the consummate compromise.

Nevertheless, its passing was historic: over seven million acres, some eight percent of the state, were designated "wilderness." George Wuerthner in "View from Silver Peak" looks at how the land is faring some five years later, especially as implementation and enforcement of the new legislation were balefully funded. Despite dire predictions by cattlemen, miners, local businesses and, most of all, off-road vehicle users, Wuerthner found it hard to run down people or organizations still opposed to the Act.

And as we go to press there is news that many of the inholdings–a checkerboard of hundreds of thousands of acres of privately-owned land, most of them old railroad claims within the preserves, and which Wuerthner refers to as the Act's "Achilles heel," are now almost certain to be transferred, via The Wildlands Conservancy, to public ownership.

While we consider protection for the desert, we want protection from tsunamis. After years of quiescence, the sea roared back into life last July when a disastrous wave swept over a part of Papua New Guinea where no significant tsunami had struck within recorded history. Anne Rosenthal in "The Next Wave" describes how scientists' detective work is closing in on this tsunami's cause. She also points out some common misconceptions: Hokusai's famous print of a breaking wave, one of his "Views of Fuji Mountain," does not resemble a tsunami–and was never meant to–though it does crop up on a few tsunami websites. Moving through the open ocean, potentially disastrous tsunamis are barely noticeable, hardly more than a few inches high. When they reach the shoreline, they are traveling too fast to break immediately. Observers have said that tsunamis come ashore resembling a rapidly rising tide, which may be the origin of the frequent misnomer "tidal wave."

But discovering their precise causes and, hence, estimating their force, is important, especially for Californians poised on a coast created by faults and subduction. Rosenthal writes about recent research that has uncovered a history of West Coast inundations.

Though Academy scientist, Luis Baptista, Curator of Birds and Mammals, has studied birds all over the world, he found one insistently calling him in his own backyard. The white-crowned sparrow is quite common throughout California, including Golden Gate Park. Baptista (who speaks five human languages fluently) is a specialist in distinguishing bird populations by their dialects. Imagine how excited he was therefore to discover that some young white-crowned sparrows learn to sing both in their native tongue and that of wintering migrants.

Keith K. Howell is Editor of California Wild.