| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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| letters to the editor Manzanita Fungus Threat In western Amador County, California, the dominant vegetation types are characteristic of many Sierra Nevada foothill regions. Rolling valley grasslands merge across low, dense chaparral scrub barrens into foothill woodlands punctuated with blue oaks. Near the city of Ione, there are remarkable differences that make this California’s Galápagos Islands: a place where plant species evolved to thrive in the nutrient-poor, highly acidic, and heavy metal-laced soils unique to a small band of earth roughly 18 miles long by three to four miles wide. In recent years, surface mining for diverse resources ranging from clay to sand, gravel, lignite, and even gold have chewed away at the critical habitat of these species, leaving some on the edge of survival. Commercial, industrial, and residential development and off road vehicle use have taken even more. Ione manzanita (Arctostaphylos myrtifolia), one of the very rare species of the area, is threatened by the same factors, and more. Perhaps the greatest threat to Ione manzanita now occurs naturally. A fungus, tentatively identified as madrone canker (Fusicoccum aesculi), infects nearly every living plant in the entire range of the species. Once solid, multiacre stands of the species can be seen from highway roadsides as sprawling fields of bleached, woody skeletons and desiccated limbs. The same fungus affects several other manzanita species in the area, too. It appears to spread like wildfire: moving in pattern from a starting point, then fanning outward, onward as if running from the wind. And it jumps, like embers, to distant plant communities. Wildfire is a natural component of California’s chaparral ecology. But fire prevention and quick suppression of chaparral fires has produced large areas of old plants that are susceptible to epidemic disease, like the fungus that may hasten the extinction of this already rare species. Can anything be done? Yes. Government and nongovernment entities can partner to acquire the most at-risk habitat, and meaningful research may be performed that can lead to the best practices for effective management of these irreplaceable natural resources. For more information, visit www.ionechaparral.org on the Internet. George Hartwell Bird of a Different Feather California Wild is an impressive magazine, and the article on Hawaii’s birds (Spring 2001) is great. However, the bird on page 27 described as a Puaiohi is actually a female Hawaii Akepa. Jack Jeffrey Freudian Slips I was troubled by Jerold Lowenstein’s essay on Freud (Spring 2001). He presents a false dichotomy between medication and psychoanalysis, suggesting that because his own ordinary youthful self-doubts were helped by psychoanalysis, people with genuine mental disorders could do the same if only they spent more time and insurers were not so stingy. That is ignorant and harmful. Just to begin with, finding the best medication for a given patient can take many months of trials and is not necessarily cheap. And why should medical insurance cover years of $100-an-hour fees, when even psychoanalysts admit that psychoanalysis works best with patients who are already healthy? Likewise, a student merely worried about impending fatherhood would not be given Valium or Prozac by a reputable practitioner. People who have severe brain disorders such as schizophrenia and manic depression often can’t even focus well enough to engage in conversation unless they take medication; and fears, conflicts, and childhood experiences are not the cause of their illness, so subjecting them to psychoanalysis instead of medication constitutes malpractice. Many disorders respond best to a combination of medication and psychotherapy; but reputable studies have shown that success in therapy is correlated more with the empathy and skills of the therapist than with the school of treatment. And I would venture that most people suffering from clinical levels of anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other illnesses don’t want them “explained”; they just want to feel better. If medication and/or targeted therapies bring that about where years of Freudian therapy have failed, why lament the loss of a mythology—especially one that claims that those who don’t get better secretly want to be ill? Lowenstein leaves the uninformed reader with the impression that Freud is controversial merely because he challenged the status quo. He would have done better to give examples of Freud’s outlandish beliefs—that girls and women want penises, that patient reports of childhood sexual abuse are secret desires rather than real-life experiences, that paranoid schizophrenia is caused by “unconscious homosexuality,” and that the best proof of his theory is that patients resist it! Psychoanalytic theory is a parallel universe of circular logic; and there is good reason to propose that Freud was influential precisely because he offered a pseudoscientific surrogate religion at a time when Westerners idealized science and traditional religion was in decline. As for his writing, take another look: it is dense and arrogant. There is no way he belongs in the same league as Copernicus and Darwin. Carol Ann Sheffield I really wanted to thank you for the article on Freud in the latest issue of California Wild; it was such a breath of rational fresh air after all the polemics of late. I always enjoy Jerold Lowenstein’s articles but this one really struck a chord for me. The point that Freud would be read long after these hacks that are trying to get tenure by trashing him (perhaps I’m paraphrasing a bit) was so succinctly to the point and true regardless of any final scientific verdicts. (After all, Newton is currently regarded as having been “dead wrong.”) I also found the personal angle interesting, i.e., that therapy helped the author make it from physics to medicine. I hope voices like Lowenstein’s become the norm in the Freud wars. Karl Young |
Summer 2001
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