Looking at our mountains in historical perspective, you can see them with other eyes. Thousands of people like our new State Parks National Superintendent, camp in the Santa Monicas every year in places like Big Sycamore Canyon, Malibu Creek State Park and Leo Carrillo State Beach. Other people with larger budgets build homes along the Malibu Beach front and in the canyons. Sitting around a campfire, you can imagine living off of the land in the Santa Monica Wilderness. No property tax, no county regulations, no laws except the ones you enforce yourself. A fair number of folks living in places like Topanga and Malibu Lake like to approximate a more natural life. They love the green grass, the flowers in the spring and the deer and bob cats on their property and hearing the coyotes singing in the night. They even like the rain. A lot of people really love to ride horses where ever they feel like going like the native peoples and the early Spanish explorers. The ancient people here saw a herd of deer then as their meat market, the oak trees as their local bread source and the meadows and grasslands as a place they could collect materials like yucca and willow branches to make necessary storage containers. If the local deer herd was your meat market, you’d think twice about killing them for sport. I doubt if many Chumash were trophy hunters. We still use the surf as a place to fish and campers can use fallen wood at their camp fires. As the Spring Fires illustrate, we are also still subject to the terror of wild fires. It doesn’t make much difference if you’re living in a 500 sq foot ap or a 50,000 sq ft mansion, wild fires are a problem. Also, thinking about people and animals who lived here 300 years ago, if you have an open mind you can learn many valuable lessons. The idea is, if you get better acquainted with other living things, you can learn about the living systems in the world we share. If you have an open mind, you can start to identify familiar things in other living organisms and why they are here and what their behavior is. It helps to be humble. You can learn from deer or rat or mountain lion populations too, if you know more about how the animals live and what they do to survive. Biologists and ecologists do it all the time, ask the Park staff at Gillette Ranch. The rat’s ability to resist disease, the deer’s feeding practices and fear of predators and the lion’s position as top predator, can all tell a lot about the bio-systems they dominate and we hike in. Top predators tell us a lot about the eco-systems they dominate. If you can see yourself as a top predator you might want to compare notes. You just have to know how to get that information from the lions. Most important, the idea that we all depend on each other, and we all share the same land, sea and air, is something people seem to have forgotten. All we’re ever going to get is this one planet. Most of the problems we have created; like smog, water and noise pollution and destruction of entire ecosystems, result from an ignorance of what the early peoples took for granted. You don’t dump your waste in your water, you don’t fill your air with smoke so you can’t see and you don’t make so much noise that you can’t hear what’s coming down the trail. We are now dealing with the consequences of ignoring these and other simple assumptions. Many Native American Indian tribes take the position that each living thing has its place in the world. If you become aware of the role each plant and animal has and you accept those roles and who fills them, the world is a different place. I learned that from an angry Apache. You might even eventually figure out what happens if you start to pull pieces out of the eco-structure. It’s a little bit like a house of cards, you knock one over and it’s good-by structure. You don’t see a deer as a target for your 1000 round automatic weapon, you see it as a food source. That makes it a functioning, and necessary part of your world. You don’t see a mountain lion as proof of your talent as an animal killer, you see it as another predator. The idea of shredding a deer into a red mist with automatic weapon fire would not make any sense to someone who was the hunter for their tribe. The hunters were the food source for their people when there weren’t any Bristol Farm meat departments to select a prime cut from.
