Stay Off the Path - Some Counterintuitive and Iconoclastic Tips for Good Environmental Behavior

Corollary:  Keep on the grass/iceplant.

Why:  Erosion prevention

Native habitat improvement by weed reduction

Avoid  crushing the few natives that are surviving (at path edges)

2. Giggle at signs that say “Plant Restoration—Sensitive Area—Keep Out.

3. Always take things out of “nature” (especially weeds), never put things in.

4. Don’t plant erosion mix.

Corollary:  Don’t worry so much about erosion unless it’s taking out your driveway.

5. Don’t believe people who say that “natives” are better for wildlife habitat and more drought-tolerant and low-maintenance and politically correct and “appropriate”.

6. Don’t plant “natives” if you live in a “natural” area—unless you collect them yourself from your own neighborhood.

Corollary:  Always propagate your own plants from the wild, don’t buy them.

7. Cows and fires and floods and erosion and disturbance are good things, sometimes even loggers (Did that last one blow all my credibility?)

8. Don’t think of yourself as a “steward” of nature unless you fancy yourself some sort of god.

Corollary:  Think of the nature as the steward and the rest of us as the stewardess.

9. If an “expert” says it, it isn’t necessarily right.  A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  Be skeptical of the consultants and the experts, the more so if :

1. 1. they look too young to have been at this kind of work less than 20 or 30 years.
   2. they don’t come from a rural background.
   3. they are not local.
   4. they use the royal “we” as in “We call this an ‘ecotone’.”
   5. they use big words, like ecotone.
   6. they start to lecture you on the principles of general ecology.
   7. they are the overconfident, fast-talker type.
   8. they have something to sell, like plants.
   9. they know all the answers.
   10. they got their “knowledge” from school rather than the real world.

Your humble narrator, of course, admits to note of these shortcomings—especially the one about looking young!

10. No plant is unredeemably evil—there is a place for everything, even poison oak and eucalyptus.  Weedy is a state of mind.