In April, desperate to restore some sanity, I took off for a few days to backpack in Big Sur. Just me and my dog Pisco.
Our timing was good. The air was cool and, thanks to recent rains, wildflowers ornamented the trail: wild iris and western columbine, Pacific starflower and silver bush lupine, orange bush monkeyflower and pink honeysuckle. A profusion of colors. Not that I knew all the flowers by name. I confess I identified most of them using my new favorite phone app, one hatched at Berkeley. As Nathalia Alcantara details in her story, iNaturalist has helped map the world’s biodiversity by leveraging both artificial intelligence and citizen science.
Looking past the flowers, I noted an abundance of heavily charred tree trunks. In 2016, the Soberanes Fire had spread across more than 100,000 acres of Big Sur, destroying some 50 homes and claiming the life of a dozer operator. For years afterward, the trail had been closed for repairs and rebuilding. As I hiked, I marveled at how robust the surrounding forest seemed despite, or perhaps because of, the burning that had occurred there.
That resilience is a theme implicit in our cover story: As destructive as it can be, fire is an essential feature of the California landscape—one that many forest ecologists and fire experts say we need more of, not less. That is, we need more controlled, low-intensity fires so as to avoid the increasingly catastrophic ones that, due to warming temperatures and more than a century of overzealous fire suppression, are now perennially upon us.
One person spreading the gospel of prescribed fire and winning converts of all political stripes is Lenya Quinn-Davidson ’04, who works to put fire back into the hands of private citizens in her position as the director of the Fire Network, a new initiative with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources. “Fire is the most powerful tool we have as a species,” Quinn-Davidson tells writer Coby McDonald, M.J. ’17. “And I think for so long we’ve disconnected from it.” For more about her work, read “The Burn Boss.”
Speaking of bosses, our Alum of the Year, Cynthia “Cynt” Marshall ’81, is indisputably one. The first Black female CEO in the NBA, Marshall is credited with having turned the once-toxic culture of the Dallas Mavericks organization into a much more tonic one, in no small part through her indomitable spirit and positive outlook. As the former Cal cheerleader tells contributor Chinaka Hodge, she believes in “lifting up the spirit” in everything she does. At the same time, she is quick to add, “I’m not naive. I know when bad stuff is going on. I confront bad stuff. But I confront it with a spirit of optimism.”
There’s a lot of bad stuff coming out of Washington right now, and universities are at the receiving end. Reporter Margie Cullen, M.J. ’22, examines what the Trump administration’s aggressive cuts to research funding mean for the UCs—not to mention the attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (which Trump calls “illegal and immoral”), the revocation of student visas, the disembowelment of the Department of Education, … and on it goes, like a runaway fire.
Back in Big Sur, as I pitched my tent under the redwoods, I was grateful to the trail crews that made my hike possible, not to mention the forest ranger who gave me a map and issued my campfire permit—the kinds of people currently being laid off by the thousands under the Trump administration.
Now is probably a good time for me to remind readers that California is the editorially independent publication of the independent, nonprofit Cal Alumni Association (CAA). It has been published in one form or another, including weekly and fortnightly formats, since 1895. For the last few years, some of you have been receiving the magazine courtesy of our campus partners at University Development and Alumni Relations—the folks who bring you the Fiat Lux section of the magazine. Sadly, that section and the free mailings will go on hiatus for the foreseeable future. But we’ll keep publishing, as we always have—both online and in print.
If you’re not a member of CAA and would like to continue receiving the magazine in the mail, please consider joining. We’d love to keep you as a reader. Go to alumni.berkeley.edu for details.
In the meantime, wishing you all a great summer. Hope you take time to smell the flowers. And remember: Confront the bad stuff, but do it with optimism.
