Cowboys loved the smell of sagebrush in the mornin’. The smell of burning cheatgrass isn’t as sweet.
If you’ve ever seen California hills covered in the plant pictured here, you’ve seen an arsonist at work. The plant is cheatgrass, an invasive species that entered the country in the late 1800s and took over western sagebrush grasslands that grazing had depleted.
Cheatgrass is the subject of an article in the LA Times fantastic series on wildfire in the west. “When lightning strikes a bed of dead cheatgrass, it’s like dropping a match into a lake of kerosene,” the article says.
The invasive grass is a powerful example of how overusing nature can have unpredictable, and uncontrollable, consequences. Too much grazing left the land susceptible to a hostile takeover. And air pollution, industrial agriculture, and greenhouse gases may continue to make the land hospitable to cheatgrass.
This is a negative feedback loop, where things go from bad to worse.
The grass is dry for most of the year, making fires more frequent. Each fire kills off any sage that has attempted to make a comeback. Because it’s an invasive species, it doesn’t provide food or habitat for any wildlife. Sage, on the other hand, offers food and shelter to sage grouse—which the IUCN classifies as endangered, mule deer (a threatened species) and pronghorn antelope (also threatened).
“In contrast,” reports the Times, “a cheatgrass landscape is about as ecologically rich as a parking lot.”
With two-thirds of California’s unique plant species at risk from climate change, the future will likely bring more ecological wipeouts like this one. The silver lining in this cloud (albeit somewhat difficult to find) is that people are beginning to understand the complexity of natural systems and how messing them up can mean bad news for everyone. Burnt homes are a problem even nature-haters will take seriously. (Plus, I hear even Dick Cheney would be sad if there were no more grouse to hunt).