Park Ranger Now Makes Fire Ecology Part of Her Youth Talks

As fire stampeded through some of the most beautiful and rugged terrain in Southern California, National Park Service Ranger Jaquie Stiver saw an opportunity to educate children on nature’s cycle of life and death.

Stiver, who is in charge of interpretive and educational programs for the Park Service, coordinates lessons for more than 10,000 schoolchildren each year in classrooms and at the Satwiwa Natural Center in Newbury Park. She talked with Times staff writer Aaron Curtiss about how those lessons will change now that thousands of acres of parkland have been engulfed by flames.

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Question: Please explain exactly what it is you do.

Answer: I am an interpretive specialist, and I work mostly on educating the public. I take the technical information from our resources management division and our fire management office and translate that into a more comfortable and more enjoyable form and communicate that information to the public.

Q: What forms would that take?

A: I do guided walks, guided hikes, community presentations to the Boy Scouts or the Kiwanis Club. We have two different education programs in the park.

Q: What are those?

A: We have a program geared to third- and fourth-graders on biodiversity, using the Chumash Native Americans and how they depended on plants and animals and how we still depend on plants and animals today. That’s an on-site program, and we’ve now incorporated a fire ecology message into that program. We have a cultural diversity program for fourth- and fifth-graders where we go into the schools and use the Spanish influence in California to explore the ranches and the missions. We talk about how California has changed through time and how it has always been a culturally diverse place and try to develop a respect and understanding for other cultures.

Q: What area do you cover?

A: I work all the way down in Franklin Canyon near Beverly Hills and all the way out to Rancho Sierra Vista in Newbury Park.

Q: And all the schools in that area as well?

A: We’ll even go to schools as far away as Glendale and Oxnard.

Q: In that area, how much was burned?

A: In the National Recreation Area there were two fires. All of the land that burned was not owned by the National Park Service, but it was within the boundary of the National Recreation Area. The Old Topanga Fire burned approximately 17,000 acres. About 350 acres were owned by the National Park Service. In the Green Meadow Fire a total of 43,848 acres were burned. And 5,393 of those were National Park Service land.

Q: Those included some of the most popular areas in the park, right?

A: Definitely Sycamore Canyon is a very popular area, especially for mountain bike riders and also hikers. It’s heavily used by the families in the nearby areas who can walk over from their homes.

Q: How will your guided walks change?

A: We are going to be doing special guided walks--one on Jan. 8 and one on March 12--called “Life After Fire.”

Q: Tell me about those.

A: They are going to focus on fire ecology, and we are asking visitors to help us with photographic and written documentation of the Satwiwa Natural Area. I went out last weekend and took a set of pictures. I’ll do that again in the beginning of December. January will be the third set. We’ll try to match up and take pictures in the same place.

Q: The idea is to watch the rebirth?

A: Exactly. We want to document that and to have the visitors help us with that work. It was very amazing to be there this weekend. I hiked the area twice, and there are already bunch grasses that are sprouting and green. The yucca has sprouted up from the burl, and you can see all the green growth along the top of those burls. Just after a week and a half, things are already greening up.

Q: If you take a group of schoolchildren or a Boy Scout troop through the area now, what would be the program?

A: Unfortunately, the two fires we had in this area were human-caused. We definitely want to focus on the fact that fire is not something to play with. We sympathize greatly with the people who lost personal property in the recent fires. However, fire is a natural occurrence in the chaparral ecosystem. It has taken place for thousands and thousands of years.

Q: In some ways it is necessary, isn’t it?

A: It’s normal. It does help as far as healthy growth.

Q: If a child looks across a landscape that is blackened and asks whether it is destroyed, what answer would you give?

A: I’d say that it appears that way, but if you look very closely you can already see plants starting to green up and if you are very quiet you will be able to hear the birds and you might be able to see some of the wildlife that has already returned.

Q: What sort of wildlife has returned?

A: We’ve been seeing road runners, the ground squirrel. Some people have already seen deer. Two days after the fire, another ranger saw a bobcat in a burned-out area. While many of the plants died above the ground, their root systems are still alive. They will sprout from their root burls, and also there is a huge storage of seeds in the ground that will sprout up quite quickly. Of course, the large trees such as the oaks and the sycamores were not killed by the fire.

Q: When you go to give the third - and fourth - graders the program on biodiversity and fire ecology, does an incident like this give you a concrete illustration?

A: Oh yeah.

Q: How does it change?

A: We’ve added about five minutes to the introduction to talk about the fire because the schoolchildren have driven through the burned area to get to the site where the program is given. Right away, we want to acknowledge what they’ve seen. And of course they’ve seen it all on the news. We do three sections during the school program--one on storytelling, one on animals and one on plants. During the plant walks we’ve added a little talk about fire ecology and we walk over to an area where bunch grasses are sprouting and we talk about the area that has burned. Remarkably, the section where we do the short plant walk did not burn.

Q: This is up at Satwiwa in Newbury Park, right?

A: Correct.

Q: What sort of reactions have you heard?

A: The initial reaction I had with children on the weekend is of course shock. There has been such a long time that we thought of fire as being bad that of course that idea is still being passed on to children and many of us carry that idea. Fire that is man caused is definitely a bad thing as far as that goes. But looking at maps that we have, the history of fire in this area has been continuous. Fire is really neither bad nor good. It’s just a natural occurrence that takes place within this ecosystem.

Q: So that is the message you try to send?

A: Exactly. Many parents have brought their children to the park to do lessons with them. It’s been really exciting to see them take that responsibility and that leadership role.

Q: In what context?

A: They really point out what can happen if you play with fire because fire is intriguing to children. As I listen to them, I also want to reaffirm what the parents are saying and praise them for teaching. But I also try to get the message across that the ecosystem will recover. And the ecosystem is very capable of recovering on its own.