When I need to get out of my head, I go to Ellwood. This stretch of bluffs along the coast in western Goleta has trails through open grasslands and small paths that wind down to a wide beach, where you can find driftwood forts and views out to the Channel Islands. At its north end, a eucalyptus grove is home to winter roosts of monarchs. I have happy memories of wandering through the trees with a group of preschoolers in rainboots. When the sun broke through the clouds, dozens of the monarchs and their orange wings descended from the branches and hovered just out of reach. The grove felt, for a moment, touched by magic.
This is one of the things that makes it so hard for me to remember that right here, in 1942, shells from a Japanese submarine were the only thing flying overhead. After the attack, the Japanese Imperial Navy reported that they had “left Santa Barbara in flames.” This was wishful thinking: The damage, at least to the land, was minimal. The target, the Ellwood Oil Field, lost a derrick and a pump house. One of the shells crashed into a nearby pier.
But for those who lived on the coast and had just been listening to President Roosevelt’s fireside chat when the shelling started, the fear sparked by the attack was much more devastating.
One concern: Los Padres National Forest, just over the ridge. Many firefighters, along with the equipment they used, had been pulled away from this and other forests to fight in World War II. How could the Forest Service get everyday people more willing to stop the fires they no longer had the ability to fight?
The Ellwood bombardment was the sparkle in the eye from which Smokey Bear was born. Wearing a ranger hat and jeans, he’s urged generations of forest users to take responsibility for preventing fires from posters and advertising spots during Saturday morning cartoons, as a giant balloon during Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
But after decades of fire suppression—and increasingly devastating fires—some wonder if Smokey’s message could use an update.
One of these people is Emily Schlickman, a landscape architecture and environmental design professor at UC Davis. Every time she drove out of the mountains and back to the Central Valley, she saw a billboard with Smokey, still protecting the dense stands of forests that cover much of the Sierra Nevada.
Then, on a field visit to Illilouette Creek Basin in Yosemite, Schlickman saw something different. Instead of thick, protected forest or large stands of standing dead wood, the valley teemed with a patchy mix of meadows, grassland, and forests—the result of decades of allowing fire to burn through this area. “People say it’s like a glimpse into the past, like what a lot of the Sierra Nevada forests should look like today,” she says. She remembers turning to a colleague and saying, “What if Smokey had a buddy?”
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