Morro Bay harbor-side / eco history ( #0517)

Nothing pandemic, political, here – just a shot of why Morro Bay is my favorite place to break up the long drive to SF.

*****

Oops, I was wrong…. even beauty comes with hazards (actually, that sounds like a truism). The seemingly glorious stand of tall, slender, trees are, I’m fairly certain, eucalyptus. An invasive from Australia, they were brought to California via Europe during the mid-1800’s Gold Rush and planted widely, first as decorations and then as economic speculation that they would provide lumber for all of the trees that had been cut down during the Gold Rush. While they smell wonderful and provide an aesthetically pleasing backdrop, they’re a disaster. It turns out that the plans for using eucalyptus for lumber were based on old-growth forests in Australia, and that the lumber from younger trees is unusable.

What they are good at is taking over landscape, driving out native trees and plants, and shedding paper-thin bark that’s wonderful fuel for fires. Fortunately their fire-hazard characteristics haven’t been much of a problem in Southern California (Morro Bay would be Central California), but it is enough of a problem in Northern California that there have been plans to try to eradicate them in some areas. The two articles below are good sources:

Sources:

www.independent.com/2011/01/15/how-eucalyptus-came-california
www.kqed.org/science/4209/eucalyptus-california-icon-fire-hazard-and-invasive-species

Picture locations are only approximate, could be off by as much as a mile.