- Kathleen Scavone
- Posted On
The Living Landscape: Our Putah-Cache Bioregion
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – We live in a unique place, called the Putah-Cache bioregion.
The dictionary states that a bioregion is “an area constituting a natural ecological community with characteristic flora, fauna, and environmental conditions and bounded by natural rather than artificial borders.”
The Putah-Cache bioregion contains a variety of habitats: Riparian, grasslands, oak woodlands and fast-disappearing wetlands.
Set like a jewel near the north section is Clear Lake, one of the oldest freshwater lakes in the world.
On the edge of the lake shores is Anderson Marsh State Historic Park.
If you visit the county of Lake's Web site, http://parks.lakecountyca.gov/ , you will see that we here in Lake County are blessed with about 30 parks. Those are the places to discover the diversity mentioned above.
The landscape in Lake County tells many stories for those who care to listen. Archaeological evidence suggests many rich cultures once lived in this Eden.
Early California impressionist artists have depicted parts of California in mythologically and spiritually robust paintings.
There are many scientific accounts outlining the need for us to pay attention to earth’s biota. Human demands on our possession of the earth have resulted in a great loss of animal and plant species.
You may hear others ask why is there a need to worry about certain plants or creatures which inhabit our backyard.
The truth is, there are more than 100 California animal species threatened with extinction due to their habitat destruction.
These diminutive creatures can often be indicators of an area's general environmental health.
We depend on earth’s bounty to feed us, just as our ancestors did, but many of us have lost the essential connection of earth’s hypnotic poetry; the earth’s enduring regeneration that is as sustaining to the soul as food is to our bodies.
Although Euro-Americans changed the Native people’s lifeways and landscape forever, there still remains dramatic landscape ripe with its mantle of rolling hills and life-giving waterways.
It is imperative that artists, folklorists, anthropologists, writers and philosophers – in other words, all of us – to remain keepers of this corner of the world, our delicate bioregion, which nurtures all of us.
It is more important than ever, now, in the 21st century to pay heed to this incomparable area known as the Putah-Cache Watershed.
Kathleen Scavone, M.A., is an educator, potter, writer and author of “Anderson Marsh State Historic Park: A Walking History, Prehistory, Flora, and Fauna Tour of a California State Park” and “Native Americans of Lake County.” She also writes for NASA and JPL as one of their “Solar System Ambassadors.” She was selected “Lake County Teacher of the Year, 1998-99” by the Lake County Office of Education, and chosen as one of 10 state finalists the same year by the California Department of Education.