My strongest memories of Pinnacles remains wandering through a wildflower meadow dominated by with brightly blooming California Poppies. Its vibrant orange blossoms were a show of delight against the dry chaparral vegetation, and egged me to go further on the trail on that warm spring day. I thought that was all there was to Pinnacles, but in my subsequent visits, I discovered that this park had far more to offer: I tracked breeding pairs of California Condors with a wildlife biologist, squeezed through narrow clefts and clambered over steep pinnacles, and watched the night skies above and the delicate under-canopy below.
It was perhaps this reason that Pinnacles was designated a National Park in 2013. While it may not carry the epic grandeur that is typical of National Parks, it preserves a rather unique part of California
Pinnacles National Park
CA USA
The Interconnected Planet
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world
John Muir
Earth day is the one day of the year that the whole world pauses to think about the environment. But one day a year isn't enough, because protecting and preserving nature should be a lifelong guiding principle, and not of effort that is expended in just one single day. And because nature is so interconnected, it cannot be dependent just on actions that taken in a few locations. It should be the ethos for everyone.
For example, the California poppy is an ubiquitous flower, found in different parts of the west coast of North America in multiple different climates. A single flower from a single shoot, fragile though it may be, represents significant effort by the plant to propagate itself for future generations. And its success is dependent on so many interconnected factors: location, short-term weather and long-term climate trends, wildlife, pollinators and lastly, humanity. On a global scale, the human species has such a high impact and influence on nature, that the burden of preserving the delicate balance also falls on to us.
After all, the Earth is what we all have in common
Pinnacles National Park
CA USA