Californians and our supposedly beloved environment still go together like oil and water

It’s not easy being a Californian. Your housing, if it exists, costs twice what it’s worth. Your autumns are less fragrant of pumpkin spice than of flaming chaparral. And your gubernatorial elections seem to occur approximately once every seven months.

But before we descend into abject self-pity, let’s spare some sympathy for our fellow Californians — specifically, those non-human Californians living ever more precariously in a state supposedly proud enough of its wildlife to have put it on its flag. Even before the latest catastrophic oil spill coated more flocks of Southern California sea birds in the viscous remnants of their distant ancestors, this year has inflicted an alarming array of insults to the state’s iconic creatures and landscapes.

The most symbolically startling was the sight of Sequoia National Park’s General Sherman Tree swathed in aluminum foil, adorning a magnificent example of California flora in a getup more suited to an oven-bound Idaho potato.

The giant sequoia in question, which has acquired a mass of more than 2,000 tons over the course of more than 2,000 years, isn’t just a paragon of a great California lineage; it’s the largest single living tree on Earth — and arguably the largest life form of any kind (not counting clonal aspen colonies and fungal networks that are, frankly, cheating).

The tree also belongs to a species so adapted to forest fires, at least as they were known in the millennia before the European conquest, that it relies partly on flames to reproduce. And yet firefighters resorted to wrapping the base of its trunk with fire-resistant fabric lest the KNP Complex do to the General Sherman what its namesake did to Georgia.

Although apparently averted for now, the threat to the Giant Forest was not theoretical. The National Park Service estimates that last year’s Castle Fire alone killed at least a tenth of the world’s large sequoias.

Even after several successive fire seasons incinerated previous records — the largest, most destructive and deadliest blazes on the books were all out-burned within the past four years — California’s conflagrations keep accumulating superlatives. This year’s Caldor Fire, for instance, became only the second to summit the Sierra Nevada — the first being the nearly contemporaneous Dixie Fire. As Cal Fire Chief Thom Porter put it plainly, “There is fire activity happening in California that we have never seen before.”

The state’s waters aren’t any safer from the fires than they are from sudden torrents of the fossil fuels driving them. Lake Tahoe’s brush with Caldor, and the threat of future such wildfires, has murky implications for the famous quality and clarity of its water.

But the fire was a boon of sorts for one facet of Tahoe’s ecosystem: the bears that rampaged through evacuated human habitations helping themselves to the food.

This wasn’t exactly the “roaring back” that Gov. Gavin Newsom boasted of in recent months while fending off a small army of would-be recallers, one of whom infamously trucked a real bear around the state. But the ursine undertones of the recall campaign reflected the simultaneous glorification and neglect of California’s natural assets in our politics.

It’s fitting that the species on our flag, unlike the scavenging black bears of Tahoe, is a California grizzly modeled after the last of its kind in captivity. In 1911, when the bear flag was signed into law by the same guy who gave us the recall, Hiram Johnson, it was three years after the last confirmed California grizzly on the loose had been trapped and shot. The last less certain sighting of a specimen was reported a decade later in Sequoia National Park — as it happens, not far from where the General Sherman had already stood for a score of centuries and more in all its un-Reynolds-wrapped glory.

Granted, we’re not shooting the grizzlies anymore, and maybe we wouldn’t even if we could. We’ve certainly come a long way from personally chopping down old-growth redwoods, which is what happened to the last one that was even bigger than the General Sherman.

Those that remain may have survived another destructive season thanks not only to plus-size space blankets but also to policies reversing a century of over-suppression, which turned forests into tinder boxes for fires now supercharged by climate change. It has to pass for progress that we’re striving to save these great Californians — even if it’s still our own rapaciousness that is threatening to send them the way of the grizzlies.