All he is saying is give brush a chance

"Let's go down in the canyon," he told his students.

Halsey didn't know much about the plant life, but he knew his insects and birds. As a child, he spent hours at a time hunting the canyons around Goleta for butterflies and bees.

Soon, he had his students help him cut a trail, and he held two lessons a week in the canyon next to school. He taught the children bird calls and quizzed them the next day. But he was at a loss for words when it came to the vegetation. He asked another teacher, an amateur botanist, to teach him about the plants in the canyon.

"It was an explosion of knowledge for me," he said.

His relationship to the land sharpened and deepened.

"There's two ways to go to a party," he said. "You can go to a party and stand there and not really know anybody's names. Or you know them and their names. It's a whole different experience."

A San Diego Tribune reporter who visited his class in 1990 found them singing, a la Julie Andrews: "The chaparral is alive with the sound of the rufous-sided towhee -- cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck."

That year, Halsey was named teacher of the year for the San Diego school district.

He got a grant and started writing a book about the chaparral, meeting with scientists, environmentalists and firefighters.

Soon, having the good fortune of a business consultant wife who could pay the bills, he quit teaching to become a full-time researcher, writer and advocate of under-loved native shrubs.

The antipathy to the shrub land goes way back. For the Indians, it was an impenetrable thicket that offered little in edible seeds and hid monstrous grizzly bears. The Spanish missionaries brought the word chaparral, derived from chaparro, a dwarf oak that grows in Spain. The American ranchers who came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries just wanted to get rid of the stuff, as they ultimately did with the grizzlies. They called it "brush."

The name stuck, as did its image, particularly as suburbia pushed into the wild lands in the last half-century.

Devastating firestorms in 2003, 2007 and the last two months have only worsened chaparral's public relations problems.

But it is an insult to nature's ingenuity, Halsey said, to label the vast biodiversity of California's most extensive plant community "brush" and to discuss it only in terms of "fuel load."

"People have a really twisted view of this beautiful ecosystem," Halsey said.