But this is Chico, too

The natural forces that created Bidwell Park’s landscape are well-known, but a comprehensive view of the human forces that shaped it is only now starting to emerge. Jeanne Boze, author of “The Nature of Bidwell Park,� began to put the pieces together last year when she wrote a booklet called “Bidwell Park: The Beginnings� for the park’s centennial observance.

Some of the human footprints that altered the park in the early years have vanished. They include the zoo at Cedar Grove, an auto campground at the lower end of the park and tennis courts at the Children’s Playground. Others, such as the golf course, Caper Acres and the athletic fields, seem to be an indelible part of what the park has become. Most intriguing to me are the parts of the park, such as the World of Trees, that appear to be natural but are manmade alterations.

Nowadays, there are campaigns to restore Bidwell Park’s natural landscape to the way it was before Chico was settled. They seem to be based on the premise that nature’s way is always better and that human activities, such as introducing non-native plants, automatically upset the balance of nature. We’ve come to think of ourselves as interlopers, as environmental bulls in a china shop.

In fact, we’re part of nature. That we’re the product of evolutionary forces that turned us into landscape tamperers may make us feel guilty, but this is who we are. We are a force that changes nature — along with glaciers, earthquakes, asteroid hits, volcanoes, tornadoes and hurricanes. One day, the sun will devour the Earth. It’s a force we can never hope to emulate.

We can be destroyers, but we can also do nice things. We’ve kept Bidwell Park around for 101 years, after all. We could have allowed the sylvan stretch that spans the heart of Chico to have become a series of hoity-toity housing developments called “Annie’s Glen,� “Sycamore Estates,� “Sherwood Forest� and “John’s Woods,� but we left things pretty much alone.

And what we didn’t leave alone, we sought to make even better out of love for the park. One of those improvement projects is the legacy of F.W. Seydel, who served on the Chico City Council from 1938 to 1947, including two one-year terms as mayor.

He’s responsible for starting the redwood grove between Big Chico Creek and picnic area No. 37 off Peterson Drive. A reader wrote to us and sent old newspaper clippings about that part of the park’s history after Mary Nugent’s story about Lester Olsen, who waters the redwood trees, ran in the Enterprise-Record.

I looked up Seydel in the Enterprise-Record’s “morgue� of newspaper clippings and found his obituary. He died in 1962 at age 84. The obituary said Seydel insisted the city be continuously planting and replanting trees in Bidwell Park to see that future generations would be able to enjoy their beauty just as he did. “If we don’t keep adding to Bidwell Park we sometime won’t have anything left,� he is quoted as saying.

He reminds me of John Bidwell, who planted trees in the same spirit. Bidwell thought his projects would improve on nature.

With the help of horticulturists at Humboldt State University, Seydel and other city officials went to Arcata and returned with 24 redwood trees, according to the obituary. Olsen said he has planted another 52 redwoods in that grove.

I suppose purists would say redwoods don’t belong in Bidwell Park because people planted them. But John Bidwell would have loved them.