Lately I’ve been walking a lot on West Cliff Drive where the ice plant is blooming, blanketing the bluffs with pink and yellow flowers and stabilizing the land against erosion, which I bet is why it was introduced in the first place, before anyone realized it was “invasive” and thus offensive to the native species.

The politically correct yet somehow reactionary defense of native plants strikes me as uncomfortably akin to current grumblings about “outsiders” moving into Santa Cruz, national anti-immigrant sentiment and “America first” ideology. Can we really make California native again? I understand landscaping with drought-tolerant plants, but to rip out established nonnatives is a bit like mass deportation. We, people and plants alike, are living in an increasingly globalized, migratory world.

Even worse than the crusade against ice plant is the demonization of the eucalyptus as “gasoline trees,” oily, flammable invaders you wouldn’t want in your neighborhood.

Brought from Australia the century before last for lumber, eucalypts proved too hard and sinewy for the sawmills. Planted all over California, the trees grew fast, and of the hundreds of species now well established, I’m most enamored of those big ones branching broadly into the sky with their long, silvery-green leaves shimmering in the sun, habitat for migrating monarchs.

Eucalypts are beautiful, volatile and a little spicy, like some women I’ve known, and their lovely, gnarly nature is part of their appeal. If you have them on your land and need to clear some, you can buck and split them and they make great firewood, long- and hot-burning, with fragrant smoke, as I learned long ago when I was living on Point Dume in a little cliffside shed with a stone fireplace and buying firewood from the Malibu Feed Bin, which burned in the recent conflagration there.

I will defend the eucalyptus for its beauty, and ice plant for the same reason, and will ask to see the birth certificate and their ancestors’ immigration papers of anyone who wishes to eradicate them.

If you rip out the ice plant, the coast will erode even faster, and if you have it around your home and you clear it, you will be stripped of an effective fire break. And isn’t your home itself an alien structure artificially grafted onto the landscape by human interlopers?

What does “ownership” of these lands even mean? We the people have ruined this planet, and all the retro-fixes and techno-futurist solutions will mitigate the damage only so much.

Meanwhile even as I write this, sitting on a bench just west of West Cliff admiring long strings of cormorants quickly skimming northward just offshore, feeling the chilly wind on my neck and smelling the ocean, I thank the surrounding ice plant for being so succulent and colorful and for holding the coast in place despite the abuse it’s subjected to by so-called environmentalists. It is part of the best of what’s left of this ravaged terrain, and its presence is a blessing. And to the beautiful eucalypts scattered all over California but especially the ones around here, I nod with gratitude for their contribution to what remains of these endangered landscapes.

I’m making the most of what’s left of my time by spending as much time as possible here at the coast, breathing the oxygen-rich air, watching the creamy foam of the waves on a choppy afternoon without surfers, glimpsing the dog-walkers and the baby-strollers, the sunburned runners in shorts and tank tops, the roller-skaters, the bicyclists passing “on your left,” the workers chilling on their lunch break, the device-bound staring into their smartphones and the drivers, parked, gazing wistfully through their windshields at the vast, dark-blue-green horizon.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.