Sierra Club
Redwood Chapter Newsletter
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Option 3 Protects Sonoma County Forests Suzanne Doyle and Sara Penn, Sonoma Group Conservation Committee | |
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In July, the Sonoma County Planning Commission will begin to make final recommendations to the Board of Supervisors about updating the county's General Plan. One of the decisions to be made in the Resources Conservation Element concerns conversion of timberland to other uses. The Sonoma Group and other environmentalists have been working very hard to convince the supervisors to choose Option 3, which prohibits the conversion of timberlands to vineyards. Option 3 would protect 194,000 acres of the redwood and Douglas fir forests that cover the northwest county. This redwood and Douglas fir forest is vitally important to the environmental health of the county. It is a complex ecosystem - providing a home for hundreds of different plants and animals and cleaning the air and water that passes through it. Forest is especially crucial to the health of the water system of the county: the groundwater and small creeks that eventually become the Russian River. Trees stabilize and protect the soil, which soaks up rainwater and then releases it slowly into the creeks during the dry season. When a piece of forest is converted to a vineyard, what was a complex plant and animal community becomes a relatively sterile monoculture - as dead to most of the wildlife around it as if it had been paved. The vineyard introduces pesticides and invasive weeds where there had been none before. Even when the vineyard is perfectly drained and planted with protective cover crops, rain will carry large amounts of disturbed soil into creeks and the river, where it interferes with salmon spawning and other river life. Runoff increases, leaving less water in the ground to fill the creeks in summer. One of the worst aspects of timber conversion to vineyards is the way in which the forest habitat can become fragmented, making life especially difficult for wild animals. In the past, agriculture and development in the county has occurred mostly in or around valleys - what used to be the oak grasslands and wetlands. Except for logging and some residential building, the forests have stayed relatively intact. Vineyard conversion presents a new kind of danger to them. The explosive growth of the wine industry in the 1970's and 1980's was at first mostly confined to converting existing agricultural lands - usually in or near valleys - to vineyards. As this land became scarcer and more expensive, many more applications were filed to convert land zoned for timber production to vineyards. Because vineyards can be planted on hilly land (preferably ridgetops), that would not be used for other agricultural purposes, they have become an urgent threat to forests in the west county. |
There have been many conversion applications recently filed in the Annapolis area. The most recently filed are located very close to each other, and are all on one steelhead bearing stream, Little Creek. The California Department of Forestry (CDF) has required very little in the way of cumulative impacts analysis or in defining thresholds that these projects might cross in their individual or cumulative effects. Projects in this coastal area that have been approved, applied for or are in the planning stage, range in size from eight acres to potentially 3000 acres. Environmental organizations are presently organizing to counter this threat and are looking to the adoption of Option 3 to help. What is Option 3? There are four timber conversion options being considered to deal with this gap in protection in the General Plan. The other options require either no change in the Plan or protection of smaller areas of forest. Option 3 protects the largest amount of forest, the 194,000 acres that are zoned Resource and Rural Development (RRD), rather than just the 69,000 acres that are zoned for Timber Production (TP). The North Coast Water Quality Control Board, the west county Supervisor Mike Reilly, and the Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) for this portion of the General Plan Update, are all supporting Option 3. Environmental groups and public opinion have been overwhelmingly in favor of Option 3 as well, but we need to keep up the pressure on the Planning Commission and Supervisors. What You Can Do: Call or e-mail the groups below and ask them to support Option 3: Planning Commission
Board of Supervisors
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