Suit Urges Water Board Action
A coalition of conservation and fishermen’s groups, including the Redwood Chapter, are challenging the failure by the state and regional water boards to implement clean water laws that protect wild rivers and streams in California’s North Coast region. The coalition has filed a lawsuit to urge the agencies to adopt clean-up plans required by state law that will meet pollution limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "While the Regional Board appears to be making some progress, they have lost 60 staff members since 2001, leaving the agency unable to protect our wild rivers," said Daniel Myers, representing Sierra Club’s Redwood Chapter. "Unfortunately, neither the Regional Board nor the State Board have taken meaningful measures to acquire the staff and resources that are needed for the TMDL program to succeed." The full text of the press release is here.

Call for CEQ Salmon Director
More than 75 commercial and recreational fishing associations and conservation organizations, including the Sierra Club, have called on President Obama to create a high-level Salmon Director position in the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to restore West Coast salmon populations, protect fishing jobs and rebuild the salmon economy.

Pacific salmon and steelhead are in great peril across much of the West Coast. But with Federal leadership, and with science guiding our way, we can restore salmon to our rivers and ocean, return to work thousands who have lost their jobs in fishing-based industries, and create thousands of new sustainable, family-wage jobs in economically depressed coastal and rural communities. The full text of the letter is here.

"Preservation" Ranch - We Propose a Better Plan. The ironically named "Preservation" Ranch project is the 20,000 acre vineyard conversion project near Annapolis, Sonoma County. Among other environmental impacts, roughly 1700 acres of forest will be permanently converted to vineyards. The project materials are still being submitted to Sonoma County Permits and Resource Management Department, after which the EIR phase will begin. The Redwood Chapter has been following the progress of this project for several years. This Premier Pacific Vineyards investment in deforestation, funded by CalPERS, is being made to support a non-essential agriculture, the production of luxury, high-end wines. Furthermore, the investment bodes to become an exemplar of how our overlogged forests are treated in the future; it is precedent-setting since it is the largest-scale attempted conversion of forest in No. California. In the present political and financial times, when the public and the world are learning the 'inconvenient truths' about global warming and at the same time the world is threatened with grave financial collapses, we do not think CalPERS should be financing such work. Here is our latest letter to the CalPERS Board, in which we suggest that, rather than deforestation, there are other options for managing and restoring over-logged timberlands, such as those employed by the Nature Conservancy for their Garcia River Forest Climate Action Project.
More about "Preservation" Ranch can be found here .

Chapter Campaigns
The Redwood Chapter's Take Action page highlights several issues that the Club is focusing its efforts on.

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Environmental Center
The Environmental Center of Sonoma County is now located at 55A Ridgway Avenue in Santa Rosa (West of the 101 Freeway, two blocks North of College and 1 1/2 blocks West off of Cleveland Ave, South of Coddingtown).

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