We Are an Island

The mystery of Rapa Nui, or as we now call it, Easter Island, intrigued me as a child when the Norwegian, Thor Heyerdahl's made his famous raft trip from Peru to Polynesia. I learned that Botanists have proven that the sweet potato originated in Latin America. How did it get to the South Seas and yet recent DNA testing traces the Polynesian's origin to a single mother land in South Asia in the opposite direction?

Easter Island developed an advanced society rich in culture and the arts, eventually supporting a peak population of 7000 - 9000 people. No other South Sea Islands have such monumental stone statues. Core samples indicate that the island was originally vegetated and forested. After man arrived the samples revealed evidence of deforestation, soil depletion, and erosion.  The forest was cut down to provide logs for rollers to move the huge statues dedicated to local chieftains to their sites along the coast, for fuel, and to clear land for agriculture. The over population, the famine, and resulting collapse of society must have been devastating.

It seems the Islanders were unable to see the future, to extrapolate the direction of their tribal society to its devastating end, and unable to change the direction of the culture before it was too late. Their implacably and inelasticity doomed them to starvation or dispersal. The lessons of Easter Island are clear. Strip the land and it will no longer support a vibrant healthy growing economy. The waters will no longer flow, the lands will wash away, and the very resources that every economic activity derives its base materials from becomes scarce. Great depreciations lead to great pestilence, droughts and great wars.

We are faced with a similar condition in Napa. The warning signs are abundant. Our modern machinery has allowed us to go to farthest ends of the County to plumb its deepest core for water, to alter irrecoverably what nature has stored up over thousands of years by drawing down in a matter of decades. American Canyon's wells no longer produce enough water and they must import it from the Central Valley Project for their burgeoning population. Mt. Veeder neighbors, many who are drawing water directly or indirectly from Redwood Creek, are upset at the accelerated cutting down of the Redwoods. Some people in the South Coombsville area had to abandon their wells and must truck in water. The Carneros farming area have always been a chancy place to drill a well. There are now salt water barnacles under the Trancas St. Bridge. Our Napa River fisheries are a ghost of its former population and our native Red Legged Frog population hangs on by a thread in a few remaining spots ! in the County.

Everyone needs water. This is not just a purview of the environmentalists. The farmers need it just as much for their crops, as the people need it for their household use. All of us are in jeopardy unless we protect our streams, our forests, and our world. We know that we can not constantly take from nature without consequences. Now is the time to act, not decades from now when the loss of water becomes exacerbated and our children are faced with intractable problems from barren uplands.

A recent Register editorial (5-19) said our Sierra Club suit ended up increasing the cost of farming and encouraged the pressure for new housing. One grower publicly lamented it cost $30,000 more to put in adequate erosion control methods for his new project. It is hard to sympathize with someone who buys a $4000 / acre hillside lot and turns it into a $130,000 / acre vineyard cash cow and not require some degree of protection of our water. Our suit simply required the County to comply with existing State law. It does cost more to farm responsibly and to be good neighbors and not foul the water for folks downstream of them, but to fault environmentalists for requiring our government to comply with their own laws is an exercise in misplaced logic.

What drives new housing outside of the cities is not the higher cost of farming but the blossoming of new boutique vineyards in the hillsides. It is natural to want to build in Napa County and to make wine. The problem is how to moderate and control it so it doesn't irrevocably alter the terrain and deprive the rest of us of water.

We are an island with finite resources. We rely on the fertile soils of Napa and a plenitude of water derived from healthy forests. Environmentalists will always strive for the highest and best farming practices possible. That should be the industry's goal too, not just the bottom line.

John Stephens, Chair