Forest & River News
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Forest & River News GRASSROOTS CONSERVATION & RESTORATION IN THE REDWOOD REGION TREES FOUNDATION WINTER 2019 Celebrating the Cereus Fund: 21 Years of Supporting Grassroots Conservation & Restoration of the Legendary Redwood Coast G The High Ecological Toll of a Wind Factory on Bear River and Monument Ridges G Saving Van Arken: Manifesting a Vision of Conservation G New Column: Plant Notes Index Cereus Fund Twenty one years of Supporting the Grassroots.....................................................12 Editor’s Note In this issue of Forest & River News we are happy Forests & All Creatures to celebrate a great win for Sanctuary Forest’s Standing With the Wiyot..................................................................................................3 (SFI) ambitious Van Arken Community Forest The High Ecological Toll of a Wind Factory on Bear River and Monument Ridges By Salmon Forever Project. Over three years ago, SFI recognized a rare conservation and ecosystem recovery Saving Van Arken: Manifesting a Vision of Conservation ...................................8 opportunity in a property that encompasses By Sanctuary Forest Inc. the entire Van Arken Creek watershed from its Toyon ..................................................................................................................................... 29 headwaters to its confluence with the Mattole Plant Notes by Lost Coast Interpretive Association River. Their original goal was to raise funds to purchase the land themselves, but they adapted The Resurgence: The North American Forest and Climate Movement Convergence 2...............3 and sought new solutions as it became clear Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters that time was running out. Luckily, they found an amenable partner—Lost Coast Forestlands EPIC in Court to Stop 7,000 Acre Timber Sale on the Mendocino LLC (LCF)—that is open to SFI’s vision. This National Forest as Forest Service Attempts to Bypass Federal Law .............. 33 Environmental Protection Information Center October, LCF closed escrow and purchased the Van Arken Creek property, and granted SFI the Trapping Banned in Rare Humboldt Marten Habitat! ...................................... 34 five years they need to purchase an innovative Klamath Siskyou Wildlands Center conservation easement that will allow them to manifest their dream of a Van Arken Community Forest. You can read the entire Water, Rivers, & Fish exciting story on page 8. One Family Working to Save Fish Habitat Is Asking for YOUR Help .......... 35 Mad River Alliance Then just to the north of that conservation victory, there is a potential for great ecological Lagunitas Creek Floodplain & Riparian Restoration Project Transforms Second Marin Ghost Town into Coho Salmon Habitat............. 35 loss if a controversial proposed wind power Salmon Protection And Watershed Network project is granted permission to move forward as planned. Pictured on our cover is the view Klamath-Trinity Salmon Runners Join Winnemem Run4Salmon in 50-Mile Trinity Connection Run Days Before Governor atop Bear River Ridge, part of a unique coastal Vetoes Bill to Protect Salmon .......................................................................................37 prairie grasslands and Wiyot high prayer site Save California Salmon located south of Ferndale, CA. Along with its Salmon Protectors Youth Camp Brings Together Elders, neighboring Monument Ridge, it is the proposed Youth for The Klamath River........................................................................................ 38 site for 60 wind turbines that would transmit Save California Salmon energy across 25 new miles of high voltage power lines. One of our longtime partner groups, Salmon Forever, lays out the significant Fire impacts and drawbacks of this proposal, while Changing the Fire Culture: Let’s be Provocative ................................................... 30 offering solar energy alternatives. Living with Fire by Lenya Quinn-Davidson You’ll also read about an abundance of grassroots conservation, restoration, and environmental From My Perspective education programs that are blossoming on Diggin’ In...The Gienger Report ....................................................................... 24 the North Coast thanks to the Cereus Fund, a By Richard Gienger, Restoration Leadership Project donor-advised fund administered through Trees Foundation since 1998. We are SO grateful for the Cereus Fund and all our donors! Cover photo: A view to the Pacific ocean from Bear River Ridge, the proposed site for a The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the windmill factory. PHOTO BY THE W YIOT TRIBE authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of Trees Foundation. Standing With the Wiyot The High Ecological Toll of a Wind Factory on Bear River and Monument Ridges By Salmon Forever safety power shutdowns, but it would Terra-Gen’s Humboldt Wind Energy open the door to other colonizing Project proposal for Monument multinational corporations to exploit and Bear River Ridges is tearing Bear River Ridge, a Wiyot high prayer our community apart and pitting area that the Redwood Coast Energy environmentalists against one another. Authority (RCEA) has identified as the Yet the misguided proposal is also most commercially viable wind site in fostering a community appalled by the County. The industrialized wind the cultural, ecological, and financial power factory also serves as a gateway havoc that would inevitably result to piecemealing the industrialization from this industrial wind factory. of other ridges further south. At the birth of international climate The Wiyot have alerted us to the accords in Rio in 1992, nations all distinctive habitat at risk (see the agreed “not to carry out any activities article by Wiyot biologist Adam Old-growth forest dependent marbled on the lands of indigenous peoples Canter in the May 16, 2019 edition murrelet adult incubating an egg. PHOTO FROM MEDIA-CACHE-AK0.PINIMG.COM that would cause environmental of the Lost Coast Outpost, and “The degradation or that would be Terra-Gen Wind Project: Feeding habitat under the Endangered Species culturally inappropriate.” to the centralized and fire-prone Act and support species such as PG&E Grid,” on the Wiyot website Chinook salmon, summer and winter Yet Humboldt County is welcoming www.wiyot.us) including over 80 steelhead, marbled murrelet, northern Terra-Gen to construct a massive different vegetation communities, 50 spotted owl, snowy plover, and yellow- industrial complex on the unique percent of which are rare or sensitive. billed cuckoo, to name just a few. prairie grasslands of ridges managed More than 100 plant and animal and held sacred by the Wiyot people species important to the Wiyot These Cape Mendocino grasslands for countless generations. The Wiyot Tribe would be impacted. (Terra- encompass one of the largest expanses Tribe opposes this sacrilegious project. of increasingly rare coastal prairies. Gen has mapped 83 drainages in the Situated at 3,100 feet elevation at the Permitting the wind factory would not project area, including 16 perennial crossroads of terrestrial and aerial provide electrical power during public waterways.) Many are listed as critical migratory pathways, the area is a flyway connecting the Pacific Ocean and the Eel River. One hundred fifty affected species are listed in the project’s Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR), all struggling to recover from the last 150 years of intensive logging, habitat fragmentation and overgrazing to grow their populations from severely depleted gene pools. This ecosystem that Terra-Gen will obliterate has no parallel anywhere on the planet. These vast and beautiful pacific coast ridges ripple out between stream-forged valleys, surrounded by mixed forests dotted with residual Bear River Ridge art BY L ARRY E IFERT old growth. The ridges and their www.treesfoundation.org Page 3 Researchers at Imperial College London, Edinburgh University and SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden report that while an average of 11.7 turbine fires are reported annually, more than 117 fires actually occur worldwide. At present there are an estimated 200,000 turbines in operation around the world. This equates to a 1 in 1709 chance of a turbine catching fire in a year. Terra-Gen proposes 60 turbines, which equates to a 1 in 28.5 chance that there will be a fire during the project’s lifetime. winds connect the ocean to the Eel The iconic marbled murrelet Terra-Gen’s so-called mitigation for River. It is no wonder that the Wiyot population is on an extinction killing murrelets is to cover garbage recognize this area as a high prayer trajectory, having lost 85 percent of cans in Van Duzen and Cheatham place. (For drone views of Bear River its inland nesting habitat, resulting County Park: a symbol if not symptom Ridges, see https://www.youtube.com/ in a 90 percent reduction in their of the subterfuge that constitutes the watch?v=CPoXGzuQv8I) population. Our local population of basis—and most of the content—of the approximately 2,000 birds will be Environmental Impact Reports. Destroying it with a wind factory forever threatened by as many as 60 would only perpetuate nearly two This project is a poster child for centuries of destruction that these wind turbines up to 600 feet into their cumulative impacts. Advocates people, and their lands, have endured. aerial flyways, where breeders fly up like to minimize the impacts of the to eight times daily into old growth