Friends of the Gualala River News February 2006

Friends of the Gualala River News
February 2006

Some good news for the Gualala River this month. Superior Court upheld the denial of the “Cassidy” timber harvest plan, keeping Gualala Redwoods, Inc. out of the floodplain for now. That should mean that GRI’s “Lily” & “Iris” floodplain logging plans will also be denied – unless GRI applies for a habitat conservation plan. If they do, Friends of the Gualala River will do everything we can to make sure the plan is based on the best available science and fully protects the river and the fish.

More good news: Our campaign to protect forests from conversion to vineyards is receiving more and more attention. The Associated Press ran a good article last month that was picked up by dozens of publications, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Next month the local section of the American Planning Association is running an article we wrote on the subject (Reactive regulation or affirmative land use planning?).

Good news (so far): The proposed Artesa vineyard conversion near Annapolis seems to be stalled. Preparation of an Environmental Impact Report began in September 2004… and hasn’t been heard of since.

Some not so good news: the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors are poised to approve a timberland conversion ordinance that is so watered down that it won’t provide any meaningful protection for Sonoma’s remaining forests. As currently written, the ordinance allows developers to destroy timberland on one third of their property in return for promising not to destroy forest on land which they couldn’t develop anyway. As Paul Carroll, an attorney representing Friends of the Gualala River, wrote in a recent letter to the Supervisors,

“To call this ‘mitigation’ is tantamount to saying that a developer can mitigate the destruction of a natural resource by not having plans to destroy all of it.”

We are urging the Supervisors to require that land protected as mitigation be equivalent (in slope and forest cover) to the forestland converted. That’s far from fully protective of the environment, but may be the best possible outcome in the current political climate.

Join us on Thursday, March 30 at 7:00pm at the Gualala Community Center for
“Our Watershed in Motion – a Geologist’s Perspective.” Mike Lane, Ph.D., sorts out the geological jumble that underlies our unique Gualala River Watershed, explains where it came from, where it is going, and why it looks the way it does. As we approach the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake, we will take a special close up look at the San Andreas Fault, courtesy of recent NASA laser photography.

Send us your photos & observations of the river for our new web log, FoGR BLoG. The blog has some good photos of the year-end flood event and its aftermath – the Gualala River looks remarkably different during and after such high flows.

Visit our website GualalaRiver.org
or simply FoGR.org

Or drop us a line: info@GualalaRiver.org