Why local forests deserve protection

The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors should be applauded for tackling the tough issue of converting private forest land to vineyards and other agricultural uses.

Unfortunately, the supervisors' solution doesn't go far enough in protecting the county's precious timber lands. The chief overseer of forest conversion in the state will remain the California Department of Forestry even if the new county rules are adopted.

The proposed changes are an effort by the supervisors to address the increasing problem of deforestation of our privately owned forests. Although the rules would bring some modestly increased regulatory protection, the proposals still institute a scheme under which conversions can be permitted on about 95 percent or even more of some 200,000 acres of our private forests.

The new rules prohibiting conversion altogether will affect only a very small percentage of the total timber acreage, and that on land which no one would wish to convert anyway. On other land, for every acre that is converted, another two acres must be set aside as timber land. For the remainder of the forested lands, the new rules are only slightly more stringent and require only a little more environmental review than under current law.

One effect of the current proposal will be that some landowners will simply ask the Board of Supervisors to rezone their land in order to allow a conversion.

A large conversion project immediately in the wings, which will probably apply for such rezoning, is the 20,000-acre "Preservation Ranch," whose owners intend to put some 1,900 acres of vineyards into the Gualala watershed.

Preservation Ranch, which is owned by a Napa winery and partially financed by CalPERS, has announced that, after deforesting some 1,400 or more acres, it intends that some of the vineyard income will be used to maintain and even to restore the rest of what are badly overlogged forests. This may be a laudable goal, in theory, but we understand that the project is still in study mode. In our eyes it is an open question whether they can manage to achieve such goals in any measure. The road to hell, etc.

The claims made by the proponents of Preservation Ranch are often very inflated. A recent article in the San Franciso Chronicle, for instance, cites CEO William Hill as promising to "preserve 2,000 acres of old-growth redwood forest" on the project. This would be an extraordinary accomplishment, as this land has been heavily overlogged for decades, and it is very doubtful whether the property includes even a few acres of anything that could be called "old-growth redwood forest."

The problem of deforestation is a worldwide one: deforestation is the second leading contributor to human-induced global warming. Besides that, agricultural conversions such as replacing forests with vineyards bring with them other environmental consequences for wildlife, fish and rivers.

As noted in the Chronicle article, four bears were just killed because they had torn down fencing to get at grapes in a new vineyard in Napa County. This is the sort of problem which will arise more frequently as humans encroach into our own remaining (semi-) wilderness.

While the supervisors have tentatively approved some of the new timber ordinance language, the final vote won't come until February. The proposed rules may be the "most stringent in the state", as Supervisor Mike Reilly noted in a recent Press Democrat article - but very few counties regulate conversions at all. One of the counties that is proactive on the issue, Santa Cruz, is defending its attempt to regulate timber harvest plans before the California Supreme Court. We encourage people who believe that Sonoma County's forests deserve greater protections to contact their supervisors.