Category: Climate Change

More opposition to Measure FF

As you make the important decision about voting on Measure FF, please take into consideration that Million Trees and the Forest Action Brigade are not the only East Bay residents who plan to vote against Measure FF.  Today we tell you more about why many East Bay voters have made that decision.

Post-election update:  Measure FF passed easily.  In Alameda County 85% of voters approved Measure FF.  In Contra Costa County 80% of voters approved Measure FF.  These were the vote tallies on the day after the election, on November 7th.  

A ’91 fire victim and survivor tells us why he will vote against Measure FF

The East Bay Times published the following op-ed about Measure FF on October 4th. It was written by Peter Scott. He states his opposition to Measure FF clearly and emphatically.  Emphasis and photo have been added.

“Save trees, ‘no’ on Alameda County’s Measure FF”

“Alameda County’s proposed Measure FF, East Bay Regional Park District Parcel Tax Renewal, appears innocent enough: improvements in area parks, safety, a 20-year continuation of a 2004 plan to enhance the public’s enjoyment of East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD) properties.

And the tax — a dollar a month per single-family residence and $69 a month for multifamily units in Alameda County — seems affordable. But wait: Half of the money raised by this measure would fund destruction of thousands of healthy, mature trees in the East Bay hills.

This isn’t the first time this deforestation has been proposed. In 2013, FEMA offered a similar plan, to be implemented by UC Berkeley, the city of Oakland and the EBRPD. After the plan’s environmental impact was discussed in three public hearings, citizens responded with 13,000 written comments, which, by FEMA’s count, were 90 percent against the plan.

The reason, subsequently confirmed in litigation, was that the plan would involve significant, permanent negative impacts to the environment but would still fail to achieve its stated goal — to reduce risk of fire in the hills. The U.S. Forest Service commented that in terms of mitigating risk, it would be better to do nothing than to proceed with FEMA’s plan. The reason this type of proposal keeps popping up is because it is the object of long-term lobbying by a clique of nativists who want to rid the hills of species they don’t like. Their reasoning depends on myths such as these:

  • Once upon a time, before white people came and changed things, the hills were a stable environment of so-called native vegetation that was healthy and inherently fire-resistant;
  • “native” species tend to be less likely to ignite, and they have manageable flame lengths (the distance at the ground from the flame’s leading edge to its tip);
  • and trees are the culprit and were the primary reason that the 1991 fire burned out of control.

These statements are not only incorrect, they are the opposite of the truth. The old landscape burned regularly; the flame lengths of “native” brush and grasses are multiples of mature trees’ flame lengths and create conflagrations that fire personnel won’t fight because they spread and change direction so fast; the 1991 fire was a STRUCTURE fire, not a vegetation fire: houses set fire to trees, not the other way around.

Factually, the ’91 fire was human-caused. First, it was a contractor’s construction debris fire that escaped into the brush; secondly, it was a reignition from embers that the Oakland Fire Department had failed to extinguish. The official report examining the causes doesn’t mention trees but does criticize the OFD’s failures in its incident command’s preparation, training and management during the fire. Of the 16 major fires in the hills since 1905, there are basically two categories: human-caused (10 fires) and “unknown cause” — it’s a safe bet most of those “unknowns” were also human-caused.

If Measure FF is truly focused on fire risk mitigation, it would fund regular removal of fine fuels around the base of the trees — as EBMUD does so successfully — because it is the brush, grasses and debris on or near the ground that are most likely to ignite and are key to the fire’s spread and ferocity. Leave the tall trees alone, because they reduce wind, shade the ground, catch fog drip and discourage growth of flammable, weedy plants. If trees are not cut down, then repeated applications of herbicides to kill re-sprouts are unnecessary.

Measure FF proposes to fund some good things — maintenance and improvements in the parks — but they make FF a Trojan horse. They are sugar-coating on a foul and foolish enterprise: deforestation to create so-called “oak-bay savannahs,” which are actually grass- and brush-covered hills, dotted with occasional low trees — the type of landscape that has been burning so fast and ferociously in Lake and Sonoma counties and throughout the state. We must send the FF authors back to the drawing board, telling them to come back to us when they have plan that will actually reduce, not increase, the fire hazard.”

Peter Scott, Oakland, California

No one is more knowledgeable about East Bay fire history and fire hazard mitigation than Peter Scott.  He is a founding member of the Claremont Canyon Conservancy and the Hills Conservation Network.  He is passionate about fire safety in the East Bay partly because of his personal loss.  His home burned down in 1970 and 1991 and his mother was killed in the 1991 fire.  Since 1991, he has made fire hazard mitigation one of his personal priorities.  Peter Scott and his wife, Teresa Ferguson, instigated the Civil Grand Jury report about the ’91 fire.

Alameda County Green Party says “NO on Measure FF”

The Alameda County Green Party has recommended that “green” voters vote NO on Measure FF, with reservations. This was a difficult decision for the Green Party, as it was for us. We all love the parks and we know that some of the money raised by Measure FF will be used to make needed and appropriate park improvements. They explain their reservations and the reluctant conclusion they reached in their Green Voter Guide that is available on line. Here’s what they say about their decision (emphasis added):

“The Green Party of Alameda County recommends a NO vote, with reservations, on Measure FF (Alameda/Contra Costa Counties):

If approved by voters, Measure FF would simply continue existing Measure CC funding. Voters passed Measure CC in 2004 to provide local funding for park infrastructure, maintenance, safety, and services. Measure CC is a $12/year parcel tax that is set to expire in 2020. Measure FF is expected to raise approximately $3.3 million annually until it expires in 20 years.

Measure CC boasts a long list of successful improvement to East Bay Regional Parks in areas of public safety, wildfire mitigation, healthy forest management, shoreline protection, environmental stewardship, habitat preservation, park infrastructure and maintenance, recreational and educational programming, and visitor services.

While impacts of the Measure have been wide-ranging and largely celebrated, record California wildfires in 2018 have caused both opponents and proponents of the Measure to highlight the wildfire mitigation aspect of the program. Neither Measure CC nor Measure FF contains language that details how to approach reducing wildfires, however, Measure CC’s funds helped in developing the Wildfire Hazard Reduction and Resource Management Plan (“Plan”) that was approved in 2010 by the East Bay Regional Parks District (EBRPD) Board of Directors.

Proponents state that passing Measure FF is critical to continue to reduce risk of wildfires along the wildland-urban interface. They accept that thinning of certain tree species and controlled use of herbicides are tools outlined in the Plan to accomplish the task.

Opponents are against unnecessary removal of non-native species and use of herbicides (EBRPD has expanded use of herbicides and clear-cutting), arguing that extreme fires are driven by effects of climate change, not a particular tree species. Opponents agree with many fire experts that the key defense of homes against wildfire is defensible space, and argue that clear-cutting removes trees that sequester carbon (mitigating climate change) and removes the canopy that provides habitat for species and helps cool the environment. On pesticide use, they simply say: “If organic farmers can do it, so can EBRPD!”

We agree with the opponents: There are environmentally-sensitive alternate approaches to reducing wildfire risk that do not involve removing so many trees and applying poisons in East Bay parks, but the EBRPD Board must be willing to implement them. Vote “No” to send a message to the Board that we can do better. Our reservations are that we like the parks and want to protect them, and we appreciate most of the improvements that Measure FF funds.”

Alameda County Green Party

We are deeply grateful to the Green Party for their decision and we commend them for considering all sides of this complex issue, which is seldom done by political organizations.

Deliver the message to the Park District

Whatever the outcome of this election, votes against Measure FF will deliver a clear message to the Park District:  STOP destroying healthy trees and killing harmless plants and trees with dangerous pesticides!! 

This is the big, beautiful yard sign that you can put in your yard and neighborhood road medians in the East Bay.

Peter Scott and the Green Party have delivered this message and you have the opportunity to add your voice by placing a yard sign in your own yard and in the road medians in your neighborhood in the East Bay.  The Forest Action Brigade is offering yard signs at no cost to you.  Request your yard sign by contacting the Forest Action Brigade:  forestactionbrigade@gmail.com or call (510) 612-8566.

Vote NO on Measure FF!!

A vote against Measure FF on the ballot for the November 6, 2018 election is a vote against pesticide use in the East Bay.  If Measure FF passes, it will renew a parcel tax for 20 years.  For the past 15 years, the parcel tax has funded the destruction of thousands of trees on thousands of acres of public parks in the East Bay.  The renewal of the parcel tax will increase the percentage of available funds for tree removals and associated pesticide use from 30% to 40% of funds raised by the parcel tax.

Post-election update:  Measure FF passed easily.  In Alameda County 85% of voters approved Measure FF.  In Contra Costa County 80% of voters approved Measure FF.  These were the vote tallies on the day after the election, on November 7th.  

Tree removals increase pesticide use because herbicides are required to prevent the trees from resprouting.  Also, when the shade of trees is eliminated, the unshaded ground is soon colonized by weeds that are then sprayed with herbicide.  The destruction of trees has put public land managers on the pesticide treadmill.

The public tried hard to convince the East Bay Regional Park District to stop destroying healthy trees and quit using pesticides in our parks.  We attended public hearings and wrote letters to Park District leadership and its governing board.  We made many suggestions for useful park improvements that would be constructive, rather than destructive.  Our requests and suggestions were ignored.

After making every effort to avoid opposition to Measure FF, we reluctantly take a stand against it.  The parks are important to us and we would much prefer to support park improvements.  Unfortunately, Measure FF will not improve the parks.  Rather, it will continue down the destructive path the Park District has been on for the past 15 years. In fact, Measure FF would escalate the destruction and poisoning of our public lands.

On Friday, August 31st, the Forest Action Brigade participated in a press conference rally at Bayer headquarters in Berkeley. Bayer is the new owner of Monsanto, the manufacturer of glyphosate. The rally was sponsored by a labor organization that is concerned about exposing workers to glyphosate, which is probably a carcinogen.  The President of the Forest Action Brigade, Marg Hall, spoke at the rally.

The Voter Information Guides in Contra Costa and Alameda counties have published the following argument against Measure FF that was submitted by the Forest Action Brigade.  We hope you will read it and take this important opportunity to protect our public parks from being needlessly damaged.

Million Trees

Argument Against Measure FF

“We love public parks, and we support taxation which benefits the common good. Nevertheless, We urge a NO vote. East Bay Regional Parks District (EBRPD) has previously used this measure to destroy, unnecessarily, thousands of healthy trees under pretexts such as “hazardous tree” designations and “protection against wildfires”. But fire experts point out that tree shade retains moisture, thereby reducing fire danger. The measure has also funded so-called “restoration”—destruction of “non-native” plants, in a futile attempt to transform the landscape back to some idealized previous “native” era.

EBRPD’s restoration and tree-cutting projects often utilize pesticides, including glyphosate (Roundup), triclopyr, and imazapyr. We agree with the groundswell of public sentiment opposing the spending of tax dollars on pesticides applied to public lands. Not only do pesticides destroy the soil microbiome; they also migrate into air, water arid soil, severely harming plants, animals, and humans. Because EPA pesticide regulation, especially under the current administration, is inadequate, it is imperative that local jurisdictions exercise greater oversight. While EBRPD utilizes “Integrated Pest Management” which limits pesticide use, we strongly advocate a no pesticide policy, with a concomitant commitment of resources.

Given the terrifying pace of climate change, it is indefensible to target certain species of trees for eradication. All trees—not just “natives” —are the planet’s “lungs,” breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. When a tree is destroyed, its air-cleansing function is forever eliminated, and its stored carbon is released into the atmosphere, thus worsening climate change.

Throughout history, plants, animals, and humans have migrated when their given habitats became unlivable. Adaptation to new environments is at the heart of evolutionary resilience. To claim that some species “belong here” and others do not strikes us as unscientific xenophobia.

Until EBRPD modifies its approach, we urge a NO vote.”

Forest Action Brigade

Do not be misled

The arguments in favor of Measure FF are misleading.  East Bay Regional Parks District attempts to portray a destructive agenda as a constructive agenda.  Please look beneath these pretty-sounding euphemisms for the destructive projects of Measure FF:

·       EBRPD claims Measure FF will “protect against wildfires.”  Destroying harmless trees miles away from any residential structures and replacing the shaded, moist forest with dry grassland that easily ignites will NOT “protect against wildfires.”

·       EBRPD claims Measure FF will “enhance public safety” and “preserve water quality.”  Spraying thousands of acres of open space in our water shed with pesticides will endanger the public and contaminate our water supply.

·       EBRPD claims Measure FF will “protect redwoods and parklands in a changing climate.”  Destroying hundreds of thousands of healthy trees, storing millions of tons of carbon, will exacerbate climate change.  Our redwood forest in the East Bay was confined to less than 5 square miles prior to settlement because of the restrictive horticultural requirements of this treasured native tree.  Because redwoods require more water than most of our urban forest, it is a fantasy that they can be expanded beyond their native footprint.  Where they have been planted outside of that range, many are already dead.

·       EBRPD claims Measure FF will “restore natural areas.”  Our pre-settlement landscape in the East Bay was predominantly grassland in which fire hazards are greatest.  A landscape that has been sprayed with pesticide cannot be accurately described as “natural.”  Previous attempts to convert non-native annual grassland to native grassland have consistently failed, partly because the soil has been poisoned with herbicide.

You can help

The Forest Action Brigade is offering yard signs in opposition to Measure FF (shown below).  Request your yard sign by contacting the Forest Action Brigade: forestactionbrigade@gmail.com or call (510) 612-8566.  Please state how many signs you would like and the neighborhood where you plan to place them.  These are the East Bay cities in which Measure FF will be on the ballot:  Oakland, Alameda, Piedmont, Berkeley, Emeryville, Albany, Richmond, San Pablo, El Cerrito.  These cities are the top priority for yard sign placement.

Million Trees

Wildfire cover story is the lie that binds

Native plant advocates originally thought they would be able to destroy all non-native trees in California based entirely on their preference for native plants.  People who value our urban forest quickly challenged that assumption.  Native plant advocates devised a new strategy based on fear.  Fear is the most powerful justification for many public policies that deliver a wide range of agendas, including the current prejudices against immigrants that is shared by many native plant advocates.  After the destructive wildfire in Oakland in 1991, native plant advocates seized on fear of fire to convince the public that all non-native trees must be destroyed.  They made the ridiculous claim that native plants and trees are less flammable than non-native plants and trees.

Scripps Ranch fire, San Diego, 2003. All the homes burned, but the eucalypts that surrounded them did not catch fire. New York Times

Like most lies, the wildfire cover story has come back to bite the nativists.  As wildfires rage all over the west, becoming more frequent and more intense, the public can see with their own eyes that every fire occurs in native vegetation, predominantly in grass and brush and sometimes spreading to native forests of conifers and oak woodlands.  It has become difficult for nativists to convince the public that native vegetation isn’t flammable because the reality of wildfires clearly proves otherwise.

Vegetation that burned in the North Bay files of October 2017. Source: Bay Area Open Space Council

Recently, nativists have become the victims of their own wildfire cover story as they try to reconcile the contradictions in their hypocritical agendas.  These contradictions are now visible both nationally and locally in the San Francisco Bay Area.  We will tell you about the lie that binds nativism today.

Sierra Club caught in the wringer of its own making

The New York Times published an op-ed by Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, and Chad Hansen, ecologist and member of the Sierra Club Board of Directors.  They informed us of a proposed federal farm bill to destroy trees on thousands of acres of national forests without any environmental review.  The stated purpose of this federal plan is to reduce wildfire hazards.

The national leaders of the Sierra Club emphatically disagree that destroying trees will reduce fire hazards.  In fact, they say “increased logging can make fires burn more intensely” because “Logging, including many projects deceptively promoted as forest ‘thinning,’ removes fire-resistant trees, reduces the cooling shade of the forest canopy and leaves behind highly combustible twigs and branches.”

They point out that climate change and associated drought have increased the intensity of wildfires.  Therefore, they say we must “significantly increase forest protection, since forests are a significant natural mechanism for absorbing and storing carbon dioxide.”  Destroying forests contributes to climate change and climate change is causing more wildfires.

The leaders of the Sierra Club tell us that the most effective way to reduce damage caused by wildfires is to “focus on fire-safety measures for at-risk houses.  These include installing fire-resistant roofing, ember-proof exterior vents and guards to prevent wind-borne embers from igniting dry leaves and pine needles in rain gutters and creating ‘defensible space’ by reducing combustible grasses, shrubs and small trees within 100 feet of homes.  Research shows these steps can have a major impact on whether houses survive wildfires.”

Does that strategy sound familiar?  Perhaps you read that exact strategy here on Million Trees or on many other local blogs that share our view that destroying trees is not the solution to fire hazard mitigation and safety. 

Unfortunately, the Sierra Club continues to talk out of both sides of its mouth.  While the national leadership speaks rationally on the subject of wildfires, the local leadership of the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club continues to demand that all non-native trees in the Bay Area be destroyed. 

The City of Oakland recently published a draft of its Vegetation Management Plan (VMP) with the stated purpose of reducing fire hazards.  The draft plan recommends removal of most non-native trees on 2,000 acres of open space and along 300 hundred miles of roads.  The plan seemed unnecessarily destructive to those who value our urban forest and have a sincere interest in reducing fire hazards, but it was unacceptable to the local chapter of the Sierra Club because it does not go far enough to destroy all non-native trees.  Here are some of the revisions they demand in their public comment (1) on the draft VMP:

  • “…removal of all second-growth eucalyptus trees, coppice suckers and seedlings in city parks…”
  • “…removal of 20-year old Monterey Pine seedlings that were allowed to become established after the original pines burned and were killed in the 1991 fire…”
  • “…identify areas of overly mature and near hazardous Monterey Pine and Cypress trees that could be removed…”
  • “…recommend adoption of specific updated IPM policies for the city to implement that will allow appropriate and safe use of herbicides…”
  • “The Sierra Club has developed the right approach to vegetation management for fire safety…The Sierra Club’s program for vegetation management can be summarized by the Three R’s:”
    • “Remove fire dangerous eucalyptus, pine, and other non-native trees and other fire dangerous vegetation like French and Scotch broom…”
    • “Restore those areas with more fire safe native trees like bays, oaks, laurels and native grasslands…”
    • “Re-establish the greater biodiversity of flora and fauna that results from the return of more diverse habitat than exists in the monoculture eucalyptus plantations…”

The local chapter of the Sierra Club is making the same demands for complete eradication of non-native trees in the East Bay Regional Park District.  The pending renewal of the parcel tax that has paid for tree removals in the Park District for the past 12 years was an opportunity for the Sierra Club to make its endorsement of the renewal contingent upon the Park District making a commitment to remove all non-native trees (and many other commitments).

“…the Sierra Club believes it is critical that in any renewal of Measure CC [now Measure FF on the November 2018 ballot] funding for vegetation management should be increased for the removal of non-natives such as eucalyptus and their replacement with restored native habitat…Measure CC [now FF] funds should not be used to thin eucalyptus but must be allocated to the restoration of native habitat.” (1)

The Sierra Club has endorsed the renewal of the parcel tax—Measure FF—that will be on the ballot in November 2018.  In other words, the Park District has made a commitment to removing all non-native trees on our parks.  We have reported on some of the clear cuts that the Park District has done in the past 6 months.

Sibley Volcanic Reserve. Photo by Larry Danos, March 2018

The national Sierra Club and the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club are at odds on fire hazard mitigation.  The national leadership understands that destroying trees will not reduce fire hazards.  They also understand that destroying trees will contribute to climate change that is causing more destructive wildfires.  The local leadership clings to the cover story that native trees are less flammable than non-native trees.

Local nativists change their tune

There is no history of wildfires in San Francisco and there is unlikely to be in the future because it is foggy and soggy during the dry summer months when wildfires occur.  But the reality of the climate conditions and the absence of fire in the historical record never prevented nativists in San Francisco from trying to use the fire cover story to support their demand that thousands of non-native trees be destroyed. 

Summer fog blanket over San Francisco. Courtesy Save Mount Sutro Forest.

Jake Sigg, retired San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department (SFRPD) gardener who is considered the doyen of the Native Plant movement in San Francisco, has a widely circulated email newsletter. In that newsletter, he repeatedly claimed that eucalyptus were dying during the extreme drought and had to be destroyed so they would not cause a catastrophic wildfire.  In fact, eucalyptus did not die in San Francisco or elsewhere in the Bay Area during the drought because they are the most drought-tolerant tree species in our urban forest.  More native trees died in California during the drought than non-native trees. 

Jake Sigg made those dire predictions before the native plant agenda was finally approved in 2017 after 20 years of heated debate and before many wildfires in California have established the truth that wildfires start in grass and brush and seldom in forests and in every case in exclusively native vegetation.

So, to accommodate this new reality, Jake Sigg has changed his tune.  He got his wish that thousands of non-native trees be destroyed in San Francisco as well as a commitment to restore the native grassland that he prefers.  Consequently it is no longer consistent with that agenda to claim that there are acute fire hazards in San Francisco, requiring the destruction of flammable vegetation.

The San Francisco Chronicle published an article about the concerns of park neighbors about dead/dying/dormant grass and brush in parks that they believe is a fire hazard and they want the San Francisco park department to clear that flammable vegetation.  Jake Sigg is now quoted as saying that it isn’t necessary to clear that vegetation—which he prefers—because there are no fire hazards in San Francisco: 

“What protects much of San Francisco’s forested area is the city’s famed fog, said Jake Sigg, a conservation chairman of the local chapter of the California Native Plant Society.  While walking on Mount Davidson on a recent afternoon, he said, one area was so muddy from fog that he has to be careful not to slip…’In the past, (fires) haven’t been too much of a concern for the simple reason that we have had adequate rainfall,’ Sigg said.”

According to nativists, the wet eucalyptus forest must be destroyed, but the dead/dried flammable brush and grassland must be preserved because it is native.

Serpentine Prairie restoration. East Bay Regional Park District

The elusive truth

Despite the constantly shifting story, we are not fooled.  The truth is that native vegetation is just as flammable as non-native vegetation and that destroying trees—regardless of their nativity—will not reduce fire hazards.

(1) These letters on Sierra Club letterhead were obtained by public records requests and are available on request.

Finding the middle ground between competing conservation strategies

Today Million Trees strays off its well-worn path of informing readers of specific projects in the San Francisco Bay Area that destroy our urban forest and spray our public lands with herbicides.  Under the guidance of Charles C. Mann’s latest book, The Wizard and the Prophet (1), we’ll take a detour into the philosophical tenets of conservation.  There are competing visions of the future of humans on Earth and they are instrumental in producing different conservation strategies.

We begin by introducing Charles C. Mann because his previous books are essential to our understanding of ecology.  His 1491 informed us that the New World “discovered” by Columbus was not the pristine landscape that modern-day native plant advocates are attempting to re-create.  Rather it was a land that had been radically altered by indigenous people who had lived in the Western Hemisphere for over 10,000 years.  The landscape had been extensively gardened for food production.  The large animals had been hunted to extinction.  The landscape in the West and Midwest was dominated by open grassland because it had been regularly burned, preventing natural succession to shrubs and trees.

Native Americans setting grass fire, painting by Frederic Remington, 1908

Early explorers carried diseases to the New World to which they were immune, but the native people were not.  By the time settlers arrived two hundred years after early explorers, most of the native people had died of the diseases introduced by the explorers.  Populations of bison and other grazing animals exploded when those who hunted them were killed by disease.  The grazing animals maintained the open grassland that had been created by the fires of the hunters.  Archaeological research has only recently revealed the extent of native populations throughout the New World.

Charles Mann’s second book, 1493, reported the global exchange of plants and animals between the New and the Old Worlds that fundamentally altered both worlds.  The extent and long history of that exchange makes it impossible for us to see those introduced plants, animals, objects as foreigners who “don’t belong here.”

Different visions of the future

Million Trees is indebted to Charles Mann for the books that are the foundation of our cosmopolitan viewpoint of the world.  Mann’s new book, The Wizard and The Prophet is equally important because it helps us understand the interminable debate about conservation.  There is a dark view of the future of the environment that predicts nothing but doom and gloom.  Extinctions dominate their predictions of the future and humans are seen as the destroyers of nature.  The more optimistic view of conservation predicts that the Earth will survive the changes made by humans because humans are capable of innovating to avoid the doom predicted by the pessimists.

Mann describes these contrasting views through the lives of two 20th Century men whom he calls the prophet and the wizard.  The prophet is William Vogt, who believed that the growing population of humans threatened the future of the Earth.  The wizard is Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Prize in 1970 for developing more productive agricultural crops, collectively called the “Green Revolution.”

The prophet believed that the resources needed to sustain life on Earth are finite and the human population was quickly reaching the point at which sources of food, energy, and water would soon be exhausted, threatening all life with extinction.  The wizard devoted his life to expanding food resources to feed the growing human population.  These viewpoints are inherently contradictory because making more food available enables more people to survive and increase human populations.  Vogt tried to cut off the sources of funding for the agricultural projects of Borlaug.

Different conservation methods:  Food

Mann applies these different viewpoints to each major resource issue to explain why the pros and cons of different approaches to conservation are debated, beginning with food production.  The Green Revolution occurred in the 1960s when subsistence crops such as wheat, corn, and rice were improved using breeding techniques.  Borlaug developed a variety of wheat that was both resistant to stem rust, its most persistent enemy, and produced more wheat for harvest.  Working in a desperately poor part of Mexico, with inadequate resources, Borlaug spent 15 years combining thousands of different varieties of wheat to find the winning combination.  His work was done prior to our knowledge of DNA and molecular analysis, so it was a process of trial and error.  It is a heart-wrenching story of brute labor in extreme conditions.  The story is important to our understanding of genetic modification because it reminds us that genetic modification is as old as agriculture itself, although it was called “breeding” until we learned what we now know about DNA.

File:Wheat yields in Least Developed Countries.svg

Mann visits some of the many modern methods of genetic engineering, such as the attempt to “revise” photosynthesis to enable plants to store more carbon, use less water, and tolerate higher temperatures.   These projects are controversial with the public, who are deeply suspicious of all genetic engineering.  In 1999, about one-quarter of Americans considered genetically modified organisms unsafe.  Sixteen years later, 57% of Americans said GMOs are dangerous.

The debate about the value or risks of GMOs is an example of the competing visions of conservation.  The prophets see risk and the wizards see opportunities.  Surely, there ARE risks, but do they outweigh opportunities?  That is the middle ground in the debate.  Mann departs from his neutral stance to take a position on GMOs.  He quotes many scientific sources in support of his opinion that there is far more opportunity than risk in genetic engineering.  My personal opinion is that GMOs are being unfairly judged because of the development of seeds that enable the indiscriminate use of pesticides.  The pesticides are damaging the environment, not the genetically modified seeds.

Update:  I sent this article to Charles Mann to thank him for his work and invite him to correct any errors I may have made.  He has offered this “tiny clarification:”

“I was actually trying to do something very slightly different. The argument about GMOs is frequently posed in terms of health risks–are they safe to eat? In my view, the evidence to date is overwhelming that there is no particular reason to think that GMO crops pose more dangers to human health than crops developed by conventional breeding. At the same time, there are a host of reasons to think that the now-conventional industrial-style agriculture brought to us by the Green Revolution has problems: fertilizer runoff, soil depletion, the destruction of rural communities, etc. GMOs are often said by advocates of industrial ag to be the only way to keep this system going so that we can feed everyone in the world of 10 billion. If you already think that industrial ag is a big problem, then of course you would oppose a technology that is supposed to keep it going. That seems to me a better, more fruitful ground to argue.”  Charles C. Mann

I agree that “industrial ag is a big problem,” and I am grateful for this clarification.

Different conservation methods:  Water

The availability of adequate water is a limitation for agriculture that provides another example of competing approaches to conservation.  The wizards want dams to control available water and maximize its use for agriculture by storing water during rainy periods and using it during dry periods.  They also want desalination plants to convert salt water to fresh water.  97.5% of all water on Earth is salt water.  It is not useful for agriculture and it is not drinking water for humans.

Prophets want to tear down existing dams to make more water available for non-human inhabitants of the Earth.  They also object to desalination plants because they kill marine life, discharge pollutants, and use a lot of energy.  Water conservation is the preferred solution to water shortages according to prophets.

Hetch Hetchy canyon was dammed nearly 100 years ago. The dam is the primary source of water for the City of San Francisco and many surrounding communities. The dam generates the electricity that runs San Francisco’s transportation system without using fossil fuels. Sierra Club and other environmental organizations have sued several times to tear down the dam.   Inklein English Wikipedia photo

Different conservation methods:  Energy

Energy is required for every human enterprise:  heat, cooking, transportation, light, industrial production, etc.  Wood was the primary source of energy for thousands of years until coal began to be used in China around 3,400 B.C.  Although coal is still used, petroleum began to replace it as the primary source of fuel in the 19th century.  The supply of coal and petroleum was considered finite until recently.  Thanks to the wizards, extraction methods have been continuously developed such that the supply is now considered effectively infinite as long as increasingly more destructive methods are used, such as fracking and strip mining.

The prophets want to replace fossil fuels as the primary source of energy because of concerns about climate change and pollution.  Although they are supportive of developing renewable sources of energy, they often object to specific projects with side-effects.  They object to wind turbines because they sometimes kill birds.  They object to large solar farms because they displace wildlife.  Their preferred approach to energy is conservation.  They want us to learn to live with less energy.

The wizards focus on improving existing sources of energy with fewer impacts on the environment.  They envision a massive energy grid that can store and share the power generated by renewable sources so that energy is available to everyone at all times whether the wind blows or the sun shines.  The prophets object to such big projects.  They want energy to be produced locally and available locally.  The Sierra Club is opposed to a California Assembly bill that would create a regional power grid.

Different conservation methods:  Climate Change

All of these issues come together when climate change is debated.  Wizards are working on geo-engineering approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, such as burying carbon in the ground.  Their public policy approaches to the issue are also complex and on a large scale, such as cap-and-trade systems to create a profit-motive for reducing carbon emissions. 

Prophets are unwilling to take the risks associated with geo-engineering strategies and they are skeptical that cap-and-trade will be more than a means of avoiding the sacrifices needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  The Sierra Club was instrumental in preventing the State of Washington from passing a revenue-neutral cap-and-trade law.  The Sierra Club also opposed the recent renewal of California’s cap-and-trade law.  Market-based approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions may not be the strongest policy tools, but they are the only tools available in the US because there is not sufficient political support for stronger policies.  Only 11 states have been able to enact market-based laws, such as cap-and-trade.  Sierra Club policies are often far removed from political realities.

Unintended consequences

Charles Mann does his best to avoid choosing a side in these debates and on the whole he succeeds.  He wants readers to understand that for every conservation method there is a cost and he dutifully tells us about the horrifying consequences of rigidly following one path rather the other.

Vogt, the prophet, firmly believed that the Earth and its human inhabitants would only survive if humans would voluntarily adopt public policies that would limit the growth of human population.  This goal was not popularized until The Population Bomb was written by Paul Ehrlich and published by the Sierra Club in 1968.  Mandatory population control became the official public policy in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, and especially India.  In the 1970s and 80s millions of women were sterilized in India, often against their will.  In China the one-child policy adopted in 1980 forced tens of millions of abortions, many of which killed mothers.  Birth control was forced on women in Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and the Philippines.

There is constant pressure within the Sierra Club to adopt an anti-immigration policy.  The Club had such a policy until 1996 and there have been several attempts since to reinstate that policy.  I digress to express my personal opinion that immigration is not a legitimate environmental issue because the environment is global.  The migration of people from Central America to North America does not fundamentally alter the impact on the environment.  If migrants have better access to birth control and education for women in North America, the size of their families would likely decrease.

The Sierra Club, like most mainstream environmental organizations, is firmly in the camp of the prophets.  They cast humans as the enemy of nature and their policies reflect their misanthropy.  They oppose every housing development project and all recreational access to public lands in California.

The Green Revolution and the way of the wizard carries its own baggage.  The new crops and the resources needed to produce them were not equitably distributed in the places where they were needed the most.  The richest farmers and biggest land owners in both India and Mexico were the primary beneficiaries of the improved agricultural methods.  But it wasn’t just inequitable distribution that did the most damage.  The poorest farmers owned the most marginal land.  Improved crops made their land more valuable.  It was suddenly worthwhile for land owners to dispossess their tenant farmers. The poorest farmers became the poorest homeless people in the huge cities of India and Mexico.

The Green Revolution also greatly increased the use of synthetic fertilizers that have caused nitrogen and phosphorus pollution from agricultural runoff.  And pesticides were another tool of the Green Revolution with their own suite of negative environmental consequences.

Both cases illustrate the important role that governments play in environmental policy.  Neither the extreme application of population control methods nor the inequitable distribution of agricultural resources were inevitable.  In the hands of competent, democratic government both methods had the potential to improve the well-being of humans without damaging the environment.

The Middle Ground:  All of the Above

I see Mann’s book about competing conservation strategies as an endorsement of the middle ground.  My own strong commitment to the middle ground probably influences my reaction to Mann’s book.  The concept of “population control” is as unappealing to me as some of the geo-engineering projects being developed to address climate change.

“Population control” is antithetical to a free society.  The middle ground is universal and free access to birth control, early sex education, and educating women in developing countries.  Educating women is the most effective method of reducing birth rates.

2014 UN Human Development Index. Human Development Index map. Darker is higher. Countries with a higher HDI usually have a lower birth rate, known as the fertility-income paradox.

The risks of geo-engineering solutions to climate change are too great to pursue without careful scientific analysis to fully understand the risks before they are implemented on a large scale.  Likewise, I am opposed to building new nuclear power plants until and unless we have a safe method of disposing of the nuclear waste generated by those plants.

Ironically, the middle ground is in some sense, the most aggressive conservation strategy because it is ALL OF THE ABOVE.  The consequences of climate change are too dire to choose one path and abandon the other.  We must carefully go down every path available.  We must do what we can to limit the increase in human population—within the constraints of a free society—and we must aggressively pursue the technological innovations that are needed to protect the environment from the activities of humans.  We must develop new sources of energy that do not emit greenhouse gas emissions as well as reduce our use of limited resources, such as water and energy.

I conclude with an important caveat.  This article does not do justice to Mann’s brilliant book.  I have only scratched the surface of Mann’s complex and deeply informed book.  Charles Mann made a presentation to the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco shortly after the publication of his book.  A video of his presentation is available HERE.  The video will help bridge the gap between this brief summary and reading Mann’s important book.

  1. Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and The Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, Alfred Knopf, 2018

Adapting to more wildfire in western North American forests as the climate changes

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has published its recommendations for a new approach to managing forests in the American West to adapt to the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires in the changing climate.  The authors of the NAS publication regarding adaptive forest management in the changing climate are 12 academic scientists from major public universities in 8 western states. (1)

Although the National Academy of Sciences was created by an Act of Congress in 1863, during the Lincoln administration, it is a non-governmental non-profit that receives no direct government funding.  Its charge is “providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology. … to provide scientific advice to the government ‘whenever called upon’ by any government department.” Members of the Academy serve without salary as “advisers to the nation.” Election to the National Academies is one of the highest honors in the scientific field. The independence of NAS is ensured by lack of governmental funding and salaries to its members.  However, 85% of NAS funding is government grants and contracts. (2)

In other words, this publication is an important policy document, prepared by distinguished scientists and published by America’s most prestigious scientific institution.  It deserves our attention and respect.

Why is a new forest management approach needed?

In the past, forest management policies have focused primarily on preventing fire, reducing fuel loads, and restoring burned areas.  Given the increasing intensity and frequency of wildfires, there is a new understanding that these approaches are no longer adequate to address new conditions created by the changed and changing climate.  The new approach recognizes that fuels reduction cannot alter regional wildfire trends and therefore must adapt ecosystems and residential communities to more frequent fires, including “planning residential development to withstand inevitable wildfire.”  This represents a shift from restoring historical conditions, now considered unsustainable, to developing fire-adapted communities.

The authors of this publication tell us that managing forest fuels has been ineffective:  “Mechanical fuels treatments on the US federal lands over the last 15 years totaled almost 7 million hectares, but the annual area burned has continued to set records.  Regionally, the area treated has little relationship to trends in the area burned, which is influenced primarily by patterns of drought and warming.”  Where fuels treatment was done, wildfires subsequently occurred:  “10% of the total number of US Forest Service forest fuels treatments completed in the 2004-2013 period in the western United States subsequently burned in the 2005-2014 period.”  This suggests that “most treatments have little influence on wildfire.” In any case, only 40% of wildfires occurred in forests since 1984, with most fires burning grasslands and shrublands.  Clearly, these projects have been a waste of time, trees, and taxpayer money.

This area on the west side of Grizzly Peak Blvd is known as Frowning Ridge. It is one of the first areas that was clear-cut by UC Berkeley over 10 years ago. Destroying the trees did not prevent the grass and shrubs from igniting in the August 2017 fire. Pictures of that area before and after the trees were destroyed are available here: https://milliontrees.me/2013/06/08/guest-article-about-fema-projects-by-a-student-of-the-forest/  The fire in August 2017 was stopped when it reached the forest on the opposite side of the road.

Nor do the authors consider “thinning” of forests a viable method of reducing fire hazards because “when thinning is combined with the expected warming, unintended consequences may ensue, whereby regeneration is compromised and forested areas convert to non-forest.”  When trees are thinned, the trees that remain are more vulnerable to wind and they lose the ability to share resources with the neighboring trees that have been removed.

Tilden Park, October 2016. East Bay Regional Park District has radically thinned this area to distances of 25 feet between remaining trees. This area is about 2 miles away from any residential structures. Cal Fire defines “defensible space” as 100 feet around structures.

There are two major reasons for increased wildfire hazards.  More than 50% of the increase in areas burned by wildfire in the American West is attributed to climate change.  The expansion of residential development into forested areas—called the Wildland-Urban-Interface (WUI)—is the second factor:  “Between 1990 and 2010, almost 2 million homes were added in the 11 states of the western United States, increasing the WUI by 24%.”  35% of wildfires in the WUI since 2000 were in California, more than any other state.

What is the new management goal?

Whereas past policies were designed to maintain forest conditions to historical conditions, this is no longer considered a realistic goal.  The recommended goal is now “supporting species compositions and fuel structure that are better adapted to a warming, drying climate with more wildfire.”  Sounds like planting tree species that are adapted to new climate conditions, doesn’t it?

The other, equally important new goal is to reduce the vulnerability of communities to wildfire by “changing building codes to make structures more fire-resistant…and providing incentives, education, and resources to reduce vulnerability to future wildfire.”  The only tree removals that make sense to the authors are those immediately around residential communities, “strategically located to protect homes and the surrounding vegetation.”  That is the principle of creating “defensible space” immediately around structures:  “fuels management for home and community protection will be most effective closest to homes…where ignition probabilities are likely to be high.”

Source: Cal Fire

These strategies are called “transformative resilience,” which “refers to planned fundamental change in response to drastically altered disturbances that have the potential to create broad-scale, systemic shifts in ecological states or radical shifts in values, beliefs, social behavior, and multilevel governance.”  The authors of these policy recommendations acknowledge that such rapid and radical shifts in social and ecological transformation are rare and difficult to achieve.  We certainly agree with that observation.

The urgently needed paradigm shift

Public policy and conventional wisdom is wedded to the past.  The public is unable or unwilling to acknowledge the realities of climate change.  They remain committed to “restoring” the landscape to an imagined pre-settlement ideal in the distant past.  And public land managers remain committed to creating that fantasy landscape, by destroying existing landscapes and using herbicides to do so.  They destroy the trees of the future and plant the trees of the past.  And they destroy trees miles from any residential properties while property owners resist the creation of defensible space needed to protect their homes.

The authors of the NAS publication clearly state the risks of continuing down that path:  “[Such policies] may be the easiest, most familiar path with the least uncertainty, but this approach is short-sighted and could come at the cost of adaptation to future wildfire as climate change continues.”

They also urge the public to wake up to this new reality:  “Some ecosystems will survive and thrive as they adapt to novel future conditions, but not all.  Embracing rather than resisting ecological change will require a significant paradigm shift by individuals, communities, and institutions and will challenge our conservation philosophies.”

Our safety and the future of our land are at stake.  We must take our heads out of the sand and look forward instead of back to a past that is long gone and will not return.  Since climate change is causing more wildfires, destroying more trees than necessary to achieve fire safety is counterproductive because deforestation is the source of about 10% of carbon emissions contributing to climate change.

(1) Tania Schoennagel, et. al., “Adapt to more wildfire in western North American forests as climate changes,” Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, May 2017

(2) Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Academy_of_Sciences

Endangered Species Law is under fire

Like most of our federal laws and regulations intended to protect the environment, the Endangered Species Act is under fire because the political party now in power is opposed to government regulations that impose any perceived limitations on economic activity.  There are a number of laws grinding their way through the legislative process that would revise, if not gut the ESA.*

I have mixed feelings about the threats to weaken the ESA because there is widespread agreement that the law could be improved.  When it was created, over 40 years ago, it was based on the scientific knowledge available at the time.  For example, recently available molecular analysis has greatly improved our ability to accurately identify species.

Climate change was but a glimmer on the distant horizon 40 years ago.  Now most people understand that climate change will cause many extinctions that the ESA is powerless to prevent.  Emaciated polar bears standing on small islands of ice are the poster children for the impact of climate change on rare animals.

The political threats to the ESA have focused the attention of the media on specific examples of endangered species and the efforts to prevent their extinction.  Each one illustrates a different issue with the existing law.

Attempts to solve one problem cause other problems

Greater sage grouse

The Greater sage grouse is a critically endangered bird (although not officially designated as such) that requires sagebrush for its home.  In an effort to expand habitat for the grouse, land managers destroyed native junipers that were spreading into grouse habitat.  A few years later they determined that destroying the trees did not produce the desired habitat.  Instead, non-native annual grasses have colonized the bare ground and many sapling junipers are growing from the seed bank left by the trees that were destroyed. (1)

Instead of calling the tree destruction a failed experiment, the scientists now propose to escalate the eradication effort.  They now plan to use herbicides and prescribed burns to eradicate the non-native annual grasses.  Given the persistence of herbicides in the soil, more sagebrush may not be the ultimate outcome.  And the sage grouse are unlikely to benefit from either poisoned vegetation or fires in their habitat.

Some extinctions are the unintended consequence of misguided “conservation” efforts

When European rabbits were intentionally imported to Australia, predictably the population quickly exploded.  A virus was then intentionally imported to kill the rabbits.  Like many biocontrols, the virus spread into the native range of the rabbits about 20 years ago, including into Spain.

Iberian lynx. Creative Commons

The Iberian lynx is very rare partly because it is a picky eater.  Curiously, rabbits are the strongly preferred prey of the Iberian lynx.  There were enough rabbits available for the lynx until the rabbits were wiped out by the virus that was unintentionally imported to Spain.  The population of Iberian lynx plummeted to only 100 known individuals.  That’s when the EU version of the ESA kicked into action.

The Iberian lynx is now bred in captivity, a complex and challenging process likened to “having a nursery for rich kids in which you have a teacher for each kid.”  Needless to say that is an expensive proposition.  Releasing the lynx back into the wild required that 50,000 rabbits (costing $12.30 each) be simultaneously released into lynx territory.  The project cost $42 million over a period of 7 years.  (2)

The Spanish environmental official responsible for the project was visibly irritated when asked about the cost of the program.  He said “some ‘ignorant’ pundits were drawing unflattering comparisons between how much was being spent on the lynx compared to funding allocated to offset social issues such as unemployment.”  The strongest defenses of extreme efforts to save rare species are made by those who earn their living on them. (2)

Growing number of “conservation reliant” species

An article in the New York Times magazine recently asked this rhetorical question, “Should some species be allowed to die out?”  (3) The article focused on Hawaii because it is a place where heroic efforts have been made to save endangered species.  Nearly 50% of 1,280 federal endangered species are in Hawaii.  Over 80% of all endangered species are considered “conservation reliant,” a term used to describe the plants and animals that are permanently on life support.  They will not survive if not permanently tended by humans in hothouses and animal shelters.

Hawaii has the most endangered species because they evolved in isolation in a distant place with no interaction with the outside world until about 700 years ago.  That isolation cannot be recreated without stopping all trade and travel to and from Hawaii.  That is clearly not going to happen.  If the underlying conditions that cause extinctions cannot be reversed, no amount of human effort is likely to prevent the extinction.

Although I consider most of these efforts futile, that is not the conventional wisdom.  There are over 300 comments on the article in the NY Times that are overwhelmingly supportive of the ESA and the heroic efforts to save rare species.

Confiscation of private land

Dusky gopher frog

The ESA enables the government to designate both public and private land as “critical habitat” for endangered animals.  The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case about the application of the Endangered Species Act that enabled the federal government to designate 1,600 acres of private land as critical habitat for an endangered frog. That designation will prevent the land owner from developing the land or using it for a different purpose other than providing POTENTIAL habitat for a frog that has not been seen in that part of the country since 1965.  US Fish & Wildlife also concedes that the frog cannot live on the land in its present condition and requires modification to accommodate the needs of this frog.  (4)

Needless to say, private land owners aren’t enthusiastic about the loss of the use of their land for purposes other than supporting a specific rare animal.

Assisted migration?

Torreya taxifolia near Cincinnati, Ohio

Torreya taxifolia, commonly known as Florida nutmeg, was classified as endangered in 1984.  It was attacked by a fungal blight about 70 years ago that has decimated its population in its small native range on the Florida panhandle.  It is an example of one of the major obstacles to keeping rare plants alive because it is very difficult to propagate:

“Unlike most plants, the tree has so-called recalcitrant seeds, which cannot be preserved in conventional seed banks because they can’t survive drying. This necessitated the development of a tissue-culture system for the species called somatic embryogenesis. Embryos are surgically removed from fully developed seeds, then cultured in vitro to encourage the formation of multiple embryos. These can be safely preserved in a new cryogenic storage unit obtained by Atlanta Botanical Garden, in which the resulting plantlets are coaxed into a state of suspended animation at -321° Fahrenheit in liquid nitrogen.” (5)

This labor-intensive method of germinating the seeds of Torreya taxifolia has enabled scientists to grow Torreya in several botanical gardens in places distant from its native range.  Tree activists want to introduce the tree to wildlands in distant locations where the fungal pathogen that is killing the tree in its native range doesn’t exist.  This is called “assisted migration,” a controversial strategy that is prohibited by the ESA.  Moving endangered plants and animals requires the approval of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, permission they have so far denied for Torreya.

The ESA defines the criteria for recovery and removal of endangered status.  The plant must be living on its own “in the wild” and must successfully reproduce naturally for at least two generations.  Given the circumstances of this rare tree and many other “conservation reliant” species, it seems they are permanently doomed to be permanently legally protected endangered species.

The ESA’s reluctance to enable the movement of species from their native ranges is inconsistent with the realities of climate change.  When the climate changes, the vegetation changes.  To prevent that from happening is to doom the vegetation and the animals that require the vegetation to extinction.  The ESA has become an obstacle to survival, rather than a tool to ensure survival.

Improving the Endangered Species Act?

In summary, the Endangered Species Act can be improved to achieve its original purpose as a means of preventing extinctions of plants and animals, as illustrated by the examples listed above:

  • Actions intended to help a rare species should not inflict further damage on the environment, such as biocontrols, pesticides, and killing other animals considered competitors.
  • Plant and animal species that require permanent human intervention to survive should be removed from life support after decades of such intensive care. Humans often make that choice for themselves at the end of life and it is widely considered a humane choice.  Triage is an ethical strategy in the medical profession and it should be in conservation as well.
  • Private property rights should be respected by the Endangered Species Act. The political cost of such confiscations are too high a price to pay for the meager benefits to the species in question.
  • If the underlying cause of an extinction is a fundamental change in the environment that cannot or will not be changed, it is pointless to aim conservation efforts at symptoms of the change, rather than causes of the change. For example, if melting Arctic ice opens a corridor between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it is pointless to try to prevent the movement of sea life between those oceans.
  • Plants and animals that can no longer survive in their native ranges because of changes in conditions, should be carefully considered for introduction to places with suitable conditions.

This wish list has nothing to do with the legislative effort to weaken the ESA.  That political effort is in the service of economic interests, such as fossil fuel exploitation and mining, and is not intended to benefit the rare plants and animals presently protected by the law. 

* “But under the Trump administration, at least 63 separate legislative efforts to weaken the [ESA] act have been undertaken since January 2017, according to the Centre for Biological Diversity.”  New York Times, April 22, 2018.

  1. http://www.argusobserver.com/news/tree-removal-could-spread-invasive-grasses/article_88eba0da-2a5b-11e8-862a-6734dbe7a90a.html
  2. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/world/europe/iberian-lynx-spain-portugal.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/world/europe/iberian-lynx-spain-portugal.html
  3. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/magazine/should-some-species-be-allowed-to-die-out.html?hpw&rref=magazine&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well
  4. https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/22/politics/dusky-gopher-frog/index.html
  5. https://e360.yale.edu/features/for-endangered-florida-tree-how-far-to-go-to-save-a-species-torreya

 

Action Opportunity: Draft of Oakland’s Vegetation Management Plan

The City of Oakland applied for a FEMA pre-disaster mitigation grant in 2005 to clear-cut all non-native trees on 122 acres of city owned property in the East Bay hills, based on the claim that it would reduce fire hazards.  FEMA cancelled that grant in September 2016 in settlement of a lawsuit against the project. 

The City of Oakland began the process of writing a new plan to reduce fire hazards in the hills by hiring a consultant to develop a Vegetation Management Plan in November 2016.  The new plan will be much more comprehensive than the original plan, covering 1,925 acres of open space and 308 miles of roadside in Oakland.  Oakland also made a commitment to an open public process to develop the plan.  A survey of public opinion was conducted and two public meetings were held in 2017. 

A draft of Oakland’s Vegetation Management Plan is now available HERE.  There are detailed maps of the areas that will be covered by the plan.  We suggest you take a look at those maps to determine what effect the plan will have on your neighborhood and the parks and open spaces you visit.

 A public meeting about the draft was held on May 23, 2018 and written public comments will be accepted until June 11, 2018. Comments may be submitted in the following ways: Download comment card; Email VMPcomments@oaklandvegmanagement.org; Mail:  266 Grand Avenue, Suite 210, Attn: Ken Schwarz, Oakland, CA 94610.  We hope you will participate in this public process that will determine the future of much of the landscape in the Oakland hills.

We are publishing an excerpt of the written public comment of one of our readers, which we hope will help you understand the issues and to write a comment of your own.  Asterisks indicate where some detail has been omitted.  You can see the entire public comment HERE: Oakland Draft Vegetation Management Plan – public comment

 Million Trees

Ken Schwarz
Horizon Water & Environment
266 Grand Avenue, Suite 210
Oakland, CA 94610

I am broadly supportive of the Draft Vegetation Management Plan (DVMP) because:

  • It will create defensible space around structures in Very High Wildfire Hazard Severity Zones.
  • It will clear easily ignited vegetation on roadsides in places where fire hazards are greatest.
  • It sets priorities for implementation in places where fire hazards are greatest.

These three elements of the plan will reduce fire hazards while limiting destruction of trees and vegetation and being fiscally responsible.

My public comment will identify some weaknesses in the plan and make specific suggestions for improving the plan with the goal of minimizing fire hazards as well as collateral damage to the environment.

The 300-foot “buffer” zone is unnecessarily destructive.  California law requires 100-feet of defensible space around structures.  The DVMP proposes extending defensible space along roadsides and around structures to 300-feet, the length of a football field.  Such a wide clearance of vegetation greatly exceeds California fire code and is therefore unnecessarily destructive.  In a recently published op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, two academic scientists confirm our understanding of how to keep our communities safe:  “The science is clear that the most effective way to protect homes from wildfire is to make homes themselves more fire-safe, using fire-resistant roofing and siding, installing ember-proof vents and exterior sprinklers, and maintaining “defensible space” within 60 to 100 feet of individual homes by reducing grasses, shrubs and small trees immediately adjacent to houses. Vegetation management beyond 100 feet from homes provides no additional protection.”[1]

The buffer zone should be eliminated, reduced in size, or reduced to Priority 3 so that it is less destructive and costly. 

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The description of herbicide use in the draft is unnecessarily vague, because it provides no information about what herbicides will be used and the health and environmental hazards of specific herbicides.  Nor does it explain how, where, or why herbicides will be used.

Instead of providing that information, the plan describes the public’s opposition to herbicides as “social stigma,” which implies that our opposition is a baseless prejudice against herbicides.  In fact, our opposition is based on scientific information about the dangers of herbicides and those dangers must be acknowledged by the final version of this plan.

The dangers of herbicides are well documented and well known. ****** Here is a brief list of some of the most recent studies that conclude that glyphosate products are very dangerous to the health of animals and humans:

  • The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as a “probable human carcinogen” in 2015. The IARC is composed of an international team of scientists convened by the World Health Organization of the United Nations.
  • The State of California responded to that news by requiring all glyphosate products sold in the State to be labeled as carcinogens. The State was sued several times by the manufacturer of Round Up—Monsanto–to prevent the labeling requirement.  The State of California recently won in the state court of appeals[2].  Unless Monsanto appeals and wins in the State Supreme Court, all glyphosate products will be labeled as carcinogens in California.
  • US National Toxicology Program recently conducted tests on formulated glyphosate products for the first time. In the past, tests were conducted only on the active ingredient…that is glyphosate alone. The formulated products that are actually applied as weed killers contain many other chemicals, some of which are not even known. The head of the National Toxicology Program Laboratory, told The Guardian newspaper the agency’s work is ongoing but its early findings are clear on one key point. “We see the formulations are much more toxic. The formulations were killing the cells. The glyphosate really didn’t do it,” DeVito said. A summary of the NTP analysis said that “glyphosate formulations decreased human cell ‘viability’, disrupting cell membranes. Cell viability was ‘significantly altered’ by the formulations, it stated.”[3]
  • The Global Glyphosate Study is being conducted by six scientific institutions all over the world. ******* This international consortium of scientific institutions recently published preliminary resultsof their study: “The results of the short-term pilot study showed that glyphosate-based herbicides (GBHs) were able to alter certain important biological parameters in rats, mainly relating to sexual development, genotoxicity and the alteration of the intestinal microbiome, at the ‘safe’ level of 1.75 mg/kg/day set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).”[4]  In other words, at doses deemed safe by the US EPA, significant negative health effects were found in animals used in testing.
  • The German Agriculture Minister announced on April 17, 2018 that she was finalizing a draft regulation to end use of the weed-killer glyphosate in household gardens, parks and sports facilities, and to set “massive” limits for its use in agriculture.[5] Germany is one of 25 countries that have issued outright bans on glyphosate, imposed restrictions or have issued statements of intention to ban or restrict glyphosate-based herbicides, including Roundup  Countless US states and cities have also adopted such restrictions. [6]
  • Marin Municipal Water District quit using all pesticides in 2015. In a letter to East Bay Municipal Utilities District, a member of the Board of MMWD explains why that decision was made.  (Attachment 2)  MMWD hired scientists at UC Davis to conduct a study of the biological persistence of glyphosate.  They found that glyphosate persisted for at least 84 days when applied to foliage, and perhaps longer after the study ended.

Garlon with the active ingredient triclopyr is more toxic than glyphosate.  Garlon is the herbicide that is used to prevent eucalyptus and acacia from resprouting when the trees are destroyed.  Its use was also specifically allowed for that purpose by Oakland City Council Resolution 79133.   Although the DVMP does not mention its use, we assume—unless specifically told otherwise by the final version of the VMP—that Garlon will be used to control resprouts.

  • Triclopyr is an organochlorine product, in the same family of pesticides as DDT, which was banned in the US in 1972. Organochlorine products bioaccumulate and are very persistent in the environment.  Nearly 50 years after it was banned, DDT is often found in the ground, in the water, and in people’s bodies.[7]
  • Organochlorine products are endocrine disrupters. The Pesticide Research Institute did a risk assessment of triclopyr for the California Invasive Plant Council.  They reported that triclopyr “poses reproductive and developmental risks to female applicators.” [8]
  • The Pesticide Research Institute did a risk assessment of triclopyr for Marin Municipal Water District in which they informed MMWD that birds and bees are both harmed by triclopyr and mycorrhizal fungi in the soil are damaged by triclopyr.[9]

More research has been done on Round Up than on Garlon because it is more widely used.  It is more widely used, partly because it is actually less dangerous than Garlon (it is also a non-selective plant-killer).  Because of the toxicity of Garlon, several public land managers in the Bay Area have made a commitment to controlling resprouts without using herbicides: ******** Marin Municipal Water District,  Marin County Parks and Open Space, UC San Francisco, and East Bay Municipal Utilities District (the supplier of our drinking water).

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There is no evidence that eucalyptus is inherently more flammable than native trees. ******** Eradicating non-native trees and shrubs will not reduce fire hazards because they are not inherently more flammable than the native vegetation that will remain.  Therefore, the reduction of fuel loads must be based on flammability, NOT the nativity of the flammable species.  The nativity of plant species is irrelevant to reducing fire hazards and must be abandoned as criterion for destroying plants and trees.

Vegetation that burned in the North Bay fires of October 2017 was almost exclusively native. Source: Bay Area Open Space Council

I support the thinning of eucalyptus, acacia, Monterey pine and cypress to reduce fuel loads, as long as the canopy is intact.  ******** When the canopy is intact, the forest floor is shaded which retains moisture that retards ignition and suppresses the growth of easily ignited weeds. The DVMP proposes to thin the targeted non-native trees to distances of 35 feet, creating gaps in the canopy of 10 feet within the 300-foot “buffer zone.”  The distance between the trees must be reduced to 25 feet to maintain the canopy.  In addition to reducing fire hazards, maintaining the canopy will also be less destructive and will reduce the amount of stored carbon released into the atmosphere.

Tilden Park, October 2016. East Bay Regional Park District has thinned this area to distances of 25 feet between remaining trees. The forest floor is still shaded because the canopy is intact.

My greatest disappointment in the DVMP is its proposal to remove all individual non-native trees where they presently exist in native vegetation outside the “buffer zone.” ******** Removing non-native trees in riparian areas and in redwood groves as proposed by the DVMP is not fire hazard mitigation because fire hazards in those areas are minimal.

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Furthermore, destroying healthy trees damages the trees that remain because the herbicide that is used to prevent eucalyptus and acacia from resprouting is mobile in the soil and it is known to damage mycorrhizal fungi in the soil that is essential to the health of the native trees.  ******* It is not possible to destroy isolated trees without damaging neighboring trees in close proximity. ****** Studies show that eucalyptus trees in native forests are not doing any damage to neighboring trees. ********

If individual non-native trees within native vegetation are not doing any environmental damage and do not increase risk of fire they should not be destroyed because destroying them WILL damage native vegetation.  Please leave them alone!

 Putting the DVMP into the long-term big picture

Finally, I suggest that we all take a step back from the details of the DVMP and consider the proposal in the context of the entire environment.  The final VMP must minimize damage to the environment while mitigating fire hazards because:

  • The climate has changed and it will continue to change. When the climate changes, the vegetation changes.  That is one of the axioms of ecology and it will continue to be.  If non-native plants and trees are better adapted to the current and anticipated climate, we should abandon futile attempts to force plants to live where we want them to live.
  • If we want trees in California, we must look to the future, not the past. 130 million native conifers have died in California since 2010. 5-10 million oaks in California have been killed by Sudden Oak Death. The future of redwoods in California is in jeopardy because they require a lot of water and they don’t tolerate wind.

********************

A climate change specialist at the US Forest Service tells us in a recent study that native tree species are the most vulnerable to climate change. USFS found that native trees are more vulnerable to the changes in temperature, precipitation, growing season, and other effects of accumulating greenhouse gases. The assessment found that 88 percent of invasive tree species are expected to prove resilient in the changing climate, ranked with low vulnerability, compared to 20 percent of natives.[10]

  • We are contributing to climate change by destroying healthy trees that are storing tons of carbon that will be released into the atmosphere as the destroyed trees decay. The primary reason why wildfires are more frequent and more intense is because of the warmer, drier climate.  Therefore destroying more trees than necessary increases fire hazards because we are exacerbating climate change by destroying more trees than necessary.
  • It is a fiction that destroying trees will release less carbon than the wildfires imagined by those who demand their destruction. According to a recently completed study at Oregon State University, “wildfire is not the biggest source of climate-warming carbon dioxide in Oregon forests—logging and wood products are.”[11]

*******************

The trees that will be destroyed in Oakland will not be used as lumber, which means they will contribute even more carbon to the atmosphere.  Timber that is used for building retains its stored carbon until the building deteriorates or is destroyed.

  • The herbicides that are used to destroy vegetation and prevent trees from resprouting damage the soil and pose serious health risks to animals and humans. The more vegetation and trees the VMP destroys, the greater the damage caused by herbicides.  Therefore, we must minimize the amount of vegetation that is destroyed as much as possible if herbicides are used.

We achieve nothing if the damage we do to the environment and to ourselves is greater than real or imagined reduction in fire hazards.

Thank you for your consideration.

Resident of
Oakland, California
June 2018

[1] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hanson-miller-governor-fire-orders-20180525-story.html

[2] https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/State-can-label-widely-used-herbicide-as-possible-12849147.php

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/08/weedkiller-tests-monsanto-health-dangers-active-ingredient

[4]https://sustainablepulse.com/2018/05/22/monsanto-in-epic-fail-with-attempted-attack-on-global-glyphosate-study/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=gmos_and_pesticides_global_breaking_news&utm_term=2018-05-23#.WwhUfkgvyUl

[5] https://sustainablepulse.com/2018/04/17/germany-moving-ahead-with-plans-to-restrict-weed-killer-glyphosate/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=gmos_and_pesticides_global_breaking_news&utm_term=2018-04-18#.WwhWWUgvyUl

[6] https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/toxic-tort-law/monsanto-roundup-lawsuit/where-is-glyphosate-banned/

[7] https://www.sciencealert.com/ddt-consistently-found-in-humans-study

[8] https://www.pesticideresearch.com/site/pri-resource-centers/weed-management-resource-center/herbicide-risk-comparisons/workers/

[9]http://www.marinwater.org/DocumentCenter/View/254/HRA_Chap4_Triclopyr_1_1_2010

[10] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/04/15/hug-your-native-trees-goodbye-thanks-to-climate-change/#4ad4a4176abd

[11] https://www.hcn.org/articles/climate-change-timber-is-oregons-biggest-carbon-polluter

Nativist fantasies about oaks

San Francisco Bay Estuary Institute is promoting a “restoration” project they call “Re-Oaking California.”  The project is planning to plant oak trees in California cities, in particular.  They have published an elaborate brochure describing their project and they have published a brief description in the quarterly newsletter of California Releaf, the biggest non-profit advocacy organization for California’s urban forest.  Locally, they have made a presentation to Oakland’s Urban Forestry Forum and to the Bay Area Open Space Council.  The Open Space Council convenes meetings of hundreds of public land managers from all over the Bay Area.  In other words, the re-oaking project is being aggressively sold to those who determine the future of our public lands.  Therefore, it is a project that deserves our attention.

First, I must say that I love oaks.  I decided to buy the home I now live in before I stepped inside, because of the beautiful coast live oak in the front yard.  The loss of that tree would be devastating both emotionally and to the value of my home.

However, my opinion of the re-oaking project is based on the reality of climate change and its implications for the future of California’s urban forest.  Although the project brochure acknowledges that Sudden Oak Death has killed many oaks in California, it does not accurately reflect the scale of that epidemic.

Sudden Oak Death

Sudden Oak Death (SOD) killed 5 million oak trees in California from 1994 to 2015, when that number was reported by a study. (1)  The study also said that the SOD epidemic could not be stopped and would eventually kill all oaks in California.  More recent estimates are that 5 to 10 million oaks have been killed by SOD. (2)

Tan oaks killed by SOD. US Forest Service

SOD is caused by a pathogen that is spread by rain and wind.  We had a great deal of rain in 2016 and 2017, which greatly increased the spread of SOD infections.  In the past, SOD has been mostly confined to wildlands.  Now it is found in many urban areas, including San Francisco and the East Bay.  In the most recent SOD survey done in spring 2017, new infections were found on the UC Berkeley campus, the UC arboretum, and the San Francisco Presidio. (2)

The scientist at UC Berkeley who conducts the annual survey of SOD infections reports that “A dramatic increase this year in the number of oaks, manzanita and native plants infected by the tree-killing disease known as sudden oak death likely helped spread the massive fires that raged through the North Bay…” (3)

Brice McPherson, Associate Specialist in Organisms and the Environment at UC Berkeley, has been studying SOD infections in Marin County and the East Bay.  He made a presentation in November 2017 about the current status of SOD infections in East Bay parks.  Wildcat Canyon is the park in which Mr. McPherson has most recently inventoried infected and dead trees.  In 2017, Mr. McPherson found that 16.2% of coast live oaks were infected and 20.5% were dead.  The number of dead and dying oaks in Wildcat Canyon is staggering:  18,750 oaks are infected and 21,360 oaks are dead.  McPherson predicted that 50% of all oaks in East Bay parks would be dead within 20 years, depending upon the amount of rainfall.

Native bay trees are considered the main vectors of the pathogen that causes SOD.  The re-oaking project therefore suggests that SOD infections in urban areas can be avoided if bay trees aren’t planted in proximity to the oaks.  However, the source of the SOD infection recently found in the Presidio in San Francisco is said to have been rhododendrons, which should remind us that bays are not the only vectors of the SOD pathogen.  In fact, the USDA reports 46 confirmed hosts for the SOD pathogen, including both native and non-native shrubs and trees. (4)  Many of the hosts are commonly found in urban gardens.

Climate change kills oaks in Southern California

Sudden Oak Death infections have not been found south of San Luis Obispo.  However, that does not mean that oaks in Southern California are any less threatened by changes in the environment.  Several land managers in Southern California made presentations at the recent conference of the California Native Plant Society in Los Angeles about massive die-offs of oaks in Southern California.  Here is an example from the Santa Monica Mountains:  “Over 9,000 coast live oak and 114,000 riparian trees died from [2014 to 2017]…” (5) These deaths were caused by extremely high temperatures to which the trees are not adapted, associated drought and new insect predators, such as shot-hole borer.

The unsuitable climate conditions in Southern California are the anticipated climate conditions of Northern California.  Carbon storage in our urban forest is one of the few tools we have to combat climate change.  Although coast live oaks store carbon, they are not particularly long lived.  Their life expectancy is from 125 to 250 years in suitable conditions. (6) Planting trees with no long-term future is not a responsible response to climate change.  The US Forest Service predicts coast live oaks will be virtually gone in California by 2060:

Wildlife in our urban forest

Although oaks are clearly useful to wildlife, they are not significantly more useful than other urban trees.  Here are three studies conducted in the East Bay that compare the biodiversity of animal life in oak woodland to other tree species:

Dov Sax (Brown University) studied six forest plots of about 1 hectare each in Berkeley, CA, three of eucalypts and three of native oaks and bays.  The sites were not contiguous, but were selected so they were of similar elevation, slope, slope orientation, and type of adjacent vegetation.  He conducted inventories of species in spring and autumn.  He counted the number of species of plants in the understory, species of invertebrates (insects) in samples of equal size and depth of the leaf litter, species of amphibians, species of birds, species of rodents.  This is what he found:

“Species richness was nearly identical for understory plants, leaf-litter invertebrates, amphibians and birds; only rodents had significantly fewer species in eucalypt sites.  Species diversity patterns…were qualitatively identical to those for species richness, except for leaf-litter invertebrates, which were significantly more diverse in eucalypt sites during the spring.”  (7)

In 1975, Professor Robert Stebbins (UC Berkeley) was hired by East Bay Regional Park District to conduct a survey of vertebrate animals living in several parks (Sibley, Chabot, and Tilden). The forest types that Professor Stebbins studied were redwood, Monterey pine, eucalyptus, and oak-bay woodland as well as grassland and dry chaparral. Here is how he described his findings:

  • “Redwood and Monterey pine habitats are notably depauperate in vertebrate species.
  • “Eucalyptus habitat is far richer in vertebrates than either redwood or Monterey pine and vies with ‘dry’ chaparral and grassland in species diversity and ‘attractiveness.’
  • “Oak-bay woodland is the richest in both species and ‘attractiveness.’
  • “Grassland is a little less rich in species and ‘attractiveness’ than the other native habitats, but only slightly richer than eucalyptus habitat.” (8)

A wildlife study of Angel  Island prior to the removal of most eucalyptus trees found:

“The total number of birds observed in native stands was similar to that observed in eucalyptus stands…Few small animals were caught in any stand; captures were in native stands five Norway Rats…in eucalyptus stands one Norway Rat…in grassland one Norway Rat and six California Voles…about three times as many salamanders were located in eucalyptus stands compared to native stands.” (9)

As David Ackerly said in response to a question at the recent conference of the California Native Plant Society, “There are few mutually exclusive relationships in nature.”  It is a risky evolutionary strategy.  If an animal is dependent upon a single plant species, it won’t survive in the absence of that plant species unless it is capable of adapting to available vegetation.  Despite the handful of examples given in the re-oaking brochure, wildlife in California is using non-native vegetation as often as native vegetation.

California’s urban forest is not native

The suggestion that California’s cities could be “refugia” for our threatened oaks is wishful thinking.  As Matt Ritter tells us in his book about California’s trees (A Californian’s Guide to the Trees Among Us), only 6% of California’s urban trees are native to California.  Thirty-three non-profit tree advocacy organizations in California (including California Releaf) told us why in their letter to California’s Natural Resource Agency about the Urban Greening grant program:  “Native trees are generally not suited to urban conditions.  They have difficulty adapting to the urban environment, thereby substantially reducing survivability…As an example, the approved list of street trees for the City of San Francisco includes no trees native to San Francisco.  In Oakland, two of the 48 allowed species are native.”

The future of California’s urban forest

So, what is the future of California’s urban forest?  Scientists with sufficient knowledge of trees are trying to answer that question and we would be wise to pay attention to their advice.  Greg McPherson gave a presentation in Davis on March 10, 2018 about “Growing Resilient Forests.”  McPherson’s research at the US Forest Service about the economic value of ecosystem services provided by urban trees (carbon storage, reduction of energy use for heat/cooling, increased property values, removal of particulate pollution, etc.) has been vital to those who defend our urban forest.

McPherson lives in Davis, where he is conducting a 20-year study about the urban forests of the future, i.e., those that will survive predicted changes in the climate. Three years into the study, his research team has made some preliminary recommendations for the trees that are likely to survive anticipated changes in the climate.  None is native to Northern California. Most are foreign, particularly Australian.  (10)

Nativists deny reality of climate change

When the climate changes, the vegetation changes, moves, or dies.  That has been one of the few axioms in nature since life has existed on Earth and we would be wise to assume that it will continue to be true.  The future of California’s urban forest depends on our willingness to plant trees that are adapted to the climate and to the anticipated climate.  Climate change is killing California’s trees and nativism is preventing us from replacing them with suitable trees.

  1. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160502161111.htm
  2. “Disease killing oaks spreads,” East Bay Times, October 24, 2017
  3. “Disease in trees pointed at in fires,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2017
  4. http://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant_health/plant_pest_info/pram/downloads/pdf_files/usdaprlist.pdf
  5. http://www.rcdsmm.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Drought-and-Invasive-Beetle-impacts-RCDSMM-1.2.18.pdf
  6. http://ucanr.edu/sites/oak_range/Californias_Rangeland_Oak_Species/Coast_Live_Oak/
  7. Dov Sax, “Equal diversity in disparate species assemblages:  a comparison of native and exotic woodlands in California,” Global Ecology and Biogeography, 11, 49-52, 2002. http://elkhornsloughctp.org/uploads/files/1109813068Sax2002.pdf
  8. Robert Stebbins, “Use of Habitats in the East Bay Regional Park by Free-living Vertebrate Animals,” August 1975. In “Vegetation Management Principles and Policies for the East Bay Regional Park District,” June 1976 (this unpublished study is available on request)
  9. “Focused Environmental Study, Restoration of Angel Island Natural Areas Affected by Eucalyptus,” California State Parks and Recreation, July 1988, pg 96-97.
  10. http://climatereadytrees.ucdavis.edu/

Nativist fantasies about redwoods

I love redwood trees.  I doubt there is anyone who doesn’t.  So, you might wonder why I am going to tell you why planting more of them in our public parks in the San Francisco Bay Area isn’t a good idea.  Read on…

History of redwoods in California

The native range of redwoods is very small.  According to the US Forest Service, “The redwoods occupy a narrow strip of land approximately 450 miles in length and 5 to 35 miles in width.  The northern boundary of its range is…in the Siskiyou Mountains within 15 miles of the California-Oregon border.  The southern boundary of redwood’s range is…in the Santa Lucia Mountains of southern Monterey County, California.” 

Many redwoods were destroyed for timber and many to clear land for other purposes, such as roads, agriculture, and development.  However, the primary reason for its small native range is the demanding horticultural conditions required by redwoods.  They don’t tolerate wind, particularly salty wind from the ocean.  They require a lot of water.  Where there isn’t enough rain, summer fog compensates for inadequate water.  They need well drained soil and plenty of space to grow to their prodigious size of over 200 feet.

Because of these horticultural requirements, there weren’t many redwood trees in the San Francisco Bay Area prior to settlement by Europeans in the 19th century.  There were no redwoods in San Francisco where the soil was sandy and strong wind from the ocean is salty.  In the East Bay, the pre-settlement redwood forest was less than 5 square miles. (1) In fact, only 2.3% of pre-settlement Oakland was forested and redwoods were a small fraction of the tree cover. (2)

Trying to defy nature

Despite their demanding horticultural requirements and the historical evidence of these limitations, redwoods are often planted where they cannot survive because they are beautiful, popular, and “native” to California.  As the climate changes, rising temperatures and drought have killed many of the redwoods that were planted in the past.  As the climate continues to change, the future of redwoods in California becomes even more doubtful. 

San Francisco’s 2017 Annual Report of the Urban Forestry Council reports that redwoods planted on public land in San Francisco are dying:

“Agencies such as SFO [San Francisco Airport], Zuckerberg General Hospital, and SFSU [San Francisco State University] reported concerns with declining health of redwood trees under their care.  This iconic California native tree is not drought tolerant and current research shows that specimens planted in landscape settings outside their native areas are suffering from water restrictions and irrigation with non-potable water throughout the Bay Area.  Redwood trees’ water and other cultural needs should be considered when planning future plantings since periods of extreme drought are expected to continue as the climate continues to change.”  (page 11)

Dead redwoods, Lake Temescal, March 2018

We see similar examples of planting redwoods in East Bay Regional Parks, where they are dying.  Redwoods were planted at Lake Temescal about 5 years ago.  Despite the fact that many of them are dead, the Park District continues to plant new redwood saplings adjacent to their dead relatives.  Although it is a relatively sheltered area, the trees may have been killed by salty irrigation water.

The growing gap between science and public policy

On March 10, 2018, I attended a conference about resiliency in Davis, California: “Deepening our Roots:  Growing Resilient Forests.” I went to hear Greg McPherson speak because I have read many of his scientific publications and I admire his work.  McPherson’s research at the US Forest Service about the economic value of ecosystem services provided by urban trees (carbon storage, reduction of energy use for heat/cooling, increased property values, removal of particulate pollution, etc.) has been vital to those who defend our urban forest.

McPherson lives in Davis, where he is conducting a 20-year study about the urban forests of the future, i.e., those that will survive predicted changes in the climate. Three years into the study, his research team has made some preliminary recommendations for the trees that are likely to survive anticipated changes in the climate.  None is native to Northern California. Most are foreign, particularly Australian.

McPherson also showed photos of trees being planted now that are destined to die in the near future. One was a densely planted row of redwoods in a median strip in Davis. Professor Arthur Shapiro, who lives in Davis, made this comment when I told him about McPherson’s presentation, “Redwoods are the walking dead here. I’ve known that forever and a year.”  McPherson said redwoods have no long-term future in most of California. None of the public land managers in the Bay Area seems to know that.

East Bay Regional Park District ignores reality

East Bay Regional Park District is making a big investment in expanding redwood forests into places where redwoods did not exist in the past and where they are unlikely to survive in the future.  They are clear-cutting non-native trees and creating visual screens on the periphery of the clear-cuts by planting redwoods along the trails.  This photo was taken in Sibley Volcanic Reserve in March 2018 (the area is larger than shown in this photo):

Sibley Volcanic Reserve. Photo by Larry Danos, March 2018

These are areas that were a part of EBRPD’s “Wildfire Hazard Reduction and Resource Management Plan.”  The Fuels Management Prescription for this Recommended Treatment Area was supposed to thin the eucalyptus trees to spacing of 25 feet by removing only small trees with trunks less than 10 inches in diameter.  The original plan for this area did not include any replanting of trees.

The recent implementation of this project suggests that EBRPD’s strategy for tree removals has changed.  At least in this instance, the trees have been clear-cut, not thinned.  And redwoods were planted where none were originally planned. 

It is always risky to speculate about the motivations of other people, but I will venture a guess about this new strategy.  The Park District’s commitment to destroying non-native trees seems to have escalated from thinning to clear-cutting.  And the public’s opposition to the destruction of trees seems to have convinced the Park District that they must plant native trees to replace the trees they have destroyed.

Unfortunately, the Park District does not seem to have taken the changing climate into consideration.  The redwoods may survive long enough to placate the public, but they are unlikely to survive in the long-term.  It is a good public relations strategy, but not a good strategy for a landscape in transition in a changing climate.  It is also not a responsible strategy, given that the carbon stored by the trees being destroyed will contribute to the changing climate and won’t be replaced by dead redwood trees. 

(1) Sherwood Burgess, “The Forgotten Redwoods of the East Bay,” California Historical Society Quarterly, March 1951.

(2) Nowak, David, “Historical vegetation change in Oakland and its implications for urban forest management,” Journal of Arboriculture, 19(5): September 1993

Highs and Lows of the 2018 Conference of the California Native Plant Society

I am pleased to publish the following report of one of our readers who attended the conference of the California Native Plant Society in Los Angeles at the beginning of February 2018. 

Million Trees

I attended the last conference of the California Native Plant Society in San Jose in January 2015.  It was interesting to note a few significant new themes in the recent conference in 2018.  Both fire and climate change were much more prominent themes in the recent conference.  While both are relevant to the future of native plants, neither seemed to have any effect on the “restoration” goals of the native plant movement.  For example, there were several presentations about massive die offs of native oak trees, resulting from higher temperatures, drought, and disease.  These presentations ended with urgent pleas to plant more oaks.  That seemed a fundamental contradiction and a denial of the reality of climate change.  When the climate changes, the landscape changes, but native plant advocates are not willing to acknowledge that.  In fact, the greater the threats to native plants, the greater the commitment to their preservation and “restoration.”

Beautiful pictures support nativist ideology

The conference began on a low point for me, but a high point for most attendees of the conference.  The keynote speaker was Doug Tallamy.  He was introduced as a “rock star” of the native plant movement, and indeed he is.  His presentation was very effective in delivering his message, which is that most insects are “specialists” with mutually exclusive relationships with native plants that evolved over “tens of thousands of years.”  If you believe that claim, you also believe that the absence of native plants will result in the absence of insects and ultimately the collapse of the entire food web.

Doug Tallamy’s closing photo, CNPS Conference 2018

Most native plant advocates believe that gloomy scenario, but few scientists still do, which creates a tension within this community of native plant advocates composed predominantly of amateur “botanists” and a smattering of academic ecologists.  For example, one of the first presentations after Tallamy’s keynote was an academic ecologist from UC Berkeley who advocated for accommodating the movement of plants outside of historical native ranges to accommodate climate change. (1) He said that restoring only with local natives is “maladaptive” and that a bioregional perspective is needed to create sustainable landscapes.  Allowing Monterey pines to grow in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they have grown in the past and are presently deemed “native” just 150 miles away, seems a good example of such a broader definition of “native.”  An amateur nativist, parroting Tallamy, asked this hostile question: “But if we move the plants how will wildlife survive?”  The academic delivered this tart dose of reality: “There are few mutually exclusive relationships in nature.  Wildlife will also move and will adapt to changes in vegetation.”

Science debunks a myth about eucalyptus

The high point of the conference for me was a presentation by Jennifer Yost, Assistant Professor at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.  She and her graduate student studied the claim that nothing grows under blue gum eucalyptus trees because of allelopathic chemicals emitted by eucalyptus that suppress the germination of other species of plants.  Two studies of this hypothesis were done in the 1960s, but the analytical methods used by those studies were misleading.

CNPS Conference 2018

Rigorous methods used by Yost’s team included planting seeds of 5 native plant species in the soil of eucalyptus forests and comparing germination rates of seeds planted in the soil of oak woodlands.  They also tested the effect of blue gum volatile leaf extracts, and water-soluble leaf extracts on germination and early seedling growth.

They concluded, “In these experiments, we found that germination and seedling growth of the species tested were not inhibited by chemical extracts of blue gum foliage, either at naturally-occurring or artificially concentrated levels.” (2)

CNPS Conference 2018

Yost observed that the lack of allelopathic effects of blue gum on the soil implies that blue gum forests theoretically can be successfully planted with native plants after removal of the trees.  However, she cautioned that those who destroy the blue gums should carefully consider what will replace them.  Will an aggressive non-native weed quickly colonize the bare ground?  If so, what is the benefit of destroying the blue gums? 

I had a conversation with one of the most influential nativists in the San Francisco Bay Area after Yost’s presentation.  This new scientific information does not alter his commitment to destroying blue gum eucalyptus in the Bay Area.  After all, there are many more negative claims that remain unchallenged by scientific studies.  For example, there are no studies that prove that blue gums use more water than native trees, as nativists claim.  Nor are there any studies that prove that eucalyptus leaves contain less moisture than the leaves of native oak or bay laurel trees, which theoretically makes eucalyptus more flammable, as nativists claim.  The lack of scientific evidence enables the persistence of speculation justifying irrational fear of blue gum eucalyptus.

Nativism dies hard because of lack of scientific studies

There appeared to be three distinct groups of people in the crowd of about 900 conferees.  There was a large contingent of grey-haired volunteers who are the backbone of every native plant “restoration.”  They are the dedicated weed pullers.  There is an equally large contingent of young people who are making their living writing the “restoration” plans and directing the activities of the volunteers.  The smallest contingent is a few academic scientists who study the underlying issues in their ivory tower.  The goals and conclusions of these three groups are increasingly divergent as scientific studies disprove the assumptions of the citizen “scientists.”

The tension between science and the citizenry is as evident within the native plant movement as it is in American politics at the present time. The general public rejects scientific evidence at its peril.  The rejection of science will not end well.  In the case of uninformed nativism in the natural world, the result will be a barren, poisoned landscape.

  1. “Climate change and open space conservation: Lessons from TBC3’s researcher-land manager partnerships in the San Francisco Bay Area,” David Ackerly1, Naia Morueta-Holme5, Sam Veloz3, Lisa Micheli2, Nicole Heller4 1University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2Pepperwood, Santa Rosa, CA, USA, 3Point Blue Conservation Science, Petaluma, CA, USA, 4Peninsula Open Space Trust, Palo Alto, CA, USA, 5University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
  2. Abstracts of CNPS conference presentations are available here:  CNPS Conference abstracts