Tree people have been pointing with alarm at a steady decline in the population of native California Oaks over the past decades. A number of factors affect that trend: housing, retail, agricultural and industrial development, grazing of both domestic and wild animals, drought, declines in air quality and others.
Agricultural development is a culprit in Mendocino County. Residents of Potter Valley have coined the term "grape-rape" to describe changes from rangeland to vinyards rapidly taking place before their very eyes. One outraged neighbor wrote a "Requiem for the Oaks" and posted it on community bulletin boards. Robert Mondavi is putting in 800 acres of wine grapes just north of Ukiah. Water-short Anderson Valley dwellers protest the construction of a plethora of new ponds for a passel of new plantings. Machines clear entire hillsides and the valleys beneath them to make way for the military rows of grape-stakes that increasingly march across our landscape. (Does anybody know the environmental consequences of this massive destruction and reconfiguration of the California native habitat?)
South of here, in Sonoma County, folks are worried about the effects of urbanization and development on the native oaks, particularly the Valley Oak. Then-County Supervisor Ernie Carpenter successfully pushed through legislation designed to preserve Sonoma County's Valley Oaks (Quercus lobata).
Here are some particulars: the ordinance changes the Sonoma County code to "add Article 67 VOH, Valley Oak Habitat Combining District, and make miscellaneous other changes in order to protect and enhance Valley Oaks and Valley Oak Woodlands in important Valley Oak habitat areas." It requires notification and mitigation whenever anybody wants to cut a Valley Oak or a group of them. The Ordinance bases the requirement on the cumulative diameter at breast height of small Valley Oaks (20" diameter at breast height or less) or the actual diameter at breast height of large ones (more than 20"). Multi-stem trunks fall into the first category.
Any person planning to cut down a total of more than 60 inches dbh of Valley Oak trees must notify the planning director at least five days before cutting and mitigate the loss of those trees by retaining other Valley Oaks on the property, planting replacements for those cut down or paying an in-lieu fee. Mitigation requirements increase with the number of inches of trunk cut down. The property owner has a year to take care of the mitigation. Fees collected go toward planting more Valley Oaks.
Will that do the job? Probably not. As Patty Clary has pointed out, the ordinance "seems to have as many teeth as my old granny and not nearly her spunk." She sees it as an end run around environmentalists and provides an out for anybody complaining about the loss of oaks and oak habitat. "After all, there is an ordinance on the books, so what's to worry?" The voluntary mitigation costs are trivial and the ordinance doesn't address the question of how a seedling can replace a magnificent old tree. It's truly, as Clary suggests, "more protection for grape growers [and developers] than for oaks."
It is a first step, but the problem remains. We need to proceed from this tiny beginning and get something together to protect the oaks - all of them - while we still have some.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1997
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