Wildflower Stew

Copyright: Good Nature Publishing Co.

I’m reading The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, a book by Richard Preston about the last remaining coastal redwood trees of Northern California and Southern Oregon. Old-growth forest means really old. Redwood trees live for thousands of years. In 1850, there were about two million acres of old growth forests between Big Sur and the southern tip of Oregon. Only about 4% of them remain.

It is difficult to imagine just how big an ancient redwood tree is. The tallest one is believed to be 370 feet tall. National Geographic called it “the Mt. Everest of All Living Things.” The Wild Trees is about an eccentric group of botanists, biologists and climbers studying a grove of redwoods, the largest of which is named Iluvatar.

Redwood trees are not just a simple configuration of one central trunk that is very very tall with horizontal branches sticking out. Many of the horizontal branches thrust out smaller “trees” that grow vertically, parallel to the trunk, and look just like the main tree. Horizontal branches on these small versions thrust out even smaller versions. Iluvatar had 220 trunks of smaller and smaller trees in six levels of heirarchy. It had become “a forest inside a forest . . . and one of the most structurally complicated living organisms that has ever been discovered.” It is, as Preston describes it, “an architecture made up of nooks and crannies and shaded, moist spots and fertile pockets where all kinds of living things can become established and can interact with one another.”

This is the home of the marbled murrelet, an elusive little member of the auk family, similar to the penguin in many respects, who spends most of its life in the ocean but who flies (so far, so fast that researchers use a radar gun to track them) up to 70 km inland to nest 140′ in the air in the lichen-lined “nooks and crannies” of old growth trees like Iluvatar, carrying very small fish in their tiny curved beaks to feed their young. These little birds, who mate for life, have become a very endangered species. I have been following the saga of those who struggle to pull them back from the brink of extinction for three years now and finally there has been an historic breakthrough.

The California Supreme Court has given new protection to the marbled murrelet and the magnificent old growth forests by throwing out an open-ended long-term logging plan for 200,000 acres in Humboldt County that the California Department of Forestry had approved - delegating the completion of the plan to protect endangered species to the logging company! Justice Carlos R. Moreno ruled that the Department of Forestry “failed to proceed according to law.” This decision grew out of lawsuits that followed the historic Headwaters Agreement, a 1996 pact between Pacific Lumber Co. and the state and federal governments.

In early August, the new management of Humboldt Redwood Co. (HRC) which was previously Pacific Lumber Co., met with activists and assured them that old growth groves on HRC land will be permanently protected. This is a wonderful victory for the dedicated activists who have put their lives on the line for the forest. This video from North Coast Earth First! shows what was involved in protecting these trees, this habitat and the marbled murrelet.

Local activists are going to keep on organizing, holding non-violence trainings and action camps, and North Coast Earth First! Media will continue to exist, releasing more videos and continuing to keep the public awareness of local issues as high as possible. There are other local lumber companies who are still clearcutting, and there may even be some hidden old growth out there, so organizing and actions will continue, until they are no longer needed. And that will be a wonderful day, indeed.

The most recent stories in Wildflower Stew on the saga of the marbled murrelet are:
Miracle of the Marbled Murrelet
Protecting the Marbled Murrelet
More Good News

The poster of the beautiful watercolor of the two marbled murrelets by artist Ram Papish is available from http://goodnaturepublishing.com along with many other visual delights of the natural world.

Let’s handcuff the property cops
By Stan Cox
Prairie Writers Circle

Susana Tregobov dries clothes on a line behind her Maryland townhouse, saving energy and money. But now her homeowners association has ordered her to bring in the laundry. The crackdown came after a neighbor complained that the clothesline “makes our community look like Dundalk,” a low-income part of Baltimore .

Tregobov and her husband plan to fight for their right to a clothesline, but the odds are against them. Although their state recently passed a law protecting homeowners’ rights to erect solar panels for generating electricity, it is still legal in Maryland for communities to ban solar clothes-drying.

Twenty percent of Americans now live in homes subject to rules set by homeowner associations, or HOAs. These private imitation governments have sweeping powers to dictate almost any aspect of a member’s property, from the size of the residence down to changes in trim color and the placement of a basketball hoop.

In the view of HOAs, people hand over control of such things when they buy their home, so they have no legitimate gripe. But a growing number of state and local governments are deciding that when HOAs ban eco-friendly practices, they violate the property rights of their members and damage everyone’s right to a habitable planet.

In recent years, a dozen state legislatures have passed laws that restrict the ability of HOAs to ban solar panels and solar water heaters. Florida and Colorado now protect the rights of homeowners to replace irrigated, chemically dependent lawns with more natural landscaping that requires little or no extra water or other artificial life support. And Colorado has become the third state to give legal protection to people who dare to defy their HOAs by putting up that most economical of all energy-saving devices, the clothesline.

The more restrictive HOAs cling to outdated standards that treat necessary features of an ecologically resilient future — renewable energy devices, clotheslines, fans in windows, awnings, vegetable gardens, fruit trees, compost bins, natural landscaping — as eyesores to be buried under restrictions or banned outright.

Meanwhile, HOAs commonly mandate large, centrally air-conditioned square footages, two-car garages, lawn sprinkler systems or synthetic lawn fertilizers and weed-killers. You’d think that in 2008, community leaders would be embarrassed to enforce overconsumption and pollution, but these property cops seem determined to impose their narrow aesthetic preferences on everyone else.

Critics say that only a strong federal law can effectively protect America ’s 60 million HOA residents from antigreen rules. One bill, the Solar Opportunity and Local Access Rights (SOLAR) Act, is designed to do just that, but it languishes in Congress with only one co-sponsor.

The energy to restrain overbearing HOAs may have to come from the grassroots. As families struggle in coming years to keep up with rising grocery and utility bills, on top of their mortgage payments and HOA dues, they may well put the heat on lawmakers to protect their right to money-saving conservation, renewable energy and edible landscaping.

A small but growing number of HOAs are actually encouraging green practices. But let’s see them push harder: Set strict limits on house size, ban pesticides and leaf blowers, maybe even discount association dues for energy conservers. These are rules we all can live with.

They also raise a dilemma. Rousing appeals to individual freedom and property rights can be effective in, say, winning Susana Tregobov her right to dry in Maryland . But as a vehicle for environmental causes, the property-rights argument can backfire. In its more fatuous forms, it can be a favorite weapon of anti-environmentalists, who would doubtless use it to obstruct green HOA rules.

We can debate the details of the rules, but we have to keep our eye on the ball — that blue-green ball we all live on. We must enforce universal rights, not just individual rights. With human-made climatic catastrophe looming, neighborhood groups have an ethical responsibility not only to protect their own turf but also to lighten the burden we all put on an ecosphere that belongs to everyone and to no one.

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Stan Cox is lead scientist for the Land Institute in Salina , Kan. , where his front yard is a vegetable and herb garden. Author of “Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine,” he wrote this comment for the institute’s Prairie Writers Circle. His address is t.stan@cox.net.