Editor:
The April 8 article “Roads and Redwoods” failed to include our Council’s views on the Richardson Grove Highway Improvement Project.
InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council is a consortium of 10 tribes retaining ancestral ties to Richardson Grove. For millennia, tribal peoples lived in profound harmony with the redwood ecosystem. We oppose Caltrans’ plan to widen and reconfigure the roadway through the Grove because — as proposed in the draft EIR — it would harm ancient redwoods by severing and compacting their sensitive root systems. Traffic safety can be improved by implementing additional slowing measures without widening and reconfiguring the roadway and thereby damaging the Grove’s ancient trees.
Since time immemorial, local tribal peoples have been taught the ancient redwoods are sacred — placed on our Mother Earth as a demonstration of the Creator’s love for humans. Years ago, our spiritual leaders warned that by destroying the ancient redwoods, human beings could end up destroying themselves. Only three percent of our region’s original old-growth redwoods are still standing. How sad that future generations will not inherit 75 percent or 50 percent or even 10 percent of those ancient trees that were still standing just a few decades ago!
That 3 percent is critical to our future. Scientists have concluded that destruction of old-growth forests is the single greatest cause of global warming. It is remarkable to us that measures such as severing or compacting the Grove’s old-growth roots would even be considered, since such actions have the potential to seriously harm the ancient trees of this “protected” redwood park. Caltrans has provided no data to show these actions would not harm the Grove’s redwoods, which supports our position that the risks posed by the project simply are not worth taking. Redwoods’ root systems are extremely shallow and infinitely interconnected. Due to the sensitive and complex root systems they share, old-growth redwoods may be seriously affected by the trauma or death of their neighbors.
The proposed project is in the middle of a state park. Richardson Grove is not owned by Caltrans or special interests. Since 1922, it has belonged to the people of California. It actually belongs to all people of the world, since the state park system’s purpose in managing ancient redwoods is to preserve them for the sake of the present and future generations of all people.
For these and other reasons, we support the “no build” alternative identified by Caltrans in its draft EIR. The project should be abandoned because it is designed to benefit only a handful of interests while threatening the sanctity, integrity, and wellbeing of the Grove. We believe Richardson Grove must be honored and protected because it is a special and irreplaceable gift, the sacred inheritance of all the peoples of Mother Earth.
Priscilla Hunter, Chairperson, InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council
Editor:
As a new member of the Save Richardson Grove group, I feel compelled to address the condescending stereotypes found in Hank Sims’ and Cristina Bauss’ respective April 15 NCJ articles entitled “Et Tu, Grovie?” and “Roads and Redwoods”:
1) I’m NOT a pot grower. 2) I haven’t been involved in any “Timber Wars.” 3) The last I checked, I was not “frothing with rage.” 4) I’m not a blogger. 5) I have worked most of my life — for 20 years as a legal assistant at well-respected law firms in Portland and San Diego. 6) I have concerns about other important environmental issues. Re: the General Plan — last year I submitted my comments to the County Board of Supervisors regarding the various growth plans for Humboldt County. Re: the Pacific Trash Gyre — my husband and I are Adopt-a-Highway volunteers. Each month we clean up a four-mile section of Highway 101 near Trinidad in an effort to keep our environment clean and to help reduce the amount of garbage (particularly plastics) that could make its way into the ocean.
As “professionals,” you should know better. In your attempt to discredit us, as individuals and as a group, you’ve succeeded in alienating community members you don’t even know. If we’re just some fringe sect of the population, as your articles portray us to be, tell me why California State Parks and California State Parks Foundation have written 12- and 13-page letters of concern to Caltrans about this proposed project?
Kimberly Tays, Trinidad
This article appears in Fifth and Goals.
That was beautifully said, Priscilla and Kim.
Sorry Priscilla, your heritage does not excuse your collection of flabby cliches and factual errors. ITSWC just added themselves to the long list of Humboldt County fruitcakes.
Thank you Priscilla, for the information on significant spiritual history and basic biology that was characterized as flabby cliches and factual errors. The more someone does that sort of thing, the more shabby their credibility becomes.
After reading these articles and comments that followed them, I’m wondering – Instead of continually trying to create larger and larger businesses whose collapse or decisions to move to another area can endanger the economy of a whole community (look at large mills and logging operations in the 70’s, or further north, Boeing and Microsoft and the way the entire Puget Sound region is hostage to those businesses’ rises, falls, and threats to move – or east to the same in Great Lakes and other industrial cities…), instead, why not be smart and channel these chunks of change towards support for small, local, diversified businesses who’ve made the decision not to keep expanding and expanding to survive. Not so easy? Well, then work at it. Small, locally based businesses who capitalized on what this area already has helped bring the Arcata-Eureka area back from economic collapse in the late 60’s and 70’s.
Make the decision to keep expanding and expanding, and you have to bring in materials from out of the area, such as milk for goat cheese – and reduce your bottom line to remain competitive – find cheaper workers, find bigger trucks. Businesses who go that route will look to the taxpayer to fund things like road expansion for less expensive materials from out-of-the-area businesses, and to pay for social services to pick up the slack for increasing numbers of minimum wage (and below) workers, in addition to less obvious supports. And, many of those ever expanding businesses will likely also have to spend lots with more experienced out-of-the-area PR firms to hang on to the special marketing cachet of small and local, when they’re really not anymore.
And the markets for many of these expanding businesses’ products can be fickle and unpredictable. Despite attempts at forecasting, nothing’s for sure, and the bottom can fall out tomorrow. One current example: Growing’s become a big and expanding business, successful, ironically, because of the remoteness of the area, and the bottom can fall out of that when it’s legalized, regulated, taxed, and then co-opted by out of the area corporations, possibly in very short order. (But, if that happens, at least crime will go down.)
"Jobs" is how paycheck to paycheck indebted working people often must make their decisions. But the unkindest cut is from those who would pretend to have those people’s interests at heart while they destroy the landscapes around them forever, for creation of "jobs" that often barely pay a living wage and often pull the rug out by disappearing when working people can least afford it. Those large scale “jobs” that do at least pay minimum wage are often not sustainable in fluctuating state and national markets, and are often subject to rapid and permanent decreases.
(Although, to be fair, there are one or two growth industries that seem to keep people employed in the service sector. Just ask Crescent City, and Camp Pendleton.)
An economy with diversified small and locally sustainable businesses can absorb losses of some small businesses employing a few at living wages. But an area’s economy can’t absorb the blow of a big loss to the tax base when a big business moves, or takes a big hit, and the big loss of jobs for low-paid workers living paycheck to paycheck with no retirement or savings, and also can’t afford the inevitable call for aid from the county when larger scale job loss, compounded by lost tax revenues, occurs.
Accept that where you live will never be a wealth machine, at least not in dollars. Admit it, nobody owes you a living, and if you can’t get financially rich here like you pictured, or can’t fancy yourself a hero by building a growing pyramid of of jobs with your name on them, have some humility and accept that.
Don’t act like you should be able to alter the landscape repeatedly, always taking "just a little bit" more, for the sake of jobs. As long as there are “more” jobs, the population will keep growing, so more things will have to be cut down and cut up – to provide "jobs". It’s an endless downward spiral, and only juvenile rationalizations support the idea that there are simple one time solutions here to keeping more people employed and really fix it forever or even for the foreseeable future. Jobs and growth are going to be some kind of problem no matter which way you look at it – and how much long term physical damage can you do to “solve” that? Why keep doing all this damage?
There’s a lot more of value than dollar bills here. Ask native people who keep on seeing things dug up, cut off, and dammed, and have seen these schemes boom and bust, leaving ever bigger scars behind, and ask other people who’ve been here a while, even 2 or 3 generations, who may live hand to mouth in the woods, the hills, the coast, and on the farmland here, but can see the value of what’s all around us. Admit to the sophisticated notion that jobs have to do with the real carrying capacity of the land. Insisting on going the direction of continually throwing that out of whack will destroy it all in the long run.
So, "Environmentalist", "conservative", whatever. Call yourself whatever you want, it’s really what you do that’s who you are.
Want to build a business empire? Move yourself to a busy port or the center of some existing cloverleaf on a superhighway, rent yourself a big industrial building, and put in conveyor belts. Don’t set yourself down in the middle of a one of a kind place that’s going to be hard to get to at 70 mph, and start cutting "low impact" holes in it, after starting your ‘one of a kind’ business, to make your life a little bit easier, get your “product out there”, “employ more people”, and all those other justifying buzz phrases.
Christ – look at what you’ve got. It can be fragile – don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs because you can’t see what the gold really is.
And, then, the point about how a straightened road can also let competition’s products in, as well as products out – that’s a pretty good point, isn’t it?
So, to complete these thoughts, isn’t "sustainable" considered the wave of the future? In the previous millions of years, it’s proved out to be a pretty good choice.
And on a related subject. When paid writing is called "journalism" and defended as speaking for itself, those who are critical of its quality should not be vilified simply for pointing out where it’s lacking. Answer their points with more thorough or correct information, if needed, but when you stray off into opinion or "defense", well, you protest too much.
And I have to wonder, why should people be mocked who, to be heard, have to make time to write for free in the middle of the night, for not having time during their day jobs at other trades, often multiple, to sit at a computer and write? Let alone not have acknowledged that they don’t get paid for their own valuable hours of research or sharing of real life experiences. No one should be mocked for not being up to educated standards of classic writing ability; for their sharing of real life, and their sometimes very wise observations and questions in their own vernacular. Do you also denigrate people who speak English with an accent? It’s a living language, and some of the richest writing comes from those who can barely spell.
NCJ not only has ink by the barrel, but by the kilobyte. Thank you for getting news out there that people need to know. Shame on you for being sarcastic and condescending about someone doing their best to tell the truth with the resources they have.
Second post (3) above should read (3 – continued).
Right on to Kim and Priscilla!
As I have so niavely suggested in the past: Why not take benefit of the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS spent on dredging and improving the harbor facilities and start shipping in and out?
Doesn’t seem to be a problem shipping trees and pulp to foreign countrys! How about helping ourselves, the state, and the entire country out a bit.
Where stands the Harbor Commission on all this? Seems to me this would work to their benefit as well.
Love This Place, I’m not certain to whom you’re referring when you write "shame on you for being sarcastic and condescending about someone doing their best to tell the truth with the resources they have"; neither Hank nor I denigrated anyone for incorrect spelling or grammar, or mocked them for not being up to professional standards.
On a different note: For the record, the original draft of the article did contain information about the State Parks Foundation – including some quotes from spokesperson Traci Verardo-Torres – and the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council. They were edited for space.
Took a right to Portland. Lots of local action up here. See you when the rivermouth is clear. Lite. Mahalo
Cristina said: "On a different note: For the record, the original draft of the article did contain information about the State Parks Foundation – including some quotes from spokesperson Traci Verardo-Torres – and the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council. They were edited for space."
Really? Let’s see it then. Post the draft here. Redeem your reputation.
There were a lot of opportunities to include the project opposition, between the fluff and chum in both articles such as the opening of part 1 which included your vague attack on EPIC or in part 2 when you referred to project opponents as "marijuana growers". Here are the groups you failed to even mention, let alone their unique issues with the project and their contributions to protecting OUR State Park:
-Save Richardson Grove(Surprised? I bet they were)
-Intertribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council
-The Center for Biological Diversity
-The State Parks Foundation
-Trees Foundation
-Humboldt Watershed Council
-Sierra Club North
-The Northcoast Environmental Center
-Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters
-The Redwood Run(I had to mention the bikers 🙂
-Friends of the Eel River
and more…
Along with close to 10,000 petition signers against the project through the efforts of the above groups, including EPIC.
There are some major differences between being ill-informed about an issue, having enough "room" or "space" to represent both sides of an issue, and ignoring facts and having a clear bias in your supposed look at both sides. In this case Cristina, it’s very apparent that you have no excuse for your biased and divisive article except for your axe grinding intentions.
Are you drunk?
Stop dumping waste in the pacific ocean…stop clearcutting southamerican jungles…stop sucking lakes dry in the middle east…stop melting computers in china…STOP CHIPPING AWAY AT THE FORESTS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST! It’s as much a local issue as it is global. We’re already standing on mountains of teeny tiny little itty bitty compromises like the CalTrans proposal. It is irreversible…it is how all future generations will judge us.
“Save Richardson’s Grove” is the type of hyperbole that is a real turn-off to those of us who prefer a more nuanced discussion of an issue. I realize that that’s asking a lot around ol’ Humboldt County these days, but there it is.
So Reynard, is your mind already made up? If so, what’s the point of discussion? Do you realize the project would not fly if it were put to a local vote? What says you to the fact that it isn’t a voting matter? And what says you to the fact that if put to a tourist vote, they’re even LESS in favor of changing the landscape they travel hundreds, often thousands, of miles to visit?
Maybe try recognizing voices of discontent for what they are.
Reynard, you wanna talk about hyperbole…it’s not like prior to hearing about the proposal you were going around saying “Widen Our Freeways! Especially Through Old Growth Parks!”
There’s plenty of nuanced discussion going on that you’re not participating in. That said, a yay or nay is really all I need to decipher from an opinion, because the actions are clear and they will be louder than words.