California: Preservation ranch has become a hell a developer wants to cover in housing & pavement

The ironically named “Preservation” Ranch project is the 20,000 acre vineyard conversion project near Annapolis, Sonoma County. Among other environmental impacts, roughly 1700 acres of forest will be permanently converted to vineyards. The project materials are still being submitted to  Sonoma County Permits and Resource Management Department, after which the EIR phase will begin.

Get full text; Support da’ word producer:
http://rare-earth-news.blogspot.com/2009/03/mountaintop-vineyards-proposed-to.html

All tree news about California:
http://forestpolicyresearch.com/category/north-american-tree-news/california/

The Redwood Chapter of the Sierra Club has been following the progress
of this project for several years. This Premier Pacific Vineyards
investment in deforestation, funded by CalPERS, is being made to
support a non-essential agriculture, the production of luxury,
high-end wines.

Furthermore, the investment bodes to become an exemplar of how our overlogged forests are treated in the future; it is precedent-setting since it is the largest-scale attempted conversion of forest in No. California.

In the present political and financial times, when the public and the world are learning the inconvenient truths’ about global warming and at the same time the world is threatened with grave financial collapses, we do not think
CalPERS should be financing such work.

Here is our latest letter to the CalPERS Board, in which we suggest that, rather than deforestation, there are other options for managing and restoring over-logged timberlands, such as those employed by the Nature Conservancy for their Garcia River Forest Climate Action Project.

Get full text; Support da’ word producer: http://www.redwood.sierraclub.org