PG&E’s War Against Trees

PG&E’s war against trees isn’t confined to Humboldt County. I’ve received letters from outraged landowners in Shasta and Mendocino Counties, and read about infuriating encounters with PG&E’s frontline troops in the media. People described threats, other harassments. They complained of being watched until they had to go out for something or other, at which point tree-cutters swiftly pounced on their beloved trees. In Santa Cruz, the complaints were so vociferous that the Board of Supervisors filed a lawsuit with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) charging PG&E with the illegal removal of trees, disruption of sensitive habitat, violating the rights of private property owners, dangerously increasing erosion and landslide risk, compromising the water supply, and hundreds of violations of the Public Resources Code.

Government leaders in San Jose and San Francisco have called for PG&E to be taken out of investor control, and to be run by the government or its customers.

PG&E often refuses to respond, an increasingly frequent reaction to government authorities among the nation’s giant corporations and monied interests. It claims it needs no permits since vegetation management is mandated by state law.

Of course the State does not dictate HOW the vegetation should be managed, and in our current perilous fire situation, PG&E could justify removing every tree in California. Indeed, trees have been known to be hurled for miles by mighty fire-generated winds.

Humboldt County, with its long history of lumber production, has been slow to regard its forests as anything but a rugged and colorful way to make a living. Concerning forests and their function in climate stabilization(trees absorb 25% of human CO2-generated emissions)  timber harvest plans contain language questioning climate change, and dismissing it as an argument between schools of scientists. They have been dismissive of the enormous role large trees play in the cycle of carbon sequestration, arguing that old trees age out, and that the young trees they plant fix carbon more rapidly.

Though admitting the role habitat maintenance plays in the survival of wildlife, one million of whose species are predicted to become extinct in the next decade, the industry puts pressure on the limits established in the forest practice rules regarding protections, and takes advantage of the impoverishment of the wildlife agencies.

A letter to the Community Services District, written by a member of the Anderson Valley Fire Department, addresses the subject of big trees,, specifically in regard to Faulkner Park but with general application. He begins by commending PG&E’s new vegetation management as a “very wise and overdue solution” to reducing wild-fire. Then, very politely, almost in baby-talk, he discusses the utterly misguided and disingenuous way they go about what they profess to be their objective.

He describes the value of the big trees, the ones PG&E is after, which offer shade.” This shading slows down the process of warming surface temperatures on smaller fuels. Along with keeping temperatures down it assists in holding relative humidity longer. Although shaded fuels will dry and warm, like all other vegetative matter, their seasonal conditions are slower to transition into a ripe fire environment. Fuels that are in direct sunlight lose fuel moistures quicker and are subsequently drier earlier in the season than shaded fuels. These sundried fuels take less energy to start and support fire growth when ember cast, sparks or other heat sources are introduced….an assumption is that PG&E would not manage the understory growth since it is not a contributor to powerline limb strike, and yet the new landscape would be at increased risk from fire…when powerlines fall on to these newly created conditions below.”

The Camp Fire, which caused 85 deaths, originated with a nearly-100-year-old power line falling into just this kind of kindling. Many of PG&E’s fires have been caused by their stunningly antiquated equipment. Loretta Lynch, (not the AG) former president of the CPUC, described equipment maintenance (charged to rate-payers) as “Cadillac prices for a jalopy” and multimillion-dollar fines she levied on the corporation as “chump change” from PG&E’s standpoint. Caroline Thomas Jacobs, the current Wildfire Safety Division director at CPUC, has the same view:” You have to put together and develop a study and tell us why enhanced vegetation management is the way to go here…they have to think it through and not just pick the easy button and the cheapest approach… you can’t just cut a bunch of trees to look like you’re doing something.”

In spite of the chaos, in spite of the well-demonstrated increased fire risk imposed on the people, in spite of the piles of cut-too-short-to-use logs, which landowners do not have the capacity to move, piled up around their houses,, and the branches and chips scattered across the landscape, PG&E continues, as it were, Sherman’s March Through Georgia.

The sudden disappearance of all these big trees has a primitive psychological effect. One even imagines how the Vietnamese felt after we dropped nalpalm.

Exposed.

Besides the time-consuming law suits and all the talk, nobody is stopping it.. Except for Mattole  Forest Defense, which has been trying to protect Humboldt Redwood State Park for four months. PG&E’s destructive action here is a true outrage. This buffer zone, purchased by the Parks in 1984, because it realized this last stand of ancient redwoods would be destroyed by logging-induced erosion if they didn’t, is being fragmented and frayed  as you read . Forest Defense is too few. There is no authority over the activity of the contractors, who are from all over the country and the majority of whom do not speak English. They do not understand the topography, the weather, the ecology or the history of the Forest. They are “just doing their job” as the ominous refrain always goes.

The Park administrator, Victor Bjelajac, and the Park biologist Amber Transou, are phlegmatic and silent. Why don’t they spring into action? The Park is the largest forest of ancient redwoods on the planet. It was saved from logging by a very brave and dedicated group of people in the 1920’s. It shelters its own exquisite biodiversity much of which is endangered. It will live a long time if we’re careful, but it is threatened by climate change, earthquakes, maybe even, in the remoter future, tsunamis. Here is the place for the Seventh Generation principle to be applied. The forest may require very careful management techniques such as controlled burns, to help maintain habitat diversity. But why does the Park allow PG&E to rampage through its protective buffer, knowing that the land is extremely steep and susceptible to erosion, is part of a wildlife corridor, the “Redwoods to the Sea”? Removing the big trees PG&E is after will destabilize the remaining ones to windfall. It will heat up and dry out the ground and the trees, creating an edge effect.

Where is the Audubon Society? Where is the Nature Conservancy, EPIC, Save the Redwoods League?

A demonstration of PG&E’s true objectives in its overall mission is its thrust to kill solar. Simultaneous with its war on trees, PG&E is attacking independent electricity generation. It complains that people who have bought solar panels and are selling back electricity to PG&E are unloading the cost of equipment maintenance on the poor. They want people with solar panels to pay them a tax. They want to get the rooftop electricity practically for free.

This is a sickeningly specious argument, as anyone who has ever had their power turned off for nonpayment knows. If PG&E cared about poor people, they would subsidize solar panels for them, and pay for their own equipment maintenance out of their profits.

If they cared about the climate catastrophe, and the anguish they themselves have caused, they would fix their equipment.

They would put their lines underground.

They would persuade the Biden administration which has just secured $73 billion from the Infrastructure Bill to construct a new power grid, to put it underground…as Europe has done, for years, and end this maniacal self-mutilation in what’s left of our forests.

(Ellen Taylor can be reached at ellenetaylor@yahoo.com)