I have been using herbicides to control hardwoods, including tan oak, in my redwood forest in Comptche since 1985. I also do thinning and pruning of young trees, and logging, all of which produce dry fuel that can easily burn if ignited. All these forest practices I employ also serve to reduce the potential of a wildfire moving rapidly through my forest because they improve access and break up fire fuel continuity. Every fire season, I am intensely concerned about the possibility of a wildfire, and do what I can to prevent such an event.
Anderson Valley Advertiser
Last Wednesday the County Courthouse was something of an old-fashioned media circus. Media ghouls, always keen for second hand blood, were drawn from near and far to watch a pair of monsters get their due.…
“Droughts come and go,” Stroeh tells me on a hot dusty August afternoon. “They’re part of the way we live, though now we also have global climate change, along with extremes such as floods and droughts.” Michael McCarthy, the author of the Man Who Made it Rain, and Stroeh’s biggest fan, argues that there are two obvious truths about hydrology today: “water is the new oil”; and “when water becomes a commodity, wars start.” Wars haven’t broken out yet in Marin but skirmishes have. This summer deputies from the Marin County Sheriff’s office raided commercial pot farms in Nicasio where growers purloined water from adjacent farms and diverted it from streams and springs to irrigate their crops. Then, too, several years ago, residents of Marshall nearly came to blows when Hog Island wanted to dig a new well on the uplands across from highway one.
Last Wednesday afternoon the team headed out of Boonville for one of their longest road trips of the season — to Middletown in Lake County, over two hours to the east, a non-league game. No…
In my dotage I am willing to admit that my loathing of the Los Angeles Dodgers is irrational, primitive, and downright silly, but I loathe them nonetheless and have hated them with a vengeance since the Giants came to San Francisco in 1958 and I was infected with an incurable Giants virus that not only causes blind devotion to my team, but inflames the adrenal glands whenever the Los Angeles Dodgers are mentioned on the radio or in print.
The biggest Eucalyptus tree is not Clint Eastwood’s Blue Gum in Carmel, but the Alexander Cockburn Tree in Petrolia. A team of scientists showed up with measuring devices officially validating and registering its 56 foot…
On the day Pope Francis released his encyclical on the fate of the Earth last June, I was struggling to climb a near vertical cliff on the Parajito Plateau of northern New Mexico. My fingers…
For years, wine industry leaders have opposed regulation on the grounds that it is burdensome and of questionable value. California agribusiness representatives have consistently maintained that they can manage their properties in an environmentally responsible manner without the need for government oversight. In the case of the wine industry, the leading edge of this effort is a marketing and certification initiative called “fish friendly farming” which has certified 100,000 acres of vineyards, including a majority of those that suckle at the banks of the Russian River.