By Shoshana Hebshi
Chapter Communications Coordinator
The transition from winter to spring often feels like a rebirth. In our region, the hills turn a bright green, wildflowers bloom abundantly in open spaces, birds busily make their nests and progress on their migration patterns. Spring feels hopeful and fresh. Like a new start.
It also is the season of Earth Day, the annual celebration hailed by the environmental community as a time to honor conservation, enjoy the outdoors, engage in environmental education and, perhaps, drive less.
This year, Earth Day feels especially urgent.
As we emerge from our coronavirus cocoon, we face a planet where the effects of climate change are ramping up, but our intentions to draw down climate-disrupting emissions have not manifested in the widespread changes needed to achieve the reduction required. We re-enter a society that has been sequestered from social interaction for more than a year, that has increased its use of single-use materials in the form of face masks, gloves and take-out containers, that has not significantly altered its method of consumption of resources, and that has not learned to live in more harmony with nature and the cycles of the planet.
Earth Day is April 22, a Thursday this year. The celebration began in 1970, organized by activists and politicians to encourage Americans to demonstrate against the “impacts of 150 years of industrial development,” according to the Earth Day website. That first Earth Day inspired 20 million people across the country to participate in rallies and events to protest the deterioration of the environment at the hands of industry.
That first Earth Day led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental regulations, including the Clean Air Act. In the beginning of any movement, it’s always exciting. As time passes, we can get used to the status quo and become complacent. We have come a long way with environmental policy and regulation since that first Earth Day, but threats to clean air and water, open space, and healthy ecosystems persist. And now, climate change.
The urgency of the climate crisis makes the usual festival in the local park, face-painting, food stands and governmental agencies giving out tips on conserving water, seem inadequate.
If the general population were inspired, as Greta Thunberg has inspired students and young people across the globe, to rally and protest with an impassioned message to demand real, starkly different climate action, if our emergence from the hardships of Covid-19 can re-energize our fervor, this Earth Day marks the perfect opportunity to transmit the necessity of rapid change.
Sierra Club provides some framework for its members to be involved in climate action, and Redwood Chapter also has many irons in the fire as we collectively strive to draw down emissions, provide education, and advocate for a cleaner economy.
Local Action is the Way
Redwood Chapter’s Climate Protectors program launched in the beginning of 2020 with the twofold mission of getting people involved in climate action at the local level and coordinating with other climate action groups to reduce overlapping agendas.
“Climate Protectors is specifically designed to help people make a difference in their own lives and in their local communities,” said Randy MacDonald, co-chair of the program and chair of the chapter’s climate and energy committee.
As a regionwide program, Climate Protectors understands that gaps in climate action work exist at the local level where larger initiatives from the state and federal levels can bypass.
“There’s a dearth of action in local communities,” said MacDonald, who lives in rural Mendocino County. “Our motto is inspiring community-based climate action. We focus on people’s individual lives and communities.”
Members of the program make pathways in their own communities, coordinate actions with existing local climate action groups and advocate local municipalities for good climate policy.
“Unfortunately, climate change is happening faster, and its impacts are more severe than have been predicted,” said MacDonald. “Our best science shows us now that actions we take this decade will make all the difference for the future of our climate. This is why we need people right now to step up and help us. Become a Climate Protector and help us make a real difference for the future of our planet.”
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
While initiatives like the chapter’s Climate Protectors group focuses specifically on engaging local climate action from a policy and advocacy standpoint, other efforts, like the work of Transportation Chair Steve Birdlebough, aim to support local public transit and carpooling, reducing vehicle miles traveled and promoting affordable infill housing to bring workers closer to their jobs.
“We know that someone who is walking or riding a bicycle is responsible for a lot less greenhouse gas emissions than someone who is driving a car,” said Birdlebough, who lives in Santa Rosa and said since the pandemic began he has filled his gas tank only three times. “We know that in many cities, close to half of all trips are less than three miles in length, so they are easily done on a bicycle or on foot, yet our instinct is to grab the keys and hop in the car.”
Cities that work to design themselves to make biking and walking attractive will be more successful in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, he said. But the only way to meet ambitious reduction targets, such as making Sonoma County carbon neutral by 2030, requires getting people out of their cars entirely.
This work is not without its challenges. Birdlebough, who was part of the effort to bring the SMART train to Sonoma and Marin counties, has watched and fought well-financed opposition interests that have worked to shut down tax measures to fund the system. While SMART has provided a great alternative to driving Highway 101, it has also spurred cities with stations like Petaluma, Santa Rosa and Windsor, to build denser housing nearby to create a more walkable area.
In his work on a project to rebuild State Route 37 between Vallejo and Novato, eventually raising the road above sea level because of flooding, Birdlebough has advocated for increased public transit and vanpooling along the route to discourage driving, as well as the construction of affordable housing in Marin to allow employees to live closer to their work. Spending the $4 to $5 billion it would cost to transform the highway into an elevated causeway could otherwise be spent on affordable housing in Marin, he said. That would save workers time and money and draw down emissions from reduced commutes.
“That solution depends on Marin County being willing to have a much more diverse population, and to have a certain number of people, maybe 20,000, move from Vallejo over to Marin, or new people could take those jobs,” Birdlebough said.
This kind of shift takes a different way of thinking from municipalities and developers, and it’s a shift that is happening gradually, “glacial speed,” he said. “But the end result can be really good.”
The pandemic has provided another source of emissions reduction as more people have been working and schooling from home and using software, like Zoom, for meetings. Birdlebough sees this development as something that will stick around and ease traffic in the long run.
“The thing that I’m trying to make clear to everyone is we need to steadily reduce our vehicle miles traveled by about 1 percent annually over the next 20, 30 years,” he said. “We have to develop a plan and an approach that reduces the amount of driving year by year by year, and there will be no end to it.”
The Climate Protectors’ Randy MacDonald said one thing we can learn from this pandemic is we can exist without driving so much.
“Transportation is a major contributor to climate change in our region,” he said. “If you’ve found ways to avoid driving, let’s try to keep that up as much as we used to. Our cars are melting the planet, and the convenience trip is no longer something that we have to do.”
Curbing sprawl
Part of the charm of our region is its wide, open spaces, its swaths of forested hills, its rivers and lakes, its scenic hiking and biking trails and its beautiful coastline. This area has, of course, historically been significantly altered by timber extraction that still includes clear cutting and habitat destruction. Our region also sees modern challenges with wild spaces converted to vineyards or cannabis and ag land converted to housing or commercial use.
In the city of Sonoma last year, voters overwhelmingly renewed the Urban Growth Boundary, which will protect open space surrounding the city for another 20 years. But other threats continue to arise elsewhere, including intensification of land use by wineries to include event centers and venues on ag land.
Regionwide, the more development and natural landscape conversion that encroaches onto open space, the more greenhouse gas emissions occur, the more habitat gets lost, and the more removed we become from our natural spaces.
“Advocating government leaders to protect open spaces from urban sprawl development is one of the ways that Sierra Club uses its voice that ultimately leads to climate action,” said Teri Shore, a Sierra Club activist in Sonoma Group who lives in the Sonoma Valley. “The more we can preserve our wild lands and the habitats and ecosystems and allow them to thrive, the more resilient we will be to climate change.”
Conservation efforts on wide swaths of space in the northern parts of our region, including Del Norte, Mendocino, Trinity and Humboldt counties, are encouraging as well. A sweeping bill heading to the U.S. Senate right now would offer protection to more than 259,216 acres as wilderness and potential wilderness areas in addition to establishing a 700,000-acre restoration area that works to restore former clear cut forest areas and prioritize community wildfire protection, rather than extractive timber sales activity.
Hug a tree, don’t cut a tree
Since the spate of wildfires that have torn through our region in the last six years, a lot of burden has been placed on trees. A white paper that the chapter’s forest committee chair, Jeanne Wetzel Chinn, helped write lays out how PG&E has scapegoated trees as the culprits and accelerators of the infernos and therefore has been cutting them down beyond a reasonable measure. The utility’s messaging avoids culpability in its aged infrastructure, instead pointing to the flammability of the vegetation that they claim “starts and spreads the fires.”
In a time when we are trying to store carbon in the soil, and trees are our No. 1 resource in doing so, cutting them down with abandon is not the best climate-friendly policy. Yet, local governments and the state have not prevented PG&E from its brazen disinformation campaign that has left trees throughout the state at the mercy of its poor methodology.
The paper concludes that PG&E is causing “extensive environmental damage to public and private lands” and calls on the state to take swift and bold action to adjust the framing and scope of PG&E’s misguided solutions.
“Decades of neglect by PG&E to modernize its distribution and transmission systems has made the system vulnerable to all sources of ignition,” said Wetzel Chinn. “These sources aren’t just tree branches or fallen trees, these sources include balloons, animals, wind, and vehicles. Almost 75 percent of the igniters are not related to vegetation. Modernizing the infrastructure protects us from all igniters, providing us with a safer and more reliable electrical system.” 
Don’t Pass Gas
Finally, Redwood Chapter has been supportive of a Sonoma County organization seeking to ban new gas stations.
The Coalition Opposing New Gas Stations (CONGAS) is led by Sierra Club members Jenny Blaker and Woody Hastings and set out to oppose gas station proposals in Sonoma County in 2019. The group has grown to include members of the community who share this desire, seeing the discord between working against climate change and approving new gas stations.
Since CONGAS began its work, it has helped to shut down two proposed projects in the county and is keeping a watchful eye on a handful of other proposals.
When the City of Petaluma unanimously imposed a ban on all new gas stations within city limits in February, CONGAS members were elated.
“There are many good reasons to oppose new gas stations including groundwater contamination, air quality concerns, public health, and more, but in the midst of a global climate crisis, we should not be literally pouring more fuel on the fire.”
Petaluma was the first municipality in the nation to ban new gas stations, and it serves as a example for similar actions elsewhere in the region, the state, and the nation.
Time’s A Wastin’
As we look forward to Earth Day 2021, 51 years following the inaugural event, let’s remember how far we’ve come and how much work is before us, urgently pressing us forward to a cleaner, healthier and more harmonious planet Earth.
Although most local festivals will be canceled again this year, Redwood Chapter invites you to step up your commitment and volunteer to be a part of our work through the Climate Protectors program or through local group or chapter initiatives.
Email us at redwood.chapter@sierraclub.org to talk about how you can help.