The impacts of local weather change at the moment are more and more pressing reminders of our dependence on nature for survival. It’s welcome information that California’s legislature handed a price range invoice this summer season with funding for our state’s 30×30 efforts, laying a path to guard 30% of California’s land, freshwater and sea by 2030. The purpose is to protect sufficient land and water to gradual the tempo of world warming, protect biodiversity and guarantee clear air and protected water for all.
Our area people is already setting the usual for safeguarding land to protect a livable setting. Internationally, 17% of land is protected in some kind. In California, 24% of land has been protected. In San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, roughly 26.5% of land — greater than 300,000 acres — has already been preserved as open house and farmland. This can be a outstanding feat for an urbanized area like Silicon Valley, and it speaks to the wonderful efforts of environmental and group leaders over the previous many years to guard our lovely forests, hillsides, Baylands and different open house areas.
We is perhaps main the way in which however we have to do extra. Because the local weather heats up, we have to shield extra native wetlands and floodplains to assist restore groundwater and shield towards flooding. We have to preserve extra native farmland for meals safety. And we have to steward extra corridors of open house to present native wildlife and vegetation the possibility emigrate to outlive.
Change has to occur incrementally and with group engagement. Beneath are only a few of the excellent native land use selections that may both transfer us nearer to or additional away from 30×30 targets. The group I work for, the Palo Alto-based nonprofit Inexperienced Foothills, is engaged on these land use points with our group companions. Go to our web site at greenfoothills.org to study extra about these points and the opposite land use points our group is engaged on.
Stanford’s Educational Development Boundary (AGB), which is a part of the Stanford Community Plan, has protected hundreds of acres of hillside open house from growth because it was permitted by Santa Clara County within the 12 months 2000. This panorama gives not solely a scenic vista but additionally habitat for threatened and endangered species just like the California tiger salamander and California red-legged frog. Nonetheless, the AGB’s ban on growth isn’t everlasting. Presently, a supermajority vote (4 of 5 Santa Clara County supervisors) is required to permit growth within the Stanford foothills, however that requirement will expire in 2025. Now the Board of Supervisors is contemplating amendments to the Stanford Group Plan, together with the extension of the supermajority vote requirement for the AGB for an additional 99 years. At a minimal, this supermajority vote requirement must be prolonged, if not made everlasting.
The town of East Palo Alto is presently conducting an environmental evaluation of a proposed replace to the Ravenswood Business District Specific Plan, which may enable large growth close to the wetlands and solely Bayfront open house protect within the metropolis. Wetlands are extremely efficient at capturing carbon. In addition they shield communities towards sea degree rise by absorbing storm surges and supply important habitat for a lot of at-risk species. Inexperienced Foothills helps East Palo Alto residents, who’re asking the town council to make sure equitable public entry, shield pure habitat, and create new city inexperienced house.
Considered one of our area’s worst polluters, Lehigh Quarry — situated simply south of Palo Alto — desires approvals to develop its mining exercise. That is laughable given the two,000 violations of legal guidelines and rules on the federal, state and native degree they’ve racked up over the previous 10 years, together with air air pollution and water high quality impacts to Permanente Creek. A moonscape now, that is an over 800-acre space that could possibly be protected and restored as habitat. On June 7, the county Board of Supervisors directed employees to discover the potential for revoking the use allow for the Lehigh Cement Plant.
Supervisors additionally directed employees to discover whether or not the Lehigh Quarry (as separate from the cement plant) could possibly be thought of a public well being and security nuisance as a consequence of these violations. This report will come again to the board and the county Planning Fee at a future date. When the choice returns to the board, the group ought to rally to assist the closure of this polluting operation.
A San Diego-based debt acquisition firm has proposed an open-pit sand and gravel mine, the Sargent Ranch Quarry, on the sacred Indigenous panorama and important wildlife hall of Juristac, situated within the hillsides southwest of Gilroy. Juristac is each essentially the most sacred website of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and the one pathway for animals corresponding to mountain lions, bobcats and badgers emigrate southward out of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The county has carried out an environmental evaluation of the impacts of the Sargent Ranch Quarry and located 14 separate important and unavoidable impacts, together with unmitigatable hurt to the Juristac tribal cultural panorama, to wildlife motion corridors, to air high quality, and to the scenic views of the hillsides. The general public is inspired to submit feedback on the proposed mine by emailing the county at [email protected] The county ought to deny this extremely harmful open-pit sand and gravel mine and shield this irreplaceable sacred website and wildlife habitat.
30×30 is a part of the brand new story we’re writing as a species. These are simply among the land use points taking place in our yard, and there are dozens extra native threats and alternatives that our group wants to deal with to battle local weather change and the biodiversity disaster. Our area is taking the lead on local weather motion however we have to do extra to achieve 30×30 targets. Inexperienced Foothills has been working to guard native nature and farmland since 1962, and we’ll proceed to assist communities to advance 30×30. Because the adage goes, we should assume globally and act regionally.
