Sunday, August 16, 2015

The Far Side of Eden 13: What would John Muir do?

Note: I recently acquired the rights to my second Napa book, The Far Side of Eden. I think the struggle over the hillsides at the outset of this century covered in the book is relevant to the current discussion of development that includes new wineries and winery expansions, and I decided to run excerpts here. The series begins with the June postings in the drop-down menu to the right.                                           


      By August Chris Malan was pushing harder than ever for the lawsuit. The best defendants, they all agreed, were the county and three individual businesses that had recently put in vineyards, all of them ignoring the California Environmental Quality Act. The individual defendants would be a little-known partnership then called The Best Cellar/ Vineyard Properties West; an aspiring boutique, Chateau Potelle, managed by a Frenchman living in the Mayacamas; and the owner of the cult wine featured in the movie Disclosure, Jayson Pahlmeyer.
      The Sierra Club would be the plaintiff, the Mennen Environmental Foundation the means. The Napa group ex-com had already agreed to this arrangement, despite the fact that the announcement was bound to be explosive, the outcome transforming. For the first time ever, a well-known, powerful environmental advocacy group was challenging not just development of wild places but the right of Napa’s successful, adulated, glamorous industry to prosper and grow. The very basis of the wineries’ existence, not just profits, was being cast into doubt, and the result was bound to be acrimony, and worse.
      Chris and John Stephens assumed that their decision to sue in the name of the Sierra Club would be sanctioned in the club’s up per echelons. The Sierra Club could not be associated with any lawsuit without approval by the litigation department in the national headquarters in San Francisco, but that should be no problem. The lesser lights in Napa assumed the slightly brighter lights in the Redwood chapter in Sonoma, to which the Napa group belonged, and the beacons in the Mission District would all be as enthusiastic about their cause as they were.
     The lesser lights were wrong.
                                                      *
      Much of the work of the Mennen Environmental Foundation was done in the house on Sylvaner Avenue at the kitchen table, made from a two-hundred-year-old barn gate from Mexico, where light fell from a chandelier of elk antlers and from a lamp made of an old saguaro cactus trunk. On a shelf stood a tightly woven Pomo basket, given to Carlene Mennen by her friend Yolande Beard, dead now, author of the elegant little book Wappo, about Napa Valley’s indigenous people. Hanging nearby was a prayer wand of wild turkey and grouse feathers dedicated to the health of Turtle Island, the Cherokee name for planet Earth.
      But the Redwood chapter of the Sierra Club in Sonoma County objected to their suing Napa County and the individual landowners. Since the Napa group of the Sierra Club was just one of several within the Redwood chapter, it was at least theoretically obligated to get approval. But the Sonomans didn’t want the Napa suit brought because the bad publicity might hurt Sonoma’s chances of passing a tough hillside ordinance of its own. A lawsuit in Napa might frighten the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors into enacting weak regulations that would not be subject to the California Environmental Quality Act, so Sonoma wouldn’t be sued. This argument was ridiculous, in Carlene’s view. The voters over there would demand a strong ordinance, she thought, just as they had in Napa, regardless of what went down in court.
      The suit would show how serious the fight had become all over California, the Sonoma syndrome being replaced by the Napa syn drome. It was time for everybody to kick it up a notch, but environmentalists in Sonoma were jealous of the resources available to environmentalists east of the Mayacamas. The Napans’ influence over the regional environment rankled the Sonomans, just as they had in Napa, regardless of what went down in court. The suit would show how serious the fight had become all over California, the Sonoma syndrome being replaced by the Napa syndrome.
      It was time for everybody to kick it up a notch.
                                                                    (Next: Muir redux)                                                            
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