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.
Chris Malan and one of her neighbors on Atlas Peak Road, Parry Mead, went up in a small aircraft and told the pilot to fly them over all of Napa Valley—Atlas Peak, Pritchard Hill, Howell Mountain, Diamond and Spring mountains, Mount Veeder. They were shocked by what they saw. Parry took a lot of photographs, and the worst, in Chris’s view, was Pahlmeyer’s new vineyard. She would later call it “the trigger.”
Broader involvement was needed to give the hillside ordinance real teeth. Yet another group, Concerned Citizens for Napa Hillsides, was founded, and Parry Mead’s photographs were submitted to the local newspaper and to the board of supervisors.
Concerned Citizens began to protest hillside conversions and demand that use permits for steeper slopes be required. They insisted that conversions of woodland and chaparral to vineyard on even more gradual slopes be subject to the California Environmental Quality Act, from which the vintners were currently exempted. They wrote letters to the editor. People whose property had been flooded by runoff from development higher up or otherwise affected got in touch with Concerned Citizens and wrote letters of their own, and all this began to have an impact.
The organization must demand that use permits for steeper slopes be required. They insisted that conversions of woodland and chaparral to vineyard on even more gradual slopes be subject to the California Environmental Quality Act, from which the vintners were currently exempted. They wrote letters to the editor.
The organization was granted a spot on the board of supervisors’ agenda, and Chris made a three-hour presentation. Using all the ammunition in the burgeoning file, she and her allies asked for a moratorium on the clearing of all hillsides. A moratorium was feared most by those seeking to profit from the unprecedented business expansion; the wine business was just so good, and all the flat land already in production, and here comes this proposal out of left field seeking to hobble the primary enterprise of Napa Valley. That was the view of most of the vintners. Moratorium was anathema to them, an economic and philosophical abomination sending up a figurative cloud of dust.
The required erosion control plans had reduced the turbidity of the river, but controversial new vineyard “conversions” like Pahlmeyer’s, new houses, and the destruction of trees and vegetation wiped those benefits out of the public consciousness.
People were so agitated. Something had to be done.
*
TOM LIPPE grew up in faraway Florida but went to law school at Stanford University and spent his free time in the Sierra Nevada. He naturally gravitated toward environmental issues and “social betterment”—his phrase—and by the time he graduated knew he wanted to practice in the public interest. Environmental litigation would be his niche.
In the eighties in northern California that meant the timber wars. Protecting old growth was the emblematic regional struggle, and Lippe represented the Sierra Club and another organization up in Humboldt County against Pacific Lumber, with some success. Along the way he got to know the leadership of the club in San Francisco, where its headquarters was located. He later opened an office just blocks away from the Sierra Club’s utilitarian digs in the Mission District.
“He now shared a suite with a financial consulting firm in an Embarcadero skyscraper but kept his hair long; he wore open shirts and sport jackets, and rarely talked about strategy. “Litigation is like poker,” he would say. “You don’t say what cards you had in the last hand” once your opponent folds. And you don’t waste a lot of time on sentiment.
In 1998, he got a call from a woman in Napa Valley named Chris Malan. He wasn’t surprised to learn that she had heard of him through the Sierra Club; it had often sent him referrals. Malan and other activists in the wine country were concerned about vineyard development in the hills and wanted to know if it could be halted, and Lippe drove up to talk to her.
He found Malan both personable and well informed. Lippe didn’t drink wine and knew nothing about it or vineyards, and he couldn’t digest all the information on the spot. But it certainly seemed to him that the county had big legal problems, and that there might be work for him. For one thing, the visual evidence was compelling. “Look what’s happening up there,” he said of the patchwork development.
He thought Napa Valley representative of other places in the United States where success had come down to money versus the environment. Many projects in the hills had been approved piecemeal, allowing developers to assemble big vineyards by doing them as a succession of smaller projects and avoiding more rigorous review. And there was the problem of enforcement—projects uninspected, violations unpunished, wrongdoers unrepentant. No one seemed to be looking at the possible effect of all this on the overall environment, or what would happen if it continued—the effects on wildlife and the river.
Here was a cautionary tale, he thought: do something destructive to the land and try to fix it with technology, and you create other problems as unintended consequences. During storms, underground drainage delivers water too quickly for the river to handle, for instance. Developed hillsides erode. Rocks roll. Species suffer.
Lots of laws applied, at least theoretically. One of these was the Endangered Species Act, savior of old growth—and of the northern spotted owl—and bane of the timber industry. It was a strong law but had its weaknesses, including the need to prove a “taking”—death or injury of an endangered creature as a direct result of activity by human beings. Proving this required a lot of field work by scientists and was very expensive (a million dollars just to get into federal court nowadays). San Pablo Bay was listed by the Environmental Protection Agency as impaired, and so consequently was the Napa River, a major tributary to the bay. The steelhead in the river were officially threatened, so that was a clear opportunity. And there were a few spotted owls in old growth above the west side of the valley.
But there was a better, cheaper, more immediate way, the best card in any potential plaintiff’s hand: the California Environmental Quality Act.
(Throw a dart)
Chris Malan and one of her neighbors on Atlas Peak Road, Parry Mead, went up in a small aircraft and told the pilot to fly them over all of Napa Valley—Atlas Peak, Pritchard Hill, Howell Mountain, Diamond and Spring mountains, Mount Veeder. They were shocked by what they saw. Parry took a lot of photographs, and the worst, in Chris’s view, was Pahlmeyer’s new vineyard. She would later call it “the trigger.”
Broader involvement was needed to give the hillside ordinance real teeth. Yet another group, Concerned Citizens for Napa Hillsides, was founded, and Parry Mead’s photographs were submitted to the local newspaper and to the board of supervisors.
Concerned Citizens began to protest hillside conversions and demand that use permits for steeper slopes be required. They insisted that conversions of woodland and chaparral to vineyard on even more gradual slopes be subject to the California Environmental Quality Act, from which the vintners were currently exempted. They wrote letters to the editor. People whose property had been flooded by runoff from development higher up or otherwise affected got in touch with Concerned Citizens and wrote letters of their own, and all this began to have an impact.
The organization must demand that use permits for steeper slopes be required. They insisted that conversions of woodland and chaparral to vineyard on even more gradual slopes be subject to the California Environmental Quality Act, from which the vintners were currently exempted. They wrote letters to the editor.
The organization was granted a spot on the board of supervisors’ agenda, and Chris made a three-hour presentation. Using all the ammunition in the burgeoning file, she and her allies asked for a moratorium on the clearing of all hillsides. A moratorium was feared most by those seeking to profit from the unprecedented business expansion; the wine business was just so good, and all the flat land already in production, and here comes this proposal out of left field seeking to hobble the primary enterprise of Napa Valley. That was the view of most of the vintners. Moratorium was anathema to them, an economic and philosophical abomination sending up a figurative cloud of dust.
The required erosion control plans had reduced the turbidity of the river, but controversial new vineyard “conversions” like Pahlmeyer’s, new houses, and the destruction of trees and vegetation wiped those benefits out of the public consciousness.
People were so agitated. Something had to be done.
*
TOM LIPPE grew up in faraway Florida but went to law school at Stanford University and spent his free time in the Sierra Nevada. He naturally gravitated toward environmental issues and “social betterment”—his phrase—and by the time he graduated knew he wanted to practice in the public interest. Environmental litigation would be his niche.
In the eighties in northern California that meant the timber wars. Protecting old growth was the emblematic regional struggle, and Lippe represented the Sierra Club and another organization up in Humboldt County against Pacific Lumber, with some success. Along the way he got to know the leadership of the club in San Francisco, where its headquarters was located. He later opened an office just blocks away from the Sierra Club’s utilitarian digs in the Mission District.
“He now shared a suite with a financial consulting firm in an Embarcadero skyscraper but kept his hair long; he wore open shirts and sport jackets, and rarely talked about strategy. “Litigation is like poker,” he would say. “You don’t say what cards you had in the last hand” once your opponent folds. And you don’t waste a lot of time on sentiment.
In 1998, he got a call from a woman in Napa Valley named Chris Malan. He wasn’t surprised to learn that she had heard of him through the Sierra Club; it had often sent him referrals. Malan and other activists in the wine country were concerned about vineyard development in the hills and wanted to know if it could be halted, and Lippe drove up to talk to her.
He found Malan both personable and well informed. Lippe didn’t drink wine and knew nothing about it or vineyards, and he couldn’t digest all the information on the spot. But it certainly seemed to him that the county had big legal problems, and that there might be work for him. For one thing, the visual evidence was compelling. “Look what’s happening up there,” he said of the patchwork development.
He thought Napa Valley representative of other places in the United States where success had come down to money versus the environment. Many projects in the hills had been approved piecemeal, allowing developers to assemble big vineyards by doing them as a succession of smaller projects and avoiding more rigorous review. And there was the problem of enforcement—projects uninspected, violations unpunished, wrongdoers unrepentant. No one seemed to be looking at the possible effect of all this on the overall environment, or what would happen if it continued—the effects on wildlife and the river.
Here was a cautionary tale, he thought: do something destructive to the land and try to fix it with technology, and you create other problems as unintended consequences. During storms, underground drainage delivers water too quickly for the river to handle, for instance. Developed hillsides erode. Rocks roll. Species suffer.
Lots of laws applied, at least theoretically. One of these was the Endangered Species Act, savior of old growth—and of the northern spotted owl—and bane of the timber industry. It was a strong law but had its weaknesses, including the need to prove a “taking”—death or injury of an endangered creature as a direct result of activity by human beings. Proving this required a lot of field work by scientists and was very expensive (a million dollars just to get into federal court nowadays). San Pablo Bay was listed by the Environmental Protection Agency as impaired, and so consequently was the Napa River, a major tributary to the bay. The steelhead in the river were officially threatened, so that was a clear opportunity. And there were a few spotted owls in old growth above the west side of the valley.
But there was a better, cheaper, more immediate way, the best card in any potential plaintiff’s hand: the California Environmental Quality Act.
(Throw a dart)
To order Napa:
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