Savory Sonoma by Stephanie Hiller - December 2018
It’s the week of Thanksgiving and with the smoke from Paradise erasing the blue sky we have entered into a sort of timeless zone. On Sunday I wasn’t even sure what day it was. Perhaps that is due to my advancing age.
Paradise is gone. Drone photos show block after block of desolation. Where is this? Hiroshima? The World Trade Center? 27,000 people displaced. Where will they go? Some have been camping out in the Walmart parking lot, Democracy Now reports. Today Walmart has told them they have to go.
Black Friday is coming. Sorry.
They ought to be serving turkey to all these folks, their customers of many years. Walmart can afford it. What’s one store without Black Friday in the massively profitable Walmart empire?
I’m reminded of Glen Ellen, where neighbors cooked all those free meals for people who lost their homes.
Those of us who have homes are practicing gratitude. But it’s hard not to feel gloomy in the post-explosion atmosphere. Grateful, and sad.
People are saying it’s the new normal. “Climate change” is suddenly part of the daily idiom. In 13 months, we had our fires, then the Mendocino complex fires, and now the Camp Fires (can you believe that name?), each in turn the biggest and worst fires “in California history.” Today 600 people missing, 79 dead in Butte. Southern California is burning too. The Woolsey fire vaporized uncounted piles of nuclear waste from the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
These fires were not in the forest. People are blaming the forests. Trump, the great timber man, declared that “poor management of the forests” was to blame. Putting aside the fact that 70 percent of our forests are federal lands, these fires were in the grasslands and chaparral. It’s supposed to burn, says Caitlin Cornwall of the Sonoma Ecology Center and others. Yes, but are there supposed to be 80 mph winds?
Let’s be clear
Meanwhile we’ve been having Big Meetings around Big Issues like equity, disaster resilience, and justice.
This month the Housing and Community Development released its report on disaster recovery. $124 million will be coming our way for houses. How many houses does that make, I wonder?
I haven’t read the report. It’s 145 pages. But HCD estimates “the total unmet recovery needs are over $922 million.”
Last January, the county said we need 30,000 new homes. If that sounds like a lot, our new governor, Gavin Newsom, has promised to build 3.5 million homes statewide by 2025.
That information came my way at the California Economic Summit held in Santa Rosa November 14 and 15th, a high event, full of promise. There’s money to be made.
The really nifty thing is that we can go in and clean up our forests (which, again, haven’t been well managed) and use the timber, even those small trees that were never been useable before, to make engineered wood. A new treatment makes it possible to create fire retardant wood. And that means jobs!
So folks, there’s a boom coming round.
But I didn’t hear any promise of a livable minimum wage.
I heard a lot of familiar environmental buzzwords, like resiliency and the “triple bottom line,” but I did not hear the word “equity.”
To be fair, the Summit did recognize that certain diverse populations have not benefited from the recovery after the recession…and it did acknowledge climate change. So, we can hope.
But these crises just keep on coming, don’t they?
Equity was definitely the word of choice at another meeting, put on by Los Cien, a Guerneville organization of Latino professionals held at the Flamingo Hotel in Santa Rosa.
That lunch meeting was pretty upbeat too, but voices representing community nonprofits like Community Action Partners and North Bay Organizing Project spoke heartfully about struggles in the Latino community, where services are particularly hard to access if you’re undocumented.
Speakers at the Alliance for a Just Recovery Forum on Novmber 19, a new coalition of community groups initiated by Martin Bennett, while not exactly glum, were concerned.
Are we going to build right up to the forest line, like we did before? asked Teri Shore, director of Greenbelt Alliance, which is pushing hard for the continuation of Urban Growth Boundaries and Community Separators in the various General Plans that will be updated in next year.
Is there a message in all of this? Yes! We are all in this together, said Alegria de la Luz, Assistant County Council, at the Los Cien affair.
If we really feel that, on both sides of the great divide, we will endure.
