Letters to the Editor 9-17-15

Go Solar?
EDITOR: Sure, it’s been a great deal because someone else, either power-rate payers or taxpayers have, for years, been sharing the cost burdens of the solar industry’s jobs and solar users power.
Now it’s time to let someone else off the hook and let the solar industry prove its viability unaided and survive on its own merits.
That’s business.
Jack V. Jones
Sebastopol
New American West
EDITOR: 50 years ago much of Sonoma County remained undeveloped. We’re at a tipping point now. The era of ever expanding vineyards is over. Citizens are asking deeper questions about what prosperity means. It is about Planning Commissions and Water Boards that no longer approve every new proposal. It is about preserving rural lands, it is about citizens trusting its leaders to help us all nurture a deeper sense of happiness and fulfillment. It is a difficult process because capitalism wants ever increasing profits and more and more higher quality products for market. The awakening citizens life has now started to compete with the ever expanding wine industry. An expansive wholistic prosperity awaits us. Increasing population, the short supply of water and congested roads are warning signs of a world out of balance. The new era of more modest development is needed. We need to nurture this habitat, this miracle of life we’ve found waiting for us here. A happier people, a more connected people living in harmony with what nature has provided us will be our legacy. Future generations are counting on us to not despoil what we have been born into. This is what it means to be part of the journey into the end of frontier and to become part of the new American West.
Dana Smith
Emeryville, CA
I have seen
EDITOR: I live near a little known Kendall Jackson vineyard. I have lived here for 18 years. This vineyard of several acres is located in the riparian corridor, the wetlands of the Atascadero Creek, that should be a migratory bird sanctuary. I used to call it “the underwater vineyard” back when itused to rain, and the creek had water in it, because it was flooded for most of the year. I have often watched as the egrets and herons navigated the hundreds of metal poles and wire trellises and the mallards swam in between the rows of poles and vines. I have seen the spraying of herbicides, every spring, that turned all existing vegetation that unnatural agent Orange color and turned the well loved puddles and small rivers into poisonous soup and toxic runoff into the creek. I have also witnessed the annual removal of all cover (or vegetation) from the banks of the pond that the local wildlife rely on. I have also seen the mama killdeer searching and crying for her babies as motorized equipment and vehicles run over the nesting grounds surrounding the pond. I have seen juvenile snakes and birds trapped in the cheap plastic netting that tightly covers all the vines and that same plastic netting after it has been removed and thrown into a pile where it remains a deadly trap for the small mammals and birds.Now you tell me if you think this is “sustainable”.
Karin Lease
Graton
Too bad
EDITOR: The Farm Bureau’s President John Azevedo now jumps on the bandwagon trumpeting the wine industry’s dedication to sustainability and land stewardship.  
It is good that the self-styled “Winegrowers” have the goal of being “100% sustainable by 2020”. The problem is that the industry’s trend is now development of event centers and production facilities that will process grapes grown elsewhere than on the land the factory occupies, and, sustainable or not, will cause traffic and usage of water that is much more than their rightful share of local resources, green or not.
I have stated publicly, as  have other opponents of the large recent proposals for new facilities, that there is little objection to wineries whose owners understand that they do not deserve a greater piece of the resource pie than any other economic or environmental engine in the county. Case in point:  Joe Wagner,  proposes a factory to produce 500,000 cases of wine and 250,000 gallons of distilled spirits on a 68 acre parcel, where he will be trucking in a vast majority of the raw product processed there, and trucking out the market-ready goods across the Rodota walking trail. Wagner proposes 62 public events annually (remember there are only 52 weeks in a year…some weeks are going to be pretty frantic) with up to 600 attendees, some running until 10 p.m., adjacent to the Laguna, in a community separator.  
These are the villains, not the law abiding, ethical vintners who play by the rules and are recognized as contributing members of our community.
I marvel that the “good guys” in the wine business have not spoken up publicly to deplore the behavior by these 600 lb. canaries that are giving what formerly was an accepted economic ingredient of a black eye to the community. Too bad.
Helen Shane
Santa Rosa