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ew York liberals will have to look for a new place from which to launch their anti-conservative diatribes if the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters is right:

Sea levels off the coastline of the Northeastern United States and Nova Scotia could rise more than in other regions within the next century if the Greenland Ice Sheet melts at an accelerated rate, according to a paper in the May 29 edition of Geophysical Research Letters.

According to the paper, “Transient Response of the MOC and Climate to Potential Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet in the 21st Century,” sea levels off the coast of New York, Boston, Halifax, and other Northeastern cities could rise 12 to 20 inches more than the average sea level rise by the year 2100 as ocean currents circulate water from the melting ice sheets in Greenland.

“If the Greenland melt continues to accelerate, we could see significant impacts this century on the northeast U.S. coast from the resulting sea level rise,” lead author of the paper Aixue Hu, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said in a statement. “Major northeastern cities are directly in the path of the greatest rise.” (From Daily Environment Report, June ’09)

Fifteen to twenty inches more than average by 2100 … let’s see, that’s 90 years from now, so that’s about a quarter-inch rise per year.

A quarter-inch a year is four times the rate of average sea level rise since 1880, right, which has been humming along at 0.6 inches a year.  To put that in perspective, it’s even greater than the number of times Obama has increased the national debt in the five months he’s been in office – just a measly three times.

Accelerated melting of the Greenland ice shelf is dependent on a lot of ifs.  Ocean temperatures would have to rise.  The North Atlantic Current would have to respond to that rise by shifting to the north. And atmospheric temperatures would have to rise as well. And the computer models would have to be accurate.

That last one’s a bugger because intuitively, it’s pretty obvious that if the ocean gets warmer, cloud cover will increase from move evaporation, and increased cloud cover will flummox those persnickety computer models.

Besides, a brilliant friend tells me, the hysterical paper is based on a running average of sea levels, like most hysterical papers, which yield “outlandish and statistically unsupportable claims of sea levels a century hence, to tens of a foot.”  Actual sea level measurement, rather than running averages, yields the cool, calm and collected data. But what fun is that?

Further messing up this little global warming nightmare is the chart on the left, which tracks ocean levels since about 20,000 years ago.  As you can see, they began rising after the peak of the last ice age, really took off about 15,000 years ago, plateaued for two brief spells, and have run pretty darn flat for the last 8,000 years.

So what does all this mean?  Not that islands are sinking anywhere, at least not any time soon, but that bureaucrats are having a heyday.  Someone has to do something with this data, and boy are they!

My brilliant friend spells it out:  The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (not to be confused with a panel of climate scientists) says ocean levels will go up 17 inches a century – three times more than they have been. And they’re planning for our future accordingly.

The California Coastal Commission, however, has decided it’s going to base its planning on a 36-inch-per-century spike in ocean levels, and it’s making anyone who’s building in the Coastal Zone develop plans to protect homes from those levels.  Oh, but it doesn’t allow you to build sea walls, so go figger.

But wait!  When regulating itself and its fellow Earth-hugging agencies, the Coastal Commission uses an 11-inch-per-century sea level rise for its planning.  The thousands of homes adjacent to the new Bolsa Chica wetlands restoration project will soon have ocean tides immediately adjacent to their homes, protected by a little bitty levee that isn’t certified by FEMA and only anticipates an 11-inch ocean level rise over the next 100 years.

The area in red in this image will become a tidal wetland as soon as oil field clean-up in the area is completed.  The homeowners on the other side of that red line better hope the Coastal Commission is dead wrong with its 36-inch sea level rise prediction and spot-on or less with the 11-inch rise it applies when it’s doing its own touchy-feely projects.

Now, if you’re asking yourself why do private landowners have to plan for 36-inch rises while the agencies that write the rules can skate by with 11 inches, you just don’t understand how government works.

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can only imagine what folks living elsewhere think when they see our California wildfires raging up hillsides, down canyons and through homes. I imagine it’s something like, “Why in the world would they live there?”

Well, “there” in most of California necessarily means somewhere in close proximity to chapparel or sage scrub, the two most prevelant plant communities from San Diego to Mendocino. And what a plant community it is! It doesn’t just burn; it has to burn, as John McPhee wrote in “The Control of Nature,”

High or low – hard, soft, or mixed – all chaparral has in common an always developing, relentlessly intensifying, vital necessity to burst into flame.  In a sense, chaparral consumes fire no less than fire consumes chaparral.  Fire nourishes and rejuvenates the plants. There are seeds that fall into the soil, stay there indefinitely, and will not germinate except in the aftermath of fire. …

When fire comes, it puts the nutrients [from mature shrubs] back in the ground. It clears the terrain for fresh growth.  When chaparral has not been burned for thirty years, about half the thicket will be dry dead stuff – twenty-five thousand tons of it in one quare mile.  The living plants are no less flammable. The chamise, the manzanita – in fact, most chaparral plants – are full of solvent extractives that burn intensely and ignite easily. Their leaves are glossy with oils and resins that seal in mositure during hot dry periods and serve the dual purpose of responding explosively to flame.

So Californians don’t really choose to live surrounded by chaparral and scrub. Unless they live packed in urban areas that were cleared of it by pioneers 150 years ago – who chose to live surrounded by it and clear it acre by acre – they have to put up with the stuff.  It’s pretty for a couple months of the year at best, fragrant with sage, resplendant in purple flowers, then it browns out and looks dead for the rest of the year.  And it burns.  But we can no more avoid it than Midwesterners can avoid living surrounded by agricultural fields.

Enter groups like the Coastal Property Owners Association of Big Sur, who watched 20 homes in their neighborhood burn last year, and who blame the regulatory rigidity of the California Coastal Commission – not oil-rich bushes – for their woes.  The Commission has rules that protect scrub and chaparral, and it requires homeowners to get a permit before they can trim back the explosive shrubs … permits that can be costly to pursue and difficult to get. 

[H]omeowners say the commission’s chaparral-protection rule blocks them from taking even basic precautions against wildfires, such as cutting a defensive perimeter around their homes, or from remodeling or expanding structures on their property.

They also contend that the definitions of precisely what constitutes maritime chaparral are vague, noting that the Coastal Commission staff said in one report that  “the syntaxonomy of maritime chaparral has not been formally studied, hence arguments as to the identity of a particular stand of chaparral as either falling within or without such a category is subject to the vacillation of personal opinion.”

The statement means that “people will have their land effectively condemned based upon the personal opinion of one person, the expert the county or commission requires them to hire to do a biological assessment of their property as part of the permit process. It seems you couldn’t find a more arbitrary and vague system for designating which land is ESHA and therefore essentially unusable,” said Michael Caplin, a member of the homeowners group who has lived in the area since the 1970s. ….

“Even when everybody could see the fire was raging, they said we had to get permits to cut. People didn’t have a choice. They had to get permits. Finally, the firefighters jumped right in, and of course they helped the property owners remove trees. It shouldn’t take a disaster like this to put some sense into the process,” [Lisa] Kleissner said. (Capitol Weekly) 

The Coastal Commission takes a “Who? Us?” attitude when accused of complicitcy in coastal area fire damage, and shifts the blame instead to the silly people who insist on living close to nature.  (The Commission is based in San Francisco, which was stripped of its habitat before the beginning of the 20th century.)

“The central message here for us is that the maritime chaparral, like the San Diego coast sage shrub, are not just fire-prone, they are fire-dependent. They have evolved over a millenium to require fire to regenerate. They have to burn, they will burn,” said Coast Commission spokeswoman Sarah Christie.

“When people build in those kinds of habitats, you have to expect that there are going to be wildfires. When a wildfire is raging out of control, it’s not reasonable to expect that you would be able to clear enough vegetation from around your house to keep it from harm’s way. People are emotional distressed and they are looking to lash out. Those fires were caused by natural forces. The Coastal Commission can’t control the lightning.”

Imagine being a coastal California homeowner looking at the charred skeleton of your home and reading that. You might be tempted to lash out.  Of course Commission staffers aren’t out there starting fires; that’s hardly the point, Ms. Christie, even if the Commission’s rules against thinning without permits may intensify the fires.  The point is, the Commission could do something to help contain the fires, but it puts Gaea first and people second.

It would be an interesting study to compare houses lost to wildfire in the coastal region to the number lost in scrub/chaparral habitat outside the Coastal Zone.  I’m sure the difference would be remarkable.  Outside the Coastal Zone, developers and homebuilders work with the less rigid California Department of Fish & Game and their local fire department to develop a fire plan that involves thinning native habitat around new homes. 

It works like a charm.  In last year’s Yorba Linda fire, one of the most exposed neighborhoods of all, Casino Ridge, which was surrounded on three sides by raging fire, lost not a single home because it was newly built and contained a carefully engineered “fuel modification zone” that knocked down the fire for the firefighters.  The neighborhood with the most losses, Hidden Hills, was built before the practice was put into effect, and had scrub growing up to the backyards of most of the homes.

The Coastal Commission’s desire to save every chaparral and coastal sage bush it can makes engineering protections like Casino Ridge’s in the Coastal Zone vastly more difficult.

It may all get down to varying views of how much of this stuff there is around us.  When I was fighting to keep the California gnatcatcher from being listed as endangered, we found a simple, dumb mathematical error in the fed’s computation of habitat loss.  They put it at 95 percent gone, but if they’d done their math right, they would have seen it was actually 70 percent lost – and that was based on suspect data; the actual amount lost is almost certainly much lower.

As for chaparral, locals say there’s 1.3 million acres of it, but the Commission clings to an entirely insane 20,000-acre figure, which it gets by counting only eugenically pure patches of the stuff with no other plants gumming up the purity.  It’s an absurd and artificial standard, and it’s causing houses to burn.

So it’s your choice: Is California going down the tubes or up in smoke? Or both?

hat-tip: Marshall

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oday we visited the Land That Time Forgot, also known as the towns of Mendacino and Gooberville. (I think I got that last one wrong … oh yeah, Garberville.) But before we travel back to the 60s, a goodbye to Gualala.

We had a send-off breakfast with our friends, highlighted by Sid Waterman’s wife Julie showing up in a sweatshirt that read “London, Paris, Rome, Gualala.” We heard the latest abominations – this time an effort to remove parking along the main drag and take land from business owners to accommodate bike lanes. Sounds reasonable enough until you realize that no other town on the entire route of California Highway 1 has restrictions from parking on the coast highway, and that the towns represent a rare respite from the terrors of bicycling the rest of the road, which is narrow and full of blind curves. Why a bike trail through the only safe haven for the bikers.

Anyway, it’s crazy enough that my friends have started the Property Rights Foundation of Mendocino County. Good luck to them all, thanks for the great time, and Marshall, I’ll try to take you up on your fly-over invitation next year.

Mendocino and Garberville definitely stuck in the 60s.  People my age who haven’t changed much since the 1960s and 1970s are the most noticeable demographic and knee-jerk liberalism abounds.   No, make that monsterously crazy liberalism, as evidenced by this letter to the editor in The Independent, which serves SoHum – South Humboldt County:

Russian Invades Georgia: Is It About Oil?

Here’s my take on this cluster….

The time was perfect with the Olympics happening and Putin, Kissinger and Bush all in Beijing at hte same time.

So if a meeting took place, perhaps it went down like this:  Kissinger says to Putin, “We’ll give you Ukraine and Georgia and all you have to do is sign a non-intervention treaty with us that states Russia will not interfere with the Israeli/U.S. attack on Iran!” Israel is ready, and Bush and Cheney want it ASAP.

Of course Putin would sign on with this deal; as of right now they (Russians) control most of the country and the BTU oil pipeline that bisects this tiny country of Georgia.

The BTU pipeline runs 1,100 miles from the oil-rich landlocked Caspian Sea to the Black Sea and would make Georgia, a democratically-controlled nation [weird word choice, no?] a major player on Cheney’s “Great Oil Chessboard!”

Now Bush will be pinning out of control, by declaring the evilness of the Russians. McCain has already jacked up the rhetoric about this invasion; his advisor Scheunemann was Georgia’s prime lobbyist and also was a major player in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion! Which is why McBush has some knowledge about Georgia. Now this note:  Joseph Stalin was born in Georgia.

So says Ted Courtemanche.  Not sure where he’s going with that Stalin note.  Perhaps he’s confusing his Commies and Fascists.

Also in the Independent:  A big ad for Humboldt Hydroponics, offering growlights, fans, filters, fertilizers, soils – basically everything you need to grow pot indoors.

Now we’re in The Ship’s Inn, a nice little B&B in Eureka (the strange, empty neighborhood put us off at first, but it’s a nice place).  Tomorrow Redwood National Park.

Now a couple photos:

Mendocino streetscape

More rocks and surf … pretty much the NorCal coast in a nutshell.

And as long as they’re over-regulating with gay abandon, why in the world did the Coastal Commission allow this little monstrosity?

I’m sorry – I left out fog.  Rocks and surf and fog.  It really is quite spectacular, and the long hours together in our rented car – a Dodge Magnum wagon that devours the road once you figure out how to fling its mushy suspension into the curves – is giving me and Incredible Daughters 1 and 3 plenty of time to enjoy each others’ company.

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ne of these houses at the Sea Ranch development near Gualala – I believe it’s the really big sucker that’s second from the left – belongs to retired gynecologist and bird watcher/know-it-all Richard Kuehn. Seeing Kuehn’s home was one of the highlights of today’s wonk’s tour of Gualala.

Kuehn, you see, was one of the instigators at the Madrone Chapter of the Audubon Society that led the march against the Gualala Festivals Committee effort to put on a fireworks show this past July 4th. Madrone and their no-growth, anti-human henchpersons were upset because the fireworks might disturb birds that nested on a rock that’s about a mile and a half from the fireworks site, and out of sight of it because of this tree-topped rise (right, in a photo taken from the fireworks site). Ironically, the birds they’re so worried about nest approximately 800 feet straight out from Kuehn’s house.

The California Coastal Commission agreed with Kuehn and other eco-nutz and nailed the Festivals Committee with a cease and desist order, so they could protect the birds – none of them endangered – from the fireworks.

Now why didn’t the Commission stop Kuehn from building his house? After all, it’s just a few hundred feet from the birds and all the hammering, sawing, loud talk, and other bothersome human behavior was going on at Kuehn’s house and his neighbors’ houses for years while the houses were being built – not minutes, like a fireworks show.

Well, that would be because Sea Ranch, home to the small core of no-fun nut-cases intent on stopping the show (with some fellow travelers from Gualala), is the only development on the coast of California that is exempt from the regulatory lunacy perpetrated by the Coastal Commission. And why would that be? Because Sea Ranch’s own obstinance was almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of the Commission.

Sea Ranch stretches some ten miles along the northern Sonoma coast, and it refused to allow any non-resident access across its property to the state’s beaches. This was one of the outrages cited as a cause for creating the Coastal Commission in the 1960s. But a deal was struck between Sea Ranch and California’s coastal protectors: In return for eight public access points that were none too convenient, Sea Ranch would be exempted from the Coastal Act’s authority. So hundreds upon hundreds of homes have been built there – many of them quite ugly, the sort of homes the Commission gets in conniptions over – with absolutely no control placed over them by the Commission.

Yet when the Gualala Festivals Committee wanted to put on its little fireworks show, to whom did these anti-Coastal Commission busy-bodies turn to for relief? The Commission, natch. And what was prominent among their arguments? The fireworks show would block access to the coast. I kid you not – they really were that arrogant.

And, of course, the fireworks would disturb the birds Kuehl had disturbed for month after month with the noisy construction of his home – and likely disturbs to this day by playing music, watching TV and having wine and cheese parties on his patio.

So the fireworks show got at least temporarily axed, even though fireworks are allowed in Monterey, where they explode above a National Marine Sanctuary.

I just hate it when regulatory overkill gets together with self-centered, pompous, anti-American people.

Did I say anti-American?

Yeah, that was pretty much the start of this whole problem. A couple years back, the Festivals Committee – really just a few citizens who like to do stuff for Gualala – decided to put up a Chirstmas tree. In just a few days with all volunteer labor, they had a 40-foot tree set in place and ready to light on the main drag (really the only drag) through this beautiful little town.

One problem. The volunteer who was supposed to create the tree-topper messed up, so they had a tree with no topper. They decided they could get an American flag from the hardware store and put it on top, and did.

The next Wednesday when the local rag, the Independent Coast Observer (or ICO, or “I See Zero”), came out, it was full of letters demanding that “Bush’s flag,” “the symbol of death,” “the Republican flag” be removed from the tree. Imagine how these sorts of people with the great misfortune to actually have to live in America felt about a patriotic fireworks show.

But that was just the wonk’s tour. The rest of the tour was fantastic. We visited Sid Waterman’s shop overlooking the ocean, where nearly every American motorsport team goes for fuel pumps. Sid and his family are super, the “what can I do for you today?” kind of folks who are such a wonderful contrast to the “What can I do to you” people I introduced you to earlier. Oh yeah, and we saw a rock with a rabbit in it.

(See the arch on the right end of the rock with the water visible through it, and the “ear” pointing up from the “head?”) And we saw a far-out little chapel, and nice views of the town, and the Hot Spot, Will Rogers’ favorite fishing hole, up the Gualala River, surrounded by redwoods. And most fun of all, we rented some kayaks from Festival Committee member Wayne Harris’ Adventure Rents, and kayaked up the Gualala River and down through its beautiful coastal lagoon. (And thanks to Wayne, I now can write a very short book called “Muslims I have met kayaking” – he had some Muslim visitors today.)

Here are photos of the everything mentioned in this paragraph, in the order mentioned.

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have no idea what went on in the world today, but somehow I’m surviving. I’m sure McCain and Obama both said something and the MSM and blogosphere considered it all carefully, while also having wise things to say about Russia. More on Russia later. Oh, and pot.

We had no wise things to say and nothing to say them about, but we did have fog. Like this. Actually, a lot worse than this. After we took this shot of that famous bridge, we drove over the coastal range to Stinson Beach, through thick, wet, almost-rain fog. Lots of it.

By the time we got north of the Russian River and looked south (top photo) it was merely cloudy, with nice even light for good photography.

Tonight, we’re at Gualala’s Surf Motel (a nice, well kept older place with very comfortable rooms and spectacular views from your room if you’re lucky, or from the end of the parking lot if you’re not. Population 545, little more than a wide spot in the beautiful endlessly curvy road, I like this town of Gualala.

We walked to Bones Roadhouse and had an excellent dinner that cost 1/3 the amount of our dinner last night on SF’s Fisherman’s Wharf, and tonight’s was twice as tasty. On the walk back to the Surf, an old, first-generation Prius stopped in the middle of the oncoming lanes of Pacific Coast Hwy, the window rolled down, and the driver asked “Laer?” It was Marshall Sayegh, my Gualala buddy from the Coastal Commission fireworks wars.

That kind of thing doesn’t happen too often in OC.

Tomorrow, I’m going to get a tour of that will illustrate me to the topography and players in the Coastal Commission’s war on fireworks. That’ll lead to an interesting post. I gathered some tidbits tonight from Marshall, and they’re juicy.

Until then, a little on the Russians and the pot growers. The Russians used to occupy No.Cal., operating farming and fur operations here to support their ops in Alaska. The current-day town of Bodega Bay – not very far north of SF – was their main port and Fort Ross, another hour or two of nice driving north, was a major Russian outpost well into the 1800s. Here’s Incredible Daughters 1 and 3 trying to see what’s inside of the fort’s gates. Pesky state of California had them locked tight.

On to pot. Marshall told me the single biggest economic problem facing this stretch of the north coast is the marijuana harvest. No, it’s not that everyone’s stoned – it’s that legit businesspeople can’t get any help during the pot harvest season because the pot growers pay more and it’s all under the table, untaxed. And they need a lot of workers to harvest pot plants that look like trees with buds as long as your arms. as Marshall described them.

Interesting place ….

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UPDATED BELOW

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s the 4th wound down towards evening here on the West Coast, my heart was pouring out to the decent people of Gualala, California, whose 4th of July fireworks show was banned by the California Coastal Commission, much to the joy of a hard core of negative, anti-fun, people-hating nature lovers.

I wrote one piece on the battle for the Gualala fireworks show here. There’s a pretty balanced LA Times piece here.

I had to take another piece off the blog when my First Amendment freedoms were attacked by a Gualalan anti-fireworks advocate who went way beyond the bounds of the debate and tried to get my agency fired by one of my clients for what I wrote.

Fireworks are a remembrance of the battles fought to secure our freedom and a celebration of the freedoms we must fight to protect. It’s symbolic that there weren’t fireworks in Gualala last night, because fanatic nature-lovers have teamed up with the regulatory over-killers of the Coastal Commission to deprive good people of a fun celebration.

I worry that Gualala is just the first to fall, and that soon we will see fireworks shows up and down the coast of California being canceled for no other reason than the celebrations of our nation’s birth keep birds up an hour later.

Update

The Gualala Festivals Committee created the fireworks show to increase summer business, the lifeblood of the remote town. My source on the committee provided me with this update yesterday evening, about an hour before the now-banned fireworks show would have begun:

Sometimes I hate to be right

This is one of those times

Last 2 years all were booked solid by this time

Last 2 years thousands were crowding the streets at this time

Last 2 years the store parking lots were full most of the day

As of 6:30 PM there are vacancies at all hotels and motels – except one

Traffic is driving through town – not stopping

The best restaurant in town – which was booked solid ALL DAY last year – has 2 reservations for tonight and the owner said today was a “financial disaster” for a holiday

The other restaurants similar

The town is almost empty

Tomorrow I will walk the businesses and get a better feel about the actual money issues

Happy 4th of July!

Happy, indeed! A small group of radical environmentalists has put their selfish need to feel they are the saviors of birds that don’t need saving ahead of the very real financial needs of families. Shame on them, and shame on the Coastal Commission for playing along in this game.

The struggle goes on. The Pacific Legal Foundation is suing to return to the Festival Committee the right to celebrate the 4th of July with fireworks so that fireworks can return in 2009. Read more here. Contribute here.

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John Adams, in 1776, wrote to his beloved wife Abigail:

“[Our Country's] foundign ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, gaves, sports, guns, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this moment forward forever more.”

Don’t tell the staff of the California Coastal Commission, which is working diligently to forbid fireworks shows on this particular end of the continent.

Tomorrow, at its meeting in Santa Rosa County, the Commission will consider a staff-issued Cease and Desist order against the tiny northern California coastal town of Gualala, which celebrates the Gualala Patriot Day festival, complete with a 10-minute fireworks show.

Note: The hearing will be webcast live! Log onto the Coastal Commission Web site and follow the link on the home page.

As the Commission’s agenda puts it:

13. Commission Cease and Desist Order No. CCC-08-CD-07 (Gualala Festivals Committee, Gualala, Mendocino County.) Public hearing and Commission action on proposed Cease and Desist Order directing the Gualala Festivals Committee to cease and desist from undertaking or threatening to undertake development without the necessary coastal development permit, including, but not limited to, conducting a fireworks display over the Gualala River estuary or 39170 South Highway One, Gualala, Mendocino County (APN 145-261-12) (NC-SF)

“Development” is a strange way to refer to a fireworks show, eh? That’s because to wring a fireworks ban out of the California Coastal Act, the Commission would have to call the show “development.” Staff is up for the challenge:

The unpermitted activity includes the placement of solid material on land [temporary fireworks launchers] and the discharge of gaseous and solid waste into coastal waters and constitutes an change of intensity of use of both land and water or access thereto, and therefore constitutes “development” as defined in Section 30106 of the Coastal Act, as discussed fully herein.

Note that in the Commission’s view, not only this tiny, temporary impact “development,” and therefore illegal, just “threatening” to do it is illegal as well. Apparently the 1st Amendment has been suspended in California’s Coastal zone.

Why does the Commission staff have its biodegradable panties in a knot over a ten-minute fireworks show in sleepy Gualala? First, because the Commission is chartered to protect public access to California’s public beaches (that would be every single beach from Oregon to Mexico), so:

… the launching of fireworks will temporarily disrupt public access to and along the Gualala Bluff Trail prior to and during the fireworks display by closing a portion of the Gualala Bluff Trail to the public.

Never mind that it’s at night, when people aren’t really safe walking coastal bluff trails. Never mind that the Gualala Patriot Days celebration attracts hundreds of people to the coast, thereby syncing up with the Commission’s charter.

Also, attached to the staff report is a 47-page report from the federal Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service with the snappy title, Seabird and Marine Mammal Monitoring and Response to a Fireworks Display at Gualala Point Island, Sonoma County, California, May to August 2007.

Yes, the full authority of the federal government — bolstered by your tax dollars, a portion of which actually went to fund this monstrosity of a study — is behind Coastal staff’s efforts to quash firework displays on the California coast.

Using the report, staff argues that:

The fireworks will affect environmentally sensitive habitat and marine and water resources. The Gualala River Estuary is a breeding ground for threatened Coho salmon and steelhead trout as well as other local fish.

The report monitors birds, not fish, and presents no evidence that fish or fish breeding was affected by the fireworks display. Salmon migrate during daylight hours anyway. I imagine trout follow suit, or trout fishing would be a night-time sport.

Then the report turns to the ospreys, great blue herons, egrets, and river otters that fish in the river and its estuary, and the marbled murrelets, and endangered species, live in the area. None of these is nocturnal.

It then brings up the Pacific Flyway, saying the Gualala Estuary provides an essential habitat for feeding, perching and nesting. Except that in July, there isn’t any traffic along the flyway — migration occurs in the spring and fall.

Undaunted, Coastal staff soldiers on:

As discussed more fully herein, a similar fireworks display occurred in approximately the same location last year and had a demonstrated adverse effect on the nesting birds, including most likely causing actual nest abandonment and consumption of abandoned eggs and/or juvenile chicks by predators, a permanent impact …. (emphasis added)

The nests and eggs in question were not those of any endangered species, so the Commission has no authority to regulate them. Even if some juveniles of plentiful bird species got eaten as a result of fireworks, I say, it was for a good cause. Look at Google Maps, and you’ll see that Gualala is a tiny speck against the vast emptiness of the California coast, so any impact its fireworks might have would be minuscule in the scheme of things.

But that didn’t stop the mighty federal government from trying against all odds to prove an impact, with agents crawling around Gualala’s rocky shores, armed with digiscoped and infrared cameras. Their report:

… Brandt’s Cormorants quickly changed from resting to erect postures at the first fireworks, followed by birds moving about or departing the island. Western Gulls also flushed, circled and called during the fireworks display.

The horror! The report then says that of 90 cormorant nests, seven were abandoned between July 5 and 7, with some additional abandonments following … all “likely” resulting from “fireworks disturbances.” I asked a biologist friend about this, and after pointing out that Brandt’s cormorants are not a listed species, he said that amount of nest abandonment did not seem unusually high.

So, armed with a “likely” and a “most likely,” the Army of Gaea is assaulting a great American tradition as it is played out in a quaint, remote coastal California town. It’s part of an assault on fireworks shows that has consumed the Commission staff for years, but thus far, the Commission has corralled their staff’s shameless attempts to destroy a great, patriotic American tradition exuberance.

The Pacific Legal Foundation is standing poised and ready to fight, and the Festival’s attorney, Keith Faulder, filed an impressive brief, which is included in the staff report, starting on page 56. Faulder is not above a jibe or two:

The citizens of Gualala love their small community, their river, and their coast. The people of Gualala, as rugged and independent as the land in which they live, have been taking care of their community and their environment since the 1860′s, with very little help during that time from any county, state or federal agencies.

This is truly the case of the little, freedom-loving guy up against the freedom-crushing power of a PC, Greenie bureaucracy that answers to no one and is, therefore, running amok.

Tomorrow’s hearing promises to be spirited. Remember, you can follow the progress on line by logging onto the Coastal Commission Web site and following the webcast links at the top of the page. The session starts at 10 a.m. Pacific time, so my guess is the Gualala cease and desist order will come up around lunch time … but don’t hold me to that.

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