Indexed News on:

--the California "Mega-Park" Project

Tracking measurable success on preserving and connecting California's Parks & Wildlife Corridors

READ OUR EDITOR ON FACEBOOK: facebook.com/rex.frankel

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

L.A. Times focuses on SF to Sacto Mountain preserve...

-
Proposed conservation area would preserve some of California's least-trampled terrain

excerpted from
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-berryessa22-2010mar22,0,7702234.story

3/22/2010--
The diverse 100-mile-swath of inner coast range land between the Bay Area and Sacramento, dubbed the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Conservation Area, is on a list of prospective national monuments.
(Editor's note: The land includes both public and privately owned lands. Monument status only affects the lands owned by the Federal government.)

...Four of the 14 sites identified as candidates either to become monuments or gain acreage via presidential declaration are in California: the Berryessa site, the Bodie Hills, the Modoc Plateau and an expansion into California of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument from Oregon.

...John and Judy Ahmann run Romagnola and Black Angus cattle on several thousand acres of ranchland that sweeps up from the shores of Lake Berryessa. The couple love the area so much that they have been exploring ways to preserve it.

...The couple have decided to place more than 3,000 acres of the ranch into a conservation easement that they hope will be folded into the prospective national conservation area.

Water-less farms may go solar instead....

-
FRESNO'S WESTLANDS WATER DISTRICT GOES SOLAR

Excerpted from PCL's Insider for 3/19/2010

Earlier this week, a private investment group with land in the Westlands Water District announced its intention to farm a new crop in California 's Central Valley : the sun's energy. The proposed Westlands Solar Park would take 30,000 acres of fallow land and provide 5,000 megawatts of renewable energy - enough to power between 2.5 million and 4 million homes in California .

As an agricultural district with junior water rights, the Westlands Water District has frequently been the center of controversy. Most recently, it attempted to overturn California 's Endangered Species Act in a desperate water grab that would have maximized the profits of the agribusiness tycoons that Westlands serves, but risked driving California 's salmon to extinction.

However, the new proposal for solar in the district has drawn a broad base of support from nontraditional allies, including the Sierra Club and the Planning and Conservation League, who are hopeful that the proposed project will make California a leader in carbon-free energy generation and create solar installation, operations, and maintenance jobs in an area with high historic levels of structural unemployment.

LA meetuphikes.org

Central Coast blogs:

E-Mail the editor:

rexfrankel at yahoo.com

Blog Archive

Quick-Search of Subjects on the Site