Seaborg Open Space Fund

Oh look, it’s the generic thoughtful voter model-wants-to-be-an-actress paid for by PG&E for the mass mailer to tell us about their “Right to Vote” Prop 16.

And looks she’s wearing green!

They should rename Prop 16 as:

The Right to Vote to-force-your-community-to-seek-2/3-voter-approval*-to-switch-to-cleaner-lower cost-alternative-utility-providers-thus-locking-PG&E’s-monopoly-into-the-California Constitution Proposition.

(* “Seek 2/3 voter approval” is lawmaker code for “Go Fish” and “Ain’t Gonna Happen.”)

PG&E does not want competition.  Prop 16 represents a big boot stomp on the emerging green jobs economy to keep the dirty non-renewable energy with ever-escalating rate-increases.

The ironic part of the PG&E’s “Right to Vote”  prop is that ratepayers cannot vote on how PG&E uses it’s money –which would be appropriate in this case given they’re spending $30 million of ratepayer money to tell ratepayers they need more economy democracy.

So thanks generic thoughtful voter model-wants-to-be-and-actress wearing green!

The last time we had a thoughtful voter model-wants-to-be-an-actress representing PG&E it was Erin Brockovich.

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George Carlin complained that save-the-earth environmentalists “don’t care about nature in the abstract …only as a clean place to live”.

(You can it watch here.) He was obviously unaware of the vast base of environmental writing that examines nature from every level of abstraction that is, well… abstractionable.

Why so angry about a clean place for us to live, if that’s just the extent of it? With every life support system on earth in decline under the crush of 7 billion people, with a daily net appearance of 200,000 more, working for a clean planet seems like something worth doing.

His target as always is self-important, ridiculous people – (guilty here!) which we first got from Jonathan Swift and Gulliver a long time ago. But George kept it fresh – and funny. Mostly. This bit of his hatin’ on environmentalists as all nothing but shallow Volvo-driving yuppies, is right up there at the top of his misanthrop-o-meter and right alongside his various papal decrees like: “don’t vote” and “kill your children”.
Saving the earth as a needless “arrogant” activity is certainly true to his general outlook. “I root for the destruction of humanity”, he said, and wanted to watch the “decline of civilization in the afterlife on a heavenly CNN.”

My only question: Why is one who arrogantly imagines a responsibility to “save the earth” more worthy of scorn that one who arrogantly imagines a right to grind it up for money?

He must have been hating those people as well when he wrote:

Oh beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticide grain,
For strip-mined mountain’s majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

So George thanks for all the laughs. Now, it’s back to work saving the earth for me, because doing nothing and heaping scorn is not a working option.

How’s that CNN working for you?

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I used to go hiking in Briones Park after taking my daughter to her orchestra rehearsal. She would play the violin with young musical achievers while I would wander with trees. I didn’t know then that there is a trail there named after Glenn Seaborg – and here I am now working to honor his love of the open space in this area. Funny how things all connect. And here’s another random line of connection in this water color of (yes-again) Briones posted recently to the blog by my long-time friend, adventure pal and accomplished Bay Area painter/designer Denny Holland. If everything is connected, maybe there’s a deeper lesson there. Hmmmm.

On the front lines now there is so much going on right now at the federal, state and local levels. Perhaps all the activity just represents the thaw of pent up action plans drafted during the long nuculer [sic] winter of the Bush era when advances for the environment were pushed back by the political buldozer driven by the extraction industries.

Here closer to home, the Seaborg Fund is currently supporting the ongoing efforts to prevent Pt Molate from becoming a casino. We also are trying to figure out the best way to help defeat the PG&E’s self-serving Prop16 (cleverly and cynically disguised as the “Right to Vote” as if it’s about democracy and sunshine – which it most assuredly is not, but rather all about the polar opposite of those things.) While not directly a part of the Seaborg Fund charter, this ballot push is too ridiculous just to stand by — likewise with the $500,000 fronted by Texas gas giant Valero to shut down California’s precedent-setting climate change legislation.

We have a sign on letter in support of saving Point Molate. Please us let know if your organization would like to sign on in support and we will present that to the Richmond City council during its next review cycle about the disposition of the Bay front property in question, and in danger.

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Point Molate might be a casino.

The Seaborg Fund is working with the local group Citizens for a Sustainable Point Molate and Blue Frontier Campaign to Save Point Molate on San Francisco Bay.

Blue Frontier’s West Coast Office is located in Richmond California which includes a headlands known as Point Molate, 422 acres of spectacular San Francisco Bay-facing green space and submerged eel grass meadows that a narrow majority of the city council wants to sell off for a gambling casino.

Please (before the vote on Tuesday if possible) email RICHMOND CITY COUNCIL members:

=> Maria Viramontes | maria_viramontes@ci.richmond.ca.us
=> Jim Rogers | elirapty@aol.com
=> Nat Bates | natbates@comcast.net
=> Tom Butt | tom.butt@intres.com
=> Ludmyrna Lopez | Lopez.Ludmyrna@comcast.net

Point Molate contains a historic wine port (with a brick castle) that later became part of a Navy fuel oil depot before the Navy sold it to the city for a dollar in 2003. One could argue that after alcohol and petroleum a gambling casino could be an example of historic continuity in terms of human addictions.

But the Point Molate headland is really an example of the resiliency of nature left unpaved, rapidly reclaiming its terrestrial area as hilly coastal grassland, range-managed by mule deer with colossal Toyons – Christmas Berry shrubs – the size of live oaks, also live oaks, federally protected Suisun Marsh Aster, native Molate Blue Fescue, a unique local bunchgrass horticulturists have bred for landscaping, coyote brush, wild mint, Dutchman’s pipe vine and its rarely seen companion, the pipe vine swallowtail butterfly. “This is the most beautiful area imaginable for grassland geeks,” Botonist Lech Naumovich who’s shown us around grins happily. The 50 acres of submerged plant habitat just beyond the beach also acts as a nursery and sanctuary for marine wildlife.

BFC believes Pt. Molate could be the third emerald jewel of Bayside green parks along with the Presidio of San Francisco and Fort Baker in Marin county.

Unfortunately with its million dollar views of the bay and Mount Tamalpais Point Molate has generated a more predictable plan. Despite opposition from the Mayor, the Governor, the State’s two U.S. Senators and what seems to be most Richmond residents, the city has plans to transfer the land’s title to Upstream LLD, a private consortium put together by a Berkeley developer that represents a small band of Pomo Indians he hopes will become California’s next gaming tribe (other Pomos have publically come out against this). Upland has already paid the city fifteen million non-refundable dollars towards a possible $50 million purchase price, promising to build the greenest most eco-sustainable Gambling Casino resort, retail shopping, hotel and housing complex this side of Las Vegas. They’re promising tens of millions more dollars from imagined future gambling revenues to the city, county, environmental critics and others. Along with the city land transfer Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar would have to agree to convert Point Molate into reservation land for urban gaming. If Salazar doesn’t but the city has already sold the land the developer could then sell it to a third party like Chevron that has a huge petroleum production facility just over the ridgeline.

Some on the city council seem to believe the promise of Casino jobs for maids and security guards is the best they can hope to provide their low-income constituents, even though there is no indication that this is what the people of Richmond support.

A far better model exists in the job-generating capacity of working parks like the Presidio and Fort Baker. In Fort Baker, along with a Coast Guard Station, marina and Bay Area Discovery Museum you have Cavallo Point Lodge, a destination luxury resort that was built on an existing historic site within the park but that didn’t require loss of public ownership, damaging offshore living resources, paving over a major watershed, installing thousands of slot machines or generating wall-to-wall traffic to achieve success.

While the city and state already have dozens of casinos there’s only one undeveloped headland left on the West Coast’s largest estuary that could be a local and world center for natural ecosystem services, youth recreation, education, jobs and opportunities if people reject the reckless development patterns of the past and work to create a Point Molate Park.

[Content courtesy Blue Frontiers]

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Mono Lake — a vast expanse of ancient landscape! I have spent many days and years and hours exploring this region east of the Sierra in awe. When always I return to the San Francisco Bay Area I long for these wide open spaces and it’s never long before I’m tramping again through East Bay Regional Parks in search of the hundred mile view!

Visit one of my favorite groups — Friends of the Inyo! at http://www.friendsoftheinyo.org/

-Shawn

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