“All is not well in wine country,” writes Stett Holbrook in FERN’s latest story, “Of Water and Wine,” published in Bohemian. As multi-million-dollar vineyards and $1,000-a-night resorts rise Napa Valley, California, residents are trying to stop the powerful wine industry from destroying the watershed.
Local conservationists are fighting to put the Water, Forest and Oak Woodland Protection Initiative on the ballot in an effort to stop winegrowers from eroding the area’s hillsides and polluting its waterways.
“The frontlines of Napa’s battles are the hillsides that rise from its narrow valley, which is maxed out with grapes,” says Holbrook. “The situation leaves new or expanding vineyards with only one place to go: up. Though the hills are zoned for agriculture, critics say converting them to vineyards threatens both groundwater and the Napa River, the 55-mile waterway that runs the length of the valley and provides essential habitat to several imperiled species.” The initiative would restrict vineyard developers from cutting down more than 10 percent of the oaks on their hillside lots and removing most timber within 150 feet of major waterways or wetlands.
Conservationists fear that the Napa River, which is officially considered “imperiled” by the EPA, will go the way of nearby Lake Hennessey. Authorities have to remove toxic levels of phosphate and sulfate from the lake (due to fertilizer runoff) using chemicals that are linked to miscarriage and bladder and rectal cancer. As is, the Napa River already faces large amounts of run-off from wastewater treatment plants, vineyards and cattle operations. The river’s native Coho salmon went extinct years ago, in the 1960s, the Chinook are endangered, and the steelhead population is also considered threatened.
And yet, in 1968, Napa Valley created one of the most progressive agricultural preserves in the country, which today protects 40,000 acres and is the main reason why the area hasn’t been swallowed by development like the Bay Area. But now, “[Napa’s] challenge is to protect the land from the excesses of what agriculture has become—viticulture, wineries and activities that look more like tourism than agriculture,” says Holbrook.
Considering that Napa’s wine growers already face some of the strictest environmental regulations in the country, Stuart Smith, owner of Smith-Madrone Vineyards & Winery, told Holbrook that the initiative will only help the rich get richer. “Any additional requirements will only serve to drive out small, family-owned wineries like his, leaving only big or corporate-backed wineries—the very operations that ‘gloom-and-doom environmentalists’ rail against,” explains Holbrook.