For the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

And to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

So we thank you for coming.

Due to a little mix-up in communication, we have a presentation that's not on the agenda.

And we will go to that in a second.

Let's see, we'll call pledge.

I guess we can move right into it.

Public matters on the club.

Yeah, so that's that's what we're talking about here.

So we have Perry Mesker from the Sierra Club, and he's going to be speaking off the agenda matters, not on the agenda.

But just to preface this, this is something we've been talking about for a couple of years.

The Sierra Club has uh lobbied me several times over the last couple of years about uh clear cutting ordinance.

And I said, Well, you know, you need to show me how it relates to the city and particularly our water supply.

And so that's what I requested of Perry, and he has some information to present to us.

You'll find on your dias some of the handouts that he has presented to us.

Ultimately, he has asked me if the city would adopt a resolution uh basically um in support of their ban for clear cutting in California for us.

So, Perry, go ahead.

Yeah, thank you, Jeff.

I think pastoring is probably an understatement.

I know I've been up and give been giving Jeff a hard time several different times.

Anyway, uh what I wanted to talk about was clear cutting and the impact on your water and uh watersheds.

And uh accordingly, the Sierra Club, California for probably a number of years has had an ongoing campaign to end clear cutting in all of California.

And I'm not sure if everyone's familiar with clear cutting is.

I know Jeff is very familiar with it now, but I've got a couple pictures here of a clear cut.

Would you that's nice?

Yeah, that is one, and here is another.

You can see there's a single tree standing there.

That is what a clear cut looks like.

Let me put another picture here of a clear cut.

Anyway, these clear cuts kind of to let you know what happens in the clear cut, it's probably one of the most destructive means of harvesting trees up in the Sierras and the Trinities.

And what they do is you can see they go through and remove all the trees on the slope on it in a clear cut, really leaving nothing standing.

And this in California is really done, usually done in probably 20 to 40 acre sections each time they do it.

Uh once the trees are removed, they come back and treat the entire area with an herbicide.

And usually that herbicide is roundup, which and uh the intent on that is to kill all the competing vegetation and species out there.

When they do use this herbicide, uh it's usually done in much more concentrated form than in what you would get on the crops, and the reason for that is because the trees and the various shrubs up there are much sturdier and it takes a lot more to uh uh take kill them.

Once they're dead, then they come back with an industrial factory farm and they plant trees in there, and it's it's really what amounts to is a crop, it's no longer a forest.

In these in these factory farms, uh birds typically don't go in there, wildlife doesn't go in there, and it's the way it's treated.

So it is really a pretty destructive thing.

Okay, the purpose of this meeting, which I want to discuss, is uh the impact, as I mentioned, on water and water supply.

Uh however, aside from that, it also affects wildlife, it affects forest fires and climate change, but I won't be covering that.

I think when I previously met with Jeff, I came in with a whole stack of things, and it was pretty more confusing than anything.

Uh I figure I'm gonna eliminate the confusion this time, and I came in with a report.

Uh the best thing I I thought was to explain it was this report, which everybody has copies up there.

It's clear-cutting impacts and California water and wildlife and uh carbon sequestration.

What it is, it's a literary review, it's probably about five, six years old.

Uh when I've read it, it really has not changed that much.

I think the only noted change I could see when they talk about uh herbicides in their uh roundup, which is considered a is now considered by the state of California uh carcinogenic and also by the World Health Organization.

Anyway, uh I'm not uh the speed this up real quick.

Uh I'm not going to cover any of the executive summary or the introduction, and if you could turn to page eight, that is the impacts that we're talking about.

Okay, I won't be reading it, you can take a look and read it yourself, but really the big impact on this first page here is erosion sedimentation of streams.

It makes sense when the trees are removed and stripped from a the a slope, you're going to have erosion.

That erosion ends up with stream sedimentation.

Also, what happens too is you got heavy equipment removing to remove the uh logs and everything up there, and that compacts the soil.

The compacted soil also does not allow the rainfall to percolate down into the uh groundwater, and you get runoff too, and you get more erosion.

They've tried to counter that, as you is mentioned on the very last paragraph on this.

Um, and they've done it by deep ripping.

And that deep reaping really disturbs the soil and it really creates more erosion and more sediment in the streams.

Now, if you notice that the very bottom, everything through this report is highly footnoted, and that was one of the questions I know what you had in the back.

Where did this data come from?