Generation green - youth fight for planet - Brief Article

Sierra, Nov, 2000 by Heather Millar

The tree-sitters are acutely aware that their radical stand will not be enough to save the remaining old-growth forests. They see themselves as witnesses, whose extreme actions will spur others to file lawsuits, speak at Forest Service review meetings, organize environmental groups, or simply write checks to support those efforts. "I lived two long, cold winters in the trees,

where all I ever heard of civilization was chainsaws," Spring says. "What I did was only symbolic. But we need our Rosa Parks and our Gandhis for the environment, people who will do what it takes to get things right."

Indigo, 19, left family problems in Ohio and has found that tree-sitting gives her new strength. "I get so much energy from the trees, and from these people," she says. "People are cheering you on." She admits that it's impossible to completely separate from mainstream culture. "We drive cars out here. There's lots of plastic. I like hot showers. I like a roof overhead. But if we don't do this, who will?"

Some 400 miles south, and very much on the ground, the young members of the California Conservation Corps recognize that changing the world often begins with less dramatic actions--as humble, sometimes, as pulling weeds. The crews look like tiny dots down the beach, completely dwarfed by the jaw-dropping drama of the Mendocino coastline. Ahead, the Ten Mile Dunes shiver and undulate toward the mountains and redwoods in the distance. The Pacific Ocean crashes onto the sand, creating a salty, almost imperceptible mist. Grass sways in the steady spring wind. It's a perfect day, except for one thing: The grass shouldn't be there.

In the late 1800s, gardeners at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park introduced European beach grass (Ammophila arenaria) to the West Coast. They thought the smooth, graceful plant was an ideal way to stabilize the dunes that edged the Pacific, but they didn't anticipate the consequences: Beach grass diminished the open pockets of sand that the endangered western snowy plover needs to build its nests. It also turned out to be highly invasive, not just accenting the landscape, but conquering it. Howell's spineflower (a delicate, low-growing, endangered flower unique to the area), the endangered Menzies' wallflower, and round-headed Chinese houses, their blooms like tiny purple pagodas, all disappeared under the relentlessly advancing phalanxes of grass.

"The dunes should look like a beautiful garden," sighs Renee Pasquinelli, the California State Parks ecologist who planned the corps' project at Ten Mile Dunes. "But with beach grass, all you get is beach grass."

The plant is tough to stamp out because it develops a system of roots and rhizomes, horizontal underground stems that descend as far as six feet into the sand. All along the coast, different agencies have tried several methods of removing the grass: ripping it out with bulldozers in Oregon, dosing it with herbicides like Roundup and Rodeo in California. But the most effective and least ecologically damaging method may be the most difficult: pulling the grass out by hand. That's where the Conservation Corps crews come in.