Take a Stand For San Rafael Redwoods

A private builder in San Rafael, CA, wants to cut down 9 mature Redwood trees to build one large house.  Help us protect these trees from this non-essential business-as-usual felling of trees providing essential ecological service during our current, raging climate emergency. Now is the perfect time to save these 9 mature trees while making an example of them as the essential new paradigm: valuing and protecting and preserving our environment over further in-this-case destructive development.  Trees are no longer replaceable objects, if they ever were.

Now all our remaining mature trees are more valuable than ever before. Show your support for this necessary shift in our community’s thinking, attitudes, awareness — and behavior.  Sign our petition, for all this reason, and more:

• These Redwood trees are decades old and are irreplaceable.  Once cut down to please a single developer and one house buyer, their robust environmental services are gone from the neighborhood, the community, our city, and the Bay Area, forever.

• This group of 9 trees, and every stand of trees, and even every tree, provides prodigious ecological service, including:
  - creating cooling shade;
  - sequestering atmospheric carbon, including scrubbing the air of particulate matter from tailpipes and wildfires;
  - produces the oxygen we breathe;
  - captures and retains atmospheric and ground moisture;
  - stabilizes hillsides with their root structures;
  - reduces winds and thus reduce wind-driven ground fires;
  - provides bird and animal habitat;
  - all these services are especially critical during our current, still increasing global (and local) warming and climate emergency.

Redwoods are especially ignition/fire-resistant in a wildfire, one of the most fire-survivable trees in our time of increasing WUI (Wildland Urban Interface) fires ravaging Marin County in now predictably destructive summer-autum fire season.

• These gentle giants, Coast Redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) were declared the official California State Tree in 1937 because they grow taller than any tree on Earth. They are crucial in mitigating global warming and our local climate too.  Just one “average" tree will sequester (remove from the atmosphere) about 1 ton of carbon in its lifetime.  But just one of these nine Coast Redwoods can absorb as much carbon as 250 “average" trees.  

• San Rafael is a designated TREE CITY USA, yet lacks a tree ordinance to protect native trees like these mature Redwoods.

• San Rafael, with its educated and supposedly environmentally aware residents, has pledged to be a "green" city...and yet this planned felling is one more in an unending stream of tree fellings for developments of all kinds.  San Rafael’s, and the San Francisco Bay Area’s, essential, protective tree cover is being relentlessly destroyed, one development at a time, to our own detriment.  

Please don't allow developers to cut down these mature Redwood trees. We must take a stand somewhere, and this stand of local Marin County, CA Redwoods is as good a place as any to advocate for all trees in all of our neighborhoods.

Help us protect these trees, and raise the visibility and value of all Redwood trees, and all trees, by signing our petition. 
Thank you.