I do not profess to be an expert on global warming or its causes, nor do I think it is productive to just single it out as the one factor by which to evaluate whether deforestation in favor of vineyards or agriculture is beneficial or detrimental to the environment and the longterm health of communities. But I do know my history. And it is full of examples with plenty of warnings which are downright dangerous, though convenient to ignore.

We can start with today's environmental wasteland we call the Middle East, which is recognized as the cradle of our civilization when it was known by a different name: The Fertile Crescent. It is an area where over the course of 3,000 years, the Phoenicians, Romans, Ottomans and the British managed to virtually wipe out its magnificent 150-foot-tall forests known as the Cedars of Lebanon to build from ships to railroad tracks and convert land to agricultural uses until its changed climate decimated its entire ecosystem not just for these but for all uses. The denuded mountains of the Levant were left to face flash floods with nothing but eroding slopes. In recognition of this environmental catastrophe, an international reforestation program was begun in 1985. Yet here, we are debating whether steadily moving in the opposite direction is the right one.

In his acclaimed book "Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," noted Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond has outlined the socioeconomic collapse of Easter Island due to deforestation, and one need only look at an aerial photograph of the Dominican Republic, a thriving country and its poverty stricken neighbor Haiti to recognize the cause obvious to any thinking person: Thriving forests on the one and a moon landscape on the other, sharply divided from each other by a precise line as if cut by a knife.

Carbon sequestration calculations may be one thing but common sense dictates that rain falling over a forest falls slowly on the ground and shaded by its canopy gets a chance to penetrate into the ground before it evaporates. And common sense dictates that when rain pounds on the soil of leafless, winter vineyards, it runs off before it has a chance to replenish the water table. That run-off, even under the best erosion control practices, carries with it top soil and silt into the streams and ends up in the ocean.

In answer to Supervisor Luce's concern on whether we may be missing something in converting forests to vineyards, we need to admit that we are doing so in support of an economic model. But trying to rationalize this practice as the best option is quite another and it is disingenuous.

The difficult decisions Supervisors are burdened with are ones of right balance, not of rationalizing accommodation of special interests.

The public is beginning to sense that we are at a tipping point and that failure of leadership to stem the steady degradation of the fundamental elements of our ecosystem are beginning to show in our overburdened infrastructure and the deterioration in everyone's quality of life.

NVR version: On forests and vineyards