Photo credit: Alessa Johns
By Juliette Beck
This morning beginning at 8:30AM the Yolo County Planning Commission is holding a public hearing on a proposed gravel mining project along lower Cache Creek, located three miles west of the City of Woodland. Teichert, an $880 million year mega-construction company, is seeking a 30-year permit to expand its aggregate mining operations to include the 319-acre Shifler property adjacent to the Cache Creek Nature Preserve.
Opposition to the project is growing by the day. Many people are pointing out that the project was conceived in a different era and is based on a flawed logic that doesn’t fit with today’s realities of climate chaos, mass extinction, deep racial disparities, and growing socio-economic divides particularly in light of the ongoing pandemic.
Mining companies have been excavating gravel for construction along lower Cache Creek since the 1950’s and initially excavated the creek itself. After significant public opposition culminated in a “No Deep Pits” referendum in the 1990’s, aggregate mining companies and Yolo County struck a deal to permit deep pit mining outside the main channel of Cache Creek on land that is primarily farmland in exchange for funding reclamation and restoration of a 14.5 mile nature parkway. The latest proposal will expand the mining footprint with the illusory promise of restoration of the excavated land back to agriculture and a lake in three decades.
There’s much at stake for the communities and future generations that are counting on Yolo County to make good planning decisions. Less than 1,400 feet away from the proposed pit mine is the WildWings neighborhood where over 330 families purchased homes. The residents say they have had enough of the cumulative impacts of decades of mining – dust, diesel pollution, heavy truck traffic, noise and threats to their water supply – and are asking the county to reject the proposal.
The county and the project applicant – Teichert – appear to be in a rush to secure final approvals including changes to county zoning and 
certification of a lengthy environmental impact report.
The rush suggests an attempt to bypass or prevent the accumulating social and environmental costs of the project from becoming known to the public. Toxicologists are pointing to alarming evidence that poisonous methylmercury is forming in the oxygen-deprived environment at the bottom of the wet mining pits. Keen to distract with promises of a nature parkway sometime in the future, the very real possibility – and enormous liability or the county – that the mining instead could be creating a deadly parkway for migrating animals who eat the toxic fish spawned in poisoned ponds all along the Cache Creek wildlife corridor is being obscured.
Outdoor education groups are also questioning a plan to build a new nature center at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve less than a mile away from the large-scale, industrial mining operations. Some have suggested a wildlife rehabilitation center would be a better use of public funds.
The new nature center is being planned by the Cache Creek Conservancy, which has three mining company seats on its board including a representative of Teichert who is also the project manager for the mining expansion. The conservancy governs the 140-acre nature preserve located directly across from the Shifler property. The preserve is being touted as the crown jewel of “gravel to green” restoration projects. Yet insufficient funding and poor management has plagued reclamation and restoration efforts.
While the preserve has clearly been set up to greenwash the mining operations, it does however contain a hidden gem – the Patwin-Wintun Tending and Gathering Garden (TGG). The garden was created as a safe place for Native Californian basket weavers to cultivate native plants and practice their cultural traditions. Over the past twenty years, the garden has become a special place to study and learn from Native Californian naturalists and culture bearers about historic ecological wetland regeneration, yet it has also faced many challenges including how to keep native plants irrigated along steep slopes with poor soil as a result of the legacy of mining.
Efforts to expand outdoor educational opportunities at the TGG for Native youth and others have also been fraught with difficulty. The extractivist logic that permeates the conservancy – a logic that sees both nature and people as something to exploit and easily replace – is hard at work marginalizing the very people that should be leading the restoration of the imperiled watershed.
We are at a pivotal moment in the history of Yolo County planning. This project comes at a time of climate emergency that is worsening and has to grapple too with the legacy of ongoing, intergenerational trauma for indigenous people here in the historic epicenter of mining mercury for gold, greed and genocide.
Many of us that have settled here in recent times are still learning about the horrific treatment of Native Californian tribal communities and how to properly acknowledge Native Californians as the original stewards of the land. A growing number of institutions – including the State of California – are seeking ways to repair the harm from the lasting legacy of racial injustice.
We have much to gain from coming into “right relationship” with Native Californian people who are reminding us that we are not separate and apart from nature. “We are nature defending itself,” is a common refrain among indigenous environmental leaders.
Let’s hope for the sake of this generation and all the generations to come that the planning commission has the courage and common sense to pause the project and break from the outdated and harmful extractivist logic embodied in the Teichert-Shifler mining and reclamation proposal. There is another path forward for Yolo County and it starts with an ethic of deep care, appreciation and respect for indigenous-led ecological stewardship.
Juliette Beck is a Davis resident and climate activist
You know, probably there are also many people who might be on board with stopping this mining operation but when things like “climate chaos, mass extinction, deep racial disparities, and growing socio-economic divides particularly in light of the ongoing pandemic” get thrown into the mix it tends to turn many people off.
Created as a safe space from what exactly?
Keith
Why should people be turned off by pointing out that the project would exacerbate a long list of regional and global problems? Is it that the opponents should only appeal to self interest by a specific population? Why is labeling so important to you?
Because many people find much of that to be a bunch of _______.
Fell free to fill in the blank.
“Why is labeling so important to you?”
For the same reason labelling seems to be so important to you. For instance, how you like to label a certain commenter as an ‘out of towner’.
But why is that a bunch of ____? Are these people denying that climate change is happening? That we are in the midst of a mass extinction event? That this country has a deep history of racial discrimination that continues today as evidenced by the 10:1 ratio of household wealth between white and Blacks? That the income distribution has grown wider over the last 40 years with the wages for the lowest 40% hardly growing? These are all factual statements.
And I did not label him as an “out of towner”. I identified him with a long description as some one with no discernable stake in the future of Davis which calls into question the legitimacy and standing of stating his opinion on policies and actions in the community. That’s an awfully long sentence to be called a “label.”
What does any of that have to do with a gravel yard?
Hmmmmm?
The comments you’re referring to could be used in support of, or against a gravel mining operation. It is the equivalent of a political “dog whistle”. I sometimes wonder if anyone is actually dumb enough to fall for it.
But hey, as long as I can call myself a “progressive”, or a “liberal”, or “young”, I’m all for it. Or, against it. After all, club membership is what’s important to me above all else, as it should be for anyone.
But (without checking with my club), I’m glad that it’s been rejected (so far).
I don’t agree, I feel he has the right to state his opinion. But if that’s the case what are you doing commenting on a matter that is more Woodland’s issue than that of Davis?
Well, labeling. Like yesterday, when old school liberals were insulted for having values like being against development and being pro on ecological issues. Which could go against progressive goals like building tons and tons of subsidized housing.
Therefore, if we are opposed to gravel mining . . . gravel mining that is used in the construction of ‘building tons and tons of subsidized housing’ and the roads leading to that housing . . . in other words . . . we can’t be against development, or pro ecological issues, like old school liberals, so we have to call it something else, something (a label) that all the pro-gressives (to label them) are panicking over. Not dirty air, that’s to old liberal a label — no it’s labeled as “climate chaos, mass extinction, deep racial disparities, and growing socio-economic divides particularly in light of the ongoing pandemic.” All the things normally associated with gravel mining 😐
That should do the trick, Eli.
Brain go: BOOM!
What’s really scary, KO, is that kind of talk turns a lot of people ON.
Talk dirty (air) to me, baby.
Note that this article was meant to be published yesterday, and the Yolo Planning Commission voted to reject the application on December 9.
There is an appeal process… we’ll see if that is pursued.
Somebody does not understand geology, history, chemistry and reality…
Simple one… open pit mining EXPOSES water, gravel to oxygen… it does not DEPRIVE it… the “is forming” is a giveaway to a lack of knowledge.
If anything, the mining of the gravel removes/impairs the ability of methyl mercury to migrate in an aquifer. The mining of gravel is NOT a ‘source’… nor cause…
There were mercury (more correctly cinnabar [usually in the form of mercury sulfide]) mines upstream of Cache Creek (often cinnabar is associated with gold mining)… the tailings could well have leached inorganic mercury into Cache Creek… or even natural leaching over the millennia. “There’s cinnabar in them thar’ hills”! True story…
The gravel extraction is NOT the source (I say again)… it (mining the gravel) may have other issues, but methyl mercury is (almost literally) a ‘red herring’ [cinnabar is red]. If anything, the mining of the gravel might be a mitigation to the migration of methyl mercury in shallow aquifers.
Forgot a cite… I knew about the facts before I spoke/wrote (like for 30 years), but for those who doubt, mercury ore – Bing
The commenter is misinformed. As I wrote in the article, toxic methyl mercury is forming at the bottom of mining pits. It is a byproduct of biologic, metabolic process of naturally occurring microbes in anoxic environments where mercury is present. I refer you to the county’s own study for more explanation. Here is an excerpt from the conclusions:
https://www.yolocounty.org/home/showpublisheddocument/64916/637280824879930000
“All of these ponds occupy former depositional zones impacted by historic mercury mining upstream in the watershed; all likely contain
sediment inorganic mercury at concentrations and bioavailabilities sufficient to lead to
problem levels of methylmercury production and movement into fish – under certain
conditions. Seasonal bottom water anoxia appears to be one important factor.”
Glad you affirm what I wrote.