[APWG] ECOSYSTEM RESTORATION and weed management projects

[Craig Dremann - Redwood City Seed Company]

Dear Wayne and All,

Thanks for your email.

I completely agree with you, we need to review weed management and
restoration projects, especially the huge ones here in California, where
CALFED has been spending $100 million each year for the last decade,
supposedly to fight the weeds and restore habitat for the Listed
Endangered fish of the Sacramento delta.

The CALTRANS project was not mine, but was a project to convert solid
yellow star thistle along the Interstate that caught fire every summer,
back to local perennial native grasses, working with UC Davis,  that you
can see at http://www.ecoseeds.com/road.test.html

SHAW’s Santa Cruz Project, was only 1% of my technologies, and Shaw
himself invented the rest of the 99% trade secret technologies that worked
perfectly, and enabled him to convert his 74 acre weed patch from 1992, to
2000 consisting of 99% native cover with over 100 species.

Shaw has a web page at http://www.libertygarden.com and anyone wanting to
view what I call--The Promised Land--should contact Michael directly and
arrange for a visit.

IDAHO--I taught classes to the USFS and BLM on how to use their own local
native seeds in their forests in Idaho and in CA, WA, OR, MT, CO, SD and
WY at, http://www.ecoseeds.com/classes.html.

I was also hired to encourage the USFS, to use small-scale test plots of
local natives in the Franklin Basin that you can see their successful test
plots at
http://www.fs.fed.us/r4/caribou-targhee/publications/monitoring/cariboumonitoring02_03.pdf

More details were posted about Franklin Basin on this list on August 18,
2009 at
http://lists.plantconservation.org/pipermail/apwg_lists.plantconservation.org/2009-August/001665.html

Also, in Idaho, I was a participant in a very important meeting in 2000 in
Boise, about the use of exotic seeds by the Department of Interior, BLM,
in the tens of millions of pounds per year on public lands, that you can
read at http://www.ecoseeds.com/juicy.gossip.six.html

I love the picture on my web page, of the rugged cowboy/farm advisor 
standing amongst the newest exotic invasive legume species that the
government has introduced to sow and spread in California wildlands.

I just saw True Grit in the theater this weekend, and it was filmed for
the high elevation conifer forest/grasslands near Santa Fe, NM, and for
the oak woodlands/grasslands somewhere in the hill country around Austin
TX.

If we consider the landscape as the main character of that movie, and look
at what is happening to that main character, then that film tells a very
different and interesting story.  The cowboys were just the most recent
players on this billion year old continent/stage.

If you look at the understory and grasslands--they are totally wasted,
grazed to within an inch of their lives, and the wildflowers were all
extinct, even though they should have been present and blooming, the time
of year they were filming those areas.

And the oak woodlands are all even-aged, with no seedlings and no elders. 
On the good side, the riparian shots are decent, and there are some wispy
native grasses, probably an Elymus species,  in the oak understory.

Unfortunately,  missing in the entire movie, you do not see any native
mammals, no ground squirrels, no deer, plus not a single bird--either
chirping and none visible flying--nor for the night scenes, a single
cricket or frog sound.

And it was also sad to see, when the go into the Indian Territory, that
there was only a single adult Indian is in the movie, and the two Indian
children on their own land, get kicked several times by the cowboy.

We need to encourage the local natives including the birds and the
crickets and the frogs and the people, and convert our weed areas back to
native cover, and make sure that we are not kicking the natives out and
leaving bare areas where the exotics can colonize in the future.

Sincerely,  Craig Dremann (650) 325-7333