General Session — Introduction of Paper


Emerging Tools and Institutions to Conserve Oak Woodlands: Integrating Public Trust and Private Benefits, or Can We Ever Get Paid for Doing the Right Thing?
Laurie Wayburn¹


Introduction
This conference on Oaks in California's Changing Landscape is a most timely and important conference at a critical time in California. Having been born and raised in California, I have never known a time when this landscape was not changing. And, usually not for the better if you care about our natural environment, as I do. But, today it is changing at an ever increasing rate and scale, and the forces of restoration and conservation of that natural landscape seem even more outpaced by those of development and degradation.

The facts speak for themselves. Perhaps 45 million acres of California was in forest at the time of settlement, and, of those, some 40 percent or just under 18 million acres were broadleaf, oak and hardwood woodlands (Küchler 1977). By World War II, California had lost one-third of its forests—mostly oak woodlands and hardwood riparian forests—to agriculture and urban development (Wieslander and Jensen 1946).

Today, we have half that number of oak woodland acres, roughly 9.5 million. Perhaps 45 percent of that is so heavily disturbed, built upon, and fragmented with roads, that is cannot function well ecologically, though it may have oaks on it.² In fact, California continues to lose forestlands, and at an increasing rate. Every year, California is losing over 60,000 acres of forestland. These are all private forests, with holdings broken up and converted to non-forest. In the five years 1992-1997 we doubled the rate at which we were losing forests compared to the period 1982-1992 (Best and Wayburn 2001, NRI 2001). As documented in the book America's Private Forests, which I co-authored with Connie Best (Best and Wayburn 2001), nationwide we are losing roughly one million acres of private forest a year. There is no doubt that, if these trends continue, we will continue to have a rapidly vanishing landscape, and a daunting challenge for those who love that landscape and seek to conserve it.