Over the last 25 years, I’ve devoted myself to acting with the community and engaging the community as stewards and part of nature as the executive director of LandPaths, an environmental education and conservation nonprofit with the mission to foster a love of the land in Sonoma County. Some may wonder, how is it possible for someone passionate about nature like myself to be on the board of a nonprofit that advocates for increasing housing production? Isn’t new construction bad for the environment?
Here’s the truth of the matter: when done right, constructing new homes in Sonoma County is good for the environment, and good for the health and well-being of our community. I’m proud to serve as a board member of Generation Housing, which promotes sustainable solutions to our local housing challenges and values equity and cross-sector collaboration. Affordable housing that incorporates the beauty of the landscape and connects with transit networks, and infill development that saves wild and agricultural lands, should be part of any cohesive ecological planning effort for a region. Affordable housing is an issue that equity-minded, conservation-oriented people can’t — or shouldn’t — ignore.
Did you know that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) includes climate and environmental justice as an integral part of its mission? Safe, stable housing is inextricably linked to health and the environment. And the ripple effects of increased affordable and sustainable housing stock would benefit our environment. For example, it would incentivize landlords to make improvements to their units like reducing toxins such as lead paint. Or how about the fact that new homes in California as of 2020 are mandated to include solar panels for energy, and modern building codes are more environmentally friendly.
Conservation practices in Sonoma County should reflect the nature of ecology, in which the whole is made up of interacting parts and organisms. In natural systems, those parts are balanced and harmonious. There’s the oak tree with the mycorrhizal fungi at its roots, and the stream nearby that feeds it, along with the jay bird sitting on its limbs burying acorns not too far away to birth another grove. These are all aspects of nature’s ability to work together. At Generation Housing, we also have an ecosystem of sorts, recognizing that many parts of our county– healthcare, education, economic vitality, and the environment–are affected by the housing shortage. Like the oak and the fungi and the jay and the stream, we are all parts of a system. Our issues are intersectional and we are all connected. We come together to champion sustainable, affordable housing.
We are so blessed in Sonoma County to have major state, city and regional parks with wild land and wild nature at the very doorstep of our urban areas, including Trione-Annadel State Park, Montini Open Space Preserve, and Fitch Mountain Park, to name a few. My wish is that we continue to create accessible and welcoming nature preserves, close enough for people to walk to or ride their bike or take public transit. Places where people feel as though they belong and they have the means, the need, and the impulse to maintain and sustain.It’s clear to me that transit-central housing, built to increase infill and placed in a manner where ecological integrity is at the same table with density and efficiency, is the equation that embraces climate smart human habitation.
I hope you had a pleasant Earth Day, and please remember that affordable housing is essential to people not just for dignity’s sake, but also because caring for our community is caring for our environment, too. Let us rise to the challenge before us.
We invite you to get outside with LandPaths in 2022 on an outing, stewardship day, or as a summer nature camp volunteer! Please visit us at www.landpaths.org and sign up for our bimonthly eblast to get all the latest. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok (@landpaths), where we post lots of inspiration to care for the land and each other.
See you in the Big Outside,
— Craig Anderson