A Fighting Chance for Oaks

If, as the proverb says, it takes a village to raise a child, wait until you hear how many people it takes just to temporarily save an 850-year-old oak tree. Or, rather, a few thousand trees, towering amid a sea of vernal pools and animal habitat.

Consider Coyote Creek, for instance. The waterway, which meanders through a vein of privately held oak woodland in eastern Sacramento County, has become shorthand for a solar-energy project planned for the area. According to its developers at D.E. Shaw Renewable Investments (DESRI), the 1,400-acre Coyote Creek Agrivoltaic Ranch will generate around 200 megawatts of energy—enough to power 44,000 homes in the region, along with 100 megawatts of battery storage. The prospect of clean and accessible solar power in its backyard was enough to hook the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), which entered a long-term arrangement in 2021 to purchase power from the Coyote Creek solar farm.

Alas, “clean” energy in this case means the planned removal of approximately 3,493 trees—mostly mature blue oaks (Quercus douglasii) lining Coyote Creek and studding the surrounding oak savannah. That 850-year-old specimen on the property? It’s just the most senior of the trees (that we know of) marked for death. More common targets include youngsters in the 200-year old range, give or take a century.

You can see the oaks for miles around the planned solar site, a landscape of rolling foothills where Jessie Dickson has spent a lot of time over the last year nurturing resistance to the Coyote Creek project. “All the foothills we see in front of us, they would either bulldoze or dynamite—not cool at all,” says Dickson, the creator behind the popular Instagram account @SacramentoFoodForest. It’s a brilliantly sunny day in early March, with swallows fluttering overhead, surveying their habitat. Dickson points matter-of-factly at a single, modest blue oak in a grassy expanse flanking Scott Road, south of the city of Folsom. “That tree right there? You would think it’s only like 50 years old because of its size. But it’s probably 250 years old. They grow 2 millimeters a year in diameter.” He bounces on tiptoe and gestures more broadly, as if throwing an invisible ball over the hill at Coyote Creek hidden in the distance. “That’s where it gets into pure old-growth forest, and they’re hella big trees. You look up, and you just see canopy.” Dickson is good and mad now, the feral botanist his fans know and love, appalled by the prospect of losing the trees. “If they lived, any of these trees, the reflection from the solar panels and the urban heat effect would kill them no matter what. It’d get hotter and drier here. So this whole area would get destroyed.”

From Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) in the desert to coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) in damp coastal forests, California’s best-known native tree species possess an instant recognizability and indelible grandeur that tends to insulate them from the worst of human encroachment. This isn’t always the case, of course—terrible development occurs in their habitats, too. But note also that both Joshua trees and redwoods (not to mention sequoias) have entire national parks named after them. Not so for the mighty but humble oak, varieties of which occupy an estimated 13 million acres of public and private land across the state. Each tree in those millions of acres supports hundreds of animal, insect, or plant species. They have incalculable cultural value to many California Native American Tribes, for whom oak acorns have provided a staple food since time immemorial. They store hundreds of millions of metric tons of carbon, as sustainable and salubrious an environmental byproduct (if not more so) than any solar farms that would replace them.

Paradoxically, however, in their plenitude and variance, California’s native oaks can be easy to overlook. They can disappear into the scenery, especially in urban settings where the impacts of their biodiversity are constrained to front yards or parking lots. Blue oaks like those at Coyote Creek face particular danger: Research has shown that their saplings aren’t growing at a rate necessary to regenerate and sustain the species’ population, victims of climate change, drought, and ranchland grazing. Yet they are rarely the subjects of the types of sweeping conservation efforts seen in other threatened habitats. Earlier this year, a California Biodiversity Network report assessing the status of California’s 30×30 initiative (an ambitious effort to conserve 30% of California’s land and coastal waters by 2030) revealed that habitats defined by the presence of oaks are among the most underrepresented habitat types in 30×30-conserved areas. While desert habitats are “at or above statewide conservation levels,” the report notes, oak woodlands are falling far behind. “Blue oak-foothill pine, blue oak woodland, and valley oak woodland all have less than 10% of their extent within 30×30 Conservation Areas, with most opportunity for additional conservation on non-conserved lands,” the report adds.

The proposed Coyote Creek project site epitomizes this opportunity—non-conserved, working farmland on which thousands of heritage blue oaks face imminent destruction in the name of infrastructure and growth. But such conservation is a steep climb: No California native oak species yet qualify for protections as threatened or endangered under the state or federal Endangered Species Acts, and only a handful of oak species with limited distribution around the state are considered at risk at all. “Blue oaks aren’t really rare, but they’re really important,” says Brendan Wilce, conservation program coordinator with CNPS. “They have an oversized importance in terms of their contributions to habitat. But the main challenge is that they’re not rare enough to have official legal protections. And then the other big challenge is that they’re on private lands where it’s harder to regulate what’s going on.”

Moreover, local ordinances for mitigating oak habitat loss have little teeth or accountability when tested, offering no match for the sheer scale of what will be lost and cannot realistically be recovered for centuries, if ever. Local leaders generally observe the status quo; the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to approve the Coyote Creek project in late 2025, looking ahead to the prospects for—and revenue from—regional development despite public opposition.

These oaks can be saved, though, at least for now. In January, SMUD backed out of its power purchase agreement with DESRI, having determined that it didn’t need the property to fulfill its 2030 Zero Net Carbon Plan. The utility’s exit left the solar farm without a buyer for its energy. The victory owed to a large, organized, and absolutely furious coalition of folks like Dickson, conservationists like Wilce, and volunteers from the local CNPS Sacramento Valley Chapter and other organizations. Tribal advocates joined a suit to halt the desecration of important cultural and historic sites. Four-wheeling advocates from a nearby offroading park got involved as well. Litigators brought three separate lawsuits (including one in which CNPS is a co-plaintiff) to re-evaluate the project’s environmental impact report. They were soon backed up by untold numbers of letter writers, testifiers, and other everyday folks who simply couldn’t abide the scope of ruin foreseen at Coyote Creek.

The fight at Coyote Creek isn’t over. In fact, it may just be entering a grueling new phase: Despite the opposition, DESRI continues to seek a new purchaser for those 200 megawatts. The owners of Barton Ranch, through which Coyote Creek runs and where the controversial solar farm is planned, remain committed to the energy contractor. Meanwhile, a growing village of project opponents has readied for a long battle both in and out of court. You don’t have to be a literal or figurative treehugger to sense the stakes here are different, with the fates—and the corresponding habitats—of at least 3,493 unprotected native oak trees hanging in the balance. Amid everything, two questions come to mind: Is there any way to avoid such loss? And how can we better protect oak habitat going forward?

You can find at least one of California’s roughly 39 oak taxa almost anywhere in the state. Of those taxa, only nine are ranked on CNPS’s Rare Plant Inventory, and they aren’t at dire risk of extinction. None is formally listed as endangered by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Thus the story of oak conservation in California often pivots from defending trees to a story of defending biodiversity.

Everywhere around a single oak, bustling ecosystems of organisms depend on the tree for their habitat and, ultimately, their survival. “There’s no genus of tree other than Quercus that hosts so many other species,” says Dr. Tim Krantz, professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Redlands. In 2014, Krantz moved to The Wildlands Conservancy’s 900-acre Oak Glen Preserve in San Bernardino County, where he observes the teeming diversity of the site’s oak habitat up close. “From scrub jays and woodpeckers to mule deer and black bears, to the more than 800 species of moths, butterflies and insects, oaks and their acorns are truly the keystone species of their ecosystems.”

“And that doesn’t include fungi and lichens and all of that other stuff,” adds Carol Witham, the conservation chair of the CNPS Sacramento Valley Chapter. Witham is a seasoned advocate for California native plants, with a black belt in fighting for vernal pools. She famously helped lead the charge to relocate the UC Merced campus in the 2000s, when its original site would have laid waste to a thriving vernal pool ecosystem. Such vernal pools dot the proposed Coyote Creek solar site as well, but that’s only part of Witham’s objection to the project. “Oaks support all of these organisms throughout their lifespans,” Witham continues. “You also have cavity dwellers that will nest in dying oak trees and a bunch of other things like that. It’s a very complex web.” Fallen branches provide sanctuary for oak woodland or savanna critters during the hot summer months. Separated bark houses and nourishes insects.

Those are just the ailing trees. At Coyote Creek and the vast surrounding oak habitat in eastern Sacramento County, you’re likelier to find hundreds of gnarled but perfectly healthy old trees that came of age around the time the United States ratified its Constitution. They have contributed to the diets and cultures of local Miwok and Nisenan peoples for centuries. A few probably had birds nesting in their limbs before Shakespeare ever picked up a quill.

Birds have a particular prominence in oak habitats. The flock of swallows churning over Coyote Creek on that bright spring day was one avian species of hundreds that make use of that land, subsisting on insects or oak galls with their nutritious, protein-packed wasp centers. Dan Airola, a Sacramento-based wildlife biologist who has contributed strategy and guidance to the Coyote Creek Oak Conservation Working Group, says he has counted no fewer than 125 bird species frequenting the blue oaks, coast live oaks (Quercus agrifolia), and valley oaks (Quercus lobata) surrounding his front porch. “It’s hard to get that kind of range anywhere unless you’re on the ocean or near a big body of water,” Airola adds. “It’s just a testament to how much diversity there is in these oak woodlands. The wildlife has evolved and adapted to the various things that oaks provide, and it just creates a very rich community.”

Oak trees owe something to their winged habitues as well. Many of the most durable mature oaks in California—both in urban settings and rural settings like Coyote Creek—started out as acorns buried in the ground by scrub jays. The resulting habitat of just one tree can yield a metropolis for critters big and small, insects, and birds both local and visiting. “Most of the non-native trees we plant in developed areas are simply worthless to migratory birds that are moving through,” Airola says. “In contrast, the more abundant the oak [and] the greater the oak canopy, the higher the populations of the birds. And the populations in those urban areas is as high as in the wildland areas with similar amounts of oak. All they care about is: ‘Just give me an oak, and I’ll use it. I don’t care where it is.’ ”

At the same time, the unbroken continuity of oak habitats at a site like Coyote Creek means everything to the interconnected organisms who live there. The solar project would splinter thousands of acres of oak savanna and riparian woodland beyond recognition, throwing its community of wildlife into catastrophic disarray. (Not to mention dispersing and inhibiting the reproductive capacity of oaks, which are wind-pollinated.) On the one hand, project planners have stipulated that the solar farm’s design preserves the wildlife corridors. Even if that were true on paper, Witham says, the solar panels themselves introduce their own environmental hazards to the shattered landscape. “The heat effect and the unseasonal runoff from having to clean the solar panels is just going to doom those corridors,” she says. “Not just for the blue oaks, but also for the vernal pools and the other things that live there.”

As though in keeping with the modern California gestalt, paring our state’s native oak populations by even a few hundred here or a thousand there triggers housing crises for wildlife. “There’s this false premise that somehow these individual birds are going to go somewhere else and live,” Airola says. “Any birds that are displaced from one area will go somewhere they either will not be accepted and cannot live, or will displace someone else who has to go somewhere and die. As we reduce the amount of habitat, the number of individuals will decline.”

Back at the Oak Glen Preserve, Krantz reflects on the monumental effort to save the preserve’s breathtaking Champion Oak. The enormous specimen—estimated to be around 1,500 years old and confirmed to be the largest canyon live oak (Quercus chrysolepis) on Earth—was threatened by the Apple and El Dorado wildfires in 2020. As he would for any structure housing a thriving and well-established community, Krantz lobbied the fire warden for support to defend the tree. As a result, a crew of 27 inmate firefighters working alongside three wardens made the steep climb up the 45-degree slope below the Champion Oak. Over the course of three hours, they applied their skilled training to carefully remove dry vegetation and other fuels from around the tree, then cut a defensive line against the approaching fire. When the threat eased, the exhausted crew hiked back down. As in many fires across California, the success of this response depended on the expertise and labor of people whose contributions are often invisible in public narratives. The oak tree still standing on the hill today is a living testament to those contributions and the scale of the lives they saved—not just that of the oak itself, but those of the creatures that make their homes in or around it.

Now imagine a metaphorical fire crackling to life in Northern California, threatening almost 3,500 oaks and their respective habitats. Perhaps call it the Scott Fire, named after the hilly road that traverses the family-owned Barton Ranch in eastern Sacramento County. On both sides of Scott Road, between Latrobe Road to the south and White Rock Road the north, cattle graze around bucolic blue oak stands, vernal pools, burbling creeks, and undulating savanna grassland.

This is where DESRI plans to build its “agrivoltaic ranch” at Coyote Creek. Its construction would require an “industrial-level repurposing of the land,” according to a CNPS statement in December 2025—the blasting and excavation of almost 1.5 million cubic yards of earth and rock. Last fall, the project’s final environmental impact report (EIR) laid the scenario out with hellish, actuarial precision: “Each proposed blasting event would be no more than approximately 8 tons of charge detonated in multiple instantaneous blasts of no more than 2.8 kilograms (kg) charges spread out over a maximum 30-minute duration in total on any given day. Each blast would displace between 10,000 and 12,000 cubic yards of soil. The average depth per blast is 12 feet.”

The Sacramento County Board of Supervisors approved this plan with a 5-0 vote in a contentious meeting last fall. The opposition was its own richly diverse coalition, in a way: Hundreds of area residents, community advocates, tribal leaders, scientists, and other critics of the project attended the meeting to voice or at least present their objections. Kim Delfino, an environmental attorney and lobbyist representing CNPS, was stunned the Coyote Creek project had advanced far enough to warrant this level of urgent resistance. “When we really dug into it,” Delfino says, “and started to realize what was on the property—vernal pools, oak woodlands, native plants, wildlife—we said, ‘Whoa. Who thought this was a good idea?’ ” She knew that the amount of topographical change from blasting, let alone the annihilation of the native oak habitat, would inflict unfathomable environmental damage. “I’ve reviewed a lot of renewable energy projects, and I’ve seen some pretty bad ones,” Delfino continues. “This jumped out as probably one of the worst I’ve ever seen.”

The supervisors’ unanimous vote prompted immediate opprobrium from the project’s opponents. The spectrum of reactions swung from incandescent outrage (“Seriously?”) to cool resolution (“See you in court”). In many cases, grief tinged the outrage. “These blue oaks and grasslands are very personal and close to me,” says Gabrielle Katanic, a naturalist who enlightens thousands of followers through dispatches on her Instagram feed @TalkNerdytoMeCalifornia. Katanic regularly leads hikes through similar terrain in the Sutter Buttes, witnessing and sharing firsthand the interplay of the habitats’ myriad species. She got involved at Coyote Creek when Wilce, the CNPS conservation staffer, reached out to content creators like her and Jessie Dickson about joining the opposition effort. She says she eagerly supports and encourages the development of renewable energy. “But this is not the way,” Katanic says of the Coyote Creek project. “For what we gain and what we lose, this is one step forward and three steps back.”

In the end, though, what really vexed Katanic and other project opponents—and what plagues much of conservation work at the city and county levels—was the supervisors’ lack of engagement with the county residents who came out to voice earnest objections or suggest alternatives. “I sat in that room and watched 150-plus people make comments,” Katanic says. “The vast majority was people talking about the environmental impacts, the cultural impacts, and the loss to our community. Every single one of the county supervisors had an opportunity to provide feedback. Not one of them acknowledged the environmental concerns or what all of these people had been saying. It just felt so insulting. I actually went back and rewatched the recording. I thought maybe I missed it. But no—it was such a slap in the face.”

From the efforts of the Trump Administration to roll back public lands protections to those scary county EIRs, there seems to be increasing tension between conservation interests and what is presented as the public interest. Even in California, a state that has been a longtime leader in environmental protections, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has been maligned as a barrier to the development of much-needed infrastructure. Even as they often protect legitimately threatened species and landscapes, regulations are routinely assailed by liberals and conservatives alike for thwarting housing, high-speed rail, and renewable energy. Worse still, state and local ordinances for mitigating habitat removal often lack teeth, rationality, or accountability. The Oak Woodlands Conservation Act, passed by the California Legislature in 2004, was supposed to establish guidelines for protecting one of the state’s signature species. Instead, hundreds of thousands of oaks have since given their lives for development. To the extent cities and counties mitigate these losses, they often require simply planting new oaks elsewhere in place of those that are lost—a one-for-one folly by any measure, but especially at Coyote Creek.   

“Sacramento’s oak mitigation policies are not terrible when applied to the urban landscape,” Wilce says. “But they’re really designed for the smaller parcel, or for the homeowner who plans to take out one oak tree to put in a new shed or something.” The policy does refer to the replacement of canopy cover, Wilce adds, but how do you replace canopy along a creek lined with thousands of old-growth oaks? “A 16-inch-diameter blue oak is probably right in the 200-plus-year-old ballpark,” he continues. “So you cut down a 200-year-old tree and end up with 12-inch twig of a tree to satisfy your mitigation requirements?” And this only applies when state and local leaders follow the ordinance in the first place. In the case of the massive oak habitat at Coyote Creek, county supervisors exercised an “override” statement stipulating an exception to its usual mitigation policy requiring no net loss of canopy area for oak woodlands.

Leaders of the Coyote Creek opposition express cautious optimism that whatever happens there, it will result in a new, stronger ordinance to protect oaks in Sacramento County. Delfino says a working group is already evaluating how to craft an ordinance with distinct protections for oak woodlands like Coyote Creek. “It looks at not just street trees—which is what our current tree ordinance is focused on—but also at riparian forests, blue oak woodlands, and things like that,” says Witham, who is part of the working group and points to conservation easements in Butte and Tehama counties as examples of what can be done policy-wise to protect oaks.   

SMUD’s retreat from the battle at Coyote Creek may even reflect new ways of doing oak conservation in a state increasingly hostile to regulation—and where, as the recent 30×30 report shows, oaks are already at a conservation disadvantage. If sweeping policies don’t work, then perhaps micro- (or even macro-) targeted strategies will save the trees, plants, habitats and biodiversity that matter most. Those policy schisms, while wide and deep, aren’t necessarily impossible to get around.

The journey starts with the fundamental question of whether or not an ill-conceived project like Coyote Creek can even be salvaged. Mitigation and settlements, brutal as they can sometimes be, are not uncommon. Even Delfino, the environmental lawyer and advocate, initially reserved the right to compromise on Coyote Creek if the builders adopted sensible design and biodiversity protections.

“There’s a way to develop the project on the property where you could avoid the worst impacts, and sometimes that’s enough,” she says. “It doesn’t mean the project should go away. It just means you should design it better because of where it’s located and the amazing resources that are out there.” Delfino knew DESRI would need to significantly downscale the project for it to work from a conservation standpoint.“The developers aren’t interested in downsizing, so that sort of leaves you in a place where you say, ‘Well, now we just can’t let this project move forward at all.’ ”

After determining a project’s necessity, the next question is, Why here? Moving the Coyote Creek solar site to another, less pristine location was somehow a nonstarter. The conservationists couldn’t understand why, if the purpose of the project was to capitalize on open space and south-facing solar panels near easy electric grid access (also known as “gen-tie” lines), then why not build in the plentiful decommissioned farm land around Sacramento County? Witham points out that CNPS and other organizations have even supported other DESRI projects in reasonable sites with such limited environmental impacts, like a 2011 solar farm on Dillard Road in south Sacramento County. “It was dryland-farmed areas—grassland, but not high-value grassland or pristine Central Valley land. There were no rare plants, no wetlands, maybe a few scattered oak trees here and there. But essentially, it was situated in a location that didn’t have important natural resources.”

Granted, the Dillard Road project was 9.4 megawatts, less than 5% of the 200-megawatt behemoth planned for much larger Coyote Creek. But even that scale is potentially attainable with a network of solar panels over other properties where earlier resource extraction makes solar farms a viable next phase. “There’s a ton of land in eastern Sacramento County that’s been aggregate mined,” Witham says. “They have 35- or 40-foot-deep pits all over the place. Those would be great places to put solar farms.” (Dickson takes a more blunt and sweeping view of alternative sites: “Solar panels should be on every rooftop, every business, and in every parking lot before we destroy our intact heritage oak woodlands to turn them into solar farms,” he says.)

Sometimes, the best move is to persuade landowners about the ecological value of oak woodlands before developers bring around their checkbooks. At Bobcat Ranch in Yolo County, a 6,800-acre blue oak preserve overseen by the National Audubon Society, conservationists work directly with ranchers on optimizing land management for habitat health—particularly for birds and oaks. According to Matt Allshouse, conservation manager at Bobcat Ranch, owners can participate in an Audubon-led certification program that teaches best practices for prescribed grazing in oak woodlands.

“When targeted grazing can be used as a tool for ecosystem health, it can be good for not just birds but oaks,” says Allshouse, who also advises on the vital role oaks play in water conservation. “Ninety percent of the water in the Central Valley flows through blue oak rangelands. So we look at it from the water side of things: If we want more water quantity, less erosion, and more water for agriculture in the Valley, we need to focus more on managing these oak woodlands in the upper areas of the watershed.”

In the end, little moves the owners of oak habitats quite as well as money. Delfino acknowledges that the owners of DESRI’s planned solar site at Coyote Creek have evinced no interest in selling their land. But should the lawsuits, bad press, and mounting public outcry over Coyote Creek persist, a conservation easement may provide an off-ramp for both sides. “We don’t have enough money to buy all the land we need to conserve in California,” Delfino says. “So conservation easements are a really valuable tool because they can keep land in production—depending on what it is and how consistent it is with the values of that area. And then we aren’t having to pay full market value for that piece of land. A lot of times, especially with ranching, conservation easements are a good tool.”

Until then, DESRI continues to seek a buyer for its prospective power at Coyote Creek, and litigation surrounds the project from three sides: A conservation team including CNPS and the coalition group Environmental Council of Sacramento (ECOS); tribal leaders from Wilton Rancheria; and off-road recreation advocates who sued when the solar farm plan was shown to encroach on the neighboring Prairie City State Vehicle Recreation Area. Each of the lawsuits contends that the project’s final environmental impact report doesn’t meet CEQA standards. There is also the tsunami of public advocacy encompassing everyone from social media influencers like Dickson and Katanic to stalwart conservation veterans like Witham and other chapter volunteers.

“At that Board of Supervisors hearing in November, we had five hours of testimony by regular people who took time out of their day to come down and talk about the importance of oak woodlands,” Delfino says. “They said why this project was inappropriate, even though we all want renewable energy. It generated such a groundswell.”

Meanwhile, on the ground at Coyote Creek, Dickson agrees that people have the power to save this landscape. “Any situation in your local area or state where you can show up to a meeting and speak in support of those lands—it helps a lot.” He swivels and looks up Scott Road, surveying the early-season foliage of the centuries-old blue oaks in the distance. “If you wanted to learn about ecology, you’d realize everything about an oak tree is beneficial. They’re the MVPs. We’re seeing them go. But they’re the keystone species, and they need to stay.”