Dreams of undevelopment

The comeback of SLO’s ‘enviro’ kids paves the way for some interesting environmental balancing acts

BY ANNE QUINN

Let’s just imagine for a moment that San Luis Obispo County actually got rid of those pesky environmentalists back in 2005.

Glancing back from our year 2020 vantage point, things sure look different. Diablo Canyon Power Plant has just been issued a new license to continue operating for another 40 years under the moniker of a new company, Essential Gen. It throbs on the edge of lifeless seas, surrounded by a cemetery of dry casks that poke fingers of nuclear waste deep into the soil.

In nearby DREAM park, children play in a cordoned-off area. The plant site was set aside years ago as one of the last areas of public access. Here, hikers climb cliffs to overlook an iron necklace of oil rigs that spike the coast. From the peaks, hikers can see a network of highways clogged with cars linking orderly subdivisions with the industries that support them.

From the ridge, it makes for a sparkling, bright palette, this new orderly society. Shopping center nodes connect with schools, housing and work centers, and sprinkled here and there are bright red oxygen stations, where people stop to refill their canisters so they breathe more easily.

Buildings are painted happy pastels. Duke Power Plant chose magenta for its new facility. Chartreuse has emerged as a popular hue now that most trees are gone.

Ancient oaks gave way to bulldozers decades ago when transmission lines needed to be protected. When baby boomers started carting their parents off to adult day centers and more housing became essential for the local toxic spill industry, more of our leafy friends had to go.

As subdivisions sprawled farther out into what once had been wilderness areas, a logging guarantee was wedged into the Bill of Rights. It’s easier now. Trees posed such a fire danger anyway, especially once the pines succumbed to that pitch canker.

Waters still run blue, however, at the aqua-farm cineplexes where creeks are channeled into quiet pools beside 30-screen movie palaces. Here, more stable forms of fish are genetically developed. Storm runoff and excess sewage spills in the old days so contaminated fish that they couldn’t safely be eaten anymore, so creeks were dammed and fish were produced instead. The pools are surrounded by cafes, shops and cement courtyards where musicians play the latest folk-rap tunes. Everyone seems to be enjoying it all.

Private choppers land and take off north of Hearst Lodge, where green grass is said to still grow. Few are able to afford the fees at the world-renowned links perched on the famous point. Since the resort is only accessible by private planes or heliscooters, the lands set aside for public access were the closest most people could get. These were later needed for hospitals and more oxygen centers, of course, so the public open space had to go.

It is rumored that up at San Simeon Point, where presidents, corporate CEOs and movie stars play untouched by any but servile hands, there are actual trees and even ocean waves, something that nobody has seen since the sea walls went up to protect the rigs.

Things are much better now. In the past, it was all such a fight. It was hard to get anything done. Now, regulations are meant for the benefit of the people, not some stupid red-legged frog or silly snowy plover. Public meetings are much more efficient, since no one bothers to comment anymore. Actually, if you think about it, there’s not much of anything to speak about.

Our own backyard

More fearsome than frivolous, the foregoing fantasy can be taken as a warning of what happens when people don’t put their lives and their livelihoods on the line to take care of their homelands. When people become mobilized and in a tizz over moves against their treasured resources, they often are labeled as NIMBYs: not-in-my-backyard types. Well, a lot of them are just that and they’re darn proud of it.

And they’re not going away.

Gordon Hensley, environmental analyst for the Environmental Defense Center says that he is often accused of being a NIMBY. "One day I thought about it," he says, "and my reaction was, ‘So? So what? Shouldn’t I care about what happens in my backyard?’ "

Jude Rock has fought to protect her backyard – the Santa Margarita Ranch – since 1986. "Only people who truly care about where they live have the gut-level intensity to be passionate about issues," says Rock, who struggles to preserve the rural nature of her turf alongside fellow stubborn cowboys and cowgirls of the grassroots group Santa Margarita Area Together (SMART).

Armed with fists full of conservation dollars and stacks of environmental law, SLO environmentalists seemingly are always in battle with government agencies and large corporations. These protectors and preservationists put up their dukes so often that opponents say they never favor anything.

Actually, "enviros" favor many things. It’s just that what is important to them – nature – used to be free and plentiful. Now with increased pollution, overpopulation and development pressures, it’s disappearing. But not without a fight, insist the environmentalists.

Whether you like them or not, you’ve got to admit, enviros are different. Instead of flocking to Wal-Mart to holiday shop on the first Saturday in December, 60 of them gathered at the first ECO-Summit. It was unlike any other conference in memory – no one was paged, nobody yakked on a cell phone. The gathered drank Yerba-Mate and discussed the future. They didn’t sit on their laurels. They sat on cold metal chairs.

Pam Heatherington, executive director of ECO-SLO, which sponsored the summit, started things off by asking for a list of environmental priorities. Within an hour, the board was jammed with more than 80 entries. Included were marine conservation, sustainable agriculture, ridding the county of big polluters, getting a county tree ordinance with teeth, sludge, valley grasslands disappearance, and much, much more.

This bunch of NIMBYs see all of San Luis Obispo County as one big backyard – theirs. While individual energies may focus on one project or another, enviros support and champion each other because they share basic beliefs.

Land does not need to have economic value to exist. Nature is valuable by itself. Earth is a complex system that humans are not qualified to run.

Trees are not just "planks sitting on a stump" waiting to be logged, as Cal Poly forestry professor, ECO-SLO and Sierra Club board member Timothy O’Keefe puts it.

The enviro landscape is not just littered with good ideas cut down before they bore fruit. They’ve had their share of victories and painful defeats, but each defeat teaches them something new.

Mothers for Peace may have lost the battle to prevent Diablo Canyon nuclear plant from being built in the 1980s, but the organization’s members have brought back the matter afresh and are rallying now to close the plant down in 2006, when its spent fuel pools are full.

SOAR, the initiative that would have put certain land-use decisions on the ballot, may be considered one big collective failure, but enviros concentrate more on the word "collective" than the word "failure." Those in the know say there is more behind-the-scenes cooperation within the environmental community since SOAR bit the dust.

This new-found cooperation will be needed as the community gears up for its next confrontations, such as the preservation of Hearst Ranch. Many enviros believe the hard lessons gained from the fight for Santa Margarita Ranch will provide tactical advantages in the coming Hearst spread showdown.

Size matters

Most environmental battles pit Goliath-sized opponents like the Hearst Corporation against David-sized environmental groups like ECOSLO or the Sierra Club. But surprisingly, David occasionally wins. Enviros recently fought the U.S. Navy over the issue of practice bombing and won.

"We figured we didn’t have a chance," says Pete Wagner, local conservation committee chair for the Sierra Club. He credits a fierce letter-writing campaign and the support of key politicians with turning the bombers back.

Rock, who’s still "smarting" over the struggle to keep Santa Margarita rural, says the David-and-Goliath story should mean more to enviros than just a pep talk for underdogs. "David fought Goliath on his own terms. He chose a sling shot, and that’s an important lesson," she says. "Don’t use their methods. Don’t follow their ways."

"They" means the developers, the polluters, the speculators, the agents of change. They are the "X" on the other side of the land-use equation.

As SLO’s loggerhead clashes over our shared living spaces reach crescendos, there is a "hardening of the lines" between the opposing forces, says Sierra Club Board member O’Keefe. But the enviros have two laws "in their tool box," says Mindy Lorenz, managing director for the San Luis Obispo office of the Environmental Defense Center. These are the California Environmental Quality Act and the federal Endangered Species Act.

These statutes definitely help the enviros’ cause and prove quite effective in the good fight. But while going to court may be effective, it also is very expensive. Activists would rather stop a bad project in the court of public opinion and try to influence decision makers before a project is thrown into the hands and wallets of lawyers.

But some developers have become increasingly wily and PR savvy, environmentalists claim. "They are co-opting our language, and using it against us," complains Henrietta Groot, chair of the Coastal Alliance.

For example, when environmentalists hear the words "conservation easement," they get nervous. Traditionally, conservation easements are agreements brokered by organizations like the Nature Conservancy, the peacemakers in the environmental fight. These groups work with willing land owners to negotiate arrangements that protect the land and assist land owners at the same time. Rights to subdivide, surface mine or plant vineyards are purchased from willing land owners who enjoy reduced income and inheritance taxes as a result.

The Nature Conservancy has protected 19,000 acres of valuable San Luis Obispo County lands in this way. This includes 1,000 acres in the Irish Hills region, Guidetti Ranch, Cambria Coast Ranch, the City of SLO’s acquisition of Foster Ranch, and 14,300-acre South Chimineas Ranch.

It’s historically been a win-win situation, because the land owner is paid the full-appraised value of these rights and also benefits from the tax advantages, and key biological communities are preserved in perpetuity. "When it works, it’s a beautiful thing," says Anne McMahon, operations manager for the Nature Conservancy.

Still SMARTing

But that’s not what happened in the case of Santa Margarita Ranch. Santa Margarita Ranch is a bitter loss for SMART and other area environmentalists because it was supposed to be preserved and wasn’t. All 13,800 acres of oak savanna, creeks and native grasslands were willed to Stanford University by owner William Reis, who died believing that it would be preserved in its entirety. But when the Stanford was strapped for cash, it sold the land to the highest bidder – the Robertson family from Texas – for nearly $5 million.

The Robertsons saw Santa Margarita as a flat piece of land near a growing town. Santa Margarita residents saw the ranch as unspoiled native grassland and oak savanna that has been a sacred Chumash site for hundreds of years. Many residents moved to Santa Margarita because it was surrounded by the ranch and still maintained the feel of the Wild West.

The Robertson family’s plans for the ranch at first included 2,000 houses, a proposal that was out of tune with Santa Margarita, a quiet, three-block town that looks as if its stores still have hitching posts.

When Mike Ryan became SLO County supervisor of the district, he got the Robertsons, county planning and SMART representatives together and brokered a development agreement.

"They got everybody together and talked about the issues," explains Sarah Christie, now the legislative coordinator for the California Coastal Commission. "Then they said they were going to draw up an agreement that reflects what everybody said at this meeting."

SMART wasn’t so smart – in fact, Christie believes it behaved like a group of gullible rubes easily misled by cunning planning professionals. "SMART thought, ‘Well, OK, that sounds reasonable,’ " says Christie. "But what they were doing was creating a development agreement, a formal planning document."

The development agreement permitted 550 homes, but also called for a full environmental impact report and solicited from the developer assurances that the town would be provided with a sewer. According to Rock, the EIR was the reason her group signed. "We were sure that if a complete environmental impact report was done, it would show that the land could never support that many homes."

But before any EIR was done, the Robertsons sold the ranch to Rob Rossi, the local developer who had worked for the family. Rossi immediately announced that he planned to reduce the scale of development to 60 homes. (However, he has never submitted a specific plan.)

Although Rossi said at the time that he was negotiating with the Nature Conservancy, in reality, he wasn’t what the group would call a willing seller. "We were not able to agree on the terms of the project," says Kara Smith, Central Coast project director for the Nature Conservancy. "We only work with a willing buyer and a willing seller."

But Rossi’s first action was to deep rip the soil and plant vineyards, an action that spoiled any chances of a "conservation easement." (Deep ripping to plant grapes destroyed the integrity of the valley oak savanna, the key biological community that first the Nature Conservancy, and later the California Rangeland Trust, thought was worth preserving in the first place.)

Press pass

When Rossi came along, says Rock, the tenor of news coverage of Santa Margarita Ranch changed dramatically. It seemed to SMART as if the mainstream media decided that Rossi’s plans for his 60 houses, a vineyard, an equestrian center, a historic center and a conservation easement were an alternative so green that the environmentalists would jump for it and they should shut up, because their point of view was so rarely quoted.

If Rossi can win over the local press, wonders Sierra Club leader Tarren Collins, what will the owner of a vast publishing empire like the Hearst Corporation be able to accomplish? "If what [the Hearsts] want to do with their North Coast property is so wonderful, why are they hiring top PR firms to sell it to us?"

Hearst has indeed hired Burson-Marstellor, one of the biggest international public relations firms in the world, plus assorted homegrown firms like Barnett Cox and Green Car Group.

While there are similarities between the Santa Margarita Ranch contest and the Hearst’s North Coast project, there are critical differences, too. While Santa Margarita Ranch incited passion, it was mostly a local fight. The beauty of native grasslands and the mysteries that surround sacred Indian sites don’t fit easily into a sound bite.

By contrast, the future of the Hearst Ranch is being debated by conservationists all over the world. "I’ve never been associated with a project that generates as much interest as the Hearst Ranch," says the Nature Conservancy’s Smith. "The Ranch includes 18 miles of California coastline, something that is virtually unheard of anymore. There are 550 plant species on the site," Smith adds, "including five that are found nowhere else on earth."

Although the fights over Santa Margarita and the Hearst Ranch are major battles with outcomes that will define San Luis Obispo County for generations to come, neither was mentioned at the ECO-Summit. Instead the topics shouted out were signs of smaller skirmishes, more likely to engage the average eco-warrior: air-quality, MTBE, erosion, alternative energy, pesticides and steelhead trout survival.

Clearly enviros have enough work for everybody as they build a future that’s good enough for their backyard. While the battle plan calls for more intimate contests, the lessons learned are still grand. Or as Collins – paraphrasing Sierra Club founder John Muir – says of SLO enviros: "Our victories are temporary, but our defeats are permanent."

The combination of those victories and those defeats – both large and small – will decide the future of San Luis Obispo County.

Staff writer Anne Quinn has never met an EIR she didn’t like.