The End of Southern California

by Alexander Cockburn

By the mid-nineties, Southern California's coastal sage scrub had almost disappeared; so had 97 percent of the vernal pools. Southern maritime chaparral had been reduced to 2,400 acres in the United States, with 400 of these on Carmel Mountain, just north of San Diego, just west of what is now one of the largest freeway interchanges in California. The chaparral has gone, and so, too, as a site for anything but high-priced real estate, has poor, bulldozer-carved Carmel Mountain.

So far as coastal habitat in Southern California is concerned, the destruction is virtually complete, but head south from Los Angeles, turn east after Oceanside, and head for Ramona or Julian. You'll discover that at the heart of San Diego County are mountains forming a blue wall between the coast and the deep desert. Rising to these peaks, and buffering them from the cities, are the magnificent, rolling grasslands and oak-covered foothills of what San Diegans call the backcountry; its pastures carrying not only cattle but live oak and golden eagles, profuse other bird life, and cougar. The country looks dry, but is an enormously important watershed, supplying the coastal cities with as much as 15 percent of their water.

Right now, the real estate market in California is so feverish that the big ranches are ripe targets for "development" the minute they are re-zoned out of agricultural designation and onto the open market. Given the power of the developers, this transition from cattle baronies to real estate cash should have been easy, were it not for the efforts of a small group of environmentalists. Over the past 10 years, Save Our Forest and Ranchlands (SOFAR), run by Duncan McFetridge, a woodworker living in Descanso, 40 miles east of San Diego, has been waging a stubborn campaign against the suburbanization of the backcountry. We're not talking firebrands here. We're talking League of Women Voters, surfers, San Diego Baykeeper, and assorted defenders of snakes, salamanders, lions and oaks. SOFAR put together a coalition of enviro and community groups, and sued the county for failing to protect the backcountry. In 1996, Superior Court Judge Judith McConnell found San Diego County grossly negligent and in violation of several state laws and its own environmental standards. McConnell gave tiny SOFAR authority over hundreds of thousands of backcountry acres.

Finally, earlier this year, the county came up with a plan. It assumed the destruction of all the 200,000 acres of rangelands, with division of this savaged terrain into 10- and 40-acre parcels, demurely described as small farms. This pleasing vision of mom-and-pop truck farms raising mangoes, orchids and macadamia nuts (the Farm Bureau's disingenuous version) collides with the reality that this part of San Diego County has no ground water suitable for such specialty farming, and little other infrastructure.

The real future under the county plan would be luxury ranchettes and theme parks linked by new freeways and serviced by off-ramp commerce. In other words, exactly the sort of unsmart growth that everyone from Vice President Gore to the San Diego Association of Governments has been complaining about. Not to be defeated, SOFAR and its allies brought the new plan to the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency. On March 31, Nancy Woo, the agency's regional chief, sent a letter to the San Diego County supervisors, and also to Mayor Susan Golding, advising them that the plan threatened the quality and quantity of the region's water, and would gravely affect air, endangered wildlife and open space. Woo's letter threw the county officials into desperation. It looked as though the scheming of years had gone for nought. Then, at the last minute, came an amazing gift from the EPA. Five days later, on the eve of a crucial April 5 county meeting, Woo rushed another letter to the frantic San Diego officials. She said she had misinterpreted the plan, and that her first letter should be disregarded.

In fact, Woo had not misinterpreted any significant part of the plan. But crucially, in her second letter, she did not advise the board to withhold approval pending further study. The supervisors were off the hook, and delightedly passed the amendment that could mean San Diego's backcountry will disappear into condoland, interspersed with Indian casinos. But the game is not quite over. Because the county is still under court supervision, the plan can't go ahead until Judge McConnell signs off on it.

So, here we have a major environmental disaster in the making, one that is an obvious test case for any supposed commitment by local, state and federal government to bar insane squandering of natural resources. We have county government acting as a creature of the big developers. We have a weak regulatory agency, with the nature-rapers held in check only by a stubborn group like SOFAR.

This is but one episode in a dire national story. I don't want to be construed as offering endorsement or encouragement, but what drives groups like Earth Liberation Front to court lifetime prison sentences by burning a ski-condo development in Vail, or Boise Cascade offices in Oregon? The people who drive them to it, who have them convinced that the fix is in, that the government is always bought, have been these past eight years men like Gore and Babbitt, so much more supple and therefore dangerous than Reagan's Interior Secretary James Watt, who was such a dunderhead he set back the course of environmental destruction by a decade.