Photo: Benno Hansen, https://flickr.com/photos/13948420@N00/33386724493
By Frank Landis, Chair Conservation Committee
This is one of the harder columns to write. No, I haven’t been through a personal tragedy, it’s just that the mess that started January 6th makes it hard to write about local environmental politics. The NGO Global Witness regularly reports on how many environmentalists were assassinated worldwide. In 2019, 212 people lost their lives doing some version of what I do for CNPSSD. I’m glad we live in a country where I can be active in local politics, trying simply to speak for the plants, and not worry about being arrested, assaulted, or disappeared. It’s unsettling to realize that this is more a privilege than a right, that it doesn’t come for free, and that quite a few people in this country want otherwise. Hopefully, when you read this in a few weeks, it will be all over except the trials, and we’ll be trying to work out a new normal where the politicians actually deal with COVID-19 and climate change.
That said, there are a lot of local issues, including one last big development in Escondido that you’ll hear more about as the spring progresses. That development is Harvest Hills, formerly Safari Highlands. Since the Escondido city council is now majority-Republican, we can expect it to come up for a vote (and probably litigation) later this year. It’s yet another leapfrog sprawl that impacts rare plants and animals, puts the people who would live there in heightened wildfire danger, and contributes to climate change. To paraphrase MLK, I have a dream that one day we won’t have to deal with these anymore, because developers will have found something better to do for a living. But that time is not yet.
There are other issues on the horizon. Unfortunately, all of them overshadowed by probable financial shortfalls inflicted by the pandemic. There’s a lot to do, and it’s unclear how it will all get done. When you see the list of things new leaders want done, remember this.
High on that list is the County Climate Action Plan. We can hope this will actually reduce emissions, but getting there will take some hard decisions. The big issue is that the County needs to reduce emissions within its own borders. Generally, that means some combination of getting everyone to drive less (our major emissions category), use less gas to do everything else, build differently, and figure out ways to get carbon out of the air, all inside the county. This last has doomed the last few CAPs, because it was always easier to assume that we could pay someone else to take care of our carbon for us while we went on with business as usual.
That option—carbon offsets—has always been problematic, because the world doesn’t have enough carbon sequestration capacity now and it will have less in decades to come. Buying someone else’s share doesn’t solve the problem, and not getting scammed on the investment is even problematic.Unfortunately, San Diego doesn’t support rain forests full of carbon-hungry trees. With our dry, fire-prone climate, we’re very unlikely to sequester as much carbon as we currently generate. Figuring out how to reduce and sequester our emissions will take some real thought, honesty, management, innovation and above all good science. That’s a tall order for governments plagued by high turnover and bureaucracies that prioritize politics.
Science also shows up increasingly in park planning, including the new-ish field of recreation ecology. Those of us dealing with park issues, especially the increasing pressure for more trails, have been learning about recreation ecology, which as a field studies the impacts of recreation on the natural world. Unfortunately for all of us, it turns out that recreation, especially mountain biking but also hiking, has serious negative effects on both plants and animals. We already know about the negative effects on plants—people damaging them, introducing weeds, and lighting too many fires. Unfortunately, it turns out that there are serious impacts on animals, too, as human recreation disrupts the activities necessary for them to survive and reproduce.
Right now, in the County and various cities, there’s a politicalpush on (yes, largely by the mountain bikers) to make more trails, more parking areas, and more bike transit corridors. This sounds superficially great, but the negative impacts are already obvious to those of us working and volunteering in parks, that this will make a hell of a mess.
The problem is convincing the planners of this. I’ve now heardmultiple plans, including the City Parks Master Plan and theproposed new park by Wright’s Field, that focus exclusively onhaving parks provide amenities for humans. The MSCP, to the extent they’ve heard of it, is now considered a trivial hurdle to be overcome during the CEQA stage, not a fundamental agreement that both City and County have pledged to uphold for another 25 years to keep species from going extinct. They’re no longer using it in the planning process, and we’re rushing tore-educate them about its importance.
This isn’t just a matter of producing good science, because to behonest, most of the decision makers have no idea how to interpret the data and little apparent interest in doing so. For example, one current park planner specializes in transportation planning and is a recent transplant from the Midwest. They have little biology background and probably didn’t know that San Diego County has at least as many native plants as their entire home state did. To them, parks were blank spaces on the map that provided convenient places to put bike paths. As another example, the planners of the park adjacent to Wright’s Field took the public requests to have “nature” in the park as an excuse to design an artificial playground with imported logs and rocks for kids to climb on. Worse for native plants, they plan to have the park serve as a massive terminus (up to 100 parking spots), for people to drive in and bike on Wright’s Field, which is an ecological reserve. Wright’s Field was never supposed to be a destination playground for that many people, and it’s not clear how much of it would survive that much traffic.
To repeat the refrain from last month, conserved has to mean conserved. It seems we will have to struggle with this going forward. We will need to demonstrate, repeatedly, that conserved spaces are not blank spaces on the map waiting to be used, but full spaces that will be degraded and broken by careless overuse and lack of real care. This, unfortunately, is part of the bigger struggle we’re engaged with right now, overprivilege and greed right in our society.
Another place the science needs to go is into creating north and east county MSCPs. I hope they can, but in reading the proposal, I had a few big concerns.
One is that the MSCPs will not cover all rare species. The North County plan will only cover a few dozen, because the plan is being pitched as a way for the County to meet its obligations under the Endangered Species Act, not as a way to protect everything. Species stuck along the North County coast, in particular, won’t be covered, so we’ll have to protect those in parcel-by-parcel struggles.
A second problem is that the developers want a “no surprises”rule. There is no mention of climate change, and this desperately needs to be in the contract, because circumstances for both wildlife and developers are going to change wildly. The developers still think they can develop the Merriam Mountains and other places. Instead, they’re going to have to go trulycarbon neutral and fire safe, a combination that rural sprawl developments are uniquely unsuited for. No one is ready for this future, yet we’re still trying to build an MSCP by compromise. It will be interesting, and I hope that sciences like recreation ecology aren’t a casualty of the negotiation.
In all of these, science matters. This isn’t a plea to fund studies and wait for the answers. Far more, it is recognizing, after decades of people believing they could choose their own reality, that there is an objective reality that we’re at the mercy of. We very much have to take care of the systems that support our lives and livelihoods, or they fall apart. These systems include our democracy, our politics, and the natural world that provides clean air, drinkable water, plants, fungi, insects, wildlife, and all the other parts of a beautiful, meaningful world that should notbe subsumed under some planners’ ugly rubric of “ecosystem services.” If they only understand built environments, it’s high time they learned about the other 90% of reality.
We have a lot to do. Stay safe.