By Frank Landis, Conservation Committee Chair & Rare Plants Co-chair
A short August daydream, for once. I thought I’d contemplate what San Diego might look like in 2035 if we actually manage to decarbonize our county in the next 14 years, as the Board of Supervisors hopes to do.
That means, as a start, few or no fossil-fuel powered cars. Every vehicle on the road will be electric. There will be more mass transit. The coaster train will run through a new tunnel that goes under Del Mar and out through…um, to be determined, but the old rail bed will be parkland crumbling onto the beach below.
New multi-story residential buildings will be going up throughout the existing urban areas, and the hot views (literally—it’s going to be hotter) will be from the penthouses. There will be fights over shading and solar panels, and everybody will be an expert on how big their solar panels need to be to power cars, and jealous of anyone casting shade.
We will be experimenting with urbanizing native trees. Perhaps we will find out that Torrey pines grow great in parts of Barrio Logan, and these beautiful San Diegans will start to signify the region as a whole, not just the wealthy coastal enclaves. Do we even know where they’ll grow in the city, or have we always just assumed?
We will all be in the business of rescuing oaks from shothole borers. There will be a massive program on to plant coast live oaks wherever they will grow. We know that most will die when they get big enough to support the boring beetles, but in the meantime, they will house and feed multitudes of birds. As the beetles hit, we’ll find which oaks resist them the best. We’ll use the acorns of the resistant oaks to provide the next generation of coast live oaks, and thereby help them become more resistant, generation by generation, people and trees growing their futures together.
We’ll make our cities more permeable to wildlife by native gardening. But the new gardens will be less about big suburban and rural spreads, and more about pocket gardens that support not just monarchs, but insects of all kinds, from steel-blue cricket hunting wasps to the little moths whose caterpillars are baby food for songbirds. Bug will be desirable, and yellow “bug lights” will be normal.
In the canyons, Canyonlands and CNPS will have persuaded city stormwater divisions to start using gabions and willows to manage stormwater flows, rather than just concrete channels, and the beaches downstream will be a bit cleaner. There may even be talk of reintroducing beavers to San Diego, where they used to live 150 years ago. They would really rewild the creeks.
Further afield, some farmers will be growing white sage and buckwheat on their dry slopes, to meet the demand for honey, honeybees for their remaining orchards, and sage smudges for the worldwide market. Some farmers will have restored wildflower meadows and chaparral. They will make money by sequestering carbon in the soil, and also by supplying native seeds to the still-growing native plant horticulture industry.
Further out still, the houses will be more fire-hardened, with water tanks, under eave sprinklers, and three-zone landscaping the norm. CalFire and the environmental community will have a working détente around the landscaping in the high fire zones, based on tested standards for creating and caring for ignition-resistant landscaping. Which will be mostly native plants.
Sound like fun? I hope so. It also sounds like a lot of work. But if you notice, there’s a lot for everyone to do. Gardening with natives in small urban spaces, figuring out where trees will grow in the cities, solving the fire issues. Helping farmers to make the farming natives profitable.
And how to do this all while eliminating our emissions of greenhouse gases? It’s a tall order. It would have been better if we’d started 20 years ago. But we still have a few years. If we all get working, there’s less for any one person to do. I can dream. Can you?