By Frank Landis, Conservation Committee Chair & Rare Plants Chair
That bit of irreverence might become my theme for 2022. Environmental planning is “rocket science,” not because it involves complex equations, but because it involves planning for and managing a complex program that takes years to plan, execute, and manage. MSCPs, for example, run for 50 years, and the North County MSCP has been in preparation for almost 25 years now. Working with projects on these timespans is not simple.
In talking with today’s planners, I get the sense that a fair number of them think of their jobs as primarily reading and writing documents, mostly from a legalistic, rather than scientific, perspective. To be fair to them, when their bosses are lawyers, this is a sane approach. Unfortunately, this leads to problems in the physical world, where we need those programs to actually work.
What follows are two examples of what I mean, from issues I’m currently dealing with.
De Anza Cove/ReWild Restart
This is mixed news. On the very good side, the City of San Diego has restarted the CEQA and planning processes on De Anza Cove. January 11, they released a new plan for De Anza Cove and a new Notice of Preparation (NOP) to kick off a new CEQA process, this for a programmatic EIR. The new plan has substantially more wetland. While I’m not sure it’s quite the “wildest” plan that the ReWild coalition had put out, it’s a massive improvement from the last iteration. So, genuine kudos to the City for recognizing that they need more wetlands in that corner of Mission Bay, both to buffer the shoreline and to store carbon.
You knew the “but” was coming somehow? In this case, it’s sea level rise, which is mentioned in the NOP in the following sentence: “De Anza Natural would also include updates to the Master Plan to ensure consistency with the Climate Resilient SD Plan, and to plan for sea level rise, emphasizing nature-based solutions to climate change.” They’ve said informally that they thought it was inappropriate to put more in an NOP. Most of the environmentalists disagree, for the simple reason that ReWild has already done quite a bit of sea level rise modeling for the project site.
The hard part with sea level rise isn’t the modeling, although the acceleration of polar ice sheets breaking up suggests that, once again, our models are possibly too conservative. No, the problem instead is that sea level rise threatens the project, just as it threatens everything that happens on our coasts. In the absence of some really good planning and management, much of Kendall Frost and the new De Anza is going to be lost when it gets inundated. So long as people live nearby, it will be difficult for the marsh to do the normal thing and migrate inland, because that route is blocked by people’s yards, houses, roads, and a school.
In general, our municipalities seem to be a bit too squeamish about talking about the mess that rising seas are going to make to everything from the airport and convention center to the Del Mar cliffs. Again, this is normal human behavior, but not planning for it won’t make it easier to deal with it.
The rocket science here is working from a base of rising seas, and trying to plan out the least destructive future for the project. It’s hard, of course, but it’s less hard than pouring money into building a marsh, only to have it predictably scoured away because attempts to do better were blocked by cautious politics and popular inertia.
Organic Waste Composting
If you live in San Diego County, you’re either already doing it, or you soon will be—notionally putting all your food and garden waste in a green bin for composting, to keep it out of landfills.
On one level, this is a necessary thing. Landfills with decaying organic matter have the bad habit of generating methane, which is a serious greenhouse gas. Worse, even though landfills have collection pipes to collect the gas and pipe it off to do something with it, the decomposition of garbage slowly warps collection grids until they spring leaks. Worst of all, methane is far from the only gas landfills emit, and it often costs more than the methane is worth to filter out all the contaminants and sell the methane. So, slowing methane production from landfills is a good thing.
If only it were that simple. Here’s the rocket science part. We’ll start at your end. Perhaps you, like me, have a compost bin? A worm bin? Excellent. So…what currently goes into your greenwaste bin? Palm leaves? Well, no, those used to be trashed, because they don’t compost well, but…Basically my green bin gets all the stuff that I don’t feed the worms: wood, tough and/or poisonous leaves, weed seeds, infected plant material, fibrous grass, all the annoying stuff. Multiply that by a county and it looks like the composters are going to have some fun getting it all to break down. That’s even ignoring the 1 percent of us, the [expletive deleted] who throw their trash in green bins, so the greenwaste stream needs a modicum of sorting, to keep the used needles, pesticides, and batteries out, if nothing else.
Unfortunately, it gets worse. There are a fair number of weeds (like cheeseweed, Malva neglecta), pests, and pathogens whose propagules pass intact through even hot composting. Because of this, compost made from promiscuously collected trash, compost that is in turn spread promiscuously throughout the County (and beyond), has real potential to be an ongoing superspreader system for any species that can survive the trip.
Previously, the California Department of Agriculture had a strong compost certification system to help farmers control the spread of pests through compost. Unfortunately, I don’t see them anywhere in this new system. And I’m not sure what anyone’s going to do about it. The County staff in charge get a bit of “deer in the headlights” look when this comes up, which is rarely a good sign.
Here we are getting to something that’s as complex as rocket science. On one side, we absolutely do have to get our methane emissions down as far as possible. On the other, at least one-third of California counties are under agricultural quarantine for pests, so it requires only a minimally dismal imagination to wonder how much further these will spread under the new system. Trying to compost huge quantities of waste and keep that waste even minimally safe for use is not easy. I sincerely hope our best and brightest take a swing at trying to make it work.
I could go on, but hopefully this makes the point. We really do want smart, skilled planners, people who know the science and can deal with the politics. San Diego is complicated and takes time to learn. We do need to hire the best, and we need to keep them here. That may require its own administrative rocket science.