Good News!

Good news! U2 guitarist, and environmental criminal, The Edge, has got bad news. The California Coastal Commission has recommended against his mountain top housing development in the environmentally sensitive Santa Monica Mountains.
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Make no mistake. The Edge argues that because he only wants to build five mega mansions and that he intends to use green technology that somehow or another it's not like building 500 suburban tract houses in the valley. Actually, it's a lot worse. While much of Los Angeles is short on parkland, open space, and recreational areas, it's also true that the majority of L.A. is already developed, and the damage is already done. Too, we do need housing and and the mega developments in already inhabited areas provide homes for large numbers of middle class people who can't afford the sort of luxury that The Edge and his future tenants can. (I'm always open to class based arguments.) Greater benefit can justify some environmental compromises. Benefit for the chosen and wealthy few, can not.
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What Edgy wants to do is to build an exclusive community, which bars those not rolling in cash, by destroying a mountain ridge with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean. He wants to continue the slicing and dicing of the only Mediterranean type eco-zone in the United States. He fools himself; makes himself feel self righteous, in that he would include green building methods for his development, and that somehow that makes things alright. But, what he can't get around is the building of roads through sensitive, relatively undisturbed land, destroying something that can't only be restored through massive and expensive effort.
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Of course, the fight against The Edge's desecration of the Santa Monica Mountains is far from over. Like most developers, he'll try and change plans just enough to get a go ahead on this unjustified project. Only a Santa Monica Mountains National Park, and the purchase of The Edge's land for this new park, can save it from alteration.
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Also, Tejon Ranch National Park, an idea whose time has come.

U2 Can Be An Environmental Criminal

Even though his about face is more symbolic than substantive, I have to say I was very disappointed that Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy chair Joe Edmiston has gone from opposing a five home development put together by U2 guitarist and environmental criminal The Edge, to one of neutrality. My oh my, what a donation of $750,000 and a few trail easements can do to a man's integrity!
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In the past I've wondered about the possibility of a Santa Monica Mountains National Park that would include all of the local, state, conservancy, and federal lands within a to be determined border touching Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, to Point Magu State Park in Ventura County. And while it would very likely be impossible, and quite frankly not desirable, to include the actual beach community of Malibu, and the long established community of Fernwood in Topanga Canyon, it would be possible to stop the ever increasing march of development in the ecologically unique mountain range, by the slow, incremental acquisition of private land beyond the coast and the 101 corridor, including The Edge's ridge top monstrosity. A no vote by the California Coastal Commission on The Edge's development would be a good start.
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And while I'm on the subject of things that will probably never happen, Tejon Ranch National Park, an idea whose time has come.

Again and Again

I keep wondering about the stupidity of the average foothill dweller in Los Angeles. Year after year, there are fires, and then if we have a wet winter, the fires are followed by mudslides. In the past couple of weeks, we've seen rain storms, mud, and destroyed homes. And then the people who have lost their homes are interviewed on TV and they assure their fellow Angelenos that, yes, they do intend to rebuild, and that they will not be defeated by this bit of adversity. And then some talking head on the evening news will say, "Aren't they courageous."
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Courageous isn't the word I would use. I'd say stupid. Like it or not, there are places where people should not live. If it was just those who loose their homes that insist on building in fire and flood zones, I wouldn't care overly much. But, we spend millions of dollars defending homes from fire and mudslide and then spend even more millions trying to engineer mountain and canyon sides in a futile attempt to prevent the inevitable. It would be far cheaper and far more sensible to just buy these people out and turn the mountain sides into open space. It isn't viable to remove the entire city of Los Angeles as a defense against earth quakes, but it does make sense to buy out a few hundred or even a few thousand homes.

On the Beach

Well, it's happening again. There is a long tradition in California of developers trying to steal public land by blocking access to the general public. The beach may be free for anyone to use, but if builders block a way to sea, for all intent and purpose, that public land becomes private property.
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Today's Los Angeles Times reports a more subtle attempt at a land grab. In order to get building permits and permission from the states coastal commission, developers of a high end, gated community at Orange County's Dana Point, offered up a plan with multiple access points to the beach, as well as an inclined railway to the sea. Seems like the money men were bending over backward to insure that swimmers, and surfers could easily get to the water.
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But, things are not always what they seem. The fly in this particular ointment is an attempt to limit the hours that the public can use the beach. "Ah shucks, it's just a matter of privacy. Isn't it unfair that surfer dudes might loose their way on paths after dark and stumble onto people's lawns?" My guess is that if Headlands Reserve, the developer, is allowed to restrict access to certain hours, as time goes by, those hours will become even more restricted, with flimsier and flimsier excuses given until only the residents of the north strand gated community can get to the ocean. I understand that people who are paying millions of dollars for a home in a gated community might not want someone walking by their kitchen window with a surf board tucked under their arm, but the law has always been that public access to beaches is a right in California. It's not like the home owners didn't know, ahead of time, what came with those great ocean views.
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California has a conservancy, set up by the state, to preserve the Santa Monica Mountains; a conservancy that has been so successful that it's been able to expand its reach to other local mountain ranges. It's time that California had a similar conservancy to preserve ocean beaches, river fronts, and stream banks. It would have been far better if the Dana Point headland had been preserved as open space by such a conservancy. Too, river and stream banks, when developed, have a tendency to prevent public access and free navigation in favor of a property right that, quite often, is nothing more than a de facto land grab. I know that proposing that all ocean front property and river and stream banks should be owned by the state sounds insanely ambitious, but I would remind readers that a sizable percentage of such lands are already preserved in California's many state and federal parks, and forests.

It Never Fails

It never fails. Every year the fires come to the mountains of Los Angeles, and when the winter rains come, the denuded hillsides become rivers of mud, sliding down to the houses that we have foolishly allowed to be built in areas prone to fire and mudslide. What is new this year, is that some of the people who have lost homes are demanding to be reimbursed by the federal government because it's federal mud.
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Wow. Not too long ago I had a conversation with a young, twenty something, lady who cursed the greed and short sightedness of the baby boom generation. It was her theory that boomers were so incapable of denying themselves anything they wanted, that they had pretty much destroyed the world around them. As a boomer myself, my first inclination was to defend myself, or at the very least point to that most self mythologizing generation in American history, the sixties generation. But, I gave her complaints some thought, and then reluctantly agreed with her. For all our yammering about how much the boomer generation changed the world, we are, as a group, unable to accept that we might have been more destructive than not.
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So what does this have to do with the natural cycle of fire and avalanche in southern California? It's pretty simple really. The development of the mountains and canyons ramped up to unprecedented levels in the past 40 years so that boomers could live in pretty places with nice views. No thought was given to the environmental damage so long as some artificial sense of living with nature could be indulged. No, the federal government doesn't have a responsibility to recompense people because they made very bad decisions on where they wanted to live. We already spend disproportionate sums of the public treasury to defend homes from the inevitable wild fires and to put up barriers in a futile attempt to save home owners from mud slides. And we should. Once the zoning boards give permission to build in dangerous, though beautiful places, those homes become a joint responsibility for us all. My point is that our own stupidity is at the heart of these problems. An unwillingness to think beyond our own immediate desires.
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Santa Monica Mountains National Park. See my post of 12/23/09. Tejon Ranch National Park, an idea whose time has come.

The Edge of the Cliff, Santa Monica Mountains National Park

I always love it when major media follows my lead on something I've written. In the original version of The New Common Sense, (See my very first post for an explanation.) I wrote an attack on U2 rocker, The Edge, and his foray into real estate development. On a ridge line over Malibu, with sweeping views of the ocean, The Edge, wants to build five McMansions, albeit, according to The Edge, eco-friendly McMansions.
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The Ouch! As reported in today's edition of the Los Angeles Times, (Remember when the L.A. Times was still a major newspaper?) columnist Steve Lopez points out that if The Edge was really that concerned about the environment, he'd stay in his already acceptable Malibu home and leave the mountain tops alone. Lopez couldn't agree with me more.
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If Lopez had actually read my original post, (And I'm not egotistical enough to think that he has.) he'd join me in my call for a Santa Monica Mountains National Park. Yes, it's time to preserve the Santa Monica Mountains in a new national park. There are many reasons to go for the much stronger level of protection than the current mish-mash of state and local parks; Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy holdings; and The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. To start with, and it's the single most important reason of all, the Santa Monica Mountains are a unique eco-system, found in few other places in the world, and the preservation of such an important habitat is exactly what National Parks are for. It also makes a lot of sense for us to stop allowing people to build in areas that are prone to both wild fires and landslides. Come on people! I don't have anything against the rich, but we can't afford to keep subsidizing their crazy desire to live in dangerous places. How many years must we pay an extra hundred million or so defending high end, stand alone homes, perched high on secluded ridges, as fires rage all around them. And while we're talking class war, what's so wrong with urban adjacent national parks that can be visited by people with bus passes?
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This isn't a crazy vision for the future of the Santa Monica Mountains. Draw a map and decide what should be preserved. Of course, Malibu stays, and so does the somewhat more downscale Fernwood area of Topanga Canyon. But other than that, as properties come on the market, the Interior Department should have first dibs to match the selling price of any property transaction. It may take twenty years, and judicious use of eminent domain laws, as well as take overs of local and state parks, to complete a Santa Monica Mountains National Park, but it's a better path to take than more, senseless, development.
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And while I'm on the subject, Tejon Ranch National Park, an idea whose time has come.
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Want a good laugh? The Edge has named his five McMansions. "Clouds Rest" "Panorama" "Shell House" "Blue Clouds" and "Leaves in the Wind." There's nothing more pretentious than a rich, middle aged man who calls himself The Edge. Come on man, follow John Mellencamp's lead and use your real name.

Tejon Ranch National Park

On several occasions, in the first incarnation of The New Common Sense, I advocated for the creation of Tejon Ranch National Park. Imagine my surprise, when I read in today's edition of The Los Angles Times, Erica Rosenberg's editorial advocating for the creation of Tejon Ranch National Park.
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I'm not accusing Ms Rosenberg of plagiarizing my blog. Far from it. The fact is, I consider the reasons to purchase Tejon Ranch and preserve it as a park, so obvious, that not to come to the same conclusion can only be explained by America's insane attachment to private property rights.
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In her editorial, Erica Rosenberg stresses preservation, recreation, and the economic advantages of national parks. These are all things that I have written about in the past. There are, however, a couple of points that I think she misses about the importance of a Tejon Ranch National Park.
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In my post advocating for another Los Angeles area national park in the Santa Monica Mountains, (published on 8/7/09) I noted the importance of a broad based parks system. Gas prices may be going down as I write this, but the probability is, that as incomes continue to stagnate, or even drop, it is only a matter of time before fuel prices once again skyrocket. With so many of our parks located hundreds of miles from major metropolitan areas, with ever increasing costs for transportation and lodging, we run the risk of the parks becoming the destination of choice for an elite group of upper middle class Americans and above. National parks close to cities, connected from downtown by mass transit can open up the natural world for those people for whom it is becoming almost impossible to survive economically. I can drive to Tejon Pass in under two hours form my apartment in the Atwater Village section of Los Angeles. Tejon Pass is also close to Bakersfield. For many economically stressed Angelenos, to be able to make a round trip to a national park for half a tank of gas, or to be able to get up early in the morning and take mass transit to a national park, would open up the natural world to an economic class that is being shut out of the parks system.
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Too, isn't it about time that we start thinking about parks, not as something separate from the urban landscape, but something that is a part of our urbanized world. While most people who have never been to Los Angeles, think of L.A. as a giant parking lot, a vast paved over area, bordered by the Pacific Ocean, Los Angeles is, in fact, a city almost surrounded by wilderness. It's not just the ocean. We are bordered by several national forests, the Santa Monica Mountains, and beyond that, the desert. A national park in the Santa Monicas, thrusting into Los Angeles, with trail corridors running the length of the chain, to downtown itself, green belts along the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers, city and county parks connected with hiking and biking trails.... How many people know that the Pacific Crest Trail runs through Los Angeles County? A bike and equestrian trail runs from Long Beach harbor, one of the busiest ports in the world to the Angeles National Forest. With the right planning, it would be possible to hike from the Pacific Ocean to the national forest, pick up the PCT and walk to Tejon Ranch. With routes radiating out to the deserts, the city itself becomes a route into some of the finest wilderness areas in the United States. It is only private holdings like Tejon Ranch that stand in the way. Yes, a Tejon Ranch National Park is an idea whose time has come. It's time for a city like Los Angeles to lead the way, and integrate itself into a more natural world.
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Added Sept. 30, 2009: I went on line to get any info on Erica Rosenberg, the author of the L.A.Times editorial advocating for the creation of Tejon Ranch National Park. I can remember when I first wrote about Tejon Ranch, going on line and finding the usual corporate boilerplate about the ranch. Google Tejon Ranch National Park and the first thing that comes up is a website dedicated to park status for Tejon Ranch. Go to www.savetejonranch.org. I love it when other people come to the same conclusions I come to.

Santa Monica Mountains National Park

There was a simple story about a land dispute in today's issue of the Los Angeles Times. Judge Charles F. Palmer ruled in favor of Harry Mansdorf, a retired airplane manufacturer. Mr. Mansdorf maintained that Michele V. Giacomazza, a former business partner of his brother, Lee Mansdorf, had tried to cheat him out of ownership of 1,291 acres of land. Normally I wouldn't care about such a story, but the land is in the Santa Monica Mountains; it's still semi-wild; now that the land dispute is ended, it's in danger of being developed.

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The Santa Monica Mountains are a unique ecosystem represented nowhere else in the United States. A Mediterranean type environment, not found outside of southern Europe, is so rare, that further development should be stopped, and the land preserved in a new national park. A survey should be done identifying the reasonable extent of that ecosystem, borders should be drawn around it, and all land within those borders should, over time, be purchased and added to land already under park jurisdiction in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, combined with state, local, and Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy holdings to create such a park. The business districts, and the most heavily populated areas along the ocean in Malibu, and along the 101 freeway, as well as the long established Topanga Canyon Community of Fernwood should be excluded from purchase, but all other private holdings within the Santa Monica Mountains as well as Pacific Ocean beaches should be part of such a park.

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While preservation of a unique ecosystem should be enough, there are other reasons for the creation of a Santa Monica Mountains National Park, and one of the biggest is fire. The earliest Europeans to see southern California noted that fires were common in the Santa Monica Mountains. Whether it's dry lightning, an untended camp fire, a wind downed power line, or a discarded cigarette, the Santa Monicas burn. And when a fire starts during the Santa Ana winds, flames can travel from one side of the range to the sea in a matter of hours. Allowing people to build in an area that is prone to wild fires, and when the rains come, mud slides ,makes no sense. In the more densely populated beach communities, there is at least, the possibility of creating a defensible perimeter, but within the mountains themselves, individual homes or small clusters of buildings, built on ridge lines or canyon sides, accessible only by winding and narrow roads, presents an extreme danger to both home owners and fire fighters. And, the cost of protecting individual homes is prohibitively expensive. The cost of saving one building with fire trucks and, more often than not, helicopters or flying tankers, can cost millions of dollars, and from time to time, it can cost the lives of firemen. Several years ago there was a fire in San Bernardino county. A group of firemen died while defending a single, isolated home. The fire was set by an arsonist, and when he was captured, he was tried and convicted of murder. Had that fire been caused by a dry lightning strike, we might have asked ourselves if those fireman's lives were lost because someone wanted to live in a picturesque, though dangerous area. In the Santa Monicas, with an alternative to development, we can ask that question before the fire fighters die, rather than after.

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Our national parks are meant to be the legacy of all Americans, but as gas prices get more expensive, as admission fees increase, as the economic disparity between the rich, and, well, everybody else, widens, those parks are becoming places for people of a certain income and above. A national park, adjacent to a large urban area, returns the park experience to all. The poor, and the economically stressed middle class, may have to get up early to catch the bus or subway, but a national park in the Santa Monica Mountains, would allow them access to a natural world that is becoming a rare experience for far too many of our citizens. The idea of an urban adjacent national park is not a new one. In Ohio, Cuyahoga National Park is bordered on the north by suburban Cleavland, and on the south by suburban Akron. A Santa Monica Mountains National Park would serve citizens of the second largest urban area in the United States. From mountain ridges to Pacific Ocean beaches; from Sunset Blvd. to Point Mugu, the Santa Monica Mountains stand as one of the last great wilderness areas, close to a large city.

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We don't need to buy all of the land within the Santa Monica Mountains all at once. As land comes on the market, the federal government can establish a right to match the selling price, as the budget allows. Special tax zones within the mountains can allow people to donate land, with tax deductions worth 110, 120, or even 150% of assessed value. The creation of a new national park doesn't have to be done all at once. As soon as boundaries of what should be the park are established, we can begin acquisition, and if it takes twenty years to finish the job, so what. What matters is that a commitment be made to the preservation of a unique and valuable ecosystem.

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Santa Monica Mountains National Park, an idea whose time has come. Tejon Ranch National Park, an idea whose time has come. The expansion of Death Valley and Redwood National Parks, an idea whose time has come.