What Does Conservation Mean?

By Frank Landis, Conservation Committee Chair

Making the halfway reasonable assumption that civilization doesn’t fall apart in the next 90 days, I wanted to bring up a problem that has started cropping up this year and which, I suspect, will cause years, if not decades, of heartburn for the conservation community.

The problem is what conservation means in current politics. In the last few months, I have seen multiple examples of planners and agencies ready and willing to develop lands set aside for conservation. There seems to be a notion that lands are to be used for conservation only until a better use comes along. At that point, the conservation agreement can be scrapped and the land can be developed.

The problem is that this is the route to extinction. If 90% or 99% of a species’ habitat is destroyed, the remaining few percent have to be preserved basically forever if we are to accomplish the goal of saving that species. Unfortunately, that’s not the way politics work. If there’s a problem, generally the answer is seen to be either a compromise—something along the lines of save “half the site” and give the other half to some really important use. Or, alternatively, the politicians count noses at events or emails on topics, and go with whoever has the most, whether they make a good case or not. Or they follow the money.

As a result, we’re dealing with a number of cases where landsallegedly set aside for conservation are basically up for grabs.I’ll list a few below, but the thing to realize is that thisphenomenon is not limited to San Diego County. Right now, the Marin CNPS chapter is dealing with similar issues.

Our first big example is Otay Ranch Village 14, where CDFW proposed to give away a chunk of the local ecological reserve in exchange for land of lesser quality. The reasoning was that the exchange land would preserve the local wildlife corridor.We’re fighting this at the level of the state WildlifeConservation Board, because it’s a terrible precedent.Ecological reserves are supposedly the most protected tier ofland that CDFW owns, and they’re ignoring their own rules topush this land swap forward. If it turns out that CDFW will give up ecological reserves under pressure, basically no site owned by CDFW is safe from future development pressure. Intellectually, we’ve always suspected that this might bepossible, but to see the agency cave so readily really was disheartening. The Wildlife Conservation Board wasn’t happy about the deal either. They were going to re-hear it in late October, but that got pushed to December. We’re hoping todefeat Village 14 and decertify the EIR, of course, but part ofthis fight is to get the state to stand with Governor Newsom’srecent executive order and state that conserved means conserved, period.

A second example is Rancho Lilac, which you may have heard about a few weeks ago. This land was purchased by SANDAG as biological mitigation for development of SR-76. The dispute right now is whether the land should be assessed for biological resources, then have trails planned in areas wherethey won’t cause damage, or whether, as Sup Desmond andthe mountain biking community are pushing for, the area should be set aside for trails, and biology preserved as an afterthought. This gets at the heart of what mitigation means.It’s often honored in the breach, but the notion is that if youdamage something, you protect something else to make up for it. This only works if that something else is actuallyprotected. Otherwise it’s just damage and more damage. Unfortunately, SANDAG has decided (as of this writing) to go with the choice that gets the most emails and comments of support, not with the one that happens to follow regulations or the intent of the purchase.

And then there’s the UTC park update. I recently sat througha presentation by City of San Diego planners about what they wanted to do with the parks. One of the things they proposed was to put commuter bike trails through Rose Canyon, something they’ve also proposed for Penasquitos Canyon. The logic is that a) there are already unpaved bike trails there, and b) traffic is too dangerous for cyclists on roads, and c) we need to cut down on car traffic, so why not put more bikes in parks where they’re safe?

It was telling that, of the five plans the planner cited to govern her plan, the MSCP was not one of them. She wanted to hand-wave away the conservation issues. Fortunately, the UTC Planning Board has other ideas and provided what would politely be termed “substantial feedback” on what she needs to do.

Bikes are not impact neutral, and there’s a growing body ofresearch about all the disruptions that bikes cause to wildlife.There’s less research on the disruptions that bikes cause to plants, but people have gone back to cutting new trails on DelMar Mesa, so I think it’s a never ending problem every time enforcement lags. The bigger problem for the cyclists and the City is that parks typically are put in the worst locations. Peñasquitos Canyon, for example, floods quite regularly, and the bridges are designed to be easy to replace, not to be floodproof. It’s a horrible place to put a commuter route because bikers would be either in harm’s way or blocked during everystorm and for weeks thereafter. Unfortunately, the current crop of City planners see only blank space and underutilized trails.

This is a chronic problem, really. It’s not just about a bunch of well-off environmentalists (us) wanting our favorite birds and flowers around, it’s that San Diego desperately needs wildlands for things like carbon sequestration and flood control. That, in turn, means that the human residents need to do things like learn to make room for bikes on roads, and the planners in turn need to learn to say no to development. If you’re shaking your head that this will never happen here, unfortunately we’regetting into a time when it has to happen here if we want this city to run on something other than petroleum products and unrestrained growth. It’s not an easy choice, but that’s wherewe are.

Hopefully, you voted to help make this choice a bit easier. Please keep doing so.