Is this Nature's way of sending a message?

I had started out six weeks ago to write about Earth Day: how well I remembered that first one in 1970, and how far along we have come since those days. But then came the news of the oil spill in the Gulf — no, let us never again use BP‘s jargon and call it a mere ‘spill;’ this one is a catastrophe. I can hardly bear to read the daily news, much less view that 24-hour footage from the sea bottom; it hurts too much. Instead, I reflect on the irony of it all: was this Nature’s way of sending a message?

The accident which led to the catastrophe DID happen on Earth Day… but no one then had yet sensed the enormity of the tragedy as it was to unfold. So I cast away the Earth Day motif and started a rant about catastrophe and its likely consequences. Unsatisfied that I didn’t understand it well enough yet, and also because of a lot of traveling, I waited. I’m glad I did.

Now five more weeks have passed. Can anything good at all come out of all this? In the end, yes.

It sure doesn’t seem so at this moment. BP’s latest effort — that ‘junk shot’ (what a choice of words!) has failed, so in a few more days they’re gonna try another cap…. and in a few more days after that… well, who can say?

“We’re preparing for the worst,” says Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security. But what does that mean? To her it means they will finally have those ‘relief wells’ drilled by late August.

Late August? In the meantime, 10-40,000 barrels a day gushes from the seabed of one of the most wildlife-rich bodies of ocean anywhere on earth. In my darker moments I think other thoughts: hurricane season is almost upon us, and this year they are predicting over a dozen — even only one of which is certain to drive that oily mess far far up into marshes and bays all along the Gulf.

St. Joseph Bay from Old Shoe Woman's Photostream

And beyond those places too, dreadful as that is to contemplate.

Oil rainstorms? Why hasn’t anyone mentioned that? Does anyone really believe that a strong hurricane won’t pick up at least some of that oil and rain it down on inland cities and towns, farms and forests? Since the tail ends of these hurricanes often sweep up well over a thousand miles into Ohio, New Jersey, Washington, DC, what about all the other places in its path? I myself have lived through the floodings and intensely stomy aftermaths of at least two dozen such Gulf Hurricanes in my own lifetime.

Hurricane Ivan (www.noaanews.noaa.gov/.../ivan091304-2015z.jpg)

The worst? I give credit to BP for doing all it can now (after failing miserably to even consider a backup plan before they drilled); but the horrible fact is that no one really knows, not down this deep. One of the many anonymous phone calls I have received recently is from a person who says he worked out there on those deep-ocean rigs: “they’ve pierced the mantle,” he says. “They deliberately went farther that they were allowed, to get at a larger pool of oil…”

Well, I hope he’s wrong; but even if it’s not like that, it is an awful event already, and it is out of control.

In another darker thought, I envision a world about six-10 months from now where it is still not controlled, and at least half of the Gulf is now an oil lake, spreading across to the Carribean and already flooding up the Gulf Stream.

I read my history and science books, and in their pages there is much talk of seminal, earth-changing events and/or human-history changing events – phase transitions they are called… where the cumulative impact of human events (or accumulations of materials, like snow in an avalanche — or oil gushing into the ocean) is so huge, that a cascade of unforeseen consequences suddenly flows therefrom. And nothing is ever the same again.

Can this be us?

So, people ask me what — if any — good, can come out of all this, whether they finally stop it  next week, or maybe not until next year?

I say yes — and in at least five different yet related ways, each of which can result in much good for our common future. They are:

1. The destruction of Big Oil’s credibility. They can still afford to hire all the lobbyists they want, and thanks to the Supreme Court’s holding allowing them to spend all they want influencing elections (see my last blog)… but few will believe them, no one will ever again easily accept their promises that they are so technologically advanced that oil drilling — on land or in the sea — is ‘safe.’

Which means that we have a breather, a pause, in industry’s headlong drive to grab all the public lands and waters they could and make them their private property, for all intents and purposes. Not only are fragile offshore areas now politically safe from exploitation for an indefinite period, but so also are beautiful and precious places on land — such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the Canyonlands park region in Utah, for example.

Sure, Big Oil and its bought politicians will continue to argue that: ‘well, if we can’t go offshore, then let us do it next to or in (as in the case of the Arctic Refuge) protected Parks, because we promise it will be safe, this time.’

Yeah, sure. I don’t think the American people will buy that. The very least that will happen is some kind of indefinite moratorium on new oil leasing anywhere, and after that, a much stronger, safer (and more enforceable) regulatory structure and future leasing regimen.

Republican National Convention 2008 (www.treehugger.com/galleries/drill-baby-drill)

2. It shuts up the “drill baby drill” crowd and all the politicians who supported them That phrase was mostly intended, anyway, as a contemptuous in-your-face slap at our environmental laws and the people who support them. Now it is a happy thing to savor their deafening silence — and total loss of credibility, loss of whatever political clout they may have thought they had, to give away & destroy the public’s natural treasures.

3. Best of all, these two political factors, stemming directly from this tragedy, gives our nation the time it needs to reassess: just where MUST (not can) we go from here? Already even some conservative politicians and pundits are slowly agreeing that we had to get away from our petroleum addiction, but they argue that would take many decades… so let’s keep drilling in the meantime.

Now we have all seen what a dirty and messy, life-destructive, toxic business, is this oil drilling, especially in places where we are trying to expand it in North America.

4. Thank God that this disaster did not occur in already leased areas in the stormy icy seas off of Alaska and in the Arctic Ocean itself. Can anyone imagine what that would be like?

If they cannot control a gusher in the relatively friendly waters and population centers of the Gulf of Mexico, what would be the consequences of a similar catastrophe near the North Pole, where most of our weather is made, and the climate already warming with an accelerated vengeance?

5. If this isn’t a teachable moment, I don’t know what is. For better or for worse, we humans seem to learn the most — and to react the best — to disasters like this. After all, it was only when the terrible dust storms of the Dust Bowl era blew the stuff right over New York and Washington in 1934-35, that the Congress took action to stop it — not before, despite all the warnings.

Dust Bowl 1930s (static.howstuffworks.com/gif/dust-bowl-cause-)

Now it is so obvious that we must have a real energy policy and program to implement it — a whole new way of dealing with the problem, one which at last really drastically reduces our dependence on petroleum… and just as drastically reduces our overall electricity consumption. That means a carbon tax, higher taxes per gallon of gasoline, a crash national program to invest in renewable energy sources, especially solar and wind — and NOT, for Pete’s sake, so-called “biomass” which will simply burn up more of the wood products which fertilize forests, and put even more CO2 into the atmosphere — the stupidest idea around in a long time.

These, and other non-coal and oil energy sources — will have have their controversies and tradeoffs too, but I have faith (born of long experience) that the good sense of the American people and our innate love for our land, will see to it that we will, now and forever after, have much stronger controls and a much more transparent decisionmaking process…so that whatever happens, it can never be as bad as this time, never again.

Obama on Science Education (www.edweek.org/.../01/20/18stem_ep-2.h29.html)

For President Obama, certain now to get the ‘blame’ for not doing enough (usually coming from those same Republicans and Libertarians who have told us for 30 years that the government is the problem, not the solution), this disaster has brought about a unique opportunity — and an eminently actionable one. In the scary depths of this disaster — which has exposed our national weakness and addictions like no other, yet has also muted the political opposition to strong and meaningful measures to kick our habit — we can see the seeds of rebirth, of something much much better, certainly much more sustainable for us and our national life together.

So on into the future — we CAN do it!

Technorati Tags: "drill baby drill", Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Big Oil, biomass, British Petroleum, Canyonlands National Park, carbon tax, Dust Bowl, Earth Day, energy lobbyists, environmental disaster, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf Stream, Janet Napolitano, junk shot, LIbertarians, oil drilling, oil rain, oil spill, petroleum addiction, renewable energy sources

Marching Brass Band from Jiformales-Im Back

Dear Friends: sorry about my long absence, which will not happen again. So much to share, in these challenging times. And also, so many positive ways to deal with them and to keep moving forward. That’s what I”ll be writing about.

 First Up – a scarcely believeable recent Supreme Court decision, holding that the richest, non-human, (corporate) sector of our society has the same “political free speech”  as we ordinary humans enjoy.

That ruling was a real heart-stopper. Almost as if in answer to every land-plunderer’s prayer, the Supremes announcng that not only did corporations have the same rights to free speech as individual American human beings… but also, and therefore, they had the ‘right’ to pour any amount of money they pleased, anywhere and anytime, into the election campaigns of “their” candidates.

 Not to mention afterwards, when they can —  openly and legally now – spend more millions on lobbyists – to ‘inform’ those they helped elect exactly how they will be ”expected” to vote on legislation affecting that company. No more restrictions; gone are the former checks and balances.

This is “paid speech,” not free speech. No matter how much the Court’s bare majority pretends that corporations are now legally ‘people’  at election-time, they  still aren’t.  Just aren’t.

I will support any and all efforts to undo this tragic and harmful decision.

75 Wall Street from SheepGuardingLama

But for now, there it stands – and it is not happy news. Certainly not for those of us who love our natural world and daily strive to protect it, pass it on into our common future. Why? Because the corporate sector controls most of the money in our society: from Wall Street to land developers to Big Oil and Big Coal and Big Timber (and all the rest)… these are the most well-fed Golden Geese of our times.

They have the money, and they have the motivation –  to elect “their” people, who will vote any way they want. Just like the robber barons of the 19th century, who bragged openly about their “bought Senators”.

Piles of Money (IronRodArt-Royce Bair)

Now it seems as if  those Bad Old Days  may have returned. Can you imagine what any developer who wants to exploit just about anything — prized open spaces, endangered species habitats, unlogged ancient forests, prisitine shorelines – will now do if a strong conservationist attempts to run for City Council, much less Senator? No more limits; the floodgates have been opened, wide.

They have the money to do all these things, and they have more of it than any other part of our society. Many, led by their trade association, the National Chamberof Commerce, have long lobbied to get rid of pesky laws like the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. No matter that all those (and many similar) laws — enacted by huge bipartisan majorities and supported overwhelmingly in every poll of public opinion –  have, for four decades, assured the American people that we will  always have a beautiful heritage to treasure, and a clean environment in which to enjoy it in. The National Chamber of Commerce crowd has always had the wherewithal to go after our conservation laws, and the precious places they defend; now they also have the  legal go-ahead to, well, — go ahead. Full steam ahead.

And as now seems obvious, they “have” the Supreme Court too; the other day I read a far-right website which bragged about  how they can’t wait to get their own anti-endangered species case up before those right-leaning  jurists, who now are the majority.

 This is how it all seemed, as the first wave of shock and anger washed though and over me. “Now what? Can it actually come to pass that most of what we have fought for and protected over the past two generations could be ripped away? Whenever there is a political struggle over these issues, ‘our side’ can never hope to match the  money-power of ‘their side.’ Never has, never will.”

Old Growth Forest cut. (from Umpquawild)

 
So have I pondered… yet, as the shock (if not the anger) of the travesty wears away, I have begun to have some positive thoughts.  This is a bad thing, yes; it is especially harmful to the rule of law and the predominance of citizen democracy in our country; more corporate dominance in our politics seems inevitable. But will it necessarily be as bad for some of our other values, or all that destructive of the precious and loved places of this American Earth… or of that  strong web of laws, so carefully constructed over the years, to protect them??

I no longer think so, despite the extra empowerment to many anti-environmental interests now granted by the Court. We have our great strengths too;  they are still with us, and within us. All we need to do is take another look at ourselves, and to recall  the odds we have faced in other times; to remember other challenges which many then thought could not be overcome — but which were surmounted anyway. Our movement has had a long and courageous history of succeeding, anyway.

Remembering that strong past can now inform and guide the stressful present. So let’s have another look at these strengths.

 1. We’ve already been here. Money, lots of money, spent to fight against environmental protection, has always been the norm. Whenever there’s been any kind of legislative/political campaign to save any park, wilderness area, open space, or pass any environmental law, the “big money” has always been on the other side. Always.

So what’s new? There’s just more of it now. But  we’re used to it — that has always been part of our experience.

 2. We win anyhow. More doesn’t mean better. If it did, there would be very very few National Parks, Wilderness areas, protected coasts and wetlands… because those who fought to save them in previous times faced the same money-power.  And won.  So can we. We must continue to be creative and nimble, and always seek the best ways to go straight to the people. They are with us still, as they have always been.

 3. Corporations are not monoliths. Sure, the Chamber of Commerce types are almost always going to be financing politicians who oppose environmental values and concerns. But there are many other companies out there which need and want a beautiful and clean environment. Their employees want these things too, as often do the businesspeople who lead them. We always neeed to keep searching, but this large segment of corporatedom can be allies; they can — and already have –donated money to the hundreds of land trusts which are buying conservation areas around the country.

4. Our strongest — and most permanent – strengths are still there, as potent as ever: 

— The people themselves. Most Americans, deep inside, love this land – their land. If that was not so, we would have scarcely any protected lands at all, much less tough, stringent laws. Despite fierce opposition when they were established, and dozens of attempts  to repeal them since,  they have only been strengthened. This because it is the people themselves who demand no less from their politicians.

— Love of place. There is a growing literature on this subject now, but we in the

Wagon Wheel Park dedication, Colo...(Orange County Archives)

— Us. We who are committed to be active in the cause of rescuing all we can of the natural treasures of our Nation,  seem to have a very special  resource upon which we can always draw: ourselves. 

To me, this quality is expressed in three special ways: 1st,  that we have love — for what we seek to protect; 2nd, that we have the inner courage it takes to stand up and fight for that place or that law, whatver it takes; and 3rd, that we have the staying power to continue, for as long as it takes.

I know these special attributes to to be so, because not only have I witnessed them continually over the past forty years, but I see them today, now too. Every day (for example),we read about some New Jersey town  taxing itself to purchase open space; a local group rallying in Florida to protect an endangered species; someone  appealing a damaging logging operation in the Northwest;  others in someone’s living room in Maine (or Arkansas),  strategizing how to protect a special precious place. These, and the thousands of other actions like them, are spontaneous,  never ending, and occur everywhere. And as we know from the recent Ken Burns series on “America’s National Parks — Our Best Idea, ” so it has been in our country for over a hundred years. 

I have a word, and a phrase for all this. The word is “The Beat” – meaning the daily, and unending actions of Americans who love their land and want to protect it. And the phrase is ”The Beat Goes On.”

That’s what we have right now; that’s who we are. No ruling of any court, no money, or extra money, can ever buy this. That’s why all that new money won’t make much, if any, difference.

The Beat goes on… and on; and cannot be stopped.

Technorati Tags: big money, Big Oil, citizen democracy, clean air act, clean water act, developers, endangered species protection, grass roots action, National Chamber of Commerce, Supreme Court, Wall Street

Reactions and Comments on the Above, By Brock Evans

Petri Dish (courtesy Pacific Northwest National)

Well yeah, this is interesting to read — of course sobering too — but is it really anything new, anything different, from what we — in our movement and many others — have been saying/warning about for the past half century at least?

Having worked my way through law school mainly by emptying thousands of those culture-dishes at a dental lab, I do believe I can say with a bit of authority that those critters (a) had no other mission, let alone other ‘thoughts’ about their existence; and (b) no apparent means to even try to change things, even if they wanted to.

My zoology is poor and my sense of the working of ecological principles not much better, but aren’t there also examples of mammals (or other life-forms) who deliberately (and inherently, via their own inner biological mechanisms) have fewer offspring when they sense overcrowding of a survival habitat?

That said, and whether or not, I still believe that we humans are in a somewhat different position and on perhaps a somewhat different plane than was alluded to in Albuquerque:

First, because we know, from what we see all around us, what is happening;

Second, because of that fact alone, we conservationists have, already and often, taken on that consumer-god… and fought it to a standstill in over a century of struggles to reserve lands, habitats, and specific life-forms, from forests to oceans, rare desert plants to mollusk-conserving rivers, salmon to spotted owls, and thousands of others.

Spotted Owl (Athena brama) courtesy of Saran Vaid

And we had to fight to do it, didn’t we? There are some exceptions, but please no one tell me or any of you other veterans out there that it was easy, or that the 200+ million acres we now have, off limits to “consumers” (in this country alone), was just a ‘token,’ not worth anything anyhow… if that was so, why did the whole ‘other side’ — mainly producers, or wannabes, of consumer goods –fight us so hard, just about every time?

That’s 200 million + acres to not be consumed so easily. As I said in my first blog, “If Money was Everything We’d Have Nothing.”

Third, “we” — meaning ourselves, and people like ourselves, and nearly all scientists and thinking people in the medical profession, plus many powerful political figures — are also aware, and are trying to shift, change, turn things around, or at least slow them down. 

This isn’t the 1960s, when no one could even pronounce ‘ecology’ correctly; not even the 80s, when (just after the coldest East Coast winter in a century I recall), a few were already sounding the warnings about global warming. It may not seem so, but we have come a long way towards understanding the problem and its causes — and its solutions. We’re not starting from zero, thank goodness.

Can we succeed? Will it be ‘enough,’ even if we do the things, take the necessary measures, to change? I don’t know. But such doubts and wonderings are no reason to ‘go home’ and just quit. We’ve got to try — and that’s a part of being human too: staying our moral/mental ground, fighting on, no matter what someone else says the odds are. Raise your right hands, anyone who has ever embarked upon a great cause — a campaign — who was not assured that to proceed was ‘hopeless’ at the time we started forth.

Fourth, it is still a beautiful planet; waves still crash on wild beaches, somewhere (actually many ‘somewheres’); the late afternoon breezes still sigh through the forest trees down by a river somewhere… and while many species are in trouble to be sure, we do also have truly moral, and noble, laws — the strongest our ‘consumerist’ political system can invent — e.g., an Endangered Species Act, a Wilderness Act, and others — to rescue them as long as the will is there. And we have never shrunk from a single battle yet, have we, dear friends?

So whatever the outcome finally is, I don’t think the whole of human society — the thinking part of human society at least – is, any longer, on such a bad track of ignorance and denial as these speakers seem to be telling each other.

No, it’s not enough. Yes, we’re just beginning when we should have been going full tilt to turn things around, starting at least 30 years ago. And yes, as long as we’re alive and as long as we love the natural world which sustains us, mentally and physically, we’re gonna do the very best we can — aren’t we?

And, speaking for myself, gonna take pleasure and pride in every acre, every species that we still can shove on into the future, to live and survive into another, hopefully more benign, time.

Entrance to Hoh Rainforest Olympic National Park

Brock

PS: those ecologists, who obviously know and see so much more of the world in which they work than I do, still do seem to be a bit deficient in their knowledge of history, perhaps among other things. For example, the political notion that “the government and economists” made a deliberate decision right after World War II to shift all those weapons factories to producing consumer goods…

They must mean us, because just about every other country in the world was shattered, and in ruins, not to mention 50-100 million dead — at the end of WWII. But the implication that The Powers That Be Somehow Deliberately Planned This, and somehow made it happen, like Stalin might try to do, demonstrates much more than a considerable ignorance of the whole structure and dynamic of our society at the time. By implying that we didn’t start being a consumer-driven society until then, it totally ignores the constant striving of so many Americans, in or out of government, throughout the whole 19th/early 20th century, from the Railroad and Robber Barons to the Gilded Age to Henry Ford and his car for the masses, to boost ‘consumerism’ without a thought for much else. What we see today is not new to us, I’m afraid… or to few other cultures worldwide.

So as I see it, the difficulties now before us, serious as they are, are nothing new. They are certainly vaster in scope and therefore much more potentially dangerous to our planet, to all we cherish, and to our own existence as well. But we still have the ability to think about it — and we are; we still have the capacity to act to stop or slow it — and we are; and we still have, I say, a duty, we who care, to do all in our power every day, to rescue every species and every acre that we can. Which we are also doing, every day.

And if we continue to do so, then perhaps — just perhaps — the sum total of all these thinkings and all these actions, now continually happening under the radar, all around us, just might produce a better surprise for the generations which will follow us than we now believe.

Brock Evans

President, Endangered Species Coalition

blogsite: endlesspressure.org

Technorati Tags: conservation history, Consumption, destruction of nature, global warming, hope for the future, Olympic National Park, Petri Dishes, Sprawl

Dear Reader:

This past May I experienced the great happiness of attending my Princeton, Class of 1959, 50th Reunion. This feeling  comes not just from the pleasure of being still around to take part in the festivities – and in good health too… but also because of the opportunity it offered to reflect on my life up to this time.  In other words, to anwser that age-old question: How Did I Get To Here?

The Essay below , written for the Yearbook,  answers that question. It’s all about taking risks, plus the great opportunities — and huge rewards – that can come to us if we do so.

                                                Life, the Journey

 Sure, it’s a cliche; but that’s only because it’s so true. It has certainly been so in my own life. The important thing I have learned is to just set out – begin it.

 Just go – take a direction not fully planned out… walk down a path that seems interesting to you. I have, and I have been constantly amazed at what always happens next: new people, new ideas, and new opportunities never imagined before.

 I think I first learned the power of these truths during my years at Princeton. It was a very big risk,  for me – the first of my family to ever leave Columbus — to even go there at all, on this my first ‘journey.’ Especially since “there” meant not just the University, but The Whole Thing: the East Coast, that “Teeming East,” as I called it. All those people and all those cities, all those cars whizzing about on newfangled roads called “freeways.”

 And all these new experiences and people and ideas played out against that stunning backdrop of Princeton’s storybook campus… for me, a place that just exuded learning and new possibilities at every turn.

Princeton Campus, Blair Hall (courtesy Gene-'s photostream)

 The pattern once understood, other new journeys, mostly unplanned, came in rapid succession. Right after graduation, always having wanted to ‘see the world’ but not having the wherewithal, I found a job as an engineboy on a Norwegian tramp steamer, bound for India. Four months among the hissing boilers, but also four months to daydream about my future… in places like the Euphrates, Bombay, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Mozambique… all dreamt about, pondered, while wandering in awe across the wild and beautiful open oceans of this planet.

To the Next Port of Call (courtesy of jaraos' photostream)

 Returning home too late to rejoin the law school which had accepted me, my pink draft notice was waiting. It was the depth of the Cold War; my time had come to be a soldier.  I enlisted in the Marine Corps, an experience which produced unexpected new rewards, by teaching me new lessons about my capacity to endure hardships and stresses, at places like Parris Island and Camp Lejeune.

 Later, I was able to get back into law school… certainly rather wiser than in my Princeton years. Now my future was set, I thought: no more wandering, I am going to settle down.

 But it didn’t happen that way, either. Because I really didn’t much like law school, my choice for a job the following summer was at a hotel in a far-away place, Glacier National Park. This Midwestern boy thought it was in Alaska!

 This turned out to be the journey that really did change my life… one which set me on an entirely different course. It opened up even vaster possibilities for both future challenges and greater happiness. How?  Because from the moment I stepped off the train, stunned by the vision of the great peaks rising straight out of the prairies, I became aware of a passion for magnificence in wild nature. It was as if some old lost chord had been plucked inside of me, saying that this was my land and I must live out here, somewhere.

St. Mary Lake-Glacier Nation Park (Courtesy Creativity+Timothy K. Hamilton's photostream

 From that moment came everything that was to follow: a move to Seattle after law school, a law practice. But I was really there for the country; and so began years of wandering, exploring, in the splendid wildernesses all around.

 Sadly, it was not very long before there came a growing awareness that these wild and beautiful places that I loved were being damaged, destroyed – by the unsustainable logging of the times.

 And from that realization came my life’s best decision: that I would give all the rest of it to try to right these wrongs, to protect these beautiful parts of our heritage. This required leaving my law practice, and to begin working for conservation groups (like the Sierra Cub) for a pittance – although the ‘psychic income’ was huge.

 And it came to mean constant travels everywhere, organizing, speaking out, standing up for what I believed…  finally living in Washington – to lobby and testify in the place (Congress) where the fates of what I loved were being decided. Since that decision, there have been campaigns and battles, victories and setbacks, now almost beyond count.

One Happy Family (by Stephen Garcia)

Technorati Tags: Add new tag, Glacier National Park, Michigan Law School, Norwegian Merchant Marine, Parris Island, Princeton University, US Marine Corp

Lupine wildflowers at sunset on hills along the Big Sur Coast, California by enlightphoto

Nature doesn’t have a chance, growled my friend the other day. His feelings were understandable — he had grown up in California… and a very different kind of California it was then than the one we know today.

My friend came of age before the War, a time when the Golden State held a near-mythic status in the imaginations of other Americans not fortunate enough to (yet) live there: it seemed to many to be a kind of magical near-paradise where sweet smelling orange groves and vinyards dappled every valley, a wild and beautiful coast framed its whole western edge, mysterious forests of huge redwoods grew in the interior… a benign, almost-separate nation: as big as Japan, yet with vastly fewer people. A gentle land whose every breeze seemed to waft some new sweetness to the senses… a land largely free of huge shopping malls, land-devouring freeways… and angry prisons.

“Golden California, ” — that’s how myself and my law school classmates at Michigan Law School described it in the early 60s. Everyone we knew — including us — wanted to move there: why not live out one’s days where the air is always sweet, the landscapes forever dramatic and beautiful, the sun shines nearly all the time? It is quite different now, I silently agreed with my friend.

The state has become a place transformed — and all in the space of just one generation. Now, much of it has been overwhelmed by a tide of newcomers since the War; the fruit trees gone, their orchards now growing new crops of subdivisions, set in between the shopping malls and office parks. Many of those rolling grassy hills and stunning seascapes are now scarred by spaghetti -like sprawls of freeway, polluting the air and the former quiet. I guess a lot of other folks wanted to move there too

Above the Harbor Freeway (I-110), Los Angeles County, California by cocoi_m

So it is a different California now; that older one has mostly just — vanished, never to return. But — again I mused to myself — is it all gone, really really gone… all those magnificent landscapes , those flourishing habitats for so many rare species? All that “Nature” mourned by my friend… is it really gone, beyond recovery?

“No,” my brain shouted at me — no! “Don’t you remember? You were there when the onslaught began, you and the many other thousands who loved the gentle way it was. We resolved to fight back — remember? ” And so we did: we did push back, challenging the worst of the destructive overdevelopment at every turn. Cry California was the name of our most-read publication; The Joni Mitchell song “They Paved Paradise and Put it into a Parking Lot,” our rallying cry. At many points and on so many occasions it seemed to be a near-hopeless struggle with developers and extractive industries for just about every acre, and every tree of this most beautiful state.

But it was not in vain. During all those intense and passionate years of ups and downs, joys and despairs… two decades of stormy hearings, legislation and lawsuits, we rescued much of that former California. We reached out for, and got, huge public support.The tactics and techniques we used were so successful that they continue to be applied to this day.

How could this be? The pushback began as we came to understand that our Old California had a major flaw: no serious environmental protections, not even a framework in place. You see, as special as it was to live in that Old California, there were no guarantees that it would remain that way. A few very fine parks, yes; but no environmental laws. Timber companies owned 97% of the redwoods, the coast was wide open to developers, and almost nowhere existed even the most rudimentary controls on rampant overdevelopment.

But it was the passion of those struggles of the 60s and 70s that changed all that. A lot of that beautiful nature lamented by my friend was lost in those years. But much was rescued too. Now protected by law; safer now than it ever had been in that former time. Safe forever. Out of those years of struggle there emerged a whole new structure — a powerful framework of some of the strongest conservation laws in the nation. Most important, the struggle created — and made much stronger — a revitalized environmental movement, whose values are now everywhere embedded in almost every new policy of this new California.  

Just to name a few examples of what was saved: a coastal protection act, guaranteeing access — and in many places, public ownership for all the people, not just the wealthy. Strong — and enforceable — wetlands and endangered species laws, far tougher controls on development. Now there are also millions more acres of the best federal and state forests, seacoast, rivers, and special open spaces, protected by law. There is even a Redwoods National Park and a California Desert Protection Act.

How could all this happen, given the wealth and political clout of developers?

Answer: the same way as it has always been. By small bands of determined individuals who personally knew and loved the places, or the values, about to destroyed. The enormous public support came a bit later. First it was necessary to speak out, to challenge and take action — to show the way. The vast majority were volunteers. All they really had was their courage, their determination to never back down. Ordinary folks like the rest of us. They are the ones who did it.

Is it enough? I think not; there are still millions more acres, habitats, miles of wild rivers to be protected. And millions more acres to be restored back to ecological health, as they are doing in the heavily logged redwood forests. But enough or not, it is a joyful and happy thing to remember.

Redwood forest by Petit Léo

So I think the Old California is still there, and I savor it.  Still wild forests and pristine beaches, grassy hills, those sweet smells of wild nature. And each time I drive up along the San Mateo Coast or Big Sur; each time I wander through a redwood park or in the pine forests inside a new Wilderness Area; each time I see the vast open parklands of the East Bay, or float another wild river still dancing in the sun, I whisper a silent prayer: of thanks to all those who made it so.

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