Gobbling Up the Land

By EUGENE LINDEN

The California gnatcatcher, a warbler-like songbird, nests along the coastal sage land in Southern California's Orange County, which happens to be some of the most expensive real estate on earth. Last July, when the state fish and game commission announced that it would consider listing the gnatcatcher as an endangered species, developers bulldozed hundreds of acres of the birds' remaining habitat so that the land would be exempt from any future protection. In September the fish and game commission, bowing to construction-industry arguments that protecting the gnatcatcher would cost the state $20 billion and 200,000 jobs, decided not to list the bird. Environmentalists hope the Federal Government may yet do so.

So went the latest chapter in the often brutal conflict between development and protection of the environment in the increasingly tarnished Golden State. California leads the nation with 283 endangered, threatened or rare species, but despite various state and federal forms of protection, two-thirds of these species continue to decline.

This destruction is occurring despite a concerted effort to prevent it. In the past 25 years, nearly 90% of the state's communities have imposed some form of restraint on growth, but urban and suburban subdivisions keep sprawling. The legislature passed laws in 1973 to ensure sustainable management of the forests, but timber companies have replanted new species instead of maintaining existing forests and have cut too often to permit the forest to regenerate itself. And though Los Angeles has made progress against smog, air quality has plummeted in other parts of the state.

Frustrated with the legislature's inability -- or unwillingness -- to get the job done, citizens have passed ballot initiatives to protect the 1,100- mile coastline, establish a fund to buy habitat for mountain lions, and authorize a bond issue to provide funding for parks and wildlife habitat. But enforcement of these laws has been so ineffectual that some enviros (as they are called in California) have turned to the courts, suing to protect the delta smelt, salmon and other species. More radical groups like Earth First! resort to direct action: blockading logging sites and driving spikes into redwoods so that they will be dangerous to cut.

Now the conflict over diminishing resources is scrambling the political map of California. Traditional allies such as agriculture and big developers frequently find themselves at odds. Some environmental groups have aligned with cities against agricultural interests to try to break big farmers' stranglehold on water supplies. Others have joined forces with surfers to fight pollution from pulp-paper mills and with commercial fisherman to end logging practices that destroy watersheds.

As an unending tide of new arrivals pushes nature to the wall, California is awash with experiments to preserve its stunning natural heritage. The Wilson administration wants to establish regional councils that would draw representatives from all interests with a stake in an area in order to reach a consensus on how to protect different biological regions. Says Larry Orman, executive director of the Greenbelt Alliance: "Because we have such massive problems, I view California as a mirror to the future." The areas of dispute:

LAND

San Francisco architect Herbert McLaughlin coined the term "slopopolis" to describe the shapeless subdivisions that spring up to house California's surging population. Each year 50,000 acres of cropland give way to housing tracts or shopping malls. Desert covers one-fourth of the state, but Jim Dodson, director of the California Desert Protection League, says two-thirds of those 25.5 million fragile acres has already been damaged by human use. Congress is debating whether to preserve threatened areas by creating a 1.5 million-acre national park in the Mojave and expanding the Death Valley and Joshua Tree national monuments into parks. But if Las Vegas proceeds with its plans to buy groundwater from central Nevada, the underground streams that flow westward to feed the oases in Death Valley may dry up, mooting any question of aboveground protection.

California's coastline has inspired more efforts at protection than any other region. But the 1976 California Coastal Act, which defined wetlands, agricultural lands and scenic routes and called for local governments to devise plans to protect their coastal areas, has been more an aesthetic than an ecological success. The Natural Resources Defense Council documented more than 300 beach closings in the state last year, including some in supposedly pristine parts of Mendocino County in the north. To a degree, economics abets preservation of the coast: its scenic beauty generates more than $30 billion in tourist revenues. In addition, communities in the water-starved state are reducing pollution as they try to reclaim every drop of waste water. Even so, the pressures on the coast will continue to grow.

WATER

The heart of California's freshwater system is the Sacramento Delta, where salt water from San Francisco Bay mixes with 40% of the state's freshwater flowing down from the Sierra Nevada through a vast web of wetlands and islands. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says this watery corridor is the most important estuary on the West Coast of the Americas because it provides a critical stopping point for birds on the Pacific flyway and a vast nursery for fish. But the area is also the hub of a huge network of dams, canals and pumps that divert water to irrigate the Central Valley and supply 18 million users in the semidesert southland. The price of this growth has been a series of ecological calamities.

Because their peaty soils oxidize when exposed to air, delta islands converted to farmland have been sinking, leaving humans and wildlife increasingly vulnerable to flooding in the next earthquake. Giant pumps powerful enough to reverse the flow of the Sacramento River stun and kill young striped bass and other fish. Encroaching urbanization, flooding, and conversion of marshes to farmland have destroyed 90% of the state's wetlands, most of which were linked to the estuary. As freshwater is diverted into canals, the zone where freshwater and salt water meet has moved upstream, starving young staghorn sculpin that in turn were food for blue herons and snowy egrets. Roughly 90% of the state's commercial Chinook salmon catch depends on the estuary, but more than half the salmon swimming up the Sacramento River to lay eggs are blocked by the Red Bluff Diversion Dam. Those that get by are often unable to spawn in overheated waters coming from drought-stricken Shasta Lake. The San Joaquin River is entirely diverted for irrigation as it emerges from the Sierra Nevada. When it resumes downstream near the Kesterson Reservoir, selenium-poisoned waters flow into it from the Westlands agricultural district.

The problems have been compounded by a five-year drought. In 1990 the state created a water bank that allowed cities to bid for some agricultural water. Some environmentalists support the scheme -- and are being criticized for it. "The enviros have been pimps for water marketing," says environmental consultant William Kier. He notes that Yuba City uses less than 10% of its water entitlement from the New Bullards Bar Reservoir, then sells the remainder to Southern California rather than allow it to replenish the fragile delta system.

Rehabilitating the region will not be easy, but the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and others have sued the EPA to force the state to protect fish like the delta smelt. Efforts are also under way to restore flow to the San Joaquin and Trinity rivers. Water consultant Mark Reisner and the Nature Conservancy have worked with rice growers, the most water-intensive farmers, to promote a plan to store water on paddies, creating wetlands and riverside habitat during the winter. Perhaps the most important aspect of Reisner's project is that it has got the warring water users to talk to each other.

FORESTS

The state's 32.5 million acres of forest continue to shrivel. In the north, loggers blame environmentalists for "locking up" ancient forests by suing to ! protect the spotted owl and otherwise halt timbering, but with 90% of the original stands of redwood and Douglas fir already cut, loggers really have only themselves to blame. Says Richard Wilson, newly appointed head of the department of forestry and fire protection: "The loggers put money into buying more old growth rather than regrowing cut forests, and the trees are not there to feed the mills." To maximize short-term profits, many companies cut the trees at ever briefer intervals. "The M.B.A.s have turned forestry into a mining exercise," laments Wilson.

Roughly half the remaining ancient redwood forests have some form of protection, and the state is negotiating with the Pacific Lumber Co. to buy the 3,000-acre Headwaters Forest south of Eureka, the biggest remaining privately owned stand of ancient redwoods. This forest became a rallying point for environmentalists when Pacific Lumber doubled the cutting rate of its 1,000-year-old trees to service debt incurred in an Ivan Boesky-arranged leveraged buyout of the company by the Maxxam Corp.

Legal protection alone may not guarantee survival for ancient forests. The National Audubon Society charges that the U.S. Forest Service has allowed logging concerns to clear-cut sugar pine and cedar trees around giant sequoias in the 13,400 acres of groves it controls. This deprives the big trees of a protective windbreak, increases erosion and eliminates habitat for other creatures. Audubon's Dan Taylor says worsening air pollution drifting into the Sierra Nevada also threatens the sequoias.

Sooner or later, Californians will have to face the dire consequences of their activities. Resources secretary Douglas Wheeler predicts that the time will come when large companies begin to flee California because of ecological as well as other problems. "The point at which a major company gets fed up with bad air, scarce water, housing prices and traffic, and talks about future capital spending in Colorado or Arizona is the point at which you get a political response," he says.

Wheeler believes voters and environmentalists alike have become exhausted by the treadmill of lawsuits and initiatives. In 1990 voters defeated almost every proposition on the ballot, including a 1,600-page environmental package nicknamed "Big Green." As an alternative, Wheeler has been promoting a series of regional agreements among developers, environmentalists and other interests. He is currently attempting to negotiate a plan that would provide a haven for the gnatcatcher as an alternative to endangered-species protection. Though deeply suspicious of a state government that in the past has acted only when it was forced to, a number of environmentalists are willing to give this approach a try. Californians are beginning to realize that they must find some common ground if they are to arrest the slide.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles