I wanted to ask him one question: Why? : Mister Boething’s Dreamscape

If I were king, every piece of open land that now exists would continue to exist. Every tree would remain standing, every blade of grass would remain untouched and no hill would be leveled to facilitate the construction of man’s empires.

I would call a royal moratorium on the building of condominiums and hotels and office buildings, and counsel the king’s legions to confiscate the bulldozers and pile-drivers and melt them into forms determined by artists of my choice.

I would declare ours a kingdom to preserve the beauty still left to the world, and condemn to banishment those who violate the royal edicts.

But I am not king, more’s the pity, and the trees and the grass are disappearing with saddening speed from the landscapes of the Valley; the hills are dying under the heavy burden of maximum-occupation tracts.

I was thinking about this the other day as I drove through Topanga Canyon, that wonderland of small surprises, where shafts of sunlight ignite the autumn leaves into flashes of pale gold and the evergreens glow with emerald luminescence in the waning afternoon.

I was thinking how much I’d like the beauty to last forever, but I know it won’t. Even by charitable measure, ideal conditions are only temporary. Leaves fall, sun shafts change direction, light intensity varies.

And the builders come.

Nature is especially vulnerable to those whose perceptions are shaped by financial yield, and to municipal legislators whose principles are for sale at the price of a campaign contribution. Each sustains the other in a kind of evil conspiracy to reconstitute the horizon in their own calamitous image.

I can psyche myself into rage by the simple expediency of seeing what builders will destroy in order to realize their goal, and that was happening as I drove through the autumn colors. I was in a fury and my timing was perfect. I was on my way to see John Boething.

Boething owns Treeland Nursery in Woodland Hills, just off the Ventura Freeway. He has stirred the wrath of his neighbors by announcing plans to develop most of his 30 acres into a hotel and 22-building office and condominium complex.

I wanted to ask him one question: Why?

He is a soft-spoken, white-haired man of 65 who lives in a lovely old rustic house on the grounds of the nursery. He has a wife and four daughters and a grandson who was asleep in another room when I arrived at his home.

Boething insisted that I see the boy before we talked, and stood above the child’s crib for several moments, saying nothing, witnessing through loving eyes a new life at peace in the streams of his innocence.

I was there, however, not to honor Boething but to dissect him into the components of greed and evil that constitute the sum of his proposal. Wasn’t he, after all, a developer and should he not be stood against the wall with the rest of them?

Not quite.

“I’m getting old,” he said, sitting back on a couch in the rustic living room of his home. The view through his window was of rows of trees that softened harsh outlines. “I have to put my estate in order for my children. Sooner or later someone is going to develop this property. I want to do it right, before I’m gone.”

He talked about the sweetness of the land and about the difficulty of acknowledging progress while preserving beauty. His daughters, he said, were hard-nosed environmentalists and were helping him plan the development.

“It’s nice to have people who care about the Earth,” he said. “We were a little asleep in my generation.”

Boething rejected proposals to build a hospital and then a shopping center because he felt they were repugnant. What he plans instead, he says, is proper for the area, and he’s surprised at the protest.

“Those people are my friends and my neighbors,” Boething said, “and nothing is a success if bad feelings exist. I don’t want that, I never wanted that.”

He promises a rustic, woodsy environment, with jogging paths and an arboretum, and points out the window to the 3,000 trees already set aside for the forest he will create.

“I want something,” he says, “that will age gently, that will respect the land.”

The protests hurt more than anger Boething. He feels the furor is his fault because he didn’t take the time to explain what he has in mind, and plans on doing that from now on.

But if that doesn’t work, he will still sell the land to create an estate for his daughters. “I don’t want to do that,” he said, “because a typical developer won’t care as much about the neighbors as I do.”

I came away from the meeting empty of rage but realizing that Boething, with his sensitivity for the sweetness of the land, was probably an exception among developers. I hope he realizes his dream and I hope that it’s something everyone can live with.

But I hope most of all that other developers understand the elements of care that constitute Mr. Boething’s dreamscape.

It would make the job of being king a lot easier.