Preventing a Wound on the Coast

Before the environment became a broad popular issue, generally before 1970, the rule of thumb was that state and local governments were the bad actors, tending to look the other way while developers worked their will and their bulldozers on the land. The fellows in the white hats often were the federal forest and park rangers riding to the rescue of the environment. National legislation was in the vanguard of environmental protection more often than not.

Much has changed since 1970. It is particularly noteworthy, and curious, that the Reagan Administration, which has been a freedom fighter in the states’-rights Sagebrush Rebellion, battled in the U.S. Supreme Court to keep the California Coastal Commission from exercising any environmental control over a strip mine on federal forest land on the Big Sur coast. The Administration came away from the court the other day with a black eye to go with its black hat.

The justices ruled 5 to 4 that federal law did not prevent California from applying reasonable environmental controls to the extraction of limestone by Granite Rock Co., which is in the Los Padres National Forest south of Carmel but also within the coastal-strip jurisdiction of the Coastal Commission. The commission sought to exercise control over the Granite Rock mine when it became apparent that the U.S. Forest Service was not interested in attaching adequate environmental conditions to the operation.

Environmentalists and officials from states that had joined California in the case were delighted. There was immediate talk of trying to exercise the new legal muscle over other economic activities on federal lands, such as timber harvesting and grazing.

The ruling indeed is significant. But it may not be the universal environmental victory that some proclaimed. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of Arizona, who wrote the opinion, made it clear that the decision did not give the state blanket land-use control over mining, but only to impose reasonable regulation. “Granite Rock’s challenge to the California Coastal Commission’s permit requirement was broad and absolute; our rejection of that challenge is correspondingly narrow,” she said.

It is not important in this case, however, whether the ruling on Tuesday was a victory for the philosophy of the environment or states’ rights. The effect is to give the state’s Coastal Commission the ability to control an activity that otherwise could have become an ugly open wound on the flank of coastline preservation in California.