Events Decided One Man: The Environment Can’t Wait

If you put a frog in a pot of scalding water, it will jump right out. But if you gently warm the water, turning up the heat ever so subtly, the frog will come to accept it. Then it will die.

Tom Larson, a horticulturist who is executive vice president of Irvine’s Sea Tree Nursery, first heard about this phenomenon from his college biology professor years ago. An interesting quirk of nature, he thought. Stupid frog doesn’t know enough to save its own hide.

Today, Larson, 43 years old, married with four children, is far less cavalier. He understands, and fears, the parable.

“We are subtly accepting things that we shouldn’t be accepting,” he says. “We are going to be like that frog. Maybe we won’t die, but we might come pretty close.”

I’d come to see Tom Larson on this smoggy morning because someone had told me about the rather odd combination of businessman and budding environmental activist, a man who says he is taking seriously President Bush’s challenge to become one of a thousand points of light.

About six months ago, Larson took it upon himself to call up Orange County’s diverse environmental groups to ask if they would be interested in helping to draft what has come to be called “A Guide for Environmental Restoration in Orange County.”

They were. The 26-page document, endorsed by everyone from the Sierra Club and Audubon Society to the Friends of the Irvine Coast, lays out the area’s problems and offers paths toward a solution. It is specific, with timetables for reaching goals, and is broken down by categories: education, air, water, transportation, natural undeveloped land, native plants and wildlife, waste, urban landscape design and maintenance, energy and population.

Larson hopes it will be a starting point, the first step toward educating people about the scientific truths of our environmental vulnerability.

“If you tell reasonable people the truth, they are going to make reasonable decisions,” he says. “I keep thinking about the Olympics. We all got together and said, ‘These are the problems.’ We reorganized and everything went beautifully . . . .

“The point is that with the technology that we have and the people that we have here in Orange County, we can be pacesetters. Orange County has some wonderful people. We have a strong economy. But we are out of balance. I think our vision is short term.”

This is how Tom Larson talks, direct and bottom line. He rarely wastes a word, or even as much as a gesture. Sitting behind his desk, ramrod straight with his arms folded in front of him, he explains why he is doing more than just worry about what kind of environment we are leaving to our children and grandchildren.

A little over a year ago, Larson went to St. Joseph Hospital to have some precancerous lesions removed from his forehead. The doctor told him that he had noticed a gradual but steady rise in cases of skin cancer, directly attributable to the thinning ozone layer.

This bothered Larson, who recalls that during his childhood in Orange County, no one had even heard of sunscreens. The environment was something to be enjoyed, not protected from.

A few days later, Larson called the manufacturer of the “Sold” tags that the nursery places on its trees. They had begun fading so quickly that they soon had to be replaced.

“They told me, ‘Mr. Larson, we are making them with better dyes, better paper than ever before, but they still keep fading,’ ” he said.

Then the local water district called to ask if they could put a test well at the nursery. They were checking for toxins penetrating the water table.

“This is all happening within a week,” Larson said. “So I’m thinking, ‘ Why am I accepting this?’ ”

Tom Larson, of course, is no longer accepting the steady erosion of our world. But even as he recalls his conversion to environmental activist--”some people have even called me radical, which is really funny, because I’m so conservative”--he acknowledges that people tend to delay action until faced with calamity. Often, that is simply too late.

The early warning signs that got Tom Larson moving came within a week of each other, but before that, the indicators seemed less compelling. Two years ago, for example, Larson decided the nursery would no longer grow Monterey pines, which are native to the California coast, because they were not doing well in the smog.

“What really bothers me is this attitude of accepting it,” he says. “I accepted it for so many years. And now the evidence is so solid, the scientific evidence of what we are doing to our environment. We need to make changes now . . . .

“Yes, unfortunately, people don’t move until the pain exceeds the fear. I want us to avoid the pain, a catastrophe that we can’t handle. Nature is not very forgiving.”

“A Guide for Environmental Restoration in Orange County” will soon be distributed to the lawmakers and community leaders that Tom Larson and other Orange County environmentalists hope to educate about the parable of the accepting frog.

Certainly, we’re smart enough to save our own hide.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.